I'm a little fuzzy about the details of our departure from Prague. My well-worn passport shows a DDR (Deutsche Demokratiche Republik) arrival stamp from Schonefeld Flughafen, which in 1964 was the only airport serving East Berlin, but I have absolutely no memory of the flight. My first really clear memory is a bus ride through Brandenburg and East Berlin on our way to the border with the west and our concern about our inevitable meeting with the infamous East German Volkspolizei, commonly known as the 'VoPo's'.
Formed after the end of World War II and the partition of Berlin into four zones, three Allied (British, French and American) that became West Berlin and one Russian zone that became East Berlin, the Volkspolitzei ('People's Police') were ostensibly a national law enforcement body. But the VoPo's were organized as a paramilitary force, complete with tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery. In their green uniforms, they were almost as feared as the Stasi, the East German secret police.
The VoPo's and the army had begun erecting what became known as the Berlin Wall in August 1961, its stated purpose to protect East Germany from the negative influence of western society, especially 'fascist sympathizers'. The wall was officially designated the "anti-fascist protection rampart", part of an effort to create a crime-free worker's state. And in the heavy hands of the Stasi and the VoPo's, they had succeeded admirably. There was virtually no crime in East Germany.
What had started in 1961 as a barbed-wire fence had by 1964 become a massive concrete barrier stretching for hundreds of miles with a three-and-a-half mile wide 'zonal border' on the East German side. In East Berlin, they had added a tall, steel-mesh fence that created a 'death strip' complete with landmines and watchtowers. Gunter Litwin was the first to die attempting to cross into the west in 1961. Nearly 200 more would follow before the wall came down in 1990. And the job of guarding the wall belonged to the VoPo's.
The bus ride into East Berlin was somewhat reminiscent of our arrival in Budapest in that the buildings seemed unusually dark by western standards except for glaring illumination of street lamps. (Why did we always seem to arrive in the middle of the night?) Oddly enough, it turned out West Berliners favored romantic gas lamps while in East Berlin they'd gone all electric. The major difference was that most of the buildings looked relatively new, although utterly lacking in anything one might call architectural style. Many were enormous apartment blocks, what in the states might be called 'the projects'.
These forbidding apartment blocks, mixed in with much older buildings, continued along Karl-Marx-Allee to within a half-mile of the border. But as we drew closer to the wall, we saw only old buildings, many appearing bricked-up and abandoned. The wall itself zigzagged through the streets, sometimes very close to deserted buildings, sometimes with a wide 'no-man's land' between brick and wire. Ahead, we could see the Brandenburg Gate and nearby the border crossing at Friedrichstrasse made famous in so many spy movies, 'Checkpoint Charlie'.
As our bus approached the barriers, we could see several smaller walls bristling with barbed-wire that squeezed the wide boulevard down to a narrow passage. We were waved off to one side by armed VoPo's, two of whom boarded the bus and began collecting our passports. Soldiers wearing several different uniforms stood by at the crossing, the VoPo's with their distinctive green uniforms and others we did not recognize, presumably East German Army. There were also men in those ubiquitous long leather coats, who we assumed to be Stasi, that took all the passports into a shed and examined them by the light of a bare bulb that we could see through the windows.
It was a scene right out of a John Le Carre novel, glaring flood lamps creating moody reflections on the wet pavement, occasional pedestrians looking at us curiously while their papers were checked before being allowed to pass, oddly enough most coming from west to east. Finally, one of the Stasi boarded the bus and began returning our passports, in each case carefully comparing us to our photographs. Occasionally, he would ask someone a question in English, usually too softly for most of us to hear. We probably all gave him more information than he asked for because he finally smiled as he left the bus and rather grandly waved us on.
The barriers were raised and the bus lurched forward across a kind of DMZ along Friedrichstrasse. Beyond that, the actual 'Checkpoint Charlie' was little more than a shack. American MP's detained us only briefly, giving us the chance to realize that we were back in the west. To one side, was the Famous Cafe Adler ('the Eagle's Cafe') where officials and tourists alike could watch the comings and goings at the border crossing over a meal and a drink. On the other side, there were viewing platforms where people would look into East Berlin even in the middle of the night. And ahead of us, the bright lights of West Berlin. After two months behind the Iron Curtain, it looked like Disneyland.
West Berlin at night dazzled the eye with neon, buildings with exotic names like 'OSRAM' and 'AEG', signs for 'Saba', 'Telefunken' and 'Bosch'. And along the major thoroughfare, Kurfuerstendamm, busy shops with signs 'verkauf und ankauf' ('buying and selling') and the twinkling lights of the Gloria Palast Cinema. I saw a movie at the Gloria Palast on my second night in West Berlin, "Liebschusse Aus Moskau" ("From Russia With Love" before it had been released in the states, dubbed in German). Further along, the famous Franzier Cafe, a well-known meeting place that demonstrated the kind of vibrant city center we had not seen in months (if ever).
The contrast between East and West Berlin was no less striking in daylight. On the western side of the wall, the letters 'KZ' had been spray-painted in several places. I learned that stood for "concentration camp". There was a large sign, written in English, facing east that read "There Is Only One Berlin". In every cafe, market or souvenir shop there were photos and other mementos of President Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech. One of the most poignant sights was on Bernauer Strasse where buildings in which people once lived had become a part of the wall itself. The bricked-over windows (always with one brick missing for snipers) were the east, the sidewalk just outside them the west. But perhaps the saddest sight of all had nothing to do with the Cold War - the bombed-out ruin of the Kaiser Wilhelm church spire, now a World War II memorial in the center of a modern city.
Once in West Berlin, our group had a couple of weeks off before we were to rendezvous again in Copenhagen for the second part of our production schedule. We all had 'open tickets' from the airlines that allowed us within preset geographic points to fly just about anywhere we wanted. I decided to stay in West Berlin for a few days while most of the others flew directly back to their home cities. I almost stayed in West Berlin, I loved the city that much, but London and New York were calling and I had to answer.
I spent a couple of days in London but, in retrospect, made the mistake of staying at the Hilton. Not that there was anything wrong with the hotel, just that in longing for something American I missed the opportunity of staying in a truly English hotel. I finally returned to New York with more than a week to go before heading back to Europe. I was visiting my father's apartment on Fifth Avenue & 14th Street and was watching television with my sisters the night The Beatles first appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show".
NEXT: Back to Europe"
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Saturday, September 26, 2009
"Behind the Iron Curtain II"
The next stop on our itinerary was Prague, Czechoslovakia or, more correctly, 'Praha'. I was sad to leave Hungary, especially after we'd been warned that the Czechs were not likely to be as friendly toward us as the Hungarians. Where the people in Budapest had been warm and generous in spite of their hardships, we were told we might find the people in Prague at best stiff and formal. One of the reasons was a lingering resentment from World War II. It was also said that the Czechs were more prosperous but completely under the thumb of the Soviet Communists. (But as I've said, five years later that would have changed enormously.)
I don't remember which members of our party traveled by air and which by auto. Almost certainly Gil Cates, Don Ameche and his wife Honey flew in, but I rode cross-country with our advance man, Axel Glasner, in his Mercedes. I was always impressed with Axel's knowledge of language and custom wherever we went in Europe. I suppose he was well into his fifties then, but he had a youthful attitude and a mischievous twinkle in his eye most of the time. I remember him laughing so hard we almost ran off the road when I told him the penicillin story.
The border crossing was a bit tense. The Czech border guards, who resembled the dreaded East German VoPo's, carefully examined our visas and passports and thoroughly searched the car and our luggage before allowing us to proceed. As had been the case entering Hungary, our arrival had not been communicated and the guards knew better than to make a mistake. But as with everything he did, Axel carried it off with great panache. It was only later that I learned that the drivers of our camera and videotape trucks had far more harrowing border crossings than ours.
For the life of me, I cannot remember the name of the hotel where we stayed in Prague. My memory is that it was on a side street just off Wenceslas Square, but looking at contemporary maps and visitor's guides I can't find a hotel that matches my memory of it. The problem is further compounded by many of the hotels having been re-named after the founding of the Czech Republic, the traditional eastern bloc 'Grand Hotel Potemkin' sort of names largely discarded. Unlike other nearby hotels, there was nothing especially memorable about our hotel except for the dark storefront directly across the street, from which men in hats and long overcoats would emerge and follow us any time we left.
Architecturally, Prague was an old and beautiful city, far more bright and colorful than Budapest had been. It had suffered significant (and unnecessary) damage from bombing raids in the last days of World War II, possibly having been mistaken in bad weather by Allied pilots for Dresden, Germany 100 km to the north. Although occupied by the Nazis, Prague had never been bombed before February 14, 1945. All the casualties had been civilian, hundreds of homes and several historical landmarks destroyed and not a single factory damaged. The Americans had apologized many times and helped pay for reconstruction, but nearly twenty years later there was still great bitterness about it.
But by 1964, the 'golden city' had been rebuilt into what some described as a sprawling "fairytale village", the most beautiful time in the city's thousand-year history. Saint Vitas' Cathedral is considered one of the most breathtaking in the world. Wenceslas Square in the city center is anchored on the southeast by the imposing neoclassical Czech National Museum and the sculptural centerpiece of the boulevard (it isn't really a 'square' at all) is the statue of Saint Wencenslas astride a horse. The boulevard was lined with picturesque hotels, office building and sometimes visually incongruous department stores. Wencenslas Square had been the traditional scene of demonstrations, celebrations and other public gatherings. But in 1964, protests seemed the farthest thing from anyone's mind.
But for all the city's beauty, none of our party seemed very happy in Prague. As predicted, many of the people we encountered, especially in the hotel, were very correct and more than a little wary of us. A few were downright hostile. Even Don and Honey Ameche, who usually had a good time wherever they went, seemed put off by their attitude. After the faded grandeur of the Hotel Gellert, where Don and Honey could drink champagne in the dining room as the throbbing violins played well into the night, this hotel felt like a well-appointed maximum security prison.
The Czech circus was organized differently than we'd seen elsewhere and it was a shock to the system after the permanent buildings we'd found in Munich and Budapest. Instead, the Kouzelny Cirkus and 'Letni Letna' had formed an amalgamation of circus troupes from all over Bohemia. They erected a tent village on a broad field outside the city center. It was a virtual city unto itself, a hodgepodge of food tents, and beer tents, and makeup and costume tents, and animal cages, and caravans and, of course, the enormous performance tent that could accommodate nearly 1,000 people.
It was still very cold in March, normally too early in the year for tent shows and it appeared this was being done mostly for our benefit. The performers were generally first-rate but, as we'd seen in Budapest, the production values were limited by lack of funds and resources. But what the circus lacked in flash and glitter it made up for with showmanship, imagination and theatrical flair. We learned this was an attempt to restore the luster to traditional circus that had suffered a decline with the advent of a home-grown Czech art form called 'Laterna Majika', a clever, innovative theatrical combination of film and live performance.
