Smile!

When it's dismissal time in TV's gold-paved wasteland, some show folk go quietly, while others go kicking the wastebaskets. Last week, after CBS canceled his Candid Camera program, Creator-Host Allen Funt, 52, went out with a bang and a whimper. Deciding that it was time "for a man to make a public happening of a catastrophe in his life," Funt appeared on a late-hour Manhattan radio show to detail the in glorious mistreatment he had met at the hands of show biz in general and CBS in particular.

What galled Funt was that CBS did not even give him the courtesy of telling him directly that he was washed up. Instead, they informed his agent. The way it happens, said Funt, is that the network tells the agent: "Joe, it's a dirty job. You tell him. Don't forget, you better tell him because we're going to be doing business with you tomorrow."

And the casual attitude toward money also burned Funt. For example, he explained, CBS paid $75,000 a week for the Candid Camera package. Out of that, his agent continued to get 10%. "Imagine," he added, "a company that makes $7,500 a week for a sale that they made seven years ago!" Another instance of television's "ridiculous arithmetic": Producer Bob Banner, who helped get Candid Camera on CBS, receives a steady $7,000 a week without having to go to the studio.

Cowardly Bondage. Funt was not poor-mouthing, however. He admitted with some embarrassment that he has been earning more than $600,000 a year from Camera. That, he pointed out, is "six times what the President of the U.S. makes. It's sickening, it's absolutely sickening for anybody to get the kind of money that television performers are paid!"

Funt also professed to be sickened by TV's cowardly bondage to image and ratings. He felt that he was always at a disadvantage because he is bald ("You can't do anything unless it appeals to teen-agers"), although it apparently never disturbed him enough to make him wear a toupee. There was also the matter of being a Jew. Television networks, he implied, are keenly sensitive to the notion that there ought to be a balance of faiths among performers, especially since so many Jews seem to be in the entertainment business.

"I was deeply suspicious at one time in our career," he said, "that unless we had somebody of another faith on the show, it wouldn't go on." Thus it was no accident that at various times Funt shared M.C. duties with Arthur Godfrey and Durward Kirby. Ironically, his current co-host is onetime Beauty Queen Bess Myerson--who is Jewish.

Over and over, Funt returned to his biggest beef. "I don't mind being finished," he said. "I've got lots to do. I feel that the 45 people who sweat this show out deserve a better fate than to hear it at tenth hand, without the dignity of a very nice funeral."

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