It amazed me that he and Dawson really disliked each other.
@Cyber Liberty It wasn't really between Rayburn and Dawson . . . it was between Dawson and
The Match Game's production
staff, after Mark Goodson (who produced
The Match Game, then still with his longtime partner Bill Todman)
tapped Dawson to host the newly-created
Family Feud in 1976, and that show became a runaway hit. The problem:
Dawson was also under contract as a
Match Game panelist for both its daytime and nighttime versions, and
he was feeling burned out enough to ask to be let out of his
Match Game contract. When his request was
refused, Dawson rebelled by becoming sullen on set, refusing to flirt or joke with the show's contestants, and
refusing to speak to the show's co-panelists, until his
Match Game contract expired in 1978. Gene Rayburn
may have been dismayed by Dawson's act, but Dawson's real feud, if you will, was with the show's production
staff and with Goodson-Todman, though
Family Feud's success didn't
exactly mean Dawson and Goodson
would be mortal enemies, either.
The Goodson-Todman partnership ended only when Bill Todman succumbed to heart disease in 1979. I once saw
a funny story about Todman from the network radio years, when Goodson-Todman first teamed up to produce
game shows on radio. Todman was carrying an armload of small appliances up into the CBS building in New
York, to be prizes on a couple of the early Goodson-Todman radio games, when he stumbled on one step and the
appliances crashed to the steps below. CBS's Goodman Ace---a legend of radio comedy as a writer (and, on his
own
Easy Aces, co-performer with wife Jane), then running a CBS workshop for comedy writing (Neil Simon
was one of his students), and eventually to become Perry Como's head writer on television (he once cracked it
was difficult to put any humour into "We now take you to exotic Brazil")---happened to see the accident and
hollered out, "Hey, Todman, you dropped your script!"
