Street Gang (6 page)

Cooney wrote press releases to churn up coverage of Sarnoff’s frequent speeches, many of which addressed advances in communications technology and the advent of color television. But while she may have cashed a paycheck from RCA during her early years in New York, it didn’t provide enough earning power to actually buy a television, the very product she was paid to promote. When she needed to see something on TV, she borrowed a key to a downstairs neighbor’s apartment. “Clyde was out most nights, and certainly wasn’t around in the daytime,” she recalls. “He’d say, ‘When I’m not home, look at whatever you want.’ So I started going down. It was not so long ago in my life that I had been an actress, so I still cared a lot about drama.”

Her next professional move was, in essence, a company transfer, moving after nine months from the more corporate public relations responsibilities of the parent company to RCA’s bourgeoning broadcasting wing, NBC Television. She wrote press releases about the network’s frothy lineup of daily serials, euphemistically renamed “day dramas” by NBC’s visionary programming chief, Sylvester “Pat” Weaver.
¹²

 

Corporate parsimony and rigidity explain, in part, why Joan did not ultimately make a career of it at NBC. When she transferred over from RCA, company rules limited her new salary at the network to no more than 15 percent higher than what she had been making for the parent company. It did not take much sleuthing for Joan to discover that she “was making half of what everybody else was making [at NBC] and having a hard time [with my] living expenses.” Her boss, Sid Igus, said, “I get it, but there’s nothing I can do about it except to help you get out of here.”

That he did. With a phone call to a friend at United States Steel Corporation, Joan Ganz had another one of those star-kissed employment moments, walking into a publicity job for the
United States Steel Hour
, CBS’s twice-monthly live anthology series that won an Emmy for Best Dramatic Series in 1955. The steel company itself, not CBS, had hired Joan—at a substantial raise in pay—to promote the show.

It was a dream job, she said later, and one that in time provided ample free time to pursue political causes. “I had done some volunteer work for the Democratic reform movement in New York that was led by Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, and Herbert Lehman, and I would go to this political club, the Lexington Club, to write releases for them. But time still hung heavy on my hands. So I called a friend at the Theater Guild, a producer of
United States Steel Hour
. I said, ‘There has to be someone in New York who could use a volunteer doing something interesting.’ And he said, ‘William Phillips of the
Partisan Review
could use some help.’ ”

In its history, the political and literary quarterly had provided a forum for T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, and other notable minds.“I was pulled—in my late twenties—into this incredible world. I helped William put on a fund-raising event at Columbia that included Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, and Lionel Trilling.

“This was incredibly heady stuff for me, far headier than the crowd at Sands Point. It was the New York intellectuals arguing, and I was a fly on the wall listening. It provided me with an education that was richer than anything I could have had at the best graduate school.”

Not everyone from the
Partisan Review
crowd immediately embraced Cooney. “Television was a no-no among intellectuals,” she said, “and Jason Epstein, a great editor at Random House of that time, had total contempt for me. Not only was I in television, but I was doing publicity for television. I mean, what could be lower?”

As the years passed though, Epstein and Cooney would forge a deep friendship, marked by wide avenues of mutual respect and a shared interest in the characters inhabiting
Sesame Street
.

 

At around 9:00 a.m on Monday, June 18, 1956, Sylvan Ganz reluctantly picked up the telephone receiver after repeated rings. It was just four days after he had returned home from a ten-day stay at Camelback Sanatorium in Phoenix. He had checked himself in, burdened by another bout of depression.

Joan’s married sister, Sylvia Houle, was on the line, concern in her voice. Sylvia lived only streets away from her parents and was checking on her father’s readjustment to being home. Sylvan kept the conversation short. “I’ll see you later,” he said.
¹³

At a seemingly robust seventy-one, Sylvan had become an agent for Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company and a director for the Butane Corporation, following his retirement from the First National Bank of Arizona. Associates hailed him as a shrewd and judicious banker whose leadership guided the institution during years of steady growth. Ever civic-minded, he had also served as president of the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce and of the Arizona Bankers Association.

Pauline had left the house that morning to swim at the Phoenix Country Club, the place her husband endured more than accepted.

