What I've been watching: June, 2025

Shows I’ve Watched:	Shows I’ve Added:
Adventures in Paradise New York: A Documentary Film Sherlock Holmes	Danger Man

If it seems a little lame to be writing about a series I'm watching for the second time, then I'm afraid I'll have to plead guilty. Thursday evenings have been problematic for a while, between finishing work on the book (Darkness in Primetime, for those of you scoring at home, or even if you're just watching) and keeping up with this here blog. What makes them more challenging is that the Friday "Around the Dial" feature can't really be finished until Thursday, to make sure I include as many blogs as possible. Additionally, if I've fallen behind on my weekend TV Guide essay, Thursday evening becomes an advantageous time to catch up. Therefore, it had become a kind of "To Be Announced" evening, one in which I might be viewing, or I might be typing. What better way to fill in a tentative gap than with a rerun of a beloved series that won't suffer if I happen to miss a week here and there?

This all brings us to Jeremy Brett's definitive portrayal of Sherlock Holmes in the succession of adventures bearing the Holmes name. I won't take a lot of time to recap, because I've written about the show before, but suffice it to say that Brett, who played Holmes from 1984-94 is everything you'd want Holmes to be: quirky, quick-witted, self-assured, occasionally tortured, frequently arrogant, and virtually always right. He's also surprisingly nimble, of body as well as mind, and I bring that up because it points out how important the physical portrayal of Holmes can be. That physicality projects not only his determination, but the rapidity of his mind; and his body language establishes that, for the criminal, he truly is a dangerous man.

Holmes is aided in his sleuthing by his loyal comrade, Dr. Watson, played by David Burke in the first season and Edward Hardwicke in subsequent seasons. This is a Watson who is very smart indeed, a far cry from the bumbling Watson we see in Nigel Bruce's portrayal; he's not at the level of Holmes, of course, but he's learned well from his compatriot, and each episode contains a bit in which Watson demonstrates how he's picked up on the art of observation, often listing the very same clues that Holmes has seen. The difference, of course, is that Watson frequently fails to come to the same conclusion—that is, the correct conclusion—as Holmes, and the cutting retort from Holmes can sometimes be painful, to us as well as to the good doctor, who is the most loyal of friends. Holmes is always quick to temper his remarks, though, and there's no doubt that when he compliments Watson, it is no mere flattery. The chemistry between Brett and both of his Watsons is excellent; it makes them a truly compatible, and formidable, team. Throw in literate, even elegant, scripts (many by John Hawkesworth) and period details that create a perfect atmosphere, and you've got just the thing for those nights when you're looking for a break. Oh, and did I mention that since plugging the Holmes repeats into the schedule, I haven't had to spend even one evening working on the blog? No mere coincidence, I suspect.

l  l  l

The second half of Thursday night's dynamic duo—and, if I'm being honest, the program most likely to get preempted if I do have work to catch up on—is Adventures in Paradise, or if we're going to be precise about it, James A. Michener's Adventures in Paradise, which ran on ABC for three seasons and 91 episodes between 1959 and 1962. The show has the look and feel of a Warner Bros. production, with an exotic location, and impressive list of guest stars, and a hunky hero who winds up being involved in solving mysteries. Not all the time, perhaps, but more often than you or I are probably called upon. (The last mystery I had to solve was tracking down where I'd left my missing brain.) 

It's not a WB show, however, but one from 20th Century Fox, and the man responsible for it as co-executive producer was Dominick Dunne, who, prior to reinventing himself as a true crime author and raconteur par excellence, was a television executive looking to cast the lead in his new series. As Dunne tells it, the studio had been screen-testing "all the best-looking young actors in Hollywood" for the part, and Ron Ely had the inside track. Then, along came Gardner McKay:

One day in a coffee shop, I saw, sitting at a nearby table in a languid pose, reading a book of poetry, a startlingly handsome young man with attitude, whom I later described to Martin Manulis, the head of television at Fox, as "a little Gary Cooper, a little Cary Grant, a little Ty Power and a lot of Errol Flynn." He was at the time, in the parlance of the town, nobody, absolutely nobody, but his attitude declared that he was somebody. I dropped my Fox business card on his table and said, "If you’re interested in discussing a television series, call me." He did, and we tested him. Gardner’s test was certainly not among the top three or four in the acting department, but as the production staff sat in the projection room, we’d keep going back to it, and one of us would say, "This guy’s got something." Finally, we gave him the part. 

That's exactly it, I think; it fits my perception of the series perfectly. Watching it, you come away with two things: McKay's not a great actor, by any stretch; and there's something about him, a presence that makes you certain of two qualities that all television heroes have to have: everything's going to turn out right in the end, and the villain of the piece is going to be sorry he tangled with him. He also comes across as a very interesting person—McKay, I mean, not the character he plays, Captain Adam Troy, although Troy is a pleasant-enough character. And indeed McKay was an interesting man: he wrote books and plays, was a newspaper drama critic, and taught a writing class. He didn't really like acting, although, as Dunne says, he liked being a star, and he was good at it.

The point is that, while Adventures in Paradise is not great television, it is fun television, another reason I make the comparison to the WB detective shows. Each week Captain Troy and his schooner Tiki III, sailing the South Pacific "looking for passengers and adventure" and finding it; else, where would the series be? I don't know if your life is going to be dramatically enhanced by watching the episodes available on YouTube, and you're not going to be taxed if you do something else while you're watching it, but I've never found it less than enjoyable, and sometimes you just aren't in the mood for hate-watching a series.

l  l  l

In 1999, PBS premiered a documentary series called New York, which was about the history of the city so nice they named it twice. It was directed and co-written by Ric Burns (brother of Ken), and at the time of its premiere, it was far behind schedule and was shaping up to last far longer than its scheduled 10-hour duration. Finally, the decision was made to release the first five episodes (ten hours in all), covering the years 1609-1931, on five consecutive nights in November 1999; the concluding episode (which quickly ballooned to two episodes) would air at a later date. 

As fate would have it, those two episodes, dealing with the city from the Great Depression to the present, aired on September 30 and October 1, 2001: 19 days after the destruction of the World Trade Center. The final episode was quickly edited to include a reference to the terrorist attack, and then, in September, 2003, came yet another episode, a three-hour special that focused solely on the Twin Towers and their own history. In all, the series ran for eight episodes and 17½ hours. 

Watching it again for the first time since its original run, I'm struck by several things. First is how overwhelmingly unlikeable the city is, and how exaggerated in importance it is. Note that I said "importance" there, not "influence," because there's no question that New York City pulled the strings in this country for many years, for good and ill. What hits you, though, is how much ill there is to it: not only an obsession with democracy and diversity that even the series can't convince you has been successful; but the sheer arrogance of it all, the idea that the rest of the country really is "flyover" territory, good only for providing tourist dollars. (And wouldn't it be great if one could get the dollars without having to deal with the tourists!) For decades, people have looked at New York as not really being a part of the United States at all, but something separate, strange, alien. New York serves to reinforce that attitude two, three, four times over. When you see the famous "Ford to City: Drop Dead" headline from the 1970s, you want to stand up and cheer.

And yet.

New York: A Documentary Film is, without a doubt, one of the most fascinating, compelling documentary series I've ever seen. It comes by that honestly, with a cast of colorful characters that rivals any fictional series television ever came up with, from Al Smith to Fiorello La Guardia to Robert Moses; an architectural history that spans Central Park, the Empire State Building, and the aforementioned World Trade Center; a history that does seem to encompass the whole of American history; a remarkable place, all in all, with something that other places just seem to lack. Even the hatred one might have for the city has to acknowledge this.

