It's Like This With TV

Some 10 years ago, when television was still just a gleam in David Sarnoff's eye, I predicted that there would one day be a program called See It Now. On my imaginary show, a girl would slither out in front of the cameras and, with maddening deliberation, remove one glove. "Tune in again next week," the announcer would cry, "and watch her take off the other one." Thirty-nine weeks later, after the most tantalizing striptease in history, the girl would be down to panty and bra and the show would have a rating of 112. (The extra 12 would come from people who turned on two sets.) "Well, that's all for this season, folks," the announcer would scream. "Tune in again next fall when we return for Pepto-Visco."

As I say, that prediction was made 10 years ago and like a lot of predictions about television it proved hopelessly wrong. See It Now came along, all right, but it dealt with other matters -- the farm problem, the Vice-Presidency, Senator McCarthy -- and not with girls, and emphatically not with sex. Let's face it: sex, one of the greatest selling forces in every other phase of show business, has hardly made any dent at all in television. The first big star of television was Milton Berle (sex appeal?). Another big star in those early days was Ollie Dragon, a puppet, and still another was Gorgeous George who did a comedy act billed as wrestling.

The big names since then have included Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers and George Gobel, and it's safe to say that hardly any teenagers go to bed with their pictures under their pillows. Among the females, the biggest smash has been Martha Raye, who boasts little under-the-pillow appeal herself.

It may come as a great shock to the man on the street to hear that sex appeal, a highly marketable commodity on the screen, the stage, the burlesque houses, has made so little inroad in television that it looks almost like deliberate suppression.

The big female stars in radio were girls like Joan Davis and Judy Canova, who had about as much sex appeal as a Mack Sennett cop. The big male stars were people like Jack Benny, Fred Allen and Charlie McCarthy, who made the girls laugh, not pant. But then, of course, radio was just a voice and the absence of sex appeal had some plausibility. But in television you can see the girls. And the boys, too. Why hasn't television produced any Cary Grants for the girls and Marilyn Monroes for the boys? Because it hasn't.

If you're still dubious about this proposition, just riffle through TV Guide any week and try to find an entertainer or a program which will arouse either sexual or romantic yearnings in your breast, no matter which sex you belong to. In the mornings, you'll find Garry Moore, a crewcutted, perennially youthful veteran who with his gang dispenses jokes and parodies and slapstick (some of it very good), Dave Garroway, who exudes weather and philosophy and a sort of boneless charm, and Arthur Godfrey, who defies explanation.

Later in the day, you'll encounter Arlene Francis and her staff, who will teach you how to cook, how to plant a garden, how to plan a vacation in the Rockies, how to do everything except how to make love. Great hunks of daytime air are given over to programs which are a combination of grief and greed. In these programs -- Queen for a Day is the most notable example -- bedraggled housewives are swept to the stage where they recount their terrible troubles. The one with the most terrible troubles is loaded down with loot.

If you can't stand grief or Godfrey, you have your choice of shows like Nancy's Kitchen, Art Linkletter's House Party (a sort of stunt show), or Bob Crosby (variety). Of programs frankly selling either romance or sex appeal (except for soap opera, which I'll deal with later), you'll find nothing at all except old movies. Of course, there you'll be up to your necks in sex, but then we are not here concerned with the sweepings from other media but with what television does on its own.

Now as to nighttime TV, you have (continued on page 66) it's like this with TV (continued from page 23) your choice of Groucho Marx or Hiram Holliday (otherwise known as Wally Cox, who can hardly be a big sex thrill for the girls), or fantasy and nature programs like Disneyland, or crime like Dragnet, or all the comedians. Any frankly sexual allure in any of these shows? You'll also encounter a halfdozen family-type shows like The Goldbergs, Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, December Bride, and, of course, the best known of them all, I Love Lucy -- all chastely connubial as a Norman Rockwell cover. Sex is allowed only in the case of puppy love which occasionally afflicts the younger members of the families. In fact, if Lucy were ever to give so much as a glance at another man apart from Desi (except in fun or as one of her elaborate plots to break into show business or to conceal the fact she cracked up the family car), the uproar would drown out the Middle East imbroglio. The Senate would probably investigate such a breach of TV decorum as a threat to our internal security.

There have been some very pretty girls on television, but the ones with the staying power -- the ones who come back week after week -- are the thoroughly scrubbed, wholesome girls like Dinah Shore, Fran Allison, Gale Storm, Barbara Britton and Jinx Falkenburg, any one of whom is likely to remind you of your sister. The Zsa Zsa Gabors appear now and then on dramatic shows and are seen no more.

