On October 22 last year, Secret was bumped at the last minute for
a paid political campaign speech by President Eisenhower. With guests and a production crew already
scheduled, they recorded the show that day and are only now airing it ten
months later. Jayne at the time was
still a regular panelist.
Harold Zweigbaum from Metuchen, New Jersey: “I’m bouncing my
answers off the moon…by radar”
Zweigbaum taps his answers (two for
yes, one for no) on a keypad and the resulting pulses are sent on a 400,000-mile
round trip before being seen and heard on an oscilloscope on stage two and a
half seconds later. The tools for this have been in place since 1946, but
practical application of the underlying technology wouldn’t be commonplace
until communication satellites became more prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s.
Years later, producer Chester Feldman pointed to this as being one of his
favorite Secrets, in part because it took the cooperation of several Federal
agencies (not to mention the good old phone company) to work.
Pixie Foster from Columbia, South Carolina: “I’m a college student
(University of South Carolina)”
Miss Foster is fourteen years old, and
never attended high school. She went straight to college from junior high. She is majoring in art, and also takes
ballet, piano, singing and drama lessons outside of her usual class load. Miss Foster became Margot Bergman as an
adult. She settled in Virginia where she
was an artist and an art professor at local colleges.
Special Guest Hermione Gingold: “Henry Morgan made a blind date
for tonight…He doesn’t know it, but it’s with me!”
Another prank
on Henry. He is set up by friends, and
Garry reads the transcript of the phone call arranging his date. Gingold, with her husky voice and English
accent, seems always to have played the eccentric matron in films like Gigi (1958) Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and The Music Man (1962) among others, but she was in fact a child
actress originally and graced stages and screens for decades. She also was a popular guest on television
talk shows, where her outsized personality could be on full display.
