"Rock & Roll"

Our life in suburban New Jersey in many ways mirrored the "Ozzie & Harriet", "Father Knows Best" sensibilities of the mid 1950's. My sisters and I dutifully went to (public) school, did our homework (usually) and as we got a little older began hanging out at the malt shop just like the good kids we saw on TV. But something new was stirring in America, something that would soon begin to change everything.

In Linden, my mother opened the first in a series of ever-larger and more successful Pat Likely Dance Studios. And we, my sisters and I, were all expected to dance, especially in her annual dance 'recitals'. Several of my mother's students went on to professional careers as dancers or in some other aspect of the performing arts. And with my father's stage production expertise, the dance recitals became increasingly large and lavish. It certainly wowed them in Linden, New Jersey!

I was never a great dancer, but it turned out my sister Liz was. She became an exquisite ballerina and before she was eleven was being scouted by George Balanchine of the New York City Ballet. Liz and my mother began spending a great deal of time in New York at auditions and lessons conducted by some of the toughest taskmasters in the world of ballet (and some of those old queens could be real bitches). But if my mother was (back) in heaven, my sister was in hell. She couldn't take the pressure and the lifestyle and abruptly quit, creating a schism between them that would never mend.

I can't be certain exactly when I first became aware of this new music called rock & roll, but it was probably in 1955 with the release of a movie called "The Blackboard Jungle" * and its use of Bill Haley and the Comets' "Rock Around the Clock" over the opening titles. But at about the same time I began listening to a 'disc jockey' on WINS-AM in New York named Alan Freed.

Freed is generally credited with coining the term "rock and roll" and popularizing the music, but he was not the first to play it. Although the R&B roots of rock go back to the late 1930's, Freed introduced it and a roster of previously unknown black performers to a much larger (and whiter) audience. In the 1956 movie "Rock, Rock, Rock!" (in which he plays himself) Freed says, "Rock and roll is a river of music that has absorbed many streams - rhythm and blues, jazz, ragtime, cowboy songs, country songs, folk songs - all have contributed to the big beat".

In addition to his radio shows, Alan Freed ** produced and emceed a series of live rock & roll shows (they weren't yet called 'concerts') and I was privileged to have attended one of them.

My best recollection is that it was '56 or '57, which would have made me twelve or thirteen. Memory can play tricks on you and there are some parts of the story that are crystal clear, other parts less so. All the biographical material says that the Alan Freed rock & roll shows were at the Paramount Theaters in Brooklyn or Manhattan. But I am absolutely certain that the show I attended was at Fabian's Fox Theater in Brooklyn.

This was another great adventure for me since my previous trips to Brooklyn had been with my father ("Hallmark Hall of Fame") via the Staten Island Ferry, but this time I went with two friends my own age via a bus ride into Manhattan and subway connections to Flatbush Avenue in deepest, darkest Brooklyn.

The theater was large and decorated in an incongruous 'Siamese-Byzantine' style. I remember sitting in the balcony with an excellent view of both the stage and the first few rows of seats in the orchestra. (This is noteworthy only because we were able to see the kids dancing in the aisles, just like in the movies that followed.) There was one large band that backed all the musical acts, but it was far from our parents' idea of a 'big band'. These guys played rock & roll!

With one major exception, the exact line-up of performers is a little fuzzy. I'm sure we saw Chuck Berry, fairly sure we saw Fats Domino, The Cadillacs, Bo Diddley, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and The Coasters (or was it The Drifters?) And there were at least a couple of 'white' acts, one a guitar player, but I'm not sure whether it was Eddie Cochran or Gene Vincent, maybe both.

But the major exception, the performance that will remain etched in my brain, was Jackie Wilson. I've seen a few true show-stoppers in my time, from Callas, to Pavarotti, to Ethel Merman, to Striesand in "Funny Girl", to (the unlikeliest of all) Dorothy Collins in "Follies", but it would be hard to rival Jackie Wilson on that stage in Brooklyn. In show-biz parlance, he "burned the place down".

It was about that same time that I bought my first 45 rpm record. It was "Don't Be Cruel" on one side and "Hound Dog" on the other by Elvis Presley.

Except for the early years, I was never a huge Elvis fan. I liked the music but somehow never really connected with him. His movies got progressively more ridiculous and by the time he reached his bloated, Las Vegas period I could not bear to watch him. But in 1957, another music star began to emerge from the pack that I did connect with and, as it turned out, someone I'd been watching on TV and listening to on radio for as long as I could remember - Rick Nelson.



* I could not have imagined that, many years later, the film's director, Richard Brooks, would become my friend, mentor and the reason I moved to California.

