This morning’s mail brought a most curious document: a press release from the largest teachers’ organization in the country announcing with pride that television actress Donna Reed will “serve as consultant to the National Education Association in the formation of a Television Committee for American Education Week, November 6-12.” N.E.A. President Dr. W.W. Eshelman explained his delight at Miss Reed’s acceptance: “Her weekly program on the ABC Television Network has repeatedly indicated her awareness of the needs of children and teachers, who are presented to the public in an intelligent and sympathetic light.” The slogan for the 1960 observance, “Strengthen Schools for the 60’s.”
Now there may be a certain poetic justice in educators’
having to turn to entertainers to wean a public away from pap to a serious
interest in education, especially since education gets into intellectual
trouble so often precisely because it tries to make education entertaining.
What bothers me about making heroes out of entertainers is that their
professional virtues—affability, a mindless, heady hedonism, a facile equation
of mass popularity with importance—begin to seem the chief virtue in life.
Not that I’m against fun; it’s heartening to watch Ernie
Kovacs, Art Carney, Mort Sahl, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May—performers for whom
satire and irony are weapons. But TV is plagued by old-line entertains like Bob
Hope, whose one-line gags pretend to
controversy (in the way Jack Paar’s 1:00 A.M. statesmanship on Cuba is fake
muckraking) and whose amiable feuds with Bing Crosby show how contrived and
predictable these “feuds” have become. When a hundred reporters brave a
blizzard to transcribe for tomorrow the lucubrations of Elvis Presley as he
leaves the Army, and when the Washington Post gives three columns at the top of the page to a photo
of Ethel Merman mugging at Dick Nixon, then our communications system may be
said to be enthralled by entertainers. We even need them to raise money for
research to cure diseases: George Gobel complains: “By the time I got there
they had run out of all the good diseases.” Someone may have beaten him to
cerebral palsy, but there is another disease endemic in
America—entertaineritis, characterized by dilation of the eyes and a certain
listlessness of the mind when confronted with difficult thought.
Paar is a good example. He has taken to crusades of varying
scope and depth, most of which embody the vices they presume to bait. All
right—so Winchell and Kilgallen are gossip mongers, but Paar’s vindictive
sneers add nothing. And is Elsa Maxwell’s calculated vulgarity Paar’s idea of
the significant?
Paar has his best argument in having presented Bob Kennedy
on Hoffa; Kennedy himself says the Paar show had more effect on Congress than
any other single item of publicity, and Paar considers Kennedy’s appearances on
his late night program as the high point of his TV career. But note that when
Kennedy reappeared and pointed out to Paar that Hoffa’s labor corruption was
possible only because of the connivance of big business, and then went on to be
very specific (A & P, Food Fair) Paar’s phony
let’s-have-another-libel-suit-look dissolved in a look of real horror. Until
Paar calls Kennedy back and lets him examine sweetheart contracts and other
kinds of business corruption, it is difficult to give him a much higher grade
than Winchell or Kilgallen as a champion of the public interest.
Paar’s simple-minded equation of contentiousness with
controversy is not even convincing to his staff, notably Hugh Downs. Downs is
one of the Chicago school, intellectual without being stuffy. He started out
there on the delightful “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” show. His next appearance in
the big time was for another lamented victim of TV ratings, Arlene Francis’
“Home”—a kind of TV combination Ladies Home Journal and Life that NBC’s Pat Weaver started to prove that twenty years of soap opera had not completely
killed the intelligence of the housewife. As the announcer of the Paar show,
Downs has much less scope for the intelligence his displayed in feature
material for Arlene Francis. Indeed, given the emotional anti-intellectualism
of Paar, Downs has been fighting a holding action as far as his career goes.
Increasingly, Paar’s transitions to Down’s commercials have
a perceptibly patronizing air. Downs, however, is not easily conned, and it is
a pleasure to see him deny the master to his face. (In answer to a rhetorical
question, an unexpectedly negative reply: “Yes, you are cruel to people
sometimes, Jack.”) More and more, painfully and consciously hollow laughs come
from Downs when Paar’s humor misfires. The marvel here, of course, is that we
are surprised on TV to see a man
insisting on his dignity.
Downs is a new kind of star. At a recent Westinghouse
Broadcasting Company press party, Downs was asked over a transcontinental phone
hookup of five Westinghouse stations whether he thought his doing educational
shows would give him an egghead tag that would hurt his career as an
entertainer. Maybe in a hundred and twelve years, Downs allowed, he’d qualify
if he worked as hard at it as he now does. Further, he didn’t see how it could
hurt him since the anti-intellectual days of egghead baiting, he was happy to
observe, were over. Another interviewer asked which gave him more
satisfaction—his M.C.’ing of “Concentration,” a worthless bit of five
times-a-week piffle on N.B.C.-TV, or his new role as M.C. of intellectual
programs like the Westinghouse “Lab 30” series and two films he has just finished
on the problems of the schools. Downs unhesitatingly condemned the game show as
fluff, and said he had a sense of having really achieved something worthwhile
in the ten problems on the frontiers of science “starring” the Westinghouse
research team.
But ironically, when Downs tried to explain how much this
series of difficult scientific experiments on TV had taught him, he revealed
something about an entertainer culture. The main thing he had learned working
with the scientists was that they were really people. Since it is the entertainer’s natures to be “on” all
the time, rapport with an audience is a highly prized virtue. But it couldn’t
matter less whether or not a scientist is warm or friendly. What matters is his ability to describe
natural phenomena for the purposes of prediction and control.
The N.E.A. may be right in believing that the way to attract
the serious attention of the public is through the entertainers. The troubling
thing about the N.E.A. press release, however, is its tone of happy acquiescence
in and even humble gratitude for the fact that the TV wag dogs the tale of our
public affairs.
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