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SMALL FROG IN A BIG POND
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Stardom? Well, at least
Jack Paar paid attention
of The Columnists.com
Before I got assigned to Special Features at The New York Daily News, I spent six months as a fill-in designated critic in the paper’s ramshackle arts department run by an editor named Sol Cantor, who never met a show he didn’t like. The office was a welcome-home mat for publicists whose press releases he ran semi-verbatim.
Cantor’s pal was a scraggly, sozzled little guy named Jimmy Davis, a member of the old guard who kept a bottle in his drawer and, aptly enough, covered what was then still called “the saloon beat”--nightclubs. I filled in a few times for Davis, reviewing cabaret shows, and when I had the temerity to dismiss some woebegone act--George Chakiris, Gretchen Wyler and Nina von Pallandt come to mind--Cantor muttered to me that I was “pissing all over Broadway.”
The publicists weren’t happy to get an occasional negative review, and Cantor heard about it. The flacks were his cronies and he saw me as an upstart trouble-maker that threatened his well-oiled fiefdom. Aptly enough, Cantor later left The News to become a suddenly well-dressed publicist for the Shubert Organization, where he belonged all along. Maybe he has me to thank for it.
I was tossed into a tight little critics circle at The News, where longtime hallowed names like TV critic Kay Gardella, movie critic Wanda Hale and theater critic Douglas Watt were staunch pillars of the paper’s old critical guard. Watt was easily the class act of the bunch. A tall, lumbering, friendly gent who also wrote record reviews for The New Yorker, Doug seemed out of place at The News, writing thoughtful, respected pieces, coming and going quietly, well above the fray.
By 1972, when I got there, The Daily News was in the last death throes of an earlier era. All of The News’ entertainment writers, like Ernest Leogrande and Pat O’Hare, were lifetime appointments. Ed Sullivan’s column still ran after he’d left TV, a bulletin board of humdrum items patched together by his longtime assistant, Carmine Santullo, a former shoeshine boy outside Loew’s Paramount who had attached himself to Sullivan 30 years earlier and still called him “Mr. Sullivan.”
Of course Ed never set foot in The News by then, but his ancient column “Little Old New York,” which had propelled him into TV because it made him a showbiz powerbroker, ran until the day he died in 1974. It was but one of three or four “Broadway” columns by old timers like Charles McHarry, many of them branches of the little old New York showbiz publicity machine.
Queen B ee in the paper’s critical hive was Kay Gardella, a large, forbidding lady with big black hair and an iron demeanor who reminded me of Katisha in “The Mikado.” In her flaming youth, though, she’d had a hot affair with Dick Young, the fabled sportswriter. Dean of the New York TV critics, Kay ran an intimidating ship in her department, where her frazzled petty officers (Val Adams, a former New York Times second-string TV critic, and George Maksian, a jovial third-stringer) clicked their heels whenever Kay beckoned.
Kay didn’t welcome me when Hagerty had me do a few reviews of old TV shows she had no more interest in--“Bowling for Dollars,” “Gunsmoke,” “The French Chef”-- programs that that hadn’t been reviewed forever and cried out for a fresh look. My pieces ran on Saturdays, when Kay was out of the paper, but she saw me as a threat, rarely acknowledging my presence. She didn’t edit me, Hagerty did, so I never feared her but kept my distance. Years later I ran into Kay, semi-retired, at a Broadway show and she acted as if we were old chums.
Two negative reviews got me into major trouble--one, of Helen Reddy’s summer show at the height of her feminist fame, and the second, of Jack Paar’s return to TV on ABC after his long layoff from “The Tonight Show.”
After the Reddy review ran, her husband and the show’s producer, a pugnacious little twerp and former flack named Jeff Wald, came hunting for me at the paper. When I was pointed out to him, Wald began screaming epithets in a red-faced rage. I’d written plenty of pans before, but this was my first brawl. Wald finally left but I was a little shaken by his fury.
The far more public fight with Jack Paar, which made Variety and all the trade papers, began with my review, the first New York review of his new show, in which I said, basically, that in our nostalgia for his old days on “Tonight” we had all forgotten what a pain in the neck Paar could be on TV.
Paar went on the air that night and, in his mock-polite cry-baby voice, challenged me to a verbal duel, inviting me on the show to discuss what I’d said. “I’d like to meet Mr. Nachman and talk to him.” Then he got in a snide, gratuitous shot at my wife Mary, “who,” he said, “wrote a nasty article in TV Guide about dear David Frost.” (Mary had done a two-parter about working as not-so-dear David’s assistant for a year. I and our friend Randy Poe egged her on.)
I was nationally famous for a week, but not in the way I’d always imagined making a name in New York. Variety called to get a comment and to ask if I was going to accept Paar’s invitation. In truth I didn’t know whether to or not. My instincts said no but my ego said, "Yes, this is the chance of a lifetime."
Most friends advised against it, knowing Paar’s reputation for carving up his critics on TV, notably Dorothy Kilgallen, whom he called “the chinless wonder.” The consensus was, “You’d be a fool to do it,” but I was brash enough to seriously consider throwing caution to the wind and accepting. Even if Paar did toss me to the lions, ridiculing me before an audience of manic Paar devotees, I’d become known and perhaps be able to parlay it into something else.
In the end, I decided not to, afraid of becoming putty in Paar’s oily hands, but in my fantasy I thought I just might handle myself pretty well, though I’d never been on TV. I remembered a great Robert Benchley piece, in which he imagines himself on the witness stand in a big murder trial and makes mincemeat of a surly defense attorney by responding to tough questions with brilliantly funny rejoinders.
So, taking my cue from Benchley, instead of going on the show I imagined myself on it in a fantasy piece I did in The News on how I chewed up Paar on nationwide television and was carried out of the studio on the audience’s shoulders. I probably was wise to stay on my own turf, but to this day I wonder how it might have gone had I taken the bait, after all. Maybe I would have performed brilliantly, been offered a talk show and wound up on the cover of TV Guide.
In short, maybe I could have become Charlie Rose. Instead, I only became friends of Charlie Rose, whom Mary met when he walked into the David Frost show one day looking for a job. Rose was then a bright, media-obsessed graduate out of Duke law school hungry for a chance to break into TV. He was a tall, good looking, charming North Carolinian as eager to soak up New York as we were. He had--and still has--a certain Southern-fried ingratiating gift of gab.
Charlie, of course, is now a media megastar, but then he was just a wide-eyed barefoot boy newly wed to a pretty, peppy Mary of his own. We had dinner with them a few times. So when my book, “Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s,” came out, and, ready at last for my close up on national TV, I sent Charlie a copy with a nice little note reminding him I’d known him before he was “Charlie Rose.” Never heard back. There’s no business like journalism business.
©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman
caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The photo of Jack Paar
is courtesy of NBC. The photo of Kay Gardella is courtesy of
Ron Miller. This special extract from a work in progress is published
by special arrangement with the author. All inquiries about this
work should be directed to the author by use of the Talkback
feature below. This excerpt first posted here 2007.
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