Chapter 4

"I have never stopped believing," he says, "that the spoken word and the imagination of the listener are infinitely stronger and more dramatic than anything television can offer." He is a silvery-haired, distinguished looking gentleman with a mischievous twinkle in hie eye and an endless capacity for humor. Ruddy-complexioned and vigorous, dressed in a gray pinstripe suit and a crimson tie, he approaches his work with an infectious enthusiasm.

On a typical weekday, Brown arrives at the sound studio at 9 a.m. with a batch of scripts under his arm, which he hands out to a group of actors assembled around a table. Many are stars of the stage or screen -- Tammy Grimes, Julie Harris, Tony Roberts, Fred Gwynn, Bobby Morse, Roberta Maxwell, Joan Hackett. "I get the best actors in the world, right here in New York," he notes with pride. "They work for me in the daytime and on Broadway at night."

As the cast members go through a cold reading. Brown interjects his comments: "Do a little more with that. ... Don't swallow your words there. ... Cross out that line." The actors laugh and joke their way through the session; Brown is the biggest jokester of all. Finally everyone takes a break before doing the actual taping. Brown calls his 91-year-old mother on the telephone and speaks to her in Yiddish for some time. Then he answers a questions about his discoveries in sound effects.

"In the 1930s I was doing _Dick Tracy_, a very popular show. For sound effects we had several doors. One of them screaked, no matter what we did to it. I like to think that door was talking to us, saying, 'Make me a star,'" he says with a smile.

The creaking door later became the signature for _Inner Sanctum Mysteries_, and is now employed as the introductory note for the _Radio Mystery Theater_, along with host E.G. Marshall's compelling greeting: "Come _in_." Himan Brown also created the sound of London's foghorns and Big Ben for _Bulldog Drummond_, the laugh of the fat Nero Wolfe, and the never-to-be-forgotten train that roared under Park Avenue into Grand Central Station.

When the recording session get underway, Brown observes the performers through the thick glass of the control booth as they stand around a microphone, reading their line with animation. From time to time he stops the action and repeats parts of a scene. "It's all spliced together afterwards," he explains.

In the late 1940s, Brown began to produce television dramas, such as _Lights Out_ and the _Chevy Mystery Show_. He built a large TV studio on West 26th Street for that purpose, which for many years he has leased to CBS for filming the soap opera _The Guiding Light_.

For most of his career, Brown has been a resident of the Upper West Side. The father of two, he is married to Shirley Goodman, executive vice president of the Fashion Institute of Technology. He has long been involved in community affairs and charitable organizations, including the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, the National Urban League and the National Conference of Social Work. Brown is constantly in demand as a public speaker, a fund-raiser, and a creator of multimedia presentations.

His plans for 1980 include reviving the _Adventure Theater_, a children's radio with that he last did in 1977. "The best thing about radio drama," he joyfully concludes, "is that we can take you anywhere, unhampered by sets, production costs, locations, makeup, costumes, or memorizing lines, and make you believe everything we put on the air. ... The screen in your head is much bigger than the biggest giant screen ever made. It gives you an experience no other form of theatre can duplicate. It's the theatre of the mind."

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FERRIS BUTLER Creator, writer and producer of _Waste Meat News_

4-7-79

Every Saturday at 11:30 p.m., millions of Americans tune in to what is indisputably the boldest, the most innovative, and frequently the most tasteless comedy show on television -- NBC's _Saturday Night Live_. But for the 400,000 residents of Manhattan who have cable TV, there is another program -- also aired at 11:30, but on Sunday evening -- that is, in its own way, even more offbeat.

Known as _Waste Meat News_, the half-hour satiric revue has been a regular feature of Channel D since April, 1976, when a young Westsider named Ferris Butler decided that he had the talent to write, direct, and produce his own comedy series, even without money and film equipment. Time has proven him right: last year, _TV World_ magazine discovered, in a poll of viewers, that _Waste Meat News_ is the most popular comedy program on cable, out of 150 public access shows.

