In his more than 30 years as emcee of “The Price is Right,” Bob Barker changed in only one appreciable way: He stopped dyeing his hair in the early 1990s, two decades into the game show’s long and storied run.
Nearly everything else about Barker – his tanned and lithe looks, his avuncular ease with contestants, his witty rapport with the audience – remained the same. Even the CBS set where “Price” had been taped five times a week beginning in 1972 didn’t change much: the same mustard-avocado-and-tangerine color scheme, the same Smithsonian-worthy Showcase Showdown wheel.
Barker has died at the age of 99, according to his publicist Roger Neal.
“It is with profound sadness that we announce that the World’s Greatest MC who ever lived, Bob Barker has left us,” Neal said in a statement.
In a town where longevity is rare, Barker broke records for stamina. As “Price,” which became synonymous with Barker, emerged as TV’s longest-running game show, Barker eclipsed Johnny Carson as the medium’s most resilient host. In an industry where trendiness trumps reliability, Barker was unusual in that he did one thing and he did it very well, for decades.
Barker won a record-breaking 15 Daytime Emmys as outstanding game show host, as well as a Daytime Emmy Award for lifetime achievement in 1999. In early 2004 he was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. Guinness World Records twice named him TV’s Most Durable Performer.
Barker retired from “The Price Is Right” in June 2007. During his 35 years as host, he missed only one taping of four episodes. And he made several guest appearances with the new host, Drew Carey.
Barker has had some health issues in recent years. He fell outside his home in 2015 and passing police officers called an ambulance. He fell again inside his home in 2017. The following year he was hospitalized for back pain, twice. In December 2018, he quietly marked his milestone 95th birthday.
“He’s still recuperating from his back (issues),” Barker’s representative William Prappas told USA TODAY at the time. “He’s improving. It’s a bit of a slow process, but … all the signs are pointing to a good recovery, and so he’ll just keep doing what he’s doing.”
Barker’s “Price” was as comfortable and unpretentious as the three-piece living room sets he gave away. “It’s like a security blanket,” Barker told USA TODAY in 2001. “You can turn on your television set and there’s something that you remember from the very beginning.”
The same could be said for Barker himself. “It’s like, ‘There’s good old Bob,’” “Price” producer Roger Dobkowitz once said. “All must be well in the world because Bob is still on TV, and I’ve been watching him since I was in the arms of my mother.”
Born Dec. 12, 1923, Barker grew up on South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation, where his widowed mother was a teacher. After a stint in the Navy as a World War II fighter pilot, Barker attended Drury College in Springfield, Missouri, while working for a local radio station. Radio and TV jobs in Palm Beach, Florida, and Southern California led to Barker’s big break in 1956, when he was plucked to host the TV game show “Truth or Consequences.” On the first day of taping the theater marquee read “Free Doughnuts and Bob Barker.” The gig lasted 18 seasons, first on NBC and then in syndication, and Barker assumed top-billing in the world of emceeing.
Starting in the 1960s, Barker narrated the Pillsbury Bake-Off for 16 years and the Tournament of Roses Parade for 19 years. For 22 years, until 1987, Barker served as host of the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants. His tenure there ended abruptly when he found out the contestants would model furs during the swimsuit competition, a violation of his staunch animal rights advocacy. A strict vegetarian, Barker turned his views into a hallmark of “Price,” exhorting the audience at the end of each show to help control the pet population by getting their pets spayed or neutered. In 2001 his production company donated $500,000 to Harvard Law School to support research and teaching on animal-rights law.
In 1996 Barker made his feature acting debut in “Happy Gilmore,” in which he made use of his black belt in karate by clobbering star Adam Sandler. When moviegoers clamored for more of Barker on the big screen, he offered a typically cheeky explanation: “I refuse to do nude scenes. I don’t want to be just another beautiful body.”
“Happy Gilmore” garnered him a whole new fan base, which the “Price” audience began to reflect, as hordes of vacationing college students competed with housewives and retirees to come on down to contestants’ row, courting their small-screen grandfather with shirts and posters emblazoned with such understatements as “Bob is fine.” The biggest winner in “Price” history during Barker’s tenure was Vickyann Chrobak-Sadowski, who won $147,517 in cash and prizes in 2006.
The show’s camp value proved irresistible to Generation Y. “The Price Is Right” seemed “so un-self-conscious of its profound squareness,” said Robert Thompson, who teaches TV’s role in pop culture at Syracuse University. Barker’s last generation of fans watched him with their tongues rammed in their cheeks, their elbows rammed into their neighbors, Thompson said.
Indeed, of all his broadcasting achievements it was “Price” that defined Barker, who boasted that he knew all of the show’s 70-plus games, from Plinko to Hole in One, well enough to render cue cards unnecessary. The formula worked by taking a task everyone could relate to – shopping, be it for antacid or an automobile – and injecting humor and sport into it. “What I try to do is have fun with the audience and get laughs … make it a big party,” Barker told the St. Petersburg Times in 2003. He added perspective, too: “On our show, we don’t solve the problems of the world. But hopefully, we can help people forget their problems for an hour.”
Sometimes, that came at the expense of other contestants. Perhaps the most famous moment in “Price” history occurred when a tube-top clad woman came on down so exuberantly her breasts popped out of her top. As Barker tells the story, at first he thought the audience’s shrieks were for him. “Then I realized no audience had loved me that much.” Turning to then-announcer Johnny Olsen, Barker asked, “Johnny, what has happened out here?” Olsen replied, “Bob, this girl has given her all for you.” Barker outlived his two veteran announcers, Olsen, who died in 1985, and Rod Roddy, who died in 2003.
Other “Price” moments are more infamous, like the $8 million sexual harassment lawsuit filed in 1994 by longtime Barker’s Beauty and onetime paramour Dian Parkinson. (Barker’s wife, high-school sweetheart Dorothy Jo Barker, died from cancer in October 1981.) Barker denied the charges and Parkinson withdrew the suit a year later. In later years, other ex-“Price” models alleged age and weight discrimination, accusations Barker deemed unfounded.
Barker even turned his sexual harassment woes into comedic fodder, shared with his studio audience once the cameras stopped rolling. His audience joshing didn’t stop, not even during commercial breaks, “when most hosts are smoking a cigarette behind the set,” as his boss, Syd Vinnedge, put it to The Boston Globe.
Barker bemoaned the lack of real-people interaction by young talk-show upstarts, whose guests are limited to “professional talkers,” not unrehearsed average Joes and Janes. As he told the St. Petersburg Times, “In what I do for a living, there’s no substitute for experience. I don’t care how much natural talent you may have.”
USA TODAY Life/Entertainment reporter Olivia Barker, no relation to Bob Barker,died in 2014.
Contributing: Erin Jensen and Hannah Yasharoff
