After a decade of fighting the most powerful man in daytime television, Holly Hallstrom had come to the end of her road.
Cresting a hilltop deep in California's wine country, Hallstrom clutched the wheel of her beat-up white Honda as it puttered to a stop. She wasn't just out of gas. She was out of money, down to her last 48 cents. She'd sold all her belongings to wage what everyone told her was a battle she was certain to lose: taking on Bob Barker, her former boss at "The Price Is Right."
As one of the game show's four models known as "Barker's Beauties," Hallstrom had been a morning fixture in millions of homes. Packaged as daytime's answer to Charlie's Angels, Hallstrom and the other women were, in many ways, America's first supermodels — scantily clad, seemingly ubiquitous, and carefully typecast as personalities that viewers could relate to. Hallstrom, who was always stumbling around in her high heels, was presented as the show's comic relief and ordered to dye her blond hair red, like Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett. She hated the pressure. "I was terrified every moment that I was going to screw up, knock something over, or fall down," she says. "I'm a klutz. I wanted to appear graceful and poised, like a professional model."
But her hair color was the least of her worries. During her two decades on America's longest-running and most popular game show, Hallstrom was embroiled in the toxic and demeaning workplace that Barker was accused of creating. Off camera, the Beauties say, they were routinely subjected to sexual harassment and racial discrimination. A male staffer groped them; Barker hit on them and belittled them. When they complained to CBS, they were ignored or threatened with dismissal. Defended by the network, Barker continued to deny any wrongdoing right up until his death last year at the age of 99. "It had nothing to do with the show or with me," he once declared, confident that his word would trump all. "It was all in the minds of the women."
But Hallstrom, along with some of the other Beauties, decided to do something unthinkable at the time. In the heyday of TV's boys-club boorishness, they set out to hold Barker, and the television industry, accountable for their mistreatment. Like the women who came after them, they faced a brutal counteroffensive. Barker and CBS shamed them in public, fought them in court, and bound them to silence with nondisclosure agreements. Fragments of what they endured have been public for years, and today YouTube is stuffed with vintage clips of "Greasy Bob" being sleazy with female contestants. Now, for the first time, Hallstrom and her colleagues have agreed to share the full story of what they went through behind the scenes — and why they decided to fight back. In taking on Barker, they not only brought down America's most beloved game-show host, they also paved the way for a public reckoning of some of TV's biggest powerhouses, including Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Roger Ailes, and Leslie Moonves, who served as CEO of CBS Television during Barker's reign. Together, the women of "The Price Is Right" created the template for the era of #MeToo.
The battle came at a steep price. Stranded on a California road in October 2005, Hallstrom had nothing left but the scattered belongings in the car — and an envelope from CBS that was about to change everything. All she had to do, with the Honda's gas gauge stuck on empty, was get down the hill and into town. Determined to finish what she started, she shifted her car into neutral, clutched the steering wheel, and let it roll.
On a bright morning in May when we meet at her home near San Diego for her first interview in decades, Hallstrom recalls the mixture of terror and excitement she felt on that final downhill stretch of her long uphill battle. Now 72, wearing a red flannel shirt and matching headscarf, she comes across as less a feminist crusader than a hippie aunt. Even though she has decided to break decades of silence to tell her story, she'd rather talk about cosmology or the Grateful Dead than revisit the trauma she endured.
"I'm happy to see this receiving the attention that is so criminally lacking," she tells me. "There's a whole bunch to the story — not just what happened with the scandals, but the whole story of that time in television in America. But it's so unpleasant for me. It just recalls all that pain and anger and outrage. I just want to tell it, and then never talk about it again."
Hallstrom hasn't seen "The Price Is Right" in ages, and she winces when I say its name. "We just call it The Show," she instructs me. Nor are we to utter The Show's familiar catchphrase, bellowed by the announcer each time a new player is beckoned to the stage. "Never say 'come on D-O-W-N,'" Hallstrom says, spelling it out.
Hallstrom never expected to come on down to the biggest game show in America. Raised in Austin, she grew up a "horrible little tomboy country girl," catching water moccasins, studying physics, and skipping a grade in school. The daughter of a Neiman Marcus model and a Navy pilot, she was on the path to becoming a Texas debutante — until she got thrown out of finishing school for skipping class. "I didn't want to bake pies," she says, "I wanted to go out and wrangle steers."
