to this article on Gleason, the first of a three-part profile of the star. "One can gauge the depth of his lonliness by how high Gleason flies," is the psychoanalytic subheading to the article. The premise continues as Gehman accompanies Gleason on a cross-country train junket to promote his new variety show.
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Edith Efron profiles Merv Griffin, and unlike Richard Gehman's article on Gleason, Efron is, shall we say, much kinder. Griffin, at the time 37, is a man of many talents—classical pianist, jazz musician, pop singer, movie actor, composer, game show emcee—and now, waiting for the next phase of his life, he admits "I don't have a fixed image."
His self-image, as it is, is much more positive than it used to be, when he weighed 80 pounds more than he does today. As the weight dropped, his career took off; the novelty song "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts" was a million-seller, after which he met Doris Day and wound up in movies, then met Tallulah Bankhead and wound up as part of her Vegas show, then would up on radio and television, and most recently a four-week gig as one of NBC's substitute hosts on
The Tonight Show during the interregnum between Paar and Carson. So impressed with Griffin was NBC that they signed him to a contract for his own talk show, scheduled to begin October 1. That show will last, with a brief break in 1963-64, all the way to 1986.
Colleagues call Merv "warm," "talented," "clever" and "ingenious," and those last two perhaps help to describe Merv's future successes in the business world. There was the real estate deal in Atlantic City
where he got the better of Donald Trump, just one of the shrewd deals that made him a major success in real estate. And we can't forget the two game shows that he developed and produced before selling them off for a good chunk of dough:
Wheel of Fortune and
Jeopardy! If memory serves, he even wrote the theme to
Jeopardy! It was said that when he died, his net worth was $1 billion. In any event, next to Gene Autry, Merv Griffin was perhaps the most successful mogul in show business. And reading this article, we can say we knew him when.
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A couple of big specials provide the highlights for the week. First off, it's Dinah Shore with her inaugural show of the year, Sunday night at 9:00 p.m. (CT) on NBC. Dinah's been associated with NBC for a dozen years, and this will be the first of nine specials she'll do for them this season. This really
is a special though, a one-woman show of just Dinah singing with Frank DeVol's orchestra.
Sid Caesar's signed up for nine specials this season as well, and his opener is on ABC Tuesday night at 9:30 p.m. It's another attempt on Caesar's part to reclaim the magic of
Your Show of Shows; as is the case with his previous and future attempts, he's never quite able to do it.
Taking a quick look at some of this week's regular variety shows, we find plenty more entertainment. Tony Bennett is the headline guest for the aforementioned Gleason on his
Saturday night show (6:30 p.m., CBS); later that night Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers take over on ABC (8:30 p.m.). On
Sunday, Ed Sullivan's guests include Connie Francis, Louis Prima and Sergio Franchi. (7:00 p.m., CBS)
Tuesday, Red Skelton welcomes Kay Starr and Jackie Coogan (7:30 p.m., CBS), while later that night (9:00) on the same network, Garry Moore has familiar faces Alan King, Nancy Walker and Dorothy Collins. It's an all-star lineup on Perry Como's
Kraft Music Hall Wednesday (8:00 p.m., NBC): Lena Horne, with jazzmen Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz, as they try out the new Brazilian dance the
Bossa Nova* with choreographer Carol Haney. On
Thursday, again on NBC (9:00 p.m.), Andy Williams has special guest Martha Raye. Finally, Jack Paar's
Friday night show (9:00 p.m., NBC) has husband-and-wife Gordon and Sheila MacRae, Woody Allen, and the Harlem Magicians, a rival of the Harlem Globetrotters. I remember that team; they used to appear on television occasionally, and they were to the Globetrotters what homemade hamburgers are to the ones you get at a restaurant: good, but not
as good. When I saw them, they were called the Fabulous Magicians, and their headliner was the great dribbler (and former Trotter) Marques Haynes.
*
Don't like dancing? Don't blame it on me.
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If you'd rather have sports, we've got it. The big game on Saturday's college football Game of the Week (CBS) is a classic: Oklahoma vs. Texas at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. This annual battle is the centerpiece of the State Fair of Texas, where the Cotton Bowl is located. Coming into the game, the Longhorns are flying high, ranked #2 in the country, and they go on to take Oklahoma in a tight defensive game, winning 9-6. Texas will finish the regular season undefeated before losing in the Cotton Bowl Classic, played in this very stadium on New Year's Day; it's the second and final regular season loss for Oklahoma, which finishes ranked #8 before they, too, lose on New Year's, in the Orange Bowl
More football Sunday, although the pro games vary depending on where you live, due to the NFL's blackout rule. If you're in the Dennison area, CBS gives you the Redskins-Cardinals game at noon; if you're in Wichita Falls, you get the Cowboys, playing at the same Cotton Bowl against the Eagles. If you live in DFW, your only choice is the AFL game on ABC, pitting the New York Titans (before they became the Jets) and the Houston Oilers. Otherwise, the week's highlights are ABC's
Wide World Of Sports on Saturday afternoon, with auto racing from Trenton and horse racing from Paris, and a middleweight bout between a couple of unranked fighters that night, also on ABC.
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The starlet of the week is actually a bona fide star,
Sally Ann Howes, From the British music halls to Broadway to television variety shows and frequent appearances on such game shows as
Password, she's become a familiar face to television viewers. This week, the elegant and stylish Miss Howes demonstrates "the beautiful trends for fall."
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Best ad of the week has to be this odd comic strip-style feature for
The Lloyd Bridges Show, an unusual anthology series in which Bridges played a newspaper reporter who, each week, would imagine himself in the role of the person about whom he was reporting. Later on it switches to a more conventional anthology, but I find this technique quite interesting. It's not as Walter Mitty as it sounds; more like the reporter trying to picture what must have happened in a given situation. Was he subconsciously testing himself, trying to figure out how he would have handled that situation? Given that the show only ran for one season on CBS, we'll never know. I'm only surprised the cartoon doesn't have a thought bubble connecting him to the scene he's imagining.
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One of the enduring mysteries of life is why we so often behave in a manner that runs contrary to what we say we want. That's no different with television, of course, where people claim to want quality programming while routinely ignoring it when it's offered. Dr. Herbert Kay, Director of the Center for the Study of Audience Reactions, thinks he knows why such things happen.
According to Dr. Kay, viewers drawn to family sitcoms are well-aware of their flaws and shortcomings, but their main reason for watching them is to "escape from crime, violence, brutality, uninhibited sex,* and other unwholesome or unhappy situations." Thus, while fans of such shows may describe them as "down-to-earth" and "true-to-life," what they really want is to escape that very quality, in favor of shows that offer happy endings and morals to the story.
*
1962 style, anyway.
On the other hand, and this I find quite interesting given my own predilection for realism on TV, those who denigrate such shows as "trite" and "unpredictable" are drawn to shows that are not necessarily realistic, but "
asks him to believe that it's realistic and could happen." Therefore, such a viewer might find himself (or herself) watching a show such as
Car 54, Where Are You?—a show that you might consider silly
—because it doesn't make any pretensions or try to insult the viewer's intelligence. "Look," it says to the viewer, "we're going to try to make you laugh through slapstick and farce. Take us or leave us on those grounds."
