by Maxwell King
Old Friends . . . New Friends was designed to take advantage of Rogers’s strength—his ability to make direct connections with people and translate that to a television audience. Aired in 1978, the twenty-episode program, filmed and recorded on location, featured Fred Rogers asking people about the meaning of life; it positioned him as an interviewer of interesting public figures in a format that allowed him to interject himself and his thinking. And some programs were essentially just Fred being philosophical Fred.
Rogers’s interviewees on Friends included the famous (Hoagy Carmichael, Helen Hayes, Milton Berle, baseball’s Willie Stargell) and inspirational figures such as Father William Wasson, who established Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos, a home for orphaned and abandoned children in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where Fred Rogers talks with some of the children about what it means to be part of this caring “family.”
Part of the problem with shows like Friends was that Fred Rogers, who had an extraordinary instinct for the power of conversational television, had already established a childlike style and persona during his twenty-plus years in children’s television, and he wasn’t able to escape it. And this adult showcase for Rogers as minister lacked the entertainment value his music and, most importantly, the puppets imparted to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Without an outlet for his whimsy, the adult Rogers fails to channel his most valuable resources.
Though Friends captured many of the ingredients that had made Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood so successful, it never escaped the gentleness of Rogers’s earlier work to translate effectively to an adult audience. In a television world growing ever more intense and overheated, Rogers on Friends lacked edge.
This was, after all, the era in which shows like All in the Family were shaking up the television landscape with jarringly honest depictions of the very social conflicts Fred Rogers decried. He held on to a thoughtful, sensitive, slow-paced approach just as most television programming was speeding up, reflecting the culture of the time.
Rogers’s former colleague Elizabeth Seamans observes: “When you are talking to somebody, they will give you an answer. Instead of moving on to the next question, you let them say that thing that isn’t so obvious. Then if you’re Fred, you probably wait again. Not only would he get more beautiful and much more nuanced and sometimes more intimate answers, but often just more interesting, complex, unusual ones—the unexpected, the thing you don’t ask. Pretty soon, they’d begin volunteering things you would never have known to ask, and Fred would allow us to show those things in television time.”12
Some of the programming Fred developed in the mid-1970s, though it was high-minded and serious, simply seemed to lack a complete understanding of what makes compelling television. A case in point is an Old Friends . . . New Friends episode on Republican Senator John Heinz of Pittsburgh and his family.13
It opens with John and Teresa Heinz and their son André talking about a recent boating accident in which André was injured. There is real drama in the offing: André had been hit in the head with an outboard-motor propeller and could easily have been killed. What’s more, his mother, philanthropist Teresa Heinz, seems inclined to be surprisingly direct and honest in this program.
But then, just as we are warming to the possibility of listening to André and his mother talk about this frightening and powerful episode in their lives, poof, they are gone, and Fred takes us into a long and turgid journey through endless videotape of Senator Heinz campaigning. The senator knows he is being filmed for a show that will be on national television, and he is not about to give us anything like candor.
Then after a long scene in which the senator tells a group of potential supporters a classic noblesse oblige story about his great-grandfather building churches all over town, we are suddenly back with Teresa Heinz again. Soft-spoken and deadly serious, she is very straightforward about political life: “Campaigning is a special kind of tension and pressure,” says Mrs. Heinz. “It’s awful, in the sense of what it does to one’s family life.”14
Teresa Heinz is as candid and blunt and honest about Washington and politics as her husband has been guarded and cautious. But just as we are focusing on Teresa’s frank assessment of political life, she is gone again, and we are back with the senator’s very guarded and politically careful description of his public life. When the program finally returns to the drama of André’s near-death experience, it is almost at the end of the shoot, and even André seems to have become bored with it.
To put it succinctly, Fred Rogers is working outside his métier. He can’t seem to focus in a way that delivers compelling documentary, conversational television for grown-ups. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is marvelously thoughtful and thematic, always responding in perfect harmony with the children it serves. But Old Friends . . . New Friends is the opposite: It seems to have little awareness of what its adult audience may be interested in, and it manages to bring out a preachy side of Fred that the Neighborhood always skillfully steered away from.
Despite laudable intentions, Rogers’s “television time” was just too slow for most adults. There were powerful exceptions, like Rogers’s interview with the iconic theater director and acting teacher Lee Strasberg, a part of the Old Friends . . . New Friends series that is often cited as the high point in Fred’s four years of producing adult programming.15
“Lee Strasberg . . . there’s a guy who’s, you know, defended with five inches of bulletproof armor,” said Basil Cox. “He [Rogers] got through to him; and he got him to talk about things that were really personal. He had a—he had a gift, just an extraordinary gift, to get to people.”16
Rogers’s gift wasn’t enough to make Old Friends . . . New Friends, or the other adult programming produced by Fred, successful enough to be sustained. The funding wasn’t secure enough, or the programming good enough, to win over the PBS hierarchy, nor were the ratings high enough to dazzle potential supporters.
