by Bob Spitz
Alfred Roberts, John’s father, was left somewhat unprepared for the task of raising three sons, and he attempted it with diffidence. He was forty-six when Elizabeth died and never felt comfortable around Keith and John. “You’re going to wind up a bum,” he’d constantly berate John, who regarded school as primarily another social event.
In 1961, John preserved the Roberts family’s Ivy League tradition without fanfare, and enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. His going to college was merely intended as “doing the right thing” and, thus, he exhausted four years away from home, “having a great time and sliding by.” Anyone evaluating his years at college would have summed them up in two words—fraternity and friends.
While an undergraduate at Penn, Roberts befriended a senior predental student named Douglas Rosenman, whose academic bravura complemented Roberts’s open contempt for discipline. It wasn’t long, however, before John came to realize that beneath the academically polished, all-American exterior, his new friend was tortured by a streak of insecurity. He was obsessed with the versatility of an older brother named Joel who seemed to have the aggravating habit of excelling in everything he attempted—and, to hear Douglas tell it, Joel had attempted everything at least once. It was not spite that Douglas nurtured, but jealousy, born together with love and admiration, the most painful kind of all.
Roberts soon tired of hearing about Joel’s exploits and was determined that if he ever got hold of this living legend, he’d seek revenge for the number he had done on his friend Douglas.
All things considered, facing graduation, John Roberts was already a man of means in search of ways. He had inherited a cache of four hundred thousand dollars on his twenty-first birthday, and he was entitled to three separate payments of one million dollars on his twenty-fifth, thirtieth, and thirty-fifth birthdays. Accordingly, money, in the ordinary sense, was not a concern. However, he didn’t care merely to live off his inheritance. But the question of what to do with his future remained. Oh, he was a talented horseman, could shoot eighteen holes in the low seventies on a good day, read about as many books as any member of his family, had an easy time acquiring and holding friends and, if one were to base an estimation of his coeducational finesse on the number of dates he had, an expert with women. But, while most of his friends (and women) devoted their full time to preparing for responsible careers, John Roberts was tensely biding his time. In the end, he was just another college kid burdened by millions of dollars.
2
The summer of 1966, what Newsweek billed as “the longest, hottest summer . . . the roughest in years,” was the watershed for rebellion against the status quo. From then on, America’s youth emerged as a group to be reckoned with. Suddenly, complaisance was designated as a treasonable offense by the young vocal masses: you were either for the draft or you evaded it; you supported the black power movement or you were a racist; you advocated the legalization of marijuana or you were a redneck. You took a stand and defended it. Everything had the potential for erupting into a passionately fought cause, and “right on!” provided the perfect wash. Within weeks, the lines were drawn across all traditions. It was child against parent, youth against the Establishment. No one knew what to expect.
By early June, for example, just before the University of Pennsylvania staged its graduation exercises at the wonderfully prehistoric Civic Center, the United States publicly admitted that it had conducted the first tactical bombing missions over Hanoi. Responding to Senator Fulbright’s charge that the country was “succumbing to the arrogance of power,” President Lyndon Johnson countered by advocating that “we must continue to raise the price of aggression at it’s source.” Students, who saw that price as being fixed relatively high in Washington, answered him by raising a phalanx of middle fingers. They saw themselves as apostles destined to change the course of history. And they were fired with determination.
Roberts watched this awakening skeptically, but he was a worried skeptic. He was cautiously amused by the movement’s electricity but wondered where and how he would fit into it. He walked through commencement exercises shell-shocked, as one who had been abandoned in a crowd of strangers. Wherever he looked, his fellow Penn classmates filed past him, swelling with the pride of decision—an emotion he sorely lacked.
To others, John acted confidently. It was time, long past time, in fact, to make a few decisions about his future. He acknowledged to himself that if he made a clean break from the past, he’d be well on his way to standing on his own. At age twenty-one, it was something less than a prophetic revelation.
• • •
Graduation left John Roberts a displaced person on uncharted seas. He had no ambition, not even a glimmering of a concrete objective he could genuinely pursue. That was his singular punishment for inherited wealth. And he’d overcome it, he was convinced of that. His family harbored the hope that he might elect law as being as likely an alternative as any, but John put an immediate end to that; law placed too much emphasis on personal discipline.
Instead, he applied to the Annenberg School of Communications in Philadelphia on a part-time basis to study writing and literary criticism. He would have preferred entering Annenberg as a full-time student, but to escape being drafted and shipped to Vietnam, he had joined an army reserve unit at Fort Monmouth and had no idea when he would be called up to fulfill basic training. To keep him busy the other three days of the week, he accepted a position at a Wall Street brokerage firm as a research assistant.
Roberts tried to be a conventional businessman. He dabbled in the stock market, but his trading of securities was purely amateur (“speculative” being a term reserved for professionals who take educated risks) and took on a frightening, albeit recurring, characteristic: John handed Wall Street his money, and they handed him even less in return. Still, there didn’t seem to be anything else looming in the future with which to occupy his time.