When she returned home just before 9:30, she discovered an empty shotgun scabbard on Sylvan’s bed. Near panic, she set off to find her difficult, fragile, tormented husband.

Pauline discovered him in the backyard, dead by his own hand.

Across the continent in New York, her father’s violent choice cut deeply into Joan Ganz. “I really had a terrible time for the next eight or ten months of being able to face what had happened,” she recalled.“I just kept pushing it down. I was having dizzy spells and claustrophobia, headaches and neurological problems. I couldn’t go to the theater. I couldn’t get on a subway. I was able to go to work and go home, but I went out very little because of this kind of physical illness that overcame me. I felt like a marionette whose strings had been severed.

“I stayed in therapy and finally it got through,” she said. Over long months, her strength and equilibrium were restored, and she emerged “a much strengthened person. My father’s death was the event that most changed my life in terms of my inner self. I evolved in quite a different way after that.”

Chapter Three

T
he stage manager barked “Ten seconds!” as Bob Keeshan found his mark, inhaled deeply, and smoothed the deep white-trimmed pockets of his navy blue jacket. It was Monday, October 3, 1955, and CBS was going live with the first episode of
Captain Kangaroo
, a hastily mounted breakfast-hour confection for young viewers. In contrast to the low-budget, locally produced cartoon caravans that defined much of morning television for children in that era,
Captain Kangaroo
would be a welcome departure. Its slower pace and idealism would reflect the better sensibilities of Keeshan, who was not only the series’ star but at twenty-eight was its wise-beyond-his-years cocreator.

What mattered on the morning of the premiere for CBS programming executives and advertising salesmen was whether the new show would provide a ratings bounce. Though morning television had not yet evolved into the ferocious battleground it would one day become, network jobs were won and lost on the basis of which viewers—and how many of them—were tuned to programs at the top of any hour. The boys on the business side were hoping cereal eaters would flock to the TV set in such numbers that CBS would crush its competition at 8:00 a.m.

Applying the old show business adage, “If you can’t beat’em, steal ’em,” CBS had convinced Keeshan to defect from
Tinker’s Workshop,
a local children’s show that had been hammering the network’s New York City affiliate, WCBS, in the Nielsen morning ratings. Its deal with Keeshan and his business partner, Jack Miller, went something like this: Come up with a show pronto and we’ll hand over a juicy plum of a time slot to you, with millions of kiddie eyeballs staring at you. We’ll set you up at Liederkranz Hall on Fifty-eighth Street and Lexington Avenue, the same studio where those daytime-serial weepers
Secret Storm
and
Search for Tomorrow
originate. We’ll need you to do two live shows every morning, five days a week. The first will be at 8:00 a.m. for Eastern affiliates. The second, at 9:00, will be for the Midwest. We’ll give you forty seconds to pee between shows,
har, har, har
. And don’t worry about the kids in California. We have a plan. They’ll see the show on film delay, a couple of weeks late.
¹

CBS moved quickly, giving Keeshan and Miller only nine days to produce a pilot. With little time to deliberate, the pair went with gut impulses, relying on the basic formula that had worked so well on
Tinker’s Workshop,
which featured Keeshan costumed as an elderly Alpine toy maker. He would play a kindly older gentleman as host on the new show, the kind of courteous soul one might encounter on a sea voyage or train trip.
²
The Captain, as he would be called, would sport a bowl-cut gray wig, a bushy mustache, and walrus sideburns. Over a white shirt and black tie, he would don a four-button, three-quarter-length coat with a carnation flourish at the lapel. The deep pockets were piped in white. “When an artist drew the character as we described him, somebody said, ‘Hey, he looks like a kangaroo. Hence
Captain Kangaroo
,’” Keeshan once told
TV Guide
.
³

