St. Thomas & The Dragon

"Did we blow it?" asked Tommy Smothers, racing up to the American Airlines ticket counter, 15 minutes after the final call for flight 78 had been announced at Los Angeles International Airport.

"No, sir. We're holding it for you," answered the reservations clerk at the check-in counter.

The bulky can Tommy held under one arm contained a video tape of the controversial television show CBS had refused to broadcast. He also carried a locked attaché case and a garment bag slung over a shoulder. Judi Pevnick, his secretary and girlfriend, trotted several paces behind him in a double-breasted pants suit.

They were the last of the 19 first-class passengers to fasten their seat belts as "the red-eye special"--the final nonstop of the day to Washington, D. C.--revved its engines shortly before midnight. As the Boeing 707 taxied toward the runway, Tommy averted his eyes from the glares of several fellow passengers and swallowed a couple of yellow Pro-Banthine pills to pacify his skittish stomach, agitated by a hasty meal of mozzarella marinara and veal piccata.

It was the end of the second frantic week since the abrupt cancellation of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in April, and Tommy's usually cherubic face looked gaunt and pasty. At 140 pounds, he was 10 pounds under his normal weight. A peptic ulcer, ripened by marital and television troubles three years earlier, was tormenting him painfully, along with frequent insomnia.

The very real insecurities that form the substance of his comedy act with brother Dick were multiplying dramatically. Toward the end of their 71-program skein at CBS, he had become increasingly ill at ease in front of large audiences, with whom he found it difficult to relate. He was now certain that someone was bugging his dressing room and tapping his telephone, and he was insisting that CBS and NBC had entered into a collusive relationship to keep him off the air.

At the moment, his limited education--he was 247th in a graduating class of 500 at Redondo Beach Union High School and spent a year and a half at San Jose State College--was causing him to worry about the prospect of delivering an address two days thence to the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. It was the primary purpose of his trip to Washington.

"I can't give speeches," said Tommy, lighting up a cigarette as soon as the no smoking sign went off. A chain smoker, he had recently vowed to visit a hypnotist in order to break the habit.

His distracting (continued on page 179) St. Thomas (continued from page 143) eyes--one of them blue, the other green--suddenly assumed a desperate intensity. "I've got to make an impression," he declared. "I've got to say things that are important."

Smothers had just spent a two-week odyssey traveling aboard planes that deposited him at press conferences in Toronto, New York and Los Angeles, where he had patiently tried to explain the reasons behind his dismissal by CBS. The publicity generated by these meetings with the press, together with public displeasure over CBS' arbitrary action, had prompted widespread support for the brothers. Pickets in their behalf marched around the 38-story Manhattan headquarters of CBS. Lapel buttons reading pray for Tommy and Dickie appeared in half a dozen American cities. For the first time since The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour had emerged as a midseason replacement to challenge Bonanza in February 1967, complimentary letters were surging ahead of the virulent hate mail.

On Tommy's earlier visit to Washington for the National Association of Broadcasters convention in March--an impulsive appearance that he feels certain helped trigger his demise--and in various informal meetings, he had found a measure of support among such influential Capitol Hill figures as Senators Edward Kennedy and Vance Hartke, California Congressman Thomas Rees and two Federal Communications Commissioners--Kenneth Cox and Nicholas Johnson.

A substantial ground swell had also surfaced in the nation's press, notably the normally dispassionate New York Times. "The cancellation ... is the latest example of how the networks profess their right to freedom of expression but fail to exercise it in defense of their own programs," read a stinging Times editorial. "The result could be a serious curb on creativity in satire in television programs under the guise of preventing vulgarity and suggestiveness...."

Not surprisingly, almost unanimous support came from editors of college newspapers, who felt that the Smothers brothers spoke for young people. UCLA's Daily Bruin warned: "You may laugh at this suggestion that the cancellation of the ... show is a threat to freedom, but it is.... [It] was canceled because of the effectiveness and truthfulness of its ridicule of the actions of America and not because it violated some technicality of procedure."

As the jet cruised to Washington at 35,000 feet through the gloom above the clouds, Tommy scanned that clipping, along with other evidences of his current preoccupation with self-exoneration--all of them visible among the bottles of pills and nostrums that stuffed his battered attaché case. Beneath the bottles were a dog-eared copy of the N.A.B. Code, a copy of NBC's censorship regulations (ironically, CBS had never provided the Smothers with any such written guidelines), files of correspondence and flattering telegrams, sheaves of FCC rulings relating to the equal-time and fairness doctrines, a first draft of his Washington speech, Fred Friendly's Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control and Dr. Maxwell Maltz' Psycho-Cybernetics, open to a chapter titled: "How to Turn a Crisis into a Creative Opportunity."

Just in case, he was also carrying an up-to-date passport. Beside it was a cherished letter from Lyndon B. Johnson--the butt of some of the show's most devastating barbs--written while he was still a resident of the White House:

To be genuinely funny at a time when the world is in crisis is a task that would tax the talents of a genius. And to be consistently fair when standards of fair play are constantly questioned demands the wisdom of a saint. It is part of the price of leadership in this great, free nation to be the target of clever satirists. You have given the gift of laughter to our people. May we never grow so somber or self-important that we fail to appreciate the humor in our lives.

The day before, Tommy had recited the Johnson letter during a lengthy meeting with several American Broadcasting Company executives who had expressed interest in returning the Smothers brothers to the air. To dispel the stigma of irresponsibility left on them by the show's abrupt cancellation, Tommy tried hard to convince ABC that he was not only a fair and reasonable fellow but a moderate trying to endure in a medium conditioned to conservative thinking.

There was something more at stake than the $4,500,000 gross of which his corporation had been deprived by the canceled contract: an entertainer's right to voice dissenting views on prime-time television. To some, the dramatic sacking of the Smothers brothers seemed long overdue. To others, their efforts to irrigate the vast wasteland were admirable--but foredoomed.

"Sometimes I think of myself on a white horse, like the white knight, because that's where people are putting me," Tommy told a journalist. "All I want is to perform and create without having restrictions put on me." The crusades had begun for Tommy not with the premiere of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour but with the contrived situation-comedy series that marked their prime-time TV debut four years ago. The story line of that puerile series--which lasted some 32 weeks--presented Dickie as a lecherous advertising man and Tommy as his deceased brother, a bumbling bungler who made inopportune appearances as a haloed angel, usually at the moment Dickie was making time with some young lovely. Surprisingly, the show ranked fourth in the first Nielsen ratings. By the fourth week, however, Tommy was ready to bolt his contract.

"This show stinks." he advised his superiors.

To placate him, a new producer was assigned to the show. Smothers was also allowed to participate in developing future scripts, a right that had previously been forbidden.

Tommy's dedication to rescuing this hopeless show from inanity kept him away from home--and from Stephanie, his wife of two years--for long periods of time. And he found himself consuming large amounts of milk to soothe a newly developed ulcer.

The ulcer worsened--along with the show's ratings--as the months wore on. By the end of the season, the program had sunk to 48th position in the ratings--still fairly respectable, but not so successful that CBS raised more than token objections when Tommy decided to abandon the series as an artistic, if not a commercial failure.

"I don't want to do television again," he said. "I don't ever want to have to work with that kind of shit."

Meanwhile, Tommy was embroiled in a turbulent divorce action. Much of the difficulty with his marriage, predictably, had stemmed from the 13 hours a day he had spent working at the studio.

"When I got up in the morning, it was dark," he said. "When I came home at night, it was still dark. My wife didn't relate to what happened during the daylight hours. She didn't come out to see what I was doing and I was frustrated when I got home. We just grew at different rates. It's not easy for anyone to be Mrs. Smothers."

His wife, who was being treated by an analyst at the time, frequently urged Tommy to undergo therapy himself. He refused each time, precipitating a stormy argument. The last of their many disputes concluded with Tommy striking her three times and moving out of their Hollywood Hills home for good.

The financial settlement was more than merely a slap in the face. Mrs. Smothers received 80 percent of Tommy's share in a music-publishing firm, 50 percent of future royalties from the ten record albums made prior to and during their marriage--and $2500 monthly in alimony. Several buildings were also granted to her, along with custody of their son, Thomas Bolyn Smothers IV.

