The Little Bombs

"Hello, darling. This is Tallulah. Could I make a date with you for next Sunday? Well, what I mean is, I'd like to have you listen to my Big Show. You know, 6:30 to 8 each Sunday evening on WNBC. That's 660 on your dial. . ."

Some 5,000 mildly startled housewives in New York City picked up their ringing phones last week to hear the familiar accents of Tallulah Bankhead and Fred Allen speaking such plugs for The Big Show. Others heard Kate Smith giving a boost for her show by phone. The voices were tape-recorded, but many a housewife was presumably thrilled to hear the stars talk; some may even have tuned in as suggested. The stunt was the kind that has become a trademarked specialty of a radio go-getter named Ted Cott.

A Harder Mess. Moonfaced Promoter Cott, 35, general manager of NBC's outlets in Manhattan (radio, WNBC; television, WNBT), believes in plastering and bombarding potential radio listeners with elaborate little gags and gimmicks. Says he: "If you take a big bomb and drop it, you cause a lot of damage, but it can be cleaned up right away. I like to drop a lot of little bombs. The mess is harder to clean up."

Most of Cott's bombs have produced more whistle than blast. Among them (on radio): a weekly children's newscast by H. V. Kaltenborn ("Good morning! Last week two bad men tried to kill the President of the United States . . ."); short disk-jockey stints by Conductor Leopold Stokowski and Hollywood's Sam Goldwyn, Walt Disney and Arthur Treacher; programs by Poet Carl Sandburg (folk songs), Eleanor Roosevelt (interviews), baseball's Jackie Robinson (children's disk-jockey quiz). Of these, Robinson and an all-night recorded symphonic series --which started only last week--are the only two still carrying on. A future possibility: Portrait of New York (new music, to be composed by Duke Ellington, Vernon Duke, Meredith Willson, Don Gillis, Skitch Henderson). Cott is currently trying to line up General Douglas MacArthur for a television Bible-reading series, avers that "the general is interested."

Cott was in charge of programing for Manhattan's independent WNEW when NBC hired him away in 1950. "WNBC," he says, "was suffering from malnutrition of excitement. They wanted me to make it a truly local station." In this respect, the new manager is a notable success. Local sponsors have increased steadily; so has the local listener-rating since Cott introduced such events as club newsbroad-casts ("The Bronx Chapter of Hadassah will meet Monday night") and other "public service" shows.

A Tougher Guy. Cott's $35,000-a-year salary is high, but he feels he earns it. Most of WNBC's little stunts, including the tape-recorded telephone horror, he thinks up himself ("Lots of people have good ideas, but they don't know what to do with them"). The rest he whips together from staffers' suggestions: "I have great faith in the creative aspects of people. Mostly I have to fight with them to make them as good as I think they are, and that makes me a tough guy sometimes. If they don't do well, they don't belong here."

With his relentless drive, Manager Cott sometimes irritates his co-workers (more than a dozen WNBC staffers have quit since he arrived). But it is all in the radio game, he feels: "I'm a tough competitor, and I like to win. I've always won."

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