The locale of this story is a show I never worked. It's a TV variety clam-bake called "Who He?" ... one of those lunatic mish-mashes that started out as a panel quiz show and ended up as a musical. It stars Mason & Dixon, supported by Kay Hill and Oliver Stacy. It's directed by Raeburn Sachs, written by Jake Lennox, with music by Johnny Plummer. It's produced by Melvin Grabinett Associates and costs the client, Mode Shoes, $50,000 a week.
"Who He?" is not an expensive show as TV variety shows go. It's in the middle bracket. I think you might be interested in a rough break-down on the budget which will give you some idea of the stakes for which the people in this adventure were fighting. The monetary stakes, that is. The network charges $25,000 for a half-hour of coast-to-coast time. Mig Mason, the star, gets $2,000 a week. Diggy Dixon, who is co-starred with him, doesn't get a nickel because Mason's a ventriloquist and Dixon is the dummy. Stacy, Kay Hill and other talent and specialties including the dancers get $3,000.
The writers, Jake Lennox and Mason's gagmen, split $1,500 between them. Lennox also gets a small cut in the producer's take for helping create the show. Incidentally, one of the gagmen got married for the first time on his forty-third birthday. The marriage broke up after two weeks. The bride went home to Canada and the gagman went down to Washington and became a spy for the government. We're still trying to figure it out. Maybe he decided that any tight rope, even an espionage tight rope, would be safer than the one he was on.
Raeburn Sachs gets $750 a week for directing "Who He?". How Sachs got started in the business is one of the great legends, and the only explanation for his weird public and private life. He was a stencil clerk in a Chicago advertising office, and one day he drove to work in a new Cadillac. He also wore new clothes and a new look. Everybody asked Ray if he'd robbed a bank. Chicago-type joke. Ray told them proudly that he'd written a hit tune called "Lumbago" or something like that.
Nobody ever heard of the tune. The office did a little detective work and discovered that "Lumbago" did exist, had truly been written by Ray, and had been recorded as a favor to him by a cousin who led a band working for a Chicago recording company. The gimmick was that there was another side to the record, the Flip, they call it, and Sinatra was on the Flip. Sinatra made the sales, but Ray shared the money. That made him a reputation and started him as a variety expert. He's been trying to justify that wrong Flip ever since.
Here's a little more budget: Johnny Plummer, married to the most exotically beautiful noodnick in the world, is allotted $1,500 a week for orchestra, copying and his own fee. The noodnick has standing orders to keep out of the theater because she disrupts the camera men, and camera time is counted like radium. Cameras and technicians cost $2,000. Sets and props cost $3,000. Special effects like rain, snow, Acts of God and Rear-Projection cost $500.
The producer, Mel Grabinett (Mr. Blinky to his enemies; he has no friends) takes $3,000 which he cuts up with Jake Lennox and Ned Bacon who developed "Who He?" with him. Jake and Ned get two and a half bills each. That's $250. Borden, Olson and Mardine, the advertising agency representing the client, adds 15% of the gross cost of the show for agency fee, and that plus prize money and incidentals comes to $50,000 a week to demonstrate the superior quality of Mode Shoes.
Some forty hard-working, variously talented people put together "Who He?" every week ... artists, technicians and business men. Each of them is walking his own private tightrope, but all of them must walk the communal tightrope of the show on Sunday night at nine o'clock before 37 million viewers. The individual pressures added to the common tension of the show make it seem inevitable that the program will blow up during rehearsal and never get on the air. Yet "Who He?" has appeared 39 weeks in succession without mishap. Without mishap, that is, until the performance on New Year's night.
It was one of those nightmares. Everyone who saw the show knew something was wrong. Mig Mason performed so badly that you could see his mouth twitch and his neck muscles jerk during the ventriloquist routines with the dummy. Oliver Stacy handed out the wrong prizes. Johnny Plummer missed his cues. Floor managers and stagehands wandered dazedly before the cameras. The dancers went through the production numbers as though they expected the roof to collapse at any moment. Variety happened to catch the show that night and murdered it.
Variety was unfair. Their reviewer should have checked first. He would have learned that the show went out the window because one man fell off his private tightrope with such a disastrous jar that everyone else was shaken. He would have discovered that less than five feet of sight-line saved the theater audience and the TV viewers from the spectacle of a dead man hanging by the neck from the iron grid above the stage.