Peter Marshall, the host who played straight man to the stars for 16 years on The Hollywood Squares, has died at age 98. He died Thursday of kidney failure at his home in the Encino neighborhood of Los Angeles, per the AP. Marshall helped define the form of the smooth, professional, but never-too-serious modern game show host on more than 5,000 episodes of the series that ran on NBC from 1966 to 1981. But he was often closer to a talk show host, and the tic-tac-toe game the contestants played, while real, was all an excuse for a good time. The questions Marshall posed to regulars like Paul Lynde, George Gobel, and Joan Rivers were designed to be set-ups for joke answers before the real ones followed.
"It was the easiest thing I've ever done in show business," Marshall said in a 2010 interview for the Archive of American Television. "I walked in, said 'Hello stars,' I read questions, and laughed. And it paid very well." The Hollywood Squares would become an American cultural institution and make Marshall a household name. However, he had lived nearly an entire show business life before he took the Squares podium at age 40. He had toured with big bands starting as a teenager, had been a part of two comedy teams that appeared in nightclubs and on television, appeared in movies as a contract player for Twentieth Century Fox, and had sung in several Broadway musicals.
The Hollywood Squares was more strait-laced when it began, but early in its run a producer suggested they write jokes for Lynde, the ever-snarky comic actor who occupied the center square and would become as identified as Marshall with the show. The first joke would set the template for the years that followed:
- Marshall: "Paul, why do motorcyclists wear leather?"
- Lynde: "Because chiffon wrinkles."
"That changed the whole thing," Marshall told the TV archive. "I had been a straight man. So working with comics was easy for me." (Read other notable obituaries.)
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