Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking

by Jessica Mitford

  In 1964 history repeated itself. Meanwhile, both broadcasting and venereal disease had made enormous strides: two popular NBC television entertainment programs were reaching approximately sixty million viewers, most of them young people, and venereal infection had risen to the appalling figure of an estimated three thousand new cases each day, the steepest rise being among teen-agers. The Surgeon General’s Office put these two facts together and proposed that a two-part fictional episode about the dangers of syphilis, designed to reach schoolchildren as well as their parents and teachers, should be given on the Mr. Novak and Dr. Kildare programs.

  The M-G-M producers in Hollywood, who make the films for both programs, were enthusiastic about the idea; and so, at first, were the NBC officials in New York who have the final say about what goes over the air. The two-part script entitled “The Rich Who Are Poor” was written by E. Jack Neuman, a topflight TV writer who won the Peabody Award as executive producer of the Mr. Novak program. Then, just as production was about to start, NBC suddenly canceled the project.

  This time NBC’s official explanation was longer and murkier. Speaking for the network, Mr. Robert D. Kasmire told the newspapers, “All who took part in the decision recognize the seriousness of the problem of venereal disease, especially among young people. In addition, the subject was not held to be inappropriate for television. In support of both these points, I should like to point out that NBC personnel cooperated closely over many weeks with the producing organization with a view toward arriving at a treatment of the subject that would be consistent with the needs of an all-family audience. Out of this effort and, of course, the extraordinary talent of the writer came a skilled and sensitive treatment for our consideration. In the final determination, however, it was felt that passages within the story, considered by all concerned to be essential to development of plot and theme, made it inappropriate for such a program as Mr. Novak, and we decided not to proceed.”

  From which it is apparent that the gentle art of double-talk has also forged ahead mightily since the thirties.

  Stunned and angry, the Surgeon General’s Office and the National Education Association, whose experts had worked closely with the writer for many months to guarantee technical accuracy of the script, urged NBC to reconsider. When Val Adams broke the story in The New York Times, scores of medical groups, clergymen, and educators joined in the appeal. The network’s only response was to reissue Kasmire’s statement and to declare the matter was closed.

  What brought on the sudden fit of nerves that led to cancellation of this patently worthwhile and constructive public service project? What sort of reasoning went into the decision? Was NBC really reflecting the wishes of the viewing public when it decided to abandon the two-part drama? And was the public interest (or, as Kasmire put it, “the needs of an all-family audience”) really served? What were the “essential” yet “inappropriate” passages in the story? To find some answers, I read the banned script and talked with those most closely connected with the incident: the writer, his collaborators at M-G-M, public health workers, and NBC’s Official Explainer.

  The script of “The Rich Who Are Poor” is innocuous in the extreme, relying as it does on the tried-and-true formulas of this sort of television play. It is a simple moral tale involving tender young romantic love, a lapse into transgression followed by inevitable retribution, a hint of happier days to come. The stock characters are all there—the financially rich yet emotionally impoverished parents (whence the title), the sensitive but confused teen-agers, the decent but worried teachers trying to muddle through to some sort of understanding of the adolescent mind.

  Briefly, the plot is this: Mr. Novak notices that one of his best students, eighteen-year-old Paul Stribling, seems out of sorts and nervous. He questions Paul—has he been spending too much time with his steady girl friend Joyce? Is he eating properly? Anything wrong?—but gets nowhere. Meanwhile Paul’s mother, who has also noticed that he seems unwell, has sent him for a checkup to Dr. Quayle, the Stribling family physician. Dr. Quayle comes to see Paul at school and tells him he has syphilis. Quayle lectures him: “I suggest you plan on behaving yourself. If you were my boy, I’d take you to the woodshed,” but assures him that “I’m going to keep it strictly between us, Paul. I’m doing this out of respect for your father and mother.” Paul, shocked and horrified, tries to commit suicide. He is next seen being brought into Dr. Kildare’s hospital, where he is treated for an overdose of barbiturates and where a routine blood test reveals his disease to Kildare and Dr. Gillespie.

