Street Gang (24 page)

Gould surpassed their expectations, convincing his bosses that the announcement was one of the most important television developments of the decade. It made page one, along with a “Woman in the News” profile of Joan Ganz Cooney. The appointment, the paper said, “automatically thrusts her into the forefront of women executives in broadcasting.”

 

Mike Dann, the brash and brilliant potentate of entertainment programming at CBS Television, snapped open his morning-fresh copy of the
Times
, read the CTW announcement story, and drew a sheet of stationery from his desk. Two days later, the congratulatory note reached Cooney. Expressing his enthusiasm for the idea of a children’s show that educated as it entertained, Dann offered “any support you desire.”

Chapter Ten

A
t the
Times
the next day, Jack Gould followed his coverage of the CTW press conference with a newsy column of television notes that included media reaction to the preschool show: “Michael Dann, vice president of the Columbia Broadcasting System, hailed the workshop as conceivably one of the most important breakthroughs in the evolution of the mass medium.”
¹

Gould also slyly noted that life had changed virtually overnight for the Workshop’s executive director. “Mrs. Joan Ganz Cooney . . . encountered yesterday the immediate problems of the head of a new agency. Before breakfast, the job applicants were on her phone.”
²

He didn’t know what others might make of Gould’s story, but that morning all Dave Connell could do was shake his head.
This isn’t any way to do a television program that’s going to appeal to kids,
Connell thought.
It’s a lovely idea, but they are going to blow eight million bucks.
He all but gagged over the mention in the
Times
about the show having a panel of academic advisers. “It’s going to be debated to death,” he predicted. No way could producers be expected to churn out 130 episodes and have the time—or patience—to deal with a cap-and-gown committee looking over their shoulders.
³

Life had improved immeasurably for Connell after bailing from Robert Keeshan Associates to join Ken Snyder Enterprises, a Santa Barbara, California-based independent film and animation company that had just established an office in Manhattan.
⁴

In his new position, Connell split his time between New York and Los Angeles, occasionally flying out in a twin-engine private aircraft he owned and piloted. “I was extremely happy for the first time in ten years,” he recalled later.
⁵
Connell’s income rose and his stress level dropped. “Bob Keeshan had been a difficult man to work with, and my dad got pushed around a lot,” said Connell’s son, Alan, a former CBS News employee who lives now in New Hampshire. “But Keeshan was pretty upset when Dad left.”

Connell didn’t spend much time with his wife and three children at their suburban New Jersey home. In those days he was never one to place family over work. “We didn’t see him as much when we were kids,” Alan Connell said. “I remember him being around on weekends.” Dave Connell’s daughter Jan, a therapist based in Warwick, New York, has childhood memories of a rigid and regimented father. “He was obsessive-compulsive,” she said. “He had to make sure everything was in its place and working, that everything was exactly the way it was supposed to be. It served him, but [also] tortured him.”

Connell’s demeanor at work was at variance with what it was at home, especially when he was around his new California pal Jim Thurman, a comedy writer who also provided voices for cartoon characters. “They were thick as thieves,” Jan Connell said. “They had a marriage after twenty-five years of working together.”

When Connell departed
Captain Kangaroo
, he took Carol Jorjorian, who was only weeks away from marrying a man from the
Kangaroo
bullpen of writer-producers, with him as his secretary. Just as Connell had indirectly brought Jon Stone and Beverley Owen together, so, too, did he have a hand in the romance between Carol Jorjorian and Sam Gibbon, a love affair that was kept secret from Keeshan.

“Keeshan was a terrible tease,” Gibbon said. “If it became known that two members of his staff were dating, he would’ve been on an unmerciful tear.”

 

Upon arriving back at his office one midafternoon, Connell was surprised to find a pink “while you were out” message to call Mike Dann at CBS.
What on earth could this be about?
he wondered.

