Street Gang (25 page)

Cooney’s call found Stone at a time of marital and parental bliss. He was joyously bound to his wife of two years and equally infatuated with his sweet-faced daughter. By day, he was strapping on a tool belt and adding cabinetry and wood accents to the house. By night, he was developing an action-adventure series based on the exploits of Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys—after abandoning a plan in early 1968 to adapt Laura Ingalls Wilder’s
Little House
books for television when an executive at Harper & Row informed him that Michael Landon had only weeks earlier secured rights to the series.

Jon, Beverley, and Polly were splitting their time between an apartment they kept in New York and the house in Sandgate. “I was bringing in a pittance here and a trifle there with sundry jobs,” Stone said. “We were somehow making ends meet and spending a lot of time in Vermont, skiing, gardening, happily hanging out, happily driving the Porsche down to the city for [New York] Giants games with Polly stuffed into the little shelf behind the seats. Financially and professionally Beverley and I were in total darkness with no dawn in sight, and we were happy as clams.”

Stone greeted a possible return to children’s television with indifference, but he agreed to discuss the matter with Cooney in New York. His insouciance “disappeared within moments of my entering Joan’s office,” he said. “Her enthusiasm for her subject was contagious and I was immediately captivated by this gentle dynamo of a woman. I had never heard of anyone involved with children’s television speak of it with such fire, not even Bob Keeshan, whose commitment to the betterment of the medium was famous. Joan spoke earnestly of the good this program might do in righting some of the inequities in our society, in closing some of the grievous gaps that existed in the education system.”

Stone returned to Vermont intrigued with the possibility of applying his years of experience in television toward an effort to assist the less fortunate. And after years of hustling for work in television, it was satisfying to be the pursued instead of the pursuer.

 

The second event involved Stone’s former roommate Sam Gibbon, that dashing Princeton grad, song stylist, and lady killer. Cooney had indentified Gibbon as a target for hire after meeting him through an introduction from writer Linda Gottlieb. Cooney sensed that Gibbon was not suited to the role of executive producer, but she was equally certain that his seriousness of purpose, good humor, and intelligence was just what CTW needed as a producer. But after meeting with him, it did not seem in the cards. “I had asked Sam to come aboard and he had turned me down flat,” Cooney said.
¹²

“I’d had enough with children’s television,” Gibbon said. “I’d been with Bob Keeshan for almost seven years and had quit and gone to work with Norton Wright to get a movie produced. I thought I had graduated into grown-up media, and that was a happy issue for me because I had sort of burned out on
Captain Kangaroo
.” In addition, he was about to be married and looking for more pay than what children’s television typically offered.

In the weeks that followed, Cooney remained in contact, using Gibbon as a sounding board. “He was the only person I could call on who knew [both Dave Connell and Jon Stone]. I called him, in agony, and we probably had two hour-long conversations while I was seeing those two guys. [Sam] was immensely helpful.”

From Gibbon she learned of the bad blood between Dave and Jon, dating back to the drunken night when the Keeshan table at Christ Cella’s steak house suddenly went from a party of five to a party of three. Connell, executive director of
Captain Kangaroo
, had backed Bob Keeshan, and Stone took it as a slight that Connell, a married man with children, didn’t jump off the cliff with him.

Gibbon praised Connell’s management skills and television savvy, his character and reliability. “There was nobody in the business then who had more experience with children’s television, nobody who had worked on a show with the concern for kids that
Kangaroo
had, nobody who was more in sync with the spirit of CTW than Dave,” Gibbon said. “Also I hoped that if he got hired and I couldn’t get this movie produced he might hire me. So I had a slightly ulterior motive in that suggestion.”

Gibbon described Stone, his roommate of seven-plus years, as a gifted writer-producer whose milieu was the studio. “Jon is very, very talented . . . but he is not an executive producer,” Gibbon said, well aware of Stone’s stubborn resistance to authority. Gibbon could not imagine Stone navigating the tricky waters of higher management, even at a relatively intimate start-up like CTW. However, it
was
easy to see how effective Stone would be in the mix with actors, writers, and directors, not to mention cranky carpenters, cameramen, electricians, and grown men with sock puppets running up their arms.