His depression over the failure of his show and of his marriage terminated in the fall of 1966, when CBS offered the brothers a midseason-replacement variety show in the unenviable nine-P.M. Sunday time slot; the opposition was NBC's Bonanza, the number-one show on television. In the past, CBS had unsuccessfully attempted to challenge the durable Western with Judy Garland, Garry Moore and Perry Mason. Now their research statistics indicated that they might succeed by offering a program appealing to a 15-to-30-year-old audience.

"What the hell, I'll get the money for thirteen weeks and run," Tommy said after making the decision. "But this time, I'll go in and do it my way. I'll never compromise myself again."

One of the main conditions of the agreement stipulated that the brothers would exercise artistic control over the content of the Comedy Hour, a power they had lacked with the situation comedy.

"We failed the first time because we let other people do our thing," Tommy told a New York press conference celebrating the contract signing. "If this one is no good, if it doesn't make it, you can look at us and say: 'You guys did it.'"

The ravages of his ulcer and the vast amounts of kinetic energy he expended in launching the new series combined to reduce his weight to a sickly-looking 128 pounds. But the prospect of getting a second chance on television brought hidden therapeutic benefits.

"If you're screwed up, you don't need to lie down on a couch; you need to build one," said Tommy. "The minute I got into the show, it was like building a couch."

Network planners, however, had their own set of specifications in mind. In preproduction meetings before the Comedy Hour premiered in February 1967, Tommy expressed a desire to provide regular exposure for contemporary rock groups, whether or not they were known to the general public.

"Original music is very dangerous on television," warned Michael Dann, CBS vice-president in charge of programing. "People in the mass television audience are more comfortable with familiar music, something they've heard two or three times before. The first time they hear a song, I don't care how good it is, they won't go for it."

The network, which had hired its own team of producers to oversee the show, also insisted on booking familiar television guest stars--many of them CBS stand-bys such as Eva Gabor, Eddie Albert, Jack Benny, Ed Sullivan, Bob Crane (of Hogan's Heroes) and Jim Nabors, all of whom appealed to a different generation from the one with which the brothers identified. But no real impasse occurred until the fifth show of the season. In a four-minute comedy sketch, I Dream of Jeannie's Barbara Eden had been cast as a sex-education instructor and Tommy as a college student. CBS' program-practices department--the network's imposing euphemism for censor--read the script and vetoed use of the word sex or the term sex education. Tommy was flabbergasted. He stalked off the set screaming, but to no avail.

The escalation of network policing was apparent soon after the taping of a satire on film censorship involving Tommy, Dickie and comedienne Elaine May:

Dick: During the past year, movies have become more and more outspoken on adult subjects. After these movies have been completed and before they are shown to the general public, they must be examined by professional censors. These are dedicated people who have an eagle eye out to detect anything that might be considered in the least suggestive. Let's watch two of these guardians of public taste in action.

(Music: ending of movie)

Elaine: I think the word breast should be but out of the dinner scene. I think that breast is a relatively tasteless thing to say while you're eating. I wouldn't mind it if they were having cocktails or a late supper, but dinner is a family meal.

Tom (makes note): "Take the word breast out of the dinner scene."

Elaine: Tell them they can substitute the word arm. It has the same number of syllables and it's a much more acceptable thing to say at the dinner table.

Tom: But won't that sound funny? "My heart beats wildly in my arm whenever you're near"?

Elaine: Why? Oh, I see. You mean because....

Tom: The heart isn't in the arm.

Elaine: Where is the heart, exactly? It's somewhere above the ribs, isn't it? On the left side?

Tom: Audrey, let's not kid ourselves. We're alone here. The heart is in the breast. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is.

Elaine: No. no, that's all right. Ed. It's not your fault.

Tom: Well, there's no use crying over spilt milk. The heart, unfortunately, is still in the breast rather than the arm. So what do we do?

Elaine: Can we change heart to pulse?

Tom: "My pulse beats wildly in my arm whenever you're near"?

Elaine: Isn't there a pulse somewhere in the arm?

Tom: Not that I've noticed.

Elaine: What about the wrist?

Tom (excitedly): That's it!

Tom and Elaine: "My pulse beats wildly in my wrist whenever you're near."

Elaine: Oh. that's marvelous.

Tom: I think it's better that the original.

Elaine: We could write as well as they do.

What happened next could easily have gone into the script. CBS censors demanded that the routine on censorship be completely censored. Tommy thereupon threatened to walk off the show and spend the balance of the season in Spain.

His anticipated walkout was thwarted by a union strike that shut down every live television show in Hollywood. Although it had nothing to do with the strike, Tommy was also having difficulties with various industry craft unions because of his desire to try out new techniques of television production and direction.

After firing his director and paying off the balance of his $30,000 contract, Tommy installed a Sony video-tape recorder in his dressing room, using it to transcribe dress rehearsals and immediately play them back, to find ways to improve the show. Under pressure from the technicians' union, CBS West Coast programing vice-president Perry Lafferty ordered the tape recorder removed. When Tommy reinstalled the machine three weeks later, nobody complained. The Comedy Hour had dislodged Bonanza from its customary position in the top ten.

Not that all was forgiven. In the eyes of the network, the Comedy Hour was still making waves by taking a stand on contemporary issues: any stand would have been an innovation, but the antiestablishment views it espoused were especially unacceptable. "The most important thing we did that first year," recalled Tommy, "was to verily the fact that there was a legitimate grievance on the Vietnam war. We were the first show that said, 'Hey. man, the war is bad' and criticized Johnson from a public platform."

The opening show of their second season signaled an even more stringent attitude within the program-practices department. Tommy had booked the controversial folk singer Pete Seeger. One of the songs Seeger taped for the show was Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, an antiwar ballad that criticized Johnson and his Vietnam policy with the lyrics:

Now every time I read the papers

That old feelin' comes on

We're waist deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool says to push on.

CBS censors erased the song from the air tape, despite Tommy's heated protests. Numerous television critics subsequently condemned the network for its unilateral action--and for its timidity. Smothers was vindicated several months later, when Seeger was allowed to return and perform the unexpurgated version of the same song.

Despite that concession, Tommy was told, "You're starting to get too preachy. You're delivering too many messages. That's not what you were hired for. That is not entertainment." The show, nevertheless, continued to lampoon the foibles and hypocrisies of American society, organized religion, police brutality, racial prejudice and civil-rights tokenism.

"We did more on the black situation than any other show, and even that wasn't near enough," said Tommy. "And we got as main black entertainers as we could on the air, proportionately, without overbalancing." He also struggled behind the scenes to hire black cameramen and stagehands on the production crew.

The appearance of such entertainers as singers Nancy Wilson, Lou Rawls and the Chambers Brothers, coupled with the barbed comedy sketches, prompted some of the most virulent hate mail ever received by the network. A few excerpts, replete with misspellings:

From Ivor, Virginia: "I suggest that you change the name of your show [to] The Nigger Brothers Smothers Nigger Show."

From Hackensack, New Jersey: "Am surprised you lousey stinkers have lasted so long. I hope you get the nigger shit kicked out of you. Will come down and Butter your Motzoths with Arab shit."

From Canton. Ohio, addressed to "Gay Smother Brothers": "Why do you queers continually show this so-called new generation.... I for one am fed up with looking at niggers, nigger-lovers and long-haired fruits on your and every other show on TV. But most of all, I disliked the remark about George Wallace."

Even more disturbing to Tommy, however, was the continuation of arbitrary and gratuitous censorship of what he considered harmless lines from subsequent scripts.

"To them, freak out is a sexual thing," Tommy complained. "Let it all hang out means Let your cock hang out. And mind blowing is pushing for psychedelics in drugs. That's the way the censors reason. These are the guys who dictate taste. They're all from 1942."

To commemorate Mother's Day, 1968, Tommy planned to cap the show by displaying a greeting card distributed by a recently formed group of Los Angeles housewives (most of them in show business) who opposed the Vietnam war. The script read:

Dick: We hope you had a lovely Mother's Day. It was kind of a special one in our family. Of course, we sent a card to our mother, but our mother also sent a card this year ... a very important one, we think. TOM: This was a very special Mother's Day card ... beautifully written.... It says: "War is not healthy for children and other living things. For my Mother's Day gift this year, I don't want candy or flowers. I want an end to killing. We who have given life must be dedicated to preserving it. Please talk peace."

