The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  Winky, Howdy, Mickey, Lucky Pup, and Life with Snarky Parker were among the less objectionable survivors in the new medium. The general level was much lower. Really clever programs were given short shrift by sponsors. Magic Cottage and Mr. I. Magination, preferred by parents in a TV Guide survey, were swiftly cut down by the A. C. Nielsen and C. E. Hooper ratings. Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, Burr Tillstrom’s charming puppet show, lasted longer, but eventually it, too, was trodden under by the prophets of violence: Captain Video, Sky King, Space Cadet, Captain Midnight, and Superman, whose young fans continued to cherish illusions of his indestructibility even after George Reeves, the actor who played him, drove his Jaguar into a stone wall in California, cut his forehead, and fainted at the sight of his own blood.

  Roughly one-third of the new programs for children were devoted to crime and violence. The number of American firms manufacturing toy guns jumped from ten to nearly three hundred, and two-fisted, gunslinging William Boyd, who had been foresighted enough to buy up rights to his discarded celluloid horse operas, built one of television’s first fortunes, grossing forty million dollars by 1950 in the sale of Hopalong Cassidy clothing alone. Hopalong’s six-gun casualties contributed to the general television toll, which by 1954 actually exceeded the death rate in Korea. Some murders on the screen were quite horrible. Jack Gould of the New York Times campaigned against close-ups of young girls being strangled, but the predominant view in the network hierarchy was that TV was no gorier than, say, “Jack the Giant Killer,” and that ferocity on the tube might even be doing some good by helping little watchers work out their aggression in fantasy. Anyway, violent programs were popular; kids wanted them. Therefore decisions to increase the homicidal level were reached in the sixty square blocks around Madison Avenue known as “the industry.” It happened to be a short ride from the apartment where an eleven-year-old truant named Lee Harvey Oswald was watching all the TV mayhem he could get.

  Almost everything about the new medium was debatable except its significance. Clearly that was immense. The Age of Television was dawning more rapidly than the Age of Radio. At the peak of radio’s expansion, Americans had bought about 165,000 receivers a month. During every month of 1948 and 1949, more than 200,000 TV sets were sold, and that was only the beginning. On January 1, 1950, there were three million television owners in the United States. In that swing year—the year of McCarthy and Korea—another seven million sets were installed in American homes. Radio still dominated the airwaves, broadcasting to forty million receivers, but that was only because the majority hadn’t yet bowed to salesmanship (“Is your little girl left out…?”) and social pressure. In metropolitan communities those forces were often augmented by newspaper campaigns. Misjudging the appeal of radio, newspapers had allowed station franchises to go to others, leaving them in the cold. This time they were in at the start. Baltimore provided an excellent illustration of how effective skillful merchandising, backed by journalistic indoctrination, can be. In the spring of 1949 Hooper’s figures showed that 82 percent of the city’s inhabitants listened to radio, while only 18 percent watched television. Then the Baltimore Sun, Evening Sun, and Sunday Sun began urging subscribers to enjoy programs on WMAR-TV, which was owned by them. As a consequence, in May 1950 the city became the first in which television’s evening audience (50.2 percent) was larger than radio’s.

  It was not as satisfied, though. Once the novelty had worn off, WMAR-TV’s delivery was found to be snowy and its programming so shabby at times as to constitute almost a new form of air pollution. “What happens to old, broken-down wrestlers?” Baltimoreans asked one another on street corners, and the answer was, “Nothing. They’re still wrestling.” Time declared, “Television became a major industry and cultural force in 1950,” but during the first part of the year its performance level remained poor. Bright spots were appearing here and there: Duffy’s Tavern, Jack Webb’s Dragnet, and an elfin Amazon from West Virginia named Dagmar. Still, even the best of it was mostly second-bill vaudeville, and in fact the man of the hour, acclaimed as “Mr. Television,” was Milton Berle, a mugging, vaudevillian joke stealer. Most of the big entertainers were veteran radio personalities. Two years earlier the Goldbergs had moved to the screen (“Enter, whoever”; “If it’s nobody, I’ll call back”), but for most the pendulum had not yet swung. Those who wanted the news from Ed Murrow or the latest ballad from Bing Crosby had to listen, not see, and Arthur Godfrey continued to keep in touch with his forty-million flock by radio, caressing them with what Fred Allen called Godfrey’s “barefoot voice.”

