Information, Please
The Show That Turned the Quiz Formula Inside Out
Most quiz shows of the late 1930s worked on the same basic premise: put an ordinary contestant in front of a microphone, ask them questions, and watch them squirm. Creator Dan Golenpaul found that premise dull. He had been listening to Professor Quiz, one of the era's early entries in the genre, and came away convinced there was a smarter angle. His idea was simple and completely contrary to the established formula — instead of testing ignorant contestants, why not let an educated public try to stump a panel of genuine experts? The show that resulted, Information, Please, premiered on May 17, 1938 on the Blue Network. The title came straight from the phrase telephone operators heard a thousand times a day, back when callers requesting directory assistance would ask the operator, "Information, please." And what went out over the air that Tuesday night is widely cited as the first panel show in the world — the earliest known example of the panel game genre in broadcasting, the format that every later quiz-panel program on radio and television would build on.
The networks weren't sold on the idea at first. The fear was that the show would come across as stuffy, pretentious, and over listeners' heads. Golenpaul pressed on anyway, cutting an audition record with moderator Clifton Fadiman and a panel that included Columbia University economics teacher Louis M. Hacker, journalist Marcus Duffield of the New York Herald-Tribune, and science writer Bernard Jaffe. Bill Karlin, chief of programming at NBC Blue, heard the record in April 1938 and offered Golenpaul a summer slot. The budget was $400 a week, split seven ways. The first broadcast used friends, wives, and Golenpaul's own secretary as fictitiously named audience participants because there was no listening audience yet to send in real questions.
Those early logistics couldn't have predicted what the show would become. By 1939, the program had an audience of roughly ten million listeners — and at its peak that figure reportedly climbed to fifteen million a week, with ratings of 15.7 recorded for the 1938–39 season. Canada Dry's sales had risen twenty percent after the company came on as sponsor, according to Encyclopedia.com, and the show's board of editors was screening as many as 75,000 submitted questions a week. The program had broken NBC's firm rule against prerecorded entertainment — becoming the first show to air a transcribed version for Pacific zone outlets — and coined the phrase still used today: "This show has been transcribed from an earlier network presentation, for release at this more convenient time."
The Four People at the Table
The show's format called for four panelists each week: two permanent chairs, one semi-regular, and one rotating guest. The permanent pair — Franklin P. Adams and John Kieran — and the semi-regular Oscar Levant formed a core that listeners came to know well over the show's ten-year run, and moderator Clifton Fadiman tied it all together.
Fadiman — born in Brooklyn in 1904 and known to friends as Kip — had an intellectual pedigree that helps explain why he was right for the job. His undergraduate contemporaries at Columbia included Jacques Barzun, Mortimer Adler, Lionel Trilling, and Whittaker Chambers, with Mark Van Doren as a teacher and lifelong friend. His original aspiration was to join the Columbia English department as an academic, but the department head told him there was room for only one Jewish faculty member, and that slot was already filled by Trilling. So Fadiman went into publishing instead, working as an editor at Simon & Schuster and then, from 1933 onward, as book editor at The New Yorker — the role he held through his entire Information, Please run. He'd done one prior radio series in 1934, a book review program, and wasn't convinced the Information, Please concept would work when Golenpaul approached him. He agreed to the audition anyway, and turned out to be exactly the right person for the job. A 1941 radio review described his style as an "ingratiating personality, with its intriguing dash of affable arrogance." Current Biography put it another way: he was "the perfect mixture of bright interest and delicate malice that spurs the experts to do their desperate best." When Orson Welles appeared and answered nearly everything thrown at him, Fadiman looked up and said, "This is your last appearance on this program, Mr. Welles."
Franklin P. Adams, known universally as FPA, was 57 when the show started. He'd come to New York in 1913 to write his column "The Conning Tower" in the New York Tribune and had been a fixture of the Algonquin Round Table alongside Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Heywood Broun, and Alexander Woollcott. Adams was a connoisseur of language down to the syllable — he is credited with coining the term "aptronym" for last names that happen to fit a person's career — and his newspaper run finally ended at the New York Evening Post in September 1941, by which time Information, Please had become his primary public platform. He was unemployed when Golenpaul first approached him about the show and initially turned the offer down, only agreeing after Golenpaul ran him through a set of sample questions in person. Adams's specialties on the program were poetry, old barroom songs, and Gilbert and Sullivan — which he consistently called "Sullivan and Gilbert." In one memorable episode, he failed to identify a passage from one of his own poems when asked.
