Preacher's Kid

By Arnold Mann

The visitor expects something more corporate--an imposing suite behind double-glass doors perhaps, with LINKLETTER ENTERPRISES in gold lettering--not this small cluster of modest offices on the second floor of a building in lower Beverly Hills, Calif. And especially not in this building--the headquarters of Larry Flynt Publica-tions. Art Linkletter, who has made a career of wholesome family fare, a tenant of the publisher of Hustler magazine? He has no problem with Flynt's being his landlord, though he is not a subscriber. "If people want to read the stuff, that's their business," he says. "But I'm still the preacher's kid."

From this unlikely base, Linkletter and a staff of only four, including son Jack, 64, who heads a separate Orange County office, run Linkletter's global business interests, which have included dozens of radio and TV shows; a publishing company; hundreds of office and apartment buildings and housing developments; 30 mini-storage facilities, an airport in Phoenix, Ariz.; a million acres of prime Australian sheep land; and "a bunch" of oil wells. Linkletter also introduced the Hula-Hoop in the U.S., and he is still collecting royalties on the game of Life.

Linkletter's famous shows--House Party, People Are Funny and Kids Say the Darndest Things--are long behind him, but he has scarcely slowed down. He is in his offices daily when he is in town, writing and managing his enterprises. When he isn't here he is on the road for one of the 150 appearances and speaking engagements he makes each year. (His fee: $15,000 for nonprofits, and upwards from there. "I also do a lot of free ones," Linkletter says.) He has never had an agent or a manager. "It's just me and my little group here," he says, referring to 60-year associate Irv Atkins; Atkins' secretary, Barbara Moorman; and Lee Ray, who has been Linkletter's assistant for 50 years.

During a typical recent week, Linkletter flew to Tennessee for the Jubilee Conferences for Christian seniors; then to Washington, where he delivered the keynote address for a United Seniors of America dinner--he is honorary national chairman for the organization and writes for its newsletter, The Senior American. Then he returned to California for a Horatio Alger Association luncheon before looping back to Texas for the Houston Health Club Senior Members Luncheon.

And by the way, he just turned 90. He still has the broad shoulders and chest of the college champion swimmer and collegiate basketball and handball Hall of Famer that he once was. He skis and surfs. He attributes his vitality to a lifetime of not drinking or smoking, sensible eating and eight to nine hours of sleep each night. That and morning exercises with weights, an afternoon swim and the Camel Walk, which Arnold Palmer taught him, and which Linkletter obligingly demonstrates by dropping to his hands and knees and arching his back a dozen times. "Basically," he says, "I'm a smart guy, and I don't do anything in excess."

Except succeed. Arthur Gordon Linkletter was abandoned at birth in Moosejaw, Sask., and adopted by an itinerant preacher--shoemaker and his wife who happened to be passing through. They left Canada and settled in San Diego over Fulton John Linkletter's shoe-repair shop. They were poor. "People from the church would leave baskets of food on our back steps," Linkletter recalls. But he got good nurturing. He describes his father as "the most loving person I've ever met in my life." His mother Mary Metzler Linkletter was "sweet and quiet."

At 17, at the start of the Great Depression, he became a hobo, jumping trains. "I did it for an adventure," Linkletter says. "Sometimes there would be 200 or 300 people jumping on a train in the Middle West." Later he enrolled at San Diego State College because tuition was free to aspiring teachers. He wanted to write and be a college professor. A play he wrote got him a part-time job as radio announcer. He was about to quit and start teaching when it happened--he heard two guys on WFAA in Dallas take a microphone out into the street and start interviewing people.

It was a life-changing moment. "I said, 'Holy smoke, what do they call that? A man on the street?' The unexpected, the unrehearsed, the outrageous, the stupid, the funny. I immediately sold a show locally to P.J. Benbough Funeral Parlor Co. and went out on the street myself. No prizes, no format--just Who are you? and What do you think? and Where are you going? I had found my place."

He moved to San Francisco and began to develop and sell quiz shows, game shows, stunt and magazine shows. He brought his son Jack onto one of his shows and heard his first Darndest Thing. "I asked him what he did in school that day, and he said, 'Nothing, and I'm not going back.' 'Why not?' He said, 'I can't read, and I can't write, and they won't let me talk.' Hundreds of letters came in, saying what a wonderful thing! Just a kid talking to his daddy."

By 1941, Linkletter was making $100,000 a week and buying up apartment buildings and starting businesses all around the city. "I was king of the mountain," he says. When he met producer-writer John Geudal, things really took off. The two sold People Are Funny, which was an immediate success. That show and House Party migrated to TV and flourished for a total of 19 and 25 years, respectively. You Bet Your Life was also theirs, Groucho, duck and all.

But not even the king of the mountain is immune to tragedy. Linkletter's son Robert died in a car accident at 35. And in 1969, his daughter Diane, 21, leaped to her death after taking LSD. Not long afterward, Linkletter was scheduled to speak at a convention of pharmaceutical manufacturers. "I got up in front of them and said, 'This is a wonderful opportunity for me to greet the greatest drug dealers in the world today. What you are doing is manufacturing amphetamines and barbiturates that are being given out by doctors who are ruining the lives of countless women and children.' They didn't like it, but I didn't give a damn. I would have walked in front of a tank, I was so mad."

His friend Norman Vincent Peale persuaded him that a better way to handle his anger was to sell--preach, if you will--"positive thinking, love, responsibility and all the good things that we have inside of us." Linkletter has been on the inspirational stump ever since, visiting and talking to the elderly and, yes, children, "because they're conned into the idea that being rich, famous and popular is what success is all about."

And orphans of course. "A lot of adopted kids feel they are second-class citizens," Linkletter says. "I wanted adopted kids to know that I was adopted, and it didn't stop me, and it shouldn't stop them. At the same time, it gave me a little secret satisfaction that somewhere in Canada, those people, probably married, would see me on TV and say, 'You know, he was a keeper.'"