Up All Night

by Lisa Napoli

  Now, none of these tiny glimmers of promise had yielded much financial fruit—yet. Sales staff scraped and fought for every commercial they sold and resigned themselves to bottom-of-the-barrel advertisers who couldn’t afford time on better stations. A sales call from Ted proved entertainment in itself. He’d jump on desks like “Jerry Lewis’s Wacky Professor,” as one of his sales guys called it, in order to seal the deal. In the rare case when the buyer was a woman, he’d get down on his knee and woo.

  And when they still didn’t want to buy time on channel 17, Ted’s team schemed other ways to fill it. There was always someone out there willing to buy time to put themselves on television. On WTCG, the godfather of soul, James Brown, revived his flagging career with a weekly on-air dance party called Future Shock. On WRET in Charlotte, evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker launched themselves into mega-church stardom. Praise the Lord!

  No decision he made struck life-saving gold like the decision to accept a type of ad most network affiliates around the country refused—unintentionally kitschy commercials hawking products not available in stores that viewers could buy from the comfort of their couches by sending in a check or calling a special number. The “Miracle Painter” that allowed painting so drip-free you could wear a tux while freshening up the ceiling inspired its purveyors to create another product—an indispensable set of knives called Ginsu that could slice aluminum cans and pineapples like butter (purported to be Japanese, but its provenance, in reality, was Ohio). In exchange for the airtime, channel 17 got a cut of each product sold.

  Inspired by the success of merchandisers on his airwaves, Ted ventured into the direct marketing business himself. He hired a buyer from the local department store, Rich’s, who sought out unique gizmos and gadgets, and deployed his crew to craft commercials the local paper declared “masterpieces of bad taste.” But wait, there’s more! Just send $9.95 to PO Box 7500, Atlanta.

  Sometimes, it took a couple of tries to find the right approach. The first commercial created for a ring with interchangeable “stones”—a “beautiful work of gold-plated art”—featured a blond southern debutante and hardly moved much merchandise. With a production budget of a hundred bucks, Greg Gunn, the director assigned to spruce up the spot, bought a mirrored disco ball to hang from the studio rafters. Then he hired a local deejay from the soul scene. As Dr. Feelgood sashayed up to an attractive woman in a halter top at a staged dance party, he posed the question:

  “Hey, where’d you get that ring?”

  “This is a Party Ring,” she responded.

  “Sure is bad! Hey! You got a Party Ring, too!”

  “Yeah!”

  “And with a different stone!”

  “Everybody’s got a Party Ring.”

  The simulated stones in the “Super-Bad” Party Ring were interchangeable not just with your outfits but with your moves—all for only $5.95.

  The new spot was so awful, observed Ted, it was almost funny—and while it attracted attention, some of it was unwelcome. A racist crank, unnerved by the vision of an interracial couple on the dance floor, called in a bomb threat. That bit was edited out to avoid further conflagration.

  Apart from that sobering reminder that hateful tension still loomed in the post–civil rights era, the commercial achieved its goal. So many orders streamed in for merchandise that a special area had to be set up at the station to answer phones and process the mail. People, it seemed, loved the convenience of shopping from their living rooms. Ted delighted in the deluge. The cash filled the station’s coffers, and the response proved that viewers were, in fact, tuning in.

  * * *

  There were, it seemed, two types of people: Those who walked into channel 17 and quickly ran screaming out the door, fleeing from this glorified low-budget college television station and the crazy man who owned it. And those who instantly fell in love with Ted and his trickledown enthusiasm, the free-form, let’s-put-on-a-show, kumbaya camaraderie that wafted through the tired hallways. You never knew when you turned the corner at work if you’d stumble upon a wrestler’s pair of underwear—or maybe even two people getting it on. The hallways were as unpredictable as Ted’s moods.

