‘Room 222’ Star Karen Valentine Reflects on Her Friendship With ‘Bewitched’ Actor Paul Lynde

In 1971, Karen found herself working with Paul again, only this time as participants on Hollywood Squares, the tic-tac-toe game show in which celebrities answered questions for contestants who were hoping to score a win. “My favorite story is when we got hit with the San Fernando Valley earthquake,” she says. “It happened at, like, 6:00 in the morning, and it was a 6.1. It was pretty devastating and I woke up to sirens — it was crazy. We actually still taped Hollywood Squares that night. We were going to do five shows that very night of the earthquake, and you know show business; the show must go on.”

“I was living in Burbank then,” Karen continues, “and I remember all the black soot that had come into the house during the earthquake. But, anyway, we reported for work and in the middle of the taping there were a lot of aftershocks. And you know how the set was built, with this scaffolding. The thing kind of rocked when people walked up it, because there were two spiral staircases to get to the top and the middle tier. So this aftershock hits, and it’s a long one. We’re swaying and the producers, Merrill Heatter and Bob Quigley, are down in the front row saying, ‘Keep going, keep going, keep going.’ And Paul was looking at them and said, ‘You got to be kidding me.’ So [host] Peter Marshall brought it to a halt.”

As has been well documented, for much of his life Paul struggled with his weight, but on that day he didn’t give a damn. Climbing down from the scaffolding, he made a bee-line for the candy machine. When things quieted down, he returned, arms filled with Snickers bars, M&Ms and other candies.

“He unloaded the candy machine, I think,” she laughs. “He walks by me and sees me sitting in my cube again and he says, ‘Oh, you’re so young to die!’ Well, I laughed until I was crying. So did everyone else, you know? And that’s what he was like. He could deliver a line like that in real life; it wasn’t written for him. That was just his humor.”

She also remembers that on taping days between the third and fourth episodes, they would go to dinner either at the studio or walk to the nearby restaurant Chadney’s. “I don’t’ think it’s there anymore,” Karen muses. “The building might be there, but it’s a Mexican restaurant or something now. It was pretty popular in those days, so we would come out of the studio and try to cross over to it, but it was practically like a freeway. There was no crosswalk, so we would have to make our way across on our own. So there’s all this traffic going and he looks at me and goes, ‘Oh, go ahead. You can make it.’ Like, just run into the traffic, you know? So there were these little comments that he would always come up with. Like I said, he was a deeply funny man and the best times were sitting around with him, talking.”

One aspect of Paul that she finds people have never spent a great deal of time talking about was his elegance. “He had the most elegant taste,” she says. “His house was extremely gorgeous; it was in Architectural Digest and was beautiful. And that was just one of the two houses I knew of. One was up in the Hollywood Hills, above Sunset Boulevard. The other one was down in Beverly Hills, I think on Maple Drive. Both houses were designed and decorated to the nines, just absolutely gorgeous.”

“He was also flamboyant,” Karen continues. “He wore a lot of kaftan and pith helmets and things like that. We had a lot of laughs together and he’d come to our house for dinner and my husband, Gary, and I would be invited to his house. I know everyone talks about his dark side, which he definitely had. He did have his demons. In fact, he threw me out of his house one night after dinner, and he threw his hat after me. He was ranting about something or another, but I kept the hat. I later said, ‘You’re never getting this hat back, you know.’ I mean, the next day, nothing was wrong. He could be volatile, but I still adored him.”

Speaking of Paul’s house, in an A&E biography of the star, actress Kaye Ballard commented on the fact that, yes, his house was beautiful, but that he treated it like a museum in that nobody was allowed to touch anything. In fact, once he had people over and had them sit in the backyard, because he didn’t want them on the couch. “That’s hilarious,” Karen laughs. “I don’t know if Kaye was being funny, but I remember sitting at his dining room table and it was gorgeous. It was a catered affair and all. So I never got that feeling with him. If it happened, it went over my head. Maybe I thought he was just being funny.”