Taking Gibbon’s and others’ recommendations into account, Cooney concluded she had two outstanding talents in her sights. “At some point I had decided that it had to be Dave [as executive producer] and I
had
to get Jon on board, as well,” she said. “How was I going to tell Jon he was not a contender for the top job?” Connell only complicated matters by warning, “I don’t think Jon will work for me.”

Stone asked Cooney to lunch, unaware that she had already decided on Connell for the chief position. “When Joan outlined the plan for the structure of the production staff, I saw immediately that the executive producer’s job would be a step removed from the day-to-day production tasks,” he said. “I interrupted Joan’s explanation to tell her that I really had no interest in the top job, that I would be much happier and more useful at the producer level. My turning it down without her having offered it was certainly presumptuous on my part, but if it was, Joan fielded my gaffe with characteristic grace and proposed that I take one of the producer positions.”

Cooney said, “Fine, the executive producer is going to be Dave Connell, in that case.”

Stone cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t want to work for Dave,” he said, “and I would only consider it if I could report directly to you.”

“Jon, that’s the road to chaos,” she said. “You’ve been in this business long enough to know that. Why don’t you two guys talk? Often these old quarrels go away when it is years later and you’re focused on something new.”

Connell and Stone agreed to talk. Whether their meeting took place in a drawing room at high tea or a boxing ring at high noon, they walked away from it having reached détente. They would never be bowling partners, but they did agree to work together. Over time and true to form, Connell was more successful at burying past differences than Stone.

 

Tim Cooney was working in Harlem on the evening of April 4, 1968. He was a coordinator for Fight Back, an advocacy group working to end discriminatory hiring practices in the construction trades.

When the news broke that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated while standing on the balcony of a motel room in Memphis, rioting broke out in black neighborhoods in New York and other cities. “It was not safe to be a white man in Harlem that night,” Joan Cooney recalled. “The black construction workers on whose behalf Tim was working made him lie down in a car that one of them had,” she said, “and they drove him home.”

Together in their apartment, the Cooneys sat alongside each other in disbelief watching the news. “We were devastated,” Joan Cooney said. “Dr. King was
the
American hero of my lifetime.”

 

On Palm Sunday, three days after Dr. King’s murder, Sam Gibbon and his fiancée, Carol, joined a throng estimated to be between ten thousand and twenty thousand people assembled in Central Park for a massive public outpouring of grief. Similar gatherings were being held in San Francisco, Newark, Houston, and Salt Lake City, as well as in smaller towns throughout the nation. At Forty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue in New York, a few hundred mourners began a solemn march to Central Park at 1:30 p.m. By the time they reached the park’s northern gate, their ranks had swelled to between 3,500 and 5,000 men, women, and children, white and black, marching twenty abreast, arm-in-arm. In a front line, Governor Nelson Rockefeller linked his left arm through the right arm of black militant Charles 37X Kenyatta, the onetime bodyguard of Malcolm X and leader of Harlem’s Mau Mau Society. Impaled on a machete Kenyatta carried were an open Bible and a presidential report on civil rights rioting.
¹³

No permit had been issued for the eighty-block procession that ended with a stream of humanity pooling at the park’s band shell at 3:30 p.m. A pale sun lit the scene with soft, diffuse light.

Rockefeller and New York mayor John Lindsay eulogized Dr. King, along with spiritual leaders from throughout the city. “He lived as God’s kind of king,” said the Reverend Wyatt Walker, pastor of Harlem’s New Canaan Baptist Church. “Just as a cross could not kill Jesus, a bullet cannot kill King. His work will live on.”
¹⁴

Led by Leopold Stokowski, the American Symphony Orchestra, 100 members strong, joined the 250-voice Westminster Choir and the Camerata Singers in selections from Beethoven, Bach, and Verdi. The musicians and singers performed for free. “Everybody is giving their services,” Stokowski said. “Nothing is too great for such a great person as Martin Luther King.”
¹⁵

