We lead off the week at Comfort TV, where David reviews the TV career of the late Tony Roberts, who first came to my attention as one-half of the legal series Rosetti and Ryan, co-starring with Squire Fridell; I was a captive viewer from back in the days of the one-station in the World's Worst Town™.
RealWeegieMidget is back on the TV-movie circuit with the 1984 teleflick Obsessive Love, which stars Yvette Mimieux and Simon MacCorkindale and carries with it more than a whiff of Fatal Attraction. It's part of the "So Bad It's Good" Blogathon, which perhaps tells you all you need to know.
At bare•bones e-zine, Jack's Hitchcock Project continues apace with the seventh-season story "The Children of Alda Nuova," Robert Wallsten's adaptation of his own short story, with Jack Carson starring as a criminal who makes a wrong turn into a wrong town.
Let's continue with crime, as John wraps up his "Private Detective Season" at Cult TV Blog with 1967's The Big M, with all the requisite sleaze that P.I.s thrive on. John also looks at some additional series, including the very good Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, with Powers Boothe.
At The Saturday Evening Post, Bob Sassone's "News of the Week" includes two pertinent questions about the TV ratings system: is it accurate, and does it even matter? Read the story, and stick around for this year's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees.
Travalanche has an excellent look back at the ubiquitqious John Charles Daly, urbane moderator of What's My Line?, anchor of ABC's evening news program, and one of my absolute favorite television persons ever. I may be coming up on 65, but I still say that I want to be like him when I grow up.
It's only tangentially related to classic TV, but unless you've been under a rock for the last couple of years, you know about the disintegration of cable television. Variety has an in-depth look at the future of Comcast, including USA Network (which produced many an original show in the day), and what it may bode for the industry as a whole.
Speaking of, it looks as if the long relationship between ESPN and Major League Baseball is over at the end of the upcoming season. Did MLB undervalue its product? And what could this mean for a new television partner? Sports Media Watch has all the details, including what happens to ESPN.
Wrapping things up with The View from the Junkyard, Roger continues his episode-by-episode review of The New Avengers, with "The Tale of the Big Why," an example of how the series handles comedy with a deft touch—unlike, perhaps, the original. TV
You probably know John Daly best as the charming and urbane host of CBS's What's My Line? on Sunday nights, but this week we get a chance to see him at his day job: vice president in charge of news, public affairs, special events, religion and sports for ABC television and radio, and anchorman of ABC's evening news program.
The combination of the two jobs isn't quite as incongruous as it might seem. "[Goodson-Todman] thought a newsman would have the necessary background to keep an ad lib show going," he says of his Sunday night job. And he enjoys his work as moderator, although he understands that "What's My Line? has got to go sometime. I'm surprised it lasted this long." (It would, in fact, last another twelve years, all with Daly at the helm.) He's really a natural at the job; "Serious and intelligent, he can rarely resist the temptation to be funny." It's what keeps him, he says, from getting ulcers.
Newsman—that's his line.
He talks with you, someone says, "as if he has nothing else on his mind but to say what he's saying, and to you." Some call this his "charm technique," but he says it's his news training. "When a newsman works on a story, he concentrates fully on it. It's the only way to get things done." And make no mistake, despite his work on WML, his news days go way back to when he was with CBS. He announced the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the death of FDR, and covered Patton in Europe. And he's a man with strong opinions on the news business, opinions that don't always align with those of his friend and former colleague at CBS, Edward R. Murrow. Whereas Murrow strongly believes that networks, like newspapers, have the responsibility to take editorial chances ("Let the networks choose their sides and fight it out."), Daly things this is impractical, for several reasons. Suppose, he says, the editorial policy of a local station differs from that of the network? Does the affiliate simply not carry the network's opinion?
And while it's fine for a news show to make "a legitimate comment on any event of public interest," it should be "a conclusion drawn on clearly defined fact." "There should be no subjective declaration of opinion," Daly insists. It's too easy for editorial opinion to drift into subjective opinion, which "could play into the hands of those who might attack the concept of a free press. If we took one stand, they might claim all our news was slanted." I can't help but wonder what he'd think of today's network and cable news divisions.
