In the Company of Legends
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IN THE COMPANY OF LEGENDS
Joan Kramer and David Heeley
IN THE COMPANY OF LEGENDS
Copyright © 2015 by Joan Kramer and David Heeley
FIRST EDITION
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Interior Design by Mark Karis
Hardcover ISBN: 9780825307423
In memory of my parents, Eleanor Cohen Kramer and Milton S. Kramer, who believed that their daughter could accomplish anything.
—JOAN KRAMER
To the television pioneers, who inspired me, and on whose shoulders we stand. And to all those from whom I learned along the way.
—DAVID HEELEY
CONTENTS
Foreword by Richard Dreyfuss
1 Back Story
2 Fred Was First
3 “That Won’t Work—They’re All Dead”
4 Joanne, Paul, and Hugh
5 “Now That I Have Friends”
6 Frank, Paper Towels, and Mickey
7 At Last, Elizabeth Taylor
8 Directing Kate
9 A Broadway Premiere
10 A Pink Hotel, A Yellow Box, and The Emmy Awards
11 The Boxer and A Singing Legend
12 Rainbow Over the White House
13 Jimmy and Johnny—Maybe
14 Dirty Laundry and A Rock Concert
15 A Visit to the White House
16 “Don’t Mess With Him”
17 “I Can’t Work Without The Bells”
18 “Stay in Touch”
19 Tea and Daggers
20 Bacall and Bogie
21 Joanne and The Group
22 Audrey in Switzerland
23 Henry and Jane and Ted and Peter
24 Kate on Kate
25 Two Birthdays—Universal and Columbia
26 Getting to Know The Last Mogul
27 Garfield—The Good Die Young
28 Life Was a Series of Adventures; Acting Was Just One of Them
29 A Few That Got Away
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Index
FOREWORD
You don’t spend fifty years of your life doing something you don’t think highly of. Not if you’re lucky, you don’t. I have been able to spend fifty years of my life doing something I adored and was praised and paid. However, I did not endure fifty years of doing something stupid or dull for money. I did it because I loved it and honored it and knew its value. Joan and David are the only people I’ve ever met who have memorialized this experience, who have told the stories of actors on as high a level as they deserve.
Here’s a secret: People come up to an actor on the street and say, “Thank you.” They don’t say that to their rabbis, their divorce lawyers or their neurosurgeons. They say it to actors because they are the ones who give them “surcease from sorrow.” I do not take lightly the compliment and I am thrilled when it happens gracefully. Joan and David have a body of work that is simplified down to the words, “Thank you.”
We walk around the world surrounded by loss, tragedy, anxiety, and stress. Then an actor makes you laugh or focuses you on some part of the human experience. It’s known as a “mitzvah.” It is a gift that actors give and actors get. Joan and David are the only ones I’ve ever met who understand that on the level it should be understood. So if they say they’re going to tell you some stories, pay attention.
—RICHARD DREYFUSS
Beverly Sills on location in East Harlem for the Salsa! episode of Skyline with Beverly Sills. New York, 1979. Photograph by Brownie Harris.
CHAPTER ONE
Back Story
As with so many events in life, our meeting each other was a matter of chance. The fact that we then began working together was the luck of the draw.
JK David and I come from two different worlds, an ocean apart.
I was a ballet dancer and assistant choreographer before starting to work in television production. From the time I was seven I mingled with people from the worlds of music, dance, opera, and art, and always felt comfortable talking to anyone of any age. Part of that is due to the fact that I was an only child who was never asked to leave the room when my grandmothers and their siblings were talking. I was just part of the family discussions.
Born and raised in Chicago, I knew early on that I wanted to be a ballet dancer. But I eventually discovered that I preferred working behind-the-scenes instead of in front of the curtain, finding it more satisfying to help put the pieces together for a production than to actually perform in it.
After graduating from high school, I moved to New York to pursue a career in ballet. Within a few years, I was hired as the assistant to a choreographer, traveling to Philadelphia and San Francisco, dealing with contracts, rehearsal schedules, costume fittings, and stage props. It would all come in handy a few years later when I switched careers.
Today, getting a start in television or film seems a lot more complicated than the way I began. As a matter of fact, I was just plain lucky.
I’d had a disagreement with the choreographer for whom I’d been working. It happened to be when The Mary Tyler Moore Show was at the height of its popularity, and that series made an indelible impression on me, since Mary’s character was a single career woman, working in the traditionally male business of television news. I thought, “I could do a job like hers. It’s just an extension of what I’ve been doing all along.”
I called all three major television networks in New York, asking, “Do you have any production jobs available?” CBS and NBC said all their programs were produced in California. ABC told me basically the same thing, but then added, “We do have one show that’s done in New York, The Dick Cavett Show, and it’s produced for ABC by Cavett’s own company, Daphne Productions. Try calling their office. Here’s the number.”