And the series, for my money, is the equal of anything brother Ken ever produced. David Ogden Stiers's overall narration is superb, neither cloyingly emotional nor deadly dull; the voice talent, provided by well-known actors and personalities reading letters, newspaper articles, and speeches, is completely appropriate, letting the written words speak for themselves; the commentary, from noted historians and public figures, is both knowledgeable and articulate, and even if you disagree with what they're saying, you can't stop listening to them. The combination of paintings, still photographs, and video (some of it quite remarkable) is riveting, and the score, primarily that composed by Brian Keane, is heart-rendingly evocative.

The final three episodes, which cover New York's fall into disrepair and disgrace, its recovery and rejuvenation, and the horror and heartbreak of September 11, are the most outstanding parts of this series, but without the previous five episodes to set the stage, they wouldn't be nearly as good, which is one reason why the entire 17½ hours need to be consumed. And at the end—or is it? Another two episodes have, for some time, been said to be in the works, bringing the series up to date—a viewer comes away from it exhausted and exhilarated, inspired and disgusted, and understanding that great cities, like great people, can inspire both love and hatred at the same time. And why shouldn't that be the case? After all, a city remains, ultimately, a collection of people: good and bad, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, admirable and dissolute. In the case of New York, it just seems to have more of all of it than anyplace else. And perhaps that's just the way they'd have it. TV  

This week in TV Guide: July 15, 1961

The brooding visage on the cover of this week's TV Guide is not that of Dave Garroway, although you'd be forgiven for thinking that it was, given how it seems to be a perfect match for the sidebar teaser on the left. No, on the cover you see Gardner McKay, star of Adventures in Paradise. More about him later. First, here's Garroway.

David Cunningham Garroway, the subject of Richard Gehman's multi-part profile, is one of the pioneers of television, a man of immeasurable influence insofar as on-camera persona is concerned. He is a very complex man as well, a troubled man, and for once the psychoanalytical angle that Gehman so likes to use comes in handy.

Garroway is the star of NBC's Today Show, or to be more precise, The Dave Garroway Today Show, as it is currently known. His friendly demeanor, inquisitive mind and engaging personality all combine to make him one of the first big stars in the new medium. Today reflects that personality perfectly. Would that today's Today (a cumbersome handle, to be sure) had as much variety and innovation as Garroway's did.

And yet the Dave Garroway that millions see every weekday morning is a far cry from the offscreen Garroway. It's sometimes said that when TV viewers see a personality on their sets often enough, they come to feel as if they actually know that person. In Garroway's case, those viewers probably know as much about him as his friends and coworkers do. Garroway is almost painfully shy, far preferring the company of his cars and telescopes to human interaction. He used to disguise himself before leaving the house, and he has a bomb shelter in his Manhattan townhouse, along with a bottle of Secanol in case of nuclear war. He tells Gehman that his anxieties actually make him better on TV, where "he can be himself" in the unblinking eye of the camera lens.

I described Garroway above as the host of Today; actually, that will be true only for another two days. Come Monday morning, John Chancellor will take over as host of the new, hard-news version of Today. Garroway had made the announcement in May, a month after his wife had committed suicide by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills, that he would be leaving the show in October, or earlier if possible. He cites the need to recharge his batteries, to get away from the entertainment business for awhile. The article promises that part two will tell why Garroway really left Today; unfortunately, I don't have that issue. (But if you think I should have it, in order to finish the story, I'll gladly give you my PayPal address.)

I've frequently picked on Richard Gehman's writing style as being unnecessarily sarcastic and snarky, making his own cleverness too much a part of the story. And yet, perhaps this time, as I suggested earlier, the subject is a perfect match for the writer. His opening paragraph is certainly as good as anything you'll read in classic TV Guide*: "In these troubled and abandoned days, some of the more troubled and abandoned among us celebrate the birth of Christ by behaving much like the very Romans who crucified Him. A bacchanalian Christmas party given three years ago by the staff of the Today show would have delighted a contemporary Edward Gibbon."

*When I mentioned this to my wife, she asked if today's TV Guide even has any writing; she thought maybe all they did was compose captions to pictures.\

Gehman goes on to discuss Garroway's obvious boredom and discomfort in these surroundings, taking it for as long as he could before getting up and disappearing. He continues, comparing Garroway to Tod Hackett, the protagonist of Nathaneal West's novel The Day of the Locust: "He was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes." Garroway, a "very complicated 48," knows this better than anyone. "For 14 years, off and on, he has been seeing a psychiatrist in an effort to learn what is inside those boxes. And what he has learned is that there are more boxes." 

What I particularly like about those paragraphs is that Gehman assumes his readers will recognize the name Edward Gibbon, that they will know who Nathaneal West was and perhaps might even have read one of his books. It doesn't strike me that he's forcing these references; he's simply respecting his audience. TV Guide always prided itself on being more than a fan magazine, with readers who were a far cry from those who read the other rags; writing such as this tends to confirm that assumption.

Dave Garroway's story is a sad one, and it's not just because one of the pioneers of television is virtually unknown today. He appeared on various media off and on through the years, hosting a science show on NET, several radio programs on both coasts, and occasional guest appearances in various series, including on Today show anniversaries. He was married three times; the first ended in divorce, the second (as we saw above) with the suicide of his wife in 1961; his third to an astronomer, not surprising given his interest in that field. He underwent heart surgery in 1982 and, suffering from complications as well as his continuing battle with depression, killed himself with a single blast from a shotgun later that year. He was only 69 years old. 

Here's a clip from the first episode of Today in January, 1952. And here is a clip from Garroway's last television appearance, on the 30th anniversary show, where he's reunited with his old Today partners, Jack Lescoulie and Frank Blair. And to learn more about him, I highly recommend Jodie Peeler's wonderful biography of Garroway, Peace.

l  l  l

And now on to Gardner McKay. He was discovered by Dominick Dunne, who was at the time a producer at 20th Century Fox, and hired to star in a new series Dunne was co-producing, Adventures in Paradise. Standing an imposing 6'5", he cuts a figure that leads Life magazine, in a cover story, to dub him "the new Apollo." McKay considers himself to still be a rookie when it comes to acting—"I'm no real actor," he tells the unnamed interviewer; "Show me a two-page speech from 'Antigone' and I'd get sick."—but Dunne, who first spotted McKay reading a book of poetry in a coffee shop, says that though he was a nobody in Hollywood terms, "his attitude declared that he was somebody." Despite the criticism of his acting, McKay is unquestionably a star, receiving up to 3,000 pieces of fan mail a week, and is well-liked by the crew that services his series.

Adventures in Paradise is now in its third and final season, but McKay remains untouched by his celebrity; he still drives the same 1958 Chevy convertible he had before Paradise, and he has no press agent, no business manager. On his weekly salary of over $1,500, he has "a few blue chip stocks and a bank account." In 1961, "the future burns brightly" for Gardner McKay. 

Like Dave Garroway after Today, Gardner McKay's life will travel a different route after Adventures in Paradise ends, but unlike Garroway's, it has a happy ending. After the series ends, McKay declines to renew his contract with Fox and turns down a chance to co-star in a movie with Marilyn Monroe, who personally lobbied him to take the part. Giving up acting completely, McKay works in the Amazon for two years and spends time in France and Egypt before returning to Hawaii, where he finds new success as a writer*, publishing several novels, an autobiography, and numerous short stories, as well as writing plays (winning a Drama Critics Circle Award for "Sea Marks"). In addition, he serves for five years as the drama critic for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and teaches a writing class at UCLA.

