High Wind in Havana

"On a romantic and starry night like this, it's hard to keep your mind on your business," said Steve Allen, sticking to the script as he peered into the Havana sky last week. The sky was overcast and black, and a chilly wind sent wavelets across the swimming pool at the Havana Riviera Hotel, where NBC was beaming its first major live production over the horizon from Cuba to the U.S.

For the hour-long occasion, the Steve Allen Show reconnoitered the place two months in advance, airlifted a cast and crew of 50 (plus ten wives), shipped 16 tons of lights and more than five miles of cable. On the scene, the show enlisted three dozen technicians from Havana's TV station CMQ, and laid siege to the gleaming new hotel. The hotel surrendered eagerly, put up $25,000 of the show's $40,000 extra costs, yielded its bellhops as extras, shut off its paging system and shooed its guests away from the pool to ensure undisturbed rehearsals. "Is there any hotel plug in this script?" somebody asked at the final production conference. Cracked Allen: "Is there any script in this hotel plug?"

Bongos & Borsch. To light up the hotel's vast lobby, gambling casino, nightclub and swimming pool, plus the 20-story structure from the outside, electricians had to string out the lights the length of almost four football fields and use more kilowatts than the same NBC lighting men once used to illumine Niagara Falls.

By Friday before the Sunday show, the hotel was growing tense. The poolside restaurant, its high glass walls plastered with brown wrapping paper, was now a TV control room, sporting a DANGER--HIGH VOLTAGE sign, and sprouting cable everywhere. Fifteen Cuban cops guarded the equipment through the night. Guest Star Mamie Van Doren and Singer Steve Lawrence toiled at synchronizing their lips with songs they had recorded in Manhattan to avoid technical hitches on the Cuban location. Producer Bill Harbach and his staff kept auditioning local talent, came up with bongo beaters, a singing quartet and a dancer named Tybee Afra who hails from the New York borsch belt. At the poolside near Gambler Meyer Lansky's cabana, in the lobby and the casino. Allen & Co. and Guests Lou Costello and Edgar Bergen rehearsed in doubletalk ("Did you put the bird in the creen?") to keep their gags fresh for the bystanders who would later form their audience.

"How About East Cupcake?" The weather clouded, and travelers brought tales that Jack Paar's Tonight show, on location at a Miami Beach hotel, was laying eggs in a heavy downpour. Little crises piled up. Slight (130 Ibs.) Actor Don Knotts, who plays the nervous type in Allen's "Man in the Street" feature, passed out in the coffee shop; flown down from the U.S., his doctor diagnosed "nervous exhaustion." Bearded Orchestra Leader Skitch Henderson created consternation at Havana's CMQ when he turned up in sweater and denims resembling a Cuban revolutionary's getup.

When Mamie Van Doren slipped out of her evening gown behind a poolside screen and reappeared in a bathing suit, an advertising-agency man with a sharp eye on rehearsals objected that the strapless suit looked too much like underwear. "This stuff may be O.K. for Havana," he said, "but how about East Cupcake, Iowa? That's where I'm from. I carry it around up here in my head." Somehow, on a Havana Sunday morning. Wardrobe's Consuelo Gana managed to produce a selection of a dozen more bathing suits to the measure of East Cupcake. And when the show's Louis (Gordon Hathaway) Nye lacked a sharpie's tie for a gambling sketch, she found one in the lobby around a guest's neck.

Rum for Fuel. A mountain of details still had to be climbed before air time. Warned Allen: "Don't forget to tell the gamblers in the casino if they're not with their own wives that they'll be seen all over America." Producer Harbach needed to clear a path for Steve Lawrence's long stroll through the casino and lobby ("Don't worry, I'll get a machine gun"), and to run interference for Comedian Costello during his 20-second dash from the casino to the next set on the nightclub stage.

A bottle of rum was produced to fuel four divers who would splash into the cold pool behind Mamie's number. Director Dwight Hemion insisted that Comic Tom Poston carry three spare sets of dice for his crapshooting sketch with Costello. Mamie asked for an "idiot card" to cue her at the pool, and, added Executive Producer Jules Green, "make sure that the water is deep enough where she's supposed to dive."

Then it was air time, and the chaos fell into order. The stiff breeze slammed Mamie's dressing screen to the ground just off-camera (it was righted on time), tore her flower-laden raft from its moorings (it was recovered on time), tugged at nervous Don Knotts, who managed to keep his footing at the pool's edge, almost lifted Announcer Gene Rayburn off the diving board on the wings of a placard picturing Co-Sponsor Greyhound's mascot. But the show hung together and the pictures moved surely and crisply to the mainland, so that millions of viewers as far north as Toronto could join Steve Allen in Havana "on a romantic and starry night."

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