  Part of TV’s problems were technical. Cameramen were still feeling their way, installers put antennas up wrong, the first mass-produced sets kept breaking down, and repairmen were incompetent. Chicago’s Hallicrafters Company didn’t develop the first rectangular picture tube until January 1950. That permitted use of the whole tube face and saved 50 percent in cabinet space. The great obstacle to national television remained: curvature of the earth’s surface. AM radio waves bend; FM and television beams do not. In those pioneer years TV receivers over the horizon could not pick up a station’s picture, so program directors were limited to local talent. During the 1948 Republican National Convention engineers had tinkered with something called Stratovision, putting an antenna in a B-29 and sending it up to circle 25,000 feet above Pittsburgh. It was a good stunt—signals flickered on screens within a 250-mile radius—but something more substantial was required. The solution lay in coaxial cable and microwave relays. Within another three years a significant grid of cable was in the ground and working. Its first coast-to-coast television broadcast was President Truman’s address at the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco on September 4, 1951, beamed to forty million viewers by 94 stations. With that, the networks began signing up local channels and the massive shift from radio to television began.

  On the eve of it, Radio Daily announced its awards for 1950, and in them the standoff between the two giants then was evident:

  RADIO TELEVISION

  Man of the Year: Jack Benny Man of the Year: Sid Caesar

  Woman of the Year: Eve Arden Woman of the Year: Faye Emerson

  Drama Show: Lux Radio Theater Drama Show: Studio One

  Comedy Show: Jack Benny Comedy Show: Milton Berle

  Over the next five years, dealer sales averaged five million TV sets a year, and they continued high until 88 percent of American families—forty million homes—had tubes, with 13 percent owning two or more and some with as many as six. For every farmer watching the screen in 1949, there were 27 ten years later. As early as 1950 one study had found that some junior high school students were spending an average of nearly thirty hours a week in front of tubes. Surveys were predicting, accurately, that the average American youth on the day of his high school graduation would have spent 11,000 hours in classrooms and 15,000 hours watching television, and a Westinghouse study later discovered that Americans were spending more man-hours in front of the screen than in working for pay.

  Those who weren’t watching—and in the 1950s few self-respecting intellectuals would admit to owning a set—were fascinated by those who were. Norman Cousins reported to his appalled readers that “the standardized television formula for an evening’s entertainment is a poisoning, a variety show, a wrestling show”; Max Lerner held that TV was “the poor man’s luxury because it is his psychological necessity”; and judges held that it was indeed a necessity, not subject to seizure by creditors. In 1954 the TV dinner appeared, obviating the need for people to tear themselves away from the screen to bolt supper, and that same year the water commissioner of Toledo made a remarkable discovery. Baffled by why water consumption surged upward during certain three-minute periods, he conducted a discreet little survey and found that all over Toledo, during television commercials, viewers were simultaneously dashing into bathrooms, voiding, and flushing their toilets in unison.

  By then the average American family was watching TV between four and five hours a day; L
ouis Kronenberger commented that television was returning people to the home, whence the auto had lured them, but destroying the home in the process:

  Where Mother and Father, Jane and John on their treks and travels exchanged pleasantries and ideas, they sit now for hours, side by side, often shoulder to shoulder, scarcely exchanging a glance. Or if they do address one another, they do so crossly, campaigning for this program or that.