*I remember once seeing an interview with him, perhaps on Today; he was plugging his latest book, possibly The Kinsman, and mentioned how at first people didn't believe he'd written it himself, until they realized the depth of detail with which he wrote about sailing.

A friend said that he always considered himself a writer rather than an actor, and added that "He hated the fact that he was known for that television series. It was not the professional or private path he wanted to take." Gardner McKay was 69, the same age as Dave Garroway, when he died of cancer, a man who by all appearances was able to write himself a happy ending.

And if you're interested, you can see the episode of Adventures in Paradise that played in this episode: a rerun of "The Big Surf."

l  l  l

If you're of an age where you only remember Julie London as nurse Dixie McCall on Emergency, you don't know what you've been missing.

London, who's already had a successful career as a singer but looks to add acting to her repertoire, complains of her lack of roles in Hollywood: "Sometimes I think they tend to measure an actress's talents by her—uh—measurements. If the measurements go beyond a certain point, they figure she can't possibly act." London's measurements, the unnamed writer helpfully points out, are 5'3", 37-23-36.

London was formerly married to Jack Webb*; the marriage was a good one until the success of Dragnet, with which he became obsessed. (Don't get me wrong; I love Jack Webb, but what do you say about a man who's married to Julie London and becomes obsessed with a television show?) They divorce in 1953, and in 1959 she marries jazz musician Bobby Troup, who also starred in Emergency but is probably best known (as he should be) for writing the song "Route 66," which made a lot of money for both him and Nat King Cole, among others.

*Of course, the irony here is that Webb, who remained on good terms with London, would hire both her and Troup for Emergency. When it came to television, Webb apparently only cared about getting the right people.

Today, though she continues singing, she still waits for the right role. "All I really want," she says, "is what every other girl in this town wants—a really good script."

l  l  l

Saturday starts with golf, ends with murder, and features beauty in-between. The golf comes from the Royal Birkdale Golf Course in Southport, England, where Wide World of Sports expands to two hours for the final round of the British Open, taped earlier in the day. (5:00 p.m. ET, ABC) Arnold Palmer is scheduled to join Jim Simpson for commentary on the final three holes, but he'll have to work hard to fit it in; Arnie's busy winning his second Open Championship (and first of two in a row), defeating Welch golfer Dai Rees by one shot. The beauty can be found in Miami Beach, where Germany's Marlene Schmidt* is crowned Miss Universe. (10:00 p.m., CBS). Johnny Carson is the emcee at the Miami Beach Convention Center, while the broadcast hosts are John Daly and Jayne Meadows. And the murder comes from the 1946 movie The Killers, one of the great film noirs of all time, starring Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, and Edmund O'Brien.

*Fun fact: Marlene Schmidt was the third of eight wives of Bronco star Ty Hardin.

Sunday's episode of Dennis the Menace (7:30 p.m., CBS) presents the long-suffering Mr. Wilson (Joseph Kearns) with yet another headache: a washed-out bridge leaves him trapped at a mountain campsite with Dennis and five other young boys. A profile of Kearns shows us another side of the actor, who was once a child actor himself. Now, however, he's a veteran character actor, worried that "the 24 inmates of a nursery school will find out that Mr. Wilson lives right across the street." And the house he lives in? It's a 2½ story soundproof home he designed and built around a 26-rank Wurlitzer pipe organ that was originally designed for Warner Brothers back in 1926 and which he delights in playing for guests.  

On Monday, the aforementioned Ty Harden appears with Clint Walker and Will Hutchins in a rare Cheyenne episode featuring all three of its stars (7:30 p.m., ABC), as they battle someone who doesn't want Cheyenne's cattle drive to reach its destination. Later, the irrepressible Spike Jones and his wife, singer Helen Grayco, return for a second season of hosting a summer replacement series, this time for Danny Thomas. Their guests for this first show are Bill Dana and Jack Jones. 

Stagecoach West (Tuesday, 9:00 p.m., ABC) is the first of a trio of obscure series that we're looking at this week; it's the first primetime starring role for Wayne Rogers, who, along with Robert Bray, operates a stagecoach in the Wyoming Territory. Tonight's episode features guest stars Pippa Scott and Warren Oats, along with Robert Vaughn, whose character has the perfectly Robert Vaughn-ish name Beaumont Butler Buell. Wonderfully smarmy, don't you think?

Remember Father Dowling Mysteries, the series starring Tom Bosley as a priest who solved murders in his spare time? (A priest told me once that he only wished he had that kind of free time; some days he barely had a chance to eat.) The series was based on the novels by Catholic author Ralph McInerny, but he wasn't the literary world's first crime-fighting prelate; before him, there was Father Brown*, the hero of G.K. Chesterton's short stories that mixed mystery and theology. Wednesday, we see an example of it in the 1954 movie The Detective (11:30 p.m., WCPO in Columbus), with Alec Guinness essaying the priestly role, and Peter Finch as the archcriminal Flambeau. 

*The current Father Brown series on BBC, starring Mark Williams, strays considerably from the moral theology with which Chesterton invested his stories.

Outlaws is a two-season Western, running between 1960 and 1962, starring Barton MacLane, Don Collier, and Wynn Pearce as U.S. Marshals patrolling the Oklahoma Territory in the latter part of the 19th Century. Despite the fact that the series focused on the lives of the outlaws rather than the lawmen, Thursday's episode (7:30 p.m., NBC) remains unusual in that none of the regular cast appear in it; this story of a cowhand-turned-outlaw is carried entirely by the guest cast, including Joe Maross as the badman. I must admit this is one of the many series with which I haven't previously been familiar until now.

Don Wilson, Jack Benny's longtime announcer, makes a rare straight acting appearance as an oil tycoon in Harrigan and Son (Friday, 8:00 p.m., ABC), a sitcom starring Pat O'Brien and Roger Perry as father-and-son attorneys. You'll be forgiven if you haven't heard on this one, either; it had a single-season run. Far more stimulating is the late movie on Dayton's WHIO, the 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead, starring Gary Cooper as Howard Roarke, the uncompromising architect, and Patricia Neal as the woman who loves him.

l  l  l

Finally, a couple of programs that epitomize the notion of television as a time capsule, and point out the importance of television preservation as an original document of cultural history.

The cover of George Lefferts'
collection of scripts from the show

We begin with NBC's series of occasional afternoon programs, Special For Woman, which returns on Tuesday for a six-week primetime run (10:00 p.m.). "Each taped drama," according to the program description, "deals with a problem faced by women in America," and concludes with a brief discussion led by NBC news reporter Pauline Frederick.* This week's episode, entitled "The Single Woman," presents the dilemma of Elisabeth Greenway (Barbara Baxley), who "has reached an age where she knows she ought to get married." She has a beau (Michael Tolan) ready and willing to tie the knot, but "Elisabeth just can't see her way clear to committing herself to him—or any man—for life." Although it's not mentioned in the description, she's also being wooed by a married man, played by Patrick O'Neal. Following the play, Frederick interviews psychiatrist Louis English.

*An example of the "women's stories" that Frederick complained about, prior to becoming NBC's U.N. correspondent. 