Daly's weekday schedule runs from 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. After an hour during which he "plays executive," he works on the script for the evening's news. Lunch is "a business event." At 3:30 p.m. he heads into the newsroom, where he remains until after the show. Then it's on the train and back home. All in all, he reads eight newspapers a day, plus current magazines and biographies. Sundays he spends at home with his family, heading to the studio at 6;00 p.m. for What's My Line?, which airs live at 10:30 p.m. Eastern. With all that, he still gets "eight full hours" of sleep every night. It's another way to prevent ulcers.
John Daly remains at ABC until 1960, when he resigns in protest over the network delaying its election coverage for an hour in order to show Bugs Bunny and The Rifleman. A principled man, he'll also resign as the director of the Voice of America when personnel changes are made without his approval. And to this day, every time I watch him on WML, I say to myself that he's what I want to be when I grow up.
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It was, let's see, about three weeks ago that I last mentioned the trend of movie studios getting into television. Back then, it was Warner Brothers and M-G-M, and before that the focus was on Walt Disney. This week we turn to Fox, whose offering, The 20th Century Fox Hour (Wednesday, 9:00 p.m., CBS) is perhaps the "most ambitious attempt" yet to crash the TV landscape. Unlike the other studios, the Fox Hour "isn't a collection of clips from old films, nor is it a 'showcase' for young, little-known actors." Instead, the studio has chosen to recruit top talent in adaptations of past Fox movie hits.
It's an ambitious proposal indeed, but it faces a not-insignificant challenge: how to adapt a 90-minute or two-hour movie into a 45-minute timeslot. (Especially, I'd think, if viewers have already seen the movie version, and know what you're leaving out.) So far, the results have been mixed: Merle Oberon and Michael Wilding starred in Noel Coward's Cavalcade, but as the review points out, "even the full-length movie version had trouble chronicling a British family from the Boer War [circa 1899] to the 1930s." Next, it was Laura, with George Sanders, Robert Stack, and Dana Wynter; alas, the cast tried "valiantly, but in vain, to evoke the feature film's suspenseful mood." It wasn't until the third outing, The Ox-Bow Incident, that they hit the jackpot, with an outstanding cast including Cameron Mitchell, Raymond Burr, and Robert Wagner; it was "something TV—and Hollywood—could be proud of."
You might have seen episodes from this series on YouTube or in syndication, under the title Hour of Stars. (The most frequently seen DVD episode is "The Miracle on 34th Street," starring Thomas Mitchell as Kris Kringle. Compare and contrast.) It runs for two seasons, continuing to feature big-name stars (though not every week), and by the second season it incorporates original stories as well as movie adaptations. Perhaps that's what the show should have done in the first place, when the story could be tailored to a shorter running time. As anyone familiar with old-time radio knows, it's very difficult to adapt a movie to a finite running time, and the results are not always satisfactory.
There's also a review of another new series that you might be interested in, a Western called Gunsmoke (Saturday, 9:00 p.m., CBS), starring James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon, and so far the show has produced "taut, action-packed stories." As a frame of reference, Gunsmoke, like Wyatt Earp and Cheyenne, is one of the early "adult" Westerns, in contrast to previous fare by Western heroes like Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and Gene Autry, and the storylines reflect it, both in terms of action (in these shows those who get shot often die), and in the moral dilemmas faced by the heroes. Already in this first season, Marshal Dillon "has killed a psychotic gunslinger who had wounded him in an earlier gun battle; he has saved another gunman from being lynched by an angry mob; and he has amputated the leg of a wounded rancher." It is, to be sure, a good day's work.
Arness is excellent in the role, and he's ably backed by a fine supporting cast including Dennis Weaver and Amanda Blake. From the sounds of things, this show might just have a future.
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'Tis the season and all, and if you have any doubt about what's in Santa's bag of toys this year for good little television watchers, look no further than this:
There are more than 20 television programs represented in the picture above, with tie-ins everywhere: everything from a Ramar of the Jungle chemistry set to a Dragnet squad car and game. Even The Today Show gets in the act, with a J. Fred Muggs doll. (So much for those Matt Lauer talking dolls that are gathering dust in some warehouse.) Not surprisingly, Disney is represented by several toys; some things never change. I imagine that if, the next time you're browsing in your local antique store, you run into a Honeymooners bus with Ralph Kramden behind the wheel, or a ukulele endorsed by Jimmy Durante. you'll be shelling out a little more than you would have back in 1955. And if you have one in your attic, better call Antiques Roadshow.
