Category: Dave’s life

Gehman on Garroway: “Portrait Of A Tormented Man”

A couple weeks ago we looked at a 1954 Esquire article Richard Gehman wrote about Today. Close to seven years later, now writing for TV Guide, Gehman returned to the Today studio to observe Dave Garroway in action. But in that time, much had changed both with the program and with the master communicator. Stories regularly circulated about staff shake-ups, of fits of temper from an unhappy Garroway. And, of course, the sudden death of Pamela Garroway in April 1961 compounded things. Soon after her passing, Garroway announced he would leave Today.

The first part of Gehman’s article ran in the July 15, 1961 TV Guide.1 A box on the cover promised, “Dave Garroway: Portrait of a Tormented Man.” A subhead in the spread stated, “His peaceful television image belies a seething personality.”

Perhaps our understanding of this article will be helped by a look at Richard Gehman’s style. In their terrific study Changing Channels: America in TV Guide2, Glenn Altschuler and David Grossvogel wrote that freelancer Gehman, who contributed many articles for TV Guide, was the kind of writer appreciated by editorial director Merrill Panitt. For the sort of respected publication Panitt and publisher Walter Annenberg wanted TV Guide to become, they felt that celebrity profiles shouldn’t gush; instead, they should probe. Panitt told Altschuler and Grossvogel that where other magazines gushed, TV Guide “looked for warts.” And Richard Gehman’s work, they wrote, “helped change the direction of the magazine.”

Gehman, they noted, grounded “virtually every profile in popular psychology.” He also employed the “new journalism” technique of placing himself in the story as participant or observer. And another calling card was his use of literary allusions. In “Portrait of a Tormented Man,” we see those techniques at work as Gehman tries to capture the essence of Garroway, who turned 48 in July 1961, as he seeks the next chapter in his life.3

Gehman leads off with a literary allusion, comparing a Christmas party for the Today staff to a Roman bacchanalia which “would have delighted a contemporary Edward Gibbon.” While others at the party lived it up, Garroway “sat near the center of the saturnalia, his bony face expressing boredom that was close to despair,” perhaps wishing he were instead working on one of his cars or relaxing with his telescope. “Whenever anyone approached, Garroway forced a wan, Proustian smile. He spoke cordially but with obvious effort.” Less than an hour into the party, Garroway left.

Why? Associates repeated things Gehman had heard for years – he’s shy, hard to know – and a Today director called Garroway a “cold fish” who “can’t warm up to people in the flesh.” But to Gehman, the best explanation came from a passage in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, describing the protagonist as “really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes.” Gehman wrote that the phrase could have been written for Garroway. “For 14 years, off and on, he has been seeing a psychiatrist in an effort to learn what is inside those boxes. And what he has learned is that there are more boxes.”

To Gehman, the conflicting aspects of Garroway’s personality – a man who could engage in breezy, light conversation and then moments later opine about dark scenarios that Communist agents had already hidden small atomic bombs in major cities, and describe his own Manhattan bomb shelter in great detail, including a supply of Seconal capsules (“better to go that way than to die horribly of radiation”) – made the real Garroway hard to define, and Gehman found the man’s own explanations contradictory. Although Garroway stayed aloof to most people, he claimed to enjoy the company of others. “Yet there was a period when he seldom ventured out before he had disguised his face with cotton wads slipped into his nostrils and cheeks and under his upper lip. ‘It made me look mean and feel mean; it got me into two fights,’ he told me.”4

Now, Gehman wrote, “he no longer disguises himself except with an air of impenetrable calm,” stylized by the famous “peace” signoff, which he also used “to bid farewell, to express approval, or to get out of arguments. Or, in the majority of cases, to shun small talk.” Garroway admitted he had difficulty relating, but insisted it helped him with the casual style he had on the air; in front of the camera, he felt he could be himself. His in-person aloofness, his preference for spending time with gadgets instead of people, didn’t come across to home viewers. “They think he loves them. They regard him as an old friend who is welcome to drop by for breakfast any morning,” Gehman wrote. One morning Garroway lamented that American-made screwdrivers no longer had wooden handles; within days his office was inundated with packages from viewers, sending him wooden-handled screwdrivers.

