Street Gang (23 page)

“It was a stunningly bad deal for NET,” Cooney said.“They administered the project without getting any money at all, except their actual costs. The deal made no sense to me then and it makes no sense [to me] now. It was one of the things that gave us a lot more money.

“The project reported to the board of NET through Jack White, and the board was ultimately responsible. I went and addressed that board, and in attendance was [board member] Pete Peterson, the head of Bell & Howell. It was the first time I had ever met him, and he was, by far, the most interested person in that room on this project. He asked me a hundred questions and came up afterward and said, ‘This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever heard.’ ”

 

In the late winter of 1968, Joan Ganz Cooney’s knack for easily landing jobs without the requisite qualifications was about to betray her.

At stake was the opportunity to steer the preschool television project to completion. As an organizational structure for it began to emerge, it was Cooney who had expressed the importance of identifying someone to be, in her words, “a central figure . . . a person in whose mind the whole project exists . . . someone functioning to see that the mix of programming, information, and research worked.” That person, she said, would carry the title of executive director and would be someone “terribly important to the morale and functioning of an organization; a central, on-premises figure who stands or falls with you and to whom you have access on a continuing basis, somebody you know keeps his eye on the ball and has a vision.”
¹⁰

That person, she said, must also be indomitable in the face of compromise, turning away any idea that would dilute or distort the original vision. And, she said, the role of executive director must be at the apex of the management pyramid. Direct reports would include an executive producer, a director of research, a financial director, an outreach director, and a public relations director. The executive director would report to a board of advisers, but those advisers would be prohibited from tampering with any of the content creators or researchers. In short, she eliminated the bureaucratic entanglements that undid PBL.

Because Cooney had guided the project’s content development from inception as both researcher and writer, she might have been viewed as the natural choice for executive director. But representatives from two of the emerging financial backers for the project, the Ford Foundation and the U.S. Office of Education, like the project’s leading academic consultant, Gerry Lesser, expressed serious reservations about Cooney’s lack of high-level managerial experience and leadership: How could someone with untested financial management skills be expected to oversee a multi-million-dollar budget? How could someone with no experience in children’s television be expected to launch the highest-profile show ever mounted for young audiences? How could a producer from ratings-challenged Channel Thirteen be expected to helm a project aimed at a national audience? How could Cooney be expected to hold her own against renowned educational researchers, with only a Bachelor of Arts in Education and a short student-teaching stint to her name?

Doubters also questioned whether a woman could gain the full confidence of a quorum of men from the federal government and two elite philanthropies, institutions whose wealth exceeded the gross national product of entire countries. Ironically, a woman was among the most adamant of these naysayers. Marjorie Martus, Ford Foundation’s education and research director, “did not think a project headed by a woman could be taken seriously,” Cooney said. “Ford thought more of having a scholar as the executive director, with producers working for him. Lou Hausman of the USOE had major reservations about anyone from public television becoming executive director, and indeed, the show being on public television at all.”

To make matters worse, the same people who found Cooney wanting had expected her to submit a list of candidates for executive producer. Only after Cooney did come up with five prominent names was her own added to the list, and perhaps only as a courtesy to Morrisett, who assumed an air of professional neutrality in the early stages of the candidate search. Cooney likewise did nothing to promote her own cause. “I wasn’t even considering myself,” she said. “It just wasn’t the sort of thing I thought women could seek even though I realized I was the most qualified.”
¹¹
The search committee, such as it was, discussed the possibility of Cooney’s being named deputy director. “The idea was that as deputy director, I would succeed whoever took the top job,” Cooney explained.

Her disinclination to fight for the executive director position did not go down well at home with her husband, the New York City political hand. Tim was appalled by the objections raised regarding his wife’s candidacy. It seemed incredible to him that anyone familiar with the evolution of the project would question her command of the material or organizational competence. That gender was an issue provoked him even further and he pushed Joan to pursue the top job. “I just wouldn’t have asked for the job if Tim hadn’t persuaded me,” Cooney once said.
¹²
“I was considered an ‘inexperienced woman.’ All I had been was a producer, which I suppose didn’t count for much, and of course I did the study that was the basis for the whole program. But I was still considered to be totally inexperienced in terms of running anything.”
¹³

Cooney knew enough about television to understand how ill suited she would have been producing a series for preschoolers, having never worked a day in children’s television. “Everyone talked about me being executive producer. . . . But I am not creative in this way,” Cooney said. “I had never worked on the kind of techniques we were talking about. I would not have known where to begin.”
¹⁴

Tim Cooney was not about to see anyone else named executive director, and so he devised a strategy: one night he turned to his wife and said matter-of-factly, “If they offer you the deputy position, the answer is,
No
, you are not going to be with the project at all. Just tell them you are not available for the second spot.” Such a tactic would force the deliberators to consider the consequences of moving forward without her involvement. If she walked, he reasoned, the project would lose its eyes and ears.

“Being number two didn’t seem all that odd to me as a woman in that period,” Cooney admitted. “And Tim said, ‘That’s just nuts. There’s no project without you. They’ll have to put you in as number one.’ ”

Joan agreed. She promptly informed Morrisett of her unavailability for the No. 2 job, if offered, confident that the decision would quickly become known to the players at Ford, Carnegie, and the USOE. “That focused their minds rather quickly on the fact that the project was not actually on paper yet. It was in my head,” Cooney said.
¹⁵
“I don’t think a threat was necessary, but by then I had made up my mind I would leave.

