Today – Page 5 – Garroway at Large

Remembering Jim Fleming

The first “Today” team: Dave Garroway flanked by Jim Fleming and Jack Lescoulie (NBC photo)

The Dave Garroway story is not only the story of Dave himself, but also of the people he worked with. Some of them are well-known, but others have fallen through the cracks of history. From time to time I hope to highlight some of those forgotten stories here.

Let’s begin with Today‘s first news presenter. This is a role that’s kind of gone with the times on some programs, but once it was commonplace for the hosts to throw to someone at the top of every half-hour for the news. John Palmer, for instance, was who I remember from when I watched Today in the ’80s, and of course Frank Blair’s long tenure as newsman is never far from our minds here. But it all had to begin somewhere, and in the beginning it wasn’t just the job of reading news on the air: the news editor was literally the news editor. And the first news editor of Today is all but forgotten.¹ So let’s take some time to remember Jim Fleming.

Jim Fleming on the first “Today” program in 1952 (NBC photo)

James F. Fleming, a native of Wisconsin, attended the University of Chicago and graduated in 1938. He moved to New York with the intent of going to law school, but accepted a job with CBS as a radio announcer. The announcing gig ended up becoming a role as a correspondent. Fleming reported from the Middle East, covering the Cairo and Teheran conferences, and also reported from the Soviet Union. On the first Today program, as Garroway gave a summary of Fleming’s credentials and mentioned his issues with the Soviet censors, Fleming said with a chuckle, “They ejected me, Dave.”

In 1949 NBC hired Fleming, and he worked on projects for television and radio. One of his duties was serving as editor of the radio series Voices and Events, a half-hour summer replacement program that highlighted events in the news. Fleming was eyed early on as news editor for Today, being discussed in mid-1951 before Dave Garroway entered the picture, and it was Fleming’s role to get together a staff and everything the program would need to bring the world’s happenings to the broadcast each morning. Fleming’s staffers included a young Phi Beta Kappan named Gerald Green, who had been reporting for the International News Service. Another of Fleming’s helpers was a young production assistant named Estelle Parsons, who remembered him as “wonderful…so brilliant” and “a wonderful intellect.” According to her, Fleming had the ability to take something that had come off the wire and know all about it no matter what it was or where it had happened.²

Fleming appears amazed as Garroway shows him some exciting leader film in a too-obvious publicity photo (NBC photo)

Fleming’s tenure at Today was brief, and there are varying accounts as to why.³ Regardless, in March 1953 he was replaced by Merrill (“Red”) Mueller. Fleming worked on various projects⁴ until he was tapped by Pat Weaver to be the executive producer of an innovative weekend programming service for the NBC Radio Network. This project, which became Monitor, ran for nearly 20 years.⁵

Not long after the debut of Monitor, Fleming was off again. CBS hired him to work on one of its many efforts to counter-program Today in the early morning hours. He also produced documentaries for CBS, including the Peabody-winning The Hidden Revolution, which he co-produced with Edward R. Murrow. In 1962 and 1963 he worked with David Susskind to present Festival of the Performing Arts. Later in the decade he worked with six crews to film a four-hour documentary about Africa for ABC. The resulting documentary, Africa, was narrated by Gregory Peck and aired for four straight hours on ABC prime-time in 1967. Fleming’s efforts resulted in an Emmy award.

Jim Fleming on Today’s 40th anniversary show (NBC photo)

In later years Fleming stayed out of the spotlight, although he did make a too-brief appearance on the January 14, 1992 Today program, where Faith Daniels (who was then on the news desk) interviewed him about the early days.⁶ Married and with four children, Fleming made his home in Princeton, New Jersey, where he died in August 1996 at age 81.

There’s much more to the story of Jim Fleming, and I look forward to finding it out as we continue the research process.

The article that started it all

In the ninth month of 1951 Dave Garroway was feeling lost. His television program had lost its sponsorship and time slot, and he didn’t know what was ahead for him. One morning, the story goes, Dave was having breakfast at the Pump Room of the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago (Dave was then living in the Windy City, remember). He happened to see a copy of Variety that someone had left behind, and inside was an article that outlined this new early-morning show that Pat Weaver was planning for NBC. Dave would later say the more he read, the more he felt the show was made for him. He contacted his agent, Biggie Levin, some meetings with NBC took place, and the rest is history.

I wondered how much stock to take in all this. Fortunately, the Internet Archive and its tremendous cache of periodicals came to the rescue, and after much searching I believe I’ve found the article that so transfixed Dave over that fateful breakfast, and changed his life forever. You can read that very article (and the rest of the issue) here.

