Production was scheduled to start in September. But by this time other things had taken precedence over Books and Brent. Pete entered into a real estate promotion to develop a kind of Disney wonderland in New York called Freedom Land. His lawyer, Milt Raynor, wrote to me in flattering terms about myself and the book project, but indicated that for the time being the undertaking would have to be shelved.
It was a letdown. But the irony of the thing was that a promotional genius like Pete could be so fascinated by the publishing field and what might be done for it, and then so totally discouraged by the supineness, invincible ignorance, and general reluctance of an enormous, potentially very profitable industry to take even modest advantage of the only advertising medium that might bring it before the public. Pete found only one publisher actively encouraging. The rest were negative.
This was the idea they were offered: I was to review, on a network show, books selected by myself from the lists of all publishers. In our experience in Chicago, although I rarely, if ever, suggested that anyone rush down to his neighborhood bookstore (if any) and buy the book in question, every bookstore in the area felt the impact of my lectures. The instances in which my own store sold hundreds of books in a week because of a review I had given were fantastic—and more frequently than not the very large downtown stores considerably outsold my own shop on the same volume, for I was not engaged in self-advertising. This is something unique in our day, but not in publishing experience, for Alexander Woollcott used to have the same effect through his radio broadcasts. He was, of course, a national figure ... but not in a popular sense until he went on the radio. Publishers were aware of all this, but they were not convinced.
Pete was convinced. He believed in me because he saw the results of the job I was doing in a very difficult city and saw no obstacle to doing at least as much in other cities. He was an entrepreneur, but perfectly willing to try the idea of wedding television to culture. Actually, I was never a party to any of the planning, any of the strategy, any of the meetings held with publishers or their representatives. To this day, I know nothing of what actually went on. I was just the talent, and all I knew was that there was a clause in the contract that required Pete to put the show on the road no later than September 30, 1959, or else I was free to return to my local television commitments. The option was not picked up, and that was that.
As I mulled the whole thing over at Bark Point, a comment of my father’s kept running through my mind: “When is a man a man? Only when he can stand up to his bad luck.”
Of course, there was no saying whether the luck was really bad—only that what I envisioned for the future was certainly being held in abeyance. I came back for another year of Chicago television, much like the year before, except for the feeling that I was bringing more experience to it.
It was the letters that kept me persuaded I was right. In spite of the hour, with wives kissing husbands off to work and mothers frantically preparing breakfast and dressing children for school, people were listening and, in increasing number, writing. Greater numbers of people were searching for answers to forgotten questions, or driven, perhaps, back to fundamental questions and to restating them. Hope and I found all this mail a tremendous stimulus. We returned to our city routine. Every evening I came home from the bookstore, had dinner, played or talked with the children, then sat down to read, while Hope read or knitted or mended or listened to music. At midnight we took a short walk to the corner drugstore with Mr. Toast, our Golden Retriever, and had a cup of hot chocolate. These moments were the best of the whole day.
Getting to the studio in the morning was never easy, and on Fridays when we made the mad rush together it was more than usually frantic. Hope is not easy to awaken and would be engaged, more often than not, as we raced across the street like maniacs toward our parked car, in the final acts of dressing, zipping up her skirt, straightening her hair, trying to find her lipstick. Sometimes we barely made it ahead of the cancellation period—five minutes before showtime, but we always managed. Then when the ordeal was over, it was perfectly delicious to go out for coffee, swearing solemnly, absolutely, never again would we oversleep ... until the next time.
But why were we doing it? The financial rewards for an unsponsored, sustaining program simply bore no relation whatever to the effort involved. Finally Quinlan called me in and suggested that since the networks didn’t seem interested, it might be a good idea to form an organization and see if I couldn’t sell the show myself.
Hy Abrams, my lawyer and tennis partner, and his brother-in-law, David Linn, often used to ask why I didn’t do anything about promoting the show, to which my answer normally was: “Do what?” But now, with Red’s insistence, I had a feeling that perhaps the time was ripe. Perhaps in the present era of political, economic, and spiritual confusion, people might be becoming worried, harassed, clipped, chipped, agonized enough for a return to reading. They might be susceptible.