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"
Friday, September 4, 2009
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"
Thursday, August 27, 2009
"Year Round"
We had lived in the house on Edgewood Road for nearly six years when my parents decided in 1958 to build a new house on the other, somewhat more 'fashionable' side of Linden, New Jersey. We found a corner lot on Georgian Drive and the whole family, in varying degrees, had a hand in its design. It was a four-bedroom split-level with four levels (not including the basement and attic). We all loved the new house but would only live there for two years.
Trouble was brewing on several fronts, most prominently my mother's drinking. She had never been much of a drinker until the mid-1950's (her early thirties) when casual, social drinking began to accelerate into something far more serious. When still in the Edgewood Road house, about 1956, she'd had a fall in the middle of the night and knocked out half her teeth against a bedpost. Another night, we awoke to horns honking and found her car in the middle of the road. The birth of a fourth child, my sister Catherine (Cat) seemed to have crushed whatever dreams she still had.
By 1958, her dancing school, which had been so successful, began a long, slow decline as parents became aware of her increasingly erratic behavior *. Student attendance and revenue began to shrink dramatically. The annual dance recitals, that had been so lavish and professional, began to look slapdash, especially as my father's participation steadily diminished. The strain in their relationship was becoming obvious and the financial pressure of the failing dance studio only added to their mutual misery.
And there were other problems. My father was becoming concerned that Linden was not the best place for any of us. I was not living up to expectations (based on several IQ tests) at Linden High School and my father felt the boys my sisters were seeing were unsuitable working-class lugs. He had an image, partly a fantasy, of the sort of young men they would find in Atlantic City where his uncles, aunts and cousins had deep roots even after the deaths of his mother and brother in 1959. He imagined blond-haired, blue-eyed, athletic, college-bound lifeguard types, like my cousin Paul (Hartman). The reality was somewhat different.
So in 1960, we sold the house in Linden and moved to an eight-bedroom, five-story near-beachfront behemoth in Ventnor, New Jersey, just 'down beach' of Atlantic City, to live year-round. Of course, Atlantic City is 140 miles from New York and far beyond any reasonable commuting distance for my father. Perhaps by design, thereafter we saw him only on weekends and, before long, not every weekend. While this arrangement may have been good for my father, it was not at all easy for the rest of us.
My father took a room at the Lamb's Club in New York and, in his absence, I became the titular 'head of the household', a thankless job to put it mildly. We felt abandoned and, as much as I loved my father, I could not forgive him for the situation he put us in. For the first year or so, my mother usually drank herself into oblivion and treated her children with 'benign neglect'. There were no trips to the dentist or the doctor. Later it became far darker. We had a housekeeper for a while, who cooked and cleaned, but, when she didn't get paid, she finally quit.
Our Aunt Rose, the matriarch of the family, came down from Philadelphia and stayed as long as she could, but my mother could not abide her obvious disapproval and ordered her to go home. We lived in what many considered a mansion but there was often no food in the house.
There were problems at school as well. Many of the students at Atlantic City High School had known each other since kindergarten. I was entering as a Junior and my sister Liz as a Freshman. We were an alien species and did not feel at all welcome, at least at first. But I was luckier than Liz. On little more than a whim, I joined the Journalism Club and the Stage Crew. Both would have a significant impact on my future, but it was in Stage Crew that I met the person who would become my best friend, Steve Berger.
I remember the moment it happened. I was in the stage-right wings, trying to get the sound system to feed to the auditorium, when Steve came by and offered me a handful of cashews. I said, "Jesus, Jack. Is that all you got for the cow?" He blinked for a moment, then doubled over laughing. I have no idea where that line came from but Steve was practically rolling on the floor and we became friends from then on. And he introduced me into his circle of friends, including Gary Allen **, Marc Lovitz (the biggest organ in Atlantic City, apart from the Wurlitzer at the Convention Hall) and a number of other members of the "Jewish mafia".