Hallstrom found the adventure she craved when her family moved to the Bay Area, where she became "a surfing country girl hippie chick," dropping acid, following the Dead, and protesting for women's rights. "I was the first generation of females to benefit from all the work and effort going all the way back to the suffragettes," she says. "But I also knew I couldn't get a license to ride a motorcycle on the streets in California. I couldn't be in the Future Farmers of America. I couldn't take auto shop in school. So those were the first years that we challenged those things. They had to change."
Hallstrom, like her mother, was also modeling on the side. In 1976, when she was invited to Hollywood to try out as the new model for "The Price Is Right," she'd never seen the show, since she didn't own a TV. At her audition, she was instructed to sit on the floor of the studio and watch tapes of the show for days on end, to familiarize herself with its routines and cadence. The experience blew her mind. "It looked just like insanity," she recalls with a laugh. "All the lights and the bells and the colors and the screaming people. It looked like a Fellini movie."
The orchestrated chaos was the brainchild of Mark Goodson, the co-creator behind such prime-time classics as "To Tell the Truth," "Password," and "What's My Line?" But it was "The Price Is Right" that proved the most iconic of all. Launched in 1956 as the first game show for daytime TV, it transformed everyday American consumerism into mainstream entertainment. Rather than rewarding a contestant's knowledge of literature or history, just guessing the price of a can of beans could win you a dinette set, an all-expense-paid trip to Tahiti, or, as the slaphappy announcer Johnny Olson would bellow, "A NEW CAR!"
A big part of the show's success was Barker, who came on board in 1972. Lincoln tall, impeccably dressed, and quick-witted, Barker had mastered the improvisational art of hosting a live TV game show. "You're working with civilians, and you never know what they're going to do," Hallstrom explains. Barker "could take whatever was thrown at him and polish it, respond with a witticism or something funny to rouse the audience. He was in command of that set."
He was also in command of the show's trio of models. Janice Pennington, a former Playboy Playmate, was the veteran of the group, poised and refined. Dian Parkinson, a former Miss World USA, was hired to be, as she put it, the "wholesome sexy" one. Often clad in bikinis and negligees, she became the Pam Anderson of daytime TV. That left Hallstrom to play the goofball. She dyed her hair red, as ordered, only to watch it gradually devolve into a terrifying shade of pumpkin. "You're going to do fine," Lucille Ball herself once deadpanned to Hallstrom during a backstage visit. "But you should do something about the color of your hair."
Hallstrom's mishaps and pratfalls made her a fan favorite. She bought a rambling house with a swimming pool in the hippie haven of Laurel Canyon, drove her red Corvette with the top down, and frequented all the hottest spots, from the Playboy mansion to Studio 54. But the fame came with a price. One day on set, her boyfriend David Hasselhoff, the coiffed star of the hit show "Knight Rider," stopped by with a bundle of her fan mail he'd picked up in the mailroom. CBS, she quickly realized, had been keeping some letters from her — like the one from a guy describing in detail how he was going to kill her.
"It was so graphic and violent, it was terrifying," she recalls. "I went to network security, but they had no idea who he was or where he was." Hallstrom put bars on her windows.
CBS responded to complaints of groping by imposing the "10-Second Rule." No crew member was permitted to stare openly at the Beauties for longer than 10 seconds.
But it wasn't only at home where she was beginning to feel uneasy. On set, she began noticing how women were being mistreated backstage. Not long after she was hired at age 25, she says, Goodson, who was 62, started coming on to her. "So," he leered at her, "what do you like to do when you're not being glamorous on TV?" Hallstrom knew just how to put off a stylish and well-heeled city slicker. "I told him I like to go camping," she recalls with a laugh. "That was the end of the conversation right there, because Mr. Goodson doesn't like to go camping."
Other women had problems of their own. One day, when a production assistant had to stay home with her baby when her nanny called in sick, Barker blew up at her. She should have left the baby in the crib, he insisted, and come to work. Another time, Pennington was hit with a camera during a taping and knocked unconscious. After hours in surgery, she was left with a scar so prominent that the show stopped putting her in bikinis — but refused to cover her medical bills. Unlike the men in the cast, the Beauties worked on weekly contracts — meaning they never knew if they had a job the following week until they received a call from a producer hiring them back. The message, Hallstrom says, was clear: "It was their way of reminding you — you were replaceable."