  Chief among the cheerleaders was radio deejay Bill Tush, who remained undaunted even after a chunk of ice plunged onto his parked Fiat convertible, slicing open the roof. The unpredictable nature of the workplace was so exciting that he’d started stopping by the station even on the days he didn’t need to voice promos and commercials, determined to learn everything he could about television—performing tasks others might consider menial, like picking up the mail from the post office and pulling cables on those unwieldy, tank-like studio cameras, which were finally upgraded to allow the station to broadcast in color. Eventually, he found himself ditching the job at the radio station and joining the staff full-time.

  In short order, he’d been enlisted as host of Academy Award Theater, the show created to counterprogram the Sunday morning religious fare on the other stations. (Ted himself had performed hosting duties for a time, which solved a personal dilemma: When he was off sailing on the other side of the world at Christmas, his kids could tune in and get a gander of their daddy on television, introducing a movie.)

  One day, somebody realized the eager young Tush was the perfect sacrificial lamb for the task of drudgery they despised: doing the news. At the end of every workday, he dutifully grabbed the newspaper and headed into the announce booth to read twenty minutes’ worth of stories, their only visual a simple slide that alerted the audience in plain type that they were watching “WTCG News.” An engineer cut out any stories that mentioned Atlanta and fed out the “newscast” to WRET in Charlotte so their skeletal staff didn’t have to do their own.

  They wouldn’t have bothered if they didn’t have to. Like all local television stations, Ted’s were obligated to comply with governmental rules mandating that broadcasters, in exchange for profiting off these public airwaves, had to serve their communities with news and public affairs programming. Ted had zero interest in starting a full-fledged news department. Such an undertaking required an investment in equipment and staff—cameramen, film processors, editors, reporters, and producers. That would be far more costly than rerunning old shows and movies.

  The bigger issue, as far as he was concerned, was that news was a bummer—an endless stream of stories about the dark side of life: rapes and murders and tragic accidents. Why was there never any good news on television? he lamented. No one ever covered the Boy Scouts! The 1 percent of the population engaged in bad behavior got all the airtime, he complained, not the people who were making positive contributions to the world.

  He shouldered particular contempt for the growing trend by news anchors to infuse their opinions into their nightly reports—especially since he found those opinions to be far more liberal than his own. As a proud patriot, he felt TV news had poisoned the populace against the military by portraying the war in Vietnam as an unnecessary disgrace, depicting soldiers as “a bunch of pothead bums.” As for draft dodgers or conscientious objectors, he fervently believed every citizen was obligated to serve their nation, and anyone who didn’t want to shouldn’t live there. He shuddered to imagine if television had been a force during World War II; likely the images of destruction would have led to a push from the citizenry for the United States to surrender! As if the power to sway public opinion using the airwaves wasn’t great enough, that New York cabal of broadcasters was cashing in big profits, too.

  In short, he believed that Vice President Spiro Agnew got it right in 1972 when he declared the networks a “tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by the government.”

  In the twenty years since television had emerged as a force, Americans had become addicted to, obsessed with, worshipful of television, but that didn’t mean even in their trance-like states that they loved every second of what got pumped out over it. Many viewers felt the same way Ted did, for
example, about broadcast journalism.

  Still, at dinner, the networks offered nothing else. They’d all tacitly conspired to air their sonorous reports from the front lines of the world’s ills at the same unappetizing time. Audiences might prefer the escapist deep-dish pizza of entertainment, but for supper, they were handed that serving of broccoli—news.

  To most in the audience, one network news anchor was virtually indistinguishable from the other.

  Though some viewers believed the anchors and newscasts on all three networks looked exactly the same, Walter Cronkite of CBS became a trusted source as he conveyed news of the major events of the mid-century. This also made him ripe for lampooning by Bill Tush. (Thomas J. O’Halloran)

  “I don’t think it makes much difference which one you watch,” said a respondent to a survey on television viewing habits that showed an overwhelming majority of Americans were tired of the nightly news. “I don’t think there is much choice between them. Truthfully, after a while, it is all boring.”

  Very occasionally, the news rivaled the dramas. The lunar landing inspired awe and captivated nearly 100 percent of the viewing audience for hours. The Watergate hearings interrupted regular daytime network programming for weeks. The resignation of President Nixon kept two of the three networks up all night, broadcasting with the kind of analysis the disgraced leader had decried throughout his tenure.

