A couple years ago I was on a certain popular auction site doing one of my semi-regular searches for Garroway memorabilia. Much of what you’ll find is common – magazines, press photos and so forth. But sometimes you’ll find an item that leaves you speechless. This was one of them. I put in a bid, not expecting much to come of it. The auction ended and I was the new owner. I was glad the price was so low, and yet the price I paid seemed like an insult to what the item meant.
This is a photo Dave inscribed to jazzman Red Norvo. If you’re up on your Garroway history, you know Red was a contributor (with Matt Dennis) to Dave’s RCA album Some Of My Favorites. Something about the way Red played really moved Dave, and it’s apparent in the inscription. It’s also apparent Red cherished the photo, for he had it very nicely framed and matted (in a frame with no glass), and the wire on the back shows signs that the photo hung on a wall for a long time.
The years of display and the inevitability of time made Dave’s inscription fade, but as best I can tell, it reads:
To Red who has brought more beauty to my life thru music than any other artist. The little appreciations we applaud loudly for. For the great ones we are silent for there are no words except, perhaps: Peace Dave Garroway
In the way that so sadly happens when someone passes away and their belongings scatter to the winds, somehow this particular item ended up on the auction site needing a new home. I don’t know the story of how it got there. All I know is that Red’s cherished photo is now a part of my home, and Dave now looks on from a place high on one of our shelves. My hope is that both Dave and Red somehow know how cherished it is.
:: You may have noticed this update came a little late. There is a reason (well, there are several, but one is seriously good). I’ll need some time to roll this out, but I can say that something incredible happened a few days ago. I will share more as I can, so stay tuned!
You’re familiar, no doubt, with the home game versions of popular television series, especially game shows (a natural enough tie-in). But you wouldn’t think Today would lend itself to a board game. Well, think again. Thanks to the good folks at Board Game Geek, here’s two attempts to bring the fun and excitement of America’s top-rated morning program to the family room: the original version, complete with nifty cameras and a set of chimes, and a 1960 treatment that uses cards instead. Enjoy! (And having produced a couple of television programs, if only it were as fun and exciting as a board game….)
:: We’ve been quiet here the last couple weeks. Much of it was work (and a lot’s been on my plate there), some of it was a trip that took place last weekend, and some of it has been other things not really of interest here. All of it has conspired to poke some holes in my schedule. Don’t, however, take this to mean there hasn’t been progress on the Dave Garroway project. Far from it. While I don’t want to count any unhatched chickens, some very good things may be in the works, and when it’s appropriate for me to do so, I will share. As always, stay tuned.
One of the neat things about attending an event like the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention is that in the vendor room, you can find original magazines useful for a project. TV Guide is particularly well-represented at these kinds of shows. There’s an obvious pop culture value in all those memorable covers, and a time machine value to looking at listings from yesteryear. But what’s so often overlooked is how valuable TV Guide is as a source of information, of interviews and insights in the journalism it presented when it was at its best.
We’ve spent some time here of late looking at some of TV Guide‘s articles about Dave Garroway. Much of it has been based on scans from microfilm held at the University of Georgia’s main library in Athens. It more than fills the bill for the text. But something’s missing when all you have is microfilm. Take the opening of this article, for instance:
It’s like looking at the past through a thick, dark fog. But when you can see the real thing, notice the difference.
The past really comes back to life. I’ll bet you never really knew what the colors were on the original Today set, did you? Most of the re-creations through the years on the retrospective shows used shades of gray. But notice the blue-gray, the earth tones, the contrasts on the big map behind the couch.
In the muddy high-contrast realm of microfilm, you just imagine Dave’s sitting in a darkened room in the wee small hours. I wasn’t prepared for how much more the original added to the scene:
Notice what you can see now: the hue and pattern of the wall behind him, the potted plant on the table, the chair near the wall, the grapefruit half that in black and white could be mistaken for a bowl. So much subtlety that you miss if you don’t see the original, and so much that reminds me how good it is to get hold of the genuine articles (pardon the expression) whenever I can.
Our journey through TV Guide‘s examinations of Dave Garroway continues on. Today’s piece examines a big and slightly controversial change at how his flagship broadcast was produced.
TV Guide photo
“Garroway No Longer Will Work By Dawn’s Early Light” read the headline in the August 1, 1959 TV Guide. “Thanks to tape, Dave will be able to live like most of us,” read the sub-head. NBC would begin videotaping each Today program the preceding afternoon starting in September.