Thanks to Steve, they adopted me as the "token goy", even made me an honorary member of their fraternity, Phi Delta Pi. I will be eternally grateful. In many ways they not only saved me, they turned me from a C-and-D student into an A-and-B student. I had hated Linden High and it showed in my grades. But ACHS would be very different for me. But, as I said, my sister Liz was not as lucky.
* Joanne Woodward gave a witheringly on-the-nose performance in the film "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds" that caught her perfectly at this point. It would get much worse later on.
** Gary Allen died in an auto accident less than a year after graduation.
NEXT: "Back to New York"
Trouble was brewing on several fronts, most prominently my mother's drinking. She had never been much of a drinker until the mid-1950's (her early thirties) when casual, social drinking began to accelerate into something far more serious. When still in the Edgewood Road house, about 1956, she'd had a fall in the middle of the night and knocked out half her teeth against a bedpost. Another night, we awoke to horns honking and found her car in the middle of the road. The birth of a fourth child, my sister Catherine (Cat) seemed to have crushed whatever dreams she still had.
By 1958, her dancing school, which had been so successful, began a long, slow decline as parents became aware of her increasingly erratic behavior *. Student attendance and revenue began to shrink dramatically. The annual dance recitals, that had been so lavish and professional, began to look slapdash, especially as my father's participation steadily diminished. The strain in their relationship was becoming obvious and the financial pressure of the failing dance studio only added to their mutual misery.
And there were other problems. My father was becoming concerned that Linden was not the best place for any of us. I was not living up to expectations (based on several IQ tests) at Linden High School and my father felt the boys my sisters were seeing were unsuitable working-class lugs. He had an image, partly a fantasy, of the sort of young men they would find in Atlantic City where his uncles, aunts and cousins had deep roots even after the deaths of his mother and brother in 1959. He imagined blond-haired, blue-eyed, athletic, college-bound lifeguard types, like my cousin Paul (Hartman). The reality was somewhat different.
So in 1960, we sold the house in Linden and moved to an eight-bedroom, five-story near-beachfront behemoth in Ventnor, New Jersey, just 'down beach' of Atlantic City, to live year-round. Of course, Atlantic City is 140 miles from New York and far beyond any reasonable commuting distance for my father. Perhaps by design, thereafter we saw him only on weekends and, before long, not every weekend. While this arrangement may have been good for my father, it was not at all easy for the rest of us.
My father took a room at the Lamb's Club in New York and, in his absence, I became the titular 'head of the household', a thankless job to put it mildly. We felt abandoned and, as much as I loved my father, I could not forgive him for the situation he put us in. For the first year or so, my mother usually drank herself into oblivion and treated her children with 'benign neglect'. There were no trips to the dentist or the doctor. Later it became far darker. We had a housekeeper for a while, who cooked and cleaned, but, when she didn't get paid, she finally quit.
Our Aunt Rose, the matriarch of the family, came down from Philadelphia and stayed as long as she could, but my mother could not abide her obvious disapproval and ordered her to go home. We lived in what many considered a mansion but there was often no food in the house.
There were problems at school as well. Many of the students at Atlantic City High School had known each other since kindergarten. I was entering as a Junior and my sister Liz as a Freshman. We were an alien species and did not feel at all welcome, at least at first. But I was luckier than Liz. On little more than a whim, I joined the Journalism Club and the Stage Crew. Both would have a significant impact on my future, but it was in Stage Crew that I met the person who would become my best friend, Steve Berger.
I remember the moment it happened. I was in the stage-right wings, trying to get the sound system to feed to the auditorium, when Steve came by and offered me a handful of cashews. I said, "Jesus, Jack. Is that all you got for the cow?" He blinked for a moment, then doubled over laughing. I have no idea where that line came from but Steve was practically rolling on the floor and we became friends from then on. And he introduced me into his circle of friends, including Gary Allen **, Marc Lovitz (the biggest organ in Atlantic City, apart from the Wurlitzer at the Convention Hall) and a number of other members of the "Jewish mafia".