While in Prague, I struck up a friendship with a handsome young Czech student whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten (or blocked). He was studying economics at Charles University in Prague, spoke nearly perfect English and seemed interested in me and in all things American. (It only occurred to me later that he might have been assigned to keep an eye on me.) I thought that we were bridging the cultural and political Cold War divide, 'hands across the sea'. That is, until he said he wanted to have sex with me. I was suitably outraged and he seemed mystified by my attitude. He said he and his friends did it all the time, that it didn't make you homosexual. I insisted that Americans didn't do things like that. He said it was proof of what a provincial and puritanical society we were. I felt hurt, betrayed and never spoke to him again. But I'll confess that I've wondered ever since what that 'adventure' might have been like.
We managed to get only two one-hour programs and a few 'banked' acts from the Czech circus. There were some technical problems but the greater limitation was coming from the NBC censors back in New York. After reviewing shows we'd completed and delivered, the Standards & Practices Department was expressing serious concern over content. They felt some of the humor of the European clowns was too bawdy, that some of the acrobats' performances were too overtly sexual, that there was just too much skin showing in general. At one point, they wanted one performer's act cut because the man's nipples were too dark. It sounds ridiculous, but they had the 'please delete' power and could not be ignored.
Before we left Prague, as a kind of follow-up to my visit to Dachau, I visited the Old Jewish Cemetery, Pinkas Synagogue and Holocaust Museum. As I said earlier, not being Jewish I cannot account for my need to see these places, just that I did. I learned that before the Holocaust, Prague had been one of the largest and most important Jewish enclaves in Europe and had been for centuries. At the outbreak of World War II over 92,000 Jews lived in Prague, roughly twenty percent of the city's population. By the end of the war, an estimated 80,000 of them had been rounded up and murdered. Throughout the country as many as 250,000 Czech Jews had been exterminated and over 60 synagogues destroyed by the Nazis.
The Old Jewish Cemetery is the oldest in Europe, dating from the 15th Century into the late 18th Century. For 400 years, roughly 200,000 Jews from the Prague ghetto were buried there, far beyond the cemetery's capacity. As a result, the tombstones were packed tightly together and stacked in layers, in one section as many as twelve-deep. It was customary for visitors to place a small stone on the top of the tombstones, not always an easy task since over time and frequent flooding they had become tilted at odd angles.
The Renaissance-style Pinkas Synagogue dates back to the 1490's and has also required regular repairs and renovations due to flooding. Likewise, its Holocaust Museum, although built only fifteen years before my visit, had suffered similar damage. But I was confused when I entered the museum, thinking perhaps I was in the wrong place. The 'nave' was composed of five or six rooms, end-on-end like a railroad flat. The rooms were completely empty. The walls and ceilings appeared to be painted a dull gray - until you got closer and realized that the walls and ceilings were white but covered with names, each one no more than three inches long. It's only when you can touch one name and think about the life it represents that you can then step back and feel the full weight of it. Over 77,000 names, from Prague alone.
NEXT: "Back to the West"
I don't remember which members of our party traveled by air and which by auto. Almost certainly Gil Cates, Don Ameche and his wife Honey flew in, but I rode cross-country with our advance man, Axel Glasner, in his Mercedes. I was always impressed with Axel's knowledge of language and custom wherever we went in Europe. I suppose he was well into his fifties then, but he had a youthful attitude and a mischievous twinkle in his eye most of the time. I remember him laughing so hard we almost ran off the road when I told him the penicillin story.
The border crossing was a bit tense. The Czech border guards, who resembled the dreaded East German VoPo's, carefully examined our visas and passports and thoroughly searched the car and our luggage before allowing us to proceed. As had been the case entering Hungary, our arrival had not been communicated and the guards knew better than to make a mistake. But as with everything he did, Axel carried it off with great panache. It was only later that I learned that the drivers of our camera and videotape trucks had far more harrowing border crossings than ours.
For the life of me, I cannot remember the name of the hotel where we stayed in Prague. My memory is that it was on a side street just off Wenceslas Square, but looking at contemporary maps and visitor's guides I can't find a hotel that matches my memory of it. The problem is further compounded by many of the hotels having been re-named after the founding of the Czech Republic, the traditional eastern bloc 'Grand Hotel Potemkin' sort of names largely discarded. Unlike other nearby hotels, there was nothing especially memorable about our hotel except for the dark storefront directly across the street, from which men in hats and long overcoats would emerge and follow us any time we left.
Architecturally, Prague was an old and beautiful city, far more bright and colorful than Budapest had been. It had suffered significant (and unnecessary) damage from bombing raids in the last days of World War II, possibly having been mistaken in bad weather by Allied pilots for Dresden, Germany 100 km to the north. Although occupied by the Nazis, Prague had never been bombed before February 14, 1945. All the casualties had been civilian, hundreds of homes and several historical landmarks destroyed and not a single factory damaged. The Americans had apologized many times and helped pay for reconstruction, but nearly twenty years later there was still great bitterness about it.
But by 1964, the 'golden city' had been rebuilt into what some described as a sprawling "fairytale village", the most beautiful time in the city's thousand-year history. Saint Vitas' Cathedral is considered one of the most breathtaking in the world. Wenceslas Square in the city center is anchored on the southeast by the imposing neoclassical Czech National Museum and the sculptural centerpiece of the boulevard (it isn't really a 'square' at all) is the statue of Saint Wencenslas astride a horse. The boulevard was lined with picturesque hotels, office building and sometimes visually incongruous department stores. Wencenslas Square had been the traditional scene of demonstrations, celebrations and other public gatherings. But in 1964, protests seemed the farthest thing from anyone's mind.
But for all the city's beauty, none of our party seemed very happy in Prague. As predicted, many of the people we encountered, especially in the hotel, were very correct and more than a little wary of us. A few were downright hostile. Even Don and Honey Ameche, who usually had a good time wherever they went, seemed put off by their attitude. After the faded grandeur of the Hotel Gellert, where Don and Honey could drink champagne in the dining room as the throbbing violins played well into the night, this hotel felt like a well-appointed maximum security prison.
The Czech circus was organized differently than we'd seen elsewhere and it was a shock to the system after the permanent buildings we'd found in Munich and Budapest. Instead, the Kouzelny Cirkus and 'Letni Letna' had formed an amalgamation of circus troupes from all over Bohemia. They erected a tent village on a broad field outside the city center. It was a virtual city unto itself, a hodgepodge of food tents, and beer tents, and makeup and costume tents, and animal cages, and caravans and, of course, the enormous performance tent that could accommodate nearly 1,000 people.
It was still very cold in March, normally too early in the year for tent shows and it appeared this was being done mostly for our benefit. The performers were generally first-rate but, as we'd seen in Budapest, the production values were limited by lack of funds and resources. But what the circus lacked in flash and glitter it made up for with showmanship, imagination and theatrical flair. We learned this was an attempt to restore the luster to traditional circus that had suffered a decline with the advent of a home-grown Czech art form called 'Laterna Majika', a clever, innovative theatrical combination of film and live performance.
While in Prague, I struck up a friendship with a handsome young Czech student whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten (or blocked). He was studying economics at Charles University in Prague, spoke nearly perfect English and seemed interested in me and in all things American. (It only occurred to me later that he might have been assigned to keep an eye on me.) I thought that we were bridging the cultural and political Cold War divide, 'hands across the sea'. That is, until he said he wanted to have sex with me. I was suitably outraged and he seemed mystified by my attitude. He said he and his friends did it all the time, that it didn't make you homosexual. I insisted that Americans didn't do things like that. He said it was proof of what a provincial and puritanical society we were. I felt hurt, betrayed and never spoke to him again. But I'll confess that I've wondered ever since what that 'adventure' might have been like.
We managed to get only two one-hour programs and a few 'banked' acts from the Czech circus. There were some technical problems but the greater limitation was coming from the NBC censors back in New York. After reviewing shows we'd completed and delivered, the Standards & Practices Department was expressing serious concern over content. They felt some of the humor of the European clowns was too bawdy, that some of the acrobats' performances were too overtly sexual, that there was just too much skin showing in general. At one point, they wanted one performer's act cut because the man's nipples were too dark. It sounds ridiculous, but they had the 'please delete' power and could not be ignored.
Before we left Prague, as a kind of follow-up to my visit to Dachau, I visited the Old Jewish Cemetery, Pinkas Synagogue and Holocaust Museum. As I said earlier, not being Jewish I cannot account for my need to see these places, just that I did. I learned that before the Holocaust, Prague had been one of the largest and most important Jewish enclaves in Europe and had been for centuries. At the outbreak of World War II over 92,000 Jews lived in Prague, roughly twenty percent of the city's population. By the end of the war, an estimated 80,000 of them had been rounded up and murdered. Throughout the country as many as 250,000 Czech Jews had been exterminated and over 60 synagogues destroyed by the Nazis.
The Old Jewish Cemetery is the oldest in Europe, dating from the 15th Century into the late 18th Century. For 400 years, roughly 200,000 Jews from the Prague ghetto were buried there, far beyond the cemetery's capacity. As a result, the tombstones were packed tightly together and stacked in layers, in one section as many as twelve-deep. It was customary for visitors to place a small stone on the top of the tombstones, not always an easy task since over time and frequent flooding they had become tilted at odd angles.
The Renaissance-style Pinkas Synagogue dates back to the 1490's and has also required regular repairs and renovations due to flooding. Likewise, its Holocaust Museum, although built only fifteen years before my visit, had suffered similar damage. But I was confused when I entered the museum, thinking perhaps I was in the wrong place. The 'nave' was composed of five or six rooms, end-on-end like a railroad flat. The rooms were completely empty. The walls and ceilings appeared to be painted a dull gray - until you got closer and realized that the walls and ceilings were white but covered with names, each one no more than three inches long. It's only when you can touch one name and think about the life it represents that you can then step back and feel the full weight of it. Over 77,000 names, from Prague alone.
NEXT: "Back to the West"
Thursday, September 17, 2009
"Behind the Iron Curtain"
After Munich, the next stop on our itinerary was to have been Vienna where, with the help of the U.S. Embassy, we were to get our Hungarian entry visas. But there had been a delay so we made a slight detour to Hamburg, ostensibly to preview a touring circus that we would later catch up with in Denmark. But equally important, was to see the city itself.
Like Munich, Hamburg had suffered major damage to both the city and its port from Allied bombing raids, but less than twenty years later there was little evidence of it. The city had been completely rebuilt but with fewer modern-style buildings than in Munich (at least in 1964), its skyline dotted with more church spires than skyscrapers. Perhaps surprisingly, Hamburg is a city of parks and canals, more canals in fact than Venice and Amsterdam combined.