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.⁷ 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 Guide⁸, 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.⁹

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.”¹⁰

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 issue¹¹, 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.¹²

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 3B¹³ 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.”¹⁴

“The Man Who Came To Breakfast”

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 Gehman¹⁵, 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 tavern¹⁶, 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.¹⁷

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 Zeamer¹⁸ 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.¹⁹ 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.²⁰ 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,”²¹ 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.²²

The Rube Goldberg Hour

As television production was being carved from the wilderness, some things worked better than others. Live production was challenging enough in a regular studio with two or three cameras and simple switching from the nearby control room. Throw in additional elements – live remotes, telop cards, film chains, you name it – and the chances of things going wrong went up even more. On Today, one of the most ambitious and technically complicated programs on the air in the early 1950s, flubs were inevitable.

In the early days of Today, the program originated from the RCA Exhibition Hall²³, across 49th Street from NBC’s facilities inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza. But while the program was directed from a control room downstairs from the studio floor, additional elements had to originate from inside 30 Rock. And one source of constant angst was the coordination of filmed pieces, which were ordered up from the control room and had to be inserted from inside the main facilities across the street.

In a 1954 Esquire article about Garroway and Today, writer Richard Gehman²⁴ described the challenges of bringing it all together. Sometimes the wrong film came up (Gehman mentioned a morning when Garroway announced, “We take you now to Ambrose Lightship!” and instead a film of the Vienna State Opera appeared). Other times, the timing was off, since the film machine required five seconds to get going up to speed. Gehman noted that if the director didn’t give an on-time cue to the assistant director to tell the film technical director to “roll up” the film machine, viewers might see numbered leader film or an empty screen. “Considering the difficult timing involved,” Gehman wrote, “it is miraculous that such horrors do not appear more often.”

But other times, film goofs weren’t the fault of the control room. Today writer and managing editor Gerald Green²⁵, interviewed by Jeff Kisseloff for the great oral history The Box, told of an ongoing frustration with Garroway and Jim Fleming that led to film problems. In their copy, on-camera talent say certain words that serve as a cue for the control room to roll a particular piece of prerecorded material – appropriately enough, this is called a “roll cue.” Green remembered that he had difficulty getting Garroway or Fleming to read their roll cues as prescribed – instead, they’d ad-lib and since the roll cue wasn’t given, no film would follow. After the program, when they would ask Green what happened to the film, he would reply, “Read your roll cue and you’ll get the film on time.”²⁶

Green remembered that when he was managing editor, he’d watch Today from his home and watch Garroway or Fleming ad-lib, miss the roll cue, and then muse aloud that there was supposed to be film to go with this. Green would shout at his television, “Run it! Run the damn film!”²⁷

All of which led to the evening Green was in the kitchen, and from the den he heard his young daughter yelling. He went in to see what was the matter. In the den, he saw his daughter watching Felix the Cat. Sure enough, she was yelling at the television: “Run it! Run the damn film!”²⁸

One week in: “Gutenberg’s reputation is not threatened”

We spend a lot of time here talking about the early days of Today, and there’s a couple reasons for that. The first, obviously, is because when you look at the career of Dave Garroway you find a ton of material about his years on that program, and to not talk about it is sort of like talking about Neil Armstrong without mentioning that whole Apollo 11 thing. But it’s also interesting to look at those early days because Today was such a departure from anything else that had come before, and it’s worth seeing how a program we now take for granted brought such responses when it was new. In this installment, we’ll look at how Broadcasting looked at the first few days of Today in its January 21, 1952 issue.

(Before we go any further, it’s only right to thank the amazing online archive at the incredible American Radio History website, where this and a ton of other issues of Broadcasting, along with many other titles, are available for research. Folks like these make historians’ jobs so much easier, and they really deserve an award or ten for doing this stuff.)

The review begins by noting the immense buildup NBC had created around the program, “suggesting that the program would be of greater historical consequence than the invention of the printing press.” After the first few days, however, the review noted “Gutenberg’s reputation is not threatened” – and that the early-morning radio programs Today was meant to rival should not yet be thrown out.

Its main problem, Broadcasting noted, was that it tried to do too much too quickly and set an impossible mission for itself. “No one television show can deliver the contents of the Library of Congress to America’s living rooms and that is just about what its originators envision Today as attempting.” As a result, it reduced news stories to brief headlines, three-minute songs were truncated to a minute’s play, and book segments didn’t go into any appreciable depth. Even the trans-Atlantic reports seemed to do little more than just demonstrate such communications were possible.