By the late 1980s, CBS was so notorious for its lack of diversity that it had earned the nickname the Caucasian Broadcasting System. To counteract its image, "The Price Is Right" announced that Barker's Beauties would be adding a Black model. In 1990, after a high-profile nationwide casting call, Kathleen Bradley, a 39-year-old model and singer, got the job. "I felt very proud to be the one that was chosen to represent people of color," she says, dressed in jeans and a denim shirt, as we sit on the leafy patio of her West Hollywood home.
But it didn't take long for Bradley to learn how Black employees were treated on the show. The prize administrator Deborah Curling, one of the show's few other Black staffers, warned Bradley of the frequent racial slurs backstage. Sure enough, Bradley found that all kinds of "offensive and discriminatory remarks, including those against blacks, women, gays, and other minorities, were tolerated," as she wrote in her memoir, "Backstage at The Price Is Right." Barker, in particular, had a reputation as a bigot. When Black contestants tried to embrace him, he would "jokingly" run from them, as if they posed a threat. Black contestants were marked on the show's call sheet with the letter B, and were called only during the third act of the show, when contestants' row was already filled with whites. "He didn't want too many," Hallstrom says.
Sexual assault, on the other hand, was colorblind. One crew member had become notorious for groping the Beauties backstage, but no one had found the courage to speak up. But when he tried it on Bradley, she immediately went to management and reported him. CBS, she says, ignored her complaint. "The higher-ups never took action," she recalls, "and he was merely given a slap on the wrist for his bad behavior." So Bradley took matters into her own hands. One day, while she was idly swinging a golf club from a prize display, she beckoned the crew member over to help her. When he wrapped his arms around her to show her how to swing, she whipped the club between his legs. "I swung around and hit him in his little peanut," she tells me. The crew member stopped his groping, but he kept his job.
Eventually, CBS responded to the complaints by imposing what became known as the "10-Second Rule." No crew member, the network decreed, was permitted to stare openly at the Beauties for longer than 10 seconds. But no one kept a stopwatch on the offenders, and the ogling continued.
The atmosphere grew more toxic when it became an open secret that Parkinson, the "wholesome sexy one," was slipping in and out of Barker's dressing room. "She'd put her robe on and go down during the breaks, then come back up with a smile," Bradley recalls. "We could tell when Barker was happy that day. You could tell that glow." Hallstrom says that Parkinson told her she was sleeping with Barker, a 66-year-old widower, because he "needed a little hanky-panky" in his life. (Parkinson and Pennington declined requests to share their experiences for this story.)
The affair soon spilled over to the show itself. During one taping, Barker leaned over to Parkinson, who was dressed in a revealing pink negligee. "I think it would be nice to have a little chat with you in your nighty," he told her.
"Well," she replied, "it's about time!"
"Are you going to get your clothes on before we play another price game?"
"I don't know," she cooed. "I think I'll tease you."
The affair divided the Beauties, who felt that Barker was favoring Parkinson. "That's exactly how we knew when she started having sex with Barker," Hallstrom says. "Because all of a sudden, here come the producers all suddenly kissing Dian's ass like she might be the new Mrs. Barker." At Barker's insistence, Parkinson was even allowed to pose for the cover of Playboy, over Goodson's objections. Backstage, the Beauties began bickering among themselves. Barker, frustrated by the increasingly hostile work environment he had created, lashed out at those around him. "My life for five years became hell with him," recalls Linda Riegert, a production assistant. During one commercial break, after she made a mistake placing a prop, he called her a "stupid bitch." Riegert began getting migraines and sobbing in her dressing room after tapings.
Barker called a meeting of the Beauties and blamed them for the tensions. "Ladies, we cannot afford to continue to have this kind of discord behind the scenes on this show," he told them. "Please, try to work out your differences and make peace." Hallstrom got a note from Goodson accusing her of spreading rumors about Parkinson. If she didn't "straighten up," he warned her, she was going to be fired.
