Part 11
David Lande, of Brason Associates, a distributing agency for publishers, helped the cause by writing to Mac Albert, of Simon and Schuster, a letter that said: “While this may not be news to you, I thought you might be interested in knowing that the Stuart Brent book review program has caught on like ‘wildfire’ in this area. Our personal experience has been that Stuart Brent has made more best sellers than Jack Paar. If this is good information for you, use it—if not, we’re still good friends.”
I went to New York and had an opportunity to talk with Mr. Simon, of Simon and Schuster, along with other editors, publishers, and booksellers. Mr. Simon said, “I like you because you are not interested in the I.Q. of man, but in his C.Q.”
“What, sir,” I said, “is the C.Q.?”
“His cultural quotient,” he replied. Then he said: “The book business is exploding. We have a lot of new schools, a lot of new libraries. So long as we believe that a child must attend school until eighteen years of age, we will need a great many textbooks. People are hungry for a lot of new things. Books are one way of appeasing that new hunger. No matter where you go or how small the community, you will usually find a new library building and new schools. The book business has a new, great future. We need more good writers to fill the need for books these days. That’s our problem, finding new writers, good writers.”
Most of the major New York publishers and some of the smaller ones bought time on Books and Brent to help initiate its showing on WOR-TV. The pre-taped half-hour shows made their debut simultaneously in New York and Los Angeles on September 12, 1960. In the October 26 issue of _Variety_, the showbusiness weekly, Thyra Samter Winslow said: “The best of the new live shows is certainly Stuart Brent, who reviews books, and books only, daily Monday through Friday, on WOR-TV.... His style is easy, intimate, calm, interesting. Who knows? He may give just the fillip needed to cause a renaissance of reading by the home girls. And about time, too!”
In Chicago, Paul Molloy, the _Sun-Times_ columnist, who had followed this apparent breakthrough with great enthusiasm, commented on the record of 2,700 letters received during the first four weeks of the broadcasts. “More interesting,” he said, “than the plaudits, however, is the fact that Brent went out on his own and sold the show because he’s convinced there’s a market for it. Most broadcasters aren’t, but they’ll have to come around to it. For 2,700 letters in four weeks is a lot of reaction. Even The Untouchables doesn’t touch this record. For my part, I find Brent the most scholarly and at the same time most down to earth teletalker in Chicago today. I’ve yet to leave one of his shows without having learned—or at least thought—something.”
But in spite of all the good sendoffs, TV syndication of Books and Brent failed to pick up the additional sponsorship necessary to make it a going concern. Hal Phillips, program director of KHJ-TV in Los Angeles, wrote: “After much discussion and consideration, we have determined that we will not be continuing with the ‘Books and Brent’ series after Friday, December 2, 1960. This in no way reflects upon our feeling of the top quality and standard of the program. The decision is based upon the lack of sales potential, etc. We have liked this series and have had fine viewer response from it and regret that we will have to discontinue these programs.”
This time, when my venture crumbled, I did not feel affected too deeply. I continued with my daily broadcasts from WBKB, fully prepared to accept their demise also. By this time I had a realistic sense of the pressures to which this industry is subject, and I knew this was a world in which I could not afford to get involved. At the end of my third successive year, the rumors began to circulate. Then Danny Schuffman dropped a hint at lunch one day. Danny has been carefully schooled in the diplomacy of the television jungle and unless you were listening with a third ear you would probably never catch the veiled meaning of the innocent remark.
After all, while nobody questioned the public service value of the show, the fact remained that the “rating” was at a standstill and there was apparently no possibility of getting a sponsor. At the same time that an estimated 20,000 were viewing me, 46,000 were supposed to be watching something on another channel, 61,000 on another, and 70,000 on still another. The competition must be met. The parent company in New York wants higher ratings. The stockholders want higher profits. Five days a week is too much exposure anyway. Books and Brent has had it. In a world about equally divided between those who are scared to death and those too bored to do anything anyway, the soundness of these operational judgments can scarcely be questioned.