And no visit to Hamburg would be complete without a trip to the notorious Reeperbahn, "die sundige Meile" (the sinful mile), the epicenter of Hamburg's night life and red-light district. The streets were lined with night clubs, sex shops, strip bars and brothels. But the short, gated street that made the most vivid impression was the HerbertStrasse, where prostitutes created window displays that left little to the imagination. Two years earlier, in 1962, The Beatles, who were already a phenomenon in Europe and soon would be in America, had famously played and partied in the clubs of the Reeperbahn.
Then it was on to Vienna, Austria where the weather had turned cold and snowy. Although briefly besieged by the Russians in 1945, the city had suffered virtually no damage and looked much like it had in the 19th Century. Perhaps the most beautiful city we had visited so far, known for its magnificent opera houses, theaters, museums and statuary, Vienna was difficult to fully appreciate due to the relentlessly nasty weather. Stuck there for several days while waiting for our visas, I did something there I had not done in Munich or Hamburg, I went 'clubbing' with our camera crew (a fateful decision as it turned out).
Our entry visas for Hungary finally approved, we boarded the Russian-built equivalent of a DC-3 and flew to Budapest in a snowstorm. It was a miserable roller-coaster of a flight and it was still snowing heavily as we landed at the airport outside the city. After the modern Vienna Airport, this airport was cold, drab and felt like a 30-year step back in time. Customs inspection amounted to the contents of our suitcases being dumped upside-down onto a table and examined. Armed guards were at every door and escorted us to a bus that would take us into the city.
Snow was still falling as we rode into Budapest at about 3 AM. Although visibility was obscured by the falling snow, we were struck by how dark the city seemed, the only illumination from amber street lamps that cast otherworldly shadows against the old building facades. As our bus approached a broad plaza in front of our hotel and the bridge across the Danube that separates 'Buda' from 'Pest', we were surprised to see dozens of dark figures out in the snow, old women wearing black coats and shawls, sweeping the snow with brooms as it fell.
The Grand Hotel Gellert looked across the Danube from the 'Buda' side of the river with a fine view of the parliament building on the opposite bank, adorned with a huge red star in case anyone might forget who was really in charge. In 1964, all eastern-block hotels called themselves 'Grand', but the Gellert had clearly seen better days.
Primarily used for housing visiting dignitaries and businessmen, only the front portion of the hotel could accommodate guests. The once-famous swimming pool and Turkish baths were closed, the terraced gardens gone to seed, the two wings of the hotel that extended up the hillside sealed with brick. The rooms were threadbare and dreary, "old world charm, old world plumbing", with microphones hidden in the light fixtures.
In daylight, Budapest was not only old, it was crumbling. Apart from a new sports stadium in which our 'escorts' in fedoras and long leather coats said they took great pride, there had been virtually no new construction in decades and few attempts even at maintenance. Many of the buildings on the 'Pest' side of the river had netting strung along their sides to catch falling masonry.
Although the standard of living in Hungary had become grim, especially after the 1956 revolution, the people of Budapest were warm, passionate about everything and very curious about the visiting Americans. We would sometimes get drawn into debates about American decadence by young students, then later asked if we could help them acquire blue jeans. Some would insist that all the truly great music had been written by Europeans, then ask if we had ever met Elvis Presley.
Our schedule called for us to videotape both the state circus and ice show, each in its permanent building, neither of which looked designed for entertainment. The circus had a limited summertime tent-show tour schedule, the ice show could not afford to tour at all. Both buildings were in a concrete 'blockhouse' style that looked more forbidding than inviting. But in each case, the audiences were enthusiastic and the performers as good as any we'd seen. But the productions were skimpy by western standards and we were shocked to discover that the performers lacked some of the most basic types of costume and makeup.
Two performers I remember most vividly were Gorgi Botond and her beautiful eighteen year-old daughter, Tunde. Gorgi was the star skater of the Hungarian State Ice Revue yet could not obtain fish-net stockings or theatrical makeup, even on the black market. They actually ground their own makeup from chalk, candle wax and dried glue. I promised Gorgi that, when I got back to the west, I would send her stockings and makeup. I sent them from West Berlin about six weeks later but never knew if she'd received them.
However any romantic possibilities with the beautiful Tunde had been preempted by my wild night in Vienna catching up with me. A few months shy of my twentieth birthday, I was not very sexually experienced. A girl I'd met in a bar in Vienna I thought might teach me a few things, and she certainly had. But she had also given me 'the clap' (gonorrhea). It was about ten days before the symptoms had started and a few more before I knew they would not go away by themselves. Anywhere in the west, this could have been quickly and easily treated. But in Budapest, in 1964, obtaining penicillin was, to say the least, problematic.
After considerable negotiations (and no small amount of embarrassment), it was agreed that I could be treated by a Hungarian doctor who was on-call at the American Legation (there was no U.S. Embassy) and had access to their small supply of penicillin. But it would not be quite that simple. Cardinal Jozef Mindzenty *, a hero of the Catholic Church for his anti-Communist stands, had been holed up inside since the 1956 revolution and Hungarian secret police were on round-the-clock duty outside should he attempt to escape. So in the middle of the night, I had to run this gauntlet of very suspicious security men just to get inside.
Then there was another problem. The Hungarian doctor didn't speak a word of English or German and the only person available to translate was his twelve year-old daughter who spoke a little German. So in my crude high school German I had to make this shy, embarrassed girl understand my problem. It was pure slapstick. The girl would go out, my pants would go down, the doctor would examine me and call the girl back in. My pants would go up, the doctor would question the girl, the girl and I would stumble through Q & A in fractured German, the girl would go out, my pants would go down... and it went on like this for some time until I finally got a very large needle stuck in my butt.
I was sore for a week and promised myself that I would not have any more 'adventures' for the rest of the trip. It didn't quite work out that way.
*Cardinal Mindzenty suffered 23 years of persecution by the Communists. He was sentenced to life in prison and tortured following a 1949 'show trial'. Freed during the 1956 revolution, he lived inside the American Legation for fifteen years.
NEXT: "Behind the Iron Curtain II"
Like Munich, Hamburg had suffered major damage to both the city and its port from Allied bombing raids, but less than twenty years later there was little evidence of it. The city had been completely rebuilt but with fewer modern-style buildings than in Munich (at least in 1964), its skyline dotted with more church spires than skyscrapers. Perhaps surprisingly, Hamburg is a city of parks and canals, more canals in fact than Venice and Amsterdam combined.
And no visit to Hamburg would be complete without a trip to the notorious Reeperbahn, "die sundige Meile" (the sinful mile), the epicenter of Hamburg's night life and red-light district. The streets were lined with night clubs, sex shops, strip bars and brothels. But the short, gated street that made the most vivid impression was the HerbertStrasse, where prostitutes created window displays that left little to the imagination. Two years earlier, in 1962, The Beatles, who were already a phenomenon in Europe and soon would be in America, had famously played and partied in the clubs of the Reeperbahn.
Then it was on to Vienna, Austria where the weather had turned cold and snowy. Although briefly besieged by the Russians in 1945, the city had suffered virtually no damage and looked much like it had in the 19th Century. Perhaps the most beautiful city we had visited so far, known for its magnificent opera houses, theaters, museums and statuary, Vienna was difficult to fully appreciate due to the relentlessly nasty weather. Stuck there for several days while waiting for our visas, I did something there I had not done in Munich or Hamburg, I went 'clubbing' with our camera crew (a fateful decision as it turned out).
Our entry visas for Hungary finally approved, we boarded the Russian-built equivalent of a DC-3 and flew to Budapest in a snowstorm. It was a miserable roller-coaster of a flight and it was still snowing heavily as we landed at the airport outside the city. After the modern Vienna Airport, this airport was cold, drab and felt like a 30-year step back in time. Customs inspection amounted to the contents of our suitcases being dumped upside-down onto a table and examined. Armed guards were at every door and escorted us to a bus that would take us into the city.
Snow was still falling as we rode into Budapest at about 3 AM. Although visibility was obscured by the falling snow, we were struck by how dark the city seemed, the only illumination from amber street lamps that cast otherworldly shadows against the old building facades. As our bus approached a broad plaza in front of our hotel and the bridge across the Danube that separates 'Buda' from 'Pest', we were surprised to see dozens of dark figures out in the snow, old women wearing black coats and shawls, sweeping the snow with brooms as it fell.
The Grand Hotel Gellert looked across the Danube from the 'Buda' side of the river with a fine view of the parliament building on the opposite bank, adorned with a huge red star in case anyone might forget who was really in charge. In 1964, all eastern-block hotels called themselves 'Grand', but the Gellert had clearly seen better days.
Primarily used for housing visiting dignitaries and businessmen, only the front portion of the hotel could accommodate guests. The once-famous swimming pool and Turkish baths were closed, the terraced gardens gone to seed, the two wings of the hotel that extended up the hillside sealed with brick. The rooms were threadbare and dreary, "old world charm, old world plumbing", with microphones hidden in the light fixtures.
In daylight, Budapest was not only old, it was crumbling. Apart from a new sports stadium in which our 'escorts' in fedoras and long leather coats said they took great pride, there had been virtually no new construction in decades and few attempts even at maintenance. Many of the buildings on the 'Pest' side of the river had netting strung along their sides to catch falling masonry.
Although the standard of living in Hungary had become grim, especially after the 1956 revolution, the people of Budapest were warm, passionate about everything and very curious about the visiting Americans. We would sometimes get drawn into debates about American decadence by young students, then later asked if we could help them acquire blue jeans. Some would insist that all the truly great music had been written by Europeans, then ask if we had ever met Elvis Presley.
Our schedule called for us to videotape both the state circus and ice show, each in its permanent building, neither of which looked designed for entertainment. The circus had a limited summertime tent-show tour schedule, the ice show could not afford to tour at all. Both buildings were in a concrete 'blockhouse' style that looked more forbidding than inviting. But in each case, the audiences were enthusiastic and the performers as good as any we'd seen. But the productions were skimpy by western standards and we were shocked to discover that the performers lacked some of the most basic types of costume and makeup.
Two performers I remember most vividly were Gorgi Botond and her beautiful eighteen year-old daughter, Tunde. Gorgi was the star skater of the Hungarian State Ice Revue yet could not obtain fish-net stockings or theatrical makeup, even on the black market. They actually ground their own makeup from chalk, candle wax and dried glue. I promised Gorgi that, when I got back to the west, I would send her stockings and makeup. I sent them from West Berlin about six weeks later but never knew if she'd received them.
However any romantic possibilities with the beautiful Tunde had been preempted by my wild night in Vienna catching up with me. A few months shy of my twentieth birthday, I was not very sexually experienced. A girl I'd met in a bar in Vienna I thought might teach me a few things, and she certainly had. But she had also given me 'the clap' (gonorrhea). It was about ten days before the symptoms had started and a few more before I knew they would not go away by themselves. Anywhere in the west, this could have been quickly and easily treated. But in Budapest, in 1964, obtaining penicillin was, to say the least, problematic.