  What were their choices? Some early network presentations were quite good. In 1950 the March of Time’s Crusade in Europe, telecast by ABC, became the first documentary to win a Peabody Award. Murrow’s See It Now began the following year, and the year after that Alistair Cooke started bringing an hour and a half of Omnibus into living rooms on Sunday afternoons, courtesy of the Ford Foundation. On other channels Jimmy Durante was funny, if broad; Victor Borge, the happy Dane, was charming, if manqué; Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, literate, if glib; NBC’s televised operas outstanding by any standard. Sunday evenings NBC’s Philco-Goodyear Playhouse and CBS’s Studio One introduced live dramas by fine new playwrights, beginning with Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty. Among commentators, CBS’s Murrow was still supreme, but viewers could also switch to ABC’s John Charles Daly or NBC’s John Cameron (“Now hopscotch in the world for headlines”) Swayze. David Brinkley was also at NBC, and in 1955 Chet Huntley joined him to form the famous newscasting team which would move to the top when Murrow retired.

  Had these programs been typical, the quality of American life might have risen. Instead it sank. Those interested enough to monitor television fare and perceptive enough to judge it waged bitter disputes over who was responsible for its tasteless sludge. No one was, really; there simply wasn’t enough talent to fill all those empty hours, and the very size of the waiting audience meant that concepts comprehensible to the majority had to be banal. Families were really amused by:

  OZZIE: Er… uh… oh, dear… have you… seen the… the paper?

  HARRIET: Gee, dear, Ricky may have seen it.

  OZZIE: Uh… oh… well, gee… I…

  RICKY (bursting in): Hi, Pop. I gave the paper to Dave to give to Thorny. (Leaves.)

  OZZIE: Oh, well… gee, dear, I… I wanted to read the… the paper.

  Young viewers—and not only the young—caught their breaths at:

  BOYD: Lucky, round up a posse. Bart Slime’s kidnapped the judge’s daughter.

  GABBY HAYES: Wh-h-h-y, them dirty, no good—c’mon, Hoppy, let’s go git them varmints.

  And four million housewives hunched over their irons and ovens were actually moved when 203 stations broadcasted:

  HELEN: Oh, Paul! The operation was a success!

  PAUL: You mean that little guy will live to play shortstop again?

  HELEN: Yes! Oh, I prayed for this so hard last night!

  PAUL (gently): And your prayer was answered.

  HELEN (after a long pause): Yes, Paul—my prayer—was answered.

  Space Cadet was just as trite as Hopalong Cassidy, My Favorite Husband as inane as Ozzie and Harriet and As the World Turns or The Edge of Night as florid as Helen Trent. On TV the pot competed with the kettle. The real Sunday evening contest was not between Studio One and Philco-Goodyear; it was the 8 P.M. duel between CBS’s Ed Sullivan and NBC’s Steve Allen, and Sullivan won it going away by signing up the most expensive guest star of the time, young Elvis Presley, a former Memphis truck driver whose most memorable line was, “Goan… git… luhhv.” For the privilege of presenting Presley on three Sullivan shows, CBS paid $50,000, which would have bought a lot of serious drama or documentary film.

  TV morality made no more sense than Hollywood’s. Presley’s pelvis and Faye Emerson’s plunging necklines were acceptable, but the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission called Godfrey’s double-entendres “livery stable humor,” and when Noel Coward retained the hells and damns in Blithe Spirit for CBS’s Ford Star Jubilee, Time commented, “Viewers last week were treated to the raciest—and most profane—language that has ever been heard on TV.” Groucho Marx was also in and out of trouble with network watchdogs, while the antics of Jerry (“I’m a bean bag”) Lester, offensive to some, were passed over in silence. In part censorship seemed to be a matter of whose ox was being gored. Almost any vulgarity was tolerated on the giveaway shows. Yet when anti-Communist blacklisters formed an organization called AWARE, Inc., and smeared John Henry Faulk, a wit in the Will Rogers tradition, CBS quickly let him go. Faulk had to sue to be reinstated. After six years in the courts he won, but no action was taken against the vigilantes, among them Clayton (Bud) Collyer of Break the Bank.