Here's a great reminder of the culture of the early 1960s, when marriage and a family is still considered the norm for women, and the stigma that's attached to being an unmarried woman—even the idea that she's not quite respectable. I wager that the phrase "old maid" isn't used nearly as much today as it was back then; now, we might think such an unmarried woman is just coming into her own today. As for her choices, does she choose boyfriend Michael Tolan, or is she content to be the "other woman" with Patrick O'Neal? And what role does the psychiatrist play in the discussion? Is he there to reassure women that the desire to remain single is not abnormal—or does he encourage them to confront their fear of commitment?*

*I cheated a bit, and skipped to the end of George Lefferts' collection of scripts from the show, which you can find at the Internet Archive; she chooses Michael Tolan. "I don't know when I'll be ready to marry you, Mike—maybe not for a long while. I need some time to think and maybe grow up a little more. But if you have the patience—" Says Dr. English in the summary, "Finding the right man is a by-product of doing the things that you yourself enjoy." Go to page 89 for more.     

l  l  l

This week's other blast from the past comes courtesy of CBS' Sunday morning religious series Look Up and Live (10:00 a.m.) that, with few adaptations, could be presented today. "The Police," based on the play by Polish writer Slawomir Mrozek, tells the story of a prison rapidly losing its reason for being. "All the other prisoners, convinced that they were living under 'the best system in the world,' have confessed their crimes against the state, received their pardons and gone home. Now there's only one prisoner left, and he too wants to confess. The Commissioner receives this news with a certain amount of regret."

Mrozek, often compared to the Absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco, is a fascinating character himself. He was once an ardent Communist, praising Polish authorities for their persecution of religious leaders, and took part in demonstrations defaming Catholic priests. Following his defection from Poland in 1963, he became a harsh critic of Communism. The always-reliable Wikipedia offers this quote from him, explaining the change: "Being twenty years old, I was ready to accept any ideological proposition without looking a gift-horse in the mouth—as long as it was revolutionary. [. . .] I was lucky not to be born German say in 1913. I would have been a Hitlerite because the recruitment method was the same." "The Police" was published in 1958, bearing the marks of his growing skepticism of totalitarianism. I wonder what he'd think about the world of today? TV  

This week in TV Guide: July 28, 1962

It's an interesting issue this week, as good as any at showing how some things have changed over time, and how hard it might be for us to appreciate what those things were like, back then. And, as is frequently the case, we turn to sports to demonstrate some of those changes.

For example, two baseball All-Star Games? Yes indeed; as sportswriter Melvin Durslag explains, for the last four years Major League Baseball has put its stars on display twice a year. Although the fans enjoy seeing baseball's best face-off to determine league supremacy, the reason behind the game has always been to fund the players' pension fund, and starting in 1959, a second game was added to boost the fund. This year's first game was played on July 10 in Washington, D.C., and the second game is scheduled for this Monday at Wrigley Field in Chicago. The managers remain the same, and with the exception of a few additional players, so are the rosters.

The twice-a-year format has gotten mixed reviews at best; while the revenue is appreciated, players are concerned about the increased possibility of injury. Fans seem to be tiring of it as well: 1960's second game, at Yankee Stadium, drew less than 40,000.* As for the future, the National League favors playing two, while the American has reservations. There seems to be a sense, though, that the days of two All-Star Games may be numbered.

*Remember that the games were still played in daytime back then. Additionally, with the departure of the Dodgers and Giants, New York really wasn't all that great a baseball town.  

In fact, the doubters are right. After Monday's game, televised by NBC at 12:45 p.m. ET and won by the Americans 9-4, the Midsummer Classic will return to one game, where it remains to this day. And with the explosion of televised baseball and the advent of interleague play, the game seems to carry less fan interest than ever.

t  t  t

The All-Star Game was created by Chicago Tribune sportswriter Arch Ward, as part of the 1933 Chicago "Century of Progress" World's Fair. Ward was the brainchild behind another all star format, one designed to benefit the Tribune charities: an annual game matching the NFL champions and a collection of all-stars from the last season's college football seniors.

Thus was born the College All-Star Game, which kicked off for the first time in 1934 and will be played for the 29th time Friday night at 9:00 p.m. on ABC, live from Soldier Field in Chicago. The concept probably sounds absurd today: pitting a team of professional champions against college seniors, no matter how good those rookies may be, gives every indication of a mismatch. And yet such was not the case for the first few years, when pro football was not yet the giant it is today, and the college game was still the more glamorous and popular of the two. The Stars more than held their own for those first years, winning six of the first 17 contests (with two ties) and often keeping the score close in the years in which they lost.

This year's game pits an all-star team led by future pro stars Roman Gabriel, John Hadl, Lance Alworth, Merlin Olson, and Heisman winner Ernie Davis against the Green Bay Packers, coming off a 37-0 destruction of the New York Giants in the 1961 NFL Championship and featuring a roster with an astounding 10 future Hall of Famers, including Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Jim Taylor, Forrest Gregg, Ray Nitschke, Herb Adderley, Willie Davis, Jim Ringo, Willie Wood and Henry Jordan. With that kind of talent, it's no surprise that the Packers easily best the All-Stars, winning 42-20.

It's a microcosm of the game's future. The All-Stars will win only one more game, upsetting the same Packers the following year 20-17. And although the Stars put up surprisingly spirited games against the New York Jets in 1969 (losing 26-24), the undefeated Miami Dolphins in 1973 (a tough 14-3 struggle) and the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1975 (leading in the fourth quarter before losing 21-14), too many of the games are mismatches. The NFL has increased worries about their star rookies being injured before the beginning of the season and the players themselves voice concerns about money. After a 24-0 route of the Stars by the Steelers in 1976, in a game called in the 3rd quarter due to heavy rain, the annual matchup disappears, never to be played again.

It's too bad. As a kid I always looked forward to this game, one of the few night games on television, and on a Friday night to boot. With the exception of the years when the Packers played, I loved rooting for the underdog college stars, always hoping for that one year when they would shake up the pros. It was, between the years when the old Chicago Cardinals departed for St. Louis and when the Bears vacated Wrigley Field, the only game played at Soldier Field. It was an event, a game with its own charm and atmosphere, and its departure, like the watering down of baseball's All-Star Game, leaves something of a void in at least one sports fan's life.

t  t  t
One more sports note before we go on to another farewell. Or actually, I guess this could fall into that category as well. It's CBS' Saturday afternoon Game of the Week between the Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees, from Yankee Stadium. It's preceded at noon by a 90-minute broadcast of one of the Yankees' great traditions: Old Timers' Day. They still do this in New York, and it's still a great tradition though it's not carried on national television anymore, which is a pity.

Looking at the lineup for the three-inning game is like flipping through the record books: Joe DiMaggio, Lefty Grove, Hank Greenberg, Bob Feller, Jackie Robinson, Dizzy Dean. Many of these players were relatively recently retired, and so they were still able to actively participate in the game. What a treat that was, back when baseball was still the national pastime and giants still roamed the earth.

t  t  t

In an issue from last year, we read a profile of Gardner McKay, star of Adventures in Paradise. At the time, McKay freely admitted "I'm no real actor," and the discussion continues this week, now that his series has been cancelled. "I read a lot about my so-called 'quality,' he says. 'Let me tell you, in Hollywood when an actor is needed but not understood, it is suddenly discovered he has "quality." The minute he is no longer needed he is dismissed as a nut.'"

Although McKay sounds bitter, confused would probably be a better word for it. About the tendency of people to refer to him as an "enigma," he replies "That means perplexing, baffling, a person who talks in riddles. It's true I don't have a disciplined mind, my thoughts do tend to wander, but I have always said what I think as best I could. You know, for three years I have been castigated by the press for not saying what they want me to say. I am sick of it."