Blindsided, Hallstrom called Goodson's office and demanded to meet with him. In person, she says, he confessed that Barker and Parkinson were the ones behind the threat. "Listen," Goodson told her. "I know Barker is sleeping with Dian. I know Dian hates you with a passion. And she is filling his head during the pillow talk." There was nothing, he added, that he could do to help her. "I no longer control the show," he said. "Barker seized control of it."
Hallstrom heard the same thing from a surprising source: Nancy Burnet, Barker's girlfriend at the time. One day, Burnet called Hallstrom out of the blue to warn her that she had overheard Barker calling Goodson. "If one more thing happens on that set," Barker told him, "fire Holly."
The tensions worsened when Barker learned that Parkinson had been sleeping with Black men, including the singer Smokey Robinson and the actor Tim Reid. "He went through the roof," Parkinson confided to Bradley. "I've never heard him that upset and nasty." When Bradley asked why Barker was so angry, Parkinson didn't mince words: "He always had the idea that if he was involved with someone who'd had sexual relations with a Black man, he might contract some sort of communicable disease just because they're Black." Hallstrom heard a similar account from Burnet, who told her, "Barker says Black men are the most diseased creatures on earth."
The breaking point came when Barker learned that Parkinson was planning to do a second photo shoot with Playboy — this time fully nude. He called Parkinson into his dressing room where they had what Hallstrom recalls as "a huge screaming fight." When Parkinson stormed out in a huff, one of Barker's assistants chased after her and pleaded with her to patch things up. "You gotta go back," the assistant pleaded. "You gotta apologize."
As Hallstrom recalls the moment, Parkinson was standing on a stairway outside the dressing rooms, where everyone backstage could see her. As they all looked on, she drew herself up and refused to back down. "I have sucked his dick too many times," she declared, "to start kissing his ass now."
Awestruck, one of the writers turned to Hallstrom. "Who writes for her?" he quipped.
On June 18, 1993, viewers who tuned in to "The Price Is Right" got a surprise. Just before the show's Dice Game, Barker called over the four models. "Here come my Beauties!" he declared, sliding his arm around Parkinson. She smiled awkwardly, her long blond hair flowing over the jacket of her red pantsuit. "I want you folks to know that the lovely Dian is leaving 'The Price Is Right' to pursue other interests," Barker announce
"You are the heart and soul of 'The Price Is Right,'" she told the audience. "And I love you very much."
"Very well said," he replied with a smile.
But that wasn't the end of what she had to say. Before she left the show, Parkinson told Bradley she'd been fighting a stomach ulcer from all her battles with Barker. And she was not going to go quietly, she promised Riegert. "She said that if he tries to take her down, she's going to take him down with her," Riegert recalls. "I wasn't quite sure what she was talking about."
Riegert found out a year later, when she overheard Barker meeting with Bradley, Pennington, and Hallstrom backstage. Parkinson was suing him for sexual harassment, Barker told them. And the picture she painted was darker than she'd let on. In her lawsuit, she alleged that Barker had forced her to perform oral sex, and that she agreed to have sex with him only because she feared losing her job if she declined. Now she wanted $8 million for her pain and distress.
"You're probably going to get called in for depositions," Barker told the women. "Just go in there and tell the truth."
The women were skeptical. They'd been complaining for years about the hostile workplace, the sexism, the disharmony, and not once had Barker taken any responsibility. But now that he was faced with a scandal, he wanted to know they had his back. "OK," Bradley thought, "so you want to schmooze up to your Beauties again now that it suits your personal needs?"
On May 27, 1994, Barker held a press conference and denounced Parkinson in no uncertain terms. Barker blamed her for the affair. "She told me that I had been so straitlaced and that it was time I had a little hanky-panky in my life," he said. "And she volunteered the hanky-panky." He denied the harassment. "It was a case of two middle-aged adults, consenting adults, having sex," he went on. "It's as simple as that." In a headline, a tabloid captured what it saw as the gist of Barker's defense: "This old man is innocent, guys! Don't listen to that mixed-up bimbo. She's mad."
It proved relatively simple to push Parkinson aside. She ended up dropping the suit, saying she couldn't compete with the deep pockets she was up against. "Bob Barker has beaten me into submission," she said. "My doctor has advised that I am not strong enough to see this thing through. As a single woman, I was no match for the power and resources of Bob Barker and Goodson Productions."
