ABC, Part 2: Road to the ‘70s

Tonight! In full color! The incredibly true story of America’s boldest TV network, brought to you as only ABC can! (Music theme of Wide World of Sports) In the battle of the balding billionaires, first they endured the Agony of Defeat. Then, in a blaze of shamelessly popular entertainment, they tasted the Thrill of Victory! It’s all here, the dreamers, the hustlers, the lawyers, the regulators, in the boardrooms and bedrooms of Hollywood and of Central Park West! (Wide World of Sports theme rounds the final turn and heads for home with a fanfare of trumpets), This…is part 2 of the story of the American Broadcasting Company! It’s headed your way, and it all begins…right now!

There’s an expression in show business, “Nothing’s as cheap as a hit”. One hit, if it’s big enough, can turn around a viewer’s impression of the channel it’s on. The Untouchables had been such a hit, a lurid, staccato crime thriller at the turn of the darkening Sixties. By the fall of 1965, ABC was poised to launch another influential hit show, Batman. They chose to make it a mid-season replacement, holding it back until early 1966. It was a wise move. The show’s timing was perfect, riding in on a wave of pop culture and comic-book based pop art.

ABC wanted to sell itself to ITT, one of Wall Street’s most aggressive conglomerates, headed by Harold Geneen, one of the most famous tycoons of his day. It would be a stock swap, with ABC management retaining some seats on the merged board. The company badly wanted this deal to go through. Washington was their obstacle. Because it involved a broadcaster, it required signoffs from the Justice Department and the FCC. Senior staff of both companies devoted months of their time to the agreement. The legal work ran into tens of thousands of billable hours. And…

The government turned ABC down flat. There was a silver lining: Forced to finance its expansion with its own cash flow, the company discovered efficiencies that other broadcasters hadn’t been pushed to find. Dollar for dollar, they became the most profitable of the Big Three.

ABC was the last of them to embrace color television. All three networks’ costs of converting to color included higher payments to the studios who made TV shows, due to their own higher technical expenses for film, costumes, makeup, lighting, and sets. The ratings of ABC’s black & white shows weren’t suffering yet: Burke’s Law, Peyton Place, The Addams Family, The Patty Duke Show, 12 O’ Clock High, Combat. But by 1964, color TV sales were finally taking off, and ABC was forced to catch up.

In 1966-’67, Batman helped ABC two ways: by giving the network the enormous advertising revenues attached to a surprise smash hit; and by giving other show producers (on rival networks) the fatal temptation to imitate Batman’s wacky, cartoonish style, above all its nodding-and-winking lack of belief in the show’s premise. It worked for Batman; it sank The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Batman was such a hit that ABC scheduled it twice a week, as they’d done with Peyton Place.

The network tried for a follow-up hit with The Green Hornet. They failed, but that show’s second lead ended up going somewhere—Bruce Lee. The color era brought ABC action shows—The Rat Patrol, Garrison’s Gorillas—and kept up ABC’s groove with middle of the road family shows like The Big Valley, Marcus Welby M.D., and The FBI.

ABC did inventive things. They did occasional live prime time dramas. Lacking their own hit spy show, they imported The Avengers from the UK. They wrung profits from daytime with soaps like General Hospital. They had a paranoid UFO show, The Invaders, three decades before The X-Files. They even filmed a TV movie, Shadow on the Land, that was going to lead to a weekly series about present-day America being run by a fascist government. Hard to picture that as competition for Bonanza or The Dean Martin Show.

Every network’s largest profit centers included their advertising-rich “O and Os”, their five owned-and-operated big city TV stations--in those days, the limit of what each network could outright own. The many hundreds of ABC’s other affiliated stations were, like those of the other two networks, bound to them by no ideology or sentiment but by short term contracts. Affiliate relations were important to maintaining a tenuous and highly breakable loyalty, based on sharing advertising time and revenue. The most effective conservative protests of the classic TV network era weren’t mass movements of millions of viewers, but of hundreds of representatives of restless network affiliates, meeting several times a year, whose regions didn’t always like what was coming down the coaxial cable from New York.

