Radio career Before appearing in television, Rayburn was an actor and radio performer. He had a morning
drive time radio show in New York City, first with
Jack Lescoulie (
Anything Goes) and later with Dee Finch (
Rayburn & Finch) on WNEW. Rayburn's pairings with Lescoulie and Finch helped to popularize the now-familiar morning drive radio format. When Rayburn left WNEW, Dee Finch continued the format with
Gene Klavan. From 1961 through 1973, Rayburn served as the longest-tenured "communicator" (host) of
NBC Radio's "
Monitor (radio program)" weekend broadcast. He relinquished the position after resuming his "
Match Game" hosting duties on
CBS' version of the show in 1973. The new show was taped at
CBS Television City in Los Angeles on alternate weekends, proving to be an insurmountable conflict with "Monitor", which originated at NBC's headquarters at
30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York.
Stage career Rayburn took the lead role in the Broadway musical
Bye Bye Birdie when
Dick Van Dyke left the production to star in
The Dick Van Dyke Show. At one point in his stage career, Rayburn's stand-in was future
Match Game panelist
Charles Nelson Reilly.
Television career Breaking into television as the original announcer on
Steve Allen's
Tonight, Rayburn began a long association with game show producers
Mark Goodson and
Bill Todman in 1953. He first appeared on
Robert Q. Lewis's ''
The Name's the Same; Rayburn frequently sat in for regular panelist Carl Reiner. In 1955, he took over as host of the summer replacement game show Make the Connection from original host Jim McKay (and appearing with his WNEW morning show successor Gene Klavan). From there he hosted shows such as Choose Up Sides, Dough Re Mi, Play Your Hunch, and the daytime version of Tic Tac Dough. On radio, Rayburn became one of the many hosts of the NBC program Monitor'' in 1961 and remained with the show until 1973. In an uncredited role (he reportedly did not want his name to appear), Rayburn played a TV interviewer in the movie
It Happened to Jane (1959) starring
Doris Day. Rayburn was also a frequent panelist in the 1960s and 1970s on ''
What's My Line? and To Tell the Truth''.
Match Game From 1962 to 1969, Rayburn hosted
The Match Game. In the original version, which aired from New York on NBC, Rayburn read questions to two panels, each consisting of a celebrity and two audience members. The questions in the original game were ordinary, like "Name a kind of muffin," or "John loves his ____________." Rayburn usually played it straight, though he would make jokes as the situation warranted. Very few episodes have been preserved; only four are known to exist. The show was canceled in 1969 to make room for the topical, short-lived game show
Letters to Laugh-In. Goodson-Todman revived
Match Game in 1973 for CBS, this time as a California-based game show. Rayburn returned as host and introduced a new format in which two contestants tried to match the responses of six celebrities. Writer
Dick DeBartolo, a veteran of the original show, created funnier and often risqué questions ("The big bad wolf said: I just came from a house where this old lady had the biggest ____________s I ever saw.")("After it was run over by a steamroller, Norman was able to slide his ____________ under the door.") Rayburn reveled in this freewheeling new approach and often indulged in funny voices, banter with the celebrities, and mock arguments with the technical crew. It soon became the highest-rated show on daytime television. From 1973 to 1977,
Match Game was number one among all daytime network game shows—three of those years it was the highest rated of all daytime shows. The daytime revival of
Match Game, which featured regular panelists
Richard Dawson,
Brett Somers, and
Charles Nelson Reilly, ran until 1979 on CBS and another three years in first-run syndication. A concurrent nighttime version,
Match Game PM, aired in syndication from 1975 to 1981. Rayburn was nominated three times for the
Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host. During the years when
Match Game was taped in Los Angeles (1973–1982), Rayburn lived in
Osterville, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. He commuted to California every two weeks to tape 12 shows over the course of a weekend (five daytime shows and one nighttime show per taping day).
Other game shows and television appearances and
Michael Landon during a 1964
Match Game episode 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. Also during the run of the 1970s Match Game
, Rayburn and his wife Helen appeared on the game show Tattletales, hosted by Bert Convy. Rayburn also hosted some episodes of Tattletales
. Three years after the original Match Game
was canceled, Rayburn hosted the short-lived Heatter-Quigley Productions show The Amateur's Guide to Love. In 1983, he hosted a pilot for Reg Grundy Productions titled Party Line
, which later became Bruce Forsyth's Hot Streak''. In 1980, Rayburn was a guest star on the television show
The Love Boat. Rayburn appeared as a contestant during a tournament of game show hosts on the original version of
Card Sharks in 1980 and was a celebrity guest on
Password Plus several times between 1980 and 1982. He appeared on
Fantasy Island as a game show host—he and another host, played by
Jan Murray, were game show rivals who vied to win the woman they both loved by creating the ultimate game show, with life-or-death consequences. He once hosted a local New York City show on
WNEW-TV,
Helluva Town, and between game show stints in 1982–1983, he returned to WNEW-TV as host of a weekly talk and lifestyles show titled
Saturday Morning Live. He ended his brief tenure to return as co-host of
Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour. Rayburn's last game show hosting duties were on 1985's
Break the Bank (he was replaced by
Joe Farago after 13 weeks), and
The Movie Masters, an
AMC game show that ran from 1989 to 1990. Just before production was to begin on a new Rayburn-emceed
Match Game revival in 1987, an
Entertainment Tonight reporter publicly disclosed that Rayburn was 69 years old, much older than many believed. Rayburn had trouble finding jobs after that, blaming the reporter for revealing his age and subjecting him to
age discrimination. His daughter Lynne blamed this and the subsequent lack of work he received for sending him into a downward spiral. Rayburn portrayed himself on a
Saturday Night Live sketch in 1990, which featured
Susan Lucci (as her character from
All My Children,
Erica Kane). He returned as one of Kane's many previous husbands, to stop another marriage (officiated by his old
Choose Up Sides co-star
Don Pardo) with the host of a game show portrayed by
Phil Hartman. He also continued to make appearances on talk shows throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, usually to discuss classic game shows, including appearances on
Vicki! and
The Maury Povich Show and
The Late Show with Ross Shafer (Shafer hosted the 1990
Match Game revival). In 1992, Rayburn also made an appearance on New York shock jock
Howard Stern's
late-night TV variety show as one of the stars of his
Hollywood Squares parody,
Homeless Howiewood Squares, in which homeless people were supposedly the contestants. Rayburn co-hosted—with his wife and Peter Emmons—the
Drum Corps International finals of the DCI Championship for two years, which were telecast on PBS from Philadelphia's
Franklin Field in 1976 and Denver's original
Mile High Stadium in 1977. ==Personal life and death==