Gambling on Guido

For showfolk, the shape of success may be a name in lights, a signature on a contract, a kind review. In the case of a witty Italian golf pro named Guido Panzini, it was a phone call from the U.S. Immigration Service. "We've been watching the Jack Paar Show," an immigration official told NBC. "Where can we find this guy Panzini? We've got no record of his port of entry."

U.S. bureaucracy had been taken in, along with 5,000,000 other Paaranoiacs.

For handsome Guido is the perpetrator of one of the slickest impersonations since the Prisoner of Zenda. His wacky tales of life in the Italian submarine service (he learned his English by sneaking up behind U.S. warships and watching the recreation movies), of golf games in Tanganyika (the course went up the side of Kilimanjaro; he shot a 77 and four Mau Mau), were not the product of an overheated Latin imagination. He has never been nearer to Italy than the pasticcerie of Manhattan's West Side, where he grew up. Guido Panzini's real name is Pat Harrington Jr. Now 29, he came to TV via Fordham, the U.S.A.F. and the NBC mailroom. Off camera, he speaks unadulterated American.

Guido & Grower. The gag had an unlikely beginning. It was born in Toots Shor's Manhattan saloon one afternoon in 1956, when Pat and a pal, Lynn Phillips, were relaxing from their jobs as time salesmen for NBCTV. They were already practiced hands at the dialect spoof. Pat had picked up a talent for mimicry from his father, a successful nightclub comic of the '30s, and he and his friend used their skill as a "sales adjunct" when they wanted to warm up prospects with a laugh or two. That afternoon in Shor's, the Andrea Doria collision was still in the headlines, so Phillips swung naturally into the Italian bit.

Spotting a CBS program director standing at the bar, he manufactured a name and introduced Pat: "This is Guido Panzini, a survivor of the Andrea Doria. He was on the bridge when it happened."

The program director was fascinated. "What was it like up there?"

Guido struggled to explain in artfully broken English. "Was a dark. Verry dark. But when Captain Calamai ask a question an' somebedy answer in Swidish, we knew we were cloze."

The gag was such a success that they moved it to another bar, were soon arguing with some Italian waiters that if Guido and other seamen jumped into the lifeboats first, they were not cowards, because it was their duty to protect those expensive little boats with the motors in them. Later, their lines more polished. Pat and pals turned Guido into a golf pro. introduced him to Singer Dick Haymes, who suggested that he had once played Guide's home course in Salerno. (There is no golf course in Salerno though Pat plays high-grade three-handicap golf.) At a party later, NBC Announcer Ben Grauer was as gullible as Haymes.

The gag was still going strong back in Shor's one winter afternoon of 1958. This time it drew a delighted audience in Funnyman Jonathan Winters (TIME, Oct. 13), who was scrabbling about in unquiet desperation, trying to scare up some good acts for his stint as host on the Paar show. He invited Harrington.

No Panky. Pat's first TV appearance drew no great response, but it did get him a start on the Steve Allen show, where under his own name he played an Italian waiter, a Scottish laird, an Irish jockey, a bop musician named Lawrence Welk. Paar, too, brought him back time after time, but always as Guido. who began to take on the dimensions of reality.

There was a wife in Salerno and three kids, and Paar worried about good-looking Guido on the loose in New York. Was there ever any hanky-panky? "Mebbe a lidla bit hanky," Guido allowed. "But definitely no panky." He had a roommate he had never seen ("works a different shift"), but had found through an ad in the paper. Last week, when Guido filled in for the vacationing Paar himself, he produced an alleged brother-in-law from Salerno, one Salvatore Padula (actually a Steve Allen writer named Bill Dana).

Judging from the hundreds of letters that have come in, the offers of hospitality from Italian-Americans, the invitations to appear before such organizations as the Boys' Towns of Italy, an astonishing number of people still believe in Guido. Pat himself believes so strongly in the voluble golf pro that he has quit his job as a time salesman and gambled on staying in show business. But how long he will remain Guido Panzini before he completes the difficult transition to Pat Harrington Jr. is uncertain. "With that accent of his," says Pat, "Guido gets laughs that I can't get myself. Still, I know that in the end, what I want to do, what I have to do, is really make it as Harrington."

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