  The doctors explain to Paul that while syphilis is extremely dangerous it can easily be cured if treated early enough. Dr. Gillespie gives Quayle a dressing-down for failing to report Paul’s case to the health department. Dr. Kildare urges Paul to tell the names of girls from whom he might have caught syphilis—or to whom he might have given it—so that they in turn can be reached and treated. Paul admits to having had relations with two casual acquaintances and after much inner conflict tells Joyce (“a nice girl, not like those other girls”) that he may have infected her. While there is no happy ending, we gather that Paul has learned much from his unfortunate experience.

  The viewing audience also would have learned much. Within the familiar framework of the “family entertainment program” the writer has skillfully managed to weave in a great deal of basic information about syphilis. All of the important facts emerge in the development of the story: how the disease is transmitted, how it is cured; the consequences of untreated syphilis (it may lead to insanity and death); the inadequacy of present medical-school training in syphilology; the importance of questioning the patient as to possible sources of infection, and the dereliction of many private doctors in this regard; how public health departments work to break the chain of infection.

  The merit of this approach to V.D. education seems self-evident: how much more palatable to tune in to Dr. Kildare, to hear that attractive and earnest young man explain these facts, than to read the same thing in a government pamphlet or even to hear it in a speech given by a health educator on the educational channel.

  The conception (you’ll excuse the expression), birth, development, and premature demise of the screenplay was poignantly described to me by the writer and the producers who had hopefully nurtured it over many months.

  Apparently the suggestion for such a program came simultaneously from a number of public health centers. The Surgeon General’s Office approached David Victor, producer of Kildare, suggesting an episode that would call attention to the epidemic of V.D. among fourteen- to twenty-year-olds. About the same time, the New York Department of Public Health wrote to E. Jack Neuman with a similar proposal for the Novak show.

  “I began fishing around, and visited several high-school principals and some of the Los Angeles Health Department workers,” said Neuman. “To a man, they told me what a frightful thing this is, what a devastating effect it is having emotionally and academically on uncounted numbers of teen-agers. They began plying me with facts and material—exciting, dramatic material.”

  Neuman discussed his findings with the executive personnel of the two shows, Norman Felton and David Victor of Kildare, and Leonard Freeman of Novak. Like the vast majority of people who are otherwise well informed and knowledgeable about current affairs, Neuman and his colleagues at M-G-M had absolutely no idea of the magnitude of the V.D. epidemic. They had assumed, as most people do, that the discovery of the penicillin cure in 1943 had pretty much eradicated these diseases.

  They learned that following a steep drop in the incidence of V.D. during the middle fifties, it staged a comeback and is today a far more devastating killer than respectable, well-publicized diseases like smallpox and polio. That over the last six years infectious syphilis has tripled in the fifteen- to nineteen-year age group; teen-agers alone account for six hundred new cases of V.D. each day. That one thousand Americans die each month of V.D., and many more become blind, deaf, and insane. That of cases treated by private
physicians, only about 11 percent are reported to public health authorities.

  “The really frustrating thing is that today, for the first time in history, total eradication of venereal disease is a practical possibility, because a quick and certain cure does now exist,” said Neuman. “The tragedy is that the people simply aren’t getting the facts—and especially the young people.” He was particularly struck with the inadequacy of V.D. education in the nation’s public schools—in many areas nonexistent, in others spotty and often sadly ineffective. “Too often it’s left up to an embarrassed gym teacher who shows a few slides,” he said. “The only state with a competent system is Oregon, where they start in the sixth grade, and consequently the V.D. rate there is extremely low.”

  As the M-G-M production team investigated further, they were evidently seized with some of the crusading zeal of the health department workers who day in and day out wrestle with the problem of getting the facts about V.D. to an ignorant and apathetic public.

