Professional Entertainment – People Pay to See or Hear It – Page 8

The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue

The Book of the Week is “The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue” by Robert Klein, published in 1991. This is a compilation of the moments most memorable to the author during the first 25 years of his existence.

The author grew up in the Bronx in the 1940’s and 50’s. He attended P.S. 94 and DeWitt Clinton High School. His first college year was spent trying to fulfill his parents’ dream of having a doctor for a son. However, he possessed much greater talent in the performing arts.

In 1967, after he had been “discovered,” Klein, doing standup comedy, was mentored by Rodney Dangerfield at the Improvisation Club in Manhattan.

Read the book to learn of the author’s career success, of his many sexual encounters, and one during which “She wanted it from every conceivable position, and with such passion and ferocity that I feared the occupants of the adjacent room would call the police or an ambulance.”

Act One

The Book of the Week is “Act One” by Moss Hart, published in 1959.

In his teen years in the 1920’s, the author had a passionate desire to work in the theater on Broadway in some capacity. However, his childhood of dire poverty, limited formal education and dysfunctional family were hardships he had to overcome to achieve his dream.

It was a major triumph for him to snag the position of office boy for a booking agent by a random twist of fate. However, he tempted fate too early. He then tried his hand at acting. He was an eighteen-year-old playing the role of a sixty-year-old man. When that gig ended, another chance occurrence with an acquaintance led him to directing plays in the evenings, and slaving away as a social director at various summer camps for several years, while plugging away at the part of aspiring playwright.

Read the book to learn all the sordid tribulations Hart endured in order to find fortune and fame, as well as the secret to how he fixed the third act of his first Broadway play, and how he came to be assisted by one of the great playwrights of his generation.

Talking Back

The Book of the Week is “Talking Back” by Andrea Mitchell, published in 2005. This is the career memoir of a TV journalist at NBC.

Mitchell started her career in the mid-1960’s covering local politics in Philadelphia. Her desire to cover national politics necessitated a move to Washington, D.C. Through the decades, she witnessed and reported on various presidential campaigns and administrations– good, bad and ugly. She traveled the world extensively, and conveyed lessons on history and politics that the nation’s leaders failed to learn.

“In administrations that lack discipline, or are led by chiefs of staff short on character or judgment… underlings desperate to please the boss [president] start breaking rules.”

There were ironies, too. During the Iran-Contra scandal, the Iranians didn’t know they were paying for an anti-Communist operation whose money was laundered through Israel– a sworn enemy of Iran.

The author’s career had its ups and downs. In the late 1980’s, she was assigned to cover Capitol Hill rather than serve as Chief White House Correspondent. The former position conferred lesser status. However, she had more freedom of movement and topics on which to report, due to her distance from the president– who required an entourage and heavy security. She could pursue important stories on foreign policy, the budget, or energy legislation, rather than public relations events and sensationalism. In 1993, she was named to the latter position, but could no longer be a political analyst on the Today show, as at that time, it was considered a conflict of interest to have the same person both report and analyze political news.

Mitchell covered the Savings and Loan scandal, a common occurrence in American financial history. A pattern of abuse in the private sector, aided and abetted by government, was followed by a taxpayer bailout.

Prior to the First Gulf War, “Dick Cheney and Colin Powell told us that occupying Iraq would saddle America with the burden of running it.” It was difficult enough for people from the three major sects of Islam to live together peacefully in the same country without a foreign power’s attempting to supervise a transition to a different political system.

Controversy over gender and racial issues came to the fore after the Anita Hill – Clarence Thomas episode. The catch-22 for females trying to build their careers, especially in male-dominated fields (such as TV news) was that if they complained of sexual harassment, they’d be complaining to its very perpetrators. The times, they are a changin’.

In 1992, Mitchell, in reporting on Bill Clinton’s presidential run, pursued an unending series of campaign scandals. Two years later, she was present at a press conference at which Hillary Clinton was responding to Whitewater accusations. “It was a flawless performance, but the first lady still would not admit to any errors of law or judgment in her financial dealings. And behind her calm gaze, I saw a woman still enraged that people would even question her ethics.”

In the mid-90’s, the author was required to have two reputable news sources before she was allowed to go on the air with a big news scoop. Read the book to learn of other ways “news” gathering and reporting have changed through the decades, and Mitchell’s experiences dealing with the changes.

Up Late With Joe Franklin

The Book of the Week is “Up Late With Joe Franklin” by Joe Franklin with R.J. Marx, published in 1995. This is the career memoir of an entertainment jockey.