Elizabeth Seamans observes: “Old Friends . . . didn’t come from inside of Fred the way other stuff did, and I don’t think it ever had a chance. I’m not sure Fred really knew why he was doing [it]. The way the subjects came up was kind of pell-mell. They didn’t come out of his marrow the way Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood did, over time.
“I think it’s too bad [it] didn’t have time to evolve. Fred’s children’s show had a long gestation period, all through the 50s. Television today doesn’t often give you that time or opportunity.
“Look at Jim Henson’s work: In his early twenties, Jim Henson was on some little local program with his goofy puppets. He’s doing what Fred was doing in his twenties: fooling around on TV and having a lot of latitude because there wasn’t that much on. The concept of television time is something to conjure with as it has gotten more and more powerful: the cost of the second, the cost of the television minute.”17
Of course, to some extent Fred didn’t care. He never had produced, nor ever would produce, television for money or ratings. He produced it for himself; to meet the standards he envisioned and to do some good in the world. Elizabeth Seamans explains: “I don’t know how much he watched ratings. I never heard him talk about ratings; I never even knew him to be aware of them, though he probably was. But the letters that came to him [were important to him], and the response was very personal. He thrived on the fan mail.”18
Rogers’s commitment to this audience was essentially a pastoral one, she adds: “He saw that people were given heart and courage, and an outlook toward children and families that he really believed in.”
In fact, in a 1978 letter to a friend, Rogers shares the hope that church groups will watch Old Friends . . . New Friends and use it as the basis for discussion groups afterward.
Fred Rogers saw the television producer as having a special, ennobling mission: “Our job in life,” he said at a graduation ceremony at Thiel College in Greenville, Pennsylvania, early in his career, in 1969, “is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is—that each of us has something th
at no one else has—or ever will have—something inside which is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness, and to provide ways of developing its expression.”19
TV executives like James Thomas Aubrey Jr., the notorious president of CBS during the formative 1960s, known to associates as “the smiling cobra,” didn’t share Fred Rogers’s aspirations for the medium. Aubrey earned the label of “barbarian” for his relentless pursuit of schlocky programming to propel higher ratings and profits.20 Aubrey managed to drive down the intelligence of television programming in the early sixties, while driving up ratings, profits, and his own compensation. He was finally fired by CBS after the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) began an investigation of charges that he was taking kickbacks from producers who wanted to get their shows on CBS channels around the country.
Ironically, it wasn’t until right before Fred Rogers died in 2003 that commercial television began making a significant amount of high-quality programming. When cable television producers (and later, Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu) began to produce such outstanding serial programs as The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad, critics began comparing such television fare favorably to the best feature movies. But even if Fred Rogers had lived to see that level of quality on commercial television, he would undoubtedly have had little use for the cynicism and violence of shows like Breaking Bad.
In addition to Old Friends . . . New Friends, Rogers and his crew at FCI produced other programs for PBS aimed at grown-ups, including some that used the talk-show format to explore important societal issues. Most notable was the series of specials on issues affecting parents and children moderated by Susan Stamberg, then the host of NPR’s highly popular program All Things Considered.21
On February 15, 1981, for instance, Stamberg hosted “Mister Rogers Talks with Parents About Divorce,” featuring Fred Rogers and family counselor Earl Grollman. This was followed on May 3, 1981, by “Mister Rogers Talks with Parents About Competition,” a program that focused on the arrival of a new baby in the family and showcased not only the commentary of Harvard psychologist Tom Cottle but also a short interview with Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Lynn Swann. Interestingly, pamphlets on the topics from Family Communications were offered halfway through the shows.
Rogers played both an on-air and a producing role on these specials. Certainly, they had many moments of high-quality television, though they were not popular enough to gain a life of their own and continue on PBS.
In a few of the specials he produced for PBS in those years, Rogers brought back the crew from the Neighborhood, but in prime time. On December 17, 1977, at 8:00 P.M., he presented his first-ever “Christmastime with Mister Rogers,” featuring Betty Aberlin, François Clemmons, Audrey Roth, Joe Negri, Elsie Neal, David Newell, and Elizabeth Seamans planning a holiday gathering. A young ballerina scheduled to perform is concerned that her family, stranded with car trouble, may not make it to see her dance, but it all works out in the end.
Notably, on the special, Mister Rogers doesn’t say much about the birth of Christ. Instead he talks about families with different traditions for Christmas and Chanukah, as well as those who celebrate neither. The trolley features a banner that reads “Merry Christmas” on one side and “Happy Chanukah” on the other. At one point, Mister Rogers plays with a dreidel as he sings “The Dreidel Song.”
He summarizes his holiday message as he thinks about a gift for all of his television neighbors: “I suppose the thing I’d like most to be able to give you is hope. Hope that through your own doing and your own living with others, you’ll be able to find what best fits for you in this life. . . . I, for one, wish you good memories of this holiday. And I hope you’ll be able to look for all the different ways that people have of showing that they love you.”