  Only occasionally, though, did television offer “breaking” news outside of its regularly scheduled programming. Doing so required technology that was just in development. Like in May 1974, when Los Angeles station KNXT learned of an impending police raid of a house in Compton. It was believed the radical Symbionese Liberation Army might be harboring kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. The station had been working with a Japanese firm on a prototype of a portable video minicam—the Handy-Looky—that would make possible the reliable capture on tape of news stories out in the field. The camera proved indispensable during the deadly raid as it unfolded in a hail of bullets and fire, allowing images to be broadcast live. “Portable,” though, was relative. The cameras alone weighed fifty pounds.

  Eager to differentiate the news and to make the local version more compelling—and thus more lucrative—and under mounting pressure to balance the books and make news pay, television executives began enlisting consultants. Their recommendation? Amp up the entertainment factor in the news. Thumbs-down on long-winded governmental and policy stories, which offered boring visuals. Thumbs-up to crime and “news you can use.”

  These outside advisors also encouraged inclusion of a force long missing from the news: women. Till now, female broadcasters had typically been relegated to reporting the weather or consumer affairs.

  Increasingly at the local level, women were being invited to sit side by side with the male anchors—a made-up, blow-dried, better-looking and nattily dressed facsimile of an American household. The presence of a woman, or the “family concept,” as some consultants called it, had the capacity to “brighten up the bad news” as long as she did not seem overtly feminist or controlling. Merely assigning a woman to read a script wasn’t enough. Newscasters had to leap through the screen, chatting amiably in between stories, a phenomenon more serious journalists disparaged as “happy talk.” Those network guys talked down to the viewer. Local newscasters needed to seem to be just like the “average Joe” who watched them—only better-looking.

  Along came the sensation of Barbara Walters, who transcended the “women’s beat” at NBC to command the highest salary then paid to a journalist, a whopping $5 million contract from ABC—including chauffeur and hairstylist. Said former CBS executive Fred Friendly in scolding the exorbitant salary, “I don’t think people will accept news from millionaires.” Better to invest that money in more reporters and camera crews, he said.

  In Atlanta, the number one station, WSB, had done its part by stealing away a star reporter from Louisville, Monica Kaufman, who also happened to be black—another rarity in TV news. She’d been so good on the air in her native Kentucky that a rival station worked to get her out of the market by sending out tapes of her newscasts. With her smooth blend of professionalism and her winning good looks, she immediately rose to local stardom at WSB.

  For Ted, the news hour was when his location on the lunatic fringe came with a distinct advantage. Channel 17, he gloated, got its best ratings then, by offering alternatives like reruns of Hogan’s Heroes or Star Trek. The news was just one big rerun of bad stuff, he declared. Actual reruns of entertainment shows were far more palatable to consume with the nighttime meal.

  And so, having opened up a whole new slice of airtime by deciding to broadcast on the overnights, he foisted his own obligatory newscast safely onto the graveyard shift, whenever the late-night movie finished. Since it would repeat again at five a.m., Tush created an all-purpose sign-off: “Have a nice night or morning, whatever the case may be.”

  One night, insomniac Ted had been among those in the after-hour viewing audience. The next day at work, he ran into Tush in the hallway and wondered out loud, “Why don’t we have someone on-camera doing the news? You’re the announcer. Why don’t you do it?”

  If he was going to play anchor, Tush decided, he’d need a coat and tie—except that he didn’t own either. After borrowing the getup, he sat for an audition in a candidate pool of one. He was a shoo-in. The station couldn’t afford to hire anyone else.

  Next came the issue of where to tape the program. Channel 17’s only studio was the size of a two-car garage—just 1,500 square feet—the nerve center of the station, in use all day producing income-yielding local commercials or wrestling matches. Taking it offline for anything else was a drain on company resources. An anchor desk was hastily fashioned out of cardboard, not unlike Tush’s childhood set in Pittsburgh, and tucked off into what staff anointed the “News Closet,” to be opened after the lucrative work was done.