Franklin started his career in radio, playing old records. He was a compulsive hoarder of them. When he moved to television, he introduced old movies. Then he became a late, late night talk show host. Although Franklin had popular shows that ran for years and years, fewer people have heard of him than of other talk show hosts because his shows ran at 1am or later.

Read the book to learn how Franklin achieved his entertainment success, and a little trivia about tens (out of hundreds) of the celebrity-guests Franklin had on his shows, which ones he interviewed before they were famous, and the ones he claims he made famous.

Reporting Live

The Book of the Week is “Reporting Live” by Lesley Stahl, published in 1999. This career memoir tells how the author clawed her way to the top of the TV news ladder (especially political news) as a female who eventually started a family, beginning in the early 1970’s, when “… the television networks were scouring the country for women and blacks with any news experience at all” to comply with affirmative action initiatives.

In her early 30’s, the author had a couple of years under her belt when she started gathering stories for CBS radio news. Television news people considered themselves superior to those in radio. Stahl worked as a reporter around the clock to prove her worth to everyone around her.

Covering the Watergate scandal was a particularly trying endeavor for all news organizations. The author was assigned, at dawn, to stake out the homes of the accused in order to stick a microphone in their faces and shout questions at them in front of the camera, and attend press conferences. Nixon was reelected despite his treachery, because when the economy is on an even keel, voters are hesitant to change horses in midstream, even when there are rumors of wrongdoing, according to Stahl.

During the 1976 presidential campaign, the author’s crew used new-fangled cameras that weighed 12 lbs, whose batteries weighed 20 lbs and were supposed to last an hour but never did. There was separate unreliable equipment imported from Japan for the soundmen, that weighed 50-60 lbs.

Stahl had no guilt about working her normal (extremely long) hours during her pregnancy and afterwards, due to her mother’s commanding reassurance that her career should come first. In early 1979, when she was named White House correspondent, her bosses asked her whether she was comfortable being away from her infant daughter, given the demands of her job. They would never have asked that of a man.

Reagan decreased taxes for the wealthy and imposed severe budget cuts in social programs. He appointed an anti-environmentalist to run the EPA. He pushed the national debt to an all-time high and significantly increased military spending. His speeches often contradicted what he was actually doing. Nonetheless, his image as Mr. Charisma endeared people to him on a personal level. The charm of the messenger made people blind to the message. They ignored his numerous actions that seriously damaged the country in many ways during his administration. One of the first problems he caused was a deep recession in 1982. His poll numbers sank, so of course his staff: quarreled, tried to plug the leaks, and bashed the media.

When Stahl’s daughter was four, she and her husband had to undergo a laborious preschool application process. “This was far more of a strain than deadlines or prime time news conferences.”

In the early 1980’s, Stahl’s producer had to do extensive planning when her reporting required her to follow the travels of the president for a couple of days from rural Iowa to Des Moines. The producer had to order rotary-dial phones for every stop, large hotel rooms in which to edit video, motorcycle carriers in which to run video, a microwave transmission facility, and a helicopter to fly the video to Des Moines. These resources were pooled with the other networks. Anyway, the White House deliberately pulled the plug on the audio of the reporters during the president’s speech.

In 1983, CBS changed the look of its evening news slot to show one star: Dan Rather. The other networks followed suit. “Now there were three young, handsome men at the three helms… and I [Stahl] was about to turn 42, the age past which newswomen weren’t supposed to survive on television.”

Read the book to learn what transpired when Lawrence Tisch took over CBS, how the “news” changed in terms of content, how Stahl topped off her career, and much more.

That Was the Life

The Book of the Week is “That Was the Life” by Dora Jane Hamblin, published in 1977. The original Life magazine was launched in November 1936. The weekly publication let photos tell news stories, with brief captions.

Caption-writing was laborious, fraught with “cooks”– at least ten of them, spoiling the broth at a layout session. Making headlines fit was a big challenge.

Most Life photographers had unlimited expense accounts (and spared no expense on transportation, food and equipment), were arrogant, and chased after what today would be considered non-stories. They got local authorities to turn outdoor public areas into photo studios using generators, stroboscopic lights, klieg lights, electric wires, a crane, etc., transported by flatbed truck. They sometimes made tens of people wait for hours in difficult poses while preparing all that. “Writers and editors, faced with the need to make even the most banal occurrence seem important, reached always for superlatives or piquant details and, if they couldn’t find them…” would stretch the truth. They thought their jobs were the most important in the world. They had such an inflated sense of self.

