In March 1956 Today had been four years on the air and gone from experiment in morning television to popular and profitable staple of NBC’s weekday schedule. Its success was in no small part to the easygoing style of its host, who had last been profiled in TV Guide three years before. So the magazine returned in its March 24 issue with a cover story on “Television’s Most Curious Man!”
The adjective “curious” came into play because Garroway “has never made a movie, never been in the theater, vaudeville or the Catskills, where many of the medium’s talents were weaned.” But Garroway was “as relaxed before a camera as most people are after three martinis. He understands camera shots like a member of Local 11, the technicians’ union.” He also had a knowledge of production that rivaled that of his producers and directors, “one of the few men in front of the camera who are completely attuned to what’s inside.”
By this point Garroway was hosting not only Today but also Wide Wide World, and doing a Sunday night block on NBC’s weekend radio service, Monitor. “His credo is ‘work,'” the unsigned piece notes. To get everything in, the article states, Garroway has conditioned himself to get by on five hours’ rest each night. According to one friend, Garroway’s “tremendous drive to work” must have come as a result of someone calling him a failure along the way for not wanting to work, “and he’s been disproving it ever since.”
The perks of Garroway’s professional life included “pretty girls, news flashes, publicity, the immediacy of live telecasting and just enough uncertainty to keep it exciting,” since a remote pickup during a live Wide Wide World was never a sure thing. But, the article notes, Garroway was always ready to talk “indefinitely” if something went amiss, drawing on his “encyclopedic” knowledge of anything and everything. Sometimes he wrote bits of information on little pieces of paper that he kept in his pockets or wallet. “Some are merely for my own amazement,” he said. At the writer’s request, Garroway shared a random one from the collection in his wallet: “Tomorrow is coming at us at 800 miles per hour.”
The article noted that Garroway was divorced, was the father of an 11-year-old daughter through that marriage, and now “leads a lonely bachelor’s existence” at 42. He had dated model Nancy Berg for a while, and had also dated Betty Furness and “a motion picture producer” named Pamela Wilde.1 He capped his long and busy weekdays by going back to his Park Avenue apartment around 5 p.m., going to the garage and working on his beloved 1938 SS 100 Jaguar2, “for which he paid $4400 and on which he has spent $13,000, despite the fact he does all the work himself.” After tinkering with the Jaguar, there usually was just time for dinner and sleep before the alarm went off at 4 a.m. The alarm, by the way, was a contraption Garroway built that he called “the horror,” which “looks like the Univac control board and does almost as many things,” controlling the phone’s bell, the phonograph, and the room’s lighting.
Tinkering with the Jaguar and building devices like “the horror” were but a few manifestations of Garroway’s many fascinations; the piece noted that Garroway “collects hobbies the way other people collect stamps.” His apartment brimmed with books, records, microscopes, and even a collection of 125 pairs of unusual cuff links. A tripod in the living room had a set of binoculars from a German tank.
The sudden fortune Garroway realized from Today left him laughing, and he confessed he didn’t know precisely how much he had made the year before. He recalled how he’d been hired as a staff announcer by KDKA for $50 a week, and had moved to Chicago because he was offered $62.50. “How would you feel,” he asked, “if you were suddenly told you were worth $300,000 a year for doing just exactly what you’ve always been doing?”
- Garroway’s friendship with Betty Furness was noted in the 1953 piece reviewed previously. His romance with Nancy Berg provided no end of fodder for New York’s gossip columnists. He married Pamela Wilde in 1956.
- Dave’s beloved Jaguar, which remains pretty much the way he rebuilt it, was offered up at auction not long ago. The car will be the subject of a future post.