  The already boring chore Tush faced each evening was one none of his co-workers relished either. By the end of the day, they just wanted to go out and grab a beer down at Harry’s, the nearby watering hole that was practically an extension of 1018 W. Peachtree.

  Nonetheless, duty called. Tush felt a bit guilty cribbing from the work he’d imagined some “poor schlub” over at the wire services had typed up so seriously. He avoided stories about murders or plane crashes, preferring quirky bits about UFOs or a CB radio funeral procession or more personally relevant items, like an impending price hike in beer and wine. Any time pot was in the news rated a mention. Weren’t most people watching at that hour likely to be stoned—just like the crew?

  Not long after his stint as on-air newsreader began, Ted stopped him in the hallway again.

  “You’re doing a good job,” the boss said. “Smile more.”

  Tush already felt like an idiot. His impulse was to laugh and joke around, more comic than Cronkite, but this was the news. Wasn’t being serious a requirement? He was grateful for this opportunity to appear on camera so that he might crawl his way out of the place he most feared he’d wind up—“anonymity-ville.” Already, he’d started to see results. At least a few people must have been watching, because now when he was out in public, strangers called to him, “Hey, channel 17.”

  One fateful day, the proverbial fourth wall came figuratively crashing down. When a lock of hair fell into Tush’s face as he read his copy, the director piped in over the PA system from behind the plate glass windows of the control room and, audible to all, made a request: “Hey, Tush, move the hair from your eyes.” The anchorman dutifully complied and kept on reading.

  The next night, as Tush recorded the headlines, the cameraman energetically swept the studio around him—the better to expedite their visit to the bar—and, out of nowhere, lobbed a piece of paper at him. Tush cracked up and kept on reading.

  Slapstick had invaded the headlines. Every chance he got, Tush mocked the self-serious delivery of real broadcast journalists—and laughed at himself.

  �
�Here I am,” he announced cheerily as he looked around the frame, “sitting inside your TV set with all the news.”

  Or, at least, Tush’s lampoon of it. One night, he told his audience about a speech Walter Cronkite had made at a journalism conference decrying the creeping “show business” approach to the news, and the chirpy, cheery trend of anchor “happy talk.” Then, Tush turned to the crew, who streamed from the wings onto the tiny set, making chirpy, cheery small talk. “I have to tell you, I agree with Walter Cronkite, happy talk is not in its place in the news.” “I don’t like informality in a program, do you?” “I don’t like the kidding around.” “How’s your girl doing? Stop by the house Sunday night.”

  When rival channel 11 began promoting its hard-charging, stylized, and self-serious “Pro-News” format, Tush took to the air with an introduction.

  “THIS IS DULL NEWS,” he reported. “No matter how good you feel, we’ll bum you out with DULL NEWS. Murderraperobberytaxes. Those are the headlines. And now the weather.”

  The next day, Ted stopped him in the hall again. They had never talked about it, but it seemed they shared the same low opinion of broadcast journalism.

  “Hey, I saw that ‘Dull News’ last night, that’s pretty funny,” Ted said.

  If Ted Turner told you he liked something, you could be certain it was genuine praise. Everyone knew the man was not capable of sugarcoating. He had no filter—about anything. He’d parade through the station with ladies who weren’t his wife, or lasciviously grope attractive women he’d just met, without retribution—to the shock and admiration of friends. When asked by a reporter about his reputation for chasing women, he replied, “What’s wrong with that?” He prided himself on his no-bullshit seduction technique. “I tell them to look at me like a nice restaurant,” he said of his conquests. “You wouldn’t want to be there all the time. You just enjoy it, then leave.” His frank, explosive personality was legendary, especially among his inner circle, who warily tiptoed around his ever-changing mood. Was he up, or was he down? He’d return from sailing expeditions clutching laundry lists of ideas they’d have to drop everything to pursue, only to find days later that he’d changed his mind. Once, he subjected his most trusted employees to a polygraph test.