When, finally, Red Quinlan got around to telling me all about this, I knew what was coming and offered no objections. It would have been inconceivable for us to part except as friends. And my mild, husbandly trepidation about breaking the news to Hope proved utterly groundless. She was simply delighted.
During the last weeks of my daily broadcasts, I planned every show with the greatest care and instead of reviewing new and popular fiction and non-fiction, I chose the most profound works that I felt capable of dealing with. In succession, I talked on Mann’s _The Magic Mountain_, Proust’s _Remembrance of Things Past_, Joyce’s _Ulysses_, Kafka’s _The Trial_, Camus’ _The Stranger_, Galsworthy’s short story, _Quality_, Northrop’s _Philosophical Anthropology_, Hemingway’s _The Old Man and the Sea_, _Hamlet_, _Job_, _Faust_, and _Peer Gynt_, Fromm’s _The Art of Loving_, Erickson’s _Childhood and Society_, Huxley’s _Brave New World_, Dostoevski’s _Crime and Punishment_; _Four Modern American Writers_, and Stendahl’s _The Red and the Black_. It was a pretty wild course in Western literature and the results were astounding, not only in viewer response, but also in the run on these books experienced by bookstores throughout the city and the suburbs.
Demand was particularly sensational for Father du Chardin’s _The Phenomena of Man_, also included in this series. A check of bookstores in the area showed sales or orders of approximately 900 copies in a single day. Over 2300 copies of this one title were sold in less than one month. Our shop sold almost 600 copies. A. C. McClurg’s reported: “We had 375 copies of _Phenomena of Man_ on hand before Brent’s review. By 3:30 that afternoon we sold them all and wired Harper and Brothers for 500 more.” McClurg’s had moved only 150 copies of the book during the previous five months.
When I reviewed _The Red and the Black_, we had only ten copies in stock at the shop (in the Modern Library edition) and sold them out immediately. We tried picking up more from McClurg’s, but they too were sold out. I then called one of the large department store book sections to see how they were doing. The clerk who answered the phone said, “No, we don’t have a copy in stock. We’re all sold out.”
“Was there a run on the book?” I said.
“Yes, as a matter of fact there was.”
“Can you tell me the reason?”
“Yes, you see they’ve just made a movie out of the book.”
He almost had me persuaded until I checked the theatres. There was no such movie—not playing Chicago, anyway.
Since I continually counseled men and women to accept life, to live it, to change themselves if necessary, but never to turn against creation or to abandon love and hope, never to fall for the machine or the corporation or to look for Father in their stocks and bonds, I was hardly in a position—even armed with the facts and figures—to try to fight the organization for the saving of Books and Brent. I did, however, two weeks before the series ended, take the audience into my confidence and explain the situation as fairly as I could. Mr. Quinlan had my talk monitored and agreed that I handled the matter with sincerity and truthfulness. There was nothing Red could do—he was tied to an organization that was too impersonal to respond to the concerns of a mere 20,000 people. We understood each other perfectly on this score.
But what happened after my announcement was something neither of us ever expected, even though we knew there were some people out there who bought books and wrote heartwarming letters. Phone calls began coming into the studio by the hundreds, letters by the thousands. One late afternoon, Red called me and said, “I knew you were good, but not that good. I just got a call from the asylum at Manteno protesting your cancellation. Even the madmen like you.” We both laughed but we were touched, too.
Letters, telegrams, and even long distance phone calls began to plague the chairman of the board in New York City. Letters by the score were sent to Mr. Minow in Washington. But the most beautiful letters were those directed to Hope and me, on every kind of paper, written in every kind of hand, some even in foreign languages. Until this has happened to you, it is impossible to imagine the feeling. The meaning of a mass medium strikes you and all at once it seems worthwhile to cope with the whole shabby machinery if you are able to serve through it.