Viewer loyalty to Garroway made Today a very profitable program for NBC, and Garroway was handsomely rewarded for it (more than $350,000 a year). But Gehman wrote that for more than two years Garroway had been unhappy because “he has been forced to work under what has seemed to him mysterious pressures, not only from sponsors but from the NBC brass.”

Complicating things, Gehman wrote, was Garroway’s home life. “Garroway’s moody introversion has made him not only hard to know but also to live with,” he wrote. When he married his second wife, Garroway was not aware of what Gehman called her “unhappy girlhood” and that she was “a highly emotional young woman.” Her psychoanalyst would not discuss her case with Garroway, citing ethical reasons. Late in April, while Garroway was spending a weekend at their summer home on Long Island, his wife was found dead in their Manhattan townhome, having overdosed on sleeping pills. On May 29, Garroway announced he would be leaving Today.

The second half of Gehman’s profile, in the July 22 issue5, tries to get inside Garroway’s head through a biographical approach. Gehman writes that Today‘s variety, and the departure of its host, couldn’t be attributed to one answer. “There are several, all as intertwined as Garroway’s several personalities.” And his closest associates “argue about what makes him tick – and about whether or not he does tick.” (“He doesn’t,” said former Today director Mike Zeamer. “He hums, like an electronic watch.”)

And here Gehman uses his favorite tactic, putting Garroway on the analyst’s couch and tracing that “humming” to a childhood spent moving from one place to another. He describes Garroway as “a shy, withdrawn youth who found communication with strangers difficult, perhaps because he met so many,” having attended 21 different schools by the time he graduated high school. “It may have been his desire to make people like him by entertaining them that led him eventually into radio, as an announcer,” Gehman writes.6

In a few paragraphs Gehman traces Garroway’s two decades or so in broadcasting, from his start as an NBC page through the birth of his style in wartime Hawaii, through the Chicago years and his tenure on Today, and his role in turning the show into “a reflection of his many interests. Also, he says frankly, it is a reflection of his shortcomings, for he does not have time to prepare adequately for the many different spots he is called upon to fill.” Gehman notes that Garroway has made mistakes for this reason, criticizes the program as “often shallow,” and that Garroway’s behavior has sometimes seemed excessive, citing an on-camera confrontation with a delegate from a Communist-controlled country that came across as “a disjointed argument on Communism.” Garroway insisted to Gehman that he spoke up because he feels anti-communists had a duty to do so. “Because he has spoken up so many times, he is certain that if the Russians ever defeat us, he will be one of the first to be liquidated.”

The article concludes with Gehman’s account of being with Garroway in Studio 3B7 during a May 29 rehearsal, right after Garroway announced he was leaving the program. Around Garroway nearly fifty people were busy with the varied tasks that went into recording each day’s program. At one point a woman slipped into the studio and approached Garroway, saying, “Darling, are you ready to go?” Garroway calmly replied, “Just a minute. I’ll get my stuff,” and gave what Gehman called “a significant look” at a nearby page, who escorted the woman away. A few moments later, someone brought Garroway’s four-year-old son into the studio, and the host put aside his preparations to visit with his child. Not five seconds later, someone summoned Garroway to the phone to talk with an upcoming guest. Gehman noticed that as Garroway was on the phone, he played with his keys – “a huge bunch, two whole handfuls, symbolic of the locks and barriers that make prisoners of all stars in television. He obviously was tense, holding himself inside the Dave Garroway shell with an immense effort.” But the moment the show was to go on, Garroway put aside his nervous tics, smiled, turned to the camera, and became “the Garroway his audiences know.” Producer Fred Freed whispered to Gehman, “How he’s been able to do this for damned near 10 years, I’ll never tell you.”

After the taping ended at 6:30, Garroway went to an appointment with his psychiatrist, then was back home at 7:45 for dinner with his three children. But he couldn’t relax, as the phone constantly rang with reporters wanting to know why he was leaving Today. Garroway patiently told them he wanted to refresh himself, read books, travel, take stock of himself, and rest. But Gehman said he had learned “through reliable sources” that Garroway and NBC had been at odds for two years because the network wanted him to stress entertainment. In addition, Gehman said, Garroway’s home life had already been unhappy for two years, and then the shock of his wife’s death made him stop and review his life.