The first Beauty had fallen. As Hallstrom soon learned, Parkinson would not be the last.
Despite the mounting dissent, Barker kept the show a hit. "He was always focused on the show," Roger Neal, his longtime publicist, tells me. We're standing in front of a life-size cutout of Barker smiling at visitors inside the Hollywood Museum, a kitschy tourist attraction in Los Angeles. "He always focused on the animals," Neal says, noting Barker's years as an animal-rights crusader. "Always focused on the fans."
The display is a testament to the legendary status Barker still maintains. "The Price Is Right" remains the second-highest-rated show for CBS, and it continues to rank among the 10 most watched shows on TV. And thanks to the classic-game-show channel Buzzr, Barker is now back on the air with daily reruns. TikTok revels in kitschy Barker-era memes, and even in the age of #MeToo, the glowing obituaries that followed his death made scant mention of his on-set behavior. As the game-show historian and author Adam Nedeff says, the franchise Barker built continues to deliver "multigenerational comfort food" to a nation hungry for nostalgia and distraction.
But backstage, Barker was furious at Hallstrom for her refusal to toe the line. "Barker was not real happy with her," Bradley recalls. "He was resentful that she wouldn't back him up." While Barker made the media rounds denouncing Parkinson, Hallstrom, Pennington, and Bradley were booked to appear on "The Suzanne Somers Show." When pressed on Parkinson's claims of sexual harassment, Hallstrom deflected. "I was not present for any conversation regarding that," she said. But now she tells me what she wished she could have said back then. "I knew that Dian was not lying about anything," she says.
The more Hallstrom refused to trash Parkinson in court and in the press, the more outraged Barker became. One day, he told her to provide a list of Parkinson's boyfriends to a tabloid reporter. When she refused, Barker blew up. That, she later testified, was when he began focusing on her weight.
Barker had always badgered the Beauties about their weight, routinely popping into their dressing room whenever he thought one of them looked too heavy. "Once you allow one or two pounds to slide on," he would tell them, "there will generally be more pounds to follow. So weigh yourself daily."
At the time, Hallstrom was being treated for a hormonal imbalance caused by a hysterectomy she'd had for ovarian cysts. The prescription estrogen and progesterone she was taking came with a side effect: weight gain. She explained the difficulties of her condition to Barker and asked for some additional time to lose weight during the show's coming hiatus. The request was denied. When a top executive at Barker's production company visited the set, he eyed Hallstrom and said, "How are you doing, Pillsbury Dough Girl?"
One night after work, Barker and the producer Roger Dobkowitz returned to Hallstrom's dressing room to discuss her weight. Bradley was also present, and Riegert overheard the talk from her own dressing room. When Barker ordered Hallstrom to lose the weight in a week, she protested. "The only way I can lose the weight is to go off my medication," she told him. "Do you want me to go off of my medication?"
"Do whatever it takes to lose the weight," he told her.
Fearing for her job, Hallstrom gave in. "I went off my medication," she later testified. But Barker wasn't through with her. The next day, Jonathan Goodson, who had taken over the production company from his father, called a meeting and fat-shamed Hallstrom in front of the entire cast and crew, according to four people who were present. "Well, it seems like Mr. Barker wants us to help Holly lose weight," they recall Goodson saying. Until she did, he went on, she would be granted no close-ups, and would not appear until the third act of the show. Whenever she was on camera, she would be positioned behind the prizes, so no one could see her body.
When I ask Hallstrom how she felt in that moment, she falls silent for a long beat as her eyes well. "I felt like the rabbit who looks up just in time to see the face of the viper," she says. "That horrible feeling inside. Wow. Intense. When your guts just turn to liquid." Sure enough, starting with that day's taping, she disappeared from view. "I was hidden behind cars and boats and refrigerators and stuff like that," she says. Everyone knew what was happening. "They were mistreating her on the show," Bradley says. "You could tell she was just getting eased out."
A week later, Barker confronted Hallstrom in her dressing room. "He was furious," she recalls. "He was screaming at me." In fear of a lawsuit, he denied having told her to go off her meds. She refused to back down, and that was that. On October 27, 1995, her last appearance aired.
Like Parkinson before her, Hallstrom went public with the reasons for her firing. The reason Barker pushed her out, she told the press, was "because I was not cooperating with his publicity campaign to smear Dian when she filed a suit against him."
