Underfoot In Show Business (16 page)

“It’s beautiful.”

And I didn’t even know I was crying till Herbie said:

“Well, it’s nothin’ to bawl about, honey!”

Two days later, Rosemary moved into a flat on the floor above mine, and you have no idea what having her overhead meant to me in the three wild and woolly years of Matinee Theatre. All the other Matinee writers had to run down to Radio City to Ethel’s office all the time. I never had to leave the house. Rosemary would come home at six, bringing me a book or play to adapt. I’d write the first draft and when it was finished leave it in her mailbox. She’d read it the next day, leave the office an hour early and come to my apartment for cocktails and a story conference. I’d write the revisions and then run up the back stairs to her apartment with the final version, and she’d take it to the office the next morning and bring home a new assignment for me that evening.

I say “that evening” because nobody connected with the show ever got a day off. Matinee Theatre was the most frenzied operation in the history of television.

Out in Hollywood, under Albert McCleery, were two assistant producers, ten directors, two story editors and twenty writers. In New York, under Ethel, were three readers, two story editors and fifty to sixty writers. There were five plays in rehearsal in Hollywood at all times. On a given Sunday, Monday’s show would be in its sixth and last day of rehearsal, Tuesday’s in its fifth day, Wednesday’s in its fourth—and so on, with Albert overseeing (presumably by bicycle) all five. In New York, all Ethel Frank had to do was find twenty properties a month, clear the literary rights, assign the scripts, read and approve the final edited versions and mail them to Hollywood at a rate which ensured a backlog of a month’s scripts.

With so many scripts to assign, Ethel was frequently forced to gamble on new and untried writers, and every few months one of them turned in an unusable script. Since there was no money in the budget for a new script, the crisis might have been acute. Thanks to me–Miss Big-Mouth–Matinee Theatre found a simple solution to the problem.

The first day an unproducible script was turned in, Rosemary read it and left it on Ethel’s desk with a note:

“Ethel: This is a dog. What do we do now?”

It happened that on that day I finished a script just before lunch. I took advantage of the rare, free afternoon to stroll down through the park and on to Rockefeller Center to pay a social call on my friends in the Matinee Theatre office. I wandered into Ethel’s private office and found her sunk in gloom. She showed me Rosemary’s note and then invited me to read the first page of the “dog.” The script was not just unproducible, it was illiterate.

“What do you do when this happens?” I asked.

“What can I do?” Ethel demanded. “We’ve got a hundred dollars left in the budget! I can’t get a script written on that!”

Ethel was my friend, wasn’t she? Thanks to her, I was making piles of money and living in a breathtaking one-and-a-half-room palace, wasn’t I?

“I’ll do it over for you, Ethel,” I said.

“We could only pay you a hundred bucks for it!” cried Ethel. (An hour script paid a thousand.)

“That’s all right, Ethel,” I said.

“You’d have to write a whole new script!” cried Ethel.

“That’s all right, Ethel,” I said.

“We need it in a week!” cried Ethel. (An hour script normally took four weeks or five.)

“That’s all right, Ethel,” I said.

I hurried home with the crisis assignment, I slaved for seven days and seven evenings and managed to turn in the script on time. Ethel and Rosemary read it and liked it and showered me with praise and gratitude and admiration, and what the two of them did to me from then on I have trouble believing, even now. As Rosemary had the nerve to reconstruct one of their typical crisis conversations for me, it went like this:

I’d be hard at work trying to reduce
Pride and Prejudice
to eight characters and fifty minutes, while down at the Matinee office Rosemary was hurrying into Ethel’s office with an illiterate script and the dread pronouncement: “It’s a dog!”

“It can’t be!” Ethel would snarl. “Albert’s hired a star for it! It goes into rehearsal next Monday!”

“Well, you’re going to have to get a new script written in three days, then!” Rosemary would say. And she and Ethel would eye each other.

“How,” Ethel would inquire delicately, “is she feeling?”

“I could ask her,” Rosemary would offer nervously.

“I’ll do it,” Ethel would say. “She can hold up on
Pride and Prejudice
till the weekend and still finish on time; she’s fast.”

A minute later my phone would ring and Ethel would ask brightly:

“How do you feel, hon? Do you feel strong?”

Occasionally it was Rosemary who phoned and, in a voice dripping with catastrophe, said:

“Dear, we’re in a
terrible
jam, I know how tired you are, but—”

I resurrected so many dead dogs for Matinee that after a while, when the phone rang, a sixth sense told me Ethel or Rosemary was at the other end with another dog, and I’d pick up the phone and say briskly:

“City Pound.”

I couldn’t sign my name to those scripts, of course. The only person who could legally rewrite unusable scripts without being paid for it was the story editor. So each time, I was put on the show’s payroll as a story editor. But since story editors were not entitled to screen credit for the rewriting they did, it was necessary for me to have a pseudonym. If you ever run across a television script by Herman Knight, I wrote it. Herman wasn’t great but he was dirt-cheap and fast as the wind.

Herman and I were both worn out by the beginning of Matinee’s third year. I was working on the adaptation of a disorganized Chinese fantasy called
The Carefree Tree
, when the phone rang and a secretary said: “Ethel Frank calling.”

“Hon,” said Ethel. “Drop
The Carefree Tree
, you can go back to it later. Come on down, I have a special assignment for you.”

“No,” I said.

“It’s not a dog, it’s a big assignment!” said Ethel, and added solemnly: “We have a new sponsor. You’re going to do their first show.”

This so thoroughly baffled me I left
The Carefree
Tree
in the typewriter and went down to the Matinee office out of sheer curiosity.

