Street Gang (11 page)

Ogg was offered a job on a summer replacement series, where again her responsibilities were clerical and her performance subpar. “I had the production skills but I didn’t type fast enough,” Ogg said. She then became a secretary with the network’s Sunday-night institution,
The Ed Sullivan Show
. That ended disastrously one Sunday afternoon during dress rehearsal, when Sullivan demanded that an introduction be revised and called out for secretarial assistance. The women of the secretarial pool worked Sundays on a rotating basis, and it was Ogg’s week. “Can you take dictation?” Sullivan asked. “No, I can’t,” Ogg said. Furious, Sullivan steamed off, and on Monday morning Ogg was fired.

But thanks to the good graces of Dave Connell, her nine-lives secretarial career got a final reprieve when she filled an opening to type scripts for
Captain Kangaroo
. Having a seat in the bullpen among the irreverent, well-schooled wits of the production staff was like answering the phone at the
Harvard Lampoon
. One day, Ogg told Whedon and Stone she was considering ditching her Dutch surname and adopting a more neutral stage name. Unsure of what it should be, she asked for their help. After caucusing in the hallway, they returned with a suggestion. “We’ve got it!” Stone said. “Tuesday Ogg!”

The surname sweepstakes ended with Beverley adopting Owen as a stage name. She got an agent, took auditions, and snagged a small role on the daytime serial
As the World Turns
, working weekends at
Captain Kangaroo
to make up for acting time away from the office. Dave Connell, who had done some acting himself during his years in the air force, approved the flex hours.

One spring evening, while Beverley was returning home from a theater performance, she stepped off a bus just as Stone was pulling up to a stoplight in his Triumph TR3, top down. “He gave me a ride home and we ended up talking,” Owen said.

With that a second secret workplace romance blossomed.

 

After four years the grind of pumping out two live daily shows and overseeing the operation began to weigh heavily on Keeshan. But even when production of
Captain Kangaroo
went to videotape, eliminating the second show and the need for arriving for work before dawn, the more carefree, playful spirit that had once defined his studio demeanor curiously withered. “Bob had a hot Irish temper and he didn’t mind using it,” said Sam Gibbon, who became educational director of Robert Keeshan Associates. On a good day, working on the show “was like living through a very secure childhood an hour at a time. It was an enormous refuge. But there were lots of stormy periods, difficulties, and arguments.”

Offstage, Keeshan had a quick-trigger temper and an acid tongue, and, as chief executive of Robert Keeshan Associates, his tightfisted, demanding managerial style spread enmity to a wounded staff. “He would never hold back on his feelings,” said Bob Colleary, the longtime head writer. “There were days when he did not want to be on the set, and other days when he was happy to be there. We had all the ups and downs you might expect, working under those conditions.”

The stress and uncertainties of dealing with Keeshan occurred particularly during what some say was a difficult period in his personal life. The boss’s moods fused a bond among the writers, whose work Keeshan often dismissed as “crap.” Colleary recalls that during a reception in Washington, he introduced the production team as his “unemployable staff.” After work, the group would commiserate over cocktails. “There was a bar across the street from the studio that sold a triple martini for a dollar fifty and it got a lot of us in deep trouble,” Whedon said. “It was the hardest-drinking crowd I ever worked with. The joke was, we loved the Captain but hated Keeshan.”

On weekends, production staff members were dragooned into accompanying Keeshan to his frequent concert appearances with symphony orchestras. Staff members were not paid for working these live “Fun with Music” shows; it was considered part of the job. “The concerts were difficult and you didn’t get a weekend off, and we all grumbled and griped about having to go, but in the end it was like a reward,” Gibbon said. “The direct contact with an audience was a real replenishment. You saw what Captain Kangaroo was doing for kids, and you felt gratified. To see Keeshan with fifteen hundred kids was just a revelation. His instincts as a performer were uncanny. He could turn an audience of kids on like nobody I’ve ever seen. His timing was brilliant. And also you learned how good simple stuff for kids could be. We’d get a bunch of cardboard boxes and paint them to look like train cars. Kids will get up onstage and be the train and we’ll do it to this piece of train music. You’d first think to yourself [in rehearsal], ‘Whoa, that’s pretty stupid,’ and then you’d see it in an auditorium with Keeshan orchestrating it and it would be the most exciting, exhilarating, theatrical thing. It was just perfectly wonderful.”