For a few months, I’d get to see ABC up close.

In March 1970, I registered for the draft, on the morning of my 18^th birthday. From 1967 on, cities and college campuses all over the country had been wracked with demonstrations against the Vietnam war. The very next morning, a block and a half from my NYU dorm at 55 East 10^th Street, a building at 18 West 11^th Street was reduced to rubble when three radical bomb-makers accidentally blew themselves up. By May, even schools without riots cancelled classes a month early. This national crisis was screwing up my plans of making some money over the summer. Fortunately, a distant relative got me an interview at ABC, and I was hired for a mailroom temp job. It paid $1.50 an hour, not bad.

ABC’s Manhattan headquarters was a new skyscraper that had just recently joined “broadcaster’s row” on 6^th Avenue. NBC was (and still is) in its original, Depression-era home in Rockefeller Center near 50^th Street. CBS was in an elegant Eero Saarinen-designed headquarters, nicknamed Black Rock, at 6^th Avenue and 53^rd Street. ABC was at 6^th and 54^th. In those pre-cable, pre-internet days, that’s a lot of media power concentrated in four city blocks. The New York Times, the Associated Press, the Hearst company, the Time-Life magazine empire, the head offices of MGM, United Artists, Columbia, and Paramount studios, and many of the ad agencies of Madison Avenue, were a ten-minute walk from ABC’s front door.

I worked noon till 8. The end of the day was busy for send outs, peaking from 4 to 6. After that, volume usually slowed, slacking off after 7. Almost every night ended with a couple of us preparing a case of memos and documents to go air courier overnight to ABC’s offices in Los Angeles, rushed to La Guardia and JFK by ABC News motorcycle messengers, who otherwise spent their days bringing unprocessed news film from airport tarmacs right to the door of the developing labs.

Getting out of work at 8 pm wasn’t always ideal, but it was summertime. My girlfriend often rode into the city to surprise me, waiting in the lobby when I left work. I instinctively knew I’d never take that for granted. We’d make a plan on the spot and go out, to one of midtown’s countless movies or restaurants. Even on the hottest of days, it was usually cooling off by 8.

I rarely saw famous actors at headquarters. British singer Tom Jones walked in. He had a show on the network. Local ABC 7 worked out of studios on the west side, so we rarely saw the Eyewitness News team. But we did see a lot of athletes when they came through New York. ABC Sports frequently did talent signings and press conferences in front of corporate backdrops and symbols. Sports had done far more than their share in making ABC profitable, so much so that Sports division supremo Roone Arledge would later be given a reward he coveted: a controversial promotion to be head of ABC News.

One time, my girlfriend entered the lobby ahead of a pair of men. One had a distinctive voice so loud it boomed off the marble-clad walls. She turned and saw a tall, vague looking middle-aged man. “Young lady”, he demanded, “Do you know who I am?” My gal had the courtesy not to say, “Why don’t you ask the receptionist? She’ll know”. Instead, she said, no doubt politely, “No, but your voice sounds familiar”.

“I’m Howard Cosell!” he harrumphed before walking away.

Even as ABC entertainment ratings soared, ABC News stayed mired in third place. News Division had its bright spots, like space and science reporter Jules Bergmann, a favorite of the astronauts. The Nixon White House felt the network was the only one of the three that even tried to be fair, and Nixon granted a rare one-on-one interview to ABC anchor Howard K. Smith.

To a greater degree (at the time) than the other networks, ABC ran their TV programming and production out of semi-autonomous offices on the Coast. Chairman Leonard Goldenson didn’t see himself as ABC’s showman, but as its wise man, the dealmaker. The New York headquarters was mostly unglamorous business: ad sales, billing, banking and payroll, government and legal affairs, public relations, and affiliate relations. HQ was impressive, all shiny and new, but functional, not fancy. The whole building understood The ABC Way: keep an eye on costs. Even network VPs kept long distance calls short. Mail went first class, but not certified or registered.