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As for what's on TV this week, what catches my eye?
Saturday's highlight is one of the nation's great sporting traditions, the Army-Navy game, live from Philadelphia, with Lindsey Nelson and Red Grange providing the play-by-play (12:15 p.m, NBC). The usually-mighty Army team has lost three games this season, but they rally this week, defeating #11 Navy 14-6. I notice that one of the Navy players is named Forrestal; any relation? Moving to primetime, it seems that no matter what issue it is from the 1950s, we're running into one of those Max Liebman spectaculars; this time, it's the Rodgers and Hart musical "Dearest Enemy" (8:00 p.m., NBC), with Anne Jeffreys, Robert Sterling, Cyril Ritchard, and Cornelia Otis Skinner. It's a romantic comedy set during the Revolution, but I'm skeptical—none of my enemies are dear to me.
Sunday afternoon on See It Now (4:00 p.m., CBS), the aforementioned Edward R. Murrow hosts a 90-minute documentary on "The Nation's Schools" and the challenges they face, including aging school facilities, federal aid to education, and the lack of good teachers. Let's see, that was nearly 70 years ago, and it seems like the same problems still exist. On a lighter note, Ed Sullivan's guests tonight (7:00 p.m., CBS) are Pearl Bailey, who recently completed a role in Bob Hope's film That Certain Feeling (and that's Bob at left, in an ad for RCA, plugging that very movie); comedian Dick Shawn; the Goofers, comedy vocal and instrumental group; the Princeton Triangle Club; Collier's magazine's All-America football team; and opera star Licia Albanese and her three-year old son doing a scene from Madama Butterfly. Afterwards, catch WCCO's movie The Stranger (9:30 p.m.), a sinister noir with Edward G. Robinson investigating a Nazi spy (Orson Welles).
I'm not positive, but I think Monday's presentation on Studio One (9:00 p.m., CBS) relates to a part of pop culture history that would have been assumed knowledge back in 1955. The episode is "The Man Who Caught the Ball at Coogan's Bluff," by Rod Serling, starring Alan Young and Gisele MacKenzie, and the storyline is thus: "George was a shy and unsung government worker when he entered the ball park. But after making that spectacular bleachers catch of a home-run ball, he was a national hero, and sky no longer." I haven't seen the episode and couldn't find a whole lot out about it other than what you read here, but there are a few assumptions we can make. Coogan's Bluff was the location of, and the nickname for, the Polo Grounds; the most famous home run ever hit there was probably Bobby Thomson's "The Giants win the pennant!" blast in the 1951 playoff against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Even non-baseball fans were familiar with it; if this story doesn't actually use that game as the background, the viewers would have supplied the details.
On Tuesday's Warner Brothers Presents edition of "Casablanca" (6:30 p.m., ABC), "A dealer in antiques and a professor are both interested in acquiring a priceless page from an ancient Bible. But Rick wants money to provide education for the ragged Arab shoeshine boy who gave him the valuable parchment." Does this sound like the Rick we know and love from Humphrey Bogart's portrayal? I suppose, if you're a cynic with a heart of gold. Personally, it sounds more to me like a case for Indiana Jones. Later, on The Red Skelton Show (Tuesday, 8:30 p.m., CBS), Red and guest star Peter Lorre appear in a sketch called "Phantom of the Ballet." "Skelton, as a private detective with a mail-order-school diploma, tries to track down a maniacal killer (Lorre). The murderer as a penchant for assassinating members of a ballet troupe." OK, you've got me on that one.
Wednesday is the second big sporting event of the week, the world welterweight boxing championship from Boston, with champion Carmen Basilio taking on the #1 challenger, former champ Tony DeMarco (9:00 p.m., ABC). Basilio defends his title with a 12th round knockout in what will be voted the fight of the year; you can see it all here. Thursday's highlight, if you can call it that, comes on Tonight (11:00 p.m., NBC), when a dentist comes on the show to drill Steve's teeth. There's also a modern dance interpretation by Katherine Litz; whether or not she's actually doing an interpretation of Steve's dental work is anyone's guess. And Friday gives us some good, old-fashioned murder: a bank embezzler is suspected of it in International Playhouse (8:30 p.m., KEYC), a young man plots it against his lover's husband in The Vise (8:30 p.m., ABC), and the men of The Lineup investigate it when an ad executive is found dead (9:00 p.m., CBS).