The cost of producing Matinee five days a week, live and in color, meant that the show was shared by four or five sponsors. This multiple sponsorship kept the show, and the writers, beyond the reach of corporation or ad agency interference, since no sponsor could hope to control a show of which he owned only one fifth. Plus which, sponsors were constantly signing on and dropping off the Matinee roster the way you’d hop on or off a bus. I couldn’t imagine any sponsor whose arrival Ethel would announce with such solemnity.

She and Rosemary were in a huddle over a list of names when I walked in.

Ethel looked up.

“We’re going to produce a series of special plays,” she said, “for the United Lutheran Church in America.”

It shook me. It shook all three of us.

“You’re going to write the first script,” said Ethel. “We’re buying that Ozark play you liked, if the Lutherans okay it.”

“Ethel,” I said, “do you think I’m the ideal writer for the United Lutheran Church?”

Ethel looked pious.

“The Lutherans,” she intoned, “are remarkable men. They told me they do not have the slightest interest in the religious denomination of the writer.”

“That may very well be,” I said, “but I doubt if they had Reform Judaism in mind.”

Rosemary laughed.

“All I need on this show is to run around trying to find six Lutheran writers,” said Ethel bitterly.

“Well, we ought to find them a Lutheran story editor, dear!” said Rosemary. Rosemary had a Catholic father and a Methodist mother, the other story editor was Jewish, and neither of them had time to take on additional scripts.

It was several days later that Ethel phoned to say she’d found a story editor for the Lutherans and I went down to the office and met Katherine, a gentle, blonde Episcopalian. (Said Ethel morosely: “In this town they’re lucky I found them a Protestant.”)

In a simple black dress with a white collar and a retiring violet lipstick, Katherine was pronounced very holy-looking, and she trotted off to meet the Lutherans with the Ozark play under her arm. The play was the story of a fifteen-year-old girl in the backwoods of Arkansas, all of whose yearnings were focused on a red dress in a mail-order catalogue. Neglected by ignorant parents and ignored by a preoccupied schoolteacher, the girl allowed a boy to make love to her in return for money to buy the red dress; she became pregnant and was driven to a fatal, self-inflicted abortion. I had read the play a few years earlier for Monograph and had recommended it to Ethel as one we might somehow sanitize for television.

The Lutherans liked the play, and they didn’t want it sanitized. They wanted plays that dealt with the problems confronting all mid-twentieth-century churches, and the teenager’s tragedy was grimly familiar to them. They approved the script and directed that it be produced as their Easter show.

Katherine and I worked hard on the script, and when it was finished copies were sent to the six Lutherans in charge of the project. All six read the script and then invited Katherine and me to a dinner conference to discuss revisions. They were charming hosts and it wasn’t till coffee was served that the six copies of the script were passed to Katherine and me, each with notes in the margins suggesting revisions. All the revisions were minor. But one particular margin note appeared prominently on every script: “WHERE EASTER?” My heritage had caught up with me; I’d gone and left Easter out of the Easter script.

We assured the Lutherans that Easter would be prominently featured in the final version, the conference ended and I went home to do the revisions. A week later, the final revised script was approved by the Lutherans and airmailed to Albert in Hollywood. It went into rehearsal on a Thursday.

On Friday, the NBC censorship office telephoned Albert and ordered him to cancel the show. NBC censorship was sent a copy of every Matinee script as a matter of form, and the only one it ever ordered off the air as too immoral for the television industry was the first script sponsored by the Lutheran Church.

Ethel, Rosemary and Katherine sat in the East Coast Matinee office that afternoon in a kind of paralysis, wondering how to tell the Lutherans they were too sinful for television. But out in Hollywood, Albert McCleery was phoning NBC, beginning with the censorship office and working his way straight up to the top-level executives, repeating the same message to each:

“You go ahead and cancel this show,” he was shouting, “and I’ll see to it that every newspaper from New York to California carries the story of how NBC censored the Lutheran Church off the air!”

Late that afternoon, NBC backed down and rehearsals of the play were allowed to proceed.

My last unsettling experience unsettled me clear out of the Annex.

Not long after Matinee Theatre went off the air, I won a fellowship from CBS. I was given five thousand dollars on which to work for a year on TV dramatizations of American history. Sitting in the bathtub, the day after I won this contest, I made a momentous decision: henceforth I would stop looking down on television. I would stop writing bad plays and commit myself unreservedly to television scripts. I even toyed with the possibility of buying a TV set.

Fired by this decision, I flung myself into the fellowship year. I researched for months in libraries, I wrote a ninety-minute script, rewrote it under the supervision of one of the Playhouse 90 producers and then plunged into a series of outlines for more ninety-minute scripts to come.

And all this time, behind my back, television, which had waited to do it till I’d made my great bathtub decision, now went completely to pot. First, the quiz-show scandals broke. Then the CBS executives in charge of the fellowship project were forced out of CBS. Then Playhouse 90 went off the air. Then every other dramatic show went off the air, to be replaced by Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, and fifty imitations of each. Most devastating of all, I woke up at the end of my fellowship year to discover that the entire television industry had packed up and moved to Hollywood where it was now permanently resettled.

I was unwilling (to put it mildly) to follow Gunsmoke and Perry Mason to Hollywood; westerns bored me and nothing could induce me to revert to shabby TV whodunits. No need to worry. I told myself. Ethel and Albert were bound to get a new show, produced in Hollywood and written in New York.

And sure enough, one day in the fall of 1960, Ethel phoned with the long-awaited words:

“Albert and I have a new show.”

“Hallelujah,” I said. “What is it?”

“I just want you to realize,” said Ethel, “that we’re almost the only show that’s still written on the East Coast. And East or West, dear, if you want to work in television you’re going to have to write for this kind of show. It’s all they’re doing now.”

“Ethel,” I said, “what’s the show?”

“The Adventures of Ellery Queen,” she said.