These appearances, where he was showered with applause and squeals, were as a balm to Keeshan. The sharp edges that were so evident in the New York studio gave way to his softer, kinder influences.

One of the weekend workers was Norton Wright, who had been a lightweight boxing champion at Yale and had worked in Europe and North Africa for Armed Services Radio and Television. Wright recalled that after a performance, promoters would often ask Keeshan to visit a children’s hospital. He would agree, but with a proviso: no press coverage. “Bob would be tired, but he would show up in his costume and reach inside oxygen tents to hold kids’ hands,” he said. “In Cincinnati, they came up to him and said, ‘The kid that only had six weeks to live when you were here last year is still alive and wants to see you.’ Bob said, ‘Cancel the plane. I’m going out to see him.’ It takes a certain amount of heart to do stuff like that, and I think Bob’s heart was in the right place.”

On the road, Keeshan enjoyed evenings out with his production staff and often treated them to the best restaurant in town. “He liked good wine and was generous with his Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch,” said Tom Whedon. When properly lubricated, the boys would often seek out local entertainment, including burlesque shows. “If there’s one real valuable lesson I learned from Keeshan, it was that a scotch sour on the rocks is a very good hangover drink,” Whedon said.

Through good days and bad, the hand-selected team Keeshan assembled brought out the best in him. “Bob wanted to be more than what he was, but he didn’t have the talent,” said Wright. “His potential was modest. You were certainly not going to turn Bob Keeshan into Zero Mostel with the bright, witty script you had written. Our writers were from terrific schools, and they knew the Broadway stage, from Neil Simon to Gower Champion. They all harbored the desire to do infinitely more than what they were doing at
Captain Kangaroo
but they, like me, had fallen into a tender trap. It was a consistent job with health and pension benefits and a decent salary.”

On the urging of her agent, staff secretary Beverley Owen auditioned for a spot in the Miss Rheingold beauty contest, a wildly successful promotion begun in 1941 by Liebmann Brewery. Once the sixth-ranking beer in terms of sales in New York, Rheingold shot to No. 1, thanks to a bevy of wholesome models who competed for the annual crown. Grace Kelly was famously turned down for a spot in the contest for being too thin. Owen, apparently, was not. As one of the six finalists in 1963, she made five hundred dollars a week.

Not long afterward, Owen signed a seven-year deal with Universal and filmed guest appearances on NBC’s
Kraft Mystery Theater,
a summer replacement series in 1961, and
Wagon Train,
a dust-caked Western that first ran on NBC (1957-62) before jumping to ABC (1962-65). On
The Virginian
(1962-71), television’s first ninety-minute Western, Owen played Doug McClure’s chaste love interest in an episode in which a sudden storm forced the two to spend a night in a cave. They did nothing beyond kiss, but Owen’s character skedaddled to a convent at the end of the story.

Stone, meanwhile, growing restless at
Kangaroo,
applied to enter the Actors Studio, Lee Strasberg’s exclusive center for professional actors looking to expand their development. He made it past the initial audition before being cut. But after multiple callbacks, he won a role in
Money,
a musical satire cowritten by his
Kangaroo
colleague Whedon, with music by composer Sam Pottle. It was staged at the split-level cabaret known as Upstairs at the Downstairs, a hip performance space on Fifty-sixth Street that was a breeding ground for actors and comedians in the 1950s and ’60s.