At the conclusion of the fifty-five-minute service, all in attendance sang two verses of the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”

Gibbon said, “These crowds of people in tears, black and white, holding hands together . . . it was an astonishing outpouring of feeling. I guess it felt to most of us as though the country was in real danger of crumbling, as though the center would not hold.” After the service, at Carol’s urging, Gibbon acted on an impulse to honor the spirit and vision of the civil rights martyr. “The notion that maybe it was time to do something useful was pretty overpowering,” he said. “And it did seem as though CTW was a place to put your energies, a place to do what we had learned.”

Cooney recalled that soon after the memorial, “Sam Gibbon called me and said, ‘I’m aboard.’ ”

 

On a warm June day in 1968, a critical day in the development of
Sesame Street
, thirty participants and observers chosen to take part in the first of five extraordinary seminars arranged by CTW were packed into a room a stone’s throw from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. There would be two such gatherings held that summer on the Cambridge campus and three in Manhattan, bringing together renowned scholars, educators, authors, filmmakers, illustrators, wits, and sages from all corners. The goal was threefold: to extract expert opinion on what
Sesame Street
should attempt to teach in its first year, to expose the production team to those experts, and to engage an elite corps of academic advisers in the process of creating the show. It was hoped that in doing so, participants would gain a sense of ownership and be less likely to criticize the show once it began.

It fell to Gerry Lesser, chairman of the CTW advisory board, to keep the sessions productive and on point, relying on the charm of a ringmaster and the whip-crack alertness of a lion tamer.

Great pains had been taken to keep the guest list free of grandstanders, blowhards, and show-offs. Lesser sought participants who could show “eagerness—(or at least willingness)—to think hard about television for children, a topic that many academics might dismiss as trivial.” A sense of humor helped, as did “the inclination to avoid converting meetings into debates where points are won and lost, but the job does not get done.”
¹⁶

Despite these precautions, there were moments on that first day when the room filled with hot air, and organizers worried that the whole affair would amount to a fifty-thousand-dollar filibuster.

“There was little reason to expect that the seminars would be productive,” said Daniel M. Ogilvie, a Harvard research associate who was working under Lesser at the time. “One could envision the invited specialists, especially academics, wasting time, space, and money in boring jargon-laden meetings that would result in impractical suggestions. Practically none of the specialists would have any experience in television, so how could they be helpful?”
¹⁷

The new team of executive producer Dave Connell, producer-head writer Jon Stone, and producer Sam Gibbon approached the seminars with varying degrees of skepticism. But in Lesser they found an accessible, congenial researcher who had experience and interest in television. That he spoke their language helped to forge a bond of mutual respect, even before the seminars began. Once they did, that skepticism dissipated.

“Gerry would come into these meetings of gray beards from all over the country, [academics] who were accustomed to defending their turf and fighting with each other,” Gibbon said. “He’d take off his coat, loosen his tie, and roll his sleeves up. He would introduce everybody and say something about their work. There would be sixty people in the room and he would introduce every single one, calling them by their first name. It was an amazing feat of memory. [Professional] titles were out the window, and he’d say, ‘Any good idea is as good as any other good idea, and it doesn’t matter where it comes from.’ What that did was get
everybody
intellectually excited in the curriculum.
We
got as involved in the curriculum as the outside advisers, and
they
got as interested in the show development as we were. So it really made people cross that barrier between the blood of show business and the brain of the curriculum and they meshed nicely.”

This is not to say there weren’t dead spots, detours, diversions, and disagreements along the way. “The artists and performers, those professionals who must rely upon and trust their intuitions—often vehemently protested the imposing of objective, abstract analysis upon the creative act of inventing television for children,” Lesser said. “They contended that any book, film, music, or television program—indeed all creative products—can only be conceived intuitively and lovingly, with the creator drawing freely upon his own fantasies, feelings, and experiences; the dissection of deliberate thought and methodical planned analysis destroys the naturalness that must be inherent in the product.