There are a few frank displays of feminine charms on some shows, but they are largely incidental. Jackie Gleason, for example, has a chorus line of very lovely girls. There are so many of them that the cameras have to back away to the second balcony, and the girls all diminish to one-inch stature. In fact, there are grounds for suspicion that the chorus line was put there for the amusement of Mr. Gleason, who likes a lot of pretty girls around, rather than for the rest of us for whom he is still the feature attraction. On some of the giveaways, the girls who hand out the $1000 bills or the checks are bare-legged, but they flash on and off screen in a trice, and the emphasis is on the money, not the girls.

Years ago, there was a hubbub about Faye Emerson's necklines, but it was largely synthetic. I ought to know because I started it by referring to Miss Emerson as a "plunging neckline Alexander Woollcott," and she bandied it about on her program, largely for the fun of it. In more recent years, Miss Emerson's neckline is on a level with that of Whistler's mother and her fans are mostly middle-aged women. Oh, sure, there have been a few frankly sexual attractions like Elvis Presley -- but then Presley is not a regular TV personality and there is some violent opposition in network circles to having him on even occasionally. About the closest thing to allure ever presented was The Continental, a white-tie-and-tailed curiosity with an odd accent, who stared straight into the camera and intoned: "Don't be afraid. Eet ees only a man's apartment." Instead of getting a tingling in the spine, the girls just roared with laughter and The Continental soon disappeared.

Television is studded with dramatic shows ranging from half-an-hour to an hour and a half, and you might think sex would have made some inroads there. But no. Television has not yet produced any love story as sizzling as Carmen or as tender as A Farewell to Arms or as savagely sexual as The Postman Always Rings Twice. Granted those are all rather exceptional examples, but television hasn't even made any stabs in that direction.

The best known love story to come out of TV was Marty, the romance of a lonely Bronx butcher. However, it was clearly pointed out that the girl in that tale was not the only girl in the world, but the first one that came along, and not a very pretty one. And Rod Steiger bears hardly any resemblance to John Barrymore. There have, it's true, been some actors on television who have made female hearts beat faster -- notably Charlton Heston and, more recently, Anthony Perkins -- but they have vanished into the movies. Grace Kelly started in television but disappeared in the general direction of Hollywood, and later Monaco, never to be seen again. Television has yet to produce a single Gregory Peck or Jayne Mansfield who is clearly identifiable with TV.

Even if a big bundle of sex appeal came along, it's doubtful whether the big brass would recognize it or exploit it. Edward R. Murrow appeals to a lot of the ladies, but his function on TV is as a deep thinker. Jerry Lewis is very attractive to some women, but he's there to make you laugh. Personally, I think Audrey Meadows is quite a dish, but they go to enormous pains to conceal it, as if they were ashamed of it.

Once in a while some of the great sexpots of the movies venture before a television camera -- mostly to plug their pictures. In this case you can't pretend the sex attraction isn't there. The TV technique here is to make jokes about it. For instance, Anita Ekberg appeared on Perry Como's show swathed in mink to her ankletops in order to cover up her charms and provide jokes for Mr. Como. Kim Novak was thoroughly insulated on the Steve Allen show with jokes, a form of entertainment she is so hopelessly unfamiliar with that she ruined a comedy sketch. Zsa Zsa Gabor has been on comedy shows two or three times -- simply as a figure of fun.

In its great thirst for material, television has gobbled up dozens of the great stories, novels and plays from the world's treasure-trove of literature, but it has shown a curious antipathy to the great love stories. Two of the most distinguished offerings in this category have been Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie's fable of childhood, and Caine Mutiny Court Martial, which hasn't got a woman in it. Of Shakespeare's plays, Macbeth has been televised on at least a half-dozen occasions, while Romeo and Juliet was tried only a couple of times. Camille was attempted once and it flopped. Classic love stories that have been successful in all other media have been pretty bad on TV.

Also, television, like radio before it, has yet to produce any real live romances of the caliber of say, Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, or Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier, or any of half-a-dozen other less publicized romances that came out of the film colony. TV stars do marry each other once in a while -- Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows, for example -- but they do it quietly and, so far, firmly. (There have been no spectacular split-ups either.)

How about The Other Woman in soap opera? There are plenty of those, all right, trying to snaffle somebody else's husband. But these femmes fatales do this in curious ways. They'll slander the wife to the husband, trying to separate the pair that way. In a pinch, they may even attempt murder. But outright sex appeal -- no. They use every weapon except that. This points up the curious morality not only of television but of radio which preceded it. Murder and mayhem -- there are plenty of both -- are considered all right. But sex -- even ordinary manifestations of it between husband and wife -- is avoided like the measles.