Thanks to Steve, they adopted me as the "token goy", even made me an honorary member of their fraternity, Phi Delta Pi. I will be eternally grateful. In many ways they not only saved me, they turned me from a C-and-D student into an A-and-B student. I had hated Linden High and it showed in my grades. But ACHS would be very different for me. But, as I said, my sister Liz was not as lucky.
* Joanne Woodward gave a witheringly on-the-nose performance in the film "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds" that caught her perfectly at this point. It would get much worse later on.
** Gary Allen died in an auto accident less than a year after graduation.
NEXT: "Back to New York"
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
"Atlantic City"
As I've said previously, I spent my summers in Atlantic City at the home of my grandparents and my Uncle Ray from the time I was two years old. They had a downstairs flat on Florida Avenue, an easy (and aromatic) walk to the boardwalk and the beach. What I remember best about that walk were the smells, the hanging cheeses and meats at the Italian deli, the fresh fruits at the produce market and the smoky, beery smell of the bar on the corner at Pacific Avenue.
My best friend Tommy Gallagher and I would spend every day at the beach *, every night on the boardwalk - Million Dollar Pier, Steeplechase, Steel Pier, Ice Capades - a blur of sights and smells, of ice cream, Planter's peanuts and salt water taffy. From Memorial Day to the week after Labor Day (and the Miss America Pageant **), we took it all in and took it for granted. I loved Atlantic City as it was then, before the casinos destroyed it all.
Before the casinos came, Atlantic City had been a city of great restaurants, especially the famous Hackney's and Capt. Starns lobster houses, elegant boardwalk hotels, amusement piers and dozens of movie houses both along the boardwalk and on Atlantic Avenue. The Steel Pier was probably the ultimate Atlantic City attraction, offering live appearances by the biggest names in show business, first-run movies, a water circus "a mile at sea" (a slight overstatement) and the famous "High Diving Horse".
The first job I ever had (at sixteen) was as an usher at the Apollo Theater on the boardwalk where in the course of one summer I saw "Elmer Gantry" (another Richard Brooks film) and Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" literally dozens of times. Both films made a lasting impression, but I'd never seen anything like the audience reaction to "Psycho". Never before had I seen grown men and women jump out of their seats screaming and run out of the theater in terror, not even stopping for a refund. If the shower scene didn't get them, detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam) getting it on the stairs did.
But my favorite movie palace (and it was a palace) was the Warner Theater on the boardwalk at Arkansas Avenue. (For some reason, the locals called it "Ar-Kansas" Avenue.) Seeing a film there was an experience unto itself, with a skyline of Mediterranean-style houses and lighted balconies all around and a dome of blue sky above. And when the lights went down, the stars came out. I saw George Pal's "War of the Worlds" there when I was eight and I've never forgotten the thrill of it.
In 1956, my grandfather died suddenly of a massive heart attack, although some would say he had died years before. He had been Chief of Detectives for the Atlantic City Police Department until be became a fall-guy in a corruption scandal and lost his job, his pension and his reputation. Nearly unemployable, he took a series of menial and demeaning jobs, including bellhop at the President Hotel, carrying suitcases from the curb to the front desk well into his sixties.
The following year, with my father's financial help, my grandmother and uncle moved from the Florida Avenue flat to a small bungalow in the 'down beach' community of Margate, across the street from the Margate Yacht Club. For those unfamiliar with Atlantic City, it occupies the northern part of Absecon Island, with the communities of Ventnor, Margate and Longport to the south. (With all those familiar names from Monopoly: Boardwalk, Park Place, Marvin Gardens etc.)
The summer of 1958 was the summer of Ricky Nelson. (I learned later that he preferred to be called 'Rick'.) His single, "Poor Little Fool" hit number one on the charts a week before he was scheduled to appear at the Steel Pier. I was fourteen and he was eighteen, just enough older that he seemed to have and be everything that I wanted. According to a Life Magazine cover story, he had displaced Elvis as "Teen's Top Throb". And I actually looked a lot like him.
