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Kevin Riordan: Recalling 'Mike Douglas Show'

Behind-the-scenes Glouco pair saw it all on the Channel 3 gem.

Set designer Dave Benyak (left) and graphic artist Tom Cloyd show some of their work for the talk show, taped at KYW. (April Saul / Staff Photographer)
Set designer Dave Benyak (left) and graphic artist Tom Cloyd show some of their work for the talk show, taped at KYW. (April Saul / Staff Photographer)Read more

Center City traffic had already stopped when Totie Fields burst out of a cake outside the KYW-TV studios.

The famously rotund comedienne sported a Playboy bunny getup for the occasion - the birthday of Channel 3's marquee attraction, Mike Douglas. Pieces of the fake cake eventually ended up on South Jersey's 42 freeway.

Just another zany story from the glory days at KYW, where set designer Dave Benyak and graphic artist Tom Cloyd helped shape the station's looks and personality for nearly 40 years.

Diva meltdowns on the set? Naughtiness on the air? "Technical difficulties" out of nowhere?

"We had them all," Benyak says.

Now neighbors in Washington Township, Benyak, 71, and Cloyd, 66, also share a career highlight: working on The Mike Douglas Show.

Five afternoons a week - in the early days live - the game-for-almost-anything Douglas presided over a 90-minute talk/variety show. Produced in Philadelphia from 1965 until 1978, Mike Douglas was carried by more than 200 stations nationwide.

Venerable vaudevillians, flavor-of-the-month rockers, and seemingly everyone in between sat in Mike's groovy chairs; cohosts and guests included the greats and not-so-greats of 20th-century popular culture. One 1969 episode featured the director Alfred Hitchcock, the poet Rod McKuen, and the peerless James Brown.

Benyak and Cloyd started working together in the mid-1960s and were part of KYW's close-knit creative and technical crew. Theirs was an era when many stations produced their own entertainment programming; locally the tradition endured the longest at WPVI, home of Al Alberts and Larry Ferrari.

At Channel 3, Benyak focused on the sets and Cloyd on the "art cards" and various on-air and for-print promotional materials. Both worked not only on Mike Douglas but also for news and other shows.

In an era when digital meant using your fingers, "we had complete creative freedom. . . . Everything was off the cuff," says Benyak, who remembers "conning" a Center City gallery to lend paintings worth $150,000 to dress a set.

"We got a lot guests because of the Latin Casino," he says, citing the long-gone, landmark Cherry Hill nightclub. "They'd be appearing there and be our guest-host for a week."

Red Skelton "was one of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet," adds Benyak, who also remembers helping Gypsy Rose Lee wrap a birthday present.

"She swore like a trooper," he says.

"Her and Phyllis Diller," Cloyd adds.

Not that curse words sounded out of place around KYW, where Zsa Zsa Gabor's notoriously profane on-air description of Morey Amsterdam's parentage put an end to live broadcasts of Mike Douglas - and where the crew was known to fill the water cooler with vodka.

"One day I walked in and saw [chimpanzee star] Mr. Jiggs go past me on roller skates," says Cloyd, before launching into a story about a ketchup bottle full of talcum powder to simulate smoke as a "train" puffed its way across the set.

That might have been for the Monkees' performance of "Last Train to Clarksville"; Benyak can't remember for sure.

One more memory: In August 1968, Benyak slipped into a seat in the darkened studio.

Perched on a stool in her signature white shirt and black capri pants was Judy Garland, a glass of liquid refreshment beside her.

It would be her first and only Mike Douglas appearance, and as she rehearsed with the house band, Benyak was an audience of one.

It was clear that Garland wasn't well; she died less than a year later.

But what he heard that morning, Benyak remembers, "was greatness."