John Kieran had launched "Sports of the Times," the New York Times' first bylined column of any kind, on January 1, 1927. He was, in the words of the show, a "sports philosopher" — but that title barely captured the range of the man. Kieran was fluent in Latin, a Shakespeare scholar, and knowledgeable in music, poetry, ornithology, and natural history. He appeared starting with the fourth broadcast on June 7, 1938, and stayed for the full ten-year run, earning along the way what had been an astonishing jump in pay from his $40-per-appearance starting stipend. Kieran later wrote that "an uproarious error or a brilliant bit of irreverence was rated far above any dull delivery of truth," which came close to capturing the show's spirit. He also called it "the most literate popular entertainment program ever to go out over the air on radio or television."
Oscar Levant joined as the third regular by December 1938. He was a pianist and composer, a close friend of the Gershwins, and the youngest of the regulars, born in Pittsburgh in 1906. Kieran described him as constantly whistling, shuffling, drumming his fingers, and humming — and dubbed him the show's enfant terrible. Levant's own summary of his problem on the program was characteristic: "I'm a concert pianist, and nobody'll believe me." His Information, Please fame proved to be the launching pad for a touring concert career beginning in 1939, and at the height of that career his concert fee reportedly exceeded those of Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein — not because he was considered a finer pianist, but because his radio audience was estimated at twelve million. Golenpaul scheduled Levant every other week, leaving six guest chairs per month to be filled.
What the Guests Brought
The rotating fourth chair — and occasionally the third — drew a remarkable range of people, and some of the show's most memorable moments came from those appearances. Gene Tunney, the prizefighter, surprised audiences with his knowledge of Shakespeare. Boston Red Sox catcher Moe Berg demonstrated a quick, wide-ranging mind — he later became an OSS operative searching out atomic secrets in wartime Europe. Harpo Marx appeared without speaking, whistling his way through the program. Fred Allen took over the show entirely, relegating Fadiman to a panelist's chair; Wendell Willkie did the same. Alfred Hitchcock answered a question about a real murder case in such forensic detail that Fadiman asked if he knew how the tide was running at the time.
The failures were just as entertaining. Novelist Rex Stout couldn't identify a recipe for Lobster Newburg even though his detective Nero Wolfe had used it in Too Many Cooks. Elliott Roosevelt couldn't place quotations that had appeared in his mother's newspaper column the week before. Playwright Russel Crouse lived close enough to the studio that he could be rounded up as a last-minute guest in emergencies; Deems Taylor filled in no fewer than 30 times; Christopher Morley appeared at least 18 times. Cornelia Otis Skinner and British novelist Jan Struther were the most frequently heard female voices — Struther, author of Mrs. Miniver, was eventually dropped after innocently answering an Agatha Christie question using the book's original English title. Guest John Gunther identified Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran, prompting Fadiman to ask "Are you shah?" and Gunther to reply "Sultanly."
Golenpaul's pre-broadcast ritual was to meet each guest in his office, share a small Scotch, and walk with them to the studio. His selection of guests was a matter he guarded intensely. The Saturday Evening Post described him as "extremely jealous of his prerogative in choosing guests," allowing no interference from sponsor, network, or anyone else. He once told the editor of Radio Life, who had requested an interview during a western trip, that he cared nothing about her publication or its 60,000 readers.
Sponsors, Standoffs, and a Decade of Battles
The show began as a sustainer on the Blue Network, unsponsored through its first six months. Canada Dry Ginger Ale came on board in November 1938, raising Golenpaul's weekly budget from $400 to $10,000 and boosting prize amounts to $5 for questions used and $10 for stumping the panel. The Encyclopedia Britannica joined the prize package in October 1939. When Lucky Strike came on as sponsor in November 1940 — moving the show to NBC — the cash prizes rose again, to $10 for questions used and $25 for stumpers.
The relationship with American Tobacco and its president George Washington Hill was contentious from the start. Hill sent Golenpaul a list of people he wanted kept off the show. Golenpaul refused. The Lucky Strike sponsorship lasted about 26 months and was defined, as one account put it, by "an uneasy standoff" between the two men. On November 6, 1942, Hill launched his famous campaign announcing that Lucky Strike's green packaging was being replaced with white as a wartime patriotic gesture, packaged under the slogan "Lucky Strike green has gone to war." Golenpaul eventually filed suit against American Tobacco over Hill's intrusive advertising tactics. The suit was dismissed, but by February 1943 American Tobacco had released Golenpaul from his contract.
