Ray Burr enjoys food, to put it mildly. When he fell for Natalie, he made up his mind to reduce. As the pounds melted off, he progressed from heavy to hero, though he made no headway with her. And that’s how lean, hawk-eyed Perry Mason was born. This I learned after he’d been on the show for a year.
Most of the action in Hollywood today centers on television. In the spring of 1962, only a half dozen motion pictures were in production there, while TV studios churned out hour shows and half-hour shows literally by the hundred. MCA alone owned 403 hour and 2115 half-hour negatives. The majority of the new faces in town are television faces—like Raymond Burr; like Chuck Connors, who went from baseball bats to Winchesters; like Vincent Edwards, who describes himself as “an eleven-year overnight sensation” after serving that long a stretch in the wilderness of odd jobs.
Ten years ago, the movies treated television the way a maiden aunt treats sex—if she doesn’t think about it, maybe it will disappear. But TV grew into a giant, and now it’s the odds-on favorite in entertainment. It’s the turn of television factories like MCA to declare, in Lew Wasserman’s words: “We think the movie industry has made many mistakes in judgment. It has refused to face up to the need for progress in the entertainment industry.”
David Susskind, of Talent Associates, another TV production company, can arrive in Hollywood to make a movie, remarking pleasantly: “This town is dedicated to pap. Show business here is founded on quicksand. The people are quick to take offense at criticism because they have a guilt complex. They know they’re turning out commercialized junk. Basically, they are ashamed of it, and they’re defensive.”
Neither the television industry nor Mr. Susskind used to be quite so cocksure, and working in TV was a lot more fun before the craze to put every show on film. David got his start in our town as a junior publicity man at Universal-International. He sat for three days in an agent’s waiting room, trying for an interview with the boss before he clicked and was invited to join the staff there.
“We don’t pay much—we’re a new business,” Al Levy told his new boy in those days before Marty Melcher and Dick Dorso squeezed him out of Century Artists.
“I must have $100 a week,” said David. “I’ve got two children to support.” That was what the little fellow was paid, $100 and no more, when he wet his feet as an agent’s assistant. After the breakup of Century Artists over Doris Day, David aligned himself on Al Levy’s side and went to New York with him in a shaky new business called Talent Associates.
After a few months of getting nowhere, the company’s bank balance had sunk to ten dollars. Al felt the fair thing to do was see whether he could help David land another, more secure job elsewhere. He introduced him to Sonny Werblen of MCA, and David enlisted in the regiment of cold-eyed young men in charcoal-gray suits who are MCA’s shock troops.
Over the next three and a half years Al Levy pounded a lot of sidewalks. Television was still the runt of the entertainment industry. Hollywood jeered at the little black box, with its nightly parade of women roller skaters, bicycle riders, and grunt-and-groan artists in the wrestling ring. In advertising agencies the money was in the big radio shows—Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. The head of the agency TV department was usually tucked away in a windowless cubicle next to the mail room. Radio had networks stretching from coast to coast, television was in the chrysalis stage, centered in a few cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Talent Associates began to get lucky when it signed Janet Blair, who’d been dropped by Columbia after seven years making pictures. Levy had seen June Allyson do a movie song-and-dance number with the Blackburn Twins. He put Janet in with the twins to make up a similar act, which ultimately was booked into the Wedgwood Room of the Waldorf-Astoria. Richard Rodgers saw Janet there, signed her for the road company of South Pacific, which kept her going for three years.