Street Gang (32 page)

“So on my first day in New York I got a drink, a job, a place to live, and all I could eat. I called my friends and said, ‘You know, New York’s not so tough.’ ”

But the story does not end there. “When I had walked into the school office at St. David’s, I spied this lovely twenty-one-year-old, Anne Sperry, who was there with her mother.”

In 2008, Bob and Anne celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary.

 

In almost no time, more freelance work came McGrath’s way than he could handle: he did backup singing for recording artists and concert performers, jingles, Gregorian chant requiems, even the occasional TV appearance at the NBC studios, at Avenue M and Fourteenth Street in Brooklyn. It was there that he sang a supporting role (as a chauffeur) with Patrice Munsel. “I remember thinking,
Someday I’ d really like to be standing here doing this by myself
. And a year later, I was doing solos right on that stage.”

McGrath got a shot at a prime-time show on NBC by virtue of his hustle and likability; it proved to be the break of his life. “When you first come to New York as a singer, the trick is to become known by auditioning for as many vocal contractors as you can. Mike Stewart was one of the best.” It was through Stewart—who took a shine to the small-statured Illinoisan—that McGrath learned a search was under way to replace a tenor on a music-variety hour entitled
Sing Along with Mitch
.

Launched first as a series of specials, the show immediately connected with American viewers who found Elvis Presley anathema.
Sing Along with Mitch
landed on NBC’s Thursday night schedule at 10:00 p.m. It featured a chorale of twenty-five men with matching sweaters and demeanors who looked as if they had been bused in from a Rotary meeting in Kokomo, Indiana.

During the show’s final segment—a community sing during which conductor Mitch Miller would prompt the home viewer to join in on chestnuts like “By the Light of the Silvery Moon”—superimposed lyrics ran across the bottom of the screen, and a bouncing ball highlighted each word in time to the music—a kind of proto-karaoke.

Miller, a classically trained oboist from Rochester, New York, took a degree from the Eastman School of Music and parlayed it into jaw-dropping success as an A&R man for Mercury and Columbia records. He signed or produced a stable of Eisenhower-era recording stars—including Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Mathis, Frankie Laine, and Johnnie Ray. Miller also popularized the homogenized sounds of Ray Coniff and Percy Faith, the Haydn and Mozart of elevator music. With his Vandyke and peculiar charm, Miller has often been regarded by purists as the Rasputin of Easy Listening.

McGrath signed on for a production schedule that cranked out a show every ten days, with four days in a recording studio, four days of rehearsal, and two full days of taping. After one day off, the cycle repeated. As spring approached, Miller turned to McGrath one day in rehearsal. “Bob, how would you like to sing ‘Mother McCree’ on the St. Patrick’s Day show?”

“No problem,” McGrath said. “I’ve been singing
that
since I was six.”

On the day the track was recorded, Miller came over to the booth where the soloist performed and conducted. “I decided I was going to sing better than I’d ever sung in my whole life, since this was the first Mitch had ever heard me solo. I poured my heart out.”

At first Mitch said nothing as the track ended, but then raised his arm and pointed to the tiny hairs. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “Where did you learn to sing like that?”

McGrath, taken aback, said, “You know, my mom, whatever.”

Fan mail poured in from listeners, and Miller doubled McGrath’s salary and appointed him featured tenor. The show’s popularity climbed so high that Miller booked his Sing-Along Gang for a couple of weeks at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas during hiatus. “The local paper said we’d probably be finished in a week,” McGrath said. “It was sold out every night, and the tour was extended by two weeks.”

The road shows expanded, the money flowed, and then, out of nowhere, the
Sing Along with Mitch
phenomena crossed the Pacific. Japanese viewers couldn’t get enough of the television show, which had been picked up by NHK, the nation’s public broadcaster. Concert halls filled from Fukuoka in the south to Sapporo in the mountainous north during a thirty-night, thirty-city tour. “We had anticipated having the same over-forty crowd in Japan that we had in the United States,” McGrath said, “but we had four thousand to five thousand
teenagers
at every stop. We were quite amazed that they wanted to hear these old songs, but it turns out they were learning English by listening to us. Because we sang clearly on television—and they could see the bouncing-ball lyrics—it was a fun, fast way to learn the language.”