Producer Bob Bendick told TV Guide the change would allow more scope. “There are more things happening at 4 in the afternoon than at 7 in the morning,” he said. “We’ll be able to cover many stories that we could never do before, including activities on the West Coast.”
Garroway and most of his staff were reportedly happy with the change, though they would miss the amusing little things that could happen when guests had to be awakened to be on the program. Dave told a story of when production assistant Estelle Parsons was sent to pick up Ava Gardner at her hotel, only to find Gardner had locked the doors and refused to answer through any means Parsons tried. “So Estelle returned to the studio and we put her on camera to impersonate Ava,” Garroway said. “She did a beautiful job.”
TV Guide photo
In another instance, Garroway remembered when the United States Olympic weightlifting team appeared on the program. Before the program, they asked for some coffee. Five minutes later, one of them “sheepishly” asked an attendant for help…because he couldn’t pull the stopper from the coffee jug. The attendant popped it right out. “At least we won’t be serving so much coffee when we move to afternoons,” Garroway laughed. Other incidents, including the morning George Jessel foiled an invitation for Harry Truman to come in, were mentioned.1
Bendick explained that an afternoon taping would allow the staff to keep a better grip on what’s going on. He explained that at 7 a.m., they could never get a good report on what was going on in Congress. “At 4 p.m., Congress is in session. We hope to be able to move our cameras someday right into the Senate corridors, into committee rooms.” Afternoon tapings might also open opportunities for Garroway to go on location – for instance, to a Broadway theater to talk with performers while an afternoon rehearsal was underway. Likewise, they could drop in on baseball or football games in progress, with Jack Lescoulie covering them. “And if we want to interview a baseball personality such as Casey Stengel or Yogi Berra, think how much better it will be for Jack to talk to them at Yankee Stadium. Until now, we had to invite them to visit our studio at 7 a.m,” Bendick said.
While the bulk of the program would be taped, the periodic news reports from Frank Blair would continue to be done live. Bendick promised that if a big story broke during the night, “we’ll be prepared to go live with the entire show,” with the entire staff notified to show up and go on live.
The article stated Garroway and the staff saw the benefits of videotaping during Today‘s visit to Paris. They also learned that it was better to do the entire program straight through, as if being done live, rather than taping segments out of sequence and assembling them for broadcast.
One more issue Bendick hoped the move would solve was the search for a new “women’s editor.” Betsy Palmer had left the show some months before, and the early hours played a role in her departure. Several women had tried out for the role after Palmer’s departure. Bendick hoped an afternoon taping might make an aspirant more likely to stay on, which meant “her personal and professional lives will not have to conflict.” He noted, however, that “no girl who has auditioned has complained that the 7 a.m. starting time was too rough.” Bendick also said they’d know when they’d found the right girl: “All the meters in the place will go ‘boing’ at the same time.”
As an early star of the national medium, one with a highly distinctive style, a lot of ink was spilled on behalf of Dave Garroway in television journals of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Let’s take a look at some of those pieces the next couple weeks or so, and perhaps that will help us remember just what a big deal Dave Garroway was back then.
TV Guide photo
The first full-length article on Garroway I could find in TV Guide was in the July 10-16, 1953 issue.1 It’s titled “Garroway Today,” and its subhead divulges, “That Chicago Touch Got Him A Penthouse On Fifth Avenue.”2 As was TV Guide‘s custom of the time, the article bore no byline.
The piece begins with an account of the summer day in 1951 when Garroway and his favorite writer and best friend, Charlie Andrews, were vacationing in a small Swiss town. At four in the morning, Garroway received a call from NBC informing him that the sponsor for Garroway At Large had pulled out. This brought the tour to an abrupt end. “Our sorrows melted 12 feet off the Matterhorn,” Garroway said.
TV Guide photo
But the loss of Garroway At Large opened the door for Today, which had debuted to great skepticism but was now a great success. “There’s no argument as to the reason: Dave Garroway.” The article noted that certain segments of the program even drew higher ratings than that of the wildly popular Arthur Godfrey, who was on later in the morning. The writer disagreed with those who compared the two, arguing that while Godfrey worked hard at being the “common man,” Garroway “lives in a world of discovery, of finding new things under the sun.”3
At the same time, the writer noted that Garroway’s more intellectual nature might be working against his wider success, that “he’s managed to build up resentment among some people who fiercely resist any idea that entertainment can be fresh and original,” and that his unusual nature may have put off some major agencies looking for more traditional fare for their sponsors.