“I find my attitudes, after nearly 10 years for Today, have standardized themselves into about 25 different cliches,” he told Gehman over a drink that night. “I’m tired of them and everybody else must be.” But Garroway saw himself getting back on television at some point. “I’ve got four years to go on my NBC contract. Relations are amiable now. I’ll be back – but I don’t know, right now, how or when.”8

Peace!

Since it’s Easter Sunday, what better time to explore the beautiful word that was Dave Garroway’s benediction?

NBC photo
Three things come to mind when you mention Dave Garroway: those horn-rimmed glasses; that bow tie; and his sign-off, an upheld hand, palm facing out, accompanied by the spoken word “peace.” Where did that come from? Thanks to the Archive of American Television and an old TV Guide article, we know enough to do a little digging and come up with the likely answer.

Charlie Andrews, who was Dave’s favorite writer and best friend, told the Archive in his lengthy interview that “peace” came from a preacher out of Philadelphia that Garroway took to listening to. This preacher would give these energetic sermons and would use the benediction, “Peace! It’s wonderful.” Garroway took a liking to “peace!” and adopted it as his own.9

But who was that preacher? The second clue comes from Richard Gehman’s 1961 TV Guide profile of Garroway10, which cites the benediction’s origin as borrowed from “Father Divine.” A little search engine magic does the rest, and you soon learn of the Reverend Major Jealous Divine, who indeed ran his ministry from Philadelphia starting in 1942 and employed the exhortation “Peace! It’s wonderful.” His story is much too interesting and wide-ranging for me to try to encapsulate here, so maybe it’s better if you consult this rundown of Father Divine’s life and times. Don’t miss his many interesting connections to other cultural phenomena, including a famous Johnny Mercer composition inspired by one of Father Divine’s sermons.

One of a kind

Playboy photos

One of the strange sidelights of my research is that it’s led me to examine the Playboy Magazine archive, since Playboy carried a couple of pieces about Dave Garroway during its early years. Since I was born in the ’70s, there’s a certain image I have of Playboy, so it’s interesting to go back to the magazine’s early years and see when it was about a lifestyle, about being a cool and swinging man, and the girlie pictures play less of a role than you might think (and are also fairly tame by modern standards – if anything, early Playboy makes me think of Esquire in the ’80s and ’90s).

In the ’50s Dave Garroway symbolized several things that fit in with the Playboy ideal. He was a cool character who talked cool. He liked fast cars. He dressed and groomed himself in a unique style. He loved jazz music. “Watching him, you get the idea he doesn’t care one way or the other if he has an audience or not,” a 1954 profile of Garroway in Playboy read. “He’s just taking it easy, doing what he wants to be doing, and if a few million people happen to be looking at him, OK. If they’re not, OK too.”

One other aspect of the Garroway lifestyle that fit with the Playboy lifestyle: Garroway’s skill with card games. Long nights with card games had led to a lot in Dave’s life – and helped launch his career in broadcasting. Even into the Today years Dave kept on playing cards, and in the November 1957 Playboy John Moss wrote about the qualities of a good poker player, hoping to inspire those wanting to improve their game. As an example of the skills a first-rate poker player would possess, Moss cited Garroway as a particularly adept opponent, saying that the master communicator “has won entirely too much of my money.”

Moss wrote that Garroway’s overwhelming characteristic was self-discipline, that he never did anything without a reason. “Calculating, unemotional, a realist, a convincing dissembler – he never beats himself.” Although Garroway had his bad nights, Moss said he never caused his own downfall. “With Garroway you have the sense that everything is going along just fine and your queens-up are going to win with ease, and then about the time you’re counting the pot for the third time and imagining yourself sweeping it in, there’s Dave with a neat little straight he had on the first five cards.”

Moss said Garroway wasn’t being modest in not raising. “He waited until his fourth up-card seemed to wreck him and everyone was relaxed. Then he was set. Then there was the bland, casual, slightly bored, slightly confused manner and the harmless, diverting small talk – all designed to soothe you, quiet your suspicions, rock you to sleep – and the next thing you knew Dave was dragging in your pot.”

