Old Tiger

"I Just Sit Around doing nothing and get rich."

That's how David Cunningham Garroway describes his life. And, considering the boneless way he shuffles around NBC and the five thousand dollars he gets every week for doing it. That sounds like a pretty accurate way of stating the situation.

Appearances, however, are proverbially deceiving. Garroway's weekly check from NBC was at one time less than sixteen dollars, and it wasn't exactly by "doing nothing" that he snuck up to the five-grand bracket. The road was a little rockier than that.

But not much. From Schenectady. 1913, (the where and when of Old Tiger's birth) to the fair-haired boy of NBC. 1954, it's been a steady, lowpressure success story.

Fresh out of Washington University in 1935, the young Garroway wrote and published a self-help book on mispronounced words. While trying to peddle this literary effort to book-dealers in New York, he was impressed by the apparently easy life of radio announcers in the big city. He promptly got himself an announcing audition at NBC along with twenty-three other hopefuls – and wound up twenty-third in the judges' rating. But the radio bug had bit him. so he took a job as an NBC page at $15.65 a week, along with a young voice student named Gordon MacRae. Garroway was soon promoted to guide, then guide-trainer, and eventually did some routine announcing. He ambled west to KDKA, Pittsburgh, further west to WMAQ, Chicago, and then the war came along. He landed in the navy, but still in radio: in the middle of the Pacific, they handed him a stack of records and told him to make like a disk jockey.

The end of the war saw him back at WMAQ doing routine announcing and dreaming the All-American Dream of The Big Break. It came when the station decided to broadcast a midnight record show. Other announcers begged off the late assignment because of the difficulty commuting. Garroway was third choice. He lived just a few blocks from the studio, so when they asked him if he would take the job, he shrugged good-naturedly and said, "Why not?"

Thereafter, at twelve midnight, late dial-twisters heard a Harry James blast from WMAQ, and the recorded voice of Kitty Kallen singing 11:60 P.M. Then an easy-going guy addressed them as "Funny Lookin'" or "Old Delicate," muttered something about this being The 11:60 Club and mentioned that his name was Dave Garroway. Night-owl listeners listened closer and radio history was made.

Garroway played records, gently batted the breeze around, and created a cozy you-and-me atmosphere that was easy to take in the wee hours. His vocabulary was on the bizarre side, including such double-take adjectives as lissome, gauzy, incandescent. John Crosby, the radio critic, called his way of speaking "distracted prose" but Garroway's audience loved it.

They liked to be called "Old Tiger" and "My So Unfrowzy." and they liked the way Garroway gave the stamp of his own good taste to the program by playing only records he personally liked. When a girl wrote in requesting a Guy Lombardo platter. Old Delicate himself quitely told her. "We don't play corn on this hassle, honey."

Garroway admits he didn't truly dig jazz until his friend Joe Klee introduced him to the musical facts of life. Klee was one of those pure jazz hounds who could tell you the exact date Barefoot McStomp's Rhythm Rascals cut their first disk or the real lowdown on why Wingy Manone's maternal grandmother hated onion soup. And it was Klee's influence that shaped Garroway's jazz tastes in the formative days of The 11:60 Club. When Klee left Chicago for the West Coast, Garroway kept his memory alive by mixing a recording of an unearthly Syrian chant right in with his standard instrumental selections, announcing. "The vocalist on that last number was Joe Klee," and asking the folks to remember Joe when placing their votes for best vocalist in the Down Beat poll. As a result of this gag, Joe Klee placed tenth in the 1916 poll–with exactly 69 votes.

Garroway also raised an unknown girl vocalist to stardom. This time it was no gag. The girl was Sarah Vaughan, and Garroway admired her work very much. Her early waxings received major emphasis on The Club, her fame spread through the midwest, and from there to both coasts.

When Sarah made a personal appearance on the stage of the Chicago Theatre, Dave was there to introduce her, and it was then fans learned that behind the mild, easy-going manner is a man who can be moved to action when he's pushed.

During one of Sarah's songs, a wise guy in the audience who didn't like the color of her skin tossed an orange onto the stage. In an instant. Garroway was at the microphone, quietly but angrily asking the electrician to turn up the house lights so the brave man who threw oranges at women could find his way backstage and have it out with Garroway. The orange-hurler didn't show, of course, but no more oranges were thrown at Sarah Vaughan or at anybody else.

