by Maxwell King
After filming the make-believe segments, it was on to the set where Mister Rogers enters his television house, including the kitchen and the porch. Due to time considerations, the introductions often changed dramatically from what Rogers had originally written in the script. Programs had to be exactly twenty-eight minutes long, so the interiors were often rewritten to fit that requirement.
Producer Margy Whitmer explains: “Fred started out in television as a floor man, so he understood continuity; it would make him nuts if it wasn’t just quite right. Shooting it in this order helped eliminate the element of surprise or error. Fred was a pretty linear person: beginning, middle, end.”12
While Whitmer was setting up the lights and tracking down the props person and art crew to make sure everything was in place for the first scene, Fred Rogers was on set with visitors such as kids from the Make-A-Wish Foundation, in what was slotted to be a ten- or fifteen-minute encounter.
Sometimes this became a headache for his staff. Whitmer recalls: “People would say, ‘Can I bring my daughter?’ Then they would decide to invite their neighbor. All of a sudden, a party of three people was six. I tried to put my foot down and limit it to fifteen people per day. The hard part was that Fred would genuinely get into talking to the kids, and having his picture taken with them. My main job then was to say, ‘Time to go.’ Though people understood, sometimes it was hard for me to be diplomatic. It was my fault if we went into overtime because we didn’t get started on time.”13
Margy Whitmer would do Mister Rogers’s makeup at around 9:30 A.M. He hated getting into makeup because it involved putting in his contact lenses, which he never learned to do himself. Pepper Mallinger, Fred Rogers’s ophthalmologist, or the eye doctor’s assistant, put them into his eyes in the morning and took them out at night.
Though she wasn’t a trained makeup artist, Whitmer enjoyed the sessions with Fred Rogers: “It was a wonderful time for me to spend with him, talking about the script, and reminding him of details for the shoot. I could judge if he was tired: Did he sleep well? Did he get his swim in? What’s on his mind?”14
Every day Fred Rogers would rise early, read his Bible, and then go down to the Pittsburgh Athletic Association building for a long swim before he went to work. When Rogers traveled, he asked his staff to book him into a hotel with a pool, so he could continue exercising daily.
On set at 10:00 A.M., one or two takes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood usually did the trick. Whitmer observes: “The actors knew that because Fred was demanding on himself, he’d be on them, too: They knew they needed to get their act together. And for the most part, they did.”15
When Mister Rogers presented a special show on music in 1985, he went down into the Neighborhood studio to introduce viewers to Johnny Costa on piano, Bobby Rawsthorne on drums, and Carl McVicker on bass. Each played his part of the show’s theme song separately on his instrument before they played the signature Neighborhood introduction together, so that kids in the audience could get a sense of how they “communicate” with their fellow musicians.
In addition to the show’s instantly recognizable theme, the trio played the trolley whistle, Mr. McFeely’s frenetic “Speedy Delivery” piano plonks, vibraphone sounds and flute toots on a synthesizer as Fred fed his fish, dreamy celesta lines, incidental music, and Rogers’s entrance and exit tunes.
Chuck Aber, whose training included the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera, observed in an interview that Johnny Costa and Fred were considered an odd couple in terms of personality, but certainly not in their musicality or insistence on the highest quality of production: “Johnny was a very ebullient, outgoing kind of guy, and just the most incredibly talented musician I’ve ever met. . . . He and Fred had a wonderful relationship.”16
Aber recalls that rehearsal time for musical segments in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe was minimal: “If we had a song to do, we’d rehearse it with Johnny Costa. He made sure the key was right and everything was good. . . . You’d get one or two run-throughs with him, and that was it.
“That’s a tribute to the director in the studio, in the control room, as well as Fred, and those of us . . . who worked so hard on the scripts. Studio time was so expensive. The professionalism of all those . . . crew guys that were there with Fred forever, like Nicky Tallo and Jimmy Seech, Frank Warninsky, Art Vogel. . . . You’d get a couple of run-throughs, and they’d say, ‘Roll tape. Underway.’”