In fact, McKay—who frankly has more going for him than acting; he is also a writer, a sculptor and a photographer—is fed up with the whole Hollywood scene: "I hate television series, uniforms of any kind, agents, business, the practice of law, career women and Hollywood—which isn't really a place but a state of mind that has to be corrected if any measure of contentment is to be achieved." So why is he still around? His reply is honest and frank: "Because I don't have the guts to get out and because nobody has offered me $150,000 a year to go and search my soul elsewhere."

The Gardner McKay story has always revolved around his handsome features rather than his acting chops; Life magazine once called him "A New Apollo." Actor Herbert Marshall said, "His rare quality is being attractive to both men and women. And compared with other TV actors, his ability to act is about average." Regarding his ability, McKay complains, "Maybe I'm not the greatest actor in the world, but nobody has given me much help to improve. I had a long line of directors who were more concerned with keeping the front office happy than working with the actors. When I suggested acting lessons, I was told to forget it because it would make me even more introspective." No wonder he feels the way he does.

Soon McKay will be gone from the acting ranks completely, by his own choice. As we know from last year's piece, his second life as a novelist and playwright will be far more satisfying.

t  t  t

So what about this week's cover?  It actually tells not one, but two stories. The first tells how being a game show host can mean big bucks for those who have the knack of "fast talk, good looks and some secret ingredients." In fact, the best in the business can pull down as much as $150,000 a year, "which seems rather high pay for simply being pleasant." But as Mark Goodson, one of the major domos of Goodson-Todman, remarks, the game show host—or emcee, as they prefer to be known—hase to have specific qualities: he must be a talker, one who can "keep right on talking for as long as he has to—and enjoy it." He has to be able to listen, rather than simply think about what they're going to do next; Goodson sites the story of an emcee who asked a woman what her husband did, was told that he was dead, and responded with a hearty "Fine!" He also has to be friendly, and be able to communicate it genuinely to both contestants and viewers at home. Then there are the secondary qualities such as timing, thinking quickly on his feet, and being a good "traffic cop."

The second article tells the story of Barbara Benner, who as a contestant on Bill Cullen's The Price Is Right won nearly $14,000 in prizes. And at first it was pretty thrilling, until reality set in. Her haul included a 21-foot Century Coronado worth $7,624, but that was the first to go: "We couldn't afford the insurance and we couldn't even get down to the shore often enough to use it." Next to go was a dining room breakfront valued at $1,500; "it's Early American. I have Danish modern." She won 23 pieces of garden furniture, but only has room for a few pieces; she also scored with 1500 cartons of Sealtest lemonade and 100 4-pound bolognas and a giant barbecue ($1,380)—her comment on that was "who on earth needs to roast 40 chickens at a time?" She had to sell that as well.

What is the result of Barbara Benner's big win on Price? So far, she's sold the boat, barbecue, lawn furniture and a set of Royal Worcester china; the breakfront hasn't had any takers yet. Sealtest gave her a $100 credit on her milk bill and paid her $200 for the lemonade, and her sister helped sell the bologna for $180. All in all, she's made $7,130 from her winnings, a little over half of their worth. But that's actually good news: "Out of the boat money, we got enough to pay all the taxes" on the prizes, and she and her husband were able to purchase a couple of modest cars, an electric dryer, some clothes, and some nice dinners. They'll wind up with about $1,000 in the bank, and hope some day to take a cruise.

The lesson then, as now, is that not all is what it seems on game shows. Paying tax on your prizes means many people have to sell some or all of their winnings, and unless you've got a cooperative prize supplier (which many are, nowadays), you might find all that glitters is not gold.

t  t  t

There are some very good movies on the tube this week; let's take a look at some of them, along with the rest of the week's highlights.

On Saturday, Indianapolis' WLW-i, Channel 13, has The Thin Man (midnight), the classic comedy-mystery starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles. It's the first of six in the series, and in many ways the best. Incidentally, for those of you who haven't seen it, the "Thin Man" is not William Powell's Nick, but the victim of the movie's central murder. It's a wonderfully fun movie, and it will make you jealous that you can't come up with quips as quickly as these characters can.

Sunday, ABC's Hollywood Special movie is the Agatha Christie mystery Witness for the Prosecution (8:30 p.m.), with a magnificent cast including Charles Laughton (who received his final Oscar nomination for the role), Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich and Elsa Lanchester. Perry Mason notwithstanding, this is the courtroom drama against which all others are measured.

We're in that period of limbo between the time Jack Paar left The Tonight Show and Johnny Carson took over, so the show's featured guest hosts until Carson's October 1 start date. On Monday (11:20 p.m.), Merv Griffin is back for the week, his second stint as host; I've heard that NBC brass, aware of the critical praise for Griffin's shows and nervous about Carson's ability to keep the audience, seriously debated going with Merv before sticking with Johnny. Don't know whether or not that's true, but in any event I don't think they had anything to worry about. He's going head-to-head against Steve Allen's syndicated talker, positioned to take advantage of any stumble Carson might make as host of Tonight.

On Tuesday, CBS presents a repeat of "Carnegie Hall Salutes Jack Benny" (9:00 p.m.), a special from last year. Benny's violin playing was a running joke, but he could actually play—not spectacularly, but certainly better than I can. It's a salute because of the money Benny has raised in benefit concerts for musicians, and also because of the work he and friend Isaac Stern did to save Carnegie from Robert Moses' wrecking ball. Fittingly, Stern is one of the guests on the show, along with Benny Goodman and his sextet, pianist Van Cliburn, opera star Roberta Peters, and conductor Eugene Ormandy leading the Philadelphia Orchestra. What a lineup! Here's an excerpt:


Armstrong Circle Theater was different from other dramatic anthology series of the time in that it tended to focus on docudramas and other stories having to do with current events. This Wednesday's show (10:00 p.m.) is no exception, as Arthur Hill and Lydia Bruce star in "Battle of Hearts," a story of how marriage counselors work to save marriages from ending in divorce. The series is hosted by Ron Cochran, who's also the anchor of the ABC Evening News.

It's movie time again on Thursday, with Indianapolis' WTTV showing the John Wayne classic She Wore a Yellow Ribbon st 10:00 p.m. Up against that, CBS presents a unique news special—a one-hour discussion between two of the great writers of the era, Pulitzer Prize winners and old friends Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren.* What a discussion that must have been.

*Fun facts: MacLeish, according to the always-reliable Wikipedia, is the great-uncle of Bruce Dern, which makes him great-great-uncle to Laura Dern. Van Doren's son, Charles Van Doren, achieved a sizable amount of television fame for reasons we all know.

Finally, the end of the week, and Friday's best, other than the All-Star Game, might well be the CBS western Rawhide (7:30 p.m.), which at this point still stars Eric Fleming as trail boss Gil Favor, but the real star of the show is Rowdy Yates, best-known for bringing to prominence one Clint Eastwood. You probably knew that, though. The theme song was also pretty well-known, but then you probably knew that too. TV  

This week in TV Guide: July 28, 1962

I't an interesting issue this week, as good as any at showing how some things have changed over time, and how hard it might be for us to appreciate what those things were like, back then.  And, as is frequently the case, we turn to sports to demonstrate some of those changes.

For example, two baseball All-Star Games?  Yes indeed; as sportswriter Melvin Durslag explains, for the last four years Major League Baseball has put its stars on display twice a year.  Although the fans enjoy seeing baseball's best face-off to determine league supremacy, the reason behind the game has always been to fund the players' pension fund, and starting in 1959, a second game was added to boost the fund.  This year's first game was played on July 10 in Washington, D.C., and the second game is scheduled for this Monday at Wrigley Field in Chicago.  The managers remain the same, and with the exception of a few additional players, so are the rosters.