One useful life lesson to a teenager: to my surprise, the offices of the top bosses were often the last ones to leave the building each night. What do you know; the big boys didn’t always have it as easy as I thought. An open memo was sent to network vice presidents, including big shots like Fred Pierce, Elton Rule, and Martin Starger, reminding them that Leonard Goldenson insisted that complaints raised by affiliates got an immediate response. Another open memo to a small group of executives noted that everyone, even the chairman, flew economy class, and expense reports should reflect that.

Sometimes, after much of the staff left for the day, a mail room worker was dispatched to the corner newsstand to buy a copy of the New York Post, an evening tabloid, and bring it to Mr. Goldenson’s secretary, up on the umpteenth floor, so he could read it on his ride home. It seemed like an odd little thing for a teenage kid to be in on, being privileged to see the common man touch in the quietest of TV’s founders. You could never picture, say, CBS’s Bill Paley ending his work day reading anything like the New York Post. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that by 1970 ABC was a respected competitor coast to coast, entering a decade when it would finally reach the top.

The aftermath for me: Working at ABC was a great summer job for an eighteen-year-old. In the fall I went back to film school. What about that girl who waited for me so many summers ago, like the one in the lyrics of Five O’ Clock World? She’s sitting across the table smiling while I type this.

The aftermath for ABC: The Seventies would be a golden age for ABC’s golden coffers. Love, American Style begat Happy Days, which led to Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy. Starsky & Hutch were no ratings slouches either. CBS programming phenom Fred Silverman came to ABC in 1975. By the time Silverman left in 1978, ABC was #1, thanks to shows like Charlie’s Angels. Was there schlock on TV? Of course; there always will be. But there were also moments of pop culture greatness.

ABC’s broadcast of Roots was the surprise hit of 1977, a genuine phenomenon. Its reputation and adherence to history look tarnished today, but give some credit to what Roots was in its time. For people old enough to remember those broadcasts, it may be one of the few, fairly-well agreed-on high notes of the vanished age when three networks ruled the commanding heights of television.

 

Side notes:

In the early Sixties, ABC bore the brunt of growing public criticism of violent TV, much of it attracted to them by the big success of The Untouchables, but everyone in television or advertising was affected. The threat of Congressional action brought all three networks to heel. First, they each put on the sackcloth and ashes of low rated, public-spirited programming, at least for a little while: An American history anthology on CBS called The Great Adventure, NBC’s Exploring and Profiles in Courage, and ABC’s Discovery and F.D.R. Networks increased the number of hours allotted to primetime documentaries and news programs. This modest level of civic piety didn’t really hurt the bottom line. By this point, not much could.

Selling advertising time on network television had become an extraordinarily profitable business, so much so that broadcasting companies began seeing themselves as financial masters-of-the-Universe. Holding companies have existed for centuries, of course. They exist today. But sixty years ago, they were suddenly repackaged as a hot new buzzword: “conglomerates”. NBC already was one, a network born as part of the far larger Radio Corporation of America, a manufacturing and technical behemoth. CBS wanted to become one, buying and selling controlling shares in businesses from TV manufacturers to TV dinners to the New York Yankees.

Color sets, almost three times the cost of black and white ones, were introduced for 1954 but struggled for most of a decade to get much market share. ABC color-casted a few times before for shows like The Jetsons, seemingly to reassure their affiliates that at least once in a while, they could actually do it, without yet bearing the expense of the full plunge that NBC, the Peacock Network, had, or even the tardy, reluctant half-plunge that haughty CBS, then dubbed the Tiffany Network, finally made. CBS and ABC would also have a hefty bill buying color cameras and equipment, much of it from arch-enemy NBC’s parent company, RCA.