There are several treatments of the early days of Today. Some of them are oral histories, some of them reminiscences, some of them as parts of books. Nothing, though, quite matches a contemporary account of Today during the Garroway era. And one of the most interesting, and inadvertently insightful, was printed in the June 1954 Esquire, and it’s a story that has a story of its own.
“The Man Who Came To Breakfast,” written by Richard Gehman1, is a bird’s-eye view of Today in its second year. There’s some good material about Garroway himself, but he’s not the main focus. Gehman spends a good bit of time on what goes into making an early-morning program work five days a week, the people behind the scenes who made it happen, and the unusual pressures they face.
One issue they faced was how the early morning hours messed up normal daily routine. Staffers complained that their kids didn’t know who they were any longer, that wives had to go to parties alone, that they had difficulty ordering in restaurants because the weird hours meant only breakfast menus were available when the staffers were free.
Another challenge? In the parlance of the day, “nervous tension.” Gehman surveyed a group of Today staffers at Toots Shor’s tavern2, saying they were conspicuous by how they kept checking their watches or a nearby clock. Some had developed nervous tics. Gehman described their routines as a “vicious circle” in which “they get keyed up on the show to such a degree that when they return home even a few drinks won’t help them sleep. Finally, after hours of tossing, they manage to fall into restless comas. The alarm goes off. The moment they get to the studio, the tension begins again. In mid-morning, real fatigue sets in.”
And here’s where the piece gets really interesting, for it touches on a famous part of Garroway lore, and shows it wasn’t exclusively his province: “To offset [the fatigue],” Gehman writes, “they take doses of a compound they call The Doctor, a Dexedrine-and-vitamin stimulant obtained by prescription, widely used by combat crews during the war to forestall fatigue.” The Doctor, Gehman noted, kept them so alert that they couldn’t get to sleep, and it fed a cycle.3
While Gehman noted that staff members seemed to face “a killing grind,” he saw no signs of the strain in Garroway. “He is happy about Today because he feels that it is educational and amusing at once,” but is always looking for ways to make the show better, Gehman wrote. And, apparently, the odd hours agreed with Garroway. Writer Charlie Andrews told Gehman that Garroway didn’t care much for parties but didn’t like to refuse invitations. “Now that he’s got this show, he can always go to a party, have one drink and escape, pleading that he has to go to bed around nine, which is true. It’s perfect for him,” Andrews said.
Gehman describes what happened in the RCA Exhibition Hall as a typical program happened, and for that alone the article is worth seeking out: the four cameras (including one on a platform), the nearby turntables, the array of desks and telephones and teletypes, everything you see in the few preserved kinescopes. But we also meet the writers (including Andrews and Paul Cunningham), directors Jac Hein and Mike Zeamer4 and their several assistants, and go inside the downstairs control room to learn about the particular kind of stress they faced making the program happen.5 We appreciate why, just after each day’s broadcast ended but before the daily post-mortem meeting in the program offices in the RKO Building, the working crew stopped off for a quick decompression at the Hurley and Daly tavern across 49th Street.6 Then it was off to the meeting, which typically lasted to around one in the afternoon.
Then after that, a group of Today staffers, calling itself the “Telop One Club,”7 adjourned to Toots Shor’s for what Mike Zeamer called “the daycap” – as Gehman explained, the daycap “differs from a nightcap in that it is not the last, but the first of several.” The club’s members unwound by telling jokes and airing gripes, and sometimes those sessions turned into impromptu conferences about new ideas for the program. And thus the cycle continued.
There’s one more item of interest in Gehman’s article: he describes the work of “a lovely, scrubbed-faced girl who also takes care of the weather board,” who also “writes the book and magazine reviews as well as serving as decoration on the show, and often gets as much fan mail as Garroway.” That lovely, scrubbed-faced girl was Estelle Parsons. While gathering the material for this article, Gehman struck up a connection with her that eventually culminated in their marriage.8
- The same Richard Gehman who later wrote for, among others, TV Guide, specializing in celebrity profiles that had a literary, philosophical, or psychological angle. His 1961 TV Guide profile of Garroway in his last days on Today will be the focus of an upcoming post.
- The same Toots Shor’s at 51 West 51st Street that was made famous by a celebrity clientele. Now long gone.
- Gehman’s article makes no mention of Garroway’s use of The Doctor.
- Hein and Zeamer directed the program but served alternating days in an effort to make the job less stressful. Originally they switched over each hour; Gehman wrote that they were talking about directing alternate weeks.
- One moment Gehman describes is when a lovely young woman was invited on the program to help promote a Lana Turner movie. Throughout that broadcast, Garroway and Jack Lescoulie pretended to compete for her affections. Gehman described a moment when Garroway told her, “Come over here, dear. I’ve got lots of dandy buttons and switches on my desk.” Lescoulie responded, “I’ve got even more buttons on my desk.” Then followed the voice of Mike Zeamer from the control room, over the studio PA: “We’ve got more buttons down here than either of you.”
- Hurley and Daly was at the corner of 49th Street and Sixth Avenue, nestled against the RCA West Building (what we call “30 Rock” is actually three buildings in one – the tower, the studio building and the West Building – but that’s a longer story than you want to read today). It was such a popular hideaway for NBC figures that it acquired the nickname “Studio 1H.” Hurley’s closed years ago; the building is now home to a Magnolia Bakery location, and thirsty NBC personnel have given way to tourists seeking cupcakes and servings of the famous Magnolia Bakery Banana Pudding (use this recipe at your own risk; you may never want any other kind of dessert again).
- Named for the program’s title card. More here about telop cards.
- Parsons described this in her Archive of American Television interview, available here.