McGrath was prompted to learn a few Japanese songs for the tour. “Every time I came out to do a solo, the teenagers were screaming ‘Bobu! Bobu!’ They hadn’t heard many Americans with my particular quality voice, a lyric tenor. And then all of a sudden there were Bobu fan clubs springing up all over Japan. Our booker in Japan asked me if I would like to come back as a single act to open the two top clubs in Tokyo, the Latin Quarter and the Copacabana. I thought it would be a lark, but I worked hard to learn half a dozen more Japanese songs.”

It was the era of the Rat Pack, even in Japan. “All of the clubs had Sinatra-style big bands,” McGrath said. “I had eighteen musicians behind me and I gave it all I had, thinking it was a one-time venture. But it spun off into a total of nine trips over a three-year period. I was going back three times a year for six to seven weeks at a time. I did commercials, TV specials for NHK, recorded thirty or forty singles and seven or eight LPs, one of them completely in Japanese. It was really bizarre, an Irish singer from rural Illinois singing Japanese folk songs with a guy playing a bamboo flute for the prime minister.”

 

“There’s an old expression,” said Bob McGrath. “ ‘If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans.’ That was the story of my life. I always ended up going in the wrong direction from where I
thought
I was going. I’d just returned from my ninth Japan tour and realized I’d been doing the same things over and over. The money was good, but I was away from home, and my poor wife was taking care of our four children by herself. So I turned down the next invitation to Japan and decided instead to take acting lessons in New York and look for freelance work singing. I wanted to get the kind of career going here that I had in Japan. I could be the next Andy Williams or Perry Como. I was copying everything they did. Then one day, right out in front of Carnegie Hall, I bumped into a fraternity brother, Dave Connell.”

Connell said he was working on a new children’s show and that they’d be auditioning people soon. “Do you think you’d be interested?” Connell asked.

“No,” McGrath said. “Not in the least.”

“Okay,” Connell said. “Just thought I’d mention it.”

A few months later, McGrath was formally asked to audition for the role of Bobby and shook off his reluctance long enough to sit through a screening of early animation pieces. It took mere minutes for him to realize he was watching no “silly kiddie show,” as he had wrongly assumed. “This is not like anything I’ve ever seen before,” he said to Connell, who simply nodded. “I suddenly want to do this more than anything.”

McGrath’s audition tape delighted the preschool focus group. He was cast as Bobby (later shortened to Bob, at McGrath’s request) and chosen to sing the opening musical theme for the five test shows.

 

Character actor Will Lee came to Stone’s attention thanks to the husband-wife writing team of Bruce and Carole Hart. Stone had hired the Harts to write scripts for the new show, but both had experience in writing song lyrics, as well. The Harts knew Lee from their neighborhood. To them, the Brooklyn-born actor looked the part of a slightly cranky Jewish shop owner, the kind of guy who might wear a white apron smudged with ink, from selling newspapers piled outside the store.

By 1969, Lee had amassed a long list of theater credits on and off Broadway and was a well-regarded acting teacher. (Among his more notable pupils was James Earl Jones, who would famously follow his mentor to
Sesame Street
in the summer of ’69.) Back in the 1930s, Lee was an ensemble member of the Group Theater, the consortium of acting and directing idealists who strove to bring to the New York stage drama that not only would reflect the travails of the common man but also trigger social reform.
New York Times
critic Brooks Atkinson called it the “school of revolutionary theater.”
³
During World War II, Lee staged shows for troops overseas as a member of Army Special Services. But a decade later, former friends and colleagues from the Group Theater implicated him in the McCarthy anti-Communist witch hunt. Lee appeared as an unfriendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950 and was blacklisted from film and television for five years. Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets had named names.