The review included this really nifty depiction of the Exhibition Hall studio. (Broadcasting Magazine)

Broadcasting was not impressed with the busy studio, noting its array of clocks (“one showing the time in Calcutta, a hot-bed of interest to Indian viewers”), flashing lights, recorders and other gadgetry “as to suggest it was designed by the producers of Captain Video or Space Cadet.” The busy set with its many occupants milling about would resemble “St. Vitus’ dance brought to the screen were it not for the restorative presence of the man who now saves the show and can, with proper support, establish it as an important television feature.” Broadcasting praised Garroway as “imperturbable” and suggested Today would be successful only if the rest of the program were tuned to more closely match Garroway’s calm demeanor.

The review noted a moment from the January 15 edition that suggested a path Today could take. That morning, Garroway had interviewed New York Daily News drama critic John Chapman about a play that had opened on Broadway the previous night. Chapman told Garroway he hadn’t cared for the play, and explained why. After Chapman expressed his views, Garroway presented a recording made the night before in which theatergoers’ opinions differed from Chapman’s. “This was imaginative,” Broadcasting noted, “and an example of the kind of foresighted thinking that it will be necessary to employ consistently to make this program a success.”

Broadcasting noted that NBC had put a lot of resources into making Today a success, and “it remains only for production genius to figure out how to use it.” The review suggested that Today limit its mission to what it could do well within its allotted two hours, for at its current pace, “it will succeed only in being a costly what-is-it, running a poor second in music and news to radio in the competition for the morning audience.”

In a separate item below the review, Broadcasting noted that on its first day Today claimed a newsbeat, with NBC publicizing that a bulletin on a Northeast Airlines plane that crashed in the East River “scooped all networks and stations.” Broadcasting noted that the “scoopees” presumably included NBC’s New York flagship station WNBT-TV, since East Coast stations left Today at 9:00 AM, while the bulletin was seen only on the additional hour for Central Time Zone viewers.

One final note: In a sidebar, the basic facts about Today included an approximate cost of $35,000 per week. In January 2018, that translates to $327,371.51 per week, which…I somehow doubt would cover the week’s expenses these days.

The King Is Dead (Part II)

A couple weeks back my co-author provided an excellent precis of what happened the morning of February 6, 1952, as Today had to throw out its planned program to cover the death of King George VI. As it happens, Billboard had been publishing ongoing reviews of Today (“because of its importance in opening up additional morning hours in television,” the publication promised it would continue to offer critiques “as long as it believes significant improvements may still be made”), and the program’s coverage of the King’s passing was a major component of its February 16 review.

Joe Csida’s review began by noting the program had improved in its second and third weeks, losing the “frantic, disorganized atmosphere” of its first week and slowly discarding ideas “which no doubt sound great on paper but come off just short of ludicrous on the air,” including a bowling match between players in Chicago and New York and a knitting contest. But the February 6 program, which had to deal with two major stories that broke before air, made Csida believe “the show really seemed to come into its own.”

The King’s death, obviously, dominated the morning. Csida noted that the program’s tribute included newsreel footage of the King’s life, a telephone report from London correspondent Romney Wheeler, and an in-studio visit from H.V. Kaltenborn, “who was shaken out of the hay for the event [and] contributed interesting sidelight and background data in interviews with Garroway to round out the picture.” Csida called the program’s coverage “dignified yet exciting” and that it “left little to be desired,” summarizing it as “knowing and beautifully-handled.”

(One casualty of the story was a plan to have a group of Boy Scouts take over the program that morning. Garroway had them come on camera, where he apologized to them and explained that in view of what had happened, the Scouts would need to come back the next day.)

As if that wasn’t enough, Today dealt that same morning with word that President Harry Truman, who had earlier called the state primaries “eyewash,” had decided to enter the New Hampshire primaries after all. The program carried a pickup from Washington with NBC’s Richard Harkness and newspaperman James Reston discussing the move. Their conclusion that Truman’s announcement was meant to counter the rise of Sen. Estes Kefauver, riding a wave of popularity after his well-known hearings into organized crime, prompted Csida to praise them for “a nice piece of ‘inside’ reportage.”

Csida concluded his review by noting that Today would rise and fall on how stories broke, and that the inevitability of dull news days meant that producers needed to bring together “sound thinking on the feature-type stuff,” and that other elements of the program needed improvement. However, he noted, “Garroway gets better every day. The guy is a great performer, and his development on this tough job is something to be marked in TV’s history books. Jim Fleming and Jack Lescoulie continue, too, to make solid contributions.”

