Ernie Banks, the great Hall-of-Famer for the Chicago Cubs, was fond of saying, on a beautiful day, "Let's play two!" It's doubtful that he had the All-Star Game in mind when he said that, and yet here we are in 1962, getting ready this week for the first of two baseball All-Star Games, this one to be played Tuesday afternoon at 12:45 p.m. ET on NBC, with Mel Allen and Joe Garagiola providing the play-by-play from the brand-new District of Columbia Stadium in, where else, Washington, D.C. (The second game is scheduled for July 30 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.)
Now, you may be wondering why they're playing two All-Star Games this year, and it's a very good question. The birth of the second game came in 1959, to increase contributions to the players' pension fund, which had just started in 1947 and only paid modest amounts to retired players. However, even players who stood to gain from the increased fund were less than thrilled with the idea; future Hall of Famer Early Wynn spoke for many of them when he said that playing two games would make the game less important, less special. (Remember this argument, because you're going to see it come back in a couple of paragraphs.) League officials hated the idea of trying to fit two all-star breaks into what was already a long schedule, which had increased from 154 to 162 games per team the previous season.
But in the days when there was no interleague play, when most teams only televised a fraction of their games back to local fans, and when there were only a couple of nationally-televised games each week, the prospect of a second game, giving fans an additional chance to see the best players from both leagues,
seemed like a good idea—
at first. It didn't take long for problems to begin, though: in 1959, the second game was played in Los Angeles on a Monday, the day after every team in the league played a full slate of Sunday games (many of them doubleheaders). Players were exhausted by the time they arrived in Los Angeles, and attendance was "only" 55,000—pretty good until you realize the Coliseum, where the game was played, could hold over 90,000. In 1960, the games were played two days apart, one in Kansas City and the other in New York, where fewer than 40,000 fans attended in Yankee Stadium. The 1962 season would be the last in which two games were played; for 1963, the traditional single game would have to do.
But is baseball's All-Star Game—the "Midsummer Classic," as they call it—still special? Remember what Early Wynn said about diluting the importance of the game; well, today we have interleague play regularly; teams routinely televise all their games, either OTA, on cable, or streaming; and games are nationally televised on ESPN, TBS, Fox, and even Roku. The starters only play a few innings, and some of them have already jetted off before the game ends. The goal seems to be not to win, but to make sure everyone gets a chance to participate. For a few years, the league that won the game was rewarded with home-field advantage, but even that failed to really spice things up. One could be forgiven for thinking that the very concept of an all-star game of any kind, in any sport, is passe. Even when I watched baseball, and it's been about eight years since I've seen a game even on television, it had been years since I'd tuned in the All-Star Game, and I'm certainly not inclined to do it again.
But then, the game still sells out and draws a sizeable TV audience; nowhere near what it used to be, of course, but one could say that about everything on television save the NFL. It's one of those things where you can't turn back the clock; you just have to live with it—or not.
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The reason I spent so much time on the All-Star Game is that we're now officially in the dog days of summer, and most of what we've got on tap consists of reruns, summer replacements, and failed pilots. In fact, there's an entire section of TV Guide devoted just to reruns, in the same way there are sections for movies, sports, and specials—two whole pages, in fact. But, as I was mentioning to someone the other day, this is the way television used to be back in the pre-VCR, pre-DVD, pre-on-demand days: the summer rerun season was the time for viewers to catch up on the shows they might have missed when they were first shown, whether due to being out or watching someting else on at the same time. Doesn't matter now, of course, but it was very helpful back then to have a list of repeats you could check out.
One show that
isn't a rerun is
The Lawrence Welk Show, and
Saturday marks the Maestro's eighth year on television (9:00 p.m., ABC). Among the selections: "Say it with Music," the opening number from the opening show. Something you
wouldn't have heard on that opening show is the biggest hit that Lawrence ever had: "Calcutta," which made it to Number One on the charts back in 1960. Here's
Bobby and Barbara doing their famous dance routine.
On
Sunday, it's the final—and one of the greatest—episodes of
Maverick (6:30 p.m., ABC), "Three Queens Full," a wild parody of a certain hit show seen Sundays on "another network," that finds Bart (Jack Kelly) chaperoning three women coming from San Francisco to marry the "three idiot sons" of rancher Joe Wheelwright: Moose (
Hoss), Henry (
Adam), and Small Paul (
Little Joe). Jim Backus is Lorne Greene—that is, Ben Cartwright—I mean, Joe Wheelwright; while the ladies in question are Merry Anders, Kasey Rogers, and Allyson Ames. A line at the end of the description notes that "Any resemblance to another TV series called "Bonanza" is purely intentional."
Speaking of reruns, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour dips deep into the past with the 1957 episode "Lucy Takes a Cruise to Havana" (Monday, 9:00 p.m., CBS), in which Lucy tells columnist Hedda Hopper the story of how she and Ricky got together. Ann Sothern and Cesar Romero guest star, and Rudy Vallee plays himself. Of course, this episode originally aired a couple of years before Castro's takeover, and our rerun comes just three months before the Cuban Missile Crisis; timing, as they say, is everything. I wonder how many examples there are of shows like this—non-period pieces—in which a country was free when the episode originally aired, and Communist when it was reshown later. I'm sure there must be several, especially in the case of Cuba, but with tensions in the region about to get even higher, I wonder how viewers appreciated a comedy about Cuba?
