Street Gang (48 page)

Cooney’s mother, Sylvia, had lived to see nearly eighty. “She had a fainting spell two years before her death that cut off oxygen to the brain,” Cooney said. “I believe she died as a result of the radiation she had had for her second mastectomy.”

“My doctor said, ‘Trust me, you’re going to be fine,’ but I had many scares afterward, and many operations. But, after each one turned out benign, he’d say, ‘I’m telling you, you can’t have a recurrence. We can’t ignore what’s happening, but it’s almost impossible for you to have a recurrence for breast cancer.’

“I never thought a lot about death, but I thought about my body having been assaulted.”

 

Nothing in Tom Kennedy’s experience at CBS and the Public Broadcasting Laboratory had quite prepared him for dealing with the federal government as CTW’s vice president for finance and administration. Being pelted with demands while being bound in red tape was its own peculiar brand of torture.

“The government sent out directives about everything, including one about hiring criminals, ordering that we had to hire people with records. I was getting it up to here, and it reached a breaking point. I went down to a CPB meeting in Washington one afternoon. There must have been twenty people there from the Office of Education and public television. They wanted to know why we weren’t hiring the mentally handicapped. The blood was boiling up inside me and I said, “The truth is I have been trying to hire the mentally handicapped. I’ve been searching and searching and I haven’t been able to find them. Now I suddenly realize why I can’t find them. They’re all working for the government or CPB.”

Things only got worse.

In 1974, CTW was informed that it was going to be the subject of a federal audit. “The head auditor from Washington sits down and has two thick books under his arm,” Kennedy said. “They contain press clippings about all the organizations he has shot down, this hospital, and that hospital. ‘I just want you to know we are competent,’ he said.

“I said, ‘Have you people done anything on auditing television?’

“ ‘Oh yes, we’ve done this before,’ he said.

“I said, ‘Do you assign people who are familiar with television? Because it
is
different. We spend money different than a research project does. And this is not a research project, even though it says on your books that it is. Can you assign people to it who have had experience in television?’

“ ‘Absolutely,’ he said. “So he introduces the guys who are going to do it. I said, ‘What projects have you handled?’ One of them was a fifteen-thousand-dollar audit of an audio-visual project at Harvard. The other had done something similar, maybe it was twenty thousand dollars. And they were going to audit the Workshop as experts. I just blew up. I knew it was going to be a disaster. They sent a bunch of nincompoops who couldn’t be talked to and couldn’t be reasoned with. They had no idea what television is about. They never heard of anybody spending fifteen dollars for lunch. They spent a dollar and a half. They asked, ‘How come Joan Cooney makes more money than congressmen make?’ They spent about a year trying to find things wrong. And they leaked everything to the press because that was the game plan they always had. They didn’t care if it destroyed the Workshop. You just had to hope their arrows didn’t get you in the back.”

It was an exhausting waste of time and energy. “The fact of the matter is they never collected fifty cents because none of it was ever substantiated. They were an impossible lot. I was going to take them on when I left the Workshop but I was preoccupied with my own problems; my wife was dying. But I really thought that something should have been done about the way those auditors functioned,” he said.

“They were not functioning in the best interest of the country.”

 

For Cooney, tussles with Washington became part of the landscape. Some were more trying than others, if not as time-consuming.

“In 1978 Congressman Lawrence H. Fountain of North Carolina had an aide who worked for him who hated public broadcasting. And he fed a story to Jack Anderson, the investigative reporter and columnist, that we had misappropriated money, which is very different from misapplied funds. Misapplied means you have to straighten that out but it’s not a crime. Misappropriated is a crime. Bob Hatch and I went down to see Congressman Fountain, and we all lit up cigarettes as we walked in because he was from the tobacco state. He pulled his aide back a little bit but that guy was a real enemy.

“Then we heard the
National Enquirer
had a reporter on it who was talking to everyone. I knew exactly what it was going to be: a big story in the supermarkets that would say ‘IS BIG BIRD A THIEF?’ You’d have to read through the whole story to find out no, he’s not.”