One afternoon John picked up the phone and was surprised to find an old friend on the other end of the line. Douglas Rosenman invited John to spend the weekend at the Rosenman family home in Long Island. “We could play a little golf, take in a few movies—you know, just take it easy, like old times. My brother, Joel, is out here. He’s taking his bar exam, but will be finished in time to play golf with us. He’s dying to meet you.”
The name caught John completely off guard.
He was tempted to tell Douglas to make it another weekend; however, his curiosity got the better of him.
“You’ve got a deal, Douglas. Let me finish up here, and I’ll see you Friday evening.”
Joel joined them at a nearby golf course on Saturday morning. Much to his surprise, it was a thoroughly enjoyable interlude for Roberts. His apprehension was abated somewhat when he discovered that Douglas had come to terms with their previous rivalry. John, in fact, found himself enchanted by Joel. On the basis of previous descriptions of the older brother, he had expected an egotistical snob who would swagger across the course with them while playing his own unblemished game of par golf. Instead, he was charmed by Joel’s friendliness and good-natured self-mockery; a young man of ordinary appearance and modest self-respect.
Joel Rosenman was of average height with active moonbutton eyes that seemed to balloon with excitement; Joel’s aquiline face resembled a Shakespearean actor’s chisled, expressive features: cheekbones set high above gaunt cheeks, a jaw jutting forth from a thin, tight mouth. His black curly hair flopped along the sides of his temples and, from afar, he gave the impression of a shaggy dog playfully loping across a field. John was overwhelmed by Joel’s carefree spirit, and they immediately struck up a relationship. By the end of the weekend, they had agreed to share an apartment in New York, where Joel was going to work at his uncle’s law firm.
A month later, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman scoured the city in search of a place of their own. It took them two days to find an apartment within Joel’s relatively conservative budge
t. But, more important, they spent most of that time locked in conversation. They opened up to each other in ways they had never thought existed. And at the end of those two days, John was convinced he knew Joel better than anyone else who had ever touched his life.
3
As a youngster, Joel Rosenman had developed a reputation for being a wise guy, rollicking in devilishness. He was a highly intelligent child, perky and aggressive, whose drive was shifted into high gear when it came to calling attention to himself in any manner possible. In school, at community functions, in a group of friends, Joel was constantly “on”—entertaining the way a comic creates his own applause, mostly at the expense of those around him. He had great energy, though; it billowed like contagious laughter and he drew others into this wonderful, fantastic child world with indefatigable verve.
There was hardly a time in his life when Joel Rosenman had not attempted to buck authority in one way or another. As a child in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, he was coddled by parents who indulged him the way one overlooks a genius’s eccentricities. His father was an orthodontist, constantly on the move between his three suburban practices, and had precious little spare time to devote to a hyperactive son. As a result, Joel became a serious behavior problem, and he was bumped around from school to school in order to keep him slightly off balance.
When it came time to consider college, Joel’s first reaction had been to put an abrupt, premature end to his formal education. But, like John Roberts, he succumbed to social pressure and enrolled at Princeton in the fall of 1959. Four years later, though, he was faced with still another leg of this now familiar dilemma: what to do after school was finished. The idea of continuing on to graduate school was not an appealing one and, yet, there was nothing more tangible on the horizon. He had no desire to teach, no attraction to commerce; though he was an artist of considerable merit, he foresaw the limitations of art as a profession. Law attracted the majority of his classmates, and Joel, totally oblivious of his stake in the future, decided to go with the flow.
In 1962, Joel Rosenman entered Yale Law School for many of the same reasons he had entered Princeton four years earlier. It had a good reputation, he could “bullshit his way through” with a minimum of effort (although while at Princeton he had to buckle down), and it would delay his having to make a decision that, he thought, would handcuff any future independence. Before long, he formed a college singing group that entertained at local clubs and hotel bars and was good enough to be booked as a lounge act at the Showboat Hotel in Las Vegas during summer breaks.
His current situation was not much better than John’s. After law school was finished, he had been stranded on the podium, diploma in hand, waiting for inspiration to strike him.
It was common practice for recently graduated lawyers to comb New York’s gray-flanneled firms and to grovel for the chance of filling some deserted cubbyhole where they could apprentice their trade. Joel, however, had exhibited nothing but disdain for the tradition—and he could afford to. While his classmates knocked on doors, opportunity beat its own path to Joel Rosenman; his uncle’s practice was well respected and well connected, and he was welcomed there with open arms. But, like Roberts, he did not enjoy having success handed to him.
The Princeton Trio, as Rosenman’s college group was called, was in demand on the coffee house circuit. They performed at a few celebrated New York clubs and were even scouted by Columbia Records’ talent acquisition genius John Hammond, Sr. Hammond quietly took Joel aside one day and told him that Columbia would be interested in having him sign a record contract—but without the rest of the trio. Rosenman pondered the offer but eventually turned Hammond down, not wanting or willing to put in the necessary time or face the frustrations of a career in professional entertainment. Instead, he decided to slug it out as an associate in his uncle’s prestigious law firm. He could still sing on his own time, and with a little luck, he might be able to settle down for a while.
