Mister Harrys

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The first collaboration of the Gold Dust Twins -another name for the successful team- was a radio quizzer named Winner Take All. Mark, a West Coast announcer, had come East with the idea in 1941. He met Bill, a fairly successful writer and director, and showed him the idea. Bill tried to sell it to CBS but an executive vetoed it. It gathered dust until 1946 when it was finally launched.

The Keystone of Empire

Winner Take All has also been on TV, but is more famous as the keystone of the expanding Goodson-Todman empire.

That empire now includes these "packages," at these "package" prices: Two For the Money. $20,000; The Web, $12,500; It's News To Me, $11,000; The Name's the Same, $10,000; I've Got a Secret, $10,000; What's My Line?, $10,000; Beat the Clock, $8,000.

Of these totals, Bill and Mark's slices come off the top and make them very high salaried personages indeed.

Bill and Mark's careers as producers have not been entirely free of grief. A particular sore spot is the case of Hal Block.

Todman says: "Hal never was able to live with the idea of being a celebrity. When he started on the show he had no trouble at all. But after a little publicity..."

Dorothy Kilgallen has quite a few critics too, although Bill denies they receive more complaints about her than the others. "Dorothy is a great game player. Best I've ever seen. She's a good deductive reasoner and is loaded with feminine intuition. No, we haven't had many complaints about her."

They're Proud of Daly

The pride of the Goodson-Todman enterprises, of course, is John Daly, who seems to have the unabashed admiration of everyone. He's a moderator on both What's My Line? and It's News To Me and has an apparently endless and effortless charm. Goodson says of John: "He rules a panel with a velvet whip," which sums it up pretty well.

Both Mark and Bill are inveterate games players themselves and this helps them dream up new games. Bill claims he went over to the Swopes (famed editor Herbert Bayard Swope) for the evening and found that the family plays What's My Line? every night, only with a tougher set of rules.

The lesson seems to be clear. If you want to be a successful TV producer, round up a few of your celebrity friends, see if you can't land John Daly as moderator, roll up your sleeves and make up a game. It's that easy.

EVE Arden, blonde star of the high-rating CBS show, Our Miss Brooks, is currently the darling of the Nation's schoolteachers for one good reason. She portrays a schoolmarm with plenty of glamor, instead of the usual spinsterish caricature.

This wasn't enough to send Eve soaring to television success, but it helped. Also helpful is the fact that she is a gifted comedienne, surrounded by a cast of experienced laugh-getters.

As for Eve herself, the laughs are coming easier these days. She has a busy life-television, radio, a husband and family. She's enjoying every minute of it, but things weren't always so happy.

"But life has battered me only slight- ly, less than most others," she said during an interview, "and I'm grateful."

Born Eunice Quedens in Mill Valley, Calif., something over 40 years ago, as Hollywood counts it, she inherited her hopes for the stage from her mother. She appeared in school plays. At 16, she applied for a job with Henry Duffy's stock company, then appearing in San Francisco.

She started with a two-line, walk-on role, then graduated to longer parts and then to a season with the Band Box Repertory Company in Los Angeles.

Eve moved into a Hollywood revue, then got her first real break when Lee Shubert cast her for a spot in the Ziegfeld Follies, which starred Fannie Brice. She was in the following edition of the Follies, when Bob Hope headed the cast, then returned to the West Coast in 1935 because of the death of her mother.

She made the first of her more than 40 pictures at that time. Eve branched out into radio in 1947 and was offered the principal role in the radio show Our Miss Brooks the following year. The program caught on, so much so that a pilot television film was made late in 1951. In February, 1952, the program made its television debut.

With success on the stage, in film, on radio and television, Eve's life would seem to have been unbrokenly happy. But she is the first to admit that this isn't true.

"I had all the things I wanted, but I couldn't enjoy them because of inner conflict," she says. "I felt a sense of re- sponsibility for everybody whose life touched mine. It was a little like trying to play God.

"Because I couldn't help everybody, I constantly found fault with myself."

RICKY NELSON at 12 has achieved many a veteran actor's dream. He works steady. He's well on his way to stardom on ABC's Ozzie and Harriet Show. He earns $1,600 a week.

His "I don't fool around, boy" is becoming almost as much of a trade-mark as Jackie Gleason's "and away we go" or Milton Berle's "I'll give you a shot in the head."

Like brother David, who is 16, his $1,600 salary is the total of $1,100 for the weekly television show and $500 a week for the radio series.

But the money for both boys is going into a trust fund. Ricky is getting along on $1.50 spending money a week. And the rest of the family makes sure that he doesn't develop any tendency toward becoming a "ham."

Ricky-his full name his Eric Hilliard Nelson-gets different treatment from each member of the family. Papa Ozzie and Mama Harriet like to talk out his problems with him. David reserves the big-brother right to box his ears.

When these fail, they have one sure-fire approach. "Don't be a child actor," they tell him.

But getting the best of Ricky isn't easy. Recently David was going to a church dance. His brother asked to go along. "Sure," agreed David, although all the girls there would be 16 to 18 years old.

At the party the girls asked to dance with Ricky. He played all the games. Afterward they went to a restaurant for a late snack. The next day his Dad asked how Ricky, only 12, could get girls who were four and five years older to dance with him.

"Well," said Ricky, "I told them I was 13."

He apparently knows what he wants and goes directly for it, as another incident reveals. Both boys were borrowing their father's neckties. Ozzie finally ordered them to buy some for themselves on the family account.

That Tattersall Vest

A few days later Ozzie was in the shop. "Tell Ricky his Tattersall vest is in," said a salesman.

"What Tattersall vest?"

"Ricky said you have a Tattersall vest so he wanted one tailored, too." "Well, from now on you check with me before you charge anything."

Until recently, Ricky attended public school but the absences for work made a private tutor more desirable.

Like Ozzie, a letterman in several sports at Rutgers, Ricky is a lithe athlete, all 90 pounds of him. He is particularly adept at basketball. "We call him 'featherfingers,"" says David, praising his brother's speedy coordination. Ricky also is waterboy for the Hollywood High School football "B" team, on which David stars.

"Ricky is intelligent and understanding of adults," his mother appraises. "He's straightforward and not a troublemaker. But he just won't pick up his own clothes."

"He has remarkable mental and physical coordination," says his father. "Just try to put something over on him," says David, ruefully.

"He's a free soul," admiringly says the principal of the school Ricky attended . . . a very free soul."