  “We all felt obligated by the nature of the subject to do something about it,” said Neuman. “It was a marvelous, rare opportunity to perform a public service.” Leonard Freeman emphasized the need to remove the social onus that is attached to this particular disease, “so a young person would feel free to go to a doctor at the beginning. People should realize it’s not the victim that’s abhorrent, it’s the disease. The terror of syphilis is that the symptoms are so brief—and painless. The victim can sit it out for two weeks, and then the symptoms disappear altogether—but he becomes a carrier, he isn’t really cured. The disease goes underground but reappears in later life in the most deadly forms. The reasons for doing the show, to bring this to the light of day, seemed to us quite indisputable.”

  Furthermore they were convinced that the unusual and intriguing format of the proposed two-part drama, in which the stars of Novak and Kildare would appear together in both shows, would have increased the viewing audience enormously. “It would have been damn good showmanship and would have sprung the ratings way up, which means the life of the show,” said Newman. “I have the same contempt for the ratings that everyone else has, but they’re a fact of life, you have to live with them.”

  The next move for the producers of the two shows was to sell the idea of the two-part drama to the NBC officials in New York.

  “Knowing the wariness of the networks in tackling this sort of subject, we realized it must be extraordinarily well and carefully done,” said Freeman. “Neuman submitted an extended, unusually detailed outline of the drama so there’d be no surprises for the network—all the cards were on the table. The network considered the outline long and painfully, then gave the go-ahead, but with a proviso that there would be no carte-blanche approval until they saw the finished script.”

  This, it seems, was a departure from usual procedure. Generally proposals for episodes are accepted or rejected at the outline stage, after being considered by NBC’s Programming Department for entertainment value and the Standards and Practices Department which rules on “matters of taste and propriety.”

  The draft screenplay, having won this tentative approval, was next subjected to the searching scrutiny of various experts. It was vetted for medical accuracy by public health educators in Atlanta, Washington, and Los Angeles; for English usage by a panel of the National Education Association (which acts in an advisory capacity to the Novak program); and for “taste and propriety” by NBC’s own Broadcast Standards Department. The painstaking work of these groups is evidenced in a formidable stack of correspondence suggesting improvements in the draft.

  The Los Angeles Health Department corrects Dr. Gillespie’s discussion of symptoms: “It might be well to qualify Gillespie’s statement, ‘In the infectious stage syphilis is often simple to detect and diagnose.’ ”

  The National Education Association punctiliously corrects Mr. Novak’s English: “Improve Novak’s English to ‘here are a couple of unsatisfactory slips.’ ” “Novak’s ‘you sure need something’ is too slangy and should be changed to ‘you certainly need something.’ ” “Novak should say, ‘whom would they suspect,’ not ‘who.’ ” “Novak seems to be imitating Jimmy Cagney with his reply of ‘yeh’ to Dr. Kildare.”

  And Joyce’s French: “Joyce should say to her French teacher, ‘simplement, mon ami,’ not ‘amant,’ which means ‘lover.’ ”

  And Mr. Peoples’s arithmetic: “Forty-eight out of one hundred eighty school days is closer to twenty-five percent than thirty percent.”

  The Broadcast Standards Department anxiously urges prudence all down the line: “In the speech ‘God knows how many unreported cases,’ please delete ‘God’ and substitute ‘who.’ ” “As is your custom, please exercise caution when showing the interns staring appreciatively at the group of nurses passing by. In addition, please eliminate Dr. Tyler’s speech, ‘If she is not anybody’s kin—and nobody’s sister—I would like to scrub with her.’ ” “Please delete ‘sexual intercourse’ and substitute ‘relations.’ ” “Please delete ‘a case of syphilis’ and substitute ‘this disease.’ ” “Please delete ‘your friendly backend’ and substitute ‘back.’ ”

  The finished script, pruned, pared, trimmed, tidied, polished, and sterilized, successfully cleared the NBC Standards and Practices Department, generally the last hurdle in the long obstacle race for writer and script. All was set in motion for production; Franciscus and the other leads had already learned their parts—when the word came. NBC had decided to kill the whole project.