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This week's words of wisdom come from George Burns, via the As We See It editorial. Burns has a new autobiography out, I Love Her, That's Why!; it's mostly anecdotical, talking about Gracie and their friends, but near the end of the book he turns serious for a moment. He and Gracie have moved into television, and he discusses his philosophy of playing to the audience.
If we are successful, it is because we don't play down to an audience—we don't believe in that. There has been foolish talk about audiences having an average 12-year-old mind; it just isn't true. They are older than anybody, and wiser. And what is more, every individual among them is a manager, because in this day of television, he owns his own theater. The first thing an actor learns is to get along with the manager. He does well when he doesn't forget it.
Now, I don't know if that was ever really true, in television or in any other form of entertainment, but already, as we come to the end of 1955, it is becoming an issue for Merrill Panitt and the editors. "We would like to see that paragraph engraved on the forehead of every network official, advertising executive, producer, director, writer and performer who has anything to do with television," he writes. "Whatever real progress television has made has come from men who realize that the only 12-year-old thinking in America is done by 12-year-olds; that the surest way to lose an audience is to talk down to it."
As I said, this may never have been the case, but it certainly isn't the case today. In just about every way, today's maestros, people not only are being pandered to, we're practically demanding it. Whether it's the entertainment industry or the political establishment, the lowest common denominator rules; the simpler the answer, the better. We don't want to be stimulated; we don't want to face anything difficult. This isn't to suggest that there aren't intelligent forms of entertainment today, television programs that challenge not only the intellect but the conscience. They are, however, the exception rather than the rule.
The editorial concludes by suggesting that the television audience "will turn away from a program that does not respect its intelligence," but I fear that's a pipe dream nowadays. We've been dumbed down in every way, from the cradle to the grave and everything in-between, and we seem to like it just fine. In a world dominated by memes, simplistic thinking, and short attention spans, we are all 12-year-olds now. TV
Perhaps it was the fact that we shared a first name, or maybe it was the way he held his arms; Mitch Miller is to conducting what Joe Friday is to walking. Whatever the reason, and we'll probably never know just what it was, I grew up a fan of Mitch Miller. I've been told that I was quite the sight, standing in front of the TV with my legs together, arms stretched out, waving my hands in imitation of Miller's famous conducting pose. Ah, those were the days.
Mitch Miller was a singularly unlikely television star. He was a classical oboist, a studio musician, and head of recording for Columbia Records. He worked with, and later feuded with, Sinatra. He certainly had an eye for talent: his discoveries included Tony Bennett, Patti Page, Rosemary Clooney and Johnny Mathis. He had a knack for marketing: in 1954, the producers of Studio One approached Miller in search of a song for a drama they were doing about payola in the music industry. (He was a natural to ask, given Columbia was owned by CBS); he gave them a ballad called "Let Me Go, Devil," and urged them to use an unknown singer (Joan Weber) rather than an established star. The show was telecast (with the song now titled "Let Me Go, Lover"); Miller shrewdly saw to it that store shelves were well-stocked with recordings of the song. It was a smash, and sold 500,000 copies in five days.
He made a few records himself, and had a big choral hit with "The Yellow Rose of Texas." Yes, Mitch Miller was doing pretty well. But there was one thing Mitch Miller didn't like: rock music. It wasn't his kind of music, the music that had been so successful for him for so long; he called it "musical baby food: it is the worship of mediocrity, brought about by a passion for conformity." So he decided to fight back, with what was called the "Sing-along" album, recordings of old favorites with the lyrics printed on the cover so listeners could sing along with Mitch and the gang.
And when Sing Along With Mitch debuted on television in 1961, Mitch Miller became a star.
