Bestseller Revisited

THE GREAT MAN (319 pp.)--Al Morgan--Dutton ($3.50).

The boys along Radio Row and Advertising Alley always enjoy biting the hand that feeds them their gimlets and girls. Latest inmate of an Executive Suite to write an expose of The Hucksters (TV division) is Al Morgan, a senior editor of NBC's Home show. His book is a shoddy production with characters that are walking cliches (lying down, in the case of the females). Its language sounds like Mickey Spillane trying to sound like Hemingway ("I belched. Loud and clear"). Nevertheless, the book has a minor and terrible fascination for what it tells about the TV business--in terms as tasteful but probably as authentic as men's-room gossip.

The book's hero-villain is Herb Fuller, "America's beloved humorist," a folksy monster of a television star. Fuller is presented as a platinum-plated s.o.b., the kind of man who would not only sell his grandmother but, in the end, not deliver her. In his programs he mixes corny piety with dirty jokes, drinks raw gin from a water tumbler while broadcasting. Like an alcoholic stashing away bottles in convenient places, Fuller stashes away girls in convenient apartments. He once hired a psychologist to find out what kind of music has the most relaxing effect on women and put together several "Seduction Suites," consisting of six or eight records each. All the suites end with Ravel's Bolero--"Greatest closing piece of music ever written [for] all the different types."

When the story opens, Herb Fuller has just been killed in a car crash, and studio bigwigs are arranging the funeral: "First off we thought of St. Patrick's ... an ideal place . . . They were nice about it, but they wouldn't buy. I think they were afraid of the crowds, but the clincher for them was that Herb wasn't a Catholic."

Finally, Fuller lies in state in a TV studio ("The corpse is wearing a blue serge suit. That was a Command Decision") and a young TV hopeful named Ed Harris is assigned to write a memorial show. As Scriptwriter Harris keeps digging into the soft, rich dirt of Fuller's life, the reader will never find out more than that a heel is a heel is a heel, but he will get a behind-the-camera TV education. He will learn how to tell an executive's importance from the kind of humor with which the doorman greets him and how a recorded quote can be transformed from hostile snarl into eulogy by cutting and splicing tape.

He will learn that some TV pressagents maintain what they call their "integrity" by not smoking the sponsor's cigarettes and how a TV performer can build up a small warehouse of merchandise by judiciously dropping brand names into his patter. Finally, he will get some lessons in TV executives' lingo, the best of which might also be applied to the book as a whole: "I thought we'd just throw it on the floor and walk around it."

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