In 1949, McNulty was an usher at NBC for The Ed Wynn Show. When Wynn was stricken with a cold, he was worried his medicine would make him flub his lines, so McNulty wrote the show’s entire script out on cardboard sheets so Wynn wouldn’t miss a word — and the cue card was born.
McNulty went on to become Hollywood’s best known cue card man, providing the right line at the right time for Bob Hope, George Burns, Lucy Ball, Groucho Marx and Jimmy Durante. But not just comedians: he also cued John Wayne, Orson Welles, Fred Astaire, even vice president Hubert Humphrey and poet Carl Sandburg. He considered Hope, Frank Sinatra and Milton Berle his three most important clients, but “I hated it when they all wanted me on the same day.”
Amazingly, he kept more than 100,000 of the used cards “because it’s a continuing history of show business.” McNulty died December 17 at home in Studio City, California. He was 77.