Heinz Foods took over next, sponsoring Monday broadcasts at 10:30 in 1943–44 and at 9:30 in 1944–45. By 1943, listeners who stumped the experts received both the full and junior Encyclopedia Britannica sets plus $57 in war bonds and stamps — a neat tie-in to Heinz's "57 varieties." The wartime theme ran through the show's road work too: during World War II the program frequently toured outside its New York base to promote war bond buying, and on tour dates a question writer won a bond instead of the usual cash prize. Heinz had its own objection back home: it bristled at the appearance of certain New Deal political figures on the show. The sponsor that followed, Socony Oil (Mobil), was described by Sally Ashley as "even more rigid and conservative." Oscar Levant left the show during this period after a series of arguments with Golenpaul culminated, according to writer Maurice Zolotow, in a fistfight.
After the NBC run ended in June 1946, Campbell Soups wanted to sponsor the show but NBC didn't want to continue it, and Campbell's wouldn't follow it to another network. Golenpaul moved to CBS, where Parker Pens sponsored a Wednesday 10:30 run through June 1947 — and where he clashed with CBS president William S. Paley over the scheduling of controversial Georgia governor Ellis Arnall as a guest. Paley threatened to pull the show off the air. Golenpaul counterthreatened to fight any censorship in the press. The Arnall broadcast went on as planned. When the Parker Pen contract expired, no further sponsor materialized, and the show aired on Mutual in 1947–48 as a sustainer before ending its run on June 25, 1948. Transcribed repeats were syndicated on various stations through 1950–51.
Beyond Radio
The show generated a substantial commercial footprint during its decade on the air. RKO Pictures filmed excerpts of 18 broadcasts and released them as a series of theatrical short films from 1939 through 1942 or 1943, depending on the source. Two card games based on the series were released commercially, along with a 1939 tie-in quiz book published by Simon & Schuster. The show was popular enough that it was mentioned by name in the 1944 film The Eve of St. Mark and the 1949 film A Letter to Three Wives. In the opening scene of the 1942 film Woman of the Year, Spencer Tracy's character enters a bar and hears Katharine Hepburn's character appearing on the show over the radio. The show even drew its own parody: the radio comedy It Pays to Be Ignorant (1942–1951) spoofed the academic panel format, even formally addressing panelists as "Mister" or "Miss" in mockery of the show's earnest tone.
Golenpaul had also been publishing the Information Please Almanac since 1947, and he continued that after the radio run ended. The almanac eventually passed through several owners, was rebranded the Time Almanac with Information Please in 1999, and ultimately became the website Infoplease.com, which continues to operate. A television version attempted in the summer of 1952 on CBS ran from June 29 to September 21 of that year; by then, Franklin P. Adams was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease and could appear only in the premiere. An Australian radio version, originating from Melbourne station 3DB around 1939, spread via the Major Broadcasting Network and continued into the early 1960s. A music-oriented variant called Musical Chairs, using the same four-member panel format, ran locally in Los Angeles in 1953 before becoming a brief NBC Television summer replacement.
The principals went their separate ways after 1948. Fadiman became a judge for the Book of the Month Club in 1944 — eventually serving on its editorial board for more than fifty years — and hosted the CBS television program This Is Show Business from 1949 to 1954. He served on the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1959 to 1998, lost his eyesight in his early nineties, and continued reviewing manuscripts by listening to tapes and dictating his impressions until shortly before his death in 1999 at age 95. Kieran launched a syndicated television show, wrote a natural history of New York City that won the John Burroughs Medal in 1960, and was inducted into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame in 1971. Adams died in 1960, followed by Levant in 1972, Golenpaul in 1974, and Kieran in 1981.
More than 200 episodes are preserved on tape, beginning with the May 17, 1938 premiere and running into the mid-1940s. Some episodes from 1944 onward are Armed Forces Radio Service rebroadcasts, with commercials removed and classical music substituted to fill the running time. Sally Ashley, who wrote a biography of Franklin P. Adams, put the show's lasting influence plainly: "the ghosts of Golenpaul, Kahn, Fadiman, Adams, Kieran, and Levant sit behind people like Johnny Carson and David Letterman, simultaneously encouraging lunacy and demanding respect for the audience." Whatever format those later programs used, they owed something to a Tuesday night in May 1938 when a rooster crowed, a voice called out "Wake up, America, it's time to stump the experts!" and a very different kind of quiz show went on the air.