Cooney understandably was very worried, and, perhaps fortunately, she wore her anxiety on her sleeve. “It was right around the time I started going out with Pete Peterson. In fact, on our first date he asked me how things were going at the Workshop.

“We are having the scariest situation with the
National Enquirer
,” Cooney told him.

Peterson seemed unconcerned. “I’ll kill the story.”

Cooney said, “You’ll do
what
?”

Peterson soothingly said, “Just understand. It’s over.”

“Well just how will you do
that
?” Cooney asked.

Peterson explained that he had attended MIT with Generoso “Gene” Pope Jr., the owner of the
Enquirer
. “We are very close, old friends, and I am trustee of his estate. I’ll just call and tell him to kill the story.”

Peterson’s secretary called Pope’s secretary, asking that CTW be added to a list of untouchable topics for the
Enquirer
, “which included the CIA, Mafia, and Pete Peterson,” Cooney recalled with a smile.

A day or two later, Cooney walked into the CTW office and said to Bob Hatch, “It’s dead.”

“What’s dead?” he asked.

“The story is dead,” Cooney said, in as businesslike a way as she could muster.

It was, she recalled, a great moment. “Hatch was almost having a nervous breakdown over what had been happening because Fountain had red flagged our funding request and time was running out.”

A CTW lawyer with ties to Joseph Califano pulled off a minor miracle on the day the funding proposal was being considered. With time slipping away, Califano agreed to freeze the clock at midnight, allowing aides to work through the night to craft an acceptable compromise. “What they said after the dust settled was ‘Okay, we’ll give you the grant, but you will have to undergo an audit,’ ” Cooney recalled.

 

Northern Calloway and his piano accompanist Alan Menken were en route to a weekend booking, passing the time onboard the jetliner playing chess.

“Pawn to king 4,” Calloway said, sliding his piece along the surface of the travel set’s board. “You know, I’ve already beaten you.”

Menken, a decent player, half smiled. “Okay, man,” he said. “Bring it on.”

Calloway’s response was insistent. “No, no, no. You don’t understand. I see every move ahead of me,” he said. “I’m going to beat you.”

Menken thought it beyond boastful that anyone would make such a pronouncement, especially after only one move. “
Um
, you’ve got to make moves in order to beat me,” Menken said. “I may have some good answers for those moves.”

But Calloway, growing indignant, would not hear any of it. “I . . . have . . . already . . . beaten . . . you,” he fumed, turning his body toward the cabin window and studying the sky.

The first signs that Calloway was becoming increasingly delusional and hostile came at moments like this, when a cheerful mood would darken over a perceived contest of some sort. “He would need to be right about something, just some little, insignificant fact,” Menken said. “And if you disagreed with him it would become a violent argument. The supposed antagonist would realize he wasn’t joking and would back off. His colleagues never felt terribly in danger but began to suspect that he was unbalanced.”

Once, while riding around with Menken and a drummer and bass player who occasionally joined them on the road for children’s shows, the subject turned to Mozart and his contemporaries. Who was the most forward-thinking composer?

“We were merely talking to pass the time,” Menken said. “But then Northern started screaming and cursing, becoming completely unglued, because his opinion was not shared by everyone else in the car. The others would try to laugh it off as if it was some sort of joke that had gone over the top. But I sensed that it was not a joke, and that the topic needed to change.” Menken recalled that “Northern would bounce back extremely fast because he was operating at a frequency that was frankly another frequency.”

In those days, Alan Menken was just beginning to make his way as a songwriter, filling assignments that came his way for
Sesame Street
. “It was pathetic money, but it still had some prestige to it,” Menken said. “It was on the air and I was getting some royalties.” Both Menken and Calloway were managed by Scott Shukat, whose idea it was to pair the two for an open-ended series of weekend appearances. “Northern needed someone to play
for
him and
with
him,” Menken said. “It was an extremely portable thing. Northern sang and I played the piano. We were booked by this little company called NAMCO, owned by Fran and Barry Wiesler. They were just trying to break into Broadway musicals back then.”