Dick: I guess there's no thought more appropriate for a day to honor our mothers.

Tom: What else can we say but thank you for being with us.

This rather innocent message was also banned from broadcast. "There's no place [for that] in an entertainment show," asserted CBS' Michael Dann. "We do not permit political positions." A program-practices memorandum explained that the mothers' group might even be a subversive organization, since it had not yet been cleared by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Near the end of the brothers' embattled second season, Tommy's ulcer began to act up again. When the last show was in the can, he took off for a two-week vacation trip to Miami Beach and Acapulco.

"I started drinking and went on the biggest drunk, did everything I wanted to," Tommy recalled. "I drank Scotch and beer and margaritas. I ate Mexican tamales and tacos. I hung out in a hotel lobby and, for the first time, I wasn't intimidated by the aggressiveness of fans."

When he returned to Los Angeles, he was hospitalized with a terrible stomach pain that he thought would require surgery. Tests revealed that lie had contracted nothing more serious than intestinal flu.

Pains of a different nature were soon undermining the Comedy Hour's, ill-fated third season. The premiere show highlighted Harry Belafonte singing a sarcastic calypso verse in front of filmstrips showing the just-concluded violence at the Chicago Democratic Convention. The seven-minute segment, devastatingly critical of Mayor Richard Daley and the Chicago police, was removed by the censors. Only Canadian viewers saw it in its entirety.

Then there was the confrontation over pediatrician-pacifist Dr. Benjamin Spock. Despite the controversy generated by his first two seasons, Tommy felt that he had failed to convey much of significance to his audience of 30,000,000. As a result, he conceived an occasional segment of the program that would showcase public figures who were unfamiliar as television guests to most prime-time viewers.

He was already in negotiation for the appearances of Henry Miller, William Buckley and Norman Mailer when he and Dickie conducted two ten-minute interviews with Dr. Spock, designed to be the prototype for this feature. A CBS censor sat in the tenth row among the studio audience, watching the dress rehearsal and air tapes in stony silence. Midway through editing the tapes three weeks later, the Smothers brothers were advised that the Spock interviews would never be broadcast. The reason: Dr. Spock was a convicted felon; convicted felons were not allowed on CBS entertainment programs.

Perhaps as a therapeutic escape from such increasing pressures. Tommy began to spend more and more time away from the production of the show. At one time, like a young Orson Welles, he had involved himself in producing, calling camera shots, checking sound levels, supervising costume design and submitting ideas for sets. Now, extracurricular business activities were diverting his attention.

Together with his personal managers Ken Kragen and Ken Fritz, he formed KSFI, Incorporated--an ambitious conglomerate of eight companies involved in public relations, music publishing, TV production, film production, convention and merchandising services. The staff consisted mainly of young, inexperienced people installed by Tommy. KSFI's problems soon paralleled on a smaller scale those of the Beatles' shaky Apple Corps., Ltd.--and required an increasing amount of Tommy's time. When the KSFI venture was finally dissolved, its failure had cost him more than $135,000, in addition to unaudited sums for salaries and overhead.

Simultaneously, against the advice of his business manager, Tommy had become actively involved as coproducer of the West Coast production of Hair. He was required to invest $360,000 in the renovation of a theater that would house the production, the down payment on a possible $6,000,000 it would take to purchase the theater outright. His potential return--at the most, seven percent--seemed to be an extreme risk. At that time, no major legitimate-theater production had ever run more than 15 weeks in Los Angeles. But in this instance, Tommy's judgment was vindicated. The musical has been sold out since its opening, earning him a respectable profit on his investment.

"Hair represented to me the same kind of thing we were trying to do in television," he explained. "It was daring. It was different. It was a change. It conveyed a viewpoint of the flower generation, their feelings of alienation, their resentment of a war they didn't understand, things we've tried to say on the show much more lightly."

Additional distractions were being caused by the Glen Campbell show, of which Tommy was half owner and executive producer, which had been incorporated into the CBS program line-up in mid-December of last year, after its debut as a 13-week summer replacement. Smothers hired his own writers, booked the guest stars, appeared himself and expended $100,000 over budget in order to ensure its success. But the program was soon beset by intramural squabbles and a decline of morale. Tommy fired the Campbell director and persuaded Mason Williams--busy making personal appearances as a best-selling pop musician and poet--to assume command as head writer. The crisis took weeks to overcome, distracting Tommy even more from his own program, which began to show the lack of polish and mordant criticism that had characterized previous seasons.

Only when he returned full time to the Comedy Hour did things begin to jell again. True to form, Tommy fired the director, replacing him with a sixth one in less than three years, and resumed developing comedy sketches and blackouts with the writing staff. "Somehow, I had to be there," he said. "They needed me as a catalyst."

Amid all these time-consuming activities, Tommy was suffering from the backlash of an appearance on the October 27th show by comedian David Steinberg. Dressed in clerical garb, Steinberg delivered the following monolog, which he had performed before on NBC's Tonight show:

Today's sermon deals with the exciting personality of Moses ... who had a wonderful rapport with God, whom I'm sure you'll remember from last week's sermon. In these troubled times I am reminded of one of the great philosophical comments that has helped guide and mold the lives of millions. It was uttered by the mother superior in The Sound of Music, act two, scene four, when she said to Julie Andrews, just before Miss Andrews was about to run off with the Nazi prince: "How do you solve a problem like Maria ... how do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?"

Julie Andrews didn't understand that, and neither do I ... and that's the point ... people today no longer are able to communicate with one another; and without communication, there can be no harmony.

Moses was a man who knew how to communicate his feelings. The Bible tells us that hoses was wandering through the wilderness when he came upon a burning bush. And though the bush was burning, yet it did not consume itself. A voice came down to Moses: "Moses, take your shoes from your feet, for the land you are standing upon is holy land," God said in his redundant way. And Moses took his shoes off of his feet, approached the burning bush and burned his feet and yelled something to God.

We're not sure what he said, but there are many Old Testament scholars who to this day believe it was the first mention of Christ in the Bible.

And God said to Moses: "Go unto the Pharaoh and tell him to let your people go." Moses said: "Who shall I say sent me?"

God said: "Whom!" And God said: "I am that I am." And Moses turned his eyes to the heavens and said: "Thanks for clearing that up." And Moses went unto the Pharaoh and said: "Let my people go."

Pharaoh said to Moses: "Who sent you?" And Moses said: "You're not going to believe this...." Pharaoh didn't believe him. And so God destroyed all of the land with that mystical sense of humor that is only His.

Perhaps I can best illustrate my point with something I saw this evening. As I was on my way to the theater, I saw an old man who I would take to be eighty to eighty-five years old. And this old man was being beaten badly by four little children. And I couldn't help but notice that one child was Negro, one was Jewish, one was Spanish and yet another, Italian.

Now ... if these little children can learn to play together, then why can't the world?

Thank you.

Unaccountably relaxing their vigilance, the CBS censors had permitted the Steinberg sermonette to be broadcast with only minor editing. Minutes after the show signed off, switchboards were lighting up in dozens of major American titles. The mail received during the next five days was overwhelming in its condemnation of the show. Several of the letters received at the Smothers brothers' Hollywood offices contained razor blades.

A CBS memorandum stated that Steinberg would never again be permitted to deliver a sermonette on CBS. As an additional rebuke, Tommy was informed that henceforth, each of his programs would be reviewed in a closed-circuit screening to CBS-affiliated stations before it could be broadcast. No other CBS show before or since has been subject to this scrutiny. There were now three forms of censorship being imposed on the Smothers--the opinions of program-practices representatives on both the East and West coasts, as well as the whims of 181 station owners.

This latest setback did little to improve Tommy's spiritual outlook. His physical condition, as a result of the accumulating pressures, was also less than ideal. In recent months, he had been abusing his already weak stomach by eating all the wrong foods again. His fingernails were gradually being nibbled away. And a number of upsetting phone calls--some of them abusive, others with only heavy breathing on the other end--had twice forced him to change his number. His customary paranoid feelings were on the upsurge.

But Tommy would not be intimidated by his fears. He introduced a new continuing character--a uniformed policeman unctuously referred to as Officer Judy--on almost every program. Whenever Officer Judy heard or saw something that displeased him, he sprayed the offender's eyes with Mace. Then Tommy taped a show with an outspoken establishment critic--folk singer Joan Baez--who unintentionally plunged the Comedy Hour into a grave crisis. The point at issue was the dedication of a song to her husband, David Harris.