Lee’s acting career was slowly restored in the early 1960s, when he began playing character roles onstage and film. He also began to teach at Boston University, the American Theater Wing, and the Herbert Berghof Studio. During those years, he made scant mention of the blacklist years. But Bob McGrath, who shared a dressing room with Lee, recalled a day when the actor arrived at the studio ashen and shaking. He was crossing a street in Manhattan when he spied Elia Kazan coming toward him. “Will said he was so full of revulsion and rage, he had to turn around and walk up to the next corner.”

In 1970, Lee told
Time
magazine, “I was delighted to take the role of Mr. Hooper, the gruff grocer with the warm heart. It’s a big part, and it allows a lot of latitude. But the show has something extra—that sense you sometimes get from great theater, the feeling that its influence never stops.”

 

A revolving door of candidates auditioned for the part of Gordon. “We auditioned player after player and no one fit our image of the part,” Stone said. “Time passed and auditions fizzled and our deadline grew closer. Panic was working itself in. At the last moment we cast an actor with whom no one was completely happy, but time had run out on us.”

And so, on July 9, 1969, the small universe of
Sesame Street
began to reveal itself, as ten days of taping began.

 

Chet O’Brien reported in to the production manager at Reeves Studio one morning in the summer of 1969, expecting “just another day’s work.” His assignment that day was to stage manage some test video for a children’s program he knew nothing about. The previous December, however, he had worked with Jim Henson and Frank Oz on
The Pied Piper of Astroworld
, a Saturday morning special on ABC hosted by Soupy Sales and shot at the Houston amusement park.
⁴

Jon Stone liked O’Brien’s work. Within weeks, after the test shows were shot, he was offered the job as stage manager for the planned one hundred and thirty episodes. He accepted immediately, excited by the possibility of working on a noncommercial project.
What a breeze
, he thought.
Just a bunch of Muppets and no agency people with their stupid commercials. So far, everyone connected with the operation seems pleasant and intelligent
.

At the time, O’Brien’s pack-a-bag existence of stage managing remote assignments for television specials—everything from the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City to Bob Hope specials in Los Angeles—was taking a physical toll. “I told my wife, Betty, about [the children’s TV offer], and she, too, thought it would be a good assignment.
⁵
It might run for several months and we could stop driving all over the map doing remotes. I would just be the stage manager—no directing or producing, no staging of musical numbers.” He sheepishly added, “That’s what I thought.”
⁶

O’Brien was the rarest of birds, a show-business journeyman who could claim experience in vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, network radio and television, musical theater, and feature films. In the 1920s, he and Mortimer “Snooks” O’Brien, his identical twin, played the small-theater circuit as the dancing O’Brien Twins. As a chorus boy in the 1934 Broadway revue
As Thousands Cheer,
he romanced the show’s glamorous star, the Ziegfeld girl Marilyn Miller, and the pair soon ran off to be married in Harrison, New York.

O’Brien went on to work as both performer and production stage manager for Irving Berlin’s two wartime stage and movie extravaganzas,
This Is the Army
and
Winged Victory
. O’Brien’s nephew, writer Brian Garfield, said that following a performance of
This Is the Army
, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approached O’Brien to express his condolences over Miller’s death. It would not be the only time an O’Brien twin would come into contact with a commander in chief. “They directed or stage directed quite a few White House galas for Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson,” Garfield said. “And they continued to do so for Nixon, Ford, and Carter. They also managed dozens of TV variety shows for Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra.”

Even with such a remarkable résumé, the summer of ’69 was a turning point for Chet, as the stars aligned in ways unimaginable.

During the summer of 1969—the summer of Apollo 11 and Wood-stock—a sound truck with speakers bolted to its roof began crisscrossing the poorer neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx. CTW’s outreach director, Evelyn Davis, had dispatched what was essentially a carnival barker on wheels to alert the populace that something wonderful was about to come their way. Davis was building awareness for
Sesame Street
with a street-level, drum-beating strategy targeted to parents and grandparents. She distributed pamphlets at churches and day-care centers, staged nighttime community meetings, enlisted a corps of volunteers, knocked on corporate doors for donations, and, in general, made a lot of noise. It was an effort akin to a political campaign.