The article makes Dave’s life sound busy but happy, noting the $2000 he made each week from Today and the additional income from the daily Dial Dave Garroway radio program, and that Dave liked how Today presented new material each day. One staffer noted that public reception was positive, and that people who thought his Garroway At Large persona was phony had changed their minds when they watched Today and saw they had been seeing the real Garroway all along. The article also notes the recent addition of J. Fred Muggs, and that Garroway was pragmatic about it. He liked that Muggs had raised Today‘s ratings two points, and “if he can help us that way, sure I want to keep him.”
Garroway and Andrews discussed each day the prospect of bringing Garroway At Large back to television, but the article noted it would be a challenge. Not only would they have to locate a sponsor, but several of the old castmembers – Jack Haskell, Connie Russell, Bette Chapel – had gone on to other things, and that only Cliff Norton was in New York.4
Of Dave personally, the article notes that the Garroway of television is much like the real Garroway, only that the latter is “a little shyer off camera.” It noted that Dave was divorced but had been seen in the company of Betty Furness, who had knitted “all of Dave’s present collection of loud Argyle socks.” Still, Dave was apparently in no hurry to get married again.5 Rather, he was more interested in getting Garroway At Large back on the air, and as part of the preparation was trying to get on a diet. “It would seem that the only way to get Garroway at Large back will be to have Garroway not-so-large.”
Last week I talked a bit about unreliable narrators, the importance of verifying information, and the process a historian must go through to make sure what’s written is as accurate as possible. This week, let’s take a look at this in action with a couple of examples, one that’s kind of related to Garroway and one that isn’t. We’ll handle the non-Garroway example first as a warm-up to how these kinds of myths begin.
Ask anybody about women in 1950s television and the name Betty Furness comes up past a certain point.1 Betty became a presence as a spokesperson for Westinghouse, famously demonstrating new appliances and opening refrigerator doors and so forth on live television. That mention of “refrigerator door” will inevitably get people talking about the night Betty Furness couldn’t get the refrigerator door to open and what a fiasco that was. And it’s a great story…except that Betty Furness wasn’t in town that night, and another lady (June Graham) was filling in for her:
And just so you’ll see the difference, here’s Betty Furness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3r2uq9ulRU
Now, let’s take a look at a story more directly related to Dave Garroway. And since it’s a story involving J. Fred Muggs, I will have to tell it carefully2, but I will tell it regardless.
There is a story that involves J. Fred Muggs biting Martha Raye. Since it involves Muggs, the assumption is automatically made that the incident happened on Today, and it’s kind of become part of the program’s mythology since many stories are out there of Muggs’ less-than-likable antics as he grew older.3 But what does the evidence tell us?
Well, do a little digging in the stacks and you find the story’s more complicated. You find out that Muggs, who was often a guest on other programs, was doing a guest spot on Martha Raye’s own television program. The incident happened April 17, 1954, as this wire service story published in the following Monday’s Minneapolis Star Tribune (among other papers) outlines:
And Life magazine provided photographic evidence, as well as a write-up, in this article (there are more photos of the Muggs incident a couple or three pages in).
What’s the lesson of it all? It’s that you have to check these things out. And it’s not just in regards to television history; it’s in any form of history.4 Just because a story sounds great doesn’t mean it’s true. It is the job of the historian to sort through all the available evidence (and seek every bit of it humanly possible), then write from that.
– We begin this week with a happy programming note: the Wide Wide Blog is now a member of the Classic TV Blog Association. Learn more about it and find links to many marvelous affiliated blogs here (and I’ll install the blogroll here as soon as I can find a way to make it play happy with the format I use here). It’s an esteemed group (which includes some friends of mine) and I’m happy to have the Wide Wide Blog in among these good folks and their work.
– Another happy note is that the manuscript continues to grow a little more each day. I set a goal of at least 100 words a day on it, and if I don’t get that done, it weighs on me (something about a work ethic that was instilled in me at a tender age). But it continues to grow and I learn new things all the time.
And sometimes, those things aren’t what they seem to be. One challenge a biographer faces is that when you’re dealing with any account, you’re dealing with a limited perspective. Memory does strange things. Four eyewitnesses will have four different accounts. (“Wow, Rashomon was an interesting movie.” “That’s not how I remember it.”)
