Audition (12 page)

For all the help my father had given me in arranging auditions, I held on to my resentments. Perhaps because I still barely knew him. How could I? I hardly ever saw him. I knew, too, that his relationship with my mother was strained, which didn’t help endear him to me. I couldn’t forget that he’d almost left us.

In the summer of my junior year at college, my father took my mother, Jackie, and me on a “grand tour of Europe.” It should have been a fabulous trip—Paris, the South of France, the Swiss Alps, Venice—but it wasn’t. Even though we stayed in the best hotels, the George V in Paris, the Carlton in Cannes, I wanted to be in New York with some new doctor boyfriend, not with my family. Jackie didn’t much care where we were, she was just happy that we were all together.

I made some friends on the ship, dated a Persian boy a few times in Paris, and also managed to acquire a French boyfriend, so I couldn’t have been all that miserable. In the evenings my father took us to the Lido, the world-famous nightclub with its sensational topless revues. The Lido’s owner, Monsieur Guerin, used to swap shows with my father, so he made sure we had the best table in the house. The trip was an extraordinary experience and why I didn’t recognize it as the dream it was is beyond me.

We went to the South of France and spent three weeks in Cannes. I got hit on there by the notorious playboy actor Errol Flynn, but I paid him no mind. He was way too old. Far more fun was the group of people my age who were staying at the hotel, the sons and daughters of Hollywood moguls; we went swimming together at the nearby Hotel du Cap during the day and went out together every night.

The big fashion then for us American young women was circular felt skirts, with big felt poodles pasted on them. They came in all colors and looked great when you were doing the Lindy. We wore two-piece dresses during the day—a little top and skirt—to show off our midriffs, but unlike today, no belly button was ever revealed. And we wore panty girdles or garter belts to hold up our stockings. The stockings all had seams running down the back, and you were forever stretching out your legs and looking over your shoulders to make sure the seams were straight. (Seamless stockings and panty hose, a great invention, came later.)

Our bathing suits were one piece, and white was the favorite color. Bikinis were unheard of. It’s amazing to me now that we never wore pants. Shorts, yes. But no pants. I remember my mother buying two pairs of red plaid shorts in Cannes—one for me and the other for Jackie. But even though Jackie and I were sometimes dressed alike, she remained isolated. As much fun as I and the rest of the kids were having, my sister, as ever, was not included, which, also as ever, tinged my good times with guilt. I am so bored with saying this, but that feeling was pervasive and rarely faded.

I look back now, and think, “Oh, my poor father!” That trip must have cost him a fortune. He did everything possible to make us all happy. Except for when I was off with my friends, he was with us all the time. He tried to make conversation at dinner, bought us anything we desired. He even danced with us when we were in the nightclubs. (I could have lived without this, though my father was a nice dancer.) He tried. He really did. I, in turn, remained mostly sullen. How I wish I’d thanked him. And I broke up with my latest doctor boyfriend anyway when I came home.

I
ENTERED MY
senior year of college with some trepidation. All my friends seemed to know exactly what they were going to do after graduation. Anita was going to work in an art gallery. Joan was going to be a social worker. Other friends were going to graduate school or to Europe. That left me. What was I going to do with my life? My problem was that there was nothing that I really wanted to do, and nothing that I thought I was particularly good at.

For two minutes I considered being a teacher, but that required getting a master’s degree, and I didn’t want to do that. In retrospect I should have, because if I had, Sarah Lawrence would have had to send the graduate school my numerical grades instead of relying on its progressive no-grade system. To be honest, not knowing my numerical grades and how I stacked up compared to others has bugged me ever since. Was I an A student? A B student? Was I smart? Am I smart? Don’t laugh. I still wonder.

I wound up taking the path of least resistance and headed home to New York to try and get some kind of job. I had seen an ad somewhere, probably in a bus, that read: “If u cn red ths, u cn ern mo pa.” And so while my friends went on to worthier futures, I went to Speedwriting school on Forty-second Street to prepare to be a who-knows-what.