"He's going to prison in June for three years," she informed the audience. "The reason he is going to prison is that he resisted Selective Service, and the draft and militarism in general. Anybody who lays it out in front like that generally gets busted, especially if you organize, which he did."

While Tommy was busy blocking, running through and taping his next show to size, CBS' program-practices department blue-penciled the bulk of Miss Baez' remarks and also objected to some "questionable" material in a comedy monolog by comedian Jackie Mason. Tommy took his time making the prescribed changes. He didn't submit the completely edited, broadcast-quality tape until Saturday, a day before broadcast. CBS retaliated by canceling the Baez show and substituting a rerun.

The canceled show was telecast--without the questioned segments--three weeks later, but Tommy was still understandably incensed. On March 14, when the network announced renewal of the Comedy Hour for 26 weeks, beginning in the fall, he publicly stated that he hadn't yet decided whether to continue on CBS. This resulted in Los Angeles meetings with newly installed CBS-TV president Robert Wood on March 17 and 18, during which Wood said he would consider Tommy's request that the network agree in principle to settling every case involving debatable material on the side of liberality. In such instances, Tommy proposed prescreening the segment in question for the affiliate stations and allowing them, rather than the network, to decide what was suitable for their respective regions.

Not waiting for a response--and apparently assuming the worst--Tommy held informal conferences in California on March 22 with Senators Edward Kennedy and Alan Cranston, in which he explained how his views were being deliberately suppressed. The following day, still having received no word from Wood--who was undoubtedly mulling over the implications of Tommy's remarks to Kennedy and Cranston--Tommy made a surprise descent on Washington on the eve of the 17th annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters. Over a two-day period, he reiterated his grievances against the network not only to the N. A. B. but to several Senators and Congressmen and to FCC commissioners Cox and Johnson, who assured Tommy that there was no threat of Federal intervention in television by revocation of station licenses because of program content. CBS censors had long claimed that cuts were necessary in order to protect affiliates' licenses.

His indiscreet appearance did nothing to mend fences with CBS, whose mandate to regulate the content of its own programs had already been challenged in recent Senate subcommittee hearings conducted by the influential Rhode Island Democrat John Pastore. CBS, as well as the two other networks, had been told to cleanse the airways of excessive sex and violence.

Toward that end, CBS corporate president Frank Stanton rejected a Pastore proposal for prescreening of questionable network programs by a television-industry review board. "An outside agency wielding the blue pencil would throttle the creative impulses which are essential to the continuing improvement of TV," declared Dr. Stanton in a message to Pastore. "The creators of our programs need encouragement and stimulation, not the reverse."

Tommy couldn't believe his eyes when he read this portion of Stanton's remarks. It seemed to be a complete reversal of the philosophy that had characterized his entire relationship with CBS. He thereupon sent a congratulatory wire to Dr. Stanton and told a trade-paper reporter that the Smothers brothers had agreed to continue for another season on CBS--so that they could retain a platform to continue their push for new standards of broadcast content.

When Wood read that statement on March 27, he sent Tommy a lengthy wire that said, in part:

You are not free to use "The smothers brothers Comedy Hour" as a device to push for new standards. If you cannot comply with our standards the [show] cannot appear on CBS.... We cannot make an exception of the "smothers brothers" show nor can we lower our program standards. The Network cannot ignore its responsibilities to the public to maintain certain standards.

Wood never explained what these standards were. He did assert, however, that CBS would police its shows even more rigorously because of Stanton's refusal to accept the Pastore review board rather than relax censorship restrictions.

Tommy seemed to relish the distress this latest wrangle was causing the network. In a March 27 phone conversation with Michael Dann from Los Angeles--monitored on a tape recorder in Dann's office--his pleasure could not be mistaken:

Smothers: Am I still the fair-haired boy back there?

Dann: Yes, you are the absolute love of our life.

Smothers: I figured that.

Dann: Only ... your understanding [of broadcasting] could enable me to go forward as a programing executive.

Smothers: I'm trying to do it for you, Michael. You're part of the establishment in the company, but I know you really care about pushing forward for more meaningful broadcasting.

Dann: I certainly do.

Smothers: Hey!

Dann: What?

Smothers: Is everybody pissed off?

Dann: No.

Smothers: You're lyin'.... Hey, by the way. There's some pretty good guys back there in Washington. Those FCC commissioners are groovy.... [You] won't have to worry about any licenses [being revoked] except when monopolies take place ... but as [far as more permissive] content [is concerned], I think we can really move forward now.

Dann: Tommy. Hand in hand, we will overcome.

Smothers: That's right. I wanna he part of this great new resurgence. As Dr. Stanton said: "No further restrictions, but more broadening and really exercising our responsibilities to the American public." Ok?

Dann: All right. I hear you and I got the message. We will overcome.

Smothers: You're so full of shit.

"We've renewed them," Dann told an associate when he hung up, "but there may be some static before the fall."

The contemplated denouement came on Wednesday, April second, after representatives of the network program-practices department previewed show number 0226, with guest stars Dan Rowan, Nancy Wilson and David Steinberg. A running gag throughout the show concerned the bestowing of The Fickle Finger of Fate Award--a dubious-achievement trophy that is a regular feature of Laugh-In--on Senator Pastore. There was also a sketch parodying an integrated romance between Tommy and Miss Wilson, played to the strains of Victor Herbert music.

The censors, however, balked only at another recitation of Biblical homilies delivered by their old nemesis David Steinberg. Late Wednesday afternoon, four days before airtime, Smothers' attorneys received notification that the Steinberg sermonette--which ran approximately four minutes--would have to be removed, thereby requiring Tommy to re-edit the tape.

Tommy reluctantly agreed to the cut and on Thursday dispatched the prescreening tape by messenger to CBS in Los Angeles. Dann, however, claimed that CBS failed to receive the prescreening tape on Thursday. "The pressure was on to show it to the stations," he said. "Stanton promised that. I sat with a roomful of people in Bob Wood's office until nine o'clock on Thursday night and the tape never came. There was no reason he couldn't deliver that goddamned tape. None! None!"

That same night, Wood telegraphed the following letter of dismissal:

As we have advised you on several occasions, most recently in my wire of march 27, your obligations to us require you to deliver an acceptable broadcast tape to us no later than the wednesday preceding the scheduled broadcast date of each program in "The smothers brothers Comedy Hour."

We hereby notify you by reason of your failure to make such delivery by yesterday, wednesday, April 2, we are forced to treat this failure of delivery of an acceptable program as a substantial and material breach of your obligations to us, and as conclusive evidence that you have no intention of performing those obligations in the future.

By reason of your breach, you have not afforded our program-practices department an opportunity to consider the acceptability of the program. On the basis of our information, we believe that the program in its present form would not be acceptable under cbs' standards because, at the very least, it contained a monolog which in our opinion would be considered to be irreverent and offensive by a large segment of our audience and, therefore, unacceptable even if this were not the week of the eisenhower funeral rites and even if sunday were not easter Sunday.

Therefore, we hereby notify you that the agreement between you and us is terminated, subject, of course, to rights and obligations which as a matter of law survive in such terminations.

One of three glaring inconsistencies in this wire was that there was no Wednesday-deadline provision in the Smothers brothers' contract with the network. Additionally, the Steinberg monolog had already been eliminated. And, as it was later proved, CBS had the tape in its possession before Wood sent the dismissal notice. Donald Sipes, CBS vice-president in charge of business affairs, verified this fact in a wire sent to the Smothers brothers.

Tommy was dumfounded when he received Wood's wire on Good Friday in San Francisco, where he had planned to move the origination of his show in the fall. He insisted that he had not breached his contract. He called Wood a liar. He said he felt like a character out of Kafka accused of an ambiguous crime he had not committed. The Steinberg show was replaced on Sunday night with the repeat of a program first aired in November: it starred Kate Smith.

In his 34th-floor office at CBS headquarters in Manhattan, Michael Dann analyzed the reasons for the cancellation.

"Tommy wants television to move forward by being more permissive," he said. "There's a grave question in my mind whether permissiveness necessarily means progress. Smothers represents, in part, the conflict between the younger generation and the establishment. But the establishment is in power. Tommy sees himself as a trail blazer and he is. But trail blazers often aren't popular and often don't survive. They may sometimes be ahead of their time."