Cavett’s secretary at the time, Doris Mikesell, was the entire personnel department, and when I was put through to her line and heard, “Mr. Cavett’s office,” I thought, “Why am I talking to the host’s assistant?”
My first words were a textbook example of what not to say. “You don’t have any job openings, do you?” I asked.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” said Doris. “I’m going on vacation at the end of next week and I need to hire a receptionist before I leave. When can you come in for an interview?”
Then, as if my opening line was not bad enough, I said, “What kind of receptionist? If it’s working a switchboard, I don’t know how to do that.”
“No one who has ever come to work here knew how to work our old-fashioned board, but it doesn’t take long to learn. So please, come in to see me on Monday.”
It was as though no blunders were enough to prevent me from getting that job. I met Doris just before Christmas, and began working the first week of the new year.
The switchboard was indeed a challenge that took me some time to master and, along the way, I accidently disconnected a few very important
people, including Dick Cavett, himself. Fortunately for me—and everyone else who called that office—I was promoted to the position of assistant talent coordinator three months later.
It was the mid-seventies, and the Cavett Show was not just an entertainment talk show; it was a reflection of the times. More than once we had bomb scares and had to evacuate the office or the studio, usually because of controversial guests, such as Angela Davis and Philip Berrigan. Often there’d be lines stretching around the block when a big star was due to appear: Bette Davis, Anthony Quinn, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Rudolf Nureyev, the Muppets, Paul Simon, Ethel Merman, Lily Tomlin, and the Harlem Globetrotters, to name just a few.
It was there that I earned a reputation for booking people who were hard to get. I rarely called their agents; instead I found ways to track them down and reach them directly.
DH To this day, Joan’s contact book is probably worth a fortune. She’s a phone person. I’m not. She can find almost anyone’s home number and schmooze with them. More often than not, by the end of the conversation, she has gained their trust and co-operation for the project we’re working on at the time. I use the telephone as a practical necessity instead of a tool for visiting with people. So my calls are usually short and to the point.
JK I’ve also always been a perfectionist, even as a child. I can glom on to one tiny thing and spend hours or days fiddling with it in order to make it better. I know there are times when David feels I’m actually making it worse; more than once he’s told me, “You’ve thrown out the baby with the bath water.” But he, too, is no slouch when it comes to perfectionism. Fortunately for both of us, we usually don’t obsess over the same things.
DH I’m from the north of England: born in Yorkshire, and raised in Lancashire. My parents were both schoolteachers, and I realize now that raising two children1 had to be a struggle for them financially. Nevertheless, they were determined that we both get a good education, and I eventually secured a place at Brasenose College, Oxford, along with a scholarship to pay the way.
As a child I had been fascinated by the stories I read about this new medium, television, before there was even a transmitter in our area. All aspects of it interested me: how it worked, who was involved, and how the early live shows were produced.
Another key event of my childhood was my joining the Boy Scouts. At the age of ten or eleven I was somewhat timid, and not at all adventurous. But my cousin dragged me to a meeting, and I was hooked. Ironically, he attended just that once, and never returned; I went all the way, eventually becoming a Queen’s Scout (the equivalent of Eagle Scout in the US).
It was as a Scout that I learned how to be a leader. And it was at Oxford that I learned not to be intimidated by others, whatever their rank or position in society (Britain had then, and still has now, the remains of a class system). I believe that both those experiences were invaluable when I started directing and had to deal with crews and on-camera talent.
I loved the sciences, and chose to study (or “read,” as they say at Oxford and Cambridge) Physics. But, although I’d always been one of the top students at my high school, I found it tough at the university level, and wasn’t sure what my career path would be when I finished. Then, by a stroke of luck, I stumbled across a talk being given by the chief engineer of ATV, London’s big commercial television broadcaster. As I chatted with him afterwards, he offered me a six-week summer internship, and I was in heaven. All the things that had fascinated me from my childhood were there2, giving me my first hands-on chance with cameras, lighting, etc. I knew I’d found what I wanted to do.
After I graduated from Oxford, I went to work in the engineering division of the BBC, starting in the telecine department, handling many miles of film. But a promotion that sent me even deeper into engineering led to the realization that I was moving in the wrong direction. Fortunately, the BBC was about to start a second television network, BBC-2, and it gave me the opportunity to jump the barrier between engineering and production. I was able to get a “training attachment” to the Presentation Department, which needed to expand quickly. There I learned the director’s craft, first with simple on-camera announcements, and later live talk shows and performance programs. Within a few years I was also making short filmed documentaries, mostly about luminaries in the performing and visual arts. It might seem a strange path for someone with a degree in Physics, but it fit right in with my many passions.