Another aspect of Hollywood Squares she remembers is that the celebrities would go on promotional tours, and one in particular that stands out was Butchart Gardens in Canada. “The guest list,” Karen recalls, “were people like George Gobel, Jonathan Winters, Art Fleming, Rose Marie, Rita Moreno, Leslie Uggams, Paul and myself. It was a real diverse groups of folks. So at every little thing we had to do a line up, and Hollywood people aren’t really used to waiting in line; you kind of just go in. So some people would complain and bitch about it, but never Paul and never Jonathan Winters. And I have to say, being stuck in a line with Paul Lynde and Jonathan Winters, with them riffing off of each other, was the treat of a lifetime. The respect they had for each other, I thought, was astounding and wonderful. And we laughed so much that you just wanted to stay in line. It was total entertainment.”

Then there was a particular New Year’s Eve, spent between Karen, her husband, Paul and Jonathan Winters. They had drinks at Paul’s home before walking over to the ballroom. “On our walk,” she smiles, “Paul is wearing a full white kaftan with tons of gold jewelry and sandals, and Jonathan is wearing a yachting outfit with the snappy hat and blazer, navy blue, fits perfectly, white pants and everything. When we were walking, I’m next to Paul and my husband’s on my other side. Jonathan had come up while we were walking and he looks at Paul and says, ‘Obviously you’re from the holy land.’ Being around that kind of humor in those days was an amazing treat and a gift that I felt I was given. But like I said, the respect they had for each other, riffing off each other and laughing at each other’s jokes — it was genuine respect, and I was quite impressed by that.”

Earlier, Karen brought up the fact that Paul battled demons for most of his life, and there have been many stories about the dark moods that would possess him when he drank (which was often), how abusive he would become to even his closest friends. Which raises the question of why they would accept this behavior and remain his friend through it all.

“I think it’s because it was pain he was feeling himself and that’s how he was working through it,” she suggests. “Not the best choice to make. I think he was lonely, in a way, and maybe, in his eyes, he wasn’t achieving what he wanted to achieve. But he was still popular and appeared on so many shows, like Donny & Marie and Bewitched. He wasn’t on a lot of episodes of Bewitched, but he was so memorable on that show.

“He was one of a kind,” she adds, “except maybe for Alice Ghostley. They were like brother and sister, I’ve got to say. To be in the same room with them was amazing. It was like, ‘Are you two related? You’ve got to be related.’ In any case, I think he was unsatisfied with himself. I know he fought his weight, he had a series that didn’t go long — and it didn’t go because he was cast as a traditional sitcom father. He could play someone eccentric, but to be a traditional father … In Bye Bye Birdie he was the father, but he was disgruntled in that about the way everything was going, so that worked. But in a series, the character has to have legs and I don’t think they ever tapped into the magic of what he could do. Or the funniness. It was just trying to fit him in a box that wasn’t where he fit. And that in turn might have affected him and made him feel stuck, not being able to be free.”

What becomes apparent is that despite Paul’s demons, Karen always maintained empathy for him that allowed her to forgive those dark moments. “You knew it was the alcohol talking,” she suggests. “It was like he was flailing out against himself, really. That’s how it seemed to me, but I’m not a psychologist. But I still absolutely adored him. And people still adore him. One of the hardest things in the world is to make people laugh and forget about their problems. He had that gift. For those of us who loved him and loved his work, he touched us in a very special way. And oftentimes humor comes out of pain.”

“Many times, when people grew up, that was how they escaped bad childhoods, through comedy,” Karen continues. “I think there’s something innate in that that we relate to. So you forgave him, because when the bad behavior would happen, you’d think, ‘This is coming from something else that he’s dealing with,’ and you wouldn’t take it personally. Because he could be a bad boy. But the fans never saw that side of him. They just saw the fun stuff, the deeply funny performances he gave and the characters that he created. You remember that, because it touches you and makes you laugh. And when it works, it works.”