don't know if the editors of TV Guide have a vendetta against Arthur Godfrey, or if they just know a good story when they see one, but ever since the Old Redhead sacked Julius LaRosa on a live broadcast, and then began purging employees on a scale not equaled since, except, perhaps, by George Steinbrenner firing New York Yankees managers). This week, the magazine continues a series on former Godfrey employees (LaRosa himself was on the cover of last week's issue), and the latest to join this not-so-select group is vocalist Marion Marlowe.
Marlowe was dismissed by Godfrey in April, along with singer Haleloke and vocal group The Mariners—two months later, she says she still has no idea why Godfrey fired them. She has to maintain a certain circumspection, considering that her husband, Larry Puck, still works for Godfrey as producer of his Talent Scouts program, and so while she continues to insist that she isn't bitter, she answers other questions by saying, "I refuse to answer on the grounds that it might incriminate me." When she was fired, following a Friday morning program, her first thought was that she supports her mother and grandparents, and that, "come next Monday, I won't have a job." The concern didn't last long; one of Godrey's nemeses, Ed Sullivan, promptly signed her for six appearances on his show for $18,000, a handsome improvement on her $1,500 per week she earned with Godfrey. She also has a deal working for a gig in Vegas, and clubs in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
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Marlowe with husband Puck and his
grandson from a previous marriage. |
Still, despite those protestations, Marlowe pleaded the fifth when asked if Godfrey showed favoritism to any members of his "family." She also refuses to parrot the standard line from other former Godfrey employees that, "All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to Mr. G." Instead, she says, "Now that it’s all over, I feel happy and free. It’s a whole new life, like a page being turned in a book. You look back at that last page with gratification, then forward to the next." Rumors have swirled that Godfrey was opposed to her relationship with Puck, which culminated in their marriage in May, and tried to break up the romance; when asked if this was true, she evasively replies, "Not in so many words. But you can bet that we heard about it on the grapevine." (Puck had already been fired from Godfrey's main show the previous December.) There's no doubt, though, that she looks forward to the future; she's hoping for a Broadway show, and perhaps her own series on TV. "I think I’m a very lucky girl that all this happened to me." Although, the article concludes, "What 'all this' means, she doesn’t say."
The series continues next week with a look at The Mariners, and if TV Guide is determined to feature a former Godfrey employee each week, it looks as if they aren't going to be running out of material any time soon. As I said, whether you're on his side or not, he makes for good copy.
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Regular readers know how I can seldom pass by a mention of The $64,000 Question (or other quiz shows of the era) without stopping to mention the Quiz Show Scandal. I just can't help it; one of the small pleasures of being a historian is finding articles such as these, where we know how the story ends, and thus have the privilege of reading them with a certain ironic hindsight. In this case, the article in question (no pun intended) is Dan Jenkins's review of "the most talked-about show on all television," and how it's likely to retain its place until the money runs out.
As is the case with so many early television programs,
The $64,000 Question traces its roots to radio, in this instance
The $64 Question, in which the grand prize was, indeed, $64.00—"the epitome of loot" back in the day. In the TV version, the questions
start at $64. Jenkins runs briefly through the rules of the game (Jean Renoir pun intended): answer four questions, and you're up to $512; three more get you to $4,000 plus a Cadillac convertible; the $8,000, $16,000, $32,000 and $64,000 levels follow, with the contestant having a week to decide whether or not to go for the additional dough, or keep what he's already won. The catch, of course, is that if he misses, he loses everything, except the Caddy. And the lucky contestant gets to answer these questions from the comfort of a soundproof glass booth. It really is the perfect setup for drama.
As Jenkins points out, we have the guarantee of the producers that the questions, "compiled by a scholarly Board of Editors," have been locked in a vault, and even host Hal March doesn't know what they are. I suppose this might technically be true, since Jenkins doesn't actually say the contestants themselves don't know the answers, because, of course, some of them do. (As, apparently, March did not.) The show seems to have a promising future; Jenkins describes it as "enormously entertaining," and reminds us that "Money, after all, still talks." As do disgruntled former contestants.