Garroway is always ready to help a friend. Another well known Chicago disk jockey likes to tell this story about Dave and himself. The other jockey (we'll call him John Doe) had a lovely young lady in his apartment one night and was trying to score. The champagne was flowing and so were the honeyed words, but the lady wasn't buying any. "What we need," Doe remarked, "Is a little amorous mood music," and he turned on the radio. Finding nothing suitable on the air, he picked up the phone, dialled WMAQ, and asked for Garroway.

"Listen, Dave," he said. "I've got a doll in my room, but I'm not scoring. I need some romantic mood music. How about it?"

A few minutes later, Garroway announced. "I'm dedicating this next number to my good friend. John Doe. It's called I've Got Those Scoring Blues." The girl. of course, was thoroughly undone, and Doe insists it turned the trick.

Garroway's own sex life is a little difficult to pin down. He was married and divorced early in his career. As a very eligible bachelor. His name was linked with the irrepressible Tallulah Bankhead during his Chicago days and with television's Betty Furness after he moved to New York (Betty found time between opening refrigerator doors to knit Mr. G a pair of socks), but the best romantic bet in Dave's life is $40-an-hour model Nancy Berg, an uninhibited beauty with a taste for strong language, late hours, and the subject of this essay.

The way Dave and Nancy met makes an interesting story. Garroway's 11:60 Club had already given him a fair sized reputation in the midwest: Nancy was a gorgeous, but unknown Chicago model. She didn't know Old Tiger, but she wanted to. So she rented a swank apartment, phoned a number of Garroway's friends and invited them to a party in his honor. Then she phoned Mr. G, told him about the shindig and who would be there, and suggested it would be rather rude if he didn't show at an affair being held especially for him. Garroway showed, a crazy time was had by all, and things have been pretty crazy with the pair ever since (they now share the same psychoanalyst.)

Garroway always enjoyed parties. The boys around WMAQ still remember the time he got sentimental about a historic old home on Chicago's Near North Side. It belonged to a friend of his, and was going to be torn down to make way for a parking lot. He felt the old place deserved a farewell party, so at about 12:45 one morning, he told his radio audience all about it. "Come on around, Doc," he invited. "And you, too, Honey-Eyes. And bring some records if you like, and if you want anything to drink, bring it. And if you want anything to drink out of — bring that, too." According to one of the more conservative reports. 650 late-listeners accepted the invite. From Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin came droves of jolly fans, including a fellow who drank out of a flower pot, using his index finger to plug the hole.

Garroway spent his daylight hours at one or more of his various hobbies: amateur mechanics, gem cutting, tile setting, golf, photography, auto racing, cabinet making, star gazing, and reading.

This was Old Tiger's real-gone period. He dazzled the populace with his leopard-skin jackets and pre-Ke-fauver coonskin hats, building quite a reputation as an eccentric until maturity and Biggie Levin caught up with him. Under the management of Levin, Garroway's sartorial splendor became less splendid and more sober. Now when sponsors get ideas about dressing him up in gimmicky clothes for commercials, they're squelched by a calm head-shake and a firm but friendly "Sorry. Doc: no funny hats."

In April of 1949, the Garroway charm was subjected to the acid test of television. He was asked to preside over a Sunday evening hour of music, dancing and comedy. It worried the usually unruffled Garroway because he wasn't sure his intimate approach would stand up under the hot lights, chalk marks, cables and general pandemonium attendant on a television show. He approached the project with wet palms and a dry throat.

A cymbal crashed in living rooms across the country, and the TV camera moved slowly past an orchestra playing Sentimental Journey, to a tall, scholarly-looking fellow with horn-rimmed glasses and a shy, toothy smile, leaning against a bare piece of television equipment. What followed made TV history.

Garroway At Large was an immediate success. It got along without a studio audience, a fat budget, or exhaustive rehearsals. There were skits and songs by a cast of talented young people, (continued on page 24) Old Tiger (continued from page 10) but the distinctive tone of the show was supplied by the man with the specs. The script contained notations like "Garroway talks for five minutes." And Garroway would talk, extemporaneously, on the ruby-polishing industry of Siam or the construction of eleven-foot poles for touching people that you wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. Camera techniques were ingenious and a great deal of the humor was visual, like the camera moving from a harmonica quartet to Garroway munching an ear of corn, or the time he closed the program by saying, "This show has come to you from Chicago where, unlike Hollywood, one can trust his friends," then turned from the camera to reveal a large knife protruding from his back.