The Bangor Daily News of Maine noted at the time: “‘Christmastime with Mister Rogers’ is a quiet show. It is a kind of lullaby, dropped in the middle of the hullabaloo.”22
Fred Rogers always advocated for a noncommercial approach to the holiday. In the early 1970s, Hallmark approached him about contributing to their annual display for the store in midtown Manhattan. He and his colleague Eliot Daley went to New York to “case the joint and come up with a plan,” as Daley remembers it.23
“There were all kinds of phantasmagorical decorations that more garish celebrities had concocted, which Hallmark was preparing to execute. But the idea that we hatched together was this: a Norfolk Island pine tree, about the height of a three- or four-year-old, which was to be left entirely natural and undecorated. It was to be a live tree, planted in a clear/transparent Lucite cube so that the roots would show. And on the plaque or whatever label they put on it, [it] said, ‘I like you just the way you are.’”
Though Daley is unsure if Fred and Joanne Rogers made it to New York to see the tree in the Hallmark store, he did: “It was perfect.”24
To his credit, Fred Rogers was evidently one of the first to acknowledge that his programming for adults was failing to hit the mark. According to Basil Cox, just as Rogers had cooled to children’s television in 1975, he began to cool to his new assignment as a creator and producer of television for adults: “I didn’t sense any, you know, enormous amount of grieving on Fred’s part that Old Friends . . . New Friends was over. I think he appreciated the experience. . . . But I think he was ready to go back to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”25
Ellen Galinsky, the president of Families and Work Institute in New York, recalled in an interview in 2007 that Fred almost seemed withdrawn when they were working together around 1980 on a program called “Mister Rogers Talks to Parents.” On the advice of consultants hired to advise FCI about the style of the program, it was faster paced, with shorter, quicker frames than the television Fred was used to doing.
Galinsky said: “The show that I did was, I think, ultimately uncomfortable for Fred. One of the things that the staff will tell you is that every time anyone from the audience asked him a question, he would turn to me, and they would have to stop the camera and say, ‘Fred! I’m sure Ellen can answer it, but they’re also wanting to hear from you, too.’ He’s a slow, contemplative person. I think the program was jarring for him.”26
Fred’s instinct for talking with children with joy and natural grace just didn’t translate to adult television. His secretary Elaine Lynch remembers that when Old Friends . . . New Friends was ending, Rogers felt a pang of disappointment that there seemed to be so little interest in this programming: “The shows were wonderful. And they aired once and—poof!—they’re on our shelves, which always disappointed him.”27
Still, observes Basil Cox: “After experiencing being away from the Neighborhood for a while, and being relieved of the pressure of having to produce for it—he [Fred] took some pleasure in thinking about going back to it again. And I think he came to terms with who he was. He was Mister Rogers. You know, and there was no need to look for a new persona, that was who he was.”28
But if Fred was disappointed in his four years of making programs for grown-ups, he was also looking forward. He remained in constant conversation with his mentor and teacher, Dr. Margaret McFarland of the University of Pittsburgh. They continued their conversations about children and early childhood education, and eventually they began to explore the idea of a new kind of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, one that could focus on some of the most difficult themes of childhood.
16.
HE’S BACK!
The new concept formulated by Fred Rogers and Dr. Margaret McFarland focused on shows that spanned a full week, integrating programs that would be watched from Monday through Friday in a way that would weave together narrative storytelling and instruction. They felt they could carry a story line, and an important theme from childhood, through a full five days, and that they could create the most powerful and sophisticated children’s television yet produced. Most importantly, they wanted to tackle the toughest questions young children might encounter.
It all came together in Hawaii, of all places.
In the late 1970s, David Newell and Fred Rogers were traveling together to Honolulu, where Fred was scheduled to make a speech. David Newell handled public relations for Fred Rogers and his production company, Family Communications, Inc. (FCI), as well as playing Mr. McFeely, the “speedy delivery” mailman character on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Rogers hated traveling by himself—in fact, he hated traveling at all, just as he hated giving speeches. But he was often called on to speak at colleges and universities, as well as to early childhood education groups and broadcasting organizations, and most often it was Newell who traveled with him. Newell enjoyed the chance to have long, discursive conversations with Fred, something they were usually too busy to do back at FCI.1
In a taxi to the speaking engagement, Rogers was lost in thought about his upcoming speech. Newell recalls: “In the newspaper, I came across this little blurb that a child had jumped off a roof with a towel—the Superman thing.”2
Newell interrupted Rogers’s reverie to tell him the shocking news that a little boy who’d watched Superman on television had decided he would try to fly, and was terribly injured falling from a rooftop. One of the few things that could raise anger—real, intense anger—in Mister Rogers was willfully misleading innocent, impressionable children. To him, it was immoral and completely unacceptable.
His feelings extended to programming of any kind, including advertising and entertainment watched by very young children. In a speech given at an academic conference at Yale University in 1972, Fred Rogers said, “The impact of television must be considered in the light of the possibility that children are exposed to experiences which may be far beyond what their egos can deal with effectively. Those of us who produce television must assume the responsibility for providing images of trustworthy available adults who will modulate these experiences and attempt to keep them within manageable limits.”3 Which is exactly what Rogers himself had tried to do with the production of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.