campaign to discontinue long-running shows that they considered stale, dominated by older demographics, and/or becoming too expensive due to escalating costs. Despite Skelton's continued strong overall viewership, CBS saw his show as fitting into this category and cancelled the program along with other comedy and variety shows hosted by veterans such as Jackie Gleason and Ed Sullivan. Performing in Las Vegas when he got the news of his CBS cancellation, Skelton said, "My heart has been broken." His program had been one of the top-10, highest-rated shows for 17 of the 20 years he was on television. Skelton moved to NBC in 1970 in a half-hour Monday-night version of his former show. Its cancellation after one season ended his television career, and he returned to live performances. In an effort to prove the networks wrong, he gave many of these at colleges and proved popular with the audiences. Skelton was bitter about CBS's cancellation for many years afterwards. Believing the demographic and salary issues to be irrelevant, he accused CBS of bowing to the antiestablishment, antiwar faction at the height of the Vietnam War, saying his conservative political and social views caused the network to turn against him. He had invited prominent Republicans, including Vice President Spiro Agnew and Senate Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, one of the Senate’s strongest supporters of the war, to appear on his program. Personal, as well as professional, changes occurred in Skelton's life at this time. He divorced Georgia in 1971 and married Lothian Toland, daughter of cinematographer Gregg Toland, on October 7, 1973. While he disassociated himself from television soon after his show was cancelled, his bitterness had subsided enough for him to appear on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on July 11, 1975; it was his first television appearance since the cancellation of his television program. (Johnny Carson, one of his former writers, began his rise to network television prominence when he substituted for Skelton after a dress rehearsal injury in 1954.) Skelton was also a guest on The Merv Griffin Show in October of the same year. Hopes he may have had that he could ease back into television through the talk-show circuit were ended on May 10, 1976, when Georgia Skelton committed suicide by gunshot on the 18th anniversary of Richard Skelton's death. Georgia was 54 and had been in poor health for some time. He put all professional