According to Moss, Garroway demonstrated that the best poker players were amateurs. Pros played a cold and calculated game that avoided risk, “but their play lacks boldness, flavor and imagination – the very qualities with which Garroway’s game abounds.”

Young Dave Garroway and the Triple-Dog-Dare

Courtesy Schenectady Historical Society

In a few days we’ll renew the annual tradition of watching A Christmas Story on the network that shows it on a loop for 24 straight hours. Somehow I never saw A Christmas Story until I was into my 30s, but in the last decade and a half it’s become a special movie to me, and I won’t dare go through the holidays without watching it at least once.

If you’ve seen A Christmas Story (and if you haven’t…well, what are you waiting for?), you’re familiar with the scene involving Flick, a flagpole, and a triple-dog-dare. But could you ever guess there’s a similar story involving a young Dave Garroway? Dave himself told it in the draft of the memoir he never completed. In the spirit of the season, here it is.

The Crane Street Bridge in more favorable weather. (Courtesy Schenectady Historical Society)

One day in Schenectady, fourth-grader Dave Garroway was headed to school. As he recalled, it was snowing that day and about ten degrees. His route took him across the Crane Street bridge, which spanned a little valley near the school. About halfway across the bridge, young Dave looked down at the thick snow blanketing the valley below, and thought it was beautiful. For some reason – “just out of love, I guess,” he later said – he had the impulse to lick the bridge. His tongue reached out to the bridge’s metal railing.

You get one guess what happened next.

No matter how he tried, Dave couldn’t pull his tongue away. He began to yell for help, but his pleas were muffled. Some of his friends came to help, but when they tried to pull him from the railing, it made things worse. Dave kept trying to yell “Get help! Get help!”

Someone had the idea of getting pails of hot water, pouring it on the rail to free Dave’s tongue. Three pails later, Dave was scalded but still stuck. The metal held the cold too well for the water to have any effect. Dave had the idea that heating the rail would do the trick, and finally had the idea to yell “Fire! Fire!” Which then prompted a call to the fire department. Young Dave had reasoned they would have torches that could heat the rail.

By the time firemen arrived, Dave had been stuck to the bridge for about 45 minutes. He was tired and his tongue was bleeding. The firemen brought over a gas torch and held it against the rail a short distance from Dave’s stuck tongue. “Gradually, slowly, I could feel the warmth creeping toward my tongue,” he remembered half a century later. Soon one side of his tongue let go, and then the rest peeled away. “Oh! What a relief. And then my tongue began to hurt worse than ever.” As he recalled, “I didn’t taste anything for some time, except the bitter flavor of the Crane Street Bridge.” Worse, he had several people upset with him. The school principal sent him home, and the fire department paid a visit to his father to tell him to stop doing that. “As though I did it every day,” Garroway remembered. “I was the guy who should have done the complaining.” Why not, the inventive fourth-grader thought, have a heated Crane Street Bridge? “But I kept my mouth shut. After all, I was only in the fourth grade. And, besides, my tongue hurt too much to talk.”

Like so much of the Schenectady that Dave knew, the old Crane Street Bridge is long gone. It’s been replaced by a newer and wider span – and though it still has a rail, I doubt today’s fourth-graders feel the urge to give it a lick. But if you look the modern bridge up on Google Earth, you’ll find an interesting bit of graffiti just a little more than halfway across the span.

No matter the real reason why that graffiti’s there, I can’t help thinking that if Dave saw it, he’d get a chuckle from it.

Whatever you celebrate, make sure you celebrate it well. And be sure to keep your tongue away from frozen metal.

Grateful acknowledgment to the Schenectady Historical Society for the two images above. See more about Crane Street on the Society’s website here.

Beginnings, part 1

Before we get too far along, it may serve some purpose to give some background on how we got here. I can only speak for myself; my collaborator on this project will soon be posting thoughts about what drew him toward researching Dave Garroway, and no doubt we’ll share the story of how our paths crossed. All that in due course, mind you.