But even after my experience with the Alan Freed rock show, I was totally unprepared for the size and frenzy of the crowds that greeted his Steel Pier debut. Owner George Hamid's staff was clearly unprepared for what they would be dealing with as thousands of screaming fans jammed the pier for the two-day run overflowing the Midway Theater which was probably designed to hold no more than 500 people. He broke an attendance record set by Frank Sinatra that had stood since 1947.
On stage, Rick was like a young god, actually looking and sounding better (and somehow different) than he did on television where he had been performing a song at the end of each episode of "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" for the previous year. What had started out as a lark, a brief, funny impression of Elvis to impress a girl, had turned into a full-blown rock & roll career - and he was the real deal. Without his parents' stern supervision, he seemed free to cut loose - and he did!
Like the Alan Freed shows, a back-up band of local musicians had been put together for him, but I found out later that he was very unhappy with it. And when he returned the following year, he had personally put together a truly kick-ass band that included lead-guitarist James Burton (who later played for many years with Elvis Presley and, more recently with the other Elvis, Costello) and this time they performed in the Marine Ballroom which could accommodate thousands. That year, 1959, Rick Nelson *** broke his own attendance record with over 50,000 people, four shows a day, over two days.
But by the early 1960's, as Rick Nelson's fortunes began to wane, so did Atlantic City's. The families that had once come down from Philadelphia and New York for entire summers now came for weekends. And jet travel made vacations in Florida or the Caribbean as easy and affordable as travel by car or train to the Jersey shore. And unlike these other destinations, Atlantic City was strictly a summer resort with a long, cold off-season. Basic economics began to take a toll.
When casino gambling came in a few years later, they didn't want competion from the very things that had put Atlantic City on the map in the first place. They wanted players at the tables and slots. They wanted them eating in the casino, not at some outside restaurant. They didn't even want to give them easy access to the beach. And one by one, the restaurants, the movie theaters, the amusement piers and many of the great old hotels were systematically demolished.
* By the end of the summer, I'd be absolutely black - which explains the skin cancers (basal cell carcinomas) they've been cutting off me for the last twenty-five years.
** My father played a pivotal role in bringing the Miss America Pageant to NBC.
*** Rick Nelson was killed in a plane crash on New Year's Eve 1985 in DeKalb, Texas.
NEXT: "Year Round"
My best friend Tommy Gallagher and I would spend every day at the beach *, every night on the boardwalk - Million Dollar Pier, Steeplechase, Steel Pier, Ice Capades - a blur of sights and smells, of ice cream, Planter's peanuts and salt water taffy. From Memorial Day to the week after Labor Day (and the Miss America Pageant **), we took it all in and took it for granted. I loved Atlantic City as it was then, before the casinos destroyed it all.
Before the casinos came, Atlantic City had been a city of great restaurants, especially the famous Hackney's and Capt. Starns lobster houses, elegant boardwalk hotels, amusement piers and dozens of movie houses both along the boardwalk and on Atlantic Avenue. The Steel Pier was probably the ultimate Atlantic City attraction, offering live appearances by the biggest names in show business, first-run movies, a water circus "a mile at sea" (a slight overstatement) and the famous "High Diving Horse".
The first job I ever had (at sixteen) was as an usher at the Apollo Theater on the boardwalk where in the course of one summer I saw "Elmer Gantry" (another Richard Brooks film) and Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" literally dozens of times. Both films made a lasting impression, but I'd never seen anything like the audience reaction to "Psycho". Never before had I seen grown men and women jump out of their seats screaming and run out of the theater in terror, not even stopping for a refund. If the shower scene didn't get them, detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam) getting it on the stairs did.