Television 101

I
ACED
S
PEEDWRITING SCHOOL.
Out of eighty-three students, I am proud to report that I ranked number one, absolute proof that I excelled at something. The fact that what I had mastered was jotting down baby shorthand that used letters rather than symbols didn’t bother me. I also learned how to type on a manual typewriter, a machine that has become so obsolete it’s probably displayed now in the Smithsonian.

Both skills would serve me well over the years to come, though they didn’t get me my first job. My legs did. So said the pink-faced advertising man in search of a secretary who followed me up the stairs to an employment agency—and hired me on the spot. He’d be all but arrested today for such a bald assessment of female anatomy, but it was SOP in the fifties. I did have good legs, and I needed the job. Well, I didn’t exactly need a job. My parents would certainly have continued to support me, but I still didn’t know what I wanted to do except that I didn’t want to go to graduate school. So a job it was.

What a ridiculous caper it turned out to be. Not only did he hire me, but I managed to get him to hire my friend Anita Coleman, and she in turn brought in another friend. So there we were, the three of us, at a little advertising agency whose name I can’t even remember. The agency placed mail-order ads to sell vials of perfume. The ads read “Big and Inexpensive.” We called the agency “Small and Cheap.” And though I excelled at typing and taking dictation, I failed carbon paper big-time. How to make copies of letters had evidently not been part of my curriculum, so when asked to make six copies, I dutifully typed each letter six times. We were wondrously inefficient.

I lasted there around a year. The novelty of working in the Small and Cheap advertising and direct-mail office cooled off at the same time as my boss was heating up. To show his affection he even gave me a dog named Raul who never obeyed me because I couldn’t pronounce my
r
’s too well. I didn’t see any future with the pink-faced man with blond hair who seemed to be perpetually surrounded by the vials of perfume he was promoting, and when he became overly amorous I decided to leave. Besides, I had a lead on a job in a much more interesting business.

Television.

I didn’t know much if anything about the television business then, but I sure knew of the importance of television in people’s lives. My mother and Jackie spent hours watching programs like
I Love Lucy, Arthur Godfrey and His Friends, Texaco Star Theater
, and
The Jack Benny Program.
Television was their main source of diversion. There were four networks to choose from—ABC, NBC, CBS, and the short-lived DuMont, all of which started their network programming in the late afternoon. The rest of the day and some of the night belonged to local stations, which did their own programming, and where I had a lead for a job.

A friend of mine, Rhoda Rosenthal, was working at WNBT, NBC’s affiliate in New York, and she told me there was an opening in the publicity department. “I got my job,” she coached me, “by telling them my father had contacts in show business,” a rather startling claim since her father manufactured dresses. In my first job search I had deliberately avoided using my father’s name, wanting to get a job on my own. But pull was pull. So, besides listing my Speedwriting and typing skills on the job application, plus basic French, I added that I was Lou Walters’s daughter and personally knew most of the Broadway columnists.

That was true. Sort of. I had shared many a table at the Latin Quarter with columnists like Hy Gardner, Leonard Lyons, and Earl Wilson, but I had always been in the role of my father’s daughter and not of a personal friend. Still, all’s fair in love, war, and job applications—and it worked. After a meeting with Ted Cott, a vice president at NBC and the station’s general manager, I was sent to meet Phil Dean, the director of publicity, promotion, and advertising, who immediately hired me as his assistant.

The two of us were the entire publicity department, which gives you some indication of the infancy of the television industry. Phil was kind and easygoing, but he spent a whole lot more time at Toots Shor’s restaurant than he did at the office. Phil claimed he was doing research at the noted hangout for show biz celebrities and athletes (Yogi Berra, the New York Yankees catcher, once remarked, “Toots Shor’s is so popular nobody goes there anymore”), but the reality was that he rarely got back to the office before 3:00 p.m., and when he returned he was rarely sober. So I wrote nearly all of the WNBT press releases, sometimes a half dozen a day.

