Producer's Progress

"The trouble with television." says TV Producer-Performer David Susskind, "is that nobody aspires to anything but money." (Personally, he ekes out his $100,000-a-year salary and expenses from his own package firm and draws an extra $100,000 from the annual profits.) The networks, he complains, are copycats, scorning new ideas in a race for the bandwagon. (But his own firm, Talent Associates, Ltd., has made its reputation with such tried old "original" offerings as The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Swiss Family Robinson and A Tale of Two Cities.)

Happily for television, while David Susskind (rhymes with bus mind) talks and talks and talks, he is far too busy to listen to himself. He goes right on producing adaptations while claiming to prefer originals, bolsters his shows with big-name stars (a technique he says he deplores), and brightens a commendable number of evenings with some of the best, most tastefully produced shows television has to offer. Last week, while he prepared his own Open End talk show for New York's gabby Channel 13 and juggled projects that will keep him busy from Broadway to Hollywood well into 1963, he also rode herd simultaneously on two diverse TV spectaculars: a 1 1/2-hour adaptation of Terence Rattigan's familiar The Browning Version, and a two-hour edition of Sally Benson's equally familiar collection of all-American corn, Meet Me in St. Louis.

Safe & Superlative. In both spectaculars, which went on the air within four days of each other, Susskind was backing a sure thing. Meet Me matched the light-fingered direction of George (Green Pastures) Schaefer with a cameraful of Hollywood glamour: Myrna Loy, Walter Pidgeon, Jeanne Crain, Tab Hunter, Jane Powell, Ed Wynn. The Browning Version was also star-packed: Sir John Gielgud, Margaret Leighton, Cecil Parker, Robert Stephens. With so much to offer, neither show could fail. And in the case of The Browning Version, Gielgud's superlative performance could have done the job alone. Sir John's every movement, every artful, effortless nuance of speech added up to a television triumph. Just having hired him to play the pathetic old English schoolmaster was a measure of Susskind's taste and talent. He could have left the rest to Director John Frankenheimer.

But all last week Susskind rushed in and out of rehearsals, spending almost as much time on the phone as he did watching the actors, yet seeing enough to scribble endless notes of advice; e.g., "Keep Myrna alive." He supervised the cutting of Jeanne Crain's lines ("She's no Duse"), and hesitated not a moment to order the taping of an entire scene from The Browning Version when one actor showed a tendency to blow his lines. (This last maneuver, by a man who has always championed live TV and frowned on tape and other mechanical aids, was as revealing as W. C. Fields's inspired advice to a harassed comic contemporary: "Never mind what I say. Do as I say!")

Frenetic & Familiar. Susskind's frenetic pursuit of both the television dollar and television quality has left many a competitor gasping in his wake. "Oh, I like David all right," says a Broadway pal, "but he's a Harvard version of What Makes Sammy Run?." The observation is unfair. Dave Susskind (5 ft. 9 in. by his own measurement) may not only be taller than Sammy, but he dresses more stylishly and talks in round, mellifluous tones. The observation is also chronologically inaccurate. David was running fast before he joined the Ivy League--fast enough to have married pretty, wealthy Phyllis Briskin while both were students at the University of Wisconsin, fast enough to be set up in a comfortable Cambridge apartment when he transferred to Harvard. After graduating cum laude (history and government) in 1942, Susskind served a tour in the Navy before he began running in earnest. Work as a movie pressagent, then as an actors' agent, taught him his stride. But he began to move out in front when he joined his friend Alfred,Levy, also an actors' agent, formed Talent Associates and began to package television shows.

At first, Susskind did well with original shows--The Rainmaker, Other People's Houses--but soon he found that there was less and less room to gamble. Sponsors wanted every effort to be a success, so the titles became more familiar--The Winslow Boy, The Prince and the Pauper, Pinocchio. Off TV, he sometimes tried the unusual: his movie, Edge of the City, was an artistic success, and his current Broadway hit, Rashomon, though based on a successful Japanese movie, is an occasionally baffling exercise in fantasy. But on TV, clients are cautious, and "you have an inevitable compromise between what you can do and what you have to do."

The inevitable compromise has not prevented him from attempting some ambitious shows. Mrs. Miniver, Random Harvest, Ninotchka, Waterloo Bridge are all on the books. He is angling for the rights to Our Town, has already taped an impressive remake of The Moon and Sixpence, starring Sir Laurence Olivier. In May he will do Billy Budd, in August The Ransom of Red Chief; just before Christmas he plans to produce Arrowsmith.

But impressive as the schedule sounds, Susskind worries. Television, he feels, is not alerting the country to the dangers of strontium 90, the political genius of Adlai Stevenson, the awful problems of the upcoming Geneva conference. That is why he organizes high-sounding discussions on his Open End show. Says his wife: "It's his Alexander the Great complex." Although, at 38, Susskind is undoubtedly TV's most successful dramatic producer, the complex keeps him going. "I want to have my own marquee value, like Sam Goldwyn and Cecil B. DeMille," he says. "Then I wouldn't always have to bother about getting big stars for every show. If people accepted it as a Susskind production, that would be ideal."

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