The twice-a-year format has gotten mixed reviews at best; while the revenue is appreciated, players are concerned about the increased possibility of injury.  Fans seem to be tiring of it as well: 1960's second game, at Yankee Stadium, drew less than 40,000.*  As for the future, the National League favors playing two, while the American has reservations.  There seems to be a sense, though, that the days of two All-Star Games may be numbered.

*Remember that the games were still played in daytime back then.  Additionally, with the departure of the Dodgers and Giants, New York really wasn't all that great a baseball town.  

In fact, the doubters are right.  After Monday's game, televised by NBC at 12:45pm ET and won by the Americans 9-4, the Midsummer Classic will return to one game, where it remains to this day.  And with the explosion of televised baseball and the advent of interleague play, the game seems to carry less fan interest than ever.

***

The All-Star Game was created by Chicago Tribune sportswriter Arch Ward, as part of the 1933 Chicago "Century of Progress" World's Fair.  Ward was the brainchild behind another all star format, one designed to benefit the Tribune charities: an annual game matching the NFL champions and a collection of all-stars from the last season's college football seniors.

Thus was born the College All-Star football game, which kicked off for the first time in 1934 and will be played for the 29th time Friday night at 9pm ET on ABC, live from Soldier Field in Chicago.  The concept probably sounds absurd today: pitting a team of professional champions against college seniors, no matter how good those rookies may be, gives every indication of a mismatch.  And yet such was not the case for the first few years, when pro football was not yet the giant it is today, and the college game was still the more glamorous and popular of the two.  The Stars more than held their own for those first years, winning six of the first 17 contests (with two ties) and often keeping the score close in the years in which they lost.

This year's game pits an all-star team led by future pro stars Roman Gabriel, John Hadl, Lance Alworth, Merlin Olson, and Heisman winner Ernie Davis against the Green Bay Packers, coming off a 37-0 destruction of the New York Giants in the 1961 NFL Championship and featuring a roster with an astounding 10 future Hall of Famers, including Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Jim Taylor, Forrest Gregg, Ray Nitschke, Herb Adderley, Willie Davis, Jim Ringo, Willie Wood and Henry Jordan.  With that kind of talent, it's no surprise that the Packers easily best the All-Stars, winning 42-20.

It's a microcosm of the game's future.  The All-Stars will win only one more game, upsetting the same Packers the following year 20-17.  Although the Stars put up surprisingly spirited games against the New York Jets in 1969 (losing 26-24), the undefeated Miami Dolphins in 1973 (a tough 14-3 struggle) and the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1975 (leading in the fourth quarter before losing 21-14), too many of the games are mismatches.  The NFL has increased worries about their star rookies being injured before the beginning of the season and the players themselves voice concerns about money.  After a 24-0 route of the Stars by the Steelers in 1976, in a game called in the 3rd quarter due to heavy rain, the annual matchup disappears, never to be played again.

It's too bad.  As a kid I always looked forward to this game, one of the few night games on television, and on a Friday night to boot.  With the exception of the years when the Packers played, I loved rooting for the underdog college stars, always hoping for that one year when they would shake up the pros.  It was, between the years when the old Chicago Cardinals departed for St. Louis and when the Bears vacated Wrigley Field, the only game played at Soldier Field.  It was an event, a game with its own charm and atmosphere, and its departure, like the watering down of baseball's All-Star Game, leaves something of a void in at least one sports fan's life.

***

One more sports note before we go on to another farewell.  Or actually, I guess this could fall into that category as well.  It's CBS' Saturday afternoon Game of the Week between the Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees, from Yankee Stadium.  It's preceded by a 90-minute broadcast of one of the Yankees' great traditions: Old Timers' Day.  They still do this in New York, and it's still a great tradition though it's not carried on national television anymore, which is a pity.

Looking at the lineup for the three-inning game is like flipping through the record books: Joe DiMaggio, Lefty Grove, Hank Greenberg, Bob Feller, Jackie Robinson, Dizzy Dean.  Many of these players were relatively recently retired, and so they were still able to actively participate in the game.  What a treat that was, back when baseball was still the national pastime and giants still roamed the earth.

***

In an issue from last year, we read a profile of Gardner McKay, star of Adventures in Paradise.  At the time, McKay freely admitted "I'm no real actor," and the discussion continues this week, now that his series has been cancelled.  "I read a lot about my so-called 'quality,' he says.  'Let me tell you, in Hollywood when an actor is needed but not understood, it is suddenly discovered he has "quality."  The minute he is no longer needed he is dismissed as a nut.'"

Although McKay sounds bitter, confused would probably be a better word for it.  About the tendency of people to refer to him as an "enigma," he replies "That means perplexing, baffling, a person who talks in riddles.  It's true I don't have a disciplined mind, my thoughts do tend to wander, but I have always said what I think as best I could.  You know, for three years I have been castigated by the press for not saying what they want me to say.  I am sick of it."

In fact, McKay - who frankly has more going for him than acting; he is also a writer, a sculptor and a photographer - is fed up with the whole Hollywood scene:  "I hate television series, uniforms of any kind, agents, business, the practice of law, career women and Hollywood - which isn't really a place but a state of mind that has to be corrected if any measure of contentment is to be achieved."  So why is he still around?  His reply is honest and frank: "Because I don't have the guts to get out and because nobody has offered me $150,000 a year to go and search my soul elsewhere."

The Gardner McKay story has always revolved around his handsome features rather than his acting chops; Life magazine once called him "A New Apollo."  Actor Herbert Marshall said "His rare quality is being attractive to both men and women.  And compared with other TV actors, his ability to act is about average."  Regarding his ability, McKay complains, "Maybe I'm not the greatest actor in the world, but nobody has given me much help to improve.  I had a long line of directors who were more concerned with keeping the front office happy than working with the actors.  When I suggested acting lessons, I was told to forget it because it would make me even more introspective."  No wonder he felt the way he did.

Soon McKay will be gone from the acting ranks completely, by his own choice.  As we know from last year's piece, his second life as a novelist and playwright will be far more satisfying.

***

So what about this week's cover?  It actually tells not one, but two stories.  The first tells how being a game show host can mean big bucks for those who have the knack of "fast talk, good looks and some secret ingredients."  In fact, the best in the business can pull down as much as $150,000 a year, "which seems rather high pay for simply being pleasant."  But as Mark Goodson, one of the major domos of Goodson-Todman, remarks, the game show host - or emcee, as they prefer to be known - has to have specific qualities: they must be talkers, men who can "keep right on talking for as long as he has to - and enjoy it."  He has to be able to listen, rather than simply think about what they're going to do next; Goodson sites the story of an emcee who asked a woman what her husband did, was told that he was dead, and responded with a hearty "Fine!"  He also has to be friendly, and be able to communicate it genuinely to both contestants and viewers at home.  Then there are the secondary qualities such as timing, thinking quickly on his feet, and being a good "traffic cop."

The second article tells the story of Barbara Benner, who as a contestant on Bill Cullen's The Price Is Right won nearly $14,000 in prizes.  And at first it was pretty thrilling, until reality set in.  Her haul included a 21-foot Century Coronado worth $7,624, but that was the first to go: "We couldn't afford the insurance and we couldn't even get down to the shore often enough to use it."  Next to go was a dining room breakfront valued at $1,500; "it's Early American.  I have Danish modern."  She won 23 pieces of garden furniture, but only has room for a few pieces; she also scored with 1500 cartons of Sealtest lemonade and 100 4-pound bolognas and a giant barbecue ($1,380) - her comment on that was "who on earth needs to roast 40 chickens at a time?"  She had to sell that as well.