Hope and I sat reading every bit of mail late into the night. She said: “Do you remember telling me what F. Scott Fitzgerald said?” I looked puzzled. “He said that America is a willingness of the heart,” she prompted.
I have indicated that Red Quinlan is a man who knows his business and his way around in it, and that he is also a man deeply enamored of the world of letters. He was even less ready than I to call it quits. He invited me to lunch one day, and after pointing out that, anyway, for the sake of my health the five-day-a-week grind was too much of a strain to be continued, he asked, “But how about once a week at a good hour with a sponsor?”
I hesitated. The columnists had broken the story of my demise at WBKB. Another station had shown interest and we had had preliminary talks. But the fact was, I couldn’t have asked for better treatment than WBKB had given me. Nobody ever told me what to do or how to slant my program. The crew on the set could not have been more helpful. I felt at home there. And while Hope had at first been concerned about the possibility of our lives being wrecked by the awful demands television exacted, she was now beginning to worry about the people who wrote in, telling about the needs that my show somehow ministered to. When Red sold the show on a weekly basis to Magikist, a leading rug cleaning establishment, there was really no doubt about my decision. When I met Mr. Gage, the president of the corporation, he said, “If my ten year old daughter likes you and my wife likes you, that’s enough for me. I’m sure everybody will like you. And we’ll try very hard to help you, too.” If you can just get that kind of sponsor, things become a good deal easier. But somehow, I do not think the woods are full of them.
Quinlan’s interest in conveying through television some of the excitement of the world of books and ideas also resulted in an interesting experimental program called “Sounding Board,” in which I was invited to moderate a panel of literary Chicagoans in a monthly two-hour late-evening discussion on arts and letters. Our regular panel consisted of Augie Spectorsky, editor of _Playboy Magazine_; Van Allen Bradley, literary editor of the _Daily News_; Fannie Butcher, literary editor of the Chicago _Tribune_; Hoke Norris, literary editor of the Chicago _Sun-Times_; Paul Carroll, then editor of the experimental literary magazine, _Big Table_; Hugh Duncan, author, and Dr. Daniel Boorstin, professor of American history at the University of Chicago. They were fine discussions and we kept them up for six months, but nobody would pick up the tab.
My approach to television performance, being untutored, is probably quite unorthodox. I do not work from notes. In preparation, I first read the book, then think about it, seeking connective links and related meanings. In the actual review of the book, I quite often stray into asides that assume greater importance than the review itself.
I never say to myself: this is the theme, this is the middle, this the end. I say: get into the heart of the book and let your mind distill it, and, as often happens, enlightening relationships with other books and ideas may develop.
I cannot perform in a state of lassitude. Before the cameras, I always find myself tightening up until the floor manager signals that I’m ON. For a moment, I am all tenseness, realizing that people are watching me, but in a few minutes I have forgotten this and am thinking about nothing but the book and the ideas I am talking about. Now I am carried by the mood and direction of thought. If I want to stand, I stand; if I want to sit, I sit; if I want to grimace, I grimace. Nothing is rehearsed or calculated in advance. All I can do is unfold a train of thought springing from the study that has preceded performance, and the toll is heavy. Sometimes after the show, I can barely straighten up, or I may be utterly dejected over my inability to say all I should have said. Then I leave the studio, moody and silent.
I never talk to anyone before a show except my director. He understands me and knows how easily I’m thrown. It can be a slight movement from the boom man or a variation in the countdown signal from the floor manager, something unexpected in the action of a camera man or a slight noise somewhere in the studio, and I react as though someone threw a glass of water in my face. Then I am off the track, floundering like a ship without a rudder. Sometimes I can right myself before the show is ended, sometimes not. Hence the frequent depression, for I feel that every show must be the best show possible, that “off” days are not permitted, and that I can never indulge myself in the attitude of, “Oh well, better one next time.” When people are watching and listening, you must perform, and perform your best.