  “You’re never told who decides these things. Nobody wants to stand up and be counted,” said Leonard Freeman. “There was no memorandum with somebody’s signature on it; we learned of the decision through a telephone call from the local NBC man who had got the word from New York.” Neither, apparently, were any specific reasons given the producers for the sudden veto—merely the mysterious observation that the plays “were not in the best interests of the viewing public,” and that the subject was not suitable for the early hour of the Novak show. “The ironic part of that reasoning is that the very audience that motivated the careful and arduous preparation of the two-part script was the audience chosen by the network to be sheltered—namely, teen-agers,” remarked Freeman.

  Understandably, the decision was received with anguish and frustration by the M-G-M producers, who saw the fruit of months of painstaking work arbitrarily discarded. “We pulled out every stop to persuade them to change their minds,” said Neuman. “I was on the telephone upside down and backwards,” said Norman Felton. “I believed in this project. But there was no recourse.” The Surgeon General’s Office sent a full delegation to New York to plead with NBC executives, and the National Education Association threw the weight of its million members behind a request for reconsideration, but without success. “There was some talk that maybe, possibly, at some future time NBC might do a documentary on V.D.,” said Freeman. “But obviously this would not have fulfilled the same purpose. As NBC well knows, teen-agers don’t watch documentaries. They are watched by only a tiny fraction of the viewing audience, by the more sophisticated people who are least in need of this sort of information.”

  NBC now began to catch it from all sides. The Saturday Review, in an editorial entitled “NBC Turns Down a Golden Opportunity,” pointed out: “If delicacy is the issue with NBC’s Continuity Acceptance Department, it had better take a hard second look at much that goes out on its network. Sex at every extreme and brutality without precedent this side of the Grand Guignol are daily fare on television, including NBC.” The Los Angeles Times called the decision ridiculous: “Why NBC should believe TV drama is not to deal with society and life escapes us.” Newsweek said, “The network’s open mind slammed shut.”

  Seeking further information on the sequence of events, I obtained audience with NBC in the person of Mr. Robert Kasmire, whose weighty title is Vice-President of Corporate Information. Mr. Kasmire was vague about who had actually delivered the coup de grâce to the two-part drama. He
seemed to remember that there were about five people, including himself, involved in the decision, and that there was at first a difference of opinion among them. The disagreement was not resolved in any formalized fashion, he said, no votes are taken in these policy meetings. “It is rather a matter of discussion and concession. Our judgment was on the side of caution.” I asked whether it would be possible to talk with somebody at NBC who felt deeply, as a matter of principle and rectitude, that the plays should not be shown, that to show them would be wrong and would do harm to the viewing audience. I should have liked to meet somebody who would defend this sort of position so that in all fairness his views could be set forth, but Mr. Kasmire was unable to produce such a person.

  The finished script was rejected, he said, because “if the plays were to have substance and authenticity as a discussion of this serious problem, there would have to be reference to sexual intimacy and a certain amount of clinical detail. The question arose as to whether this was fit and appropriate as entertainment. The determination was made that it was not.”

  This was getting curiouser and curiouser—for how could a play of substance and authenticity be written about syphilis without reference to sexual intimacy? “Some of us hadn’t considered that at the beginning,” said Mr. Kasmire uncomfortably. Was consideration given to asking the writer to rework certain passages? “Well, no; it would have looked silly to go back to the writer and say, ‘We can’t talk about sex.’ ”

  Indeed it would, for the whole point of the script—and a major thrust of public health education about venereal disease—is to make it crystal clear that for all practical purposes sexual intimacy is the only way V.D. can be transmitted. The likelihood of becoming infected in any other way has been compared to the likelihood of being hit by a falling meteor. “Venereal disease is not spread from toilet seats or doorknobs or towels,” say the high-school pamphlets on the subject. At Harvard, Dr. Alfred Worcester, in his famous freshman hygiene course, used to drive this fact home in a slightly different way. Invariably a student would ask, “Can you catch syphilis on a toilet seat?” And invariably the good doctor would pause reflectively before replying, “Well ... I suppose you could, but it does seem to me it would be a rather uncomfortable place....”