Connell’s name and phone number were in fact at the top of a list of names on Dann’s desk, a ranking prepared by one of the fourteen vice presidents who served under him. In fact, Connell had been the topic of conversation that very afternoon at the Ground Floor, the elegant, street-level restaurant at Black Rock, CBS’s headquarters at Sixth Avenue and Fifty-second Street.
⁶

Upon arriving at the restaurant, Joan Cooney greeted Dann, who led her to their table and introduced Fred Silverman, the thirty-year-old CBS vice president for daytime and children’s programming. Cooney sensed right away that Silverman “couldn’t have cared less” about her project.
⁷
He was there only because Dann insisted on it.

Silverman was a young man on the make, but in those days his domain was limited. To be charitable, his interest in young viewers was clinical, detached, and pragmatic. To him, children were the unseen pajama demographic, the cereal-eating number clusters that he was paid to lure to the screen. Of course, Silverman was hardly the only children’s programming executive in the 1960s and ’70s to place matters of commerce above matters of content. Nevertheless, he did create the
CBS Children’s Film Festival,
which indirectly linked
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
to
Sesame Street
, and he did use his knowledge of
Captain Kangaroo
to lead executive director Cooney to her first big hire.
⁸

Dann had run a background check of sorts on Cooney after she had taken him up on his offer to help. “I got her dossier,” Dann recalled. “I found out she was a real proper lady, a well-bred girl from Arizona. But I also realized that she had no background whatsoever in programming. What she had was a
concept
,” he said, one that happened to appeal to him in a powerful and profound way.

At the time, the forty-seven-year-old programming executive was undergoing a crisis of conscience, nagging bouts of self-doubt that robbed him of sleep and churned acid in his gut. While he had been responsible for much of the quality programming that had once distinguished CBS as the “Tiffany network,” he also populated its prime-time schedule with the likes of
The Beverly Hillbillies
—popular but weightless shows that in his estimation deflated the television medium. He was especially pained that children’s television on all three networks had devolved into nothing more than a Saturday morning marketplace to peddle plastic toys, super-sweetened cereals, and marshmallow-domed cupcakes zapped with preservatives and entombed in shrink-wrap.

“I wrote the note to Joan and picked up the phone when she called almost out of a sense of guilt,” Dann said. “I had three young children of my own at home, and I knew the networks, mine included, were putting on such awful programming for them.”

After twenty years in network television programming, the appeal for it had begun to wane. Dann, who had once aspired to write comedy, began his career at NBC in 1948 around the time of the debut of
Howdy Doody
. He worked on the classic musical adaptation of
Peter Pan
with Mary Martin, Dave Garroway’s
Wide Wide World
, and on the launches of the
Today
and
Tonight
shows. As programming chief at CBS, he championed
The Defenders
(1961-65), the Reginald Rose-written courtroom drama featuring the father-son legal team of E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed, and the much-acclaimed
East Side, West Side
(1961), with George C. Scott as a New York social worker. Dann brought Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts to the home screen, along with
A Charlie Brown Christmas
, and the 1966 staging of
Death of a Salesman
with Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman.

But Dann felt these achievements were overlooked amid the prime-time mix for which he was also responsible, the derivative sitcoms (
My Living Doll
) and the formulaic cowboy (
Cimarron Strip
), medical (
The Doctors and the Nurses
), and detective programs (
Mannix
).

The ego absurdities of show business had taken its toll, as well. With no small amount of sarcasm, he once said, “For twenty years, in the action world of the networks, I had been involved in many critical, turbulent problems that shook the nation to its very roots. Such issues as how to repair Jackie Gleason’s golf cart or how to build Danny Kaye’s dressing room on the top of Television City.”
⁹

By the spring of 1968, Dann was in a downward spiral. “The only thing I knew for sure was ratings, which I was addicted to,” he said. “The A. C. Nielsen Company was my lord and master.”