As Chuck Aber recalls, “Johnny would occasionally speak up. I remember watching a replay of one of the scenes we’d done. Fred would say, ‘Everyone okay with that?’ Because if you said, ‘No, I didn’t think—’ very often, he’d say, ‘Let’s do it again.’
“Other times, Margy [producer Margy Whitmer] would say, ‘No. . . . We just have to keep going, and deal with it.’ But at this one occasion, we’re watching the playback . . . Fred said, ‘I think that was good. Let’s move on.’
“Johnny went, ‘They always use the one after my best take.’ Now, of course, none of us would have noticed anything, but in Johnny’s mind, that one wasn’t as good, or maybe the next one would be. I think he was often a little dissatisfied. I don’t know how he could possibly have improved it. But if Johnny had insisted, Fred would have said, ‘Let’s do it again.’”17
Rogers’s son Jim notes that Neighborhood floor manager Nicky Tallo was short and heavy, wore a Fu Manchu mustache, and had tattoos up and down his arms: “He looked like a biker. He and Dad got along like two peas in a pod.”18
In an interview with writer Daniel Kellison in the now-defunct web magazine Grantland, Michael Keaton provides an additional illustration of the relationship between Fred Rogers and Nicky Tallo: “So one day, we were taping, and Fred comes in, and starts singing, ‘It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day . . .,’ puts the shoes down here, goes to hang up the sweater in the closet. And he’s singing, and he opens the door—and there’s his floor manager, Nick, this big guy with his long goatee, pierced ears, hair all over the place, totally nude, just standing there naked in the closet. Well, Fred just fell down; it was the most hysterical thing you’ve ever seen. He was totally cool.”19
After taping each show (and even the thirteen operas Fred Rogers wrote had to fit into the twenty-eight-minute format), everyone would break for lunch. Fred Rogers would often go to his office to read his mail, or perhaps do a little meditating. Then he’d come back down to carry on. Producer Margy Whitmer recalls that as he started to slow down, “Towards the end, he wouldn’t tape two days in a row. We didn’t realize how lucky we were, working three days a week, 10:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.”20
One of the challenges of her job was to find practical applications for Fred Rogers’s sometimes wacky ideas: “Weekly staff meetings were the bane of my existence. Once Fred wanted Prince Tuesday, the puppet, to get a bicycle. Prince Tuesday doesn’t have legs. So how do you make a bicycle, and how does the puppeteer manipulate it? Fred would come up with flying trolleys and flying carpets, or he’d want it to rain in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe but not all over the studio floor.”
Other problems arose because, as Margy Whitmer saw it, “He couldn’t really visualize what he wanted until he saw something, and then he would know that he didn’t want that, or he’d want it changed. The hardest part was that he had such respect for the art crew, their talent, their whimsy, and their wackiness, that it was hard for him to tell them he didn’t like something. So sometimes I would have to go in and say, ‘Fred, that learning machine that they came up, they didn’t do such a great job on it. Tell me what you think.’
“Then he would agree: ‘Well, I really didn’t like it that much.’
“I’d have to go back and ask the crew to change it, with them not really knowing that it was from Fred.”21
Chuck Aber remembers Rogers’s directing style as similarly indirect. Aber debuted as the voice of H. J. Elephant III, named after Fred’s friend Senator H. John Heinz III. As he recalls Rogers’s directive: “He wanted H.
J. to be a little—not too much, but a little—streetwise, and have maybe a Southern accent.”22
Other than that, Rogers gave Aber very little instruction or direction: “Fred’s attitude was, let the muse take you . . . not as a puppet, but as Neighbor Aber. Whenever I would ask him a question, maybe about the script . . . sometimes he would say, ‘We’ll have to ask the writer about that.’
Of course, Rogers was the writer. The way Chuck Aber figures it: “I don’t know that Fred necessarily separated himself from that process. He knew he was the writer, of course. But I think it was just part of his whimsy.”
He adds: “Fred didn’t always want to tell you . . . what things meant. Whatever it means to you, that’s more important.”23
Sometimes Rogers wrote scripts with specific performers in mind. Once he wrote a set of scripts about dance for Tommy Tune, who turned out not to be available. So Margy Whitmer had to find another dancer: “It was fine, because we weren’t really about stars, like Sesame Street; we were about having good talent.
