Al’s hustling meantime was paying off, though nobody was making any fortune on the prices television paid. His agency put Wally Cox, Tony Randall, Marion Lorne, and Jack Warden into the first of the situation-comedy series, “Mr. Peepers”—with a price tag of $14,500, which had to be stretched to pay for everything from script to hire of a studio. The Associates also had the “Philco Playhouse,” an hour-long dramatic series for which they were paid $27,000 to cover everything but actual air time. “Playhouse” had stars like Eli Wallach, Eva Marie Saint, Grace Kelly in Scott Fitzgerald’s “Rich Boy”—the finest talents in the theater. I even did a couple of shows myself.
After three and a half years soldiering for MCA, David Susskind received his marching orders. He hadn’t won any medals as a salesman or contact man. He wanted to be a bigger noise than that. I suspect that David’s ambitions spouted the day he was born. He talked over his problems over breakfast in a Schrafft’s restaurant on Madison Avenue. As a result, he was taken back into Talent Associates on a six-month trial.
They had their offices in a six-room apartment on East Fifty-second Street, rented for $210 a month. A secretary and switchboard operator occupied the living room. The master bedroom was the main office. In bedroom number two sat the script writers, pounding out “Mr. Peepers.” The back bedroom comprised the quarters of Ernie Martin and Cy Feuer, who had the space on a work-now-pay-later arrangement while they labored to produce a show that developed into the Broadway hit of the season, Guys and Dolls.
Ernie said to me not long ago, after he and his partner had five hits in a row, including How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying: “Hedda, you made me $3,000,000.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never did any such thing.”
“You drove me out of Hollywood,” he said. “I had to quit radio or get an ulcer.” Then I remembered. Ernie, a CBS vice president at the age of twenty-nine, was responsible for censoring my radio scripts for my weekly show. I always popped in three or four items which I knew hadn’t a hope in hell of getting on the air. I’d fight over those paragraphs until the red light glowed and I was on. That kept Ernie and his legal eagles so busy they didn’t have time to argue over the items I really wanted to get off my chest.
The secretary in the living room doubled as cook in the kitchen for luncheon. Meat balls and spaghetti were ladled out to the hungry mob of writers, actors, and directors who haunted the place at mealtimes. “Do you have to smell up the place with all that cooking?” Martin and Feuer would steadily complain. But since they were on the free list until later in the matter of paying rent, spaghetti and meat balls stayed on the menu.
The business was loaded with talents, a bunch of enthusiastic young men who had tremendous fun in the brand-new medium that was just beginning to grow. There were directors who went on to earn international reputations—Delbert Mann, Arthur Penn, Robert Mulligan, Vincent Donehue. There were the writers who set the future pattern for drama on TV—Paddy Chayevsky, David Swift, Horton Foote, James Miller. There was Fred Coe as producer. And David, who developed an itch to produce.
When his six-month trial was over, he was kept on for a further six. Then Levy went into the hospital for a series of operations and stayed out of the business for a year. Al Levy, who has since died, was a good and dear man; he left a glow in every life he touched.
David, meantime, had turned from selling to producing, and he proved himself to be good at it. He helped carry the business right to the top in reputation and influence. But he wanted to make a louder noise. He took on “Open End,” the TV gab fest, and fell flat on his face more than once as a would-be Socrates, most notably when Nikita Khrushchev decided to pay him a visit.