Barker took to the air to launch a PR campaign against her. "If the company were going to terminate her for a weight problem, Holly would have been gone years and years ago," he told "Entertainment Tonight." Another time, he said her weight had fluctuated so much that for a while she "was wearing a full body girdle down to her thighs.'"
Hallstrom's lawyers urged her to sue Barker for libel and medical discrimination, but she refused to play that game for one reason: She didn't want to be muzzled by a nondisclosure agreement, no matter how much CBS settled for. Instead, she would simply sit back and wait for Barker to sue her first. That way she could countersue him, winning a victory without having to sign an NDA.
"I'm telling you, this man is stupid," she told her lawyers. "He's going to sue me."
Hallstrom was betting, in effect, that Barker's ego would get the better of him. She and others think that Barker, on some level, actually relished his bouts with Parkinson, which cast him as a virile older man with a young sexpot girlfriend. "He wanted that big old celebration of Bob, the silver-haired stud," Hallstrom says. "You know: Here's another model suing him." To make matters worse for Barker, fans began to miss their favorite Beauty. "I knew he would sue me because he couldn't take the hit to his ego that suddenly the fans were turning against him."
The gamble paid off. Within days, Barker sued her, alleging defamation of character. Hallstrom, as planned, countersued with her own defamation claim as well as allegations of infliction of emotional distress and discrimination based on disability, age, and sex. The legal battle raged for years, draining Hallstrom's hope and bank account. Having spoken out, she was viewed as radioactive by the industry. "No one was returning my calls," she says. But even when she was offered hundreds of thousands to settle, she turned the deals down, refusing to be silenced by an NDA.
The two remaining Beauties, Bradley and Pennington, made a different decision. In September 2000, after returning to the show from the summer hiatus, they each got subpoenaed to testify on Barker's behalf against Hallstrom. The next day, Barker called them to his office, flanked by the show's director and producer. When Barker pressed Bradley to reveal the contents of her deposition, she told the truth. "I distinctly recall you not telling Holly to stop taking her medication," she said, "but for her to do whatever was necessary to lose the weight."
Barker glared at her. "Either you're lying," he said, "or you're making it up." She wasn't, and she had the proof — a diary of everything that had happened, including dates and times.
Soon after, both she and Pennington were fired. "It felt like a dagger," Bradley tells me. "I couldn't believe it — my whole head spaced out." She stumbled to her car, where she broke down in tears, furious at being kicked to the curb for telling the truth. But rather than risk the costly and time-consuming campaign required to take on CBS, Bradley and Pennington settled out of court, agreeing to sign NDAs.
They weren't the only women fired for refusing to play Barker's game. The same day, Linda Riegert and Sherrell Paris, Barker's executive assistant of 23 years, were also fired for refusing to back up Barker. Both women sued for wrongful termination, saying they'd been fired in retaliation for testifying against Barker. "I knew the truth about what went on," Riegert says.
Riegert's case was dismissed because she had signed an arbitration agreement when she was fired, and Paris settled for an undisclosed amount. But Hallstrom continued to hold out. Being single and childless, she says, made it easier for her to bet everything she had. "I was in a unique situation — I'm the one who could stand up."
By 2004, Hallstrom had lost all her money, and was forced to sell her home. She was sleeping in a shed and living out of her car. She would have used the car to kill herself, she tells me, but she had nowhere to park inside. "If I could have gotten the car in the garage," she says, "I would not be standing here today." But something inside her kept her going. "I didn't know what was going to happen or how it was going to unfold," she says, "but I just knew it was not going to go the way they thought it was going to go."
"People need to understand that in the workplace, you cannot be forced to do anything illegal," Hallstrom says. "People need to understand that we have rights."
Two days before her case was scheduled to go to trial, her lawyer contacted her with urgent news. Barker and CBS were settling. The network agreed to pay her what she will only say was several million dollars. And with it came an even bigger victory: She would not have to sign an NDA. Despite years of intimidation, she was free to tell her truth whenever she wanted. "I remember dropping to my knees," she says. "It's really true — that happens."