“I think there was a real fear of rejection in Fred: To have to ask Tommy Tune first, and have Tommy Tune say, ‘No, I’m not interested in being in the show,’ would have been really hurtful. It was much easier to write the script, and say: ‘He wasn’t available. What can I do?’ There was an insecurity there.”24
The staff had to find ways to allow Fred Rogers to be Mister Rogers—to keep up his image, and not show any flaws. There were times when he didn’t want to cooperate: “That was the part of him someone in the office called ‘Baby Fred,’” recalls Margy Whitmer.
She felt that her role included being Fred Rogers’s protector, so that he could save his energy. If he was talking to someone on the phone and wanted to get off, Whitmer would pretend to be his secretary Elaine, who needed Mister Rogers’s immediate attention.25
Lots of times David Newell had to be Fred Rogers’s shield, as the de facto “Number Two” on the show and the public relations director. If someone wanted to interview Mister Rogers, it was Newell’s job to massage the request, sometimes for weeks.
Newell observes: “It was never Fred Rogers’s goal to be a television star. Television was a vehicle for Fred, to reach children and families; it was sort of a necessary evil.”26
Still, his staffers often noted that he could “glow” onscreen. As Hedda Sharapan puts it: “Fred wasn’t an actor, but he loved the camera . . . and he loved the fact that he was able to communicate through television.”27
David Newell feels that Rogers did enjoy aspects of being famous: “I think he enjoyed the respect he got for good work. It was about all those years of child development, and music, and his discipline—his investment.”28
By its second run in the early 1980s, the Neighborhood was such a cultural touchstone that it had inspired numerous parodies, notably Eddie Murphy’s Saturday Night Live sketch “Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood,” which aired over numerous episodes of the sketch comedy series in 1983 and 1984. Set in an urban ghetto, the parody was “not always G-rated,” as David Newell put it.29
SNL was filmed upstairs from David Letterman’s show in NBC’s Studio 8H, where Rogers worked in his first television job as a floor manager, decades earlier. Right before Fred Rogers’s appearance on the popular talk show, he and David Newell took a special elevator to the SNL outpost and found Murphy in his dressing room.
As Newell related the story in January 2017 on the The Moth Radio Hour, “Eddie Murphy was truly surprised, and stepped back at first.”30
But he recovered quickly, and exclaimed, “Here’s the real Mister Robinson!” before giving Fred Rogers a big hug. David Newell noted: “Eddie Murphy had grown up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and it was obvious that there was a real connection.”
Shortly thereafter on Letterman, Fred Rogers held up a Polaroid just taken of him with Eddie Murphy. Most of the parodies of the Neighborhood were done “with kindness in their hearts,” Rogers told David Letterman.31
Despite Rogers’s ambivalence about fame, his staff was aware that when you were with Fred Rogers, unexpected things happened. Margy Whitmer recounts a time when the show was shooting in colonial Williamsburg, Virginia: After the staff got on the plane in Pittsburgh, she realized that she’d left the signature Mister Rogers sweater and sneakers back in the airline’s club lounge. Since the plane wasn’t ready to take off, Whitmer asked the attendant if she could go back to retrieve the essential props. But the flight attendant said she couldn’t reopen the plane door. Instead, she proposed that she put the sweater and sneakers on a flight to Roanoke that left shortly thereafter.
A relieved Whitmer planned to take Fred Rogers to Williamsburg and then drive back to the Roanoke airport to get the sweater and sneakers. But a woman behind the Rogers team on the flight overheard the exchange and offered to do it herself. Whitmer noted: “I trusted this woman, even though I’d never seen her before in my life.”32
But there was another wrinkle: How would the staff at the airport know that this volunteer was authorized to pick up the Rogers props? Unable to get the airport on the phone, Whitmer finally dialed the US Airways 800 number to describe what awaited in Roanoke: “The woman who answered said, ‘I can’t do that for you.’
“I said, ‘Listen, lady, this is Mister Rogers’s sweater and sneakers, and if we don’t have these tomorrow, we can’t shoot.’