What is the result of Barbara Benner's big win on Price?  So far, she's sold the boat, barbecue, lawn furniture and a set of Royal Worcester china; the breakfront hasn't had any takers yet.  Sealtest gave her a $100 credit on her milk bill and paid her $200 for the lemonade, and her sister helped sell the bologna for $180.  All in all, she's made $7,130 from her winnings, a little over half of their worth.  But that's actually good news; "Out of the boat money, we got enough to pay all the taxes" on the prizes, and she and her husband were able to purchase a couple of modest cars, an electric dryer, some clothes, and some nice dinners.  They'll wind up with about $1,000 in the bank, and hope some day to take a cruise.

The lesson then, as now, is that not all is what it seems on game shows.  Paying tax on your prizes means many people have to sell some or all of their winnings, and unless you've got a cooperative prize supplier (which many are, nowadays), you might find all that glitters is not gold.

***

There are some very good movies on the tube this week; let's take a look at some of them, along with the rest of the week's highlights.

On Saturday, Indianapolis' WLW-i, Channel 13, has The Thin Man, the classic comedy-mystery starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles.  It's the first of six in the series, and in many ways the best.  Incidentally, for those of you who haven't seen it, the Thin Man is not William Powell's Nick, but the victim of the movie's central murder.  It's a wonderfully fun movie, and it will make you jealous that you can't come up with quips as quickly as these characters can.

Sunday, ABC's Hollywood Special movie is the Agatha Christie mystery Witness for the Prosecution, with a magnificent cast including Charles Laughton (who received his final Oscar nomination for the role), Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich and Elsa Lanchester.  Perry Mason notwithstanding, this is the courtroom drama against which all others are measured.

We're in that period of limbo between the time Jack Paar left The Tonight Show and Johnny Carson took over, so the show's featured guest hosts until Carson's October 1 start date.  On Monday, Merv Griffin is back for the week, his second stint as host; I've heard that NBC brass, aware of the critical praise for Griffin's shows and nervous about Carson's ability to keep the audience, seriously debated going with Merv before sticking with Johnny.  Don't know whether or not that's true, but in any event I don't think they had anything to worry about.  He's going head-to-head against Steve Allen's syndicated talker, positioned to take advantage of any stumble Carson might make as host of Tonight.

On Tuesday, CBS presents a repeat of "Carnegie Hall Salutes Jack Benny," a special from last year.  Benny's violin playing was a running joke, but he could actually play - not spectacularly, but certainly better than I can.  It's a salute because of the money Benny has raised in benefit concerts for musicians, and also because of the work he and friend Isaac Stern did to save Carnegie from Robert Moses' wrecking ball.  Fittingly, Stern is one of the guests on the show, along with Benny Goodman and his sextet, pianist Van Cliburn, opera star Roberta Peters, and conductor Eugene Ormandy leading the Philadelphia Orchestra.  What a lineup!  Here's an excerpt:


Armstrong Circle Theater was different from other dramatic anthology series of the time in that it tended to focus on docudramas and other stories having to do with current events.  This Wednesday's show is no exception, as Arthur Hill and Lydia Bruce star in "Battle of Hearts," a story of how marriage counselors work to save marriages from ending in divorce.  The series is hosted by Ron Cochran, who later in the year will find himself the anchor of the ABC Evening News.

It's movie time again on Thursday, with Indianapolis' WTTV showing the John Wayne classic She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.  Up against that, CBS presents a unique news special - a one hour discussion between two of the great writers of the era, Pulitzer Prize winners and old friends Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren.*  What a discussion that must have been.

*Fun facts: MacLeish, according to the always-reliable Wikipedia, is the great-uncle of Bruce Dern, which makes him great-great-uncle to Laura Dern.  Van Doren's son, Charles Van Doren, achieved a sizable amount of television fame for reasons we all know.

Finally, the end of the week, and Friday's best, other than the All-Star Game, might well be the CBS western Rawhide, which at this point still stars Eric Fleming as trail boss Gil Favor, but the real star of the show is Rowdy Yates, best-known for bringing to prominence one Clint Eastwood.  You probably knew that, though.  The theme song was also pretty well-known, but then you probably knew that too. TV  

This week in TV Guide: July 15, 1961

The brooding visage on the cover of this week's TV Guide is not that of Dave Garroway, although it would appear to be a perfect match for the sidebar teaser on the left.  No, on the cover you see Gardner McKay, star of Adventures in Paradise.  More about him later.  First, here's Garroway.

David Cunningham Garroway, the subject of Richard Gehman's multi-part profile, is one of the pioneers of television, a man of immeasurable influence insofar as on-camera persona is concerned.  He is a very complex man as well, a troubled man, and for once the psychoanalytical angle that Gehman so likes to use comes in handy.

Garroway is the star of NBC's Today Show, or to be more precise, The Dave Garroway Today Show, as it is currently known.  His friendly demeanor, inquisitive mind and engaging personality all combine to make him one of the first big stars in the new medium.  Today reflects that personality perfectly.  Would that today's Today (a cumbersome handle, to be sure) had as much variety and innovation as Garroway's did.

And yet the Dave Garroway that millions see every weekday morning is a far cry from the offscreen Garroway.  It's sometimes said that when TV viewers see a personality on their sets often enough, they come to feel as if they actually know that person.  In Garroway's case, those viewers probably know as much about him as his friends and coworkers do.  Garroway is almost painfully shy, far preferring the company of his cars and telescopes to human interaction.  He used to disguise himself before leaving the house, and he has a bomb shelter in his Manhattan townhouse, along with a bottle of Secanol in case of nuclear war.  He tells Gehman that his anxieties actually make him better on TV, where "he can be himself" in the unblinking eye of the camera lens.

I described Garroway above as the host of Today; actually, that will be true only for another two days.  Come Monday morning, John Chancellor will take over as host of the new, hard-news version of Today.  Garroway had made the announcement in May, a month after his wife had committed suicide by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills, that he would be leaving the show in October, or earlier if possible.  He cites the need to recharge his batteries, to get away from the entertainment business for awhile.  The article promises that part two will tell why Garroway really left Today; unfortunately, I don't have that issue.  (But if you think I should have it, in order to finish the story, I'll gladly give you my PayPal address.)

SOURCE: HADLEY TV GUIDE COLLECTION

I've harped on Richard Gehman's writing style for some time.  I've often felt he was unnecessarily sarcastic; a snarky writer who makes his own cleverness too much a part of the story.  And yet perhaps this time, as I suggested earlier, the subject is a perfect match for the writer.  His opening paragraph is certainly as good as anything you'll read in classic TV Guide.*

*When I mentioned this to my wife, she asked if today's TV Guide even has any writing; she thought maybe all they did was compose captions to pictures.

In these troubled and abandoned days, some of the more troubled and abandoned among us celebrate the birth of Christ by behaving much like the very Romans who crucified Him. A bacchanalian Christmas party given three years ago by the staff of the Today show would have delighted a contemporary Edward Gibbon.

Gehman goes on to discuss Garroway's obvious boredom and discomfort in these surroundings, taking it for as long as he could before getting up and disappearing.  He continues,

In "The Day of the Locust," the late Nathaneal West said of his protagonist, "He was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes." The phrase might have been written for Garroway, who is a very complicated 48. Nobody knows it better than he. For 14 years, off and on, he has been seeing a psychiatrist in an effort to learn what is inside those boxes. And what he has learned is that there are more boxes.