After considerable negotiations (and no small amount of embarrassment), it was agreed that I could be treated by a Hungarian doctor who was on-call at the American Legation (there was no U.S. Embassy) and had access to their small supply of penicillin. But it would not be quite that simple. Cardinal Jozef Mindzenty *, a hero of the Catholic Church for his anti-Communist stands, had been holed up inside since the 1956 revolution and Hungarian secret police were on round-the-clock duty outside should he attempt to escape. So in the middle of the night, I had to run this gauntlet of very suspicious security men just to get inside.
Then there was another problem. The Hungarian doctor didn't speak a word of English or German and the only person available to translate was his twelve year-old daughter who spoke a little German. So in my crude high school German I had to make this shy, embarrassed girl understand my problem. It was pure slapstick. The girl would go out, my pants would go down, the doctor would examine me and call the girl back in. My pants would go up, the doctor would question the girl, the girl and I would stumble through Q & A in fractured German, the girl would go out, my pants would go down... and it went on like this for some time until I finally got a very large needle stuck in my butt.
I was sore for a week and promised myself that I would not have any more 'adventures' for the rest of the trip. It didn't quite work out that way.
*Cardinal Mindzenty suffered 23 years of persecution by the Communists. He was sentenced to life in prison and tortured following a 1949 'show trial'. Freed during the 1956 revolution, he lived inside the American Legation for fifteen years.
NEXT: "Behind the Iron Curtain II"
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
"Munich"
After six-plus fairly tedious hours, our flight finally landed in Frankfurt with a connection on to Munich where we would be joined by our technical crew from a company called Intertel, based in Basel, Switzerland but made up primarily of former BBC technicians. After a stretch of the legs and some duty-free shopping in the sprawling Frankfurt 'Flughafen', we flew on to Munich, or more correctly 'Munchen'.
I don't remember exactly what I'd expected, but Munich surprised me in several ways. Although I knew the city had suffered heavy damage from Allied bombing raids in World War II, less than twenty years later there was not a hint of damage to be seen. The city had been meticulously rebuilt and in 1964 was a striking mix of old and new, ultra-modern and medieval, and somehow it all worked.
The people were warm and friendly, the food (and those great Mosel wines) was wonderful and our hotel, The Excelsior, was clean, modern and comfortable in an almost Spartan way - except for the absolute luxury of eiderdown. But you could never entirely forget that this was where Hitler and the Nazi Party got its start, where they staged the 'Beer Hall Putsch' in an attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic, where they built the first concentration camp just outside the city.
And Munich was the year-round home of "Europe's Largest Circus", Circus Krone. All the big European circuses had permanent headquarters where they would 'winter', Circus Krone in Munich, Circus Schumann in Copenhagen, Trolle-Rodin in Amsterdam. And in the summer months, they all sent out traveling tent shows that might visit as many as thirty cities between April and October. And there were dozens of smaller tent shows that toured the continent nine months of the year.
There are significant differences between the European and American approach to circus. Unlike the American three-ring emphasis on spectacle, European circus is one ring and with a greater focus on style and theatricality. In European circus, you quickly became aware of traditions and characters, especially among the clowns, that seemed missing in American circus. And you often felt the audiences treated it more as an art form than a mere entertainment. Although this was many years before Cirque de Soleil, the European circuses we videotaped in 1964 were far closer to that theatrical sensibility than to the American 'Big Top'.
We spent over a month in Munich, the physical set-up at Circus Krone as ideal as any we would encounter on the entire trip. We built three camera platforms for optimum coverage of the ring as well as overhead for the aerial acts, especially the 'high trapeze', and a fourth camera at ringside for close-up's and the pan to and from Don Ameche. By using the Marconi cameras favored by the BBC, their higher resolution gave our video, even after conversion to the U.S. standard, a better image quality than was usually seen on American television.
Audiences always love the clowns and the European clowns were among the best I've ever seen, often more acrobatic than their American counterparts. Risley acts (juggling people or objects with the feet) were always popular, but the highlight of any circus performance is the trapeze and the Holy Grail of trapeze is 'the triple', a triple somersault in midair. We were very fortunate to record a 'triple' at Circus Krone although I'm embarrassed to admit I've forgotten the name of the man who did it.
While in Munich, by an accident of timing, we were also able to videotape the Vienna Ice Revue's 25th Anniversary production, "Gluckstraume" (which loosely translates "dreams of luck") which was on tour and we would have otherwise missed by the time we got to Vienna. Ice shows too had a slightly different feel in Europe. American shows like "Ice Capades" and "Ice Follies" also put the emphasis on spectacle while the European shows placed greater emphasis on precision and performance. I'm not suggesting that the Europeans were better skaters, only that the quality of their skating was valued more highly than how many of them you could put on the ice.
It was in a taxi en route to the Bayernhalle in Munich to see the "Wiener Eisrevue" that I became the unofficial translator for the company. How I wished I'd been a better student in Mr. Parisi's German class! Yet I found myself speaking better German than most of my companions. Although I joked that I was always looking for store windows that said, "high school German spoken here", I somehow managed to make myself understood - a trick that would come in very handy by the time I got to Budapest.
We could usually get two or three one-hour programs out of one major circus, and still be able to 'bank' a few acts for compilation shows. But Circus Krone, with so many acts booked for two touring companies as well as their home venue, was a bonanza, easily enough for four shows plus at least two more from the Vienna Ice Revue. Our trip was off to an impressive start, but the next leg of our journey was an unknown to say the very least. No American television crew had "gone behind the Iron Curtain" and no one knew what to expect.
On our last weekend in Munich, I did something that some might have found out-of-character. I took a tour of a place just 16 kilometers outside of Munich, the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. In 1964, Dachau was exactly as the allies had found it when the camp was liberated in 1945. I looked at the horrific photos while standing on the very spots where they were taken. I saw the barracks, the showers, the ovens, all of it. (I was appalled that someone had recently carved a heart and initials on the wooden frame around one of the ovens.) Almost twenty years after the camp's liberation, the smell of death was still in the air.
Being neither German nor Jewish, I can't entirely explain why I felt the need to experience this piece of history firsthand, but I did.*
* An acquaintance of mine recently told me that he doesn't believe the holocaust ever happened. He also doesn't believe we ever landed on the moon. There is little point trying to change his mind. This first-person account is not for him, it is for you.
NEXT: "Behind the Iron Curtain"
I don't remember exactly what I'd expected, but Munich surprised me in several ways. Although I knew the city had suffered heavy damage from Allied bombing raids in World War II, less than twenty years later there was not a hint of damage to be seen. The city had been meticulously rebuilt and in 1964 was a striking mix of old and new, ultra-modern and medieval, and somehow it all worked.
The people were warm and friendly, the food (and those great Mosel wines) was wonderful and our hotel, The Excelsior, was clean, modern and comfortable in an almost Spartan way - except for the absolute luxury of eiderdown. But you could never entirely forget that this was where Hitler and the Nazi Party got its start, where they staged the 'Beer Hall Putsch' in an attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic, where they built the first concentration camp just outside the city.
And Munich was the year-round home of "Europe's Largest Circus", Circus Krone. All the big European circuses had permanent headquarters where they would 'winter', Circus Krone in Munich, Circus Schumann in Copenhagen, Trolle-Rodin in Amsterdam. And in the summer months, they all sent out traveling tent shows that might visit as many as thirty cities between April and October. And there were dozens of smaller tent shows that toured the continent nine months of the year.
There are significant differences between the European and American approach to circus. Unlike the American three-ring emphasis on spectacle, European circus is one ring and with a greater focus on style and theatricality. In European circus, you quickly became aware of traditions and characters, especially among the clowns, that seemed missing in American circus. And you often felt the audiences treated it more as an art form than a mere entertainment. Although this was many years before Cirque de Soleil, the European circuses we videotaped in 1964 were far closer to that theatrical sensibility than to the American 'Big Top'.
We spent over a month in Munich, the physical set-up at Circus Krone as ideal as any we would encounter on the entire trip. We built three camera platforms for optimum coverage of the ring as well as overhead for the aerial acts, especially the 'high trapeze', and a fourth camera at ringside for close-up's and the pan to and from Don Ameche. By using the Marconi cameras favored by the BBC, their higher resolution gave our video, even after conversion to the U.S. standard, a better image quality than was usually seen on American television.
Audiences always love the clowns and the European clowns were among the best I've ever seen, often more acrobatic than their American counterparts. Risley acts (juggling people or objects with the feet) were always popular, but the highlight of any circus performance is the trapeze and the Holy Grail of trapeze is 'the triple', a triple somersault in midair. We were very fortunate to record a 'triple' at Circus Krone although I'm embarrassed to admit I've forgotten the name of the man who did it.
While in Munich, by an accident of timing, we were also able to videotape the Vienna Ice Revue's 25th Anniversary production, "Gluckstraume" (which loosely translates "dreams of luck") which was on tour and we would have otherwise missed by the time we got to Vienna. Ice shows too had a slightly different feel in Europe. American shows like "Ice Capades" and "Ice Follies" also put the emphasis on spectacle while the European shows placed greater emphasis on precision and performance. I'm not suggesting that the Europeans were better skaters, only that the quality of their skating was valued more highly than how many of them you could put on the ice.
It was in a taxi en route to the Bayernhalle in Munich to see the "Wiener Eisrevue" that I became the unofficial translator for the company. How I wished I'd been a better student in Mr. Parisi's German class! Yet I found myself speaking better German than most of my companions. Although I joked that I was always looking for store windows that said, "high school German spoken here", I somehow managed to make myself understood - a trick that would come in very handy by the time I got to Budapest.
We could usually get two or three one-hour programs out of one major circus, and still be able to 'bank' a few acts for compilation shows. But Circus Krone, with so many acts booked for two touring companies as well as their home venue, was a bonanza, easily enough for four shows plus at least two more from the Vienna Ice Revue. Our trip was off to an impressive start, but the next leg of our journey was an unknown to say the very least. No American television crew had "gone behind the Iron Curtain" and no one knew what to expect.
On our last weekend in Munich, I did something that some might have found out-of-character. I took a tour of a place just 16 kilometers outside of Munich, the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. In 1964, Dachau was exactly as the allies had found it when the camp was liberated in 1945. I looked at the horrific photos while standing on the very spots where they were taken. I saw the barracks, the showers, the ovens, all of it. (I was appalled that someone had recently carved a heart and initials on the wooden frame around one of the ovens.) Almost twenty years after the camp's liberation, the smell of death was still in the air.
Being neither German nor Jewish, I can't entirely explain why I felt the need to experience this piece of history firsthand, but I did.*
* An acquaintance of mine recently told me that he doesn't believe the holocaust ever happened. He also doesn't believe we ever landed on the moon. There is little point trying to change his mind. This first-person account is not for him, it is for you.