A stinging rebuttal of sorts was aired on a show taped prior to the firing but telecast on April 13. Unaccountably, the censors permitted Mason Williams to recite uncut an unusually hostile poem from his best-selling book The Mason Williams Reading Matter.

The Censor sits

Somewhere between

The scenes to be seen

And the television sets

With his scissor purpose poised

Watching the human stuff

That will sizzle through

The magic wires

And light up

Like welding shops

The ho-hum rooms of America

And with a kindergarten

Arts and crafts concept

Of moral responsibility

Snips out

The rough talk

The unpopular opinion

Or anything with teeth

And renders

A pattern of ideas

Full of holes

A doily

For your mind.

"That was pretty heavy stuff," Tommy fondly recalled, as the captain of the red eye special to Washington announced that the East Coast was shrouded by a layer of thick fog, necessitating a 90-minute delay. The plane circled in a holding pattern at 29,000 feet, somewhere over the Midwest.

"I deserve a vacation to get my head straight," Tommy sighed to seatmate Judi Pevnick as he gazed out the window at the lightening sky. "I've told my story so many fucking times. I'm getting tired of making my case."

With that, he settled his head on a pillow, huddled inside his fawn-suede jacket and dozed off into a fitful sleep. When he awakened--in a sweat--he confided the following recurrent nightmare that had just revisited him.

In the dream, Tommy saw himself driving a black Cadillac limousine. Among his six passengers were CBS board chairman William S. Paley and programing vice-presidents Michael Dann and Perry Lafferty, all of them wearing the same gray suits and mirthless smiles. "Their lips were smiling," lie remembered, "but their eyes weren't."

Suddenly, Smothers found himself seated in the back between two CBS executives while Dann took over the driving.

"Where are we going?" asked Tommy apprehensively.

"Don't worry about it," replied one of the passengers. By then, all of their smiles had become laughs.

The limousine arrived at a loading clock, a door slid open and Dann drove into a large warehouse. The executives were still laughing as they left the car with Tommy and surrounded him.

"We've taken enough shit from you," they said in unison. "You're a smart-ass, you're impudent, you're cocky and there's no room for you."

"What are you going to do?" he asked, his voice quavering.

"We're going to kill you."

Tommy was forced to remove his clothing. Now there were seven naked strangers beside him. The number of gray-suited adversaries had meanwhile swelled to more than 100. Several of them seized hot pokers and took turns searing his flesh. Despite his pain, he could hear them deriding him:

"You smart-assed kid."

"You think you're so cute."

"No, no," Smothers cried. "Give me another chance. I'll do all the shit you want me to. Anything."

"We're going to kill you."

"Don't kill me! Please don't kill me!"

"The first time Tommy had had this nightmare, he had awakened sobbing convulsively in his bed at home. This time, however, he merely squirmed in his seat, chewed on a fingernail and shrugged it off.

Judi Pevnick's Mickey Mouse wrist watch read 9:04 A.M. as the 707's wheels touched down on the damp asphalt run-way at Washington's Dulles International Airport, more than two hours late, accompanied by the canned strains of Eleanor Rigby on the P.A. system. Tommy's eyes seemed glazed and rheumy. His white, flare-bottomed Levis were rumpled.

There were no fans waiting to greet him in the surrealistic-looking terminal, and nobody noticed him as he strode through the nearly deserted structure to the cab stand.

"I never realized until two weeks ago how alone I am," he muttered, stepping into a taxi. "I know I'm self-destructive. I'm constantly putting myself in a position to be destroyed. But I'm a loser who keeps winning, because I'm not afraid of losing."

During the half-hour journey through the picturesque Virginia countryside into the nation's capital, his girlfriend reports, all the insecurities of Tommy's past came washing back over him. In a strange and feverish monolog, he talked compulsively about the origins of the nagging feelings of inferiority that had gnawed at him since his years in grammar school in Redondo Beach, California. His ears, he recalled, resembled water-pitcher handles, and his diminutive body seemed mismatched for his strong, bulldog chin. But he tried hard to compensate for his appearance by using his fists. Among dozens of altercations, he remembered winning only one battle in the second grade and another 20 years later, when he pummeled a drunken heckler in a Denver coffeehouse.

As a student, he always felt he was less intelligent than anyone in his class. And the first time he drove his brother's treasured 1910 Packard, he unintentionally burned out the transmission and stripped the gears. Even his first sexual experience, at the age of Hi, had an unsatisfactory conclusion. "It took me all night, drunk, raving mad, over at a friend's house, where the parents were out of town," he said of that unforgettable dalliance with a 19-year-old swinger from the local junior high school. "But finally I did it. Got into her, came the first stroke, jerked out. I thought she was pregnant and went through a whole anxiety trip."

This assortment of insecurities began to form the foundation for his unique style of comedy. "I used them constantly in social situations," Tommy explained. "They were so real that it made us a giant success. People related to me. They all felt it themselves."

The "Mom always liked you best" theme of sibling rivalry that later became the mainstay of their act was no less real--but in reverse. Mrs. Ruth Smothers--widowed during World War Two, when her husband, an Army career officer, died on a prisoner-of-war ship en route from the Philippines to Japan--always showed partiality to Tommy rather than to Dickie, as well as a deeper reliance on him.

Following high school graduation, Tommy took a job with the gas company to help support the family after Mrs. Smothers was forced to file for bankruptcy. By the time he was finally admitted to San Jose State College at 19, he said he had already prepared excuses for flunking out. He had been rejected by every other college to which he had applied.

But he managed to maintain a passable grade-point average and even achiever, a measure of campus recognition as a member of the gymnastics team--a sport he had first pursued in high school to develop his scrawny physique. Competing on the side horse, flying rings and parallel bars, he won numerous first-place medals in a series of meets.

Within a year after Dickie enrolled at the same college, the Smothers brothers had become B.M.O.C. for their impromptu entertainment at the Kerosene Club, a local beer joint. Early in 1959, they were offered a nightly salary of live percent of the net receipts (amounting to seven dollars apiece)--rather than the free beer and pretzels they had been receiving. That was incentive enough to buy their own instruments. Dickie acquired a $285 West German bass (which he still uses today) for payments of $13 a month--$5 less that the payments on Tommy's Martin guitar. By the time they retired these debts three years later, they had dropped out of college and developed the gimmick of Tommy playing the overgrown kid, stuttering and bumbling responses to his brother's straight lines. And their spoofs of contemporary folk songs such as Rock Island Line and Jamaica Farewell were making them popular attractions on the nation's folk-music night-club circuit.

Within six months, the brothers had made a resounding television debut on the Tonight show, then hosted by Jack Paar. By 1903, four of their comedy albums were listed simultaneously in Billboard's top 20, and they were earning $10,000 a week for appearances in New York and Las Vegas night clubs. Over a three-year period, they also played 500 one-night concerts in high school and college auditoriums across the country.

Their most memorable concert date, on November 1, 1904, at a high school gymnasium in Elkhart, Indiana, is significant for what occurred in its aftermath. A local concessionaire had demanded an inordinate percentage of the profits horns the sale of Smothers Brothers souvenir programs, whose net proceeds were earmarked for the American Cancer Society. The amount in dispute was roughly $30. When Tommy refused to capitulate, the concessionaire called the police. Strong words ensued when two uniformed officers suggested that the Smothers brothers and their manager accompany them to the station house.

"Suddenly, this cop yanked me out of my car by the sweater, crashed down with an eight-battery flashlight, opened my skull and was beating on me," Tommy recalled. His eyes were blazing as he recounted the incident for George Slaff, a prominent civil-liberties attorney seated in Tommy's Washington command post at the Shoreham Hotel.

"I was on my back, bleeding like a pig," he continued. "Nine stitches were taken in my head. I never thought it could happen to me. But this is when I became very aware that there was a legitimate police-brutality thing. I thought to myself: Hey, we were taught to believe that the policeman was our friend. Now I know better."

A former mayor of Beverly Hills and long an anti-censorship activist, Slaff had been contacted by Tommy to help determine the constitutional implications of his dismissal by CBS.