Often my grammar goes haywire. I know better, but I can become helpless against the monster known as time. I have to fight time. I cannot hesitate or make erasures. So I plunge on, hoping that some one significant thought may emerge clearly—some thought perhaps as vital as that which animates the pages of _The Phenomena of Man_, calling on us to recognize the eternal core of faith and courage: Courage to rebel and faith in the realization of our own being. Courage that takes the self seriously; faith that is grounded in activity.
I hesitate to make any predictions about the future of television, as a means of communication or as a business. As a business, it must be run for profit. The argument is not about this point, but about the level of operation from which such profit shall be sought. From personal experience, I can say that TV does not have to constitute a blow to life itself. Perhaps many of us are “mindless in motion” and now sit “mindlessly motionless” in front of our TV sets. But I take heart in the certain knowledge that many men and women are not so much concerned with the camera eye as they are in finding a way back to the inward eye.
12 Life in the Theatre
There are even odder ways of life than sitting alone behind a desk in a little room lined with books waiting for someone to come in and talk with you, or delivering sermons on literature to the beady red eyes of a television camera. One of them is the theatre.
You may recall the scene in Kafka’s _The Trial_ in which K meets the Court Painter and goes to this innocuous madman’s room, ostensibly to learn more about the Judge who is to sit at the trial. The room is so tiny, K has to stand on the bed while the Painter pulls picture after picture from beneath this lone article of furniture, blows the dust off them into K’s face, and sells several to him. Although the reader recognizes from the beginning that it is all a tissue of lies and deception, K leaves feeling satisfied that at last he has someone on his side who will put in a “right” word for him. It is evident to what ends K will now go to bribe, cheat, blackmail, be made a total fool of, in the hope of getting someone to intervene in his fate. In addition to its comment upon a culture that would rather surrender identity than face up to its guilt, the scene is terribly funny, as well as terribly humiliating.
It is this scene that always comes to mind when I think of the nightmare of nonsense I lived through in the course of three weeks in the theatre. It happened one summer a few years ago when Hope and I had come down from Bark Point to check on the shop. I was answering a pile of letters when the phone rang. It was a man I had met sometime before who turned out to be business manager of a summer stock theatre operating in a suburb northwest of Chicago. He wondered if I would like to play a lead opposite Linda Darnell in the Kaufmann and Hart comedy, _The Royal Family_. The role was that of the theatrical agent, Oscar Wolfe, who theoretically functioned as a sane balance to a family of zany, childish, totally mischievous grown-ups (roughly modeled on the Barrymore clan).
Hope, who had grown up in Westchester society, admitted that when she was a girl attending summer theatre it had always been her secret wish to be a part of it. She thought it might be good fun, even though I had never acted in my life. So the business manager came over and I signed the contract, calling for a week of rehearsal and two weeks of performance.
Summer theatre around Chicago cannot be classified as an amateur undertaking, although part of its economics is based on utilizing large numbers of young people who want the “training” and generally avoiding the high costs involved in regular theatrical production. But top stars and personalities are booked, the shows are promoted to the public as professional offerings and are reviewed as such by the theatrical critics, and the whole enterprise is regarded as essential to the vitality of a “living theatre.” The outfit I signed up with was an established enterprise and, as a matter of fact, is still going. I was not entirely confident that I could deliver, but I had no doubt that I was associating myself with people who could.
The theatre itself was not a refashioned barn or circus tent set-up, but an actual theatre building, restored from previous incarnations as a movie and vaudeville house. I arrived on a lovely August morning but inside the theatre was in total darkness except for some lights on the stage. I made my way timidly down front where a number of people were sitting. Several nodded to me, and I nodded back. Presently a tall man got up on the stage and announced that he was going to direct the play. He said, however, that Miss Darnell had not yet arrived and, also, that there were not enough scripts to go around. We would begin with those who had their parts.