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There aren't many actors associated with a single role as much as Jack Webb is with Dragnet. Although he was responsible for several other programs, most notably Emergency! and Adam-12, it is the stoic sergeant Joe Friday that most resonates with the public when they think of Jack Webb. And that's a problem. For Jack Webb.
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| Joe Friday swings! |
Dragnet began on radio in 1949, and it's about to begin its fourth television season, with production starting in October. It's one of the most successful programs on television, a pioneer in the genre to be known as the police procedural. But Webb's tired of the role. With his contract requiring him to produce 55 more episodes, he's been "desperately" trying to promote Friday to lieutenant and bring in a new actor to play sergeant.* Webb's not looking to take it easy, though. He has his eyes on a new project, called
Pete Kelly's Blues, the pilot for which is scheduled to premiere in theaters later this month at a price tag of $1,100,000, making it the most expensive pilot ever made. It boasts big-name co-stars, including Janet Leigh, Edmond O'Brien, Peggy Lee, and Ella Fitzgerald. It has the added draw of being shot in color and CinemaScope. Should the movie be a commercial hit, Webb will have the option of turning
Kelly into a weekly series.
*When Dragnet premiered on television, Webb actually wanted Lloyd Nolan to play Friday, but it was thought that Webb was too associated with the role from the radio series for anyone else to take it on.
The question remains: will the viewing public accept Webb in a different role, that of a jazz musician? That is, to coin a phrase, the $64,000 question. (Where have I heard that before?) Webb himself is a jazz enthusiast, and the role obviously has a great personal appeal for him; he developed and wrote the original 13 Kelly episodes that played on radio in the summer of 1951. He denies, though, that his interest in the new project has caused him to "slough off" Dragnet; "If we spent less time on the last batch, it was only because the crew has shaken down to the point of having one of the smoothest filming organizations in the business," he says. "But just ask any of the actors around here if I’ve been sloughing off on ’em. Dragnet is still as good as we can make it, and I think the ratings bear me out."
I probably don't need to tell you the rest of the story: although Peggy Lee cops a supporting actress Oscar nomination, Pete Kelly's Blues does not lead immediately to a series; and when it does, in 1959, Webb casts William Reynolds in the title role. Dragnet, meanwhile, continues on television until 1959 (pumping out 39 episodes a year for most of that run), and though Friday does eventually win his promotion to lieutenant, it's only temporary; when Dragnet returns to the small screen in 1967, he's back as a sergeant again. And still popular.
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In the 1950s, you could expect to see almost anything on television, including a version of Musical Chairs. At least that's the title of this quiz show (Saturday, 9:00 p.m., NBC), which has perhaps the most distinguished panel we've ever seen on such a show: Johnny Mercer, Mel Blanc, and Bobby Troup*. Bill Leyden is the emcee. Later on, we have Star Tonight (10:30 p.m., ABC), the show that casts "rising young actors and actresses" in leading roles. Tonight's new star: Theodore Bikel, who will go on to a pretty fair career as actor and singer both.
*Fun fact: Bobby Troup will marry Jack Webb's ex-wife, Julie London, in 1959. They'll both star in Webb's later series Emergency!
The Colgate Variety Hour (Sunday, 8:00 p.m., NBC) is hosted by the man of the issue, Jack Webb, in an hour-long preview of Pete Kelly's Blues, with co-stars Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, and Janet Leigh, and backed by the "Pete Kelly Combo," led by Ray Anthony. Talk about an hour-long infomercial! That's up against Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town (8:00 p.m., CBS), with Guy Mitchell guest-hosting for the vacationing Ed; his guests are Polly Bergen, ventriloquist Arthur Worsley, and the band and color guard of the First Infantry Division. And at 9:00 p.m. on NBC, it's the Philco Television Playhouse, with Paul Newman starring in "The Death of Billy the Kid," written by Gore Vidal. This isn't the only time Newman plays The Kid; in 1958, he reprises the role in the big-screen movie The Left Handed Gun, based on Vidal's teleplay.
Monday night on
Producers' Showcase (8:00 p.m., NBC, in color), the husband-and-wife tandem of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy star in the two-character drama "The Fourposter," the story of a married couple spanning 35 years, based on the Broadway play of the same name, in which they also starred. Meanwhile,
Voice of Firestone (8:30 p.m., ABC) features another husband-and-wife team, opera stars William Warfield and Leontyne Price, singing selections from Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess," as well as duets from Mozart and Jerome Kern.