Joel found that this pleasant picture of life was overturned by this reality: practicing law was even more dull than studying it. It was mundane, it was disciplinary—burdens he had so carefully avoided in the past. The thought of sharing an apartment with someone possessing the “sporting vitality” John Roberts exhibited was galvanizing to him. Here at last was the answer to some of his problems.
It wasn’t long before John Roberts, too, realized the scope of their relationship, their interdependence, and upward mobility. He was certain that Rosenman was the one person on whom he could rely for friendship and motivation; Joel was assertive, a bit too cocksure of his own potential, skeptical of the counterculture—all qualities John was convinced were essential to his own growth.
The decision of Roberts to leave the Annenberg School of Communications in March 1967 and to pursue a business relationship with Joel Rosenman was anticlimactic. Joel, in turn, resigned his position at his uncle’s firm with the hope of never returning to law. In all, he had been there less than six months.
• • •
Roberts was determined to continue his writing in one aspect or another. He had received rejection slips from all of his magazine submissions to date, but he got personal gratification from his work and was willing to wait patiently until some astute editor stumbled onto his talent. Joel also thought that writing would suit him, and they ascribed to the theory that two heads collaborating on manuscripts were better than one unpublished writer banging his brains against the wall. Furthermore, they reached the decision to write for television. That medium, they agreed, had the greatest potential for easy riches and instant fame, and it was a respectable career choice—one that their parents would be able to understand.
Joel had recently seen the movie The Landlord starring Beau Bridges and had identified with it from beginning to end. Its story line went something like this: A young man from a wealthy Westchester family inherits a tenement in Harlem and decides, against his parents’ vehement protests, to become the resident slumlord. The young man’s cunning soon wins over his angry tenants. And, of course, the predicaments he finds himself involved in from one extreme to the other are hilarious. Joel surmised that this was a universal concept, and they could adapt a similar story line for a series format. Their show would be about two men in their early twenties who pursue nutty business ventures and always manage to get themselves in over their heads; as the hour reached its end, the pair would be extricated by the miracle that somehow is television. (A year later, this farcical scenario would come back to haunt them in living Technicolor.)
It took Roberts and Rosenman about a week to write a proposal, which they rushed off to a television series packager who loved the idea. All he needed to cement a deal was a half-dozen episodic themes.
The only problem that stood between the amateur screenwriters and their creating a television dynasty was that, when it came to business, they were so inexperienced that they couldn’t come up with a single insane business venture for the show. Everything they tried looked flat on paper.
At one point, however, John remembered that his brother, Billy, had at one time or another placed an advertisement in the newspaper looking for business capital.
“You’d never believe the assholes who responded,” he told Joel, barely able to contain his laughter. “Every wacko in the county—no, excuse me, in the world—wrote in with their get-rich-quick schemes. It was a fiasco for Billy, but it kept us hysterical for weeks.
“Look, who says lightning doesn’t strike twice! We compose an ad to lure these guys back out of the woodwork, and we’re bound to wind up with the same type of idiotic schemes Billy got.”
Joel finished the thought. “Instant zany business ventures for the series.”
“Exactly.”
Three days later, on March 22, 1967, the following ad ran in the “Capital Available” classified section of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal:
Young Men with Unlimited C
apital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions.
The box at the respective papers to which reply was to be made was held in the name of Challenge International, Ltd., and, although the inquiries were to be “treated in the strictest of confidence” as protocol required, no disclaimer was made concerning the irreverent manner in which they were going to be used. The entire affair, as far as John and Joel were concerned, was to be played strictly for laughs.
The result was as expected: a prized collection of featherbrained offers. Sexual apparatus outdistanced the other inventions by nearly two to one. A man in Des Moines tendered an electric gadget guaranteed to bring about an orgasm with “shocking results.” There were edible golf balls with subpar aftertastes, flying telephones that would land in one’s lap upon ringing, a refrigerator that was programmed to inform its owner when it was out of certain staples, and an account of a proposed instrument designed to induce woodchucks to sing. John found one claiming that, for a mere $150,000, its author could tap the power from the eighth dimension. It was a carnival of absurdities. On the basis of the amount of preposterous mail they were receiving, they’d have enough material to get them through six years’ worth of shows.
But not all of the ideas were laughable, and John and Joel found themselves intrigued enough by the feasability of some of them to investigate further. Eventually they realized they had stumbled onto a career. They had thoroughly enjoyed researching the plausibility of an investment and recognized that there had to be thousands of similar undeveloped opportunities waiting to be spawned. They were already endowed with perhaps the most scarce natural resource: John’s money. And with a little help from their friends, Roberts and Rosenman let it be known around the New York business community that they would entertain any idea exhibiting commercial promise.