“She said, ‘Oh my gosh. Hold on a second. I’ll make this happen for you.’”
When Margy Whitmer got back from dinner, the sweater and sneakers were on her bed.33
Rogers’s quirks came to the forefront on a trip to the Soviet Union in 1987, during the perestroika era. David Newell initiated the visit after watching Nightline. Host Ted Koppel likened the gentleness of Mister Rogers to a Russian show called Spokoynoy, nochi malyshi! (Good Night, Little Ones), on in prime time. In a time of building bridges, Newell and Whitmer suggested that the Neighborhood crew do a cultural exchange with the cast of the Soviet show.
At the time, Rogers and the staff were working on a week about “alike and different.” He wrote to Good Night host Tatiana Vedeneyeva about an exchange between the two shows. As a lead-in, the Neighborhood staff composed a segment about television shows from different countries.
By the fall of that year, the complex preparations had been completed. Once they got to Russia, Fred Rogers never changed his watch to local time. He stayed on his usual schedule, getting up at four o’clock in the morning and going to bed at eight o’clock. So the staff had to finish shooting by the middle of the day, Russian time.
Margy Whitmer recalls: “We only shot two segments, and it took us two weeks. We didn’t even get to go anywhere. It took forever to do anything. Poor Fred was tired. We got followed by the cops once; all we needed was to have Mister Rogers get arrested in Russia.”34
But she was struck by the fact that the Russians knew all about Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, because it had been pirated there. At the first production meeting, Rogers’s staff was on one side of the table, and the Russians were on the other side.
She observes: “At one point, Fred was thinking, this is not good. So he pulls out Daniel Striped Tiger the puppet, and Daniel warms everybody up, even though they don’t really understand what he’s saying. Then Fred pulled out X the Owl. The beak was broken. The Russian art director takes the puppet, and we’re thinking: ‘Uh-oh, we’re never going to see that again.’ About half an hour later he brings back X, with the beak fixed perfectly.
“These puppets were a way for Fred to break the ice. And the crew couldn’t have been more wonderful. We all cried and cried when we left. Our interpreter came to visit me a few years later. But I think this set of shows was more PR for who Fred was, for his philosophy.”35
For the kids in the TV “neighborhood,” Russia could have been down the street. As wonderful as it had been, the trip was an exhausting experience Fred Rogers vowed never to repeat.
Hedda Sharapan noted: “There was a wonderfu
l, thoughtful intensity . . . in the studio of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: ‘Let’s do this really well.’ But there was also wonderful playfulness . . . warmth, playfulness, and respect.”36
Fred Rogers’s great sense of humor, and his sense of timing, often came out in unexpected ways. Arthur Greenwald recalls an incident while driving Rogers to the airport after a conference on early childhood development at Yale, also attended by Dr. Margaret McFarland: “I ran out of gas in this borrowed car, and finally flagged down a state trooper. I was really embarrassed. I said to Fred, as the state trooper took him and Margaret and their belongings into the car with the flashing lights, ‘Oh, Fred, what would Lady Elaine say at a time like this?’
“And through the darkness, Lady Elaine’s voice came back: ‘She’d say, ‘Oh, shit!’”37
Fred Rogers’s humor could be subversive in its own way. When Katie Couric was traveling the United States one summer, she did her Today show openers in different cities. Broadcasting from Pittsburgh, she set up next to “this beautiful fountain at the headwaters of the Ohio” and went on to introduce Rogers: “This is a premier citizen of Pittsburgh, Mr. Fred Rogers.
“Good morning, Mister Rogers. Do you have anything in particular to say to our viewers?”
Fred said, “Well, I just think it’s really appropriate, because I am so interested in young children, that you’re interviewing me next to this fountain, because you know, the control of bodily fluids is so critically important to children. And this fountain is so exuberant, and yet it contains all the fluid.”
Katie Couric just looked at the camera and said, “I think we’re going to go to a commercial.”38
Fred Rogers was completely deadpan. As usual, he was thinking about children, and not so much about Katie Couric and her show.
18.
FRED ROGERS, MUSICIAN