How did it begin for me? I’m not exactly sure how I grew up fascinated by early broadcasting, but it happened. I was born in the early 1970s, and my childhood was well into the full-color era. Yet when I’d see some historical footage, or hear some clip from an old radio program, it fascinated me. Maybe it’s that time-machine feeling you can get listening to something from the archives, like it’s a half-hour of another time that’s been preserved in real time, and you can relive that moment as it happened. There’s something tantalizing about it.

I must have been five or six when it really first manifested itself, and TV Guide had published a book commemorating its first quarter-century. Its jacket displayed several TV Guide covers from yesteryear, and inside was a color section with dozens upon dozens more covers showcasing the stars of earlier days. I begged my parents to buy me that book – odd for someone my age, perhaps, but mom and dad came through. How I loved that book, too, and how I loved reading through the articles showcased therein and looking at year after year of covers. There were earlier versions of people I already knew of: Walter Cronkite, Sally Field, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, David Brinkley. But there were also mysteries. Who was this Bishop Sheen with those intense eyes? Why does Sid Caesar have that look on his face? Who are those people stacked atop each other, especially the guy with the glasses and the funny smile? And who was that Van Doren guy in the headphones? (Was he supposed to be a pilot?)

That TV Guide anniversary book wasn’t where it all began for me, but it was probably my touchstone through my youth. Other things came in, too; for instance, perhaps our local paper would carry a wire service obit for a broadcaster of yesteryear, and sometimes those would have photos, and I’d clip those. Or I’d see a picture in a book of an old radio microphone with the network flags on it, and I’d be endlessly fascinated. (I may well be the youngest reader ever of Prime Time, Alexander Kendrick’s biography of Ed Murrow, which I kept checked out from the local library when I was nine or ten.) It was also around that age I discovered old-time radio tapes at a record store, and that opened a whole world to me. Clip shows and documentaries that showed how television was back in its early days also fascinated me – the heightened shadows and contrast, the extreme close-ups through fixed-length lenses, network logos long since retired, all fascinated me and scared me just a little for some reason, and left me wanting to know more about this weird new world of old.

But why Dave Garroway? Perhaps it was seeing one of the retrospective shows, or maybe it was in a piece on some news or documentary program. I’m fairly certain, though, it comes to having seen the clip we’ve all seen a dozen times or more from that very first morning, ghostly pictures with rainy audio, Dave with that goofy microphone at his waist (and we’ll talk more about that goofy microphone in an upcoming post), welcoming all and sundry to this new program. For me, growing up in the Tom Brokaw-Jane Pauley era of Today when the most unpolished thing about the program was Gene Shalit’s hairdo, getting a glimpse of how it once was…that was fascinating. The guy with the bowtie and glasses who spoke in that low, purring voice? That weird studio crammed with stuff? This was the same program? And I had to know more.

That, sadly, was about the time Dave ended his own life. The obituary articles, and the retrospectives published in weeks and months to come, featured pictures from Dave’s time on Today. I saved all of them I could. Eventually retrospective books about the program came along, some of them very nicely illustrated, and many of them with interesting anecdotes about Dave. He seemed like an interesting guy with a wide range of interests, but also a guy who…well, had some interesting things going on in his mind. (Beryl Pfizer’s 1984 remembrance of Garroway in TV Guide, in which she catalogued many alleged Garroway eccentricities she saw during her time on Today, really left an impression.) And when we got a VCR, I taped the Today retrospectives. This, oddly enough, in a household where we really didn’t watch Today – most of my memories are of Good Morning America or whatever morning program CBS was trying at any given moment.

All of this was in the back of my mind, one of those subjects I had some interest in but no real urge to do anything further with. Other fields had my attention, as did other pursuits – school, college, graduate school, and three or four other causes I worked on during my 20s and 30s. In grad school I really didn’t do that much on broadcast history, despite my deep love for it.

As a full-time academic, though, I found myself with opportunities to put decades of trivia to some sort of use – and I also faced the academician’s challenge to produce papers for presentation and possible publication. (Could I possibly have used more words beginning with “p” just then?) Early on at my present job, I turned some of that fascination with broadcasting into a paper about Garroway’s contemporary Arthur Godfrey, and presented it at a conference. I’d hoped to do more, but the daily demands of the job got in the way, and I found myself devoid of time and motivation to conduct more research.