In 1969, I made one of those difficult, far-reaching choices many of us face at some point in our lives. I decided to resign from the BBC and move to New York. There was no job waiting, and there were lean times trying to find one. But eventually I was hired as an associate director at WNDT, the New York public television station, which would soon become WNET.
Dick Cavett with Joan Kramer.
New York, 1998. Authors’ collection.
JK I’ve maintained close contact with Dick Cavett. Even now, so many years later, I believe that working for his show was the best job in television, and the best training for what came later.
But good things don’t last, and eventually The Dick Cavett Show was canceled. However, I’d caught the television “bug,” and one of the jobs I landed afterwards was writing intermission segments for Live from Lincoln Center, at a time when Robert MacNeil was the host. When he learned of my background, he told me, “WNET is about to launch a new series about the arts. I think you’d be a good candidate to work on it.”
I wasn’t especially interested in working for public television, so when Robin (as most people call him) offered to pass along my résumé to the executive producer, I was not as enthusiastic as I should have been. “Let me think about it,” I said. “I don’t want to put you in an awkward position. Maybe I should just send it myself with a cover letter.”
“No,” he said. “It would be much better coming from me.”
DH By the late seventies, I’d gone from associate director to director, to managing station breaks and Pledge Weeks, and back again to directing, when it was announced that the station was developing a weekly arts show. In my opinion, it was long overdue; I’d already submitted a proposal for a similar series myself. So I was pleased to be chosen to join the staff as a producer/director.
The executive producer of the new program, Skyline, was Gail Jansen, who was impressed by Joan’s résumé, which Robin had sent to her with a hand-written note, and she realized that the staff she was putting together didn’t have anyone with a dance background. So after they met, Gail hired her as an associate producer. There were three teams of producers and associate producers, and everyone, except Joan, came from within the station.
My first program, which also launched the series, was a profile of flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal, with Linda Romano as my associate producer. It was nominated for an Emmy, but didn’t win.
In the meantime, Joan had suggested to Gail a program about the set and costume designer, Rouben Ter-Arutunian, whom she had interviewed for the Lincoln Center Library of Performing Arts Oral History Project. Gail liked the idea, and assigned me to produce it with Joan as my associate producer. It was a nightmare.
JK Rouben was a wonderfully-talented man, and charming—until we came to the actual taping of the show in WNET’s Studio 55, on 9th Avenue and 55th Street.
We had arranged for scale models and photos of many of his sets to be brought to the studio. But, when David tried to shoot them, Rouben came into the control room and stayed there, not hesitating to insist how each model should be lit and shot, and how each picture should be framed for the camera. It went on for hours.
DH Unfortunately, we didn’t have hours. The same studio was used every weekday evening for the live broadcast of The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, so we had to be finished and out in time for that production to reset, rehearse, and go on the air. It was the first—and thankfully—the last time in my career that I thought I was going to leave a studio with nothing “in the can.” But here was where my many years of working with the same crew p
aid off. They were terrific. They saw the problems I was having, and worked through required union breaks, and even shortened their official lunch hour until we got everything we needed on tape. I’ll never forget that. In some ways it meant more than any of the awards I would receive in the future.
JK I felt terribly guilty, knowing that this was my idea to begin with, and seeing what a hard time David was having with it. He finally succeeded in getting the show recorded, including an excellent interview of Rouben by art critic, Grace Glueck. But the whole day was like pulling teeth. After the program was edited, Rouben went back to being a friend and gave each of us a signed original costume sketch in appreciation. Apparently, there had been very few, if any, programs devoted to a costume and set designer before this one.
However, I wondered if this would be the last time David would ever want to work with me again.
DH Together, Joan and I did profiles of Rudolf Nureyev, Lotte Lenya, Patricia Birch, John Curry, the ice dancer who’d won an Olympic gold medal, the Wagnerian opera soprano, Birgit Nilsson, and the musical genre, salsa. All of them received critical acclaim, and for the show about Patricia Birch, we received an Emmy nomination—although we didn’t win.
JK My three months at WNET were extended when Skyline was renewed for a second season, and then for a third, when it became Skyline with Beverly Sills.
JK and DH However, it wasn’t in the cards for the series to be renewed again. But by then it didn’t matter to either of us because we had proposed an idea that would propel us from the local programming arena onto the national stage.
Olympic Gold Medalist John Curry with dancer/choreographer Peter Martins in the Skyline program John Curry:Dance On Ice. Curry told us, “Every choreographer says, ‘I’d love to learn to skate.’ That passes quickly.”
Westchester, NY, 1978. Photograph by Ken Diego.
Authors’ collection.
CHAPTER TWO