Television III: "Up Close"

In the early 1950's television was moving from a purely technical medium run by men in white lab coats to a more theatrical medium. They began performing live dramas and comedies that demanded stage production experience. The folks at NBC had only to walk across 50th Street to Radio City Music Hall.

My father became one of the original Unit Managers at NBC, along with a mutual friend, Tom Loeb, (who many years later I worked with at CBS). The NBC studios were a building within a building, part of the larger 30 Rockefeller Plaza complex with separate NBC entrances on 49th and 50th Streets. The NBC studios were only eight stories tall, attached to and dominated by the 70-story RCA (now GE) Building.

So it was about 1950 (that would have made me six or seven) that I got my first inside look at television. On that first trip to '30 Rock', my father took me to see my favorite television show, "Howdy Doody".

That day was a real adventure for me. We rode the 'El' into the city, took a taxicab along Fifth Avenue, visited St. Patrick's Cathedral (where I was christened), had lunch at the Horn & Hardart Automat* (which wasn't really automated at all) and then went to NBC.

Instead of entering through the NBC side entrances, we entered '30 Rock' from the plaza, past the skating rink, the golden statue of Prometheus, the RCA Building towering above us... overwhelming. The plaza provided the sculptural centerpiece for the entire complex, a 'sense of place' like few others in the world.

The lobby entrance of the RCA Building had a mural painted on the ceiling that created an illusion of even greater height above the towering marble columns, straddled by colossal, naked, muscular titans - ego monumental.

We rode the NBC elevators (where years later I would work as an NBC page) to the third floor and entered the studio through a wide hallway. The studio smelled funny, like paint and rubber. It was smaller than I'd expected and darker - until they turned on those terrible, blinding hot lights. There were about twenty of us, five, six and seven year-olds taking our seats on long wooden benches, suddenly frozen like deer in the headlights. One kid screamed and hid on the floor until he was carried out - the first casualty. The rest of us sat blinking, paralyzed in the lights, staring at all the familiar things we'd seen on TV looking so strange here.

I'd been watching Howdy Doody since 1948, a year after its debut. People forget that the original setting of the show was a circus. It makes perfect sense when you think about it; Buffalo Bob was the ringmaster, Phineas T. Bluster (a marionette like Howdy) was the circus owner, and all the other characters - Clarabell the clown (Bob Keeshan before Captain Kangaroo), Salami Sam (Dayton Allen), Chief Thunder-thud (the original "kowa-bunga") and Princess Summer-Fall-Winter-Spring - were all acts in the circus. (Flub-A-Dub? No idea.) It was only years later that they moved the setting to 'Doodyville' and started calling their child audience 'the Peanut Gallery'.

I absolutely believed it was a real circus and, although the show was broadcast in black & white, my imagination saw it in color. But now the curtain behind us, that I was certain was covered in bright red and blue polka dots in 'real life' were just big circles in different shades of gray. In fact, everything seemed to be in shades of black or gray except for some odd accents painted in a strange rust color. It wasn't a circus at all! It was like some parallel universe, a fraud.

Buffalo Bob's makeup was the same rusty color as the floor and started dripping the minute the lights came on. His face looked the size and color of a basketball. And Clarabell the clown seemed to be melting like a snow cone under the lights. But the strangest thing of all was right in front of us on the familiar puppet stage, hanging next to it like a dead body on the gallows was Howdy Doody.

Everything was fake. Buffalo Bob did Howdy's voice when off camera without even the pretense of ventriloquism and somebody else pulled Howdy's strings from above the puppet stage. Howdy was just a block of wood and was treated like one when the cameras couldn't see. And all these other people you never saw on TV seemed to be sharing some inside joke, laughing at us instead of with us.

At the end of every program, Buffalo Bob would tell the boys and girls to be sure to go to church on Sunday and they would show a beautiful church with a tall white steeple, its bell tolling in some sunny, tree-lined New England village. But as we were herded out of the studio after the show, there it was. The church was a cardboard model, the trees a painted backdrop, sitting on a prop table. I thought I saw dust on it.

I would never entirely trust anything I saw on television again.

* In later years, my father would take me to two of his favorite eateries, the Lamb's Club and the Headquarters Restaurant (Eisenhower's 'headquarters' after the war).