Wise Is on Adjective

Robert Saudek Associates is a Madison Avenue firm so non-M that its partners think flagpoles are for flags and not (in admen's lingo) for running up ideas to see who will salute. Moreover, the Saudek people consider the word wise an adjective rather than a suffix (as in "Impact-wise, it's terrific"). And they never write memos, preferring to speak to one another in fogless civilized conversation. Their offices, quiet as the board room at Morgan Guaranty Trust, belie the nature of their business. Saudek Associates is just about the best and most versatile packager of TV shows within range of a tape machine.

A topnotch Saudek sample came along last week on NBC. Four for Tonight was an unusually witty review in which Tony Randall did a string of sight gags based on Mad magazine, Bea Lillie fanned her way through a couple of her more durable numbers, and Cyril Ritchard went Around the World on 80 Pounds, at one point carrying his valet in his valise. Best of all was Songstress-Comedienne Tammy Grimes, summing up the history of American women in popular songs; her smoky voice got everything but the filter feedback out of that 18th century smash, Tobacco's but an Indian Weed,

Not Yet Obsolete. Saudek Associates started at the top. Most of its members were with the Ford Foundation's Omni bus, founded their own firm three years ago when Ford pulled out, ran the show successfully for NBC. This season, NBC decided that the spate of specials would make the program obsolete. Rarely has a network been so wrong. Last week No. 1 Associate Robert Saudek quietly released the news that Omnibus will return to the air next season.

In the works meanwhile: five Leonard Bernstein-New York Philharmonic programs spaced across the present season; six more NBC specials, including a Tammy Grimes show resulting from her success on Four for Tonight; a series of twelve "classical" mysteries, opening March 31 with Helen Hayes and Jason Robards Jr. in Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Bat; and a sort of living prospectus of Manhattan's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (last month Saudek Associates was named the center's exclusive TV producers).

The Potent Group. A Harvard Phi Beta Kappa ('32) and onetime ABC vice president for public affairs, sad-faced Bob Saudek was running the Ford Foundation's TV-Radio Workshop when he developed the idea for Omnibus. Getting the program under way with foundation capital, he evolved a principle that his firm applies today with its own funds: "We should take the money and blow it, and we should blow it in a big way." The big way brought some memorable shows to the air (The Life of Samuel Johnson, Orson Welles's King Lear, Comic Satirists Mike Nichols and Elaine May). As for the future, muses Saudek, "maybe a three-hour show, something from 8 to 11. Or maybe 15 minutes of silence."

Actually there is slim chance of silence from Saudek Associates, whose unsilent partners include:

P: Walter Kerr, 46, onetime drama professor at Catholic University and since 1951 theater critic for the New York Herald Tribune, who reads all scripts, adapted Oedipus Rex for Omnibus, is now adapting Richard Marsh's The Datchett Diamonds for the new classical mystery series, which he thought up. Kerr would like to do the historical plays of Shakespeare, in order, on consecutive nights, from King John to Henry VIII, is meanwhile having a rough time finding a Sherlock Holmes story for the mystery series because A. Conan Doyle's plots were so "simple-minded."

P: Mary Ahern, 37, a well-shampooed alumna of Boston's Girls Latin School and Radcliffe, finds writers for shows, advises them and usually edits their scripts, has long aided and edited Lenny Bernstein. Says she amiably of R.S.A.'s relaxed working methods: "A floating crap game." P: David Oppenheim, 37, a tall, solemn, black-thatched clarinetist and onetime head of the masterworks division at Columbia Records, serves as a general scout for new shows and talent. He has been a Saudek associate less than a year, quips that he welcomed the chance "to get away from music."

In addition to this creative quartet, there are Alistair Cooke, 51, Manchester Guardian correspondent who has pretty much confined himself to acting as host for Omnibus ("Bob Saudek really wanted Alexander Woollcott, but since he was dead, I was picked"); Production Manager