In the July 10, 1963, edition of the
New York Times
, critic Paul Gardner wrote, “Perhaps the best number is given to Jon Stone, an angular scare-crow, who readily admits to being the loser of the year. In ‘Give a Cheer,’ he holds back the tears and observes manfully: “I waited for years for opportunity to knock, but every time I open the door it’s Avon calling.”
²²

Stone, then a producer at
Kangaroo
who also wrote scripts, was already working a brutal schedule before he started moonlighting. Because there were two ninety-minute performances of
Money
each night, his new workday didn’t end until 1:30 a.m., which meant he would often get less than four hours of sleep before having to be at
Captain Kangaroo
by 8:00 a.m. As
Money
stretched into a six-month run, his boss, Dave Connell, confronted him with an ultimatum: choose either his day job or acting. Stone, who could be petulant and defiant of authority, was leaning toward quitting
Captain Kangaroo
when another development arose. Bob Keeshan, who was also looking to stretch as a performer, was mounting a second children’s show for Saturday mornings, a
Kangaroo
spinoff called
Mister Mayor
. Keeshan expected the writing staff to pump out material for the new show, without any additional compensation. This did not sit well with Stone and Whedon, and one night during a staff dinner at Christ Cella’s steak house on Forty-sixth Street, with their tongues loosened by alcohol, they ignited an argument at the table. “If our work is such crap, why then do you want more of it?” Stone asked. It got testy, and sides were drawn. Executive producer Dave Connell and head writer Bob Colleary, while perhaps sympathetic to the writers’ grievances, understandably lined up with the boss, which further enraged Stone and Whedon.

They unloaded all of their pent-up hurt and hostility, and then, like woozy tag-team wrestlers leaving the ring, arms over shoulders, walked out of the restaurant and off the show.

 

It’s fair to say that in the late spring of 1961, executives at the nation’s three broadcast networks were still stinging from the public approbations of FCC chairman Newton Minow. The withering phrase Minow had used in his May speech to industry leaders of the National Broadcasters Association, describing television as “a vast wasteland,” branded the hides of the network overlords, especially those charged with programming for younger audiences. In his speech, Minow had described children’s TV as little more than “massive doses of cartoons, violence, and more violence.”

In response, the networks raced to be the first to launch a high-profile commercially viable children’s project, if for no better reason than to get Minow, the JFK-appointed FCC chairman, off their backs. NBC devoted a year of development to
Exploring
, an hour-long noontime series designed to pique the curiosity and expand the knowledge of children age five to eleven. Its host was Dr. Albert R. Hibbs, a senior staff scientist at the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

For series producer, the network turned not to a rocket scientist but to an experienced newsman in Craig B. Fisher, who began his career with NBC as an associate producer of
Today
under Dave Garroway. It was Fisher who promoted staff writer Barbara Walters to her first on-air job, as the cheery “
Today
girl.”

Fisher took the extraordinary step of bringing aboard an academic consultant for
Exploring
in Dr. Gerald S. Lesser, a Bigelow Professor of Education and Developmental Psychology at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. At the time, Lesser and his students had begun a serious inquiry into television’s effects on child development. “I had had extensive opportunities starting in 1961 to observe young children watching television, and found these experiences to be an illuminating source of ideas about how children learn,” Lesser once wrote.
²³
“[Craig Fisher] asked if I would watch with groups of children as the show was being produced to see what I could learn that would improve the series from week to week. The arrangement provided him with immediate access to children’s reactions and provided me with an opportunity to observe children closely and see how television programs were created.”

In 1963, Encyclopedia Britannica purchased a half-sponsorship of the show, at the urging of the company’s new vice president and general counsel, Newton Minow, who had resigned as FCC chairman.

In June of that year
Exploring
won a Peabody award for service to children, as did
Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color
. As the Sunday prime-time schedule began at 7:00 p.m., the NBC Peacock would appear in full plumage, reminding viewers that “the following program is in living color,” and Disney himself would introduce each episode of the anthology series. That program was as much a showcase for the Disney entertainment brand as it was a campaign by NBC’s parent company, RCA, to entice consumers to replace their aging black-and-white TVs with a color model.

Chapter Four

O
n the morning after the Cooneys’ dinner party, thoughts were percolating for Joan, at Twenty-first and Third, and Lloyd Morrisett, out in suburbia. The two inspired opposites, the pragmatist and the experimentalist, the producer wired into the worlds of politics, celebrity, and issues and the social scientist plugged into educational research and philanthropy, were duly caffeinated and stirred.