** Alan Freed died broke and discouraged in 1965 at the age of 43, having been caught up in the "payola" scandal of the late 1950's.

NEXT: "Atlantic City"

Part Two

In preparing to write this book/blog, something I've been planning to do for many years, it occurred to me that between my father's career at NBC and mine at CBS you have pretty much the entire history of American network television.

One might get the impression from Part One that my father was only involved with "Kraft Television Theatre" and "Hallmark Hall of Fame" in those early years, but I have a few souvenirs of that time which remind me that he must have been working on several shows simultaneously. I have a single gold cuff link in the shape of a Coca Cola bottle (I'm sure it started out as a pair) that was given to him by singer Eddie Fisher when they worked together on "Coke Time". I have a gold money clip in the form of a St. Christopher medal that is inscribed "For Joe, with love from Talullah" *

In many ways, we were both in the right places at the right times to be eyewitnesses to some of the most pivotal moments in the growth and development of the medium. My father spent the second half of his NBC career with "The Tonight Show" and the ascendancy of its new host, Johnny Carson. My CBS career included double-stints in both the Program Department and the Program Practices Department - much like having been both a defense attorney and a prosecutor - the only person at any network to have ever done that.

We both started in New York and finished in Los Angeles. We both worked with, and in some cases had to deal with, many of the biggest names (and egos) in the entertainment industry. Unfortunately, this account of my father's career will be necessarily incomplete as he is no longer with us to fill in the gaps in my knowledge and memory. And it follows that this account of my career is fresher in memory and will be far more detailed.

But it is not my purpose to embarrass anyone (if I can help it). Between marriages, I 'dated' several well-known women, but I would not like this effort to be characterized as a kiss-and-tell. Similarly, I've had personal knowledge of a number of what might be called scandals but I will try to be discreet, having no desire to spend the rest of my life in litigation.


* Talullah Bankhead was primarily a stage and screen star, but also did a surprising amount of radio ("The Big Show") and television ("All Star Revue"). A very bawdy lady, she was best known for saying "Who do you have to fuck to get off this picture?" Her relationship with my father remains something of a mystery.

NEXT: "Rock & Roll"

Television VI "Lost"

The great tragedy of television is that so much has been lost. Most of the early years of television were done live, the only recording capability a primitive film system called kinescopes (in which they literally filmed from a picture tube) until videotape first appeared in the mid-fifties. The original videotape machines were as big as mini-vans.

"Kine's" deteriorated quickly but even more catastrophic was the loss through deliberate destruction. It seemed that few television executives appreciated the historic value of those early recordings. The real purpose of kinescopes was to 'bicycle' the programs to stations that were in outlying markets beyond broadcast range. Once the kine's were returned to the networks, they were routinely destroyed.

If that wasn't bad enough, much of the early videotape record of television was bulk-erased to make storage space. I won't mention his name, but there was one network executive in the late 1950's who erased NBC's entire videotape library, including their Christmas perennial "Amal and the Night Visitors" - a production that had to be mounted again at an expense far greater than any savings incurred.

Among the many other lost programs was the NBC Opera Company's 1955 production of Puccini's "Madame Butterfly", the original recording of "Peter Pan" with Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard, "Robert Montgomery Presents" (most notably Helen Hayes in "Victoria Regina") and virtually all of producer Albert McCleery's daytime "Matinee Theatre" productions.

We have "I Love Lucy" today only because Desi Arnaz had the foresight to do it on film (and in the process invented the three-camera/live audience form that is so common today). But so many other programs, arguably as good, are lost. A good example is "Mr. Peepers", starring Wally Cox, Tony Randall and Marion Lorne. And what little can be found of Ernie Kovacs, "Your Show of Shows" *, "Texaco Star Theater". "Colgate Comedy Hour" (with early appearances of Martin & Lewis, Ed Wynn, Jimmy Durante and Louis Armstrong) are of poor quality and therefore rarely seen.

Very little of television's 'Golden Age' survives. But anyone who watched it, especially the live dramas, like the (aforementioned) "Kraft Television Theatre" and "Hallmark Hall of Fame", as well as "Studio One", "Playhouse 90", "Producers Showcase", and "Ford Star Jubilee" (to name just a few), felt the special 'opening night' energy that live television had. And most of it is gone.


* One of my most vivid memories of early television was when I attended a rehearsal of "Your Show of Shows" and what turned out to be a classic routine in which the cast (Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner & Howard Morris) played figures in a giant animated clock.