A tall, willowy, 27-year-old with a quizzical expression permanently fixed on his face, Ferris once worked as a part-time office boy at Channel 7's _Eyewitness News_, and there he came to the conclusion that "TV news is nothing but throwaway scraps, like sausages or hot dogs. ... Very little protein, like waste meat."

Many of the skits he conceives have the same format as "straight" news items, but have been twisted by his imagination into something outrageous. In place of the standard weather reports, for example, there is Ferris' "Leather Weather Girl," in which a girl is tied to a table, her body representing a map of the world.

The weather reporter, while telling about an impending onslaught of rain and snow, dramatizes his points by pouring a pitcher of water over the girl, smothering her with shaving cream, and finally applying a blow dryer to evaporate the messes while explaining that a warm air front will follow. Other skits include "Swedish Grease," "Music to Eat Rice By," and "The Adversaries," in which two actors wearing grotesque masks debate the question: should monsters be allowed to kill people, or just frighten them?

Ideas for skits, says Ferris, come to him any time of night or day, now that he has "stopped working at any legitimate job. I watch a lot of television. But most of the time, I meander around the streets and just think.

"I remember when I got the idea for the foreign language cursing detector. I was sitting on a bench in the park, smoking grass, when some foreign tourists came and sat down, and started talking about me in German like I was a bum. And I thought, why not have a portable siren that goes off whenever a swear word is spoken in any language?"

He describes himself as "a very unregimented person who can't jive with the mainstream industry." This accounts for much of the spontaneity in _Waste Meat News_. The performers sometimes don't see the scripts until the taping session. Each segment requires several run-throughs before it is smooth enough to be filmed. Frequently the filming goes on far into the night. Although the show is done with a single camera and half-inch videotape, the final result makes up in charm what it lacks in professional gloss.

"Maybe I'm a little rough in the way I produce it," says Ferris, "but I'm being a pioneer and I'm not worried about perfection as long as the audience has a positive reaction."

His cast is an irregular group of about 15 unpaid actors and actresses, most of them young. Two current stars of _Waste Meat News_ are Pat Profito, a master of comedy who injects an infectious vitality into all of his performances, and Laura Suarez, a Strassberg-trained actress and former Playboy Bunny who frequently portrays the naive sexpot who crops up in many of Ferris' sketches.

Most of the filming is done on the Upper West Side -- usually on the street or in someone's apartment, but also in such diverse places as stores, restaurants, the waterfront, boiler rooms and lobbies. A recent skit was shot at a Westside swimming pool; it features Pat Profito as a swimming instructor who teaches three bikini-clad beauties his "jump-in-and-swim" method, in which he pushes them into the pool and expects them to swim instinctively, or drown.

Ferris, who grew up in Queens and Brooklyn "and departed as soon as was possible," studied filmmaking at New York University under Martin Scorsese and was encouraged to pursue comedy writing. For the past five years he has been married to Beverly Ross, a composer with many hits to her credit including "Lollipop."

It's 10 seconds before midnight on Sunday evening. Time once again for Ferris to bid his viewers goodnight. "And remember: stay alienated, stay wiped out, and stay wasted."

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EASTSIDER SAMMY CAHN Oscar-winning lyricist

3-10-79

"I've never written a song that didn't almost write itself," says Sammy Cahn, one of the world's most successful lyricists of popular songs. "I'm like the catalyst. It's like I start the boulder down the hill, but after that, there's only one place it can go. I'm always thrilled by the adventure of finding the lyric and leading it to a happy conclusion. If I come to the slightest impasse, I've learned to stop, and look around and see what needs to be done around the house. Then I come back, and it's so easy. You can't go into combat with a lyric."

