There was always someone in the control room watching the host, the sponsor copy, the audience, and the 3 seconds before a joke became a problem. One man let a puppet say YMCA on the last daytime question of a network institution. Another was loved so fiercely that his ashes stayed in a bedroom drawer for 31 years.
Another built dead wives and a dead son to protect one living man. Before we start, drop a comment below and tell us where you’re watching from right now. Wayland Flowers, June 1980, final NBC daytime episode of Hollywood Squares. Peter Marshall asks where Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Strauss all lived, and Madame fires back, “At the YMCA.
” before giving the serious answer. That was the great trick. Born in Dawson, Georgia in 1939, he built Madame in the late 1960s, broke through off-Broadway at the Village Gate in 1971 with Kumquats, and took the center square after Paul Lynde in 1976. He called himself not a ventriloquist, but an illusionist, because after 2 minutes, audiences stopped watching him and started believing the puppet.
That made Madame the perfect weapon. She could answer questions about casinos, men, cigarettes, and desire with lines the control room could defend as comedy and gay viewers could hear as code. He was widely understood inside that world, but on television the separation held. Madame said it, Wayland didn’t. He kept performing after an HIV diagnosis in 1987, collapsed on stage at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe in September 1988, and died in Los Angeles the next month at 48.
Even after he was gone, the puppet stayed behind as the archive of a truth he never had to phrase in his own voice. His career even extended into solid gold in the early 1980s, but television never solved the central arrangement. The puppet kept taking the risk and the man beside her kept collecting the consequences.
Rip Taylor. He made the almost physical. On The Gong Show and The 198 Beauty Show, he didn’t edge toward disclosure with elegant lines. He detonated into confetti, sequins, shrieks and that famous toupee, turning his own body into the joke the censors couldn’t bleep. Born Charles Elmer Willis, Jr.
in Washington, D.C. in 1931, he logged more than 2,000 TV appearances and became the king of confetti. A performer so visually unmistakable that audiences understood the signal long before anyone said a word. That is what made him so fascinating on live television. The delay button existed for language, not for a man ripping off his hairpiece, exploding into glitter and sitting back down as if nothing had happened.
Off camera, the record was always there, but never sealed by him. He served as grand marshal of Washington, D.C.’s Capital Pride in 2005, was publicly described as openly gay in 2009, and instantly pushed back on that label in a tart email. Yet, when he died at Cedars-Sinai in 2019, his publicist named Robert Fortney as his long-time partner.
The confetti was never hiding anything. It was the answer, staged as spectacle, while the formal confirmation remained forever under his control. He was close to Liberace, too. Another clue in plain sight that the era could register socially without allowing formal language to settle on it. Paul Lynde.
If this whole era has a patron saint of the double entendre, it is him. From 1966 to 1981, he appeared in 1,083 episodes of Hollywood Squares, usually in the center square, where Peter Marshall would ask something harmless, and Lynde would answer it sideways. You’re the world’s most popular fruit. What are you? Humble.
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How many men are on a hockey team? Oh, about half. The miracle was never just the joke. It was the calibration. Writers could prepare the setup, but his pause, glare, and wounded elegance made the line land in two directions at once. Innocent enough for NBC, unmistakable to viewers listening differently.
Off-camera, the mainstream press still refused to say the obvious. A 1976 People profile came as close as it dared by describing Stan Fine-Smith as his hair stylist, sweetmate, and chauffeur bodyguard. Behind the camp, there were darker private fractures, too, including the 1965 death of his friend James Bing Davidson after a fall from Lynde’s San Francisco hotel room, and Lynde’s long spiral afterward.
He got sober in 1980, died of cardiac arrest in Beverly Hills in 1982, and left behind a thousand taped near confessions built from nothing more than timing, phrasing, and nerve. That is why his old clips still play like miniature suspense scenes. The card asks one thing, and Lynde answers the forbidden version without ever technically doing so.
Charles Nelson Reilly. He worked a neighboring lane to Lynde, but his almost came through persona. On Match Game, especially in the CBS years from 1973 to 1982, he wore caftans on national television, performed exaggerated mock masculinity, and turned every appearance into a tiny war between who he was expected to be and who the camera could plainly see.
He had survived the Hartford circus fire as a 13-year-old in 1944, later said he rarely liked sitting in audiences after that, and became the performer instead. By the time America knew him as Gene Rayburn’s brilliantly mannered panelist, he had already been told early in his career, “They don’t put queers on TV.
” And he went on TV roughly 2,000 times. The genius of his act was that he could joke about butchness without ever having to define the absence of it. Off camera, Patrick Hughes became the great fixed fact of his life after they met around Battle Stars in 1980 and stayed together for 27 years. He finally confirmed his sexuality outright in his 2006 one-man show, Save It for the Stage.
He died of complications from pneumonia in 2007. For decades, though, the truth had already been visible in the caftan, the voice, and the joke about being very butch. The audience laughed at the performance of mismatch, but the deeper charge came from how little distance there really was between the joke and the man delivering it.
Vincent Price. He brings a different kind of almost because almost nothing in his game show appearances needed to be funny. Born in St. Louis in 1911, trained in art history, and famous for turning elegance into something faintly sinister, he moved through Hollywood Squares, Match Game, and The $10,000 Pyramid in the 1970s with a style that made every answer feel overqualified.