A star-studded repeat on
The Dick Powell Show lightens up
Tuesday night (9:00 p.m., ABC); Powell and his wife, June Allyson lead the way in "
The Time to Die," the story of a crime boss on the verge of death, who's given a second chance at life—but only if he can find someone, from a specially drawn-up list, to die in his place. The script is by Aaron Spelling, and it bears all the trademarks of Spelling's later series
Burke's Law (produced by Powell's Four Star Productions), with appearances by Tuesday Weld, Andy Williams, John Saxon, Ernest Truex, Edgar Bergen, and Ricky and Pamela Powell, who just happen to be Powell and Allyson's son and daughter. That's followed by the anthology
Alcoa Premiere (10:00 p.m., ABC), in which host Fred Astaire stars with Maureen O'Sullivan and Harry Townes in "Moment of Decision," with Astaire as an escape artist with a very disagreeable neighbor.
The aforementioned Tuesday Weld also stars in a very good Naked City rerun on Wednesday (10:00 p.m, ABC). She and Rip Torn play a thrill-seeking hillbilly couple who embark on a crime spree, beginning by shooting detective Arcaro (Harry Bellaver). We'll complete our Tuesday trifecta a bit later, with a profile of the young star and her growing career: is she turning into a real actress? Stay tuned.
Syndicated repeats of
Peter Gunn begin
Thursday on Boston's WHDH with "The Candidate" (7:30 p.m.), in which Gunn is hired to find out who's trying to assassinate gubernatorial candidate Adrian Grimmett, running on a no-taxes platform. I suppose we could start with accountants, tax preparers, and IRS agents to begin with; think about how many of them would be out of work! Later, on Dick Powell's
Zane Grey Theater (9:30 p.m., CBS), Edward G. Robinson makes a rare television appearance, along with his son, Edward G. Robinson Jr., in the story of a family divided by the Civil War. And the Tiffany Network's morning show
Calendar presents a special primetime episode (10:00 p.m.), as hosts Harry Reasoner and Mary Fickett (above) look at the daytime life of the American homemaker, with guests Vivian Vance, Bob Keeshan, and Bob and Ray.
On Friday, Jimmy Dean wraps up a week as guest host of The Tonight Show during the interim period between Jack Paar's departure on March 30 and the arrival of Johnny Carson on October 1 (11:15 p.m., NBC). The list of hosts who filled in until Carson's arrival is pretty interesting, filled with names you'd expect (Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin, Jerry Lewis) and those who might be more surprising (Jack Carter, Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy, Mort Sahl). Groucho Marx did a week, as did comedian Jack E. Leonard, while Merv and Art Linkletter each did four weeks, and Hugh Downs (Jack's sidekick) hosted for three weeks. Last week Jerry was up, and next week it's Arlene Francis's turn, making her the first female host of Tonight.
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The third annual TV Guide Awards were broadcast on June 24 on NBC, wth host Dave Garroway presenting a passel of presents to deserving programs and performers, including Bob Hope, who won an award for performing for the first time in his 40 years in the business, for "Best Single Musical or Variety Program." Hope, never at a loss for words, said of the award, "I got to rush this over to my stock broker." Favorite Male and Female Performers went to Vince Edwards and Carol Burnett, Favorite Series was taken by Bonanza, and Favorite New Series went to Ben Casey. The broadcast got generally positive reviews, and for those who left empty-handed, Garroway had these words of encouragement: "Virtue is its own reward."
On the Teletype, ABC's new Saturday night series,
McHale's Men, is taking shape, and it's noted that there was uncertainty as to whether the show would be "heavy drama or comedy." This uncertainty dates back to the origin of the series as an episode of
Alcoa Premiere entitled "Seven Against the Sea." The story, taking place in the Pacific theater during World War II, starred Ernest Borgnine as Lieutenant Commander Quinton McHale, captain of the torpedo boat PT-73. He and his men were stranded at Taratupa base, which had been substantially destroyed by a Japanese attack. Left on their own, as Japanese patrols prevented any rescue attempt, McHale and his men had drifted into a comfortable, laissez-faire lifestyle with the island's natives. Despite these similarities, though, "Seven Against the Sea" was a drama with comedic overtones, and symbolized by a conflict between McHale and his executive officer, Lieutenant Durham, a by-the-book Annapolis man.
When the movie was spun off into a series of its own, it was, therefore, understandable that the show could go either way, as a comedy or a drama. Borgnine would later remember that the original intent had been to use the show as a vehicle for Ron Foster, who played Durham; when that didn't work out, Borgnine became the lead, and the tone of the show was shifted to comedy. If there was any doubt, the Teletype announces that the first two supporting roles have been cast: comedian Tim Conway, and comic magician Carl Ballantine. And the series itself would come to be titled McHale's Navy.