“Lloyd, who was nervous that I would leave, said, ‘How can you be married and take this kind of job?’ I said, ‘Lloyd, I was born to do this job!’ And I knew it. I knew that I was going to do the job and I knew that it would be successful. All that crazy confidence.”

The Ford Foundation’s Edward Meade, a product of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, was among those charged with identifying the best candidate for executive director. “I didn’t know Joan too well. . . . And I said, ‘Gee, can’t we get someone who has more educational experience?’ ” Meade said. “So some people, including myself, went out looking for somebody who doesn’t exist. As we looked around, we could offer no alternatives that seemed to make any sense at all. Not just alternatives to Joan, but alternatives per se. I think it was Lloyd Morrisett who said, ‘Why don’t we just turn to someone who started the whole thing?’ ”
¹⁶

Cooney understood that Morrisett was solidly in her corner, even if his blank expression gave no clue of it to others. “Lloyd had worked with me so long and so closely that he had no doubts,” Cooney said. “So he was both at an advantage and a disadvantage in suggesting me.”
¹⁷
As deliberations narrowed, Cooney urged Morrisett to temper his support of her candidacy a bit. “Make sure you don’t ram me through,” she said. “The project can’t succeed if you will not appoint an executive director you trust and say, ‘We’ll leave that person alone.’ That must be built in. You can’t negotiate it after you have the money.”
¹⁸

Meade’s apprehension about Cooney eventually abated. “The more I talked to Joan, the more I saw what a foolish question I had raised. She had done a good feasibility study and was anxious to get the show on the air. She
never
once promoted herself. There is no question about that. If anything, she was far too humble. We suddenly realized we had the diamond right in our hands.”
¹⁹

On February 15, Cooney was selected as executive director. “They realized that it would have been impossible to move on without me,” Cooney said, with a slight smile. “They were stuck with me!”
²⁰

 

Doc Howe’s assistant, Lou Hausman, may have seemed to some an annoying contrarian at first, but his contributions to
Sesame Street
were not insubstantial. He was the first to realize that the feasibility study did not come close to projecting what the show would actually cost. That reality check helped to boost the budget to $6.7 million by January 1968. Included in that sum were funds to cover the prebroadcast months and the first twenty-six weeks of shows.

As substantial as that figure was, Hausman, the commercial television veteran, was not convinced that even it would do. One day, with an eyebrow cocked, he asked Cooney, “How do you know you won’t need a million dollars more [for animation]?”

“We don’t,” she flatly said.

Hausman’s question triggered one final now-or-never review of the financial plan. When the dust settled, the budget had taken a last leap, to just under $8 million, a staggering sum.

Undaunted, the Office of Education agreed to put up half, leaving something less than $4 million to be made up from Carnegie, Ford, and whoever else might drop by with a checkbook. “We were short by $1.5 million,” Cooney said, just before another stroke of good fortune—and well-lubricated networking—fell upon
Sesame Street.

The good news came hand delivered from John W. Macy, the newly installed president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He had heard about the shortfall for the preschool project and wanted to help. “John was another person out of those times who believed in getting things done, a real no-nonsense guy in many ways like Doc Howe, and easy to deal with,” said Morrisett. “He had been a very good friend of Jim Perkins, who was vice president when I was first at Carnegie. And I knew John well. That combination of people and friendship was enormously important. I’m not exactly sure how the conversation came about, and how the amount of money was arrived at, but it was certainly eased by the personal relationships.”

On behalf of CPB, Macy came forth with the final $1.5 million.

With that, the project had a home at NET, a fat bank account, the beginnings of a leadership team, and a name. “We were going to call it the Children’s Television Laboratory until someone said, ‘No, that sounds too much like PBL,’ Cooney said. “That’s how it became Children’s Television Workshop.”
²¹

 

On March 20, 1968, the first day of spring, a gaggle of well-wishers at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel formed a semicircle around McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation; Alan Pifer, president of Carnegie Corporation; and Harold “Doc” Howe, commissioner of the U.S. Office of Education. There representing the three major funding institutions, each man had been given a short opportunity to speak to the assembled multitudes at a press conference to announce the formation of Children’s Television Workshop. Protocol dictated as much.

But as the room began to empty and the microphones and cameras were packed away, it was the speaker whom no one had recognized at first who had caught everyone’s attention. There, off to the side, was Joan Ganz Cooney, the newly introduced executive director of CTW.

In his taxi ride back from the event to the
New York Times
, Jack Gould must have been already crafting what his lead should be for the following day’s article, the pithy paragraph that would open a multidimensional story about the event he had left only minutes earlier:

 

In fact Gould had had more than just that morning to prepare his story, as on the day before the press conference, Cooney and Morrisett had taken the
Times
’s television writer to lunch, providing an exclusive briefing about the preschool television project, with the proviso that the newsman honor an embargo not to publish details until the Thursday edition. This was done not entirely to curry favor but rather to give Gould information that he, in turn, could share with the top editors of the
Times
, their hope being that the newspaper might give the story decent play on its news pages.