The Jews in America Trilogy (166 page)

The house, in the heart of WASP country, though a few German-Jewish Loebs, Lehmans, Lewisohns, and Warburgs lived nearby, was one of the finest in the city. It contained over thirty rooms on six stories, connected by a private elevator. Its ceilings were high, its scale grand. On the ground floor was a large paneled formal dining room, from which French doors led out into a capacious private city garden landscaped with
boxwood, evergreens, and fruit trees. On the second floor was the principal sitting room, which was decorated in an Oriental motif, taking its theme from a series of ancient Chinese murals that had been set into the walls. On this floor, too, there was a screening room, where the Sarnoffs could entertain their guests with previews of the latest RKO films, shipped to him from Hollywood. Adjoining this was David Sarnoff's “radio center,” powered and equipped so that he could pick up almost any radio station in the world—as well as tune in and monitor the goings-on at his National Broadcasting Company rehearsal studios.

The third floor was the family floor, and contained the Sarnoffs' bedrooms, dressing rooms, and baths, as well as the bedrooms and baths of their three sons, Bobby, Eddie, and Tommy. The fourth floor, however, was entirely David Sarnoff's, and was the most extraordinary collection of rooms in the house—his private sheikhdom. It was part office, part library, part club, and part shrine to Sarnoff's personal achievement. A long central gallery was filled with testimonials and memorabilia—the awards, citations, plaques, medals, and honorary university degrees with which he had been presented, even though he had never earned a high school diploma. Mounted, lighted, displayed on shelves and in illuminated cases, arrayed for inspection, were also the silver and bronze cups, bowls, beakers, and figurines he had been awarded. On shelves, in thick leather covers, lay bound copies of all his speeches, and other leather albums were filled with newspaper clippings chronicling his career. Everywhere, in silver and leather frames, were autographed photographs of David Sarnoff smiling and shaking hands with important people—Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, Guglielmo Marconi, Arturo Toscanini, as well as all the NBC radio stars.

Off the museumlike gallery, or “memory room,” as Sarnoff called it, was a clublike lounge, with a fully equipped bar (though Sarnoff was a teetotaler), card tables (though he never played cards), many deep leather chairs and sofas, and a temperature-controlled humidor for the oversize cigars that he puffed on constantly. From this part of the house, it was also possible to get the impression that the unathletic Sarnoff was an outdoorsman and big-game hunter. Heads and tusks and
horns of wild beasts adorned the walls—lion, panther, impala, dik-dik, leopard, wild boar. An elephant's foot had been fashioned into a wastebasket. A giant marlin arched, stuffed and mounted, above the bar, and mummified game birds posed inside bell jars. The taxidermic menagerie in this trophy room was, however, misleading. Sarnoff, if pressed, would admit that he had never pulled a trigger or baited a fishhook in his life, and that all the carnage had been done by others.

The fifth floor contained servants' rooms, and on the top floor of the house guest bedrooms opened out onto a huge trellis-shaded roof garden, with a spectacular view of the mid-town skyline, including the new RCA Building. And on this level, too, David Sarnoff had given himself a particular indulgence—his private barbershop.

Throughout the house, meanwhile, on every level and in virtually every room, were television sets. Some were concealed behind sliding doors, and others were treated as pieces of furniture. There was never a clear-cut way of counting the sets, since they were changed and rearranged and replaced with such frequency, but there were usually at least three dozen in the Sarnoff house at any given time. To most Americans, of course, television came as a post–World War II phenomenon, but Sarnoff had been trying out various television receivers since the early 1930s, and television had been more than a glimmer in his eye as far back as 1923, when, in a memorandum to his company, he had pondered the future of the medium as he saw it then:

I believe that television, which is the technical name for seeing instead of hearing by radio, will come to pass in due course.

Already, pictures have been sent across the Atlantic by radio. Experimental, of course, but it points the way to future possibilities.…

I also believe that transmission and reception of motion pictures by radio will be worked out in the next decade. This would result in important events or interesting dramatic presentations being literally broadcast by radio and, thereafter, received in individual homes or auditoriums where the original scene will be re-enacted on a screen, with much the appearance of present day motion pictures.…

The problem is technically similar to that of radio telephony though of more complicated nature—but within the range of technical achievement. Therefore it may be that every broadcast receiver for home use in the future will also be equipped with a television adjunct by which the instrument will make it possible to see as well as to hear what is going on in the broadcast station.

If that description of television sounds a little loose and imprecise, Sarnoff had a better grasp on the idea a year later when he told an audience at the University of Missouri in 1924: “Think of your family, sitting down of an evening in the comfort of your own home, not only listening to the dialogue but seeing the action of a play given on a stage hundreds of miles away; not only listening to a sermon but watching every play of emotion on the preacher's face as he exhorts the congregation to the path of religion.” And, by 1927, he had expanded the idea even farther and said, “If we let our imagination plunge ahead, we may also dream of television in faithful colors.”

David Sarnoff was neither a scientist nor an inventor, and so it is not possible to say that either he or the scientists and engineers who worked for RCA actually
invented
television. As early as 1880, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, had taken out patents for television devices, and in the mid-1920s both General Electric and the American Telephone Company had succeeded in beaming moving pictures across considerable distances. Sarnoff's genius lay, not in inventing things, but in seeing the commercial possibilities of other people's inventions. Like so many other Eastern European entrepreneurs, he was a skillful adapter of the ideas of others. As such, he made his company the first to put serious time and money into the development of television broadcasting, and Sarnoff himself became the country's most ardent spokesman for the new medium. RCA scientists and technicians worked on perfecting television transmission and reception throughout the 1930s, and, with typical showmanship, Sarnoff was able to unveil the company's device at the RCA Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

The RCA Pavilion became one of the fair's biggest attractions, and long lines of people formed to watch the astonishing new gadgets called television sets. (Cameras had been arranged so that fair visitors could actually see themselves passing across
the tiny screens.) As a result of the pavilion's popularity, several hundred people purchased the rather costly RCA sets—for about six hundred dollars apiece—and so, though further development of commercial television was halted by the war, a few Americans were able to watch a very limited program schedule during the war years.