Over the past four decades, his songs have received four Oscars and more than 30 Oscar nominations. Among his numerous hits, written in collaboration with six different melodists, are "Three Coins in a Fountain," "Love and Marriage," "Call Me Irresponsible" and "Let It Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!" His musicals include _Anchors Aweigh_ and _High Button Shoes_. As a performer, he has the distinction of making his Broadway debut in 1974 at the age of 60, in a one-man show with backup musicians titled _Words and Music_, in which he sang his own material and told colorful stories about his life and career. For his performance, Sammy won the Outer Circle Critic's Award for Best New Talent on Broadway, as well as a Theatre World Award. Since then, he has been in great demand all over the country as an entertainer.

Small, wiry and energetic -- he describes himself as "all glasses and mustache" -- he is utterly without pretension, and seems as much at home with strangers on the street as he is with royalty (last year he sang for England's Prince Charles). He manages to embrace both worlds by involving himself in many projects simultaneously.

Born on "the lowest part of the Lower East Side," he now has an apartment in the East 60s with his wife Tita, a fashion designer. He has another residence in Los Angeles, and spends about the same number of days each year in the two homes.

Recently Sammy completed the songs for a new cartoon film of _Heidi_ and a series of songs for _Sesame Street_. He also works as a consultant for Faberge, and has a large office in the company's East Side headquarters. As president of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Sammy devotes much of his time to publicizing the non-profit organization's museum on the eighth floor of One Times Square. It is open Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and admission is free. He recently met with the producer of the Broadway musical _Annie_ to discuss writing a new musical. He gives generously to many charitable causes.

But the majority of his time these days goes to writing and performing special lyrics for special occasions -- usually parodies of his own hit songs. Sometimes he does this for profit, and sometimes for love. He was paid handsomely to prepare a birthday celebration for Ray Kroc, the head of Mcdonald's. But a couple of weeks ago, when a man wrote to Sammy telling him how much his songs had meant to him and his wife over the years, and asking him to please write some personalized lyrics for their 18th wedding anniversary, Sammy was "just enough of an idiot to sit down and do it."

He works exclusively at the typewriter. "I have become almost audacious. When I put a piece of paper in the typewriter, I know that the completed song will be on that page. I'm very grateful to the man who invented Correctotype and liquid paper. I start to type as soon as I get up, and I think about songs all day long. When I sleep at night, I sleep with an earplug in my ear, tuned to WCBS or WINS radio. They're both news stations. The radio distracts me: it stops me from thinking about lyrics."

As we are talking, Sammy keeps remembering telephone calls he needs to make, but he keeps them brief and to the point. As soon as he hangs up, our conversation jumps immediately back to the previous subject, as if there had been no interruption. He is extremely quick-minded -- to the extent that his thoughts sometimes race ahead of him, and his sentences lose their structure. In speaking of his son, a very successful jazz guitarist who performs under the name Steve Khan, Sammy comments: "Now, my son -- brace yourself -- my son -- this is one of my great, great achievements -- my fame is coming from a very curious source. People come up to me and say, 'You're Steve Kahn's father?'"

Asked about the satisfaction he has gotten from songwriting, Sammy insists that he can't imagine a more rewarding career. "I once told that to a college audience and a boy said, 'I'm studying to be a lawyer. What's wrong with that?' I said, 'Nothing, but who walks down the street humming a lawsuit?'"

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WESTSIDER HUGH CAREY Governor of New York state

9-16-78

It was 5 p.m. on the Friday before Labor Day. Governor Hugh Carey sat alone in his office on West 55th Street, rubbing his forehead wearily with both hands when his assistant press secretary, Judy Deich, ushered me in. The introductions were brief, and the governor spoke very rapidly, keeping is eyes on the table in front of him, where he was scrawling pencil lines in geometric patterns on a piece of blank paper, as if to maintain his concentration.

The Governor had been up for 12 hours, and his voice occasionally faded to a whisper, but he answered all the questions with a flair and displayed a sincere manner throughout. Sitting kitty-corner to me at a conference table, he looked smaller and thinner than his photographs. He also looked like one of the tiredest, most overworked men I had ever met.