Down to her last 48 cents, Hallstrom scrounged her sofa cushions for enough change to pay for a gallon of gas to get her to the bank and deposit the check. But she ran out of gas before she made it, and had to roll down the rest of the road in neutral.
Soon after, on the "Today" show, she was asked why she had continued her fight even after she was homeless. Hallstrom remained unequivocal. "People need to understand that in the workplace, you cannot be forced to do anything illegal, such as lie for your boss, or suffer sexual harassment or racial discrimination or discrimination of any kind," she said. "People need to understand that we have rights, and they have recourse." Hallstrom sold her beat-up Honda and bought herself a roomier ride from which to live: a luxury tour bus. Packing her things, she hit the road for the Pacific Northwest, far from the Hollywood she forever left behind.
The road she paved would soon lead to the final prize. Eighteen months later, in April 2007, the longtime "Price Is Right" employee Deborah Curling, the woman who had first warned Bradley about racism on the set in 1990, sued Barker and CBS with claims of wrongful termination and a hostile work environment. Barker, her lawsuit alleged, "intentionally inflicted emotional distress on Curling," including racist and antisemitic jokes."Any employee who complained about the working environment or contradicted Barker was fired," she claimed.
She named more than Barker in the suit. Eleven years before the CBS chair and CEO Les Moonves would be brought down for sexual harassment and sexual assault, Curling sought to depose him over his own "conduct, which constitutes sexual harassment and creates a hostile working environment." She warned that he and other executives had created "a widespread policy of sexual favoritism that is set from the top at CBS."
A judge refused to allow Curling to depose Moonves, and eventually granted a summary judgment in favor of the network and Barker. But CBS had apparently had enough. Barker's game was over. In June 2007, he taped his last show, telling the audience he had decided to retire. While he didn't mention the claims against him over all the years, he did let on that the decision to go wasn't entirely his own. "I'm really not ready to leave," he said. "But I'm 83, so I think it's a good time."
"Come on down! You're the next contestant on 'The Price Is Right'!" The show's current announcer, George Gray, is bellowing the familiar catchphrase during a taping of the show in Glendale, California. Inside the blindingly bright, candy-colored studio, the slaphappy audience parties like it's 1979, shouting and dancing in the aisles. "It was my first plane trip to get here," Mary Capps, a grandmother who arrived with her family in matching T-shirts, tells me before the show. "I had to use a barf bag!"
While "The Price Is Right" remains the top-rated game show on TV, the troubles of the Barker era didn't end with his departure. Three years later, in March 2010, the model Brandi Cochran sued the show and CBS, claiming she was ridiculed about her weight and barred from returning to work after taking maternity leave. A jury awarded her $8.5 million in damages, but the verdict was overturned because of an error by the judge. The following year, the model Lanisha Cole sued the show for sexual harassment, alleging that a producer had barged into her dressing room when she was naked. CBS settled with both Cole and Cochran for undisclosed sums. Thanks to Hallstrom and the other Beauties, women on the show now had a model for how to stand up for themselves — and hold the network accountable.
Hallstrom has advice for anyone considering speaking up at work. "Do everything you can to maintain your personal power and your ethics," she says. "And if you are brave enough and can support yourself and whoever you need to support through a long battle, then by all means stand up, speak out, and resist. Because the women I know who did not, it stains your soul, and it never goes away."
For the women who took on Barker during his heyday, the nightmare of their time on the show continues to haunt them. Riegert, Barker's longtime assistant, still suffers from what the women jokingly call "Pricemares" about their time on the set. "They're usually about Barker coming at you with his mic, shaking it at you, or him looking at you," Riegert says. "If you ever saw the meanest look ever on somebody's face, you never, ever forget it." Bradley has Pricemares in which Parkinson is storming across the stage in a murderous rage. "She was mad at me," Bradley says. "She wanted to kill me."
Hallstrom still gets the occasional Pricemare, too. Sometimes they mirror the struggle she and so many other women continue to face in the workplace: She can't figure out what is expected of her. "I just had one where it's like: Oh my gosh, where am I supposed to be? Door three? Door two? Door one? Onstage? Backstage?" But in the midst of all the uncertainty and anxiety, there's one person who never appears in her dreams: Bob Barker.
"He couldn't get in here if he tried," Hallstrom says.
David Kushner is a regular contributor to Business Insider. His new book is "Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game."