Jack Webb's talent obviously doesn't extend to writing program descriptions for TV Guide; check out the one for Tuesday's episode (8:00 p.m., NBC): "Sgt. Joe Friday and Officer Smith investigate a crime." Well, that ought to narrow it down a bit. Looking at more specific descriptions, the summer replacement show Music 55, hosted by bandleader Stan Kenton, features a pair of musical greats as guests: violinist Yehudi Menuhin and jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington. It doesn't get much better than that. (8:30 p.m., CBS)
We seldom stop to look at the boxing cards here, even though boxing remains a dominant fixture in primetime, but the Pabst Blue Ribbon Bouts (Wednesday, 10:00 p.m., CBS) features what one insider predicts could be "one of the best fights of the summer," with future light-heavyweight champion Willie Pastrano taking on up-and-coming Chuck Spieser, live from Chicago Stadium. After that, Steve Allen's Tonight (11:30 p.m., NBC) features singer-actor Allan Jones, father of Jack Jones.
One of Thursday's highlights comes from the suspense drama Climax! (8:30 p.m., CBS), with Michael Rennie starring in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," adapted from the Robert Louis Stevenson novel by the prolific Gore Vidal. Sir Cedric Hardwicke co-stars. On Ford Theatre, Edward G. Robinson makes a rare television appearance in "And Son," a domestic drama about a husband and wife quarreling over whether or not their soldier-son should join the family business. And once again, Steve Allen rounds off the evening on Tonight with jazz great Dave Brubeck and Jonathan Winters. (11:30 p.m., NBC)
Windows—no, not the operating system, but a half-hour anthology series that serves as the summer replacement for
Person to Person—presents a one-character drama tonight (10:30 p.m., CBS), "Rose's Boy," with Judith Evelyn as a woman explaining to an unseen young man how his mother died. What I find interesting about this is not the episode itself, but the handwritten note in the margin of the issue I'm looking at, which had to come from the announcement of the following week's story at the end of this episode: "The Love Letters of Smith," starring Eileen Heckart. You don't often get that kind of first-hand interaction from these old issues, and it's kind of cool to see the reminder that a real person actually read this.
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Finally, a plea for sanity when it comes to television weather coverage. The man making the plea is Francis K. Davis, Jr., a staff meteorologist at WFIL in Philadelphia (a station we've seen frequently), and a member of the American Meteorological Society. It seems that sponsors have fallen in love with the five-minute TV spots that have become a standard part of local news coverage, so much so that the airwaves are now filled with "a rash of so-called 'weathermen' and 'weathergirls,' who breeze through alleged weather information, 'embellished' with philosophy, wisecracks, costume changes and gimmicks. And for this," Davis notes, "they earn up to $40,000 a year."
The problem with all this jocularity is that weather is important. "To many viewers," Davis says, "it may determine where they go, how they go, what they wear, even what they earn." In other words, viewers deserve personnel who take their jobs as seriously and with as much dignity as those presenting the news. Instead, "most 'weathermen' were primarily entertainers, whose only qualification was an ability to use a telephone and a pencil—the first, to call the nearest U.S. Weather Bureau office; the second, to jot down the results of the conversation."
Davis goes on to say that "if TV weathermen are going to pose as experts, we feel they should be experts." Among his recommendations is that weathermen make use of on-air display of the "seal of approval," indicating that they're qualified to prepare forecasts, something that has, by and large, come to pass.
One of the trends that has evolved as a result of weather's popularity is the advent of the "weathergirl." Ah, yes, the weathergirl. Did you have them in your local market? Here's but a sampling of some of the nation's most popular practitioners of the art:
The one example I left off this montage is Milwaukee's Judy Marks; it's not that she isn't attractive, but she really doesn't count for our purposes, since she actually
did study basic meterology before joining the staff of WOKY.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, Davis stresses that this is not necessarily a bad thing. "For don’t misunderstand. We heartily approve TV’s use of pretty girls, like the ones shown. But unless they’re qualified, we’d be happier if—on TV, as on a date—they’d talk about anything except the weather." TV