End of Part One

Television V: "Hallmark Hall of Fame"

Looking back, I'm always impressed with how much of his work my father shared with me. Over the years we lived in Linden, he would take me with him into the city just about any time my school schedule would permit (and occasionally even when it didn't). And one of my favorites was spending entire Sundays with him when, in about 1955, he became Associate Producer of "Hallmark Hall of Fame".

What had begun in 1952 as a series of half-hour dramas had grown into ninety-minute productions broadcast live on Sunday nights. Produced at the NBC 'color' studios at 14th Street and Avenue M in Brooklyn (color was still a novelty in which only a few programs were broadcast and few people could receive), "Hallmark" boasted the most elaborate productions yet seen on television. Produced by George Schaefer in association with actor-director Maurice Evans, their greatest success was with serious dramas, adaptations of classics and historical plays.

My father and I would leave early Sunday mornings, take the Staten Island Ferry across New York Harbor (the Verrazano "Narrows" Bridge had not yet been built) to Brooklyn and I would spend the day observing the preparations and mounting tension of rehearsals leading up to the live broadcast. There were two studios that opened up to become the biggest television studio I'd ever (or have ever) seen, considerably larger than Studio 8-H in Manhattan. If "Kraft" was big, "Hallmark" was bigger *.

Among the most memorable "Hallmark" productions were "The Green Pastures" with William Warfield, Maxwell Anderson's "Winterset" with George C. Scott and Piper Laurie, "The Lark" with Julie Harris and Boris Karloff, "Born Yesterday" with Mary Martin and Paul Douglas and James Costigan's original drama "Little Moon of Alban" with Christopher Plummer and Julie Harris.

Often**, I was allowed to sit in the back of the control room, watching directors 'prep' the show, seeing how cameras were positioned and shots rehearsed, how all the elements of audio and video were merged into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Given how relatively primitive the technology was, the overall effect depended entirely on creativity and imagination, truly a 'magic lantern show'.

Of the many things that impressed me about "Hallmark", the sets were especially amazing. They were not only full-scale but 'practical', meaning not only did everything work, the sets had a front and rear so that the audience would never see the back of a flat if a cameraman accidentally shot off-set.

I remember one set in particular, a castle built for Shakespeare's "Richard II", starring Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson, complete with battlements, watchtowers, a dungeon and even a working drawbridge over a moat. Unlike my earlier experiences with television production, these sets were complete down to the smallest detail and absolutely exquisite. For me, it always seemed tragic that after the production was over they would wheel them outside and burn them.



* Years later, that enormous stage was often under utilized on lesser-scale productions. One that stands out was "The Perry Como Show", which seemed lost in that massive space. Another was "The Sammy Davis Jr. Show", but it gave me the opportunity in 1964 to meet Sammy's guest-host when he became ill, Sean Connery.

** But sometimes, when things were not going well or there was a director who didn't like some kid in his control room, I would be sent to a nearby movie theater. It was there I saw my first grown-up movie, "From Here To Eternity".

"New Jersey"

In 1951, we moved from our apartment in Queens to a rented house in Metuchen, New Jersey. It was really half a house, having been divided to accommodate two families, although we had the larger 'half' that included a wide front porch and big living room the other side lacked. The dividing walls were paper thin and we got to know our neighbors far better than we wanted to.

The house was on Middlesex Avenue, the busiest street in town, and my seven year-old mind found the name very funny. I decided that homosexuals must be the "middle sex" but, since there didn't seem to be any in Metuchen, I could not understand why they would name a street after them. All I knew was that we were getting farther away from Broadway and the life I'd loved.

I had no particular animosity toward New Jersey. I'd been spending my summer vacations with my grandparents and Uncle Ray in Atlantic City since I was two. But living in New Jersey all the time was another matter entirely. Even at seven I was something of a snob toward anything west of the Hudson. My biggest problem with New Jersey was that it wasn't New York.

The move probably had the least impact on my father. He commuted by train into Manhattan each day, continued as Unit Manager on "Kraft" and other NBC shows, lunched at the Lamb's Club with his old pals and was starting to make a pretty good living. And if he missed performing it only showed when he would be asked to sing at family gatherings.

We only lived in Metuchen for a year, second grade for me, kindergarten for my sister Liz (Elizabeth). And if I was less than thrilled with New Jersey, my mother was even less so. I'm sure she tried to make the best of it, but Metuchen made Queens seem positively cosmopolitan. And with another child on the way (my sister Ellen), whatever dreams she harbored must have seemed to be slipping away.