Sometimes we’re lucky in that we find documentary evidence that tells us how things actually went. For instance, one file contains a typewritten recollection Garroway wrote of that very first morning on Today, the last seconds before the show went on the air. He writes about how he “realized that I had better say something quickly of an inspirational nature, something wise and to the point, preferably with a little humor in it.” And it’s a great account…except what he says he said (“Good morning – it’s Today on NBC”) was nothing like what he actually said. And we know this because the kinescope tells us so:
But other times, we’re not as fortunate. And that’s where the biographer becomes a detective. How much can you find out about the circumstances? What was going on? Can you find newspaper clippings about whatever it is? (I’ll write next week about one particularly famous episode that took on a life of its own, one that has been incorrectly attributed to Today, that a newspaper search finally put the nails in.) Have others written about it? Are there photographs? If it involves a location, do those aspects add up? (Some claims are geographically impossible once you look at a map.) Did the building even exist then? You get the idea.
And sometimes you can’t find a definitive answer. What to do then? Well, sometimes you have to acknowledge the ambiguity. I had to do that in the book I just finished writing, when a family member claimed that the subject of my book had been involved in some covert operations. They were interesting claims and the account in question seemed oddly detailed, but I only had that relative’s claims to go on. All the physical evidence that would have nailed down the claim had disappeared decades before (and sadly, appears to have been thrown out along with other family papers when her children were going through her effects after her passing – not out of malice, not out of covering anything up, but out of one of those things that happens when effects are gone through and discarded after someone passes). The information was too good not to include, but I had to qualify it, acknowledging that it was based on a single source and that only a secondhand account backed it up, and though I found circumstantial evidence in my subject’s surviving papers, it wasn’t the more concrete substantiation I’d love to have had.
This is why history and biography are more difficult to write than they may appear. If it were easy, I could just rewrite the drafts of Garroway’s unfinished autobiography, throw in anecdotes I found from others, and call it done, and my only effort would be the time I put into typing it all up. That might be fun, but what kind of contribution would it be to history? It would be a souvenir, but I’m not sure it would be an accurate reflection of the man and his times. It would frustrate future historians, who look to these kinds of works as references as they write their own new works (and it’s amazing how hard it is to kill an inaccurate story; once it’s committed to print, it’s often taken as gospel, and I’ve seen great historians repeat long-discredited stories in their own works because the works they trusted repeated said stories).
And such a work would be filtered through Garroway’s own perspective, and thus limited – just as we limit our own perspectives when we tell our own stories. And memory being the funny thing it can be, sometimes things don’t add up. I’ve lost track of how often I could have sworn under oath that a thing I remembered went a certain way, only to go back and find irrefutable evidence that it was far different than I recalled.
And that’s part of why the historian and biographer must take a step back, read through claims and stories and verify them, and above all employ good judgment and sound thinking. Then again, that’s just good advice for life, period.
Next week we’ll take a closer look at this concept, using that story I mentioned above as a case study.
My search through old newspapers has just led me through January 1952. As you can imagine, there was a lot of coverage and a lot of reviews related to NBC’s new early-morning experiment. Some of them are pretty famous (notably John Crosby’s review, which asked “what hath God and NBC wrought?”), some are pretty critical, some are generous and optimistic. But one stood out for me, one by H.I. Phillips that was carried widely in the days following Today‘s debut, and it takes the cake.
In a review titled “The Great Shaving Hazard,” Phillips called Today “a sort of global cafeteria of dissa and datta,” and wondered what Dave Garroway had done to “bring the heavy sentence down on his head…if he is not a superman he will petition the governor for an early pardon.” Phillips said that no program should go two hours, unless the idea is to make it tougher to take than the commercials, in which case “either Garroway will have to give up the program or we will have to give up shaving, bathing, dressing and getting ready for work with the video on. The human system can’t absorb so many things so early in the day.”
Phillips said the program, which he called “Attaway with Garroway,” had everything but wrestling and cooking recipes. “We wouldn’t be surprised to see the trend wind up with a six-hour video program in which Jimmy Durante would give the weather forecast, Helen Traubel deliver a message on the state of the union, and Vishinsky, Anthony Eden and Harry Truman alternate in giving the correct time at one-minute intervals.” He said Today “is like a trip on a flying carpet in your pajamas, with no time for orange juice and with frequent stops at a madhouse to change pilots. The plot is by Joe Cook, the settings by Rube Goldberg and the direction by Abbott and Costello.”