But my favorite movie palace (and it was a palace) was the Warner Theater on the boardwalk at Arkansas Avenue. (For some reason, the locals called it "Ar-Kansas" Avenue.) Seeing a film there was an experience unto itself, with a skyline of Mediterranean-style houses and lighted balconies all around and a dome of blue sky above. And when the lights went down, the stars came out. I saw George Pal's "War of the Worlds" there when I was eight and I've never forgotten the thrill of it.
In 1956, my grandfather died suddenly of a massive heart attack, although some would say he had died years before. He had been Chief of Detectives for the Atlantic City Police Department until be became a fall-guy in a corruption scandal and lost his job, his pension and his reputation. Nearly unemployable, he took a series of menial and demeaning jobs, including bellhop at the President Hotel, carrying suitcases from the curb to the front desk well into his sixties.
The following year, with my father's financial help, my grandmother and uncle moved from the Florida Avenue flat to a small bungalow in the 'down beach' community of Margate, across the street from the Margate Yacht Club. For those unfamiliar with Atlantic City, it occupies the northern part of Absecon Island, with the communities of Ventnor, Margate and Longport to the south. (With all those familiar names from Monopoly: Boardwalk, Park Place, Marvin Gardens etc.)
The summer of 1958 was the summer of Ricky Nelson. (I learned later that he preferred to be called 'Rick'.) His single, "Poor Little Fool" hit number one on the charts a week before he was scheduled to appear at the Steel Pier. I was fourteen and he was eighteen, just enough older that he seemed to have and be everything that I wanted. According to a Life Magazine cover story, he had displaced Elvis as "Teen's Top Throb". And I actually looked a lot like him.
But even after my experience with the Alan Freed rock show, I was totally unprepared for the size and frenzy of the crowds that greeted his Steel Pier debut. Owner George Hamid's staff was clearly unprepared for what they would be dealing with as thousands of screaming fans jammed the pier for the two-day run overflowing the Midway Theater which was probably designed to hold no more than 500 people. He broke an attendance record set by Frank Sinatra that had stood since 1947.
On stage, Rick was like a young god, actually looking and sounding better (and somehow different) than he did on television where he had been performing a song at the end of each episode of "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" for the previous year. What had started out as a lark, a brief, funny impression of Elvis to impress a girl, had turned into a full-blown rock & roll career - and he was the real deal. Without his parents' stern supervision, he seemed free to cut loose - and he did!
Like the Alan Freed shows, a back-up band of local musicians had been put together for him, but I found out later that he was very unhappy with it. And when he returned the following year, he had personally put together a truly kick-ass band that included lead-guitarist James Burton (who later played for many years with Elvis Presley and, more recently with the other Elvis, Costello) and this time they performed in the Marine Ballroom which could accommodate thousands. That year, 1959, Rick Nelson *** broke his own attendance record with over 50,000 people, four shows a day, over two days.
But by the early 1960's, as Rick Nelson's fortunes began to wane, so did Atlantic City's. The families that had once come down from Philadelphia and New York for entire summers now came for weekends. And jet travel made vacations in Florida or the Caribbean as easy and affordable as travel by car or train to the Jersey shore. And unlike these other destinations, Atlantic City was strictly a summer resort with a long, cold off-season. Basic economics began to take a toll.
When casino gambling came in a few years later, they didn't want competion from the very things that had put Atlantic City on the map in the first place. They wanted players at the tables and slots. They wanted them eating in the casino, not at some outside restaurant. They didn't even want to give them easy access to the beach. And one by one, the restaurants, the movie theaters, the amusement piers and many of the great old hotels were systematically demolished.
* By the end of the summer, I'd be absolutely black - which explains the skin cancers (basal cell carcinomas) they've been cutting off me for the last twenty-five years.
** My father played a pivotal role in bringing the Miss America Pageant to NBC.
*** Rick Nelson was killed in a plane crash on New Year's Eve 1985 in DeKalb, Texas.
NEXT: "Year Round"
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
"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.
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"
Monday, August 17, 2009
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"
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"
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
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.
"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
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