Csida concluded his review with these words: “If the program’s planners and thinkers don’t let up, Today is a cinch to make it, and make it big.” (Wonder how that turned out?)

The Truman interview that wasn’t

By November 1953 the big window of the RCA Exhibition Hall had become a popular attraction for visitors to New York, and every once in a while a famous face could be seen looking in on Dave Garroway and his merry group as they made Today happen. But one day, a particularly famous face could be seen looking in from the 49th Street sidewalk – and but for one particular remark, Today could have landed its biggest interview to date.

On Friday, November 13, former president Harry Truman was in New York. Truman, who had been out of office less than a year, was known for the brisk walks he would take each morning. New York was no obstacle to his routine, and that morning he left his hotel for a two-mile stroll around the city. In tow were his old haberdashery store partner, Edward Jacobson, and entertainer George Jessel. Following them were about 15 reporters and photographers, who peppered the former president with questions about current controversies and received Truman’s candid comments in response.

Truman’s path through Midtown brought him along 49th Street, and as he passed through Rockefeller Center he noticed the crowd looking in on the Today program across the street. Intrigued, he crossed in the middle of the block. “I know this is against the law,” the nation’s highest-ranking jaywalker told reporters.

Inside, the program staff noticed Truman at the window, smiling and waving. Cameras were quickly swung around. Somebody scooped up J. Fred Muggs and brought him to the window to see Truman, who smiled. “I’d better get along,” he said. “I don’t want to spoil the show.” Quickly, staffers hurried outside, bringing Muggs along to meet Truman. Truman shook hands with the chimp, but backed away when he tried to put a hand around his shoulders. “I don’t let people get so intimate with me,” the former president quipped. Although Truman drew the line at an embrace, he did sign a baseball for Muggs.

For a moment, Today staffers thought they’d have the interview of the year. A staffer asked Truman and Jessel if they’d step inside to talk with Garroway. Truman sounded receptive to the idea. But Jessel, who had a program on ABC, had other ideas. “The president is too busy and I work for another network,” Jessel said. (Years later, recounting the incident, former Today writer Gerald Green called Jessel “the biggest schmuck that ever lived.”) To the consternation of Today staffers, the retired chief executive and his entourage waved goodbye and wandered on, the hoped-for exclusive gone as quickly as it seemed to appear.

The King Is Dead

Teletypes inside the RCA Exhibition Hall clattered to life at 5:45 a.m. EST, Wednesday, February 6, 1952, carrying news that Britain’s King George VI died. Today was still in its first month on the air, experimenting to find the right balance of its various tasks – news, weather, sports, music, interviews, reviews and myriad ephemera. But the significance of the king’s death made its own case. The plan for that day’s program was thrown out, and a new one created from scratch.

Dave Garroway points to a headline on the “Today in Two Minutes” board, 9:30 a.m. EST, February 6, 1952. (NBC photo)

In the slim hour available before airtime, the Today crew arranged for remote phone reports from London and Paris, found stock film, and secured live television pickups from Washington. Broadcasting magazine reported the show went on at 7:00 a.m. with Dave Garroway’s announcement of the king’s death. A few moments later, he spoke with NBC correspondent Romney Wheeler, phoning from London. The “Today in Two Minutes” board was updated through the morning with newspaper front pages and wire service photos.

NBC foreign affairs commentator H.V. Kaltenborn was summoned to the Exhibition Hall. He worked with Today news anchor Jim Fleming to provide background information on George VI’s tenure. Coverage continued through the program’s three hours that day. CBS and ABC, having no comparable early-hour network program, aired their first television reports beginning at 10:00 a.m., after Today signed off. It was a coup for the show.

The busy Exhibition Hall during the 9:00 a.m. hour, February 6, 1952. News anchor Jim Fleming is at right, wearing a dark suit. (NBC photo)

As should be no surprise to students of early television, no kinescope of this Today exists, so we’ll never be able to see how it all played out. But accounts that have been written since indicate the cast and crew pulled off their first real test of breaking news and helped solidify the show’s bonafides.

In November 1955 Mad magazine trained its sights on Today. The result was The Dave Garrowunway Show, a spoof that gleefully skewered the program’s conventions. Dave not only loved the piece, but talked about it on the air and recommended the Today audience check it out.

Obviously I can’t post the whole piece here (besides, the version I have is the reformatted version printed in the paperback The Brothers Mad, and it doesn’t look anywhere as good as the magazine version). But the image above, the work of the great Jack Davis, should give you an idea of how deliciously off-the-wall The Dave Garrowunway Show is.