Eugene Rubessa (December 22, 1917 in Christopher, Illinois – November 29, 1999 in Gloucester, Massachusetts) was an Emmy-nominated American radio and television personality.

The only child of Croatian immigrants, he graduated from Knox College. After the birth of his first child, Rayburn was drafted into the U.S. Air Force.

He chose his stage name by randomly pointing at a page in the phone book after being told Rubessa sounded "too Italian". He became a popular radio personality in New York City on WNEW-AM. He was half of the first two-man team in morning radio, partnering with Jack Lescoulie and later Dee Finch.

Before breaking into television as the original announcer on The Tonight Show, he hosted his first game show, Make the Connection, in 1955; from there he hosted shows such as Choose Up Sides, Dough Re Mi, and Tic Tac Dough. He was also a frequent panelist on The Name's the Same. On radio, Rayburn become one of the many hosts of the popular NBC program Monitor in 1961 and remained with the show until 1973.

In 1962 Rayburn first hosted The Match Game. The original version, which aired on NBC, lasted until 1969; in 1973 the show returned to CBS with a new format in which contestants had to match celebrity answers to humorous fill-in-the-blank questions. Millions tuned in and soon the show became the highest-rated daytime TV show. From 1973 to 1977, it was #1 among all game shows, fueled mostly by the zany questions and Rayburn's witty style. His interaction with the panel and contestants and his antics, including breaking through the entrance doors, roller-skating on stage and climbing the audience, made the show a classic. The daytime revival of Match Game, which featured regular panelists Richard Dawson, Brett Somers and Charles Nelson Reilly, ran until 1979 with a concurrent night-time version, Match Game PM, airing from 1975 to 1981. Rayburn was nominated for two Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Host or Hostess in a Game or Audience Participation Show. In 1983 the show was revived as part of the Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour, with Rayburn hosting the Match Game segment and sitting on the panel of the Hollywood Squares segment. The show lasted nine months on NBC.

During and between his Match Game years, Rayburn served as guest panelist on two other Goodson-Todman shows, What's My Line? and To Tell the Truth, where he exhibited the same inquisitiveness on serious subjects he showed on Monitor. Three years after the 60s Match Game was cancelled, Rayburn hosted a short-lived Heatter-Quigley Productions show called The Amatuer's Guide to Love (1972). He also hosted a pilot for Reg Grundy Productions in 1983 called Party Line, which later became Bruce Forsyth's Hot Streak (which made it to air in 1986 and was cancelled after 13 weeks).

The final game shows Rayburn emceed were: a 1985 revival of Break the Bank, where Rayburn was fired after 13 weeks and replaced by Joe Farago, and The Movie Masters, an AMC cable game show that ran from 1989 to 1990.

Right before production was to begin on a new Rayburn-emceed Match Game revival in 1985, a Entertainment Tonight reporter publicly disclosed his age, which was much older than many people believed. Rayburn had trouble finding jobs after that, blaming the reporter for disclosing his age and subjecting him to age discrimination.

Rayburn died at his daughter's home of congestive heart failure at the age of 81.

Trivia

• In a taping of Match Game '74, he unintentionally told a contestant, Karen Lesko, that she had "pretty nipples", meaning to say "dimples." The incident was cut from the original CBS episode and is not shown in GSN reruns either. The actual aired episode only makes one reference to the "dimples", when Kaye Stevens mentions the word. Since the average viewer didn't know of the Lesko gaffe at the time, the comment makes no sense when one hears it uttered by Stevens. Nonetheless, it has come to be known as possibly the most embarrassing "host screw-up" in game show history (Art James and his fiasco on live TV with a peanut butter jar that goes awry on a 1960's airing of Say When may be the other one). The moment has been aired on several present-day TV specials regarding game show mishaps, including VH1's Game Show Moments Gone Bananas and NBC's The Most Outrageous Game Show Moments.

• The long and skinny Sony microphone (model ECM-51) that Rayburn used on the 70's version of Match Game became "a part of pop culture", as the E! television network described it. The microphone, (which Rayburn himself designed and patented), has long been associated with the host and the game show itself ever since. It has been preserved and saved, shown to current TV audiences in a 2003 NBC special and on a "Match Game Retro Reunion" on The Early Show in 2002. In 2006, Ricki Lake used the same microphone in a Match Game remake featured in a month-long miniseries on CBS, which revived one or two classic game shows each week.