In 1952, with help from my mother's step-father, Parker Likely, we bought a house in Linden, New Jersey for the princely sum of $16,500. It's hard to find a new car for that amount today, but it was a lot of money then. Linden was a mostly blue-collar community of 30,000 and, in retrospect, not at all a bad place to raise a family. Our house was a small three-bedroom on Edgewood Road, a pleasant tree-lined street easy walking distance from the Myles J. McManus public school. So gradually, we all settled into life in the New Jersey suburbs.

Television IV: Studio 8-H

If "Howdy Doody" was something of a disappointment, "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet" was even worse. I'd been watching "Captain Video", starring Al Hodge and Don Hastings, since its debut in 1949, but that was on the Dumont Network and I had no access to that. (A year later, I became a big fan of "Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers", starring a very young Cliff Robertson.)

I also liked "Corbett", starring Frankie Thomas, which began a year later on NBC. But the set, that had looked so big and realistic on television, was in reality like the inside of a cardboard toilet paper tube set on end. Of all the impressive-looking switches, dials and levers, the only thing that actually worked was the ladder. I was beginning to get a sense of the difference between television illusion and reality. But it's a hard lesson and one I would continue to grapple with for my entire career.

As a viewer, I remember many television 'firsts', from Eisenhower's inauguration to the debut of the "Today Show", both in 1952. "Today", like "Tonight" was the brainchild of television visionary Sylvester 'Pat' Weaver (Sigorney's father) and starred Dave Garroway along with newsman Frank Blair, Jack Lescoulie, Betsy Palmer and a roller-skating chimp named J. Fred Muggs. But J. Fred disappeared from the show after tearing up the set one morning and biting a member of the crew. (Chimps are not only very strong, they can be very nasty as well.)

It was on that same visit to NBC that I saw Studio 8-H for the first time. As it turned out, both my father and I would have a connection to that studio in the years to come. It was the biggest stage in the building by far but, when I first saw it, it was still a radio studio. Arturo Toscanini* conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra on that stage. Odd, green acoustical panels were mounted on the walls and ceilings to control the sound in what was a very 'live' room.

The next time I saw Studio 8-H it had been converted to a television studio and was where my father was now Unit Manager of "Kraft Television Theatre". It was the first one-hour drama series on television and it was broadcast live twice a week, Wednesdays on NBC, Thursdays on ABC. "Kraft" set a number of records in its eleven and one-half years on the air, presenting some 650 plays and employing over 4,000 actors.

There was nothing to compare with the 'opening night' excitement, the pure adrenalin rush of live television. If it could go wrong, it likely would go wrong. There were no re-takes, no "let's try that again". Guns didn't fire, doors wouldn't open, dead bodies got up and walked away. (I remember one show in particular, some sword-and-tights epic starring Jacques Sernas in which he leaped into a casement window and he, and the entire set fell over and crashed to the floor. There was nothing to do but get up and keep fencing.)

But week after week, "Kraft Television Theatre" mounted the most ambitious productions ever seen on television, including the sinking of the Titanic in Walter Lord's "A Night to Remember" on that stage in 1956.**

Normally, "Kraft" employed four cameras and rarely had a back-up. If a camera went down, the director was suddenly doing a three-camera show and all his carefully planned 'blocking' was suddenly out the window. One of the cameras was also required to do the live Kraft commercials. With about two minutes to go, one of the cameras was 'released' and pushed out of the studio and down the hall to a small commercial studio where announcer Ed Herlihy would share stomach-churning recipes involving miniature marshmallows and Velveeta.

The next time I saw Studio 8-H was about 1955 and it was also the home of "Your Hit Parade", (at that time) starring Gisele MacKenzie, Russell Arms, Dorothy Collins and Snooky Lanson. The show was already in trouble; they were doing the same squeaky-clean 50's songs ("How Much is that Doggie in the Window") week after week because rock & roll was rapidly taking over the music industry and they simply could not (and would not) perform the new hits.

The next time I saw Studio 8-H, the music battle had already been won and the studio was now home to "Hullabaloo", NBC's go-go answer to the wildly popular "Shindig" on ABC. It had oddball musical guests but the primary interest was the Hullabaloo dancers, especially the "girl in the cage". But 8-H was also sometimes home to Gene Rayburn and "The Match Game" and Merv Griffin's "Play Your Hunch".

But the show that will forever be most associated with Studio 8-H, where it began and where it continues to this day is "Saturday Night Live".


*When, many years later, the original recordings made there were transferred to digital, engineers heard a strange humming sound in the background. Isolating the sound, they realized it was Toscanini humming the score as he conducted the orchestra.

** Imagine just the problem of transporting and controlling thousands of gallons of water in a television studio on the eighth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper. Add eight large sets, seven cameras and over 100 actors and you begin to see the logistics problems.

Television III: "Up Close"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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