Garroway remained at a low simmer in my mind, and eventually I came to learn of his abandoned attempt at a memoir. And, tantalizingly, how so many biographical materials were preserved in archives. Over the years I toyed with the idea. “Should I?” I’d published things before and knew it was a big job. You have to love a subject enough to stick with it through times good and bad, easy and challenging. Is that how you could feel about Dave Garroway? Could you commit to him that way?

In the end, I could. The more I learned about him, the more I wanted to learn. Watching so many interviews with his colleagues in the great Emmy TV Legends series reminded me of how important he was to the medium, and of the magic he could make happen. In one interview a longtime television professional who worked with him laments that nobody’s ever written a book about Dave, and what a shame that is. And, personally, I’m amazed nobody’s done it before now, for Garroway’s life has a fascinating, wide-ranging, story to tell, by turns adventurous and heartbreaking.

I am looking forward to the opportunity, both through this website and the book on which we’re working, to tell a story long overdue – and to finally give Dave Garroway the biographical treatment he merits. It’s a shame it hasn’t been done until now, but it’s an honor to have the chance to do so. It will be a big job, and it won’t be easy, but I am looking forward to it.

Well, here we are.

Happy birthday, Dave!

Welcome to Garroway at Large, an online tribute to Dave Garroway, the original Master Communicator. And more specifically, welcome to Wide Wide Blog, where we’ll occasionally post thoughts, essays, discoveries, and other musings about Dave Garroway’s life and times. We’re especially pleased to launch this on July 13, which was Dave’s birthday. (Happy 104th birthday, Old Tiger!)

Why Dave Garroway, you ask? Well, because the man’s life and work have been sadly neglected. Chances are good you know him only from his work on Today, and that your vision of him is frozen in what little there is from that first morning, or you remember him trying to keep a certain primate within the bounds of good behavior. And while it’s important to remember Dave Garroway for his time on Today, there’s more to the man than just that, or Wide Wide World, or any one program in particular, or even his broadcasting career.

As we explore Dave Garroway’s life, we are finding a man of many interests and many layers, and the portrait that is emerging is much more nuanced than the stories and rumors and legends would have you believe. Certainly Garroway had his troubles, and we shall deal with those well-known troubles in as appropriate a manner and context as possible. But there are other stories to tell of this man who was headmaster of a new school of broadcasting, a very shy and private man who somehow had the ability to look into a camera and make millions of viewers feel he was a friend talking to them and them alone. Here was a man who somehow fit dozens of interests – broadcasting, automobiles, telescopes and astronomy, engineering, music, you name it – into his life. And, sadly, here is the story of a man who was once virtually everywhere in popular culture, then vanished into obscurity, his efforts to restart his career too often ending in a fizzle.

In telling the story of this fascinating man, the journey will be long and far-ranging, and it’s already taken us many places. It will take us to many more, scouring archival holdings and conducting interviews and doing all the other tasks necessary to reconstruct Garroway’s 69 years in accuracy and detail. But we’re doing it because it’s a story worth telling, and we think you’ll learn some neat things along the way.

Along with this, we extend an invitation. We are always looking for people who somehow had a connection with Dave Garroway, because while documents and recordings can tell us much, they only go so far in telling us what the man himself was like. That’s where you could come in handy. Perhaps you met Dave Garroway, either in passing, on business, or in connection with one of his programs. Perhaps you worked with him. Or perhaps you’re related to him. (We’d especially welcome a chance to talk to Garroway’s family, especially members of his immediate family.)

Even if you didn’t have an encounter with him, perhaps you have some item of Garroway-related memorabilia, some original photos, or some rare documents. Maybe you have a recording of one of his shows that has heretofore been thought lost forever. We’d welcome hearing from you too! Just click on the “Contact” button in the menu above to get in touch with us. We’ll get back to you soon as we can (day job permitting, of course).

We’re glad to be here, and we’re happy to have this chance to honor Dave Garroway. There’s a long journey ahead, and it may well be a sentimental one. We’re looking forward to it, and we hope you’ll join us.