NEXT: "Behind the Iron Curtain"
Thursday, September 10, 2009
"International Showtime"
At about the same time as the JFK assassination, I first met a man I knew only as 'Gil". He would stop by during tapings when he was in the building for meetings. He had started his career as an NBC page himself, about ten years earlier. (I remember him admiring our uniforms, not nearly as gaudy as the gold braid and epaulets he used to wear.) He knew and liked my father and seemed interested in my career plans. One night, during a "Tonight Show" taping, he asked me if I'd be interested in a job as a production assistant on a show he was doing in Europe? I suppose I said something like, "sure" and promptly forgot about it.
I saw him again a few weeks later and he asked me if I'd gotten my passport? I suddenly remembered our conversation and realized he was serious and that my father had been in on the plan all along (although he'd said nothing to me about it). The man's name was Gil Cates * and he was the director of a show called "International Showtime with Don Ameche", produced by his brother Joe Cates (Phoebe's father). In less than a month, I was going to Europe and would be there for almost a year!
"International Showtime" had premiered on NBC in 1961, occupying the Friday night 8:00 timeslot, introducing American audiences to the best of European circuses and ice shows. Former movie great Don Ameche would sit at ringside and in his charming, debonair way introduce each act. This would be the show's fourth and, as it turned out, final season. The second week of January, 1964 we were flying to Europe, our first stop Circus Krone in Munich, Germany.
Needless to say, I was in a flurry of activity to get ready for the trip. I did manage to get my passport in time, bought or borrowed luggage (I don't remember which) and searched frantically for a roommate to take my place at the apartment on West 72nd Street. Luckily, our friend and NBC guide, Shelly Markham (now a well-known L.A. composer-conductor) was looking for a new place and was able to step right in. The question would be what to do when I got back, but we had ten months to think about it.
This trip would be notable in several respects, not the least of which the two months we would spend behind the 'Iron Curtain', first in Budapest, Hungary, then in Prague, Czechoslovakia. 1964 was still the height of the 'Cold War' and the timing was, especially in retrospect, interesting to say the least. It was only eight years since the 1956 Hungarian Revolution had been brutally crushed by the Soviets. And (what we couldn't know) it was only four years before the 'Prague Spring' in which Alexander Dubcek attempted to liberalize Soviet Russian control only to be invaded by the Warsaw Pact nations. We would be among the first Americans to be admitted to either country in many years.
I don't remember much about the flight to Europe other than it was very long. Up to that point, the longest (and only) 'plane ride' I'd taken was three hours to Florida in 1959. If I remember correctly, this flight was over six hours and I was by myself in 'tourist' class, the rest of our group, director Gil Cates, location producer Pat Plevin (Joe Cates remained in New York), associate producer Billy Watts and our star, Don Ameche and his wife Honore ** (known as 'Honey') up front in first class. (If that sounds at all like a complaint, it isn't. The associate producer was lucky to fly in 'first', let alone a lowly production assistant.)
Although he was always a gentleman, this could not have been an easy time for Don Ameche. Beginning in the late 1930's and throughout the 1940's, Don had been a major movie star of the magnitude of a Tyrone Power or Robert Taylor. After playing the title role in "The Story of Alexander Graham Bell" (with Henry Fonda), a generation of Americans would often refer to a telephone call as "an Ameche". He starred in over fifty films, including "In Old Chicago" (1937) with Tyrone Power and Ernst Lubitch's Best Picture Academy Award-nominated "Heaven Can Wait" (1943) opposite Gene Tierney.
Don also had significant careers on Broadway and on radio, most memorably radio's "The (Battling) Bickersons" with Frances Langford. But his career began to fade in the 1950's and by the early 1960's, Don Ameche had been all but forgotten. When our publicity advance man, Axel Glasner, would visit the next city on our itinerary to promote the arrival of the "famous American film star", he was often greeted with blank stares. Don suffered all the "he's waiting for Sonja Henie to make a comeback" jokes with grace and dignity.
I suspect that anyone who ever worked with Don Ameche took great pleasure when his real comeback came, first in John Landis' "Trading Places" (1983) starring Eddie Murphy, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dan Akroyd and fellow film veteran Ralph Bellamy, and in Ron Howard's "Cocoon" (1985) with an all-star cast that included (husband & wife) Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, and the sequel, "Cocoon: The Return" (1988). Don won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for "Cocoon".
* Gilbert Cates went on to a distinguished career as a film director ("I Never Sang for My Father") and television producer. A former president of the Directors Guild, he is probably best known today as the producer of the annual Academy Awards show.
** Don and Honore were married in 1932 and remained inseparable until her death in 1986. Don Ameche died of prostate cancer in 1993 at the age of 85.
NEXT: "Munich"
I saw him again a few weeks later and he asked me if I'd gotten my passport? I suddenly remembered our conversation and realized he was serious and that my father had been in on the plan all along (although he'd said nothing to me about it). The man's name was Gil Cates * and he was the director of a show called "International Showtime with Don Ameche", produced by his brother Joe Cates (Phoebe's father). In less than a month, I was going to Europe and would be there for almost a year!
"International Showtime" had premiered on NBC in 1961, occupying the Friday night 8:00 timeslot, introducing American audiences to the best of European circuses and ice shows. Former movie great Don Ameche would sit at ringside and in his charming, debonair way introduce each act. This would be the show's fourth and, as it turned out, final season. The second week of January, 1964 we were flying to Europe, our first stop Circus Krone in Munich, Germany.
Needless to say, I was in a flurry of activity to get ready for the trip. I did manage to get my passport in time, bought or borrowed luggage (I don't remember which) and searched frantically for a roommate to take my place at the apartment on West 72nd Street. Luckily, our friend and NBC guide, Shelly Markham (now a well-known L.A. composer-conductor) was looking for a new place and was able to step right in. The question would be what to do when I got back, but we had ten months to think about it.
This trip would be notable in several respects, not the least of which the two months we would spend behind the 'Iron Curtain', first in Budapest, Hungary, then in Prague, Czechoslovakia. 1964 was still the height of the 'Cold War' and the timing was, especially in retrospect, interesting to say the least. It was only eight years since the 1956 Hungarian Revolution had been brutally crushed by the Soviets. And (what we couldn't know) it was only four years before the 'Prague Spring' in which Alexander Dubcek attempted to liberalize Soviet Russian control only to be invaded by the Warsaw Pact nations. We would be among the first Americans to be admitted to either country in many years.
I don't remember much about the flight to Europe other than it was very long. Up to that point, the longest (and only) 'plane ride' I'd taken was three hours to Florida in 1959. If I remember correctly, this flight was over six hours and I was by myself in 'tourist' class, the rest of our group, director Gil Cates, location producer Pat Plevin (Joe Cates remained in New York), associate producer Billy Watts and our star, Don Ameche and his wife Honore ** (known as 'Honey') up front in first class. (If that sounds at all like a complaint, it isn't. The associate producer was lucky to fly in 'first', let alone a lowly production assistant.)
Although he was always a gentleman, this could not have been an easy time for Don Ameche. Beginning in the late 1930's and throughout the 1940's, Don had been a major movie star of the magnitude of a Tyrone Power or Robert Taylor. After playing the title role in "The Story of Alexander Graham Bell" (with Henry Fonda), a generation of Americans would often refer to a telephone call as "an Ameche". He starred in over fifty films, including "In Old Chicago" (1937) with Tyrone Power and Ernst Lubitch's Best Picture Academy Award-nominated "Heaven Can Wait" (1943) opposite Gene Tierney.
Don also had significant careers on Broadway and on radio, most memorably radio's "The (Battling) Bickersons" with Frances Langford. But his career began to fade in the 1950's and by the early 1960's, Don Ameche had been all but forgotten. When our publicity advance man, Axel Glasner, would visit the next city on our itinerary to promote the arrival of the "famous American film star", he was often greeted with blank stares. Don suffered all the "he's waiting for Sonja Henie to make a comeback" jokes with grace and dignity.
I suspect that anyone who ever worked with Don Ameche took great pleasure when his real comeback came, first in John Landis' "Trading Places" (1983) starring Eddie Murphy, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dan Akroyd and fellow film veteran Ralph Bellamy, and in Ron Howard's "Cocoon" (1985) with an all-star cast that included (husband & wife) Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, and the sequel, "Cocoon: The Return" (1988). Don won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for "Cocoon".
* Gilbert Cates went on to a distinguished career as a film director ("I Never Sang for My Father") and television producer. A former president of the Directors Guild, he is probably best known today as the producer of the annual Academy Awards show.
** Don and Honore were married in 1932 and remained inseparable until her death in 1986. Don Ameche died of prostate cancer in 1993 at the age of 85.
NEXT: "Munich"
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Part Three
In the days and weeks that followed the Kennedy assassination, life settled back into its normal routines, Christmas and New Year's came and went and seemed only slightly subdued. But gradually the sadness so many felt turned to disillusionment and eventually to anger. For many of my generation it was more than a loss of innocence, it was the death of idealism.
Many of us were dissatisfied with the 'lone gunman' story and the reassurances that there was no wider plot. For years, we were caught up in conspiracy theories - shots fired from the 'grassy knoll', CIA operatives disguised as 'hobos', Cuban retribution for the Bay of Pigs, a Mafia hit and on and on... I used to joke that "Lady Bird Johnson did it", but I wasn't entirely kidding.
In my view, the decade that had begun with such optimism and bright promise had turned dark and uncertain. The Kennedy assassination set the stage for the tumultuous remainder of the 1960's, further fueled by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X. Many believe the Vietnam War was the cause of the political upheavals, societal schisms, protests, counter-culture and insurrections that marked the remainder of the decade. I believe it would happened, in some form or another, regardless.
Many of us were dissatisfied with the 'lone gunman' story and the reassurances that there was no wider plot. For years, we were caught up in conspiracy theories - shots fired from the 'grassy knoll', CIA operatives disguised as 'hobos', Cuban retribution for the Bay of Pigs, a Mafia hit and on and on... I used to joke that "Lady Bird Johnson did it", but I wasn't entirely kidding.
In my view, the decade that had begun with such optimism and bright promise had turned dark and uncertain. The Kennedy assassination set the stage for the tumultuous remainder of the 1960's, further fueled by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X. Many believe the Vietnam War was the cause of the political upheavals, societal schisms, protests, counter-culture and insurrections that marked the remainder of the decade. I believe it would happened, in some form or another, regardless.
Monday, September 7, 2009
"A Weekend in November, 1963"
By November 1963, I'd been on the NBC page staff for almost a year. In August, I'd been promoted to 'key man', a uniformed supervisor with a gold key now neatly embroidered on my sleeve. I was feeling a lot more confident than when I'd started there, even did a couple of "John Wayne's" when rowdy fans showed up in the NBC lobby demanding to see a star or a show. I took a couple of classes at the New School of Social Research in Greenwich Village but college was essentially on hold.