Of Garroway, Phillips said his personality “combines the features of Peter Lind Hayes, Jules Verne, Ed Wynn, Aladdin, Puss-In-Boots and the Forepaugh Brothers,” and that “when he stops you know you are late for work. We listened for four mornings. Now we get the same effect by playing a harmonica, doing a toe dance and studying maps of Formosa while we drink our coffee.”
While Phillips felt Today was a noble effort, it left him exhausted. “To see all those video people working in the studio all snarled up in wires, gadgets, etc., so early makes us depressed. We just can’t feel global before noon.”
As work continues on the manuscript (now more than 14,000 words, by the way), sometimes it’s useful to take a break and watch a video or two. In that spirit, here’s a little offering of interest: a clip from the 1948 film I Surrender, Dear. The entire clip is interesting because it gives you a glimpse into what radio was like in the immediate postwar years, but the last minute or so is really interesting for our purposes. Take a look and enjoy.
As the manuscript very slowly starts taking shape (and I’m pleased to report it’s now past 10,000 words), I’m coming to appreciate how much material is out there and how much I’m constantly discovering, and how all of it is making the job a lot easier. Garroway’s uncompleted autobiography, for instance, exists in two drafts and one of them includes supplemental material, and as much as I wish he had brought the story current before he put the project aside I am grateful those drafts exist, for even incomplete and with their imperfections and occasional inconsistencies (and even with their occasional assertions that don’t match the historical record) they lend an awful lot of insight.
Be that as it may, there are times when I will scour through other materials and find tantalizing hints of things that either never happened, or that have fallen through the cracks and are probably gone forever. For one, many “where are they now?” pieces about the original Today gang mentioned what they were up to. In 1977 one such story mentioned the forthcoming publication of Frank Blair’s memoir, but also mentioned that Jack Lescoulie was writing a book about his days in television. What became of that project, I wonder? I can’t begin to imagine what kinds of insight that would have lent.
The same goes for a couple of women who worked with Garroway. One of them was Lee Lawrence, who was entrusted with Garroway’s materials from his memoir project. She tried to get interest in a book about the early days of Today, but to no avail. That’s a true shame, because she knew the subject, knew the principals in that story, and would have written an awesome book. The other was Beryl Pfizer, who was briefly a “Today Girl” in 1961 and wrote a couple of articles about working on Today with Garroway. She wrote that she kept a journal of the odd things he did each day. I really wanted to interview her for this project…only to find that she died a few months before I decided to take the project on. What became of her papers, I wonder?
Then there are other things that, by all accounts, don’t exist. A few months ago I came across a tantalizing mention that in January 1977, Garroway appeared on Dr. Robert Schuller’s Hour of Power telecast, and on it spoke of his newfound faith in Jesus Christ. I’ve found a couple of promotional-style clippings and advertisements, and eBay has yielded one press photo of Garroway with Schuller (the same one that’s in the ad).
You can imagine what a recording of this program would mean for our project. My heart leapt when I came across the Schuller papers, and when I saw it included some recordings I got really interested…only to find that the recordings don’t include anything from January 1977. Nuts.
Some finds in this project have come from careful planning. Others have come from being in the right place in the right time. And some of them have come from people who have contacted us out of the blue. And this, as much as any post, is a reminder that if you knew Dave, if you or a family member worked with him, if you’re related to him, if you have something that belonged to him that has a story to it, if you have a recording of any of his appearances on anything like Hour of Power or The CBS Newcomers or anything of the sort…we’re all ears, and we’d love to hear from you. This project will be only as good as the information we uncover and the assistance we’re able to get, and we’ll certainly be grateful.
This is a photo Dave inscribed to jazzman Red Norvo. If you’re up on your Garroway history, you know Red was a contributor (with Matt Dennis) to Dave’s RCA album Some Of My Favorites. Something about the way Red played really moved Dave, and it’s apparent in the inscription. It’s also apparent Red cherished the photo, for he had it very nicely framed and matted (in a frame with no glass), and the wire on the back shows signs that the photo hung on a wall for a long time.
To Red
Then there are other things that, by all accounts, don’t exist. A few months ago I came across a tantalizing mention that in January 1977, Garroway appeared on Dr. Robert Schuller’s Hour of Power telecast, and on it spoke of his newfound faith in Jesus Christ. I’ve found a couple of promotional-style clippings and advertisements, and eBay has yielded one press photo of Garroway with Schuller (the same one that’s in the ad).