Sing Along With Mitch was an instant, and surprise, hit, reaching #15 in its first season. It slaughtered The Untouchables (perhaps the most violent program on television at the time). It spawned the successful singing career of Leslie Uggams. It introduced us to Bob McGrath, of Sesame Street fame, who was a longtime singalongers. Not bad.
The show stayed on the air for three seasons, was seen in reruns through 1966. The Christmas specials were always a highlight. The records sold well. Eventually, of course, the British invasion and the rock movement proved too much. But Mitch Miller never really faded away entirely. He was a pretty good, not great, player on Password. He was a frequent guest conductor for the Boston Pops. A lot of people credit Miller with being the progenitor of karaoke. OK, we'll give him a pass on that one.
Today I suppose it's hard to imagine a show like that being a hit, but then back in the day, almost anything was possible on television. It's—well, it's unfortunate that TV, with its astounding technological advances, is in many ways far less advanced than it was when it depended on the incredible creativity of its pioneers. But, as with so many other things, that's a story for another day.
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This Saturday is a red-letter day in Minnesota: the first home game of the new Minnesota Twins, who used to be the old Washington Senators, back when we had sports—remember those days? The pre-game show begins at 1:00 p.m. on WTCN, and at 1:25 the Twins take the field against the new Washington Senators from Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota, a suburb located roughly midway between the rival cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul; the team plays there for its first 21 seasons before moving to the Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis. The Met was as good a place as any to watch a ballgame, a stadium that lacked what we’d call the finer amenities, but there were few bad seats in the place.
Unfortunately, the one thing it lacked was a roof, and when the politicos in Minnesota decided that an indoor, climate-controlled stadium was essential to retain the Twins and Minnesota Vikings, the stadium’s days were numbered. The Metrodome, too, has since bit the dust, being replaced by a new—outdoor—stadium in 2010. Meanwhile, the site of the old Met is now the Mall of America, which shares one thing in common with today’s Twins: right now, neither of them is open. Oh, and by the way, the Twins lost that first home game to the Senators, 5-2. A perennial loser when in Washington (“First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League”), by 1965 they’d be in the World Series.
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Affiliate switch! It’s not as big as the one in 1979, but “Operation Big Switch” prepares the Twin Cities for the swap, effective April 16, with ABC moving from WTCN, Channel 11, to KMSP, Channel 9; Channel 11 will take Channel 9’s place as the area’s independent station. And the first fruits of that change. . .
. . . None other than Hollywood's own red-letter day, the 33rd Academy Awards (Monday, 9:30 p.m., ABC), live from Santa Monica, California. The show’s hosted for the ninth time by Bob Hope, with a star-studded cast of nominees, presenters, singers and dancers filling out the two-hour program, which preempts Peter Gunn. The big winners? Burt Lancaster as Best Actor, Elizabeth Taylor as Best Actress, and The Apartment as Best Picture. I suspect you can catch them all on TCM. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I always enjoyed having the Oscars on Monday night; like Monday Night Football, it gave you something to look forward to on the toughest day of the week. Moving it to Sunday night has, I think, taken some of the glamour away. As for the argument that Sunday allows for an earlier start (and therefore an earlier end), I have a better idea: make the show shorter. You know their attitude towards us viewers, though: let 'em eat cake.
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Sunday's highlights are mostly for night owls At 10:00 p.m. on WTCN, it's the debut of The Oscar Levant Show, with guests Carl Reiner and Jayne Mansfield. For those of you who aren't familiar with him, Oscar Levant was a fascinating bundle of contradictions: he was a prodigy at the piano, studied with Arnold Schoenberg (had he more self-confidence, he could have had a career as a concert pianist; as it was, he was still very good), was a friend of George Gershwin, served as Al Jolson's sidekick on the radio version of Kraft Music Hall, and acted in all kinds of musicals, including The Band Wagon, An American in Paris and The Barclays of Broadway, providing an acidic wit to leaven their hoakiness. It was that caustic, sarcastic humor that he came to be best known for—well, that and his mental health. Oscar was hospitalized several times because of it, and he was quite open and upfront about it; in fact, an episode of The Jack Benny Program features Jack going to Oscar's psychiatrist for troubles with his nerves. Levant often discussed his problems on talk shows like Jack Paar's, where he was a favorite. Oscar Levant was not, I think, a happy man; the fact that he found humor in his problems doesn't disguise the fact that he had them.