The page staff was part of the Guest Relations Department which, in addition to the pages, handled ticket distribution and the NBC Tours, conducted by 'guides' who wore identical uniforms to ours. We held military-style inspections to see that our uniforms were clean and pressed, our shoes shined, our hair and fingernails trimmed before each shift. We lived on pride, professionalism and esprit de corps (in lieu of money). The page staff had been the launching pad of many entertainment industry careers.
I was living with two roommates, Larry Treger and Laurie Neff, in a $200-a-month apartment on West 72nd Street with only the hint of a view of the Hudson River from one bedroom window. Even with promotion and small raise, none of us was making enough money to allow for many luxuries beyond rent, food and subway tokens (which I believe were then 15 cents). It seemed a real luxury when we could afford to go to a show, get our suits dry-cleaned or have our shirts washed and starched at the Chinese laundry.
But in retrospect, these were the best of times. I could not have dreamed on a Friday morning in late November that my view of the world was about to be changed and that, in many ways, it would remain changed for the rest of my life. It started off like just another Friday, I worked a game show in Studio 6-A (across the hall from the "Tonight" studio) and was trying to decide what to do about lunch when I ran into Bob Cotton, another page who was also moonlighting with NBC News, on the fifth floor. As he ran past me, he said only three words, "Kennedy's been shot!".
This was the time of the 'sick joke' and I said something like, "Yeah, very funny!" It was at least another ten minutes before the first bulletins from Dallas were on radio and television. (There was something very creepy about having known before most of the world.) Everything after that was a blur, a brief hopeful period based on false reporting that he'd only been wounded, then the devastating confirmation that our young president was dead. And then it seemed that everyone, everywhere was crying.
The normal studio activities, apart from NBC News, stopped almost immediately. All afternoon and evening tapings, including "The Tonight Show" were cancelled and would remain so until further notice. Not knowing what else to do, a group of us gathered in the Guest Relations office where the very nice woman who handled tickets (sadly, I've forgotten her name) was sobbing uncontrollably in front of her TV set. For what seemed like a long time and probably wasn't, we watched the story unfold. (There was very little video at first from Dallas, mostly anchormen holding telephones up to microphones.) When I couldn't stand watching it anymore, I left the building.
New Yorkers are usually hard-bitten or just blase about most things, but not this day. On the street, I saw taxi drivers refusing fares, just stopping at the curb and turning on their 'off-duty' signs, openly weeping as they listened to the news on their radios. At the newsstand on the corner of 50th Street and 6th Avenue, extra editions of the Daily News and New York Post were already on the street, a super-bold headline on one of them read: "KENNEDY SHOT DEAD".
As people gathered around the newsstand to snap up copies (which I still have), the vendor would not take their money. An impeccably dressed man in a gray suit sat down on the dirty sidewalk, reading the paper in tears. Some people seemed silently distraught, watching the skies as if waiting for the bombs to start falling. And the usual horn-honking jostle and bustle of midtown Manhattan had gone eerily still.
I don't remember exactly how the next few hours played out, whether I went home to our apartment or not. I do remember walking around Rockefeller Center for a while, watching a dreamlike parade of sorrows, until I realized while staring at the golden statue of Prometheus at the skating rink that I was still wearing my page uniform and went back inside to change. I do remember that a group of us on the Guest Relations staff all felt an overwhelming need to do something, we didn't know what. I don't know whose idea it was or how it was proposed, but we were going to organize a caravan of cars and go to Washington.
Although my father had considered himself an Eisenhower Republican, we were never especially political. As I mentioned previously, one of my earliest television memories was Eisenhower's inauguration in 1952 and, from my point of view, after eight years in the White House, it seemed like he'd been president forever. If I'd been old enough to vote in 1960, I might have been expected to vote for his vice-president, Richard Nixon. But I'd never warmed to Nixon, especially after his ludicrous "Checkers speech", and the father of my first girlfriend at Atlantic City High School, Frank Caywood, was a campaign organizer for his opponent, Jack Kennedy.
But my interest in JFK had been more than a desire to impress Frank's daughter, Joyce. His message had resonated with me powerfully. "The torch has been passed to a new generation" meant something profound to me. The 'New Frontier', the Peace Corps, the space program all seemed youthful, vigorous and optimistic ideas to me. And when in 1961 the new president came to speak at the Convention Hall in Atlantic City, a high school field trip for us, both his speech and sheer star-power were dazzling. I became a Kennedy Democrat and a true believer in the dream of Camelot.
I had never been to Washington D.C. before and the three-hour trip down from New York was long, quiet and somber. We listened to the radio and talked in whispers when we talked at all. About twenty of us from NBC Guest Relations made the trip in five cars, although whose cars they were I have no idea. Certainly my roommates and I could not begin to afford to keep a car in Manhattan.
When we reached D.C., we used tourist maps to get as close to the Capitol Building as possible where Kennedy's closed-casket would lie in state inside the rotunda until the next morning. The parking situation was nightmarish but the line of people leading to the Capitol was even more daunting. Three and four abreast, the line stretched for miles.
We knew enough to dress warmly, but we were not prepared for a bitterly cold November night in Washington D.C. The line was orderly and quiet and all night long we slowly shuffled forward, many hugging one another for warmth. I spent most of the night with one young 'guidette', who I barely knew, in an oddly intimate exchange of body-heat.
At one point, I looked around and realized that hundreds more people had joined the line behind us. But as the Capitol dome finally came into view very early that morning, our anxiety grew. We knew that they would have to turn the crowd away at daybreak to prepare the casket for the trip to Arlington National Cemetery. It was going to be close.
We finally climbed the Capitol steps in the first light of dawn. The line was split into two and passed to either side of the flag-draped coffin at the center of the rotunda, braced by military guards. Our shuffling footsteps echoed off the marble floor as we passed. They said not to touch the flag, but I did it anyway. We were probably inside the rotunda for less than a minute, then found ourselves outside again, blinking in the sunrise. We were among the last hundred or so people to be admitted.
We didn't know what to do next, the first trick to find where we'd parked our cars. Part of our group became separated in the process and we had no way of contacting each other. We were cold, hungry and exhausted. We found a coffee shop and wolfed down some breakfast, then slept in the cars for a period of time I cannot estimate.
Later, we attempted to get to Arlington, but encountered roadblocks at every approach. We did a little half-hearted sightseeing, then began the long trip home to New York. I got back to our apartment in time to see Jack Ruby shoot and kill Lee Harvey Oswald live on television.
NEXT: "International Showtime"
The page staff was part of the Guest Relations Department which, in addition to the pages, handled ticket distribution and the NBC Tours, conducted by 'guides' who wore identical uniforms to ours. We held military-style inspections to see that our uniforms were clean and pressed, our shoes shined, our hair and fingernails trimmed before each shift. We lived on pride, professionalism and esprit de corps (in lieu of money). The page staff had been the launching pad of many entertainment industry careers.
I was living with two roommates, Larry Treger and Laurie Neff, in a $200-a-month apartment on West 72nd Street with only the hint of a view of the Hudson River from one bedroom window. Even with promotion and small raise, none of us was making enough money to allow for many luxuries beyond rent, food and subway tokens (which I believe were then 15 cents). It seemed a real luxury when we could afford to go to a show, get our suits dry-cleaned or have our shirts washed and starched at the Chinese laundry.
But in retrospect, these were the best of times. I could not have dreamed on a Friday morning in late November that my view of the world was about to be changed and that, in many ways, it would remain changed for the rest of my life. It started off like just another Friday, I worked a game show in Studio 6-A (across the hall from the "Tonight" studio) and was trying to decide what to do about lunch when I ran into Bob Cotton, another page who was also moonlighting with NBC News, on the fifth floor. As he ran past me, he said only three words, "Kennedy's been shot!".
This was the time of the 'sick joke' and I said something like, "Yeah, very funny!" It was at least another ten minutes before the first bulletins from Dallas were on radio and television. (There was something very creepy about having known before most of the world.) Everything after that was a blur, a brief hopeful period based on false reporting that he'd only been wounded, then the devastating confirmation that our young president was dead. And then it seemed that everyone, everywhere was crying.
The normal studio activities, apart from NBC News, stopped almost immediately. All afternoon and evening tapings, including "The Tonight Show" were cancelled and would remain so until further notice. Not knowing what else to do, a group of us gathered in the Guest Relations office where the very nice woman who handled tickets (sadly, I've forgotten her name) was sobbing uncontrollably in front of her TV set. For what seemed like a long time and probably wasn't, we watched the story unfold. (There was very little video at first from Dallas, mostly anchormen holding telephones up to microphones.) When I couldn't stand watching it anymore, I left the building.
New Yorkers are usually hard-bitten or just blase about most things, but not this day. On the street, I saw taxi drivers refusing fares, just stopping at the curb and turning on their 'off-duty' signs, openly weeping as they listened to the news on their radios. At the newsstand on the corner of 50th Street and 6th Avenue, extra editions of the Daily News and New York Post were already on the street, a super-bold headline on one of them read: "KENNEDY SHOT DEAD".
As people gathered around the newsstand to snap up copies (which I still have), the vendor would not take their money. An impeccably dressed man in a gray suit sat down on the dirty sidewalk, reading the paper in tears. Some people seemed silently distraught, watching the skies as if waiting for the bombs to start falling. And the usual horn-honking jostle and bustle of midtown Manhattan had gone eerily still.
I don't remember exactly how the next few hours played out, whether I went home to our apartment or not. I do remember walking around Rockefeller Center for a while, watching a dreamlike parade of sorrows, until I realized while staring at the golden statue of Prometheus at the skating rink that I was still wearing my page uniform and went back inside to change. I do remember that a group of us on the Guest Relations staff all felt an overwhelming need to do something, we didn't know what. I don't know whose idea it was or how it was proposed, but we were going to organize a caravan of cars and go to Washington.
Although my father had considered himself an Eisenhower Republican, we were never especially political. As I mentioned previously, one of my earliest television memories was Eisenhower's inauguration in 1952 and, from my point of view, after eight years in the White House, it seemed like he'd been president forever. If I'd been old enough to vote in 1960, I might have been expected to vote for his vice-president, Richard Nixon. But I'd never warmed to Nixon, especially after his ludicrous "Checkers speech", and the father of my first girlfriend at Atlantic City High School, Frank Caywood, was a campaign organizer for his opponent, Jack Kennedy.
But my interest in JFK had been more than a desire to impress Frank's daughter, Joyce. His message had resonated with me powerfully. "The torch has been passed to a new generation" meant something profound to me. The 'New Frontier', the Peace Corps, the space program all seemed youthful, vigorous and optimistic ideas to me. And when in 1961 the new president came to speak at the Convention Hall in Atlantic City, a high school field trip for us, both his speech and sheer star-power were dazzling. I became a Kennedy Democrat and a true believer in the dream of Camelot.
I had never been to Washington D.C. before and the three-hour trip down from New York was long, quiet and somber. We listened to the radio and talked in whispers when we talked at all. About twenty of us from NBC Guest Relations made the trip in five cars, although whose cars they were I have no idea. Certainly my roommates and I could not begin to afford to keep a car in Manhattan.