He was aware of all this, which may be why Cooney’s quest to test the prosocial potential of television proved so alluring. “After her call, I had a staff meeting to talk about how we could help her find an executive producer, saying, ‘I want you to give me a list of names of value to this project in descending order.’ That’s when Fred Silverman said, ‘Why not Dave Connell?’ ”

Connell had departed
Captain Kangaroo
and CBS on the best of terms, leaving a legacy of solid and dependable work.

During the lunch at the Ground Floor, candid and to the point, Dann told Cooney that the greatest obstacle facing her was “you don’t know what you don’t know.” And of all the unknowns, the most important was that she needed to find an executive producer familiar with “volume producing,” if she hoped to shoot 130 episodes of a show without keeling over. “It’s running a sausage factory, as Dave used to say,” Joan remembered. “You need to find someone who knows how to make the sausage.”

Cooney was attentive. She had already missed her first choice as number two, having offered the executive producer slot to George Dessart, the clever chap who had first made the inspired suggestion of using the same approach Madison Avenue used to sell soap to sell the alphabet to little kids. To his credit, Dessart felt he was not the right candidate and told her as much. She was surprised—not the least because she had no second choice.

But Dann and Silverman did.

Dann went on to explain that only volume producers had the superior organizational skills and temperament to keep one eye on that day’s shooting schedule and the other on tomorrow’s, next week’s, and next month’s. The volume producer is to the studio what a plant manager is to the widget factory. The smoother and more efficient the assembly line, the better the product and the happier the workforce.

Dann then suggested Dave Connell as a “proper, well-educated man” who had all of the requisite skills of a volume producer and a sterling track record in children’s television. He offered to call him as soon as he got back to the office, and Cooney gratefully accepted.

When Dann reached him, Connell expressed satisfaction with his new life and an unwillingness to return to daily television. Added to that, he said he wanted no part of a children’s show that seemed to him doomed from the start. In full sales mode, Dann responded with a fabrication of parade-balloon proportions. “Bill Paley and Frank Stanton would like you to consider this,” he said, dropping two ten-megaton names.

Did Connell really believe that two titans of broadcasting rose from their thrones and pointed to a fairly anonymous guy in black-framed glasses sitting at a tidy desk? It seems unlikely. But at the close of the conversation, Connell did agree to meet with Dann’s new friend, Joan Cooney.

“I was instantly enchanted by her,” Connell said. “We had four rather lengthy conversations and we discussed all my reservations about the project. I was so concerned as to whether I could function in an organization with this huge academic advisory board and felt a little arrogant about it because I didn’t need a job. I wasn’t going to take this unless it was on terms I felt comfortable with and, in fact, I wasn’t even sure I’d take it then because I had obligations to my business partner. I had gotten a three-year lease on an office, a secretary, and an assistant. To walk out on all that nine months into the thing was a fairly important problem.”
¹⁰

For her part, Cooney said, “I convinced him that he would have a lot of artistic freedom, that I would not be breathing down his neck. But I said there were certain nonnegotiables, one of which was that there would be commercials to teach letters and numbers, there would be four or five hosts who were men and women, black and white. That the show was never going to be ‘owned’ by a single talent. And that of course, it would be an educational program. The education and entertainment would not be separate. Every piece of education would be entertaining, and every piece of entertainment would be educational.”

Connell said, “In time, we discussed all my reservations, and I came to find that she agreed totally with me that the staff should be largely, if not exclusively, first-rate successful commercial television people and the ultimate decisions about what goes on the air has to remain with the producers. If it had to be run by an academic advisory board, there was the risk of disaster. If we were going to err, it must be on the side of entertainment, not education.”
¹¹

 

While Connell deliberated, a chain reaction of events complicated matters.

It started one night when Lou Hausman of the USOE phoned Cooney at home. She remembers Hausman saying, “My friend Tom Whedon tells me the most creative guy in children’s television is Jon Stone.” Cooney, pleased to have another lead on a candidate, tracked down Stone at the A-frame in Vermont. Infant Polly was asleep in a tiny room off the kitchen when Beverley picked up the phone and handed it to Jon.