"I have been staying on the West Side a lot since last September," he said. "That's when my sons Donald and Michael got an apartment near Central Park. They're kind enough to put me up there. We have the usual tenants' complaints about the leaky ceilings and peeling paint. All in all, it's a good building. I find more and more advantages to living on the West Side. I like it because of the accessibility to work and because I jog in Central Park.

"One of my headaches is Central Park. Some of my colleagues would like to make it a national park. It's the city's biggest showplace. ... I want to get the automobiles out of there more and more. In the morning, I see all the New Jersey cars coming through. That's why I want Westway below 42d Street -- so it will take more pressure off the city. ... I wish everyone would realize that Westway is not a road. It's a recessed highway -- more of a tunnel."

Speaking frankly of the problem of ex-mental patients in parts of the West Side, Carey said that "we have indexed all the SRO's. That was never done before. ... The homeless people who live on the street are not the wards of the state. We can't just go out and pick them up. ... If they need some kind of health care, they should be taken to a shelter and given health care. If they resist, we will have peace officers to take care of them. That's something I'm doing with Mayor Koch."

Ever since he defeated Nelson Rockefeller's appointed successor, Malcolm Wilson, in 1974, Hugh Carey has become well known for both his conservative moral code and his unswerving fiscal restraint. Born on April 11, 1919, to an Irish Catholic family in Brooklyn, Carey grew up with five brothers believing in certain principles that he has never abandoned. These moral principles have become the foundation of his controversial stands on the death penalty and abortion.

"I am against the death penalty," said Carey, "because the government can make a mistake. A sentence of life without parole is better. There are six people now walking around the state who were condemned to death and later proven innocent. One is named Zimmy and he works on the West Side in a garment factory. Somebody should ask him what he thinks about the death penalty. He's alive because somebody confessed.

"I oppose abortion personally. But the Supreme Court upheld that it's the choice of a woman of her own free will, and I support that ruling. In New York, the state pays for it if it's a matter of medical necessity. Otherwise, there might be a mangled body in a back alley. ... I'm also advocating an alternative -- a teenage pregnancy bill, where girls can have a baby without shame and go back to school. It's the most common reason for dropouts among teenagers."

During World War II, Hugh Carey fought in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany, and attained the rank of major. After the service, he worked for many years as an executive in his brother Edward's Peerless Oil and Chemical Corporation. Not until 1960, when he was 41 years old, did Carey decide to run for political office. He won his first congressional race and during the 1960s developed a national reputation for his liberal attitude on education, and programs for the elderly and handicapped.

His life has twice been touched by deep personal tragedy in recent years. An automobile accident in 1969 took the lives of his two eldest sons, and cancer claimed his wife Helen in 1974. A man who loves the company of other people, Carey enjoys such simple pleasures as cooking with friends and singing with his children.

Asked about the chief difference between himself and Republican challenger Perry Duryea, the governor replied with obvious glee: "I can't think of anything we have in common. ... I'll knock the Y right out of his name before I'm finished."

Generally known to be at his best in times of crisis, Carey said that whenever the pressures of his office become too great for him to handle alone, he drops into the chapel and asks for help. "It's a matter of privacy to me; I go where I'm not seen," he said. "I need help quite a lot. Also, I believe that New York is a very special place, with a resourcefulness that can't be matched anywhere in the world. When people have come together as New Yorkers, they have done amazing things."

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WESTSIDER CRAIG CLAIBORNE Food editor of the _New York Times_

3-10-79

"To be a good restaurant critic, you shouldn't have a conscience," says Craig Claiborne, food editor of the _New York Times_. "I used to visit restaurants twice a day, frequently seven days a week, and lie awake brooding about whether my reviews were honest -- whether I was hurting somebody who didn't deserve to be hurt."

Recognized throughout the United States as the father of modern restaurant criticism, Claiborne joined the _Times_ in 1957, and shortly thereafter was given the go-ahead to write reviews based on a four-star system. "The _New York Times_ made the decision. I was the instrument. It was the first newspaper that allowed a restaurant critic to say anything he wanted. It took a lot of guts, when a newspaper depends on advertising."