Why is sex so conspicuously absent? Doesn't it project on television? Of course it does, the Darryl Zanuck Law notwithstanding. (Early in TV history, Darryl Zanuck, whose pronouncements carry the weight of Supreme Court decisions in Hollywood, declared: "Television can never hurt us because no one can get aroused over an eight-inch Betty Grable." For several years this dictum proved very comforting to the ostriches in Hollywood, until movie theatres started folding all over the country.) People don't like sex in the living room? Now, don't be silly.

There are several theories why sexual magnetism doesn't have any staying power on television, some of them provable, some of them clearly conjecture. One reason is that when a sexpot appears -- like Anthony Perkins -- the movies grab him immediately and TV has no way of keeping him. Another school of thought holds that the very nature of the medium defeats any such thing. "It doesn't wear well," runs this line of argument. "After all, TV stars are on once a week -- some of them five times a week -- and for such constant exposure the audience wants someone it can relax with. Suppose Gina Lollobrigida got Dave Garroway's job. We'd be awfully sick of that flamboyant sex within a couple of weeks."

My own theory is even more novel and it will be fiercely disputed by a lot of people -- especially Mr. Philip Wylie. My theory is that Madison Avenue -- far from being obsessed with sex as he claims -- doesn't even know what it is. They know what a pretty girl is, true enough, but they don't know what she's for -- or at least their idea of what a pretty girl is for and mine are markedly different. A girl's function, according to the Madison Avenue clan, is to make toast -- specifically, to make it on the Westrolux Auto-Magnetic Super Triotic Toastmistress, the 1957 model, not last year's. In every toaster ad you ever saw, the girl is a symbol of domesticity. When you're selling Westrolux Auto-Magnetic Super-Triotic Toastmistresses, sex is positively a hindrance. If a man's mind gets running along certain channels, he's not likely to care whether the toast is burned or even whether there is any. So, for heaven's sake, keep his mind away from that sort of thing. The most spectacularly successful salesman; or rather saleswoman, on television is Betty Furness, and Miss Furness deliberately turns off all her sex appeal on television so that it won't distract attention from the refrigerators she's selling.

Well, why, you may well ask, not let sex and romance creep into programs, well insulated from the commercials? One reason is our strong streak of Puritanism. Any hint of sexual impropriety -- or even sexual propriety -- brings forth a flood of condemnatory letters, and an Elvis Presley brings forth an avalanche. And ad men hate criticism.

But an even more potent reason why television has produced no Clark Gables, no Greta Garbos whom it can claim for its own, is simply force of habit. Both the advertising and network bigshots who call the turns grew up in radio, and radio produced no romantic stars; therefore no one has bothered to look for them in television. Some day television is going to produce its own Sophia Loren, a girl whose appeal is so basic that Madison Avenue, conditioned as it is to think that a woman's chief function is to make clothes cleaner than anything, won't even realize what has hit it.

The scene, as I see it, would go something like this: a bunch of agency men have gathered together to give it the benefit of their best charcoal gray thinking. Their show, Name Your Poison, has just jumped from an 11.1 Trendex to 18.7 and the boys are trying to figure out why.

"Let's lay it on the couch and give it a little free association," suggests the account exec. Advertising figures of speech have progressed significantly from the athletic fields ("We're just a short chip shot from the green"), through the Navy ("Let's up periscope and look around"), to the headshrinker's office -- showing graphically not only where the boys have been but what torments they've been through.

The charcoal suits spitball awhile, just feather-bedding, and then Osgood, the youngest member of the firm, speaks up. "I'm just thinking off the bottom of my pants, but it seems to me that new girl we have on the show -- she has eye appeal. You know -- uh -- advanced styling. Her skin has that tender, flaky, golden brown look. She looks like a combination of medically proven active ingredients."

What he's trying to say is something quite different, but his mind has been bent in wrong directions. The secret of the girl's Trendex is just simple enough to elude him entirely. In fact, it eludes the whole agency.

Until one day the account exec's son, age 15 and therefore uncorrupted, will be looking at the show and will turn to his chum and remark: "Daddy-o, she's real here."

"What was that, son?" says his poppa, thinking daddy-o referred to him, which it didn't.

"I mean," says the son, groping for the sort of archaic terminology the old bastard might understand, "she's got -- uh -- sex appeal."

The next day at the conference, the exec says: "Close ranks, men. The balloon has gone up. I've been looking through the small end of the telescope to get the big picture. To get down to the short strokes, the watchword is sex appeal."

From then on, look out. They'll break sex down into cost per thousand, media differentiation, product identification, and all the rest of it. And that, gentle reader, is the time to buy your second television set.