Later, the public became familiar with the uplifted palm and breathy benediction, "Peace," that have become Garroway's sign-off trademark.

With growing national popularity, Mr. G began to cultivate a fondness for foreign sports cars, outfitted in true Garroway style. He upholstered one of his Jaguars in alligator skin, then finished it in Nankeen cream, covered its rocker arms with gold paint and inlaid its trunk with mahogany. By this time, of course, he was making enough money to pay others to do these things for him, and his friends thought him a little odd because he did most of them himself. But Garroway didn't look at it that way, and explained, "A garage mechanic puts in a hard day's work and then goes home and turns on his TV set. I spend the day in a TV studio and then go home and work in my garage. What's the difference?"

Garroway At Large was acclaimed by the critics, and achieved a very special televiewer following, but hidebound sponsors thought the show "too unusual" and withdrew their support. The program coasted along on a sustaining basis for a while, but finally folded. Live television was moving to New York, and so the man most responsible for the relaxed "Chicago School" of TV travelled East.

Garroway had been an important personality in the Windy City, but he was just another fish in the big New York pool. NBC was planning a two-hour morning television show to keep early-risers "in touch with the world." This was to be accomplished through the mediums of transoceanic telephone, telephoto, TV walkie-talkie, teletype, tape recorders, films and records. To coordinate all this mechanical paraphenalia, a human m.c. or "Communicator" was needed. Garroway walked into the thick of it. As he put it later, "They weren't looking for a lean-against-the-ladder, go-to-sleep-standing-up guy like me. They wanted a guy with dynamics." But it was undynamic Garroway who got the job.

So, in 1952, earphones strapped to his head, portable mike slung around his neck, he inaugurated the hodgepodge of news, weather reports, drama, book reviews, music and entertainment features labelled Today. Initial reactions to the program were mixed: some thought it was great, others called it "pointless . . . pretentious." But the Garroway manner counteracted the pretentiousness and made the show a favorite with public and sponsors alike.

The one-time NBC page now lives in a penthouse formerly occupied by an NBC vice-president and has a spacious office in Radio City. But when he first arrived from Chicago, the office they gave him was small and gloomy, with barely enough space for his staff. Garroway, however, has his own offbeat way of getting what he wants. Warren Kitter, his secretary at the time, recalls how they kept moving into successively larger offices, until they finally had one that filed the bill. Only one item was lacking: suitable chairs. The Garroway gang was doing its best with the straight-backed wooden variety, waiting patiently for the cushioned swivel chairs that had been promised. Garroway decided to do something about it. He called one of the NBC bigwigs and invited him in: "Thought you might like to drop in and see how we're getting along." When the Wheel opened the door, he found Garroway and his crew sitting cross-legged on the floor, calmly discussing the next day's show. Garroway looked up. "Oh, hello there," he grinned. "Won't you join us?" Chuckling in retrospect, Kitter recalls, "We got the chairs."

Today has continued to grow in popularity, and Old Tiger recently added to his chores a two-hour radio show of records, interviews, and Garroway gab called Sunday With Garroway.

Entertainers of the old school find Garroway's success a rather bitter pill.

(continued on page 35) Old Tiger (continued from page 24)

The guy just wanders around and seems to say the first thing that pops into his head. Watching him, you get the idea he doesn't care one way or the other if he has an audience or not. He's just taking it easy, doing what he wants to be doing, and if a few million people happen to be looking at him, OK. If they're not, OK too. He doesn't sell, he doesn't push, he doesn't hustle. Even his most ardent admirers would probably admit that Garroway cannot truly be called a talented man, unless the ability to make people like him can be considered a talent. He can't sing (even Godfrey does that, after a fashion), he can't act, he's not particularly handsome, he doesn't play a musical instrument or juggle or do card tricks. He doesn't even crack the usual kind of jokes. What the hell, wonder his envious colleagues, has this man got? The Christian Science Monitor has done the most accurate job of pin-pointing the Garroway secret. "He is a stylist," they say: "His style is calculated unpretentiousness."

Others have had more difficulty pigeon-holing the Garroway personality–have, in fact, offered diametrically opposite descriptions. Time Magazine has called him an extrovert; Newsweek, an introvert.

We offer the suggestion that he is a shrewd but bashful extrovert, and wish him a liberal share of his favorite commodity, peace.