Radio-TV mirror (July-Dec 1954)

A zipper complicated Joan Caulfield's reaction when Ralph Edwards pronounced those magic words. Time out for Ralph and Jan Boehme, busy and resourceful research editor of This Is Your Life. Four Magic Words (Continued) plaque, judge a bathing beauty contest, review a book authored by a boyhood friend? Do you have an eerie sense that you are being shadowed? If so, don't look now, but the Life that Ralph Edwards is planning to use — some exciting night in the near future, on his NBC-TV show, This Is Your Life— may be Your Own ! If the "angel" of This Is Your Life fame is planning this, do you realize what you are? You're "top secret." You're "hot." And you are really being shadowed. You are one of the most carefully shadowed and guarded individuals in the U.S.A. Your friends are avoiding you for fear that, by so much as a slip of the tongue, they may give you a clue as to what's cookin'! For the same reason, the members of your family are keeping their distance. And neither your family nor your friends hesitate to tell you bare-faced lies in order to maintain the secrecy in which — until that tense moment when Maestro Edwards makes the ringing statement, "This Is Your Life!" — you are swaddled and swathed. The ends to which Mr. Edwards and his staff go in maintaining secrecy are fantastic, sometimes very funny, always ingenious, and no pains are spared to keep you from suspecting that it is your Life the network audience — millions of 'em! — are about to view. Unless they can throw a big, fat red herring across the trail, you — the principal — are never contacted. Not directly, that is. If or when it becomes necessary to get some first-hand information about you, one or the other of Mr. Edwards' two research editors, Don Malmberg and Jan Boehme, calls upon you . . . posing as a columnist wanting an "item" about one of your best friends ... a detective on the trail of a missing person concerning whose whereabouts you may be able to shed a ray of light ... as a magazine writer from TV Radio Mirror polling you on your favorite radio and television personalities ("We're always being writers," Don told us, laughing, "from TV Radio Mirror") ... as a solicitor of magazine subscriptions, an insurance agent, a friend of a friend from your old home town. "Many and elaborate are the ruses we use," says Don, "to forestall every suspicion of the person with whom we must make contact." If blue -eyed Mr. Edwards — himself, in person — makes the contact, he'll look you straight in your own blue, brown, gray, green or black eyes and tell you that it's the Life of your best friend, or next door neighbor, or family doctor, in which he is interested . . . and, please, can you help? "When we were planning the Life of Dinah Shore," Ralph says, "we told Dinah that it was Eddie Cantor's Life we were doing, and would she — who knows Eddie so well — be good enough to help us with the research? Dinah, always a helping hand and a warm heart, both would and did. We even had a whole phony Eddie Cantor script written which we submitted to Dinah, who thereupon called us daily with suggestions about including this or that person in the script . . . she was so upset, I recall, because Deanna Durbin, of whom Eddie is so fond, was out of the country! "Busy as she is, Dinah even helped with the rehearsal, the one and only rehearsal we have — with every