Charles Nelson Reilly - Personal Life

Personal Life

Reilly did not publicly affirm his homosexuality until his one-man show Save It for the Stage. However, much like fellow game-show regular Paul Lynde of the same era, Reilly played up a campy on-screen persona. In many episodes of Match Game, he would lampoon himself by briefly affecting a deep voice and the nickname "Chuck," and self-consciously describing how "butch" he was. He mentioned in a 2002 interview with Entertainment Tonight that he felt no need to note this and that he never purposely hid being gay from anyone.

Patrick Hughes III, a set decorator and dresser, was Reilly's domestic partner; the two met backstage while Reilly appeared on the game show Battlestars. They lived in Beverly Hills.

Despite sporting what appeared to be a full head of hair for most of the prime of his career, Reilly was in fact bald, wearing a toupée throughout most of his appearances in the 1970s and 1980s. During the filming of Match Game 74 his toupee became the joke of the filming when Reilly had to go to NYC to have his toupee put back on. During the filming of several episodes Reilly is seen wearing different hats because his toupée is back in NY waiting for him to be fitted. This was the start of the long-running jokes on Match Game about his hair. He abandoned the toupée in the late 1990s and appeared bald in public for the rest of his life. Reilly survived the infamous 1944 fire in Hartford, Connecticut, at age 13. Because of the trauma of the event, he rarely attended theater, stating that the large crowds reminded him of what happened that day. He dramatized the experience in his stage show, "The Life of Reilly."