The almost was in the manner. He could discuss horror, painting, cuisine, or aesthetics with the authority of a man who genuinely knew more than everyone else on stage, and that cultivated otherness became its own code. Standards and practices had no defense against tone. There was nothing to cut. Nothing explicit had happened.
Only a look, a cadence, an eyebrow, a voice that seemed to reveal more than the sentence itself. Later biographical accounts, especially Victoria Price’s 1999 Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography, suggest that he had intimate relationships with men and lived a deeply private bisexual life that he never confirmed publicly himself.
That distinction matters here. The evidence comes later through family and biography, not through Price on camera. Which means his almost never sounded like a joke or a confession. It sounded like perfect control, so complete that the missing sentence became part of the performance.
Even his marriage to Coral Browne is often remembered in later accounts as a companionship shaped by mutual privacy and deep understanding rather than by old studio mythology. Wally Cox. He may be the most heartbreaking file in this whole story because the almost is barely on the tape at all. Audiences knew him as the mild, careful, bespectacled panelist from Hollywood Squares and What’s My Line? A man whose public image was built on meekness.
Friends said the off-camera version was tougher, more athletic, more adventurous. The real archive, though, sits with Marlon Brando. They met as boys in Illinois, became inseparable, lived together early in New York, and remained bound for the rest of Cox’s life. Brando would later say that if Wally had been a woman, he would have married him.
After Cox died of a heart attack in 1973 at only 48, Brando was supposed to scatter his ashes. Instead, according to later accounts, he kept them for 31 years at one point in his Mulholland Drive home, speaking to them and imitating Cox’s voice. When Brando died in 2004, family members scattered both men’s ashes together in Death Valley.
The nature of their relationship is still debated, and it should be framed that way, but the devotion itself is documented. His almost was not a line, a look, or a live TV pause. It was the life that never reached the card at all, preserved in ashes someone else refused to let go of. In his case, silence became its own evidence chamber.
No scandal, no statement, just a tenderness so persistent it outlived both men and finally reached the public through burial. Raymond Burr. He made silence architectural. On Hollywood Squares and other 1970s game show appearances, he projected the same authority that made Perry Mason and Ironside believable.
Deep voice, grave certainty, the face of a man who always seemed to know more than he intended to say. Off camera, that instinct became a fortress. According to later biographical reporting, he constructed an elaborate false heterosexual history that included wives who never existed and a son who never existed, and parts of that invented biography made it into major obituaries when he died in 1993.
What was real was Robert Benevides. They met around Perry Mason in the late 1950s, stayed together for roughly 33 to 35 years, ran an orchid business and a Dry Creek Valley vineyard, and worked side by side on later Perry Mason movies, where Benevides was credited professionally, but kept largely out of the personal story.
His will cut through every fabrication with brutal simplicity. His estate went to Benevides. That is why he belongs here. His almost was not a slip or a camp joke. It was the absence created by construction, the wall built so high that the truth could only enter through probate, biography, and the business records of a life already lived.
He did not merely evade the question, he pre-built the answer the public was supposed to accept, and that made the eventual correction feel less like gossip than structural collapse. Tom Poston. This is the quietest chapter here and the most fragile one, evidentially. So, it has to be handled with care.
Born in Columbus, Ohio in 1921, he was a superb deadpan comic, an Emmy winner from the Steve Allen show, and a familiar face on To Tell the Truth, Hollywood Squares, and Match Game. His great gift was control. He could make stillness funny, make blankness expressive, and keep almost everything behind the face.
That matters because the record on his private life is thin. He married actress Jean Sullivan, later married Kate Mulgrew in 2001, and died in Los Angeles in 2007. General retrospective accounts and industry memory writing place him in the same broad social world as Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly. But, there is no equivalent documentary trail here.
No named long-time male partner in the public record. No late autobiography confirming anything. No single decisive posthumous revelation. So, this chapter cannot go further than the evidence goes. He belongs in the structure of this video because he represents the softest kind of almost. Not a near confession, but a file so sparse that the absence itself becomes part of the period portrait.
Sometimes the archive speaks loudly, sometimes it barely whispers. In a video built around documented pressure points, he functions as a caution. Sometimes the historical mood is real even when the surviving proof remains frustratingly incomplete. Jim J. Bullock. He is where the almost finally breaks. Born in Casper, Wyoming and raised in Odessa, Texas, he arrived in the 1980s occupying the same comic niche earlier held by Lind and Riley.
The actor audiences read instantly while television still insisted on pretending not to. On Too Close for Comfort, producers reportedly worried he was too fat and too gay, then later sent him fan mail complaints questioning Monroe Ficus’s sexuality and urged him to lower his voice. He tried. It kept springing back.
At the same time he learned he was HIV positive in October 1985 and kept performing anyway, terrified of what the era would do with either truth. On game shows like The New Hollywood Squares, Battle Stars, Body Language, and Match Game Hollywood Squares Hour, that tension was visible every time he laughed, moved, or answered before self-editing could catch up.
Then in 1990 on the Joan Rivers Show, the almost became the actual. He came out publicly, later describing it as an unplanned outburst after years of concealment. His partner John Casey died in 1996. Bullock lived, worked, and kept talking. That makes him the perfect closer. He is the man in this lineup who finally crossed the line the others kept circling.
The pause failed, the truth arrived, and the camera was already rolling. In this story, he is not just another almost. He is the release of pressure. Back in the control room, the hand still hovers over the delay button. Which almost gets you most, the puppet, the pause, or the man who finally said it?