Photos were published in the magazine as is, with no doctoring, through the 1950’s, however. There was even a “Chinese firewall” between the editorial and the ad departments, to prevent the appearance of favorable reportorial coverage of advertisers. Bureau chiefs would compete by sending reporters to chase an international story with wasteful redundancy.

When there were big stories to cover, Life covered them. In summer 1958, the magazine threw a budget-busting party to get a scoop on the U.S. Navy’s current underwater war toys. Sailors and the females hired to keep them company, had a grand old time enjoying rich food, alcohol and dancing. The following day, hung over staffers’ typewriters were clicking with the story. In early 1965, Life had more than thirty people fly eight hours to London to cover Winston Churchill’s funeral.

Part of the 1950’s gravy train included an independent study program for lucky employees, who were paid over years to basically write a PhD dissertation, parts of which became magazine articles. Reporters traveled, at times, to places like Marrakech, Baghdad and the Nile Valley, and withstood harsh conditions, such as camping out in a snow-bound military post heated by a wood-burning stove, where wolves were present. Other reporters tested culinary recipes or sampled restaurant food for weeks on the company’s dime.

By 1956, there were three versions of the magazine: in America and Canada, in Spanish for Latin America, and Life International. At its peak, eight million copies of the first version and almost a million of the third version were sold per week. Life‘s United States competition included Look magazine, the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. In Europe, subscribers could purchase Paris Match in France, Europeo in Italy, the Daily Express in London, and Quick, or Der Stern in Germany, instead of Life.

Life employees worked around the clock with deadline pressure for all, and frequent travel for some, so their social lives were usually spent with their colleagues; many celebrations were hosted and paid for by their workplace. Office supplies were provided for staffers’ personal use, and they got a library, post-office and medical services in-house.

Read the book to learn of other characteristics of that bygone era of magazine publishing.

CNN, The Inside Story

The Book of the Week is “CNN, The Inside Story” by Hank Whittemore, published in 1990. This volume tells the history of CNN, Cable News Network. The point of CNN was to create an alternative to the then-three networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, that monopolized American TV.

In 1976, Ted Turner owned a company that provided cable TV via satellite, consisting of games of the professional sports teams owned by him, and movies. By the end of the 1970’s his goal was to start a 24-hour cable network of just news. He was like the American president Donald Trump in that “…Turner had set the goal and the deadline and the sense of mission; and now, as he always did, he was putting together the people who knew how to make it happen.” However, the entertainment industry in the United States is a completely different animal from the federal government.

Nevertheless, a headquarters– a previously decrepit structure, gutted and created from scratch– for the new cable channel in Atlanta, had been readied sufficiently to provide minimal functionality in six months. The secretary of Reese Schonfeld, a high executive in the venture, had this to say, “… they had sketched out the whole newsroom one night on the back of a grocery bag…”

Launched in mid-1980, CNN evolved into a “revolving door” station (viewers tuned in periodically to see whether there was breaking news; they didn’t watch it every second) because it had to do things on the cheap and fill 24 hours of airtime every 24 hours. The big three networks practiced cartelizing behavior in order to shut CNN out of information-sharing. So CNN sued all parties involved, not just the networks.

Read the book to learn of what became of CNN, up until the book’s writing.

The Jew in American Sports

The Book of the Week is “The Jew in American Sports” by Harold U. Ribalow and Meir Z. Ribalow, originally published in 1952, revised most recently in 1985.

The authors contended that the achievements of the athletes who were perceived to be Jewish, were all the more remarkable, considering that they had to overcome religious discrimination in addition to the fierce competition, rigors of training and harsh traveling conditions they had to endure in their generations. That is why the authors compiled this specific list of athletes.

The authors said Hank Greenberg might have been better than Babe Ruth in the 1930’s. “… Ruth was left handed and aimed at a 296 foot wall at Yankee Stadium most of the time. The park was built for him. Greenberg, right handed, aimed at a fence 340 feet away… he fell only two [homeruns] shy of Ruth’s record!” Later ballplayers had more opportunities to break records with lengthier seasons, stadiums easier to hit in, not to mention performance-enhancing drugs. Other baseball standouts included Al Rosen, Moe Berg and Sandy Koufax.

Jews became proficient in professional boxing in the early 20th century due to abuses they suffered at the hands of local neighborhood thugs of rival ethnicities, such as Irish and Italian. The New York City law against boxing was relaxed when Mayor Jimmy Walker saw the appeal of the sport among World War I veterans.

Benny Leonard was a Jewish boxer who benefited from that. He became rich and famous and from the mid-1920’s into the 1930’s, used his fame to purchase a hockey team, act in Vaudeville, write about sports and teach a course on pugilism at City College, New York. After his failed comeback, he tried his hand at refereeing, Zionism and helping to sponsor a Jewish Olympics in Tel Aviv.