When we reached D.C., we used tourist maps to get as close to the Capitol Building as possible where Kennedy's closed-casket would lie in state inside the rotunda until the next morning. The parking situation was nightmarish but the line of people leading to the Capitol was even more daunting. Three and four abreast, the line stretched for miles.
We knew enough to dress warmly, but we were not prepared for a bitterly cold November night in Washington D.C. The line was orderly and quiet and all night long we slowly shuffled forward, many hugging one another for warmth. I spent most of the night with one young 'guidette', who I barely knew, in an oddly intimate exchange of body-heat.
At one point, I looked around and realized that hundreds more people had joined the line behind us. But as the Capitol dome finally came into view very early that morning, our anxiety grew. We knew that they would have to turn the crowd away at daybreak to prepare the casket for the trip to Arlington National Cemetery. It was going to be close.
We finally climbed the Capitol steps in the first light of dawn. The line was split into two and passed to either side of the flag-draped coffin at the center of the rotunda, braced by military guards. Our shuffling footsteps echoed off the marble floor as we passed. They said not to touch the flag, but I did it anyway. We were probably inside the rotunda for less than a minute, then found ourselves outside again, blinking in the sunrise. We were among the last hundred or so people to be admitted.
We didn't know what to do next, the first trick to find where we'd parked our cars. Part of our group became separated in the process and we had no way of contacting each other. We were cold, hungry and exhausted. We found a coffee shop and wolfed down some breakfast, then slept in the cars for a period of time I cannot estimate.
Later, we attempted to get to Arlington, but encountered roadblocks at every approach. We did a little half-hearted sightseeing, then began the long trip home to New York. I got back to our apartment in time to see Jack Ruby shoot and kill Lee Harvey Oswald live on television.
NEXT: "International Showtime"
Friday, September 4, 2009
"The Tonight Show"
At the beginning of 1963, I returned to New York where my father helped me get a job as an NBC page. For those not familiar with the page staff, our primary jobs were to seat the audience or to collect tickets at the studio entrance. But sometimes we acted as backstage 'go-fers' for the star or guests on a show. We worked variety shows and quiz shows but the plum assignment, the one we all wanted was "The Tonight Show". It was (then) ninety minutes and done 'live-on-tape' in Studio 6-B at 6:30 and broadcast at 11:30 the same evening.
"The Tonight Show" was in transition from Jack Paar, who had announced in October that he was leaving the show, to a relative unknown named Johnny Carson. Johnny had done local television in Omaha and Los Angeles, but his only national exposure had been a game show on ABC called "Who Do You Trust?" It seems odd now, but many in the television industry wondered who could possibly follow Jack Paar? They could not have imagined that Johnny Carson would host "The Tonight Show" for thirty years.
Their off-stage personalities were very different, in some ways exact opposites. Off-stage Paar was gregarious and seemed genuinely friendly to everyone from stars to stage hands. But on camera, Paar wore his heart on his sleeve and showed his feuds and friendships openly, at one point walking off in the middle of a show when the NBC censors deleted a fairly innocuous joke about a "W.C." and whether it meant "water closet" or "wayside chapel".
But where Paar was emotional and mercurial, Carson was cool and contained with an impeccable sense of comic timing. But off-stage, at least in that first year, Johnny was wound tight and many described him as a "cold fish". My most vivid image of Johnny was backstage before the show, pacing and chain-smoking and hardly interacting with anyone. To be fair, he was undoubtedly under a lot of pressure. But when the music played and he walked through the curtain to Ed McMahon saying "Heeere's Johnny!", he became a different person. By all accounts a complex man, it's open to debate which was the real Johnny Carson.
The continuing success of "The Tonight Show" was important to my father as well as to NBC. After years of working on various shows there, he had been promoted to Director of Nighttime Programming and Johnny's success was priority number one. But Jack Paar was also important to the network and was given a prime-time variety show on Friday nights at 10:00 that was taped in the same Studio 6-B. That studio became even busier when a young game show host named Merv Griffin, best known for "Play Your Hunch", was given his own daytime talk show.
I worked all three shows (and got to know the hosts to varying degrees) but my favorite assignment was on "The Tonight Show" when Johnny went up into the audience to play "Stump the Band". Resplendent in my NBC page uniform, I would meet Johnny halfway down the aisle * and hand him the prizes, usually passes to the Cattleman Restaurant (a notch or two below Sizzler) or a record album by band leader Skitch Henderson. **
I worked "The Tonight Show" the night Zsa Zsa Gabor threw a fit backstage when the wardrobe lady, holding a gray object at arm's length, demanded Ms. Gabor's "lucky girdle" be washed. I worked Jack Paar's prime-time show the night he presented the first television appearance of a sixteen year-old singer with one leg in a full cast who he introduced as "E-jude Land-gar". Typical of Jack's sense of drama, it was Liza Minelli. I was there the night that Richard Nixon played the piano - badly.
Most of the pages enjoyed working Merv Griffin's daytime talk show because there was a level of unpredictability, often involving the pages, that didn't exist on Johnny's show. It began with Merv preferring to make his entrance not through the curtain but from the seventh floor entrance used by the audience, then coming down the aisle to the stage. He would often play pranks on us, throwing our carefully-collected tickets in the air like confetti, on one occasion shoving one of my roommates, Larry Treger, through the doors and into the camera waiting for Merv's entrance.
Merv had guest-hosted "The Tonight Show" several times after years of hosting (usually forgettable) game shows. But he had started out as a singer with Freddy Martin's band and as an actor in a few minor movies. He had his first real success with a novelty song, "I've Got A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts". When I first met him in 1963, he already owned a couple of radio stations and was clearly intent upon building an entertainment empire. Soon "Jeopardy" and "Wheel of Fortune", both of which he created, would make him a very rich and powerful man. But Merv's daytime show as well as Jack Paar's prime-time show lasted only one season.
Six years later, Merv and I would work together again, on a late-night talk show, but under very different circumstances.
Some inside stuff from "The Tonight Show":
It was not widely known that Johnny wanted to fire Ed McMahon on several occasions during their thirty years on the show. The motive was unclear, some said he felt Ed was "disloyal", others that McMahon was "stepping on his laughs". Each time, the network had to step in and patch things up. One network wag suggested that Johnny could never get over the fact that Ed was a lot taller.
Also little known was that Johnny's offices at NBC were seized and occupied by black militants for several hours and would not leave until their demands for airtime were met. After heated negotiations, the show went on as scheduled and the rest was sorted out by the News Division.
Two members of the NBC page staff, Curt Taylor and Ed Archer, bore striking resemblances to John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the show got a lot of mileage out of it on slow nights. But the Kennedy look-alike was the Republican and the Nixon look-alike was the Democrat.
The "beloved" Miss Miller, who had attended every taping of Jack Paar's shows and continued the tradition in the early years of Johnny Carson's reign, was actually a very unpleasant woman who believed she was a TV star and had a tendency to either fall down or throw up shortly before taping began.
A Scottish actor refused to appear on the show for many years after his initial booking in 1962 to promote his new film, "Dr. No", was cancelled by talent coordinators who said, "who ever heard of See-Ann Connery?"
* We always had to carefully watch our footing. Those stairs in Studio 6-B were notoriously treacherous.
** Skitch was summarily fired over what seemed a minor indiscretion and replaced first by Tommy Newsom and eventually by Doc Severinsen.
It was during this period that I got to work as an assistant to the location scout on two motion pictures that were shooting location scenes in New York, "Mr. Buddwing" with James Garner and Eva Marie Saint and "Sunday in New York" with Rod Taylor, Jane Fonda and Cliff Robertson. Johnny Graham, the location manager, suffered from emphysema and needed someone to do most of the leg-work for him. I didn't even care whether I got paid, I just wanted to work on a Rod Taylor project.
I can't say exactly when I became aware of Australian actor Rod Taylor, perhaps as early as small parts in "Giant" (1956) or "Raintree County" (1958). But by 1960, leading roles in "The Twilight Zone", "The Time Machine" and, most importantly, the ABC-TV series "Hong Kong" had made me a fan to a degree I have never been before or since. I got within ten feet of him when we were shooting a scene in Central Park but didn't have the nerve to speak to him.
I can remember the specific New York theaters where I saw Rod Taylor films, most memorably "The Birds", "Fate is the Hunter" and "Dark of the Sun". Now, some fifty years later, I was especially gratified to see him in a cameo performance as Winston Churchill in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds". (For more, visit Diane Tomasik's The Complete Rod Taylor Site for which I am a contributor, rodtaylorsite.com.)
NEXT: "A November Weekend, 1963"
COMING UP: "International Showtime"
"The Tonight Show" was in transition from Jack Paar, who had announced in October that he was leaving the show, to a relative unknown named Johnny Carson. Johnny had done local television in Omaha and Los Angeles, but his only national exposure had been a game show on ABC called "Who Do You Trust?" It seems odd now, but many in the television industry wondered who could possibly follow Jack Paar? They could not have imagined that Johnny Carson would host "The Tonight Show" for thirty years.
Their off-stage personalities were very different, in some ways exact opposites. Off-stage Paar was gregarious and seemed genuinely friendly to everyone from stars to stage hands. But on camera, Paar wore his heart on his sleeve and showed his feuds and friendships openly, at one point walking off in the middle of a show when the NBC censors deleted a fairly innocuous joke about a "W.C." and whether it meant "water closet" or "wayside chapel".
But where Paar was emotional and mercurial, Carson was cool and contained with an impeccable sense of comic timing. But off-stage, at least in that first year, Johnny was wound tight and many described him as a "cold fish". My most vivid image of Johnny was backstage before the show, pacing and chain-smoking and hardly interacting with anyone. To be fair, he was undoubtedly under a lot of pressure. But when the music played and he walked through the curtain to Ed McMahon saying "Heeere's Johnny!", he became a different person. By all accounts a complex man, it's open to debate which was the real Johnny Carson.
The continuing success of "The Tonight Show" was important to my father as well as to NBC. After years of working on various shows there, he had been promoted to Director of Nighttime Programming and Johnny's success was priority number one. But Jack Paar was also important to the network and was given a prime-time variety show on Friday nights at 10:00 that was taped in the same Studio 6-B. That studio became even busier when a young game show host named Merv Griffin, best known for "Play Your Hunch", was given his own daytime talk show.
I worked all three shows (and got to know the hosts to varying degrees) but my favorite assignment was on "The Tonight Show" when Johnny went up into the audience to play "Stump the Band". Resplendent in my NBC page uniform, I would meet Johnny halfway down the aisle * and hand him the prizes, usually passes to the Cattleman Restaurant (a notch or two below Sizzler) or a record album by band leader Skitch Henderson. **
I worked "The Tonight Show" the night Zsa Zsa Gabor threw a fit backstage when the wardrobe lady, holding a gray object at arm's length, demanded Ms. Gabor's "lucky girdle" be washed. I worked Jack Paar's prime-time show the night he presented the first television appearance of a sixteen year-old singer with one leg in a full cast who he introduced as "E-jude Land-gar". Typical of Jack's sense of drama, it was Liza Minelli. I was there the night that Richard Nixon played the piano - badly.