  Trendex ratings that February offer some insight into American mass taste in the 1950s. The top ten programs were Ed Sullivan, The $64,000 Question, Perry Como, I Love Lucy, December Bride, Talent Scouts, You Bet Your Life, Red Skelton, What’s My Line?, and Walt Disney. On the whole they were bland and slick, and the dominant theme was slapstick, which may say something about television as a new medium, the national character, or the times. Allen Tate thought the tragedy of the 1950s lay in the mass media’s destruction of ways to communicate through love. Louis Kronenberger believed it significant that with the advent of TV’s square eye, all walls guarding privacy were crumbling. We had, he said, become a nation of peeping Toms.

  But all words spoken in the United States were not for microphones, and millions of words were not being spoken at all. They were in print, in Braille, on tape, on newsprint, in phonographs, on celluloid, on plastic, on canvas, and even in architecture. Communications was having its revolution, as economics did in the 1930s and sex would in the 1960s. Never had there been so much information to transmit, or so many ways to transmit it. The volume was breathtaking. Beginning in 1950 the paperback industry alone sold over a quarter-billion books each year in drugstores and newsstands for twenty-five cents, thirty-five cents, and (for giants then) fifty cents. Already the industry had 81,000 titles in print, including seventeen editions of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. “There is,” D. W. Brogan argued, “abundant evidence that popular taste in the United States is improving.” A random glance at paperback sales in January 1952 shows 400,000 for Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, 1,250,000 for The Naked and the Dead, 750,000 for Nineteen Eighty-four, 500,000 for A Streetcar Named Desire, and—for a translation of the Odyssey with an abstract cover design—350,000. The broad rivers coming down from Canada were choked with logs waiting to sacrifice their pulp at mills so that America might be educated as well as entertained, inspired as well as amused, aroused as well as inflamed, and their thousands of square miles of paper went to U.S. News and the New York Times, Commentary and Playboy, Holiday and Grove Press, the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Peyton Place, Mad and the American Scholar, the books of Harold Robbins and John Crowe Ransom, and the works of Norman Cousins, Max Lerner, Allen Tate, and Louis Kronenberger.

  ***

  Across America five thousand motion picture theater marquees had been darkened in the great box office recession which had accompanied the rise of television. Ernie Kovacs and Queen for a Day had stolen hearts once pledged to Clark Gable and Ginger Rogers. The tarnish of time clouded the stars’ names embedded in Hollywood Boulevard’s sidewalks. Bitter signs there read, “Buy Christmas Seals and Stamp Out TV,” and studios would have had to close down without revenue from abroad, which now, for the first time, was providing 50 percent of the movie industry’s gross. President Eric Johnston of the Motion Picture Association of America said, “We will simply have to face the fact that we are in for a leveling off in the future because of the public’s driving habits and television.” In vast tracts of countryside films had become a summer business; since V-J Day the number of drive-in theaters had grown from 351 to 7,000. Meanwhile the gaudy old movie palaces on Main Street, the Paramounts and Capitals and Bijous and Foxes and Hippodromes—once the pride of the only big business to flourish throughout the Depression—went into eclipse.

  Nationwide weekly attendance figures showed that about forty-fiv
e million people had stopped going to the pictures. Things perked up briefly with the Cinerama vogue and then dropped off again. Owners shut off their balconies. They let help go and took over the popcorn concessions themselves. After a while they took to showing films only on weekends, and finally many of them closed down altogether. Some became bowling alleys, supermarkets, banks, apartment houses, or even churches; in Manhattan, ironically, they were converted to television studios. In metropolitan neighborhoods and little cities, where they were abandoned to dust and mice, they turned into fire hazards and eyesores. Because the old exit doors were easily forced, some became trysting places for tramps and lovers. Beneath screens on which Paul Muni had defended Alfred Dreyfus and Gary Cooper had submitted to torture rather than divulge the cavalry’s location, empty whiskey bottles accumulated, and where Charles Boyer had begged Hedy Lamarr to run away from the Casbah with him, and Jennifer Jones as Bernadette had been visited by the Virgin Mary, aisles became cluttered with cigarette butts, sanitary napkins, and used contraceptives.