Harry Newman, like Benny Friedman before him, played exceptionally great college football in the early 1930’s at the University of Michigan. In 1932, the team was undefeated and untied. “He had a hand in every winning play in every single game.” Benny Friedman, who played with the (professional) New York Giants, was popular with Jewish fans. The Giants saw Newman’s potential to keep up the good work, so they agreed to an irregular contractual provision that gave Newman a percentage of home attendance revenue.

In 1928, Irving Jaffee competed as a speed skater in the Olympics. When a Norwegian judge committed religious discrimination against Jaffee, a tremendous hue and cry erupted from athletes and the International Olympic Committee to award Jaffee a deserved gold medal. The American media picked up the story so the athlete became more famous than otherwise.

Read the book to learn about many other American athletes perceived to be Jewish, who overcame hardships and prejudice to rock the sports world with their feats.

inventing late night

The Book of the Week is “inventing late night (sic), Steve Allen and the original tonight show (sic)” by ben alba, published in 2005. This slightly sloppily edited book tells how Steve Allen created the format for late night talk shows on American television, starting in the early 1950’s.

When television was in its infancy, Allen’s original ad-libbing and off-the-wall physical comedy made audiences laugh through the 1950’s. However, since history is written by the most prolific propagandists, and Allen was modest and less than aggressive at self-promotion, other entertainment-industry moguls such as Johnny Carson and his ilk, bragged that they were the ones amusing Americans in an unprecedented way on their late-night talk shows. David Letterman was one of the few who attributed his show’s stunts to Allen’s ideas.

In autumn 1954, Pat Weaver, president of NBC, gave Allen free rein to do whatever he wanted on his new, unrehearsed, live (!) program, “Tonight!” What resulted was an unscripted variety show featuring insane stunts, a band, singers, celebrity guests, news and theater reviews. In planning each weeknight’s episode, Allen would loosely specify the number of minutes of each segment– but continue with a segment if it got a great audience response, and cut the next act on the spot. If the show was a bit slow, he would go into the audience to converse with them. Every minute of airtime was unpredictable. The only segment that was usually predictable, was the music.

Unfortunately, episodes of the taped, live shows were later incinerated due to lack of storage space at the network. Shortly after the airing of the show, the only way for the general public and cast and crew to get a recording was to buy one– a kinescope for $160. The singers made about $300 a week.

Eydie Gorme had this to say: “All of us working singers would go the Brill Building [in Manhattan] and get all the new sheet music, which they gave you free in those days.” Other celebrities who appeared on the show and were interviewed for this book, lamented that of late, performers of recent decades have resorted to obscenity and vulgarity to elicit cheap laughs from the audience, because they lack talent and creativity. Sadly, most audience members are unaware that their intelligence is being insulted. Even so, the younger ones are unaware of how high Steve Allen set the bar for quality entertainment.

Even more impressive– Allen’s show had TWO writers and twenty band members, while nowadays, late-night shows have TWENTY writers and five or six band members.

Read the book to learn the specifics of Allen’s stunts, antics, routines and style, and what changed when he started a second talk show simultaneously with what became “The Tonight Show.”

Rebel Without Applause

The Book of the Week is “Rebel Without Applause” by Jay Landesman, published in 1987. This ebook-autobiography has a few slightly distracting misspellings, but reveals the zeitgeist of Landesman’s generation.

Landesman was born in 1920. The talents of the author and his two brothers and sister differed considerably. Thus, he and his siblings got along well, as they weren’t in competition. However, his mother had control issues, so his parents opened separate antique shops; his mother in St Louis, and his father in Houston.

Landesman became distracted from the family business, and got into magazine publishing in New York. He co-founded “Neurotica”– launched in March 1948. The publication contained articles of famous writers’ anxieties to which readers could relate. Sex was a taboo topic of discussion but violence was all the rage.

In 1949, Landesman dared to ask for a divorce from his first wife. Describing himself as a “respectable Jewish boy” he later met someone new, who had looked up his family in “Dun & Bradstreet”– the keeper of the data in those days.

Landesman had two sons with his second wife, Fran. Their wealth allowed them to hire a nanny. “We were like any other ordinary American family enjoying the Ed Sullivan Show. Instead of a six-pack, we shared a couple of joints.”

Read the book to learn of what later transpired with the author’s second wife, about their collaboration on theater productions, his relationship with Lenny Bruce, and where the family moved to and why.