If you're still awake after Levant, you might want to stick around for Eichmann on Trial (Midnight, ABC), which replaces the news program Roundup USA for the duration of Adolf Eichmann's war crimes trial. It's a digest of the week's developments at the trial, which began on April 11 and will run through August; Eichmann will be found guilty in a verdict released in December, and is executed on June 1, 1962. Eichmann was one of the most evil of the Nazis, a prime architect of the "Final Solution" agreed upon at the 1942 Wannsee Conference. His trial is big, big news worldwide.
You're going to want to save your energy on Monday for the Oscars, but if you can, watch the prime time premiere of the daytime game show Concentration (8:30 p.m., NBC), hosted by Hugh Downs. Not only does it give working stiffs like us a chance to see the fun, there's a bonus: unlike the daytime version, it's in color! Tuesday night presents the premiere of Walter Matthau's only television series, the police drama Tallahassee 7000 (9:30 p.m., KMSP). As shows go, there's nothing special about it; according to the always-reliable Wikipedia, Matthau did the series "only for the minor inconvenience of making a living," and the bio Matthau: A Life by Rob Edelman and Audrey E. Kupferberg call it "another Matthau career nadir." If you want a Florida-based show, you're probably better off sticking with Surfside 6. Meanwhile, if you've only seen Frank Sutton on Gomer Pyle, you're going to want to check out Wednesday's episode of Naked City (9:00 p.m., ABC), where Sutton and Robert Blake (no surprise) play a couple of psychopathic killers on the loose.
Do you remember how the networks used to do specials when the Ringling Brothers Circus or the Ice Capades would open their seasons? They'd be hosted by someone like Ed Ames, who'd sing a couple of songs and introduce a few acts that would duly impress viewers, and everyone would have a good time. We have one of those on Thursday, as Arthur Godfrey travels to Greensboro for highlights of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus (7:00 p.m., CBS). Makes sense, since Godfrey often appears at western shows of one kind or another, doing some dance steps with his horse, Goldie; I saw him at the Minnesota State Fair one year, performing at such a show. He was a crowd pleaser, even when he wasn't appearing on a twin bill with Julius LaRosa. Later one, Pat Boone has his own springtime special (7:30 p.m., ABC), with Dorothy Provine, Fabian, Johnny Mercer, Joanie Sommers, and the Kingston Trio. Saving the best for last, at 9:30 p.m. on ABC, it's another of Ernie Kovacs' monthly specials. The night's heavy on music, with "interpretations" of Tchaikovsky, Bartok and Weill.
The most intriguing program of the week may well be Friday’s Jackie Gleason special entitled "The Million Dollar Incident” (7:30 p.m., CBS). It is presented to us as a “true” story and is set seven years ago, with Gleason, as himself, bursting into Toots Shor’s and, after a shot of whiskey for the nerves, telling his friend Ed Sullivan (also playing himself) what’s just happened to him. From there we learn that Gleason had been kidnapped by a trio of crooks who planned to hold him for ransom—one million dollars, to be precise, payable by CBS. The crooks are played by Everett Sloane, Jack Klugman and Peter Falk; Gleason himself came up with the story, which was written by A.J. Russell, Sydney Zelinka and Walter Stone, and was directed by Norman Jewison. You can see it at the Paley Center in New York, and it would be a great one (for the Great One) if it was made available for home viewing.
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Richard Gehman has an article on John Charles Daly, one of my favorite television personalities of all time, a man now making news rather than reporting it. We know about his remarkable news career, which I wrote about here; Gehman says that over the years Daly became known as a man "who could cover anything from a Presidential tour to the birth of a penguin." His desire to learn as much as he could about a subject, and to find the facts for himself, had made him one of the most learned men in the news business. Not long ago, according to Gehman, a friend had asked Daly about the situation in Laos. He replied with "a 10-minute exposition, peopling it with the principal characters in the struggle for power, giving their backgrounds and forecasting the events of the next few months."
