This Is Your Wife?

Having run through every faded actress still able to cry on cue. Ralph Edwards' This Is Your Life, probably the most sickeningly sentimental show on the air, lately turned to ordinary people as subjects for its weekly, treacly "true-to-life" biographies. During the Mother's Day season last May, the program presented a portrait of Mrs. Elizabeth Hahn a Queens housewife and mother, devoted to her husband and so dedicated to her children that she had worked as a chambermaid, waitress and cook to further their education and keep them off the streets.

When Mrs. Hahn and her children appeared on the show, one viewer in New Haven, Conn. refused to swallow any of it. Claiming that he had been separated from his wife for some four years, Abraham Hahn also said that he had refused the producers' invitation to take part in the show, choked up when he heard Edwards tell all America that the only reason Mother's husband was not on the show was that he had slightly injured his foot at his foreman's job (at West Haven's Technical Rubber Inc.). In extolling Mrs. Hahn's family life, Ralph Edwards also failed to note that Hahn had filed a divorce suit against her, and that early this year Mrs. Hahn had haled her own daughter into a magistrate's court as a delinquent. Last week Hahn filed a $500,000 lawsuit against the National Broadcasting Company, alleging invasion of privacy because his name and portrait had been used without his consent. "The humiliation," he says, "it was terrible. My wife, she's off her mind."

Calling a press conference, Mrs. Hahn gave a different version of the story. She had written to This Is Your Life suggesting they do a show about her 18-year-old daughter who had been nearly blind as a young child, had gained normal sight and become a nascent actress (Horn & Hardart Children's Hour, small Broadway parts). This Is Your Life turned out to be more interested in a portrait of the self-sacrificing mother and her husband, said Mrs. Hahn. As for that episode in magistrate's court, she had taken her daughter there on a rabbi's advice because the girl had fallen in with a bad crowd and was the victim of a "fraudulent ring" of thugs.

NBC spokesmen declared that Ralph Edwards had been hoaxed, and Edwards, who once produced a program called Truth or Consequences, blandly insisted that nothing in the show's "research" indicated that the Hahn family was anything but blissful. He did not explain just what he meant by research, but then, that is his life.

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