What I particularly like about those paragraphs is that Gehman assumes his readers will recognize the name Edward Gibbon, that they will know who Nathaneal West was and perhaps might even have read his writing. It doesn't strike me that he's forcing these references; he's simply respecting his audience. TV Guide always prided itself on being more than a fan magazine, with readers who were a far cry from those who read the other rags; writing such as this tends to confirm that assumption.

Dave Garroway's story is a sad one, and it's not just because one of the pioneers of television is virtually unknown today. He appeared on various media off and on through the years, hosting a science show on NET, several radio programs on both coasts, and occasional guest appearances in various series, including on Today show anniversaries. He was married three times; the first ended in divorce, the second (as we saw above) with the suicide of his wife in 1961; his third to an astronomer, not surprising given his interest in that field. He underwent heart surgery in 1982 and, suffering from complications as well as his continuing battle with depression, killed himself with a single blast from a shotgun later that year. He was only 69 years old.

Here's a clip from the beginning of Today in January, 1952.

And here is a clip from Today's 30th anniversary, Garroway's last television appearance, where Garroway is reunited with the classic Today cast, his old partners Jack Lescoulie and Frank Blair.

***

And now on to Gardner McKay.  He was discovered by Dominick Dunne, who was at the time a producer at 20th Century Fox, and hired to star in a new series Dunne was co-producing, Adventures in Paradise. Standing an imposing 6'5", he cuts a figure that leads Life magazine, in a cover story, to dub him "the new Apollo."  McKay considers himself to still be a rookie when it comes to acting - "I'm no real actor," he tells the unnammed interviewer, "Show me a two-page speech from 'Antigone' and I'd get sick." - but Dunne, who first spotted McKay reading a book of poetry in a coffee shop, says that though he was a nobody in Hollywood terms, "his attitude declared that he was somebody." Despite the criticism of his acting, McKay is unquestionably a star, receiving up to 3,000 pieces of fan mail a week, and is well-liked by the crew that services his series.

Adventures in Paradise is now in its third and final season, but McKay remains untouched by his celebrity; he still drives the same 1958 Chevy convertible he had before Paradise, and he has no press agent, no business manager.  On his weekly salary of over $1,500, he has "a few blue chip stocks and a bank account."  In 1961, "the future burns brightly" for Gardner McKay.

You can see the episode that played on ABC that Monday night, July 17, 1961, right here: a rerun of "The Big Surf."


Like Dave Garroway after Today, Gardner McKay's life will travel a different route after Adventures in Paradise ends, but unlike Garroway it has a happy ending.  After the series ends, McKay declines to renew his contract with Fox and turns down a chance to co-star in a movie with Marilyn Monroe, who personally lobbied him to take the part.  Giving up acting completely, McKay works in the Amazon for two years and spends time in France and Egypt before returning to Hawaii, where he finds new success as a writer*, publishing several novels, an autobiography, and numerous short stories, as well as writing plays (winning a Drama Critics Circle Award for "Sea Marks").  In addition, he serves for five years as the drama critic for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and teaches a writing class at UCLA.

*I remember once seeing an interview with him, perhaps on Today; he was plugging his latest book, possibly The Kinsman, and mentioned how at first people didn't believe he'd written it himself, until they realized the depth of detail with which he wrote about sailing.

A friend said that he always considered himself a writer rather than an actor, and added that "He hated the fact that he was known for that television series.  It was not the professional or private path he wanted to take."  Gardner McKay was 69, the same age as Dave Garroway, when he died of cancer, a man who by all appearances was able to write himself a happy ending.

***

And now, a word about Julie London, actress and singer.  The word is **sigh**.  If you're of an age where you only remember Julie London as nurse McCall in Emergency, you don't know what you've been missing.

London, who's already had a successful career as a singer, complains of her lack of roles in Hollywood: "Sometimes I think they tend to measure an actress's talents by her - uh - measurements.  If the measurements go beyond a certain point, they figure she can't possibly act."  London's measurements, the unnamed writer helpfully points out, are 5'3", 37-23-36.

London was formerly married to Jack Webb*; the marriage was a good one until the success of Dragnet, with which he became obsessed.  They divorced in 1953, and in 1959 she marries jazz musician Bobby Troup, who also starred in Emergency but is probably best known (as he should be) for writing the song "Route 66," which made a lot of money for both him and Nat King Cole, among others.

*Of course, the irony here is that Webb, who remained on good terms with London, would hire both her and Troup for Emergency.  When it came to television, Webb apparently only cared about getting the right people.

Today, though she continues singing, she still waits for the right role.  "All I really want," she says, "is what every other girl in this town wants - a really good script."

***

There's seldom a great deal of interesting programming in the summer months; most of what we encounter consists of reruns and forgettable summer replacements.  In addition, this issue comes from Southern Ohio, which means I'm not too familiar with the local terrain.  I think, therefore, I'll wrap up with a look at a couple of programs that serve as perfect examples of why TV Guide offered such a window to the cultural world.

The first comes to us on Tuesday night.  I think I've mentioned this before (pauses, enters words in the search engine, reads) - ah, yes, it's right here - the NBC Special For Women series that originally ran on the daytime schedule.  They're now appearing on NBC's summer prime-time schedule over the next six weeks.  "Each taped drama," TV Guide says, "deals with a problem faced by women in America," and concludes with a brief discussion led by NBC news reporter Pauline Frederick.

This week's episode, entitled "The Single Woman," presents the dilemma of Elisabeth Greenway (Barbara Baxley), who "has reached an age where she knows she ought to get married."  She has a beau ready and willing to tie the knot, but "Elisabeth just can't see her way clear to committing herself to him - or any man - for life."  Following the play, Frederick interviews psychiatrist Louis English.

Now, I would love to see how this drama played out.  It gives us a valuable glimpse into the culture of the early '60s, when marriage and a family is still considered the norm for women, and the stigma that's attached to being an unmarried woman - even the idea that she's not quite respectable.  After all, how many times have we heard the phrase "old maid" applied to a woman whom we might think is just coming into her own today?  I'd be curious as to what decision Elisabeth makes, and exactly what role the psychiatrist plays in the discussion.  Is he there to reassure women that the desire to remain single is not abnormal - or does he encourage them to confront their fear of commitment?  Again, talk about a time capsule!

***

SOURCE: HADLEY TV GUIDE COLLECTION

Did you say time capsule?  Here's a presentation of CBS' Sunday morning religious series Look Up and Live that, with few adaptations, could be presented today.  "The Police," based on the play by Polish writer Slawomir Mrozek, tells the story of a prison rapidly losing its reason for being.  "All the other prisoners, convinced that they were living under 'the best system in the world,' have confessed their crimes against the state, received their pardons and gone home.  Now there's only one prisoner left, and he too wants to confess.  The Commissioner receives this news with a certain amount of regret."

Mrozek, often compared to the Absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco, is a fascinating character himself.  He was once an ardent Communist, praising Polish authorities for their persecution of religious leaders, and took part in demonstrations defaming Catholic priests.  Following his defection from Poland in 1963, he became a harsh critic of Communism.  The always-reliable Wikipedia offers this quote from him, explaining the change:  "Being twenty years old, I was ready to accept any ideological proposition without looking a gift-horse in the mouth – as long as it was revolutionary. [...] I was lucky not to be born German say in 1913. I would have been a Hitlerite because the recruitment method was the same."  "The Police" was published in 1958 and, I suspect, bears the marks of his growing skepticism of totalitarianism.

He died, just last year, at his home in Nice, France.  Though he was never a religious man, he received a Catholic funeral presided over by Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, the former personal secretary to Pope John Paul II. TV