"It's a hell of an interesting legal problem," Slaff advised him. "How far does the First Amendment of the Constitution apply to television and radio, quasi-public utilities which have been granted a right by Government and which are subject to regulation by Government? It applies in certain senses because of the so-called fairness doctrine of the Federal Communications Commission. What are the rights of a man who has a contractual right to appear? What are his rights to express an opinion? This is going to take some deep thought." There was the added possibility of a lawsuit against CBS for illegal censorship under the terms of the Civil Rights Act.

"The thing that blows my mind is that I'm not the guy who should be doing this," Tommy told Slaff. "I couldn't conceive a year ago that I would be forced by whatever motivates me to get in this position. I always thought it was going to be some real erudite, heavy cat who really knew everything that was happening. If I stopped and looked around, I'd really get nervous."

Later that afternoon. Tommy conferred for nearly two hours with Nicholas Johnson--whom he had met on his previous visit to the city. Johnson, too. was interested in the relevance of the First Amendment. He wondered whether the three networks exerted an undue influence on the dissemination of information. He compared the lofty position of CBS. a network with few restrictions in this area, with General Motors, a corporation obliged to recall hundreds of thousands of faulty automobiles since the implementation of Federal restraints.

"You've turned this town on its head." Johnson told Tommy. "You weren't willing to corrupt yourself to maximize profit, and that's unusual. This is an interesting situation: How does the information system work in our society? Who gets to express his views? Who doesn't? What pressures are there to cut ideas or information out of the system? Suppose you have some dissenting view. How are you going to get it out to the people? I am particularly concerned about the impact of ownership on content."

Elaborating after the meeting on his sympathy for Tommy, Johnson said: "Like everybody else our age [31]. I watched his show and I liked it. Part of what I liked about it was that they made an effort to put out a little information instead of just nothing. Tommy's got a hell of a lot of talent. He seems to care about what's going on in our country, and he seems to be getting beaten around. Sure, he hasn't thought about all these issues with the degree of sophistication a Harvard Law Review student would. But at least he's genuine."

"All these things that are happening are really beautiful," said Tommy as he paced the floor in his hotel room. "If nothing comes of it, it's a sad commentary. Goddamn it. we can't let the passion die, like they've done everywhere else. We've gotta follow it up." He pitked up the phone.

The operator was unable to reach Dickie Smothers in either Los Angeles or Miami Beach. He had been due in Washington hours before.

"Where can he be?" Tommy asked rhetorically, glancing at the prepared remarks the two of them would deliver the following night to the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention. "God. I'm so nervous about that speech."

Still pacing the room, swilling a Scotch, the leafed through a pile of telegrams received after the cancellation announcement. He read several of the wires to those assembled in the room, adding special emphasis to his recitation of a night letter sent to CBS president Stanton and network president Wood. It was signed by 100 staff members of the Michigan Daily, a student publication at the University of Michigan. "Listen to this," he exclaimed:

"This act of blatant political censorship has cut off the only television production to confront reality with a judicious and many times enlightening humor. the show stands in marked contrast to the specious drivel that pervades most television entertainment. You have demonstrated first that america is not the land of free speech and that even if the government is not ostensibly cutting film tape. The nation's media executives and the advertising money of american industry are unwilling to tolerate even the mildest form of dissent. By refusing to accept even the social criticism of the gentle smothers brothers you have shown your willingness to pander to the malaise of the majority--even if that includes elitism, racism or fascism. Secondly, you have demonstrated what television commercials have indicated for years: television is not for the sophisticated, the intellectually mature or those at all concerned with the state of society. It is the soma pill for the nine-to-five dunce who, because of his boob tube, becomes so limited he is of little more worth than a machine programmed to laugh when lucy slips on a banana or to sob at a soap opera----"

The reading was interrupted by a knock on the door.

"Jesus Christ, who's paying for this?" asked Dickie Smothers as he breezed into suite B-120.

Though he's two years younger than his brother, the foliage on his upper lip made him appear older than his 30 years. He wore aviator's steel-rimmed sunglasses, a see-through dotted-swiss shirt, Western-pocketed twill trousers and Italian leather boots, all part of his meticulously selected wardrobe. The week before, in a 12-hour road race at Sebring, he and codriver Fred Baker had piloted a 1966 Porsche sedan to first place in the under-two-liter prototype classification. It had cost them nearly $5000 to put the car on the track and they had received only a tarnished $400 trophy in return. But the exhilarating experience of two amateurs having beaten skilled factory drivers, he said, was more than worth the expense.

"On our show, we tried to do one hundred percent," Dickie recalled. "When we went over that hundred percent, we were in deep shit. It's the same thing that happens with an automobile. If you spin off the road, you could kill yourself. And in this situation with CBS, the name thing could happen to us professionally. We're competing for our lives, actually, by taking a stand that is completely unnecessary, just as driving a car is unnecessary--but both are important. There may be a little bit of self-indulgence to the ego involved, but you have to do what you feel strongly about."

He hadn't seen his brother since before the cancellation, the news of which he had received while attending an automobile show in New York. Nor did he seem particularly pleased about being summoned from Florida. He had come to Washington only after repeated urgings.

"Dickie isn't as concerned, except on the basis of brotherly love and respect," Tommy said in his presence. "I know what's happening and he doesn't want to get involved in these situations. He's given me carte blanche, until I really screw up."

For an hour and a half, the two of them sat side by side, reading through their scripts for the following day's appearance--a comedy routine based on future prospects for employment and more formal remarks concerning the generation gap. Dickie was situated on the left, as he customarily appears on stage. The scene was reminiscent of the initial run-through for one of their television shows--but Friday night's speech would be their only professional appearance for many months to come.

"What happened with ABC?" Dickie asked, pausing in their rehearsal.

"They turned it down, man." Tommy sighed. "I told them: 'We'll do anything. I'll adjust to the affiliate line-up and go on a risk basis with you.' But if there was that much risk involved, they're not prepared to take it." NBC had refused even to discuss the possibility of a show.

By now, Dickie had little desire to resume rehearsing their lines. "Where do you find the girls?" he asked those congregated in the room. "This town should be crawling with broads."

"Dick, would you please read the script?" asked Tommy wearily.

"I'm more interested in finding a young lady for the night. Eighteen million secretaries in Washington and I don't have a date."

"There are supposed to be a lot of expensive ladies of the evening around here," Judi suggested.

"Are you kidding?" said Dickie. "They pay for me, 'cause they get their names in the columns."

Only recently, he had been granted a divorce from his college sweetheart and wife of nine years. Linda Miller Smothers was awarded a generous financial settlement in addition to custody of their three children.

"Dickie now has the swinger reputation I used to have." Tommy said when he left the room. "The trouble with his marriage was that his ex-wife thought we were overpaid. She still insisted on making all of her drapes, her clothes, painting the halls--the do-it-yourself things. She resented the money and never adjusted. My wife adjusted so easily it was unbelievable. It was like money was one of her inalienable rights."

Since his separation, Dickie had occupied himself as much with his cars as with the opposite sex.

"Basically, I'm a post-War auto collector, because that's my era," he told a visitor. "I'm a post-War person. I have three sports cars that symbolize the ultimate in high performance. They're a hallmark of that era. One is the Jaguar XK-120 roadster. It came out in 1918. It went 127.5 miles per hour, 0 to 60 in nine and a half seconds and could bebought by a middle-class workingman. There was nothing that could touch it.

"Then I have a 30SL Mercedes-Benz gull-wing coupe. The sexiest car ever in the world. Fantastic workmanship. The third is the ultimate development of the two-seater roadster--the 427 Shelby Cobra, brine horsepower. It's so tender you can't even touch the body or it'll dent. But it's so rugged and masculine. There will never be another car to replace these three."

For off-the-course amusement, Dickie also maintains five motorcycles, two more Porsches, a 1932 Ford, a 1940 Packard limousine, a Volkswagen Microbus, a 1944 Army-surplus bus, a Dodge Mobile-home, a dune buggy, two Bentleys and a 1959 Cadillac once owned by Sophia Loren. Seven of these vehicles are garaged in his Woodland Hills, California, home. All of them are kept in immaculate, concourse condition, lovingly rubbed with Classic Car Wax by Dickie himself.

He slept late the next morning--a Friday--while Tommy sat at a card table studying his portions of the speech. "The young generation is speaking out," he read aloud, occasionally nibbling at strips from a cold rasher of bacon, "but too often, they're only talking to themselves."