Learning to write those releases was invaluable experience. Television was considered such minor entertainment at the time that newspapers did not have TV critics. Instead sports and gossip columnists were expected to add television to their regular beats. As a result most TV press releases were tossed into their wastebaskets. Some papers even punished a columnist who’d erred in some way by assigning him (there were no “hers” then) to cover TV. So I learned fast to start each release with a startling fact or a provocative anecdote to catch their attention, something I still do today with my interviews. I remember one release I sent out: “WNBT to feature a star-studded panel on sex.” Sex worked just as well then as now, and it got great pickup.

When I wasn’t writing releases, I was calling the columnists I knew and planting items about the station’s talent. All those years of sitting silently at my father’s table at the Latin Quarter really paid off when I actually started talking. The columnists all took my calls, and I got an amazing number of items about our local shows into nationally syndicated columns. I also began to truly appreciate my father’s positive reputation and popularity.

Then there was another development: I was soon going out with my boss, Ted Cott. Ted, who had two small children and was in the middle of a divorce, was the head of the station and had the reputation at NBC of being brilliant and innovative. Both were true and were what attracted me to him. (I was then, and still am, attracted to men who are smart and powerful. I’m not sure why. I think it’s because I’d always hoped there would be a strong, successful man to take care of me so I wouldn’t have to take care of myself.)

Ted was at least ten years older than I, balding and short, with a little bit of a belly. Even with the belly, he was the first man I slept with. In his “bachelor” apartment in Greenwich Village. To be honest it wasn’t really passion that made me take the plunge—I just thought it was time. I was in my twenties and still a virgin while many of my friends were not only married but having children. I don’t remember many of the details of that night, so it couldn’t have been either very wonderful or terrible. I do remember thinking rather sadly that from that moment on, whatever happened, for the rest of my life I would never again be a virgin. But then I told myself to shut up. “It’s time already,” was my silent mantra.

Ted, the protégé of RCA’s pioneering chief, David Sarnoff, knew everybody in the media in New York and entertained quite often at his apartment. I sometimes acted as his hostess, and learned the value of networking. Through Ted I met Tex McCrary and his beautiful model and ex-tennis-star wife, Jinx Falkenburg. They had a long-standing radio show,
Tex and Jinx
, and an extremely popular TV show,
At Home.
I also became friendly with Eloise McElhone, a very attractive and funny woman who was making the transition from radio to her own show on television. Though I didn’t know it then, Eloise would play an important role in my career.

Ted was a very creative boss. About a year after I started there in the publicity department, he launched a training program to teach the younger employees how to produce television shows. I drew a daily fifteen-minute children’s program named
Ask the Camera.
The director was a young redhead named Roone Arledge. Years later Roone would become head of ABC News and a legend in both the sports and news businesses, but then he was just a friendly guy who drove his convertible every day to the studio to direct various programs.

The format of
Ask the Camera
was simple. People sent us questions, and we answered them with film clips from our archives. Because we had a relatively small film library, I would often have to make up questions that matched what film we had available. We had a good clip of hippopotamuses, for example, so I wrote the question: “I’ve always wondered, how does a hippopotamus eat?” Though the ethics may have been questionable, I felt it was okay because I was acting as a producer, not a journalist. I also wrote the voice-over narration for the show’s host, Sandy Becker, and edited the film to fit the time. I got so good at it that eventually I didn’t need to use a stopwatch. I could both write copy and edit film almost to the second. I still can.

I didn’t physically cut the film myself, the film editor did. But we worked it out together, hunched over a machine called a Moviola and going through the film clip frame by frame. I’d tell him exactly which scenes I wanted, and he would cut and splice them together into a cohesive whole. I also learned the fundamentals of what made a good story in that tiny editing room. If you have a strong beginning—a must—and a powerful ending, then you don’t really need a dramatic middle. That is the formula I still follow today.

The production work somehow landed me in one of the first issues of
TV Guide.
I guess I was a novelty, being both female and the daughter of Lou Walters. I was pleased by the little piece titled “Young Producer,” which cited me as an example of the “bright young people in responsible jobs” in television and suggested I was the youngest producer in the field. I still have a copy of that
TV Guide
, dated May 15, 1953.