“Northern and I would go show up at an airport, fly somewhere, and put on our show. Northern had been married briefly to a beautiful show-girl, but it did not last. And he came out of that quite a ladies’ man. He would hit on these women who came to the shows, and these attractive young white mothers would pick him up. And we’d go into these cities, often in the South, and Northern would be charming these white women. Sometimes I was his ‘beard,’ playing the role of a respectable suitor walking down the street with a woman. But she, of course, would be going to the hotel to be with Northern.

“Northern’s behavior over time began to get pretty intense, and then somewhat erratic, and, in time, I came to understand that he was manic-depressive, or what is now bipolar disease. But unbeknownst to me, he was also snorting a lot of coke.

“It all reached a peak when we were met by a young woman in Nashville. There had been a big power outage with no power in the city. So we went off to sit at a coffee shop, where Northern had this breakdown, crying about how much emotional and mental turmoil he was in. He was having terrible nightmares and wasn’t sleeping.

“We did the show and, as was Northern’s pattern, he got involved with that woman. It was strange and intense, and it was almost the kind of thing where I felt like I should protect her. He had become very aggressive with his flirtations, almost out of control.”

Menken and Calloway’s relationship ruptured in the years that followed. “I had stopped working with him and my career had taken off,” Menken said, starting with my first musical,
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
, and then
Little Shop of Horrors
. Northern watched all of this and was feeling competitive with me. He considered himself a songwriter and was a talented man. And he felt that because I was white and he was black is why I had succeeded, and that Scott was favoring me as a client. It was tense and unpleasant to deal with Northern, and then he sued Scott for money he felt that he deserved that Scott had not gotten for him. It was a horrible thing for Scott to go through, and he was completely exonerated. Scott Shukat was the most scrupulously honest manager I’ve ever known. He was embarrassingly honest. I mean he literally took me away from his own business managers and sent me to the business managers I’m with now, who are the best in the business, specifically to make sure there was not even a hint of conflict of interest.”

Along with the late Howard Ashman, Menken went on to write the soundtracks for three modern-day Disney animated classics:
Beauty and the Beast
,
The Little Mermaid
, and
Aladdin
.

Calloway went on to fall off the edge.

Chapter Seventeen

J
on Stone wasn’t a man’s man—he had few cigar-chomping, belt-sanding instincts—and while he wasn’t entirely a ladies’ man, the ladies did find him attractive and witty and appealing. Many succumbed to his charms.

If Bert and Ernie adored him, Big Bird (and the man inside him) was less enamored. Stone was at times cruel and punishing to Caroll Spinney, whose preference was to read over his lines on the morning of taping rather than commit them to memory overnight. Stone attributed this practice to laziness and unprofessionalism, Spinney to a desire to approach material fresh.
¹
Spinney, by nature sensitive and always eager to avoid conflict (not unlike Big Bird himself ), was often victimized by Stone. When Stone would strike, Spinney would respond by walking in circles, wounded and perplexed.

Stone’s superiors, with one notable exception, found him at times to be a grating, unpleasant, defensive, unyielding, superior pain. He mostly felt the same way about them. He was capable of carrying grudges, ridiculing those who dared challenge his authority, refusing to suffer fools gladly.

That he could also be lovable, tender, brilliantly funny, tireless, resourceful, imaginative, and instinctive rounded out the edges of an emotionally complex and moody man, without whom there would not have been
Sesame Street
as we know it. Stone’s supervision of the show defined his professional life and determined his legacy. That
Sesame Street
flourished during its adolescence, blossoming in the period from its tenth anniversary in 1979 to its twentieth in 1989, can be attributed to Stone’s dedication to its content and to nurturing its spirit. Talent came and went in that ten-year span, but Stone—and his handpicked No. 2, Dulcy Singer—provided the constancy, the good taste, the adventuresome reach, and the great good humor that not only kept the show alive but thriving.