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Gil Seldes, TV Guide's critic, takes a look this week at Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, which, as he says, is really "the wonderful world of Walt Disney," notwithstanding the efforts of RCA and Eastman Kodak in pointing out to us all the wonderful benefits of the world being seen in color.
Seldes's relationship with Disney goes way back; "I was," he points out, "born early enough to have seen 'Steamboat Willie,'" the first appearance of Mickey Mouse. He's been a Mickey and Donald fan ever since, and despite Disney's efforts in live-action presentations, they remain the core of the Disney appeal. On the other hand, "I think Disney's early efforts to 'humanize' animals were (and still are) a mistake." He cites an often-fascinating film on the peregrine hawk as an example of Disney at both his best and his worst; the part of the film in which we're shown how the hawk is trained "can entrance the person who doesn't know but is excited by the unknown." He then plunges us into "a wallow of pity for pigeons that get killed and boys who are crippled, and—I think this is what makes me sore—at the end I'm on his side." Let them live their lives and let us live our lives." Everyone knows what it's like to laugh at a joke and, a moment later, feel it was "pretty sour." "I like Disney," he concludes, "even when I don't like him much."
Lest you get the wrong impression, though, he adds this: "Walt Disney is one of the very few people who has added to the enjoyment of life of virtually everyone now alive. The only single human being I know who has done more in the entertainment profession is Charles Chaplin." He doesn't know if Disney would take that as a compliment or not; I think he would. But, in it's most literal sense, "the world of Walt Disney is a part of the world we cannot live without."
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And now for that profile of Tuesday Weld that I've been promising. I've never lived in a world in which Tuesday Weld wasn't already well-known as being, if not a great actress, a star. She was once married to Pinchas Zuckerman, and if you're an aficionado of classical music, you'll know that pretty much qualifies you as being cool.* But in 1962 Tuesday Weld is in the process of transforming from a starlet to a name; it is, I think, that point in one's career where things could go either way. For Tuesday, it went in a good way, even though you can look at her career and think it could have amounted to more.
*She was also married to Dudley Moore, making her coolness quotient even higher.
Three years ago, when she was a mere 15-year-old, Danny Kaye described her as "15, going on 27." She once showed up for a TV interview "barefoot, hair unkempt, cigaret lodged in the corner of her mouth, and wearing what appeared to be a nightgown." (Nowadays, someone probably would have told her that she didn't have to dress up, and would have meant that as a compliment.) She'd been called "the Baby Beatnik," "the new Kim Novak," "the sexiest teenager since Liz Taylor," and "a disgrace to Hollywood." For her own part, she remarked that "If teen-agers are gullible enough to use me as a model, that's their problem." During a recent return to the show in which she was once a regular,
Dobie Gillis (Warren Beatty was another alumnus of the show), Max Shulman said, "This was an elegant Tuesday we'd never seen before—a real professional, hair up, wearing a smart business suit. And she knew her lines! In the old days she never used to know line one." She's turned in strong performances in recent shows:
The Dick Powell Show and
Naked City (both of which we read about earlier),
Adventures in Paradise, and the pilot for
Bus Stop, which some speculate could be the turning point in her career.
"I've had no turning point," she tells our unidentified interviewer. "All of life is a turning point. But I do feel more confident now." She sees herself as, variously, a mature actress, a child-woman, a spoiled little girl, and, "sometimes—I see nothing at all." She was born Susan Ker Weld (her parents had expected a boy and didn't have any girl names ready), but had always been called Tuesday because, her mother says, "she looked like a Tuesday." (Besides, Tuesday adds, "Thursday is a boy's name." From the Norse god Thor, you know.) A couple of years ago, she had her name legally changed, and so Tuesday it is.
She remains a polarizing figure; one director said that working with her was like trying to get an elephant to move, while others doubt her ability to transform from a star to a true actress. On the other hand, many of her co-stars have nothing but good things to say about her, and director Ted Post says, "There's always been a deep, serious vein in this girl—it's coming out now." Those in the know say her steady relationship with actor Gary Lockwood has been a "steadying influence." And Rod Amateau, the producer-director of Dobie Gillis, says, "Nothing is going to stop this girl short of a cataclysm—and I mean nothing."
Finally, there's no MST3K this week, but it's not for lack of trying. For example, on Saturday night's late movie on WJAR in Providence, we've got 1959's Cosmic Monsters, starring Forrest Tucker and Gaby Andre: "The world is threatened with destruction when a mad scientist sets loose huge insects." On Tuesday, it's WMTW in Poland Spring and Prehistoric Women, from 1950, with Laurette Luez, Alan Mixon, and Mara Lynn: "A group of cave women go in search of husbands. On the way, they encounter dinosaurs and other monsters." And on Friday, there's The Ghost of Frankenstein on WNAC in Boston, with Lon Chaney Jr., Sir Cedric Hardwicke, and Ralph Bellamy: "A man plans to replace the criminal brain in a mobster's head with the brain of an educated man." What, I ask you, could possibly go wrong? TV