There were problems to be faced, of course. NBC's rival network, the Columbia Broadcasting System, did not manufacture television sets. Sarnoff's company, on the other hand, did, and once the war was over, planned to manufacture and market them in a big way. Thus, as the two networks lined up to do battle over television programming, wartime viewers were treated daily to this curious announcement from CBS television stations:

Good evening. We hope you will enjoy our programs. The Columbia Broadcasting System, however, is not engaged in the manufacture of television receiving sets and does not want you to consider these broadcasts as inducements to purchase television sets at this time. Because of a number of conditions which are not within our control, we cannot foresee how long this television broadcasting schedule will continue.

Viewers might not have had any idea what CBS was trying to say, but to RCA it was gallingly clear—don't buy television sets, mere are many bugs to be worked out still, and we are not at all sure that television is here to stay. Sarnoff, of course, was stumping the country with the opposite message, trying to whip up Americans into a frenzy of excitement and anticipation for the Age of Television that would dawn as soon as the war was over. At the same time, RCA and Sarnoff could see competition building from other electronics manufacturers—General Electric (which was no longer associated with RCA), Philco, Dumont, and a number of smaller companies. Sarnoff, however, was determined to make RCA synonymous with television. He almost succeeded.

One of the biggest hurdles that the whole television industry would have to surmount, meanwhile, was the vociferous opposition of privately owned American radio stations. Most station owners did not agree with Sarnoff's views that television and radio could share the airwaves and coexist compatibly.
Most were convinced that television would destroy the radio industry. In radio editorials across the country, David Sarnoff was denounced as a “televisionary,” and listeners were confidently told that television would never work. In at least one national advertisement by an association of radio broadcasters, David Sarnoff was caricatured as King Kong crushing poor little radio beneath his simian heel. Unfazed by these outcries, Sarnoff and RCA marched on with the development of television.

In 1944, the Television Broadcasters Association bestowed another of the long series of awards and honors on Sarnoff, and it was perhaps the one that would please him the most. At the association's annual dinner, Sarnoff was named “Father of American Television.” The award went straight to the wall of his fourth-floor gallery on East Seventy-first Street.

By the late 1940s, he had been proved right about radio as well. Radio and television could coexist, and RCA's new sets contained radio dials as well as television screens. To be sure, television would change radio programming drastically; there would be a period of readjustment as the radio soap operas and big comedy shows flew off to the television screen, and radio settled down to music, news, and talk. And now that television had finally come of age, Sarnoff did not mind at all that much of the general public—remembering the thrill of seeing it for the first time at the RCA Pavilion—assumed that television was an RCA invention, nor did he protest being labeled the “father” of it. His contribution had been, if anything, more important. He had learned about television just as he had learned about radio, had had a hunch that it could be made to work somehow or other, and had kept his company persistently at it until it did.

Throughout all those years, Hollywood—mysteriously—had been much less foresighted. In the late 1930s, Sam Goldwyn had said, “I don't think this television thing is going to work. But what the hell—if it turns out that it does, we'll just buy it.”

By 1950, however, the Radio Corporation of America was not for sale.

A television set and a home in the suburbs—these were the two things Americans seemed to want the most in the years immediately following the war, and a forest of television
antennas would become one of the symbols of suburbia. Historically, after a war, real estate values become depressed, and a number of economists had predicted that this would happen after World War II. But—helped in part by GI loans—the real estate market boomed, particularly in the suburbs of large cities, and new houses went up by the hundreds of thousands.

The war had also changed the demography of such cities as New York. As had happened following the first war, a new influx of poor blacks was moving up from the rural South, and another wave of immigrants was arriving from the island of Puerto Rico. The pale, pinched faces of New Yorkers that Helena Rubinstein had noticed a number of years earlier were now less in evidence, and the city had taken on a decidedly swarthy cast. The new metropolitan black population had expanded the traditional boundaries of Harlem—to the north, south, and west—and now practically all the Manhattan real estate north of Ninety-sixth Street, between the East River and Washington Heights, fell under the designation of “Harlem.” Harlem now even extended into the South and East Bronx, and the once-proud Grand Concourse and its crowning jewel, the Concourse Plaza Hotel, wore a sad and seedy look as middle-class Jews moved out in the face of the advancing black population. It was a pattern that would be observed in a number of American cities, as a neighborhood first “went Jewish,” and then, making way for the next ethnic group that was struggling up from poverty, “went black.” And since Jews frequently retained their properties in their former neighborhoods, becoming absentee landlords, a social problem between blacks and Jews would be created that is evident to this day.

From the South and central Bronx, some Jewish families moved westward, to the bosky and pleasant reaches of the West Bronx and Riverdale, overlooking the Hudson River. Still more moved northward, into suburban Westchester County, and owning a house in Westchester would become the newest Jewish status symbol. In Westchester, moneyed Christian families had already taken dibs on the most desirable waterfront properties, along the Hudson and Long Island Sound, but pleasantly rural stretches in the interior of the county, in Scarsdale, Harrison, Purchase, and White Plains, were still available for development. To be sure, some inland communities—most notably Bronxville—remained restricted against Jews by gentlemen's
agreements. (Bronxville's Jewish merchants could not live in Bronxville.) And longtime Christian residents of Westchester County would complain that the postwar movement into the county was responsible for a “Bronxification” of Westchester, as more suburban shopping centers, restaurants, bars, motels, and high-rise apartment houses went up.