Each morning, the Captain would unlock a door to the knickknack-decorated Treasure House, “private wonderland of childhood,” as described in a CBS press release.
⁴
Events both prosaic and fantastical could occur within and outside the Treasure House set. Mr. Green Jeans, a neighboring farmer and sidekick played by Hugh “Lumpy” Brannum, would drop by to show the Captain—and the “boys and girls at home”—a basket of baby chicks or a goat tethered to a rope. A slumbering grandfather clock could blink to life and share a riddle, or a life-sized teddy bear could dance around the studio. The Captain could read aloud from a storybook, the way a father or grandfather might at bedtime. Or he might dicker with a hand puppet named Bunny Rabbit, a mute, shrewd schemer in tiny eyeglasses who always found a way to scam a stash of fresh carrots from the Captain. Or Mr. Moose, a gentle punster-prankster with a voice that sounded as if the puppeteer who was manipulating him, Gus Allegretti, had been huffing helium, would find ingenious ways to rain Ping-Pong balls on the Captain’s head. Anything could happen and did, within certain polite limits. Even before its premiere, CBS promoted
Captain Kangaroo
as “the gentlest children’s show on the air.”

 

Keeshan had all but fallen into show business. Two weeks prior to his eighteenth birthday, on Flag Day, 1945, he had been inducted into the United States Marine Corps Reserves and dispatched to Parris Island. “The marines were all training for the assault on the ‘home islands’ of Japan, which we knew we would be part of in a few short months. The atomic age changed all that as my boot camp days wound down,” Keeshan said.
⁵

To his great good fortune after being discharged, Keeshan was rehired by NBC, where, as a high school page, he had earned $13.50 a week for ushering radio audiences to their seats at the network studios. As part of his new responsibilities as a receptionist for NBC Radio, Keeshan had to scavenge research material for Bob Smith’s chatty morning show. During a segment called “That Wonderful Year,” Smith would sit at a piano and sing popular favorites from days past, using a script woven from Keeshan’s notes.

At the time, Keeshan had been taking prelaw night courses at Fordham University, rebounding from an academic slide in high school following his mother’s sudden death at age forty-five. A school guidance counselor, Gertrude Farley, interceded and “demanded that I find my way once again,” Keeshan recalled. “Miss Farley saved my life.”
⁶
In high school, Keeshan’s pleasant voice and interests in broadcasting led him to produce plays over the school’s public address system.

He abandoned a path toward law in 1947 after meeting Smith, a wavy-haired charmer who had leaped to popularity in his native Buffalo before landing a morning music-and-talk show in New York City. It was an answer to
Arthur Godfrey Time
on CBS, a variety show lorded over by a star-making, ukulele-plinking host who became a radio colossus, then later conquered TV. Smith’s audience was minuscule compared to Godfrey’s.

But Smith was also host of
Triple B Ranch
, a hit Saturday morning radio show for kids that aired on NBC’s New York affiliate, WEAF. The three Bs in the self-referential title stood for Big Brother Bob. Affecting the voice of a rube ranch hand, Smith greeted listeners at the top of the show with an exuberant, “Oh, ho, ho, howdy doody!”
⁷

Capitalizing on the radio show’s popularity, Smith’s agent, Martin Stone, sniffed out a possible move to television. NBC, hungry for programming and aware of the fan base for
Triple B Ranch
, bought Stone’s pitch. Conceptualized for television as a cross between a one-ring circus and a Wild West show, the program got its start on the six stations that composed NBC’s eastern television network: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, and Schenectady, epicenter of research and development for General Electric, manufacturer of the television picture tube.

The show’s title was changed to
Howdy Doody
in recognition of its lead character, a freckled cowboy marionette that lived with a menagerie of characters, both human and wooden, in the video village of Doodyville, USA. Within a year,
Howdy Doody
would become television’s first megahit children’s show and a rollicking commercial success. By 1955, boxcars of
Howdy
-branded merchandise—hand puppets and marionettes, moccasins, RCA phonograph records, comic books, marbles, sleeping bags, cookie jars, and a small library of Little Golden Books—had found their way into display cases in toy stores, five-and-dimes, pharmacies, and neighborhood markets.

Howdy
’s impact on consumer culture was later astutely measured by
Miami Herald
humorist extraordinaire Dave Barry in his book
Dave Barry Turns 50
: “We sang the
Howdy Doody
song, and we nagged our parents incessantly to buy the many items of Howdy Doody merchandise advertised on it. They could have advertised the official Howdy Doody edition of all sixteen volumes of
Remembrance of Things Past
by Marcel Proust in the original French, and we would have
begged
our parents for it.”
⁸