An hour later, a taxicab deposited Tommy at the New Senate Office Building for his first appointment of the day.

"So what's going on?" asked shirt-sleeved Alan Cranston, the junior Senator from California, offering Tommy an armchair.

"Just lobbying and going around and letting everybody know I'm not a bad cat," he began, before sketching what he felt were the constitutional implications of his firing. "We were taken off the air, even though we appealed to a large segment of the audience. There should be room in five minutes of one hour out of the 90 hours of prime-time television to hear a dissenting viewpoint. But the networks feel they own the air waves and that's where it's at. I'm a moderate, and when they start shutting up moderates, that's a bad scene. ABC, for example, seems to be conditioned against us. They think we're hotheads and troublemakers. 1 can't pinpoint what they're afraid of."

"I would like to be as much help as I can when you get all your evidence together," said Cranston, ending their 20-minute meeting. "We've got to have you on the air, for God's sake. It's the only show I ever watch, besides pro football. It's great to see you."

Next stop was the office of Indiana Senator Vance Hartke, number-two man on Senator Pastore's sex-and-violence subcommittee. Balancing a coffee cup and saucer on his knee, Tommy continued to hammer away at the networks. To illustrate what he meant, the paraphrased one of the comments made by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison in a Playboy Interview. "It really blew my mind when he said that if America ever becomes totalitarian or fascist in nature, it won't be through force, through the Army, through police," Tommy recalled. "It will be through the control of the media. And it looks like that's exactly what's happening."

The informal gathering was then joined by Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had once asked Tommy to be a delegate to the 1968 Democratic Convention. The Senator wondered about the composition of the Comedy Hour's viewing audience.

When Tommy seemed vague about the demographic breakdown, he was rescued by his speechwriter and publicity man, Denny Shanahan, who told McCarthy that the show rated poorly among those with only a grade school education, among blue-collar workers and in the Southern states. Black viewers accepted the program moderately well. But it stood among the top five in homes with incomes exceeding $15,000, in homes with professional or managerial heads of the household, with college graduates and with those residing in large cities, especially in the Northeast.

"It sounds just like my constituents," said McCarthy.

"The main thing is to break the hold that the networks have on the dissemination of information," Tommy persisted.

Senator Hartke, anxious to reopen the television subcommittee hearings and expand their scope to include just such issues, asked Tommy to supply him with all the tapes and scripts of segments censored from his show by CBS.

Back in his hotel room, Tommy worried about the size and quality of the turnout for a 4:30 screening of the canceled show, which would be held some distance away, in Arlington, Virginia. "My stomach's starting to hurt," he said, grousing about the light rain falling outside, the prospect of delays in rush-hour traffic and the distinct possibility that many Government officials would leave the city early for the weekend.

While Tommy continued to scan his speech, Dickie talked long distance--trying to promote a new engine for one of his racing cars. Another Smothers writer, John Barrett, stood at Tommy's side, underlining each brother's lines with red and blue Magic Marker pens. "We haven't talked about any of the things they expect us to talk about, none of the stuff about the cancellation," Tommy complained, chewing on a Gelusil tablet. "The intellectualism in this speech gets in the way of what I want to say. That's why the whole younger generation is using different words. I know we're not gonna charm these editors. So we might as well get 'em bugged and talking a little bit."

Dickie balked when the time arrived to leave for the press conference--and for the fourth in a series of screenings in different cities that had cost a total of $15,000 to stage.

"Don't you think we're overdoing it, showing the show every goddamned week?" he snapped, refusing to leave the room.

"I never liked him," Tommy quipped, standing with his ubiquitous attaché case at the elevator, "even before he became a bigot."

A chauffeur-driven limousine transported Tommy. Shanahan and Miss Pevnick across the Big Dirty--the polluted Potomac River--past half-staff American flags commemorating the 30-day mourning period for the late Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Awaiting Tommy at the Logos Videotape Center were nearly 100 representatives of the Washington television and newspaper press corps, assorted bureaucrats and half a dozen Representatives and Senators. Among them were Congressman Thomas Rees, Senator Hartke and the FCC's Nicholas Johnson.

Tommy's boyish grin, as he stepped to the front of the room, belied a skittish stomach tranquilized moments before with a Permathene capsule.

"It's very difficult for us to go into a court case on litigation as far as breach of contract is concerned," he said, standing before two color monitors. "It would make us unavailable to anyone else to go on the air. So I kind of have to air my breach problem publicly. The show you're going to see was direct censorship, the big C."

Sipping Scotch from a plastic cup, Tommy stood in the shadows at the rear of the studio, watching the tape that had been shown to the public in its entirety only on Canadian television. It was all there: Tommy dressed in a wig, string tie and high collar, playing Nelson Eddy to Nancy Wilson's Jeanette MacDonald, David Steinberg's Biblical sermonette, the gentle ridiculing of Senator Pastore and Tommy being Maced by Officer Judy.

The bright klieg lights bounced off Tommy's blondish hair, combed forward to compensate for his receding hairline, as he called for questions from the gathering. Soon he found a persistent antagonist in Dawson Nail, managing editor of the trade publication Television. Digest, who fired a series of questions from his perch on a stepladder near the back of the room.

"Tom," he asked, "do you have any specific examples of things that CBS' standards department has ordered taken out of your program? And, if so, why don't you show them to us? And have you ever submitted any finished tapes that included four-letter words?"

"No. Never. Never has our show come even close to what other shows have done as far as sexual connotations.... Of course, we've been involved in the morality change taking place.... Seventy-five percent of the 26 shows we've done this year have been censored through edits and cuts. CBS will not bleep words out--I'm not talking about four-letter words. They'd rather cut entire sentences, which makes it look like a sloppy production. Also, this is the truth; you won't believe it, but they told me: 'There are lip readers, too, and we don't want to take a chance that they will comprehend bleeped words.... We had Dr. Spock on and we were informed by CBS that his segment would not be allowed to be on the air because he was a convicted felon and convicted felons aren't allowed on television."

After shaking hands with well-wishers and signing a number of autographs, Tommy slumped into the back seat of the limousine. "It was really great, wasn't it?" he said. "They really seemed interested. I just hope something comes of it."

One immediate benefit was the endorsement of Congressman Thomas Rees, who made the following observations on the Comedy Hour cancellation in a subsequent edition of his regular media newsletter:

For the life of me I just [can't] recall any rapings, nude scenes or killings on that show. Of course, the Smothers brothers weren't pure. They did spend a good part of their time knocking the establishment ... needling President Johnson, the Vietnam war, candidate Nixon and both the Democratic and Republican Conventions. Even worse, they had a spoof on the Bible [and] some of their guests, such as Dr. Spock and Joan Baez, were controversial and had the audacity to utter some controversial thoughts. Better they should have had a mass rape, a gangland massacre, a striptease or a machine-gun-mortar-hand-grenade killout between Americans and Germans on some World War Two saga--anything but goading the establishment.

The Smothers Brothers Show was not designed for "everyman." It was aimed at those in their teens, their 20s and their early 30s who are turned on by someone other than Lawrence Welk and who don't think of "My country right or wrong" as the most profoundly sacred patriotic slogan ever uttered....

Tommy was still elated when he returned to the hotel room. "It really was a good turnout," he told Dickie, who had just awakened. "There were some pretty heavy people there."

"Let's get on this," Dickie demanded, designating a copy of that evening's comedy routine and address.

Betraying his anxieties after a final run-through, Tommy poured himself another Scotch.

"It's seven o'clock and you should pull yourself together," Judi Pevnick interjected.

"You've had enough to drink," Dickie agreed. "What time are we due downstairs? Is it gonna take all evening? I'd just like to go in and do the thing and then get out."

"We go on at ten o'clock," Tommy said. "I think it would be good if you were there during the dinner, just to get the feeling of what the hell the vibrations are. It will help us."

"I'm on a diet!" Dickie exclaimed. "I don't want to sit on that goddamn dais, eating peas and overdone meat. I don't dig that shit!"

His tirade was interrupted by another long-distance phone call. Tommy walked out of the room while his brother spoke to a racing crony, discussing the possibilities of inducing automotive manufacturers to sponsor his Porsche at Le Mans.