• He knitted socks as a publicity stunt during his time on Rayburn and Finch and later became avid in needlepoint, so much to the point that he would constantly do some in plane rides from New York to "MG" tapings in Hollywood. In a 1974 Match Game episode, MG creator Mark Goodson made a surprise visit to congratulate the host on making the show #1 among daytime television programs and Goodson gave Rayburn a needlepoint bag as a gift in turn. In a later episode that year, panelist Richard Dawson showed off a picture of Gene knitting socks as part of the aforementioned publicity stunt.

• Handled a surprise cameo appearance by Burt Reynolds during Match Game '74 with his typical wit, sharpness and attitude.

• Ranked #3 on TV Guide's list of the 10 "hosts we love the most" in January 2001.

• Rayburn was married to Helen Ticknor from 1940 until her death in October, 1996. They had one child, a daughter, Lynn. Helen appeared with Gene on the TV game show "Tattletales" in the 1970s and '80s. As a related side note, Gene himself hosted a week's worth of "Tattletales" during early 1974 (the show itself debuted in February of 1974).

• From 1978 up until Rayburn's death, he never spoke with ex-Match Game regular panelist Richard Dawson. Dawson was a popular celebrity panel member who enjoyed joking around with the rest of the crew, yet in late 1977 until the summer of 1978, he appeared less interested in the game and he was beginning to find more fun with his own new hit game show, Family Feud. Years later, Rayburn recalled that Dawson was in the end, a "loner...with a monumental ego" who was "trying to kill the show."

• As noted earlier, Rayburn was of Croatian ancestry and he could also speak the language. On Match Game, when a contestant with the same ancestry would appear on the show, Rayburn would exchange a few words in Croatian with them.

• Rayburn was unabashedly liberal in his politics. So much that, on one occasion on Match Game (CBS), the name of William F. Buckley, Jr. (a famous conservative) was brought up. Rayburn said that Buckley was "...always wrong!" At one point, tabloids circulated that he supported North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, however this turned out be a falsified and fictional story.

• During the 1960s, he occasionally substituted for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. In 1967, Carson would make a surprise appearance on the original black-and-white version of "The Match Game" during the same week that Tonight announcer Ed McMahon was a guest celebrity. In 1973, Rayburn recalled his guest-hosting duties as "the hardest job" he ever had.

• During an interview, he was asked what his worst fear was and he responded, "being caught stealing something cheap."

• Fred Wostbrock, the co-author of The Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows series, deemed Rayburn the "Frank Sinatra of game-show hosts."

• Howard Stern's television show featured Rayburn as a guest three times in 1992.

• He hosted a 1981 special honoring TV's "greatest comedians" including Groucho Marx and Lucille Ball. Today, the special is available in VHS on Ebay.

• Rayburn portrayed himself on a Saturday Night Live skit in 1990 in which a parodied Susan Lucci marries the "Match Game" emcee. The skit was intended to ridicule the ABC soap opera, All My Children.

• After his gig on The Movie Masters was done, Rayburn virtually vanished from Hollywood until a sudden reentrance in the mid-to-late 1990s, appearing on The Jenny Jones Show, Jones was a Match Game contestant in 1980, and appeared on a "Match Game reunion" on Maury and was interviewed on the 1997 A & E Biography of MG, The Price is Right, and Family Feud creator Mark Goodson. His very last TV appearance was a 1998 interview with Access Hollywood which was intended to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the CBS game show. Portions of the interview were shown again recently on Game Show Network, which in 2001, showed parts of another previously unaired interview only during the first airing of it's successful Match Game Blankathon.

External links

• Gene Rayburn bio on the Match Game Homepage
• Gene Rayburn bio on MatchGame.org

1917 births | 1999 deaths | Roman Catholics | Match Game | Game show hosts | American television personalities | Croatian-Americans | Croatian diaspora | Entertainers who died in their 80s | game show panelists | What's My Line panelists | To Tell the Truth panelists