• December 13, 1993
• Vol. 40
• No. 24

Less Was Moore

TV's Brushcut-Next-Door, Winsome Garry Moore, Was Always Welcome in America's Living Rooms

GARRY MOORE WAS ONE OF THOSE people who could look into the camera and you felt he was talking just to you," says his old friend Carol Burnett. That, as much as anything, might explain how this ordinary-looking guy with a crew cut and bow tie essayed one of TV's most extraordinary success stories. When he died last week at 78, of emphysema at his home on Hilton Head Island, S.C., Moore had been retired from the medium for over 15 years. But colleagues and fans still fondly remembered him as the host of The Garry Moore Show, which aired for a total of 15 years on CBS, starting in 1950, and two popular game shows, I've Got a Secret (which he emceed from 1952 to 1964) and To Tell the Truth (1969-76).

The secret of his success? Moore, to tell the truth, was puzzled. His role on his variety show—a genial grab bag of gab, songs and skits that introduced Burnett, Jonathan Winters and Don Knotts—was, he insisted, simply to serve as a "pointer," shepherding one act after another before the camera. "A dog could do the same thing," he said, "if you smeared meat on the actors."

Such humble pie was belied by Moore's stratospheric salary in the early '60s—at one point he was earning $2.2 million a year—which made him the highest-paid performer on TV. Born Thomas Garrison Morfit in Baltimore, Moore had started out as a writer in radio. He eventually discovered that he had more fun doing patter and jokes on the air and found national fame when he was partnered Jimmy Durante on The Durante-Moore Show in 1943. The Garry-Moore Show, where he was first teamed with sidekick Durward Kirby, debuted on CBS radio in 1949, then switched to TV the following year. He quit in 1964, refreshed himself with a sail around the world and returned in '66. This time, losing to NBC's Bonanza, he was canceled at midseason.

Moore—survived by his second wife, Betsy, and two sons, Garry and John Mason Morfit, from his first marriage to Eleanor Little, who died in 1974—kept his personal life far from cameras and headlines. Yet despite failing health in recent years, he maintained a robust, if typically self-deprecating, sense of humor. As son Garry recalls, "When people would come up to him and say, "Aren't you Garry Moore?' he would say, I used to be.' "