The noisy throng filling the Regency Ballroom of the Shoreham Hotel was everything that Tommy and Dickie had imagined--toupeed, brilliantined, heavily talcumed men wearing rented tuxedos smelling from disinfectant; perfumed women crowned with synthetic wigs or lacquery hair spray, who had pinned huge rose corsages to their 1959 ball gowns. More than 1000 newspaper executives and their wives reveled beneath five ornate chandeliers, slapping one another on the back and sloshing down cheaper-by-the-case hotel liquor.

A mild stir of recognition arose as the Smothers brothers threaded their way to the palm-fronded dais. At the last minute, Dickie had condescendingly agreed to sit through the meal. But he had been wrong about the menu. He was served string beans, not peas, and a hunk of gristly filet mignon, not to mention strawberries jubilee with rum sauce.

Just before their formal introduction, Tommy conducted a hushed but heated caucus with Dickie and Shanahan. He wanted to discard the platitudinous speech and ad-lib remarks similar to those heard in Arlington.

"Let's just talk," he pleaded. "Let's tell 'em what they want to hear. We've been fired and it's very hot. Let's tell 'em the truth. The words we've rehearsed all say the right things but they don't say it the way it's supposed to be said."

Shanahan beseechingly threw his hands in the air.

"We made our plan," Dickie insisted. "Let's follow it through."

The dispute ended just as the toastmaster rapped his gavel, cleared his throat and launched into his introduction of the featured speakers.

"We're very pleased to be here tonight," Dickie began, peering through a thick layer of cigar smoke.

"We're very pleased to be anywhere," Tommy quipped, parroting the well-rehearsed opening of their comedy dialog. If they had stopped alter this ten minutes of amusing banter--strongly reminiscent of each Comedy Hour's opening segment--their appearance would have been a huge success. But their prepared statement, just as Tommy had anticipated, sounded more pedantic than profound. Although the clinking of glasses and table talk subsided, most of their perfervid orotundities were greeted with total silence.

In a desperate attempt to salvage the evening. Tommy launched into a passionate, often disjointed discourse. "I want to tell you right now there's been no breach of contract," he said, repeating a familiar theme. "All the things that you people have seen through the wire services saying we did not deliver this, we did not deliver that, the total show was in bad taste--it was within every good-taste boundary, yet we're off the air. The important part is that there are people who have something to say and that avenue should be open through print and through the media. We are, unfortunately, being pushed into being radicals, when we are moderates.... We say something moderate, but the audience is already conditioned to know that television doesn't have a damned thing to say...."

These remarks received little more than perfunctory applause. "We are indebted to you for a most unique presentation," said the toastmaster.

"Even Teddy Kennedy was funnier," remarked one of the matronly guests, recalling an A. S. N. E. speaker of another year, as she carried an entire centerpiece of roses from the ballroom.

Sprawled on the couch in his hotel suite, tartan tie loosened, Tommy was wallowing in self-accusation. "I blew my opportunity to really turn those people on," he said. "I bowed to the fact that I knew it was a conservative group; and to work through the system, you supposedly shouldn't antagonize such people. I disappointed myself and I've learned a lesson. I gotta go by intuition and I know it can't always be right.

"I'm not the comedian I used to be," Tommy went on, stilling a yawn. "My humor, that realness that people related to, is gone. There's a phoniness there and people spot it. I come off stage now never feeling satisfied, because I haven't reached the total thing I wanted to say. I end up doing an imitation of what the Smothers brothers used to be. What I want to do now is turn off my head and get some sun and dig nature. I need to turn on the stereo, throw some booze down and let the wind blow over me."

Fourteen hours later, following a morning flight to Florida with Dickie, Tommy stretched out in the stern of a 23-foot outboard churning along the Coral Gables waterway out toward Biscayne Bay. The sun was warm and revivifying. In this new milieu, the contrast between the two brothers was never more apparent. When Dickie removed his sweat shirt, emblazoned with the legend: pat paulsen for president--vote or get off the pot. his chest was lean and tanned. He talked animatedly about his own motorboat--a S9100 model identical to the one in which they were riding but enhanced by an additional 100 horsepower--and the position he had recently accepted on the board of directors of a California motor speedway.

Looking pale and wan. Tommy remained unusually quiet, as if he had left all his ardor behind in Washington. With Dickie's automobile-racing partner--Fred Baker--at the helm, the brothers eventually sat side by side on a foam-rubber cushion, legs resting on the gunwales, laughing and really communicating with each other for the first time in days.

They talked abstractedly about the demise of the show, wondering if they would have any luck taking CBS to court, and idly discussed the possibility of selling a package of Smothers brothers specials to another network.

"I felt a certain economic insecurity when the show was canceled." said Dickie, offering Tommy some potato chips, "and then I thought to myself: 'What the hell am I worrying about? I would have been a schoolteacher if it weren't for this.' So now I'm not worried about anything."

It was dusk as the boat headed home, down an inland waterway past the majestic homes on Millionaire's Row. Tommy squatted on the bow like a figurehead, watching the schools of catfish illuminated by the vessel's running lights.

Bumming a cigarette, he talked about his son. "The last time my four-year-old kid saw me with a cigarette, he said: 'Daddy die: I throw away,' and he went and threw the pack of cigarettes into the garbage."

He recalled frolicking in a swimming pool with the boy when he was only nine months old. But Tommy had seen him only occasionally since the divorce. "My boy has every advantage, though. He's not going to live in poverty or anything. And the kid doesn't have any authority figure in his life--so that's his break. Same kind of thing I had to go through. I always resented my own upbringing. We didn't have enough attention."

His eyes wandered from the water to bikinied Judi Pevnick, sitting alone in the back of the boat. She had been his live-in secretary for a year. Lately, however, a conflict had developed between their business and social relationships.

"Part of my need for her was to help me," he said. "She's started losing some of her efficiency. Little screw-offs are starting to happen, and it bugs me, 'cause I don't make those mistakes. I want the trivia taken out of my life, so I can have room for the things that count. I demand productivity from people. Women too often take advantage and don't contribute to the good life. They're just not strong enough. I have a distrust of them, my mother and sister included."

Most of all, he said, the events of recent weeks had prevented him from enjoying the $2000-a-month home he leases in the Hollywood Hills, a Spanish-contemporary dwelling laden with richly carved walnut furniture and colorful paintings. From his bedroom patio, he could see the sprawling CBS Television City seven miles away. According to Tommy, it symbolized "a stumbling block in the path of progress."

So much of his recent life had been spent propagandizing on the road that there was little time for utilizing the three motorcycles in his garage (one of them equipped with a sidecar), his green Porsche coupe, a hot-rod station wagon painted orange or the free-form swimming pool that overlooks the city. The life preserver mounted on a cabana wall, however, stands as testimony to the cause. Its inscription reads: s. s. Unsinkable.

Tommy was still a long way from home when he settled down the following night to watch a telecast of the farewell show--the last of 71 Comedy Hours. Missing from the gathering assembled at Fred Baker's Coral Gables home was Dickie Smothers. He had left town that afternoon for a board meeting.

Tommy had dressed completely in white for the occasion: loafers, socks, slacks and mock-turtleneck sweater. His pasty-white skin was only slightly colored from the boat ride.

"Hey, man, you know what?" he said, pouring out his third mai tai from a blender. "We couldn't go off any better. You know who's opposite us? The repeat of a Bonanza show and an Elvis Presley movie on ABC."

As he sat in a Queen Anne armchair with faithful Judi at his feet, the opening number--a vaudeville satire featuring Tommy and Dickie--brought a broad smile to his face. Then Anthony Newley came on to sing one of his own compositions, Life Is More Than Just a Game:

"Poor Punchinello, laughing at fate,Isn't it time you knew?

Learn, little fellow, before it's too late,That fate has the laugh on you."

"This show was really prophetic," Tommy observed, applauding Newley.

Tommy's upbeat mood gradually changed to one of melancholy as he watched Dickie and himself introduce each of the 87 cast and crew members--ranging from secretaries and receptionists to cue-card holders--who filed out on stage one at a time. They stood like a phalanx behind the Smothers brothers, listening to the last hurrah.

"Good night and peace," Tommy said, holding his fingers aloft in the shape of a V, while the Jimmy Joyce singers harmonized an Amen chorus.

"I'm proud of that one." Tommy said, flicking off the set. "Somehow I don't mind going down with my flags flying."