Most of the pages enjoyed working Merv Griffin's daytime talk show because there was a level of unpredictability, often involving the pages, that didn't exist on Johnny's show. It began with Merv preferring to make his entrance not through the curtain but from the seventh floor entrance used by the audience, then coming down the aisle to the stage. He would often play pranks on us, throwing our carefully-collected tickets in the air like confetti, on one occasion shoving one of my roommates, Larry Treger, through the doors and into the camera waiting for Merv's entrance.
Merv had guest-hosted "The Tonight Show" several times after years of hosting (usually forgettable) game shows. But he had started out as a singer with Freddy Martin's band and as an actor in a few minor movies. He had his first real success with a novelty song, "I've Got A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts". When I first met him in 1963, he already owned a couple of radio stations and was clearly intent upon building an entertainment empire. Soon "Jeopardy" and "Wheel of Fortune", both of which he created, would make him a very rich and powerful man. But Merv's daytime show as well as Jack Paar's prime-time show lasted only one season.
Six years later, Merv and I would work together again, on a late-night talk show, but under very different circumstances.
Some inside stuff from "The Tonight Show":
It was not widely known that Johnny wanted to fire Ed McMahon on several occasions during their thirty years on the show. The motive was unclear, some said he felt Ed was "disloyal", others that McMahon was "stepping on his laughs". Each time, the network had to step in and patch things up. One network wag suggested that Johnny could never get over the fact that Ed was a lot taller.
Also little known was that Johnny's offices at NBC were seized and occupied by black militants for several hours and would not leave until their demands for airtime were met. After heated negotiations, the show went on as scheduled and the rest was sorted out by the News Division.
Two members of the NBC page staff, Curt Taylor and Ed Archer, bore striking resemblances to John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the show got a lot of mileage out of it on slow nights. But the Kennedy look-alike was the Republican and the Nixon look-alike was the Democrat.
The "beloved" Miss Miller, who had attended every taping of Jack Paar's shows and continued the tradition in the early years of Johnny Carson's reign, was actually a very unpleasant woman who believed she was a TV star and had a tendency to either fall down or throw up shortly before taping began.
A Scottish actor refused to appear on the show for many years after his initial booking in 1962 to promote his new film, "Dr. No", was cancelled by talent coordinators who said, "who ever heard of See-Ann Connery?"
* We always had to carefully watch our footing. Those stairs in Studio 6-B were notoriously treacherous.
** Skitch was summarily fired over what seemed a minor indiscretion and replaced first by Tommy Newsom and eventually by Doc Severinsen.
It was during this period that I got to work as an assistant to the location scout on two motion pictures that were shooting location scenes in New York, "Mr. Buddwing" with James Garner and Eva Marie Saint and "Sunday in New York" with Rod Taylor, Jane Fonda and Cliff Robertson. Johnny Graham, the location manager, suffered from emphysema and needed someone to do most of the leg-work for him. I didn't even care whether I got paid, I just wanted to work on a Rod Taylor project.
I can't say exactly when I became aware of Australian actor Rod Taylor, perhaps as early as small parts in "Giant" (1956) or "Raintree County" (1958). But by 1960, leading roles in "The Twilight Zone", "The Time Machine" and, most importantly, the ABC-TV series "Hong Kong" had made me a fan to a degree I have never been before or since. I got within ten feet of him when we were shooting a scene in Central Park but didn't have the nerve to speak to him.
I can remember the specific New York theaters where I saw Rod Taylor films, most memorably "The Birds", "Fate is the Hunter" and "Dark of the Sun". Now, some fifty years later, I was especially gratified to see him in a cameo performance as Winston Churchill in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds". (For more, visit Diane Tomasik's The Complete Rod Taylor Site for which I am a contributor, rodtaylorsite.com.)
NEXT: "A November Weekend, 1963"
COMING UP: "International Showtime"
Thursday, September 3, 2009
"Back to New York"
My sister Liz's relationship with my mother had been explosive since Liz quit the ballet and now that my father was no longer there most of the time to mediate, it became an ongoing battle. Liz was in open rebellion and would ditch school to hang out at a juke joint called the Beehive. A habitual truant, she would be dropped off at the front door of the school and walk straight out the back door. She quit ACHS at sixteen and never went back. (Years later, she got her GED and teaching certificate.)
My two years at Atlantic City High School were far happier. Stage Crew was great fun, working with my friends Steve and Gary, and my experience working on my mother's dance recitals gave me an insight into stage production that few others had. Another member of Stage Crew was Frank Ward, who had always seemed strangely familiar. It was only when he mentioned that he had lived in Jackson Heights (some 140 miles away) when he was younger that it clicked. Looking through some old photos, there was Frank at my fourth birthday party.
Journalism Club was another kind of fun. Steve Berger was the photographer for the school newspaper and I slipped into the semi-official job of cartoonist. But it also allowed me to travel to Philadelphia for the Temple University Press Tournament, surprising everyone (especially me) by taking third place in Radio News Editing, the only ACHS student to do better than 'honorable mention'.
I also discovered I had a natural talent for playing drums. Drums came easily, guitar did not. (I was better at posing with it in the mirror than actually playing it.) I joined a band called "The SurfRockers" who lived in neighboring Brigantine. We played dates at clubs in Ocean City and Somers Point and were regulars at the Brigantine Country Club. I don't think any of us, Mike Lange, Barbara Ogram or James Duffield, considered careers in music, but we had a lot of fun and made a bit of money. But the footnote to my brief musical career was a chance recording, laying down a single drum track (uncredited) for a band that would become famous as The Ventures.
My schedule had become fairly busy which was a relief since things at home were not going at all well. My mother was becoming increasingly delusional, at one point believing that she was being controlled by a distant star. We would sometimes find her standing on the roof outside her bedroom window, easily thirty feet above the sidewalk, pointing at some faraway object in the night sky. This situation was not at all helped by the night that all of us saw a UFO. *
Her first 'suicide attempt' was comical, walking dramatically into the surf, then coming up sputtering when she got hit in the face by a wave. The next time was much more serious and directed at my sister Liz. Their long-simmering feud took a very dark turn, my mother apparently blaming Liz for all the disappointments in her life, including the recent failure of her attempt to open a new dance studio in Ventnor.
My mother waited until she and Liz were alone in the house when she slashed her wrists. She filled her bathroom sink with blood and trailed it back to her bed, reclining grandly and calling out to Liz, "Mommy has something to show you!" We could hear Liz's screams from the beach. An ambulance arrived in the nick of time or she might have actually done herself in. But this time there were consequences. She was confined to Ancora State Mental Hospital for a month or so where, as luck would have it, I saw her while on a school field trip.
I graduated from Atlantic City High School in 1962 on my eighteenth birthday. My grades were good senior year but, overall, my four years of high school looked pretty bad. I'd won a prize at Temple University but couldn't get accepted there, or at Penn State, or anywhere else I wanted to go. I spent one miserable semester at Union (Junior) College in Cranford, New Jersey. When I went home for the Christmas holiday, I found that my mother had sold my drum set for booze money. From that point on, all I could think about was getting back to New York.
* We heard voices from the beach and realized that a crowd had gathered there, unusual in the middle of the night. They were looking up at a huge, glowing orange ball directly overhead. It was silent and seemed to pulsate slightly. We watched it for at least ten minutes until it suddenly flew straight up at an astonishing speed and disappeared. No explanation was ever offered and we rarely discussed it.
NEXT: "The Tonight Show"
My two years at Atlantic City High School were far happier. Stage Crew was great fun, working with my friends Steve and Gary, and my experience working on my mother's dance recitals gave me an insight into stage production that few others had. Another member of Stage Crew was Frank Ward, who had always seemed strangely familiar. It was only when he mentioned that he had lived in Jackson Heights (some 140 miles away) when he was younger that it clicked. Looking through some old photos, there was Frank at my fourth birthday party.
Journalism Club was another kind of fun. Steve Berger was the photographer for the school newspaper and I slipped into the semi-official job of cartoonist. But it also allowed me to travel to Philadelphia for the Temple University Press Tournament, surprising everyone (especially me) by taking third place in Radio News Editing, the only ACHS student to do better than 'honorable mention'.
I also discovered I had a natural talent for playing drums. Drums came easily, guitar did not. (I was better at posing with it in the mirror than actually playing it.) I joined a band called "The SurfRockers" who lived in neighboring Brigantine. We played dates at clubs in Ocean City and Somers Point and were regulars at the Brigantine Country Club. I don't think any of us, Mike Lange, Barbara Ogram or James Duffield, considered careers in music, but we had a lot of fun and made a bit of money. But the footnote to my brief musical career was a chance recording, laying down a single drum track (uncredited) for a band that would become famous as The Ventures.
My schedule had become fairly busy which was a relief since things at home were not going at all well. My mother was becoming increasingly delusional, at one point believing that she was being controlled by a distant star. We would sometimes find her standing on the roof outside her bedroom window, easily thirty feet above the sidewalk, pointing at some faraway object in the night sky. This situation was not at all helped by the night that all of us saw a UFO. *
Her first 'suicide attempt' was comical, walking dramatically into the surf, then coming up sputtering when she got hit in the face by a wave. The next time was much more serious and directed at my sister Liz. Their long-simmering feud took a very dark turn, my mother apparently blaming Liz for all the disappointments in her life, including the recent failure of her attempt to open a new dance studio in Ventnor.
My mother waited until she and Liz were alone in the house when she slashed her wrists. She filled her bathroom sink with blood and trailed it back to her bed, reclining grandly and calling out to Liz, "Mommy has something to show you!" We could hear Liz's screams from the beach. An ambulance arrived in the nick of time or she might have actually done herself in. But this time there were consequences. She was confined to Ancora State Mental Hospital for a month or so where, as luck would have it, I saw her while on a school field trip.
I graduated from Atlantic City High School in 1962 on my eighteenth birthday. My grades were good senior year but, overall, my four years of high school looked pretty bad. I'd won a prize at Temple University but couldn't get accepted there, or at Penn State, or anywhere else I wanted to go. I spent one miserable semester at Union (Junior) College in Cranford, New Jersey. When I went home for the Christmas holiday, I found that my mother had sold my drum set for booze money. From that point on, all I could think about was getting back to New York.
* We heard voices from the beach and realized that a crowd had gathered there, unusual in the middle of the night. They were looking up at a huge, glowing orange ball directly overhead. It was silent and seemed to pulsate slightly. We watched it for at least ten minutes until it suddenly flew straight up at an astonishing speed and disappeared. No explanation was ever offered and we rarely discussed it.
NEXT: "The Tonight Show"
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