A 58-year-old bachelor whose soft voice still carries strong traces of his native Mississippi, Claiborne has few of the characteristics generally imagined of a Timesman. He is a true bon vivant, and does not appear to take himself or his work too seriously. He prefers to be called by his first name, is not a particularly fashionable dresser, and spends as little time as possible in Manhattan. In his lighter moods, such as that in which I find him on the day of our interview, he delights in telling jokes that are classics of schoolyard humor. The punch line, more often than not, is drowned by his own uproarious laughter.

Although he has maintained a Westside apartment for the past nine years, Claiborne spends most of his time at his house in East Hampton, Long Island, next door to Pierre Franey, one of the greatest French chefs in America, who, since 1974, has co-authored Claiborne's food articles for the _New York Times_ Sunday magazine. Recently he purchased a larger, more modern house about 15 minutes from Franey, which he plans to occupy shortly. The pair cook together about five times a week. Claiborne calls the house "my Taj Mahal -- my Xanadu."

He explains his jovial mood by saying that the night before, he attended a big dinner party for restaurateur Joe Baum at the Four Seasons. "It was an everybody-bring-something dinner. Jim Beard brought bread. I brought saviche (marinated raw fish), and Gael Greene brought some chocolate dessert. I got roaring drunk."

In spite of his earthiness, Claiborne unquestionably ranks as one of the leading food authorities of his time. His articles, which appear in the _Times_ each Monday, Wednesday and Sunday, cover every subject from the particulars of a dinner for Chinese Vice-Premier Teng Hsiao-ping in Washington (where Claiborne saw a rock group he had never heard of called the Osmonds) to the six most creative ways of preparing scallops. He has written numerous best-selling cookbooks, and he often travels around the world on fact-finding missions.

Claiborne's rise from obscurity to the most prestigious food job in America astonished no one more than himself, since his principal qualifications were a B.A. in journalism and one year's training at a hotel and restaurant school in Switzerland. However, the _Times_ knew exactly what they were looking for when Jane Nickerson retired in 1957, and Claiborne quickly proved to be the man of the hour. He threw himself into his work with boundless energy, writing no less than five columns a week, but his relationship with the newspaper eventually became a love hate affair. "Things came to the point where I couldn't go to a restaurant at night unless I came home here and had at least four Scotch and sodas and four martinis. And at this point, I took myself off to Africa. I stayed at the Stanley Hotel in Kenya, and I came back and said, 'Give me my benefits. I'm quitting this place.' They thought I was kidding."

He wasn't. Claiborne left the paper for almost two years. "Then the _Times_ came to me and said, 'Would you come back under any circumstances?' And I must confess that I felt a great emotional relief." He agreed to return if the paper would have someone else do the local restaurant reviews; he also requested that his neighbor and cooking partner Pierre Franey share the Sunday byline. The conditions were immediately met.

Claiborne's Westside apartment is painted green from floor to ceiling -- thus fulfilling an old fantasy of his. He describes the apartment itself as "gently shabby," but says that the building, constructed in 1883, is "the greatest residency in the entire island of Manhattan. You're catty-corner from Carnegie Hall, you're six minutes by foot from Lincoln Center, you can walk to any place on Broadway within seconds, and there are very few restaurants you couldn't get to within five minutes of this place." His favorite restaurant in all of Manhattan is the Shun Lee Palace (155 E. 55th St.), while two other favorites on the West Side are the Russian Tea Room and the Fuji Restaurant (238 W. 56th).

Asked about other interests or hobbies, Claiborne smiles mischievously and replies: "I'm having a $6000 Bolton stereo system put into my new Xanadu. You can clap your hands and change the tapes or records. I love music and sex and food, and outside of that, forget it!"

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WESTSIDER MARC CONNELLY Actor, director, producer, novelist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist

1-7-78

Eleven years ago, during my senior year in high school, I saw a movie just before Christmas that made a deep impression. It was a film of a stage play called _The Green Pastures_ -- a fascinating look at life in biblical times, performed by an all-black cast.