For the next three days, I sat in the darkness from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon. No one asked me to read, no one asked me to rehearse, practically no one talked to me at all. I managed a few words with Miss Darnell, who was gracious and charming, but I was beginning to wonder when I would be asked to act. Hope had been working with me on my lines, but it is one thing to know lines sitting down and quite another to remember them while trying to act and give them meaning before an audience.
I began to suspect that something was haywire. A friend who taught drama at a nearby college and often took character roles in stock confirmed my fears by assuring me that this play would never get off the ground. “It will never open,” he said.
We were to open on a Monday. It was already Friday and I had been on stage exactly once and nobody yet knew his part—I least of all. In addition to my fears, I was beginning to feel slighted. I wondered what I was doing in this dark, dank place, and what the rest thought they were doing, including the innumerable young men and women between sixteen and twenty years of age who were ostensibly developing their knowledge of the theatre through odd jobs such as wardrobe manager, program manager, etc. There didn’t seem much to manage and I wasn’t sure it was really a very healthy environment. By this time, a fair number of the cast had taken to screaming, which is something I am not used to among grown-ups for any extended period. I also had my doubts about a young man who spent most of his offstage moments sweet-talking a bulldog. I wondered if acting necessarily precluded any kind of emotional responsibility.
Saturday night the play preceding us closed. We rehearsed all that night. Sunday the theatre would be dark, and Monday _The Royal Family_ was to go on. The Saturday night rehearsal was initially delayed because one of the principals could not be found. Finally he was located, dead drunk, in a local tavern. It was now almost one a.m. and not even a walk-through with script in hand had yet been attempted. Instead the company was engaged in a welter of screeching, shouting, confusion, and recriminations. This was sheer, silly nonsense I decided, and went to see the business manager. I told him I’d be pleased to quit and offered to pay double my salary to any experienced actor he could get to replace me. I was at once threatened with a lawsuit.
At two in the morning, everyone was called on stage by the director, who made a little speech saying that he was just no longer able to direct the play, he couldn’t pull it together! At this, Miss Darnell walked off the stage, saying, “This play will not open on Monday or Tuesday or ever, unless something is done immediately.” After all, she had a reputation to uphold.
Thereupon, the director returned with a further announcement. It so happened, he said, that a brilliantly gifted young New York director was “visiting here between important plays” and he had consented to pull the play together for us! Our gift of Providence then stepped forward and we began to rehearse.
When my cue came and I offered my lines, the new director said: “The Oscar Wolfe part is really just an afterthought. The show will play just as well without the Wolfe character appearing at all.”
“Fine,” I said, but pandemonium had already broken loose as the former director and some of the actors took issue with this new twist. We were already missing one actor and now this new director wanted to sack me. Well, I had asked for it, but Miss Darnell and the others persuaded me to stick with it. The rehearsal continued.
At five a.m. a halt was called and the treasurer of the theatre asked to say a few words. Under Equity rules, he reminded us, we were entitled to overtime for extra rehearsal. He asked us to waive this for the sake of the play. I waited silently to see what the general reaction would be. It didn’t take long to find out: Nothing doing, play or no play! I went along with them on that. What I couldn’t understand was why they put up with all they did: the filthy little cubicles that served as dressing rooms, the rats and cockroaches that scudded across the floor, the lack of any backstage source of drinking water—the whole atmosphere seemed deliberately designed to make an actor’s life completely insupportable. And now the management was sulking because the actors didn’t have enough “love for the theatre” to forgo their pay for overtime.
At six a.m. it was decided that rehearsal would resume at one o’clock in the afternoon. As we were about to leave, too tired to care any longer about anything, the director came up and said he was sure I must have misunderstood him. He would indeed be sorry if I left the show or if he had hurt my feelings. What he had really meant to say was that the Oscar Wolfe part lends credence to the movement and meaning of the play. I was glad to leave it at that.