But, as the headline says, Daly's now making the news himself. Last year he left his position as news chief at ABC after a dispute about the network's election-night coverage. Sure, there had been disagreements in the last four or five years, but things came to a head on November 8. "When the executives cut into my news coverage to put on two shows, Bugs Bunny and The Rifleman, I felt it was going too far." It's freed him to work full time as emcee of What's My Line? on CBS, a job he's held since 1950. (Even though he was a VP at ABC, the network allowed him to do WML on CBS, a network he had worked for until 1949.) For Daly, hosting the quiz show is "little more than a chore." He arrives at the studio at 10:10 p.m., talks a little with the night's guests, gets some powder on his face for the live broadcast beginning at 10:30 p.m, and leaves the studio at 11:05, five minutes after WML goes off the air.
A half-hour a week hardly enough time to keep a man like Daly busy, so everyone wonders what he's headed for next. Will he go into government? Will he go into newspaper publishing? Daly himself says only that "I've had no vacation for four years. I'm getting some rest now. [And also spending time with his bride, Virginia, whom he married last year.] I don't know how long I"ll rest. But when, one morning, I wake up itchy, I'll know it's time to go back to work." John Daly hosts What's My Line? until its network run ends in 1967. He then spends a year as head of the Voice of America, and works for several years for the American Enterprise Institute. Through it all he remains urbane, avuncular, good-humored; as I've said many times, he's what I want to be when I grow up.
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Do you remember Mark Wilson? I probably haven't thought of him in years, but whenever I see his name in TV Guide, or run across an article like the one in this week's issue, he reappears in my memory as if out of nowhere. Which is appropriate, since Mark Wilson is one of the best-known magicians in the country. For the last three years he's hosted the Saturday morning ABC show called The Magic Land of Allakazam. The article focuses on his work with the animals in his act (Basil the Baffling Bunny, Gertrude the Glamorous Guinea Pig, Charles the Charming Chicken, and more), but if you want to know how he gets them to levitate in his act, don't count on him telling you. "With all the animals sailing into space these days," he says, "we can brag that we do not use a space capsule, and we promise to bring 'em back alive."
Unlike many of the shows I write about, I can't really tell you much about Allakazam, other than that "Allakazam" (not "Presto!") is the magic word. No, my memory of the show comes from finding a "paintless paint book" in an old cedar chest in our basement about 25 years ago. There were all kinds of things in that chest: old cartoon-character soaky toys, scrapbooks, comics and coloring books. We kept the soaky toys and got rid of most everything else in one of the many downsizings we've gone through over the years; part of me is sorry for having gotten rid of it all, but on the other hand it's pretty embarrassing when things like that keep you from fitting into the condo you want to buy, so it's a question of values. We'll always have the memories though, even if we don't have Paris, and the memory I have is of seeing Mark Wilson on the cover of this paint book, where if you dampened the page, the color magically! appears. Even before I found the picture on the right, I could tell you what it looked like: yellow cover, Mark Wilson pulling a rabbit out of the hat, and the word "Allakazam" across the front.
So whenever I see Allakazam, I don't remember the show, although I know I watched it; I remember the paint book. It's a pleasant memory, seeing something that you'd forgotten about for so long, I suppose this whole website has been about memories, come to think of it. But then, where would we be without them? I think someone answered that once, but I can't remember what it was. TV
When we think about the chroniclers of the passing scene, the witnesses to the cultural history of our times, how many of us think of John Charles Daly? And yet, once you think about it, he seems so obvious, I wonder why it took me this long to figure it out.
Most people probably think of John Daly as the urbane host of CBS's What's My Line? from 1950 to 1967, a job at which he excelled. But if you'd been around back then, you likely would have been familiar with a different side of John Daly: that of a newsman, first for CBS Radio, and then at ABC television. And as it happens, Daly reported on some of the biggest news stories of the era.
He became known to audiences as CBS's White House correspondent, where he announced many of President Roosevelt's speeches. Later, he moved to New York to become the anchor for CBS's long-running news program The World Today, and that's where Daly was on December 7, 1941 when he was first on the air with the bulletin that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.
During the war, Daly was a correspondent on the front lines in the European and North African theaters. In 1942, he was "one of the first to report. . .of the growing concerts regarding the Nazi treatment of the Jews" based on reports coming from unoccupied France. He was covering the American advances through Italy in 1943 when General George Patton slapped two soldiers he accused of malingering (they were suffering from "shell shock") and was one of the reporters who brought the story to the attention of General Eisenhower. (Daly agreed to sit on the story at Eisenhower's request; "I need this man. I can't win the war without Patton.") Back home, it was Daly who broke another story on CBS: the death of President Roosevelt in Warm Springs, Georgia on April 12, 1945.
After the war, Daly hosted You Are There, the program that dramatized historic events as if they'd been covered on the radio. By 1952, Daly had moved to ABC, where he'd become vice president of news and public affairs, winning three Peabody awards, and he was anchor of ABC's evening news from 1953 to 1960. At Daly's suggestion, the network carried live coverage of Senator Joseph McCarthy's hearings on communist infiltration of the Army; neither CBS nor NBC were doing so, and it was cheap programming for a network that was a distant third in the ratings. Daly's "worldly charm" was so apparent, NBC responded by replacing longtime anchor John Cameron Swayze with a team of anchors, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. In 1959, when Vice President Richard Nixon engaged Nikita Khrushchev in the famous "Kitchen Debate," guess who was there to cover it? John Daly. He wasn't one of the panelists of the Kennedy-Nixon debates, which might have been one of the few things he didn't do, but he represented ABC in the negotiations with the other two networks and the campaigns.
In his 17+ years on What's My Line?, Daly was witness to people from every segment of society: politics, entertainment, sports, and art. Joe Louis was one of the Mystery Guests, as was Colonel Sanders. Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Bishop Fulton Sheen, Herman Wouk, Ronald Reagan*, Victor Borge, Lucille Ball, Walt Disney, Frank Gifford, Sean Connery, Gypsy Rose Lee, Edward R. Murrow, Carl Sandburg, Billy Graham, Steve Allen, Ernie Kovacs, Jacques Cousteau, Chuck Yeager, Pearl Buck, Eleanor Roosevelt; all sat next to Daly as the blindfolded panel tried to guess who they were. Blonde bombshells, Supreme Court justices, political party chairmen, football heroes, various Congressmen and governors, television stars: they were all on What's My Line?, either as Mystery Guest or guest panelist or both. And Daly saw them all.
*Ronald Reagan wasn't the only future president to appear as Mystery Guest; on the syndicated version, which Daly didn't host, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter stumps the panel.
In addition to the celebrities, there were the ordinary people who made up the bulk of What's My Line?'s guests, and from that chair as moderator, Daly could see how the American workforce was changing, how jobs that were done by people in 1950 were becoming mechanized by 1967, and how women were increasingly present in jobs that had formerly been done exclusively by men. People working in the aerospace industry were now side-by-side with those twisting pretzels by hand; it had to be a profound demonstration of the new American economy, presaging perhaps the economy of today.
Daly's life at the center of things doesn't end here, though. After What's My Line? ended, Daly served as head of the Voice of America through 1968. His second wife, Virginia, was the daughter of Chief Justice Earl Warren, and it was Daly who served as an intermediary between Warren and the Nixon administration in negotiating the date of Warren's resignation from the Supreme Court. He was a member of the Peabody Awards Board of Jurors, and throughout the 1980s he hosted forums for the American Enterprise Institute; indeed, a 1982 forum he moderated was on the topic "Terrorism: What Should Be Our Response?"
What, then, do we have? As a newsman, John Daly covered the New Deal, Pearl Harbor, World War II, political conventions, and the Cold War. As host of What's My Line?, Daly saw most of the cultural icons and political leaders of the 1950s and 1960s, not to mention the changing work habits of Americans from the post-war boom to the space age. During these times, he was, in the words of authors Jeff Allen and James M. Lane, "one of the most well known and highly regarded people in the country." For over 50 years, he observed the evolution of trends in politics, entertainment, sports, and American culture itself. By any definition, it is a remarkable career. Does anyone else compare? The only name that comes to mind is Edward R. Murrow, whose impact was formidable, but I'm not sure even Murrow's experience equals the length and breadth of Daly's.
John Charles Daly died in 1991. He never wrote his autobiography, which is a shame, because it would have been one of the most fascinating cultural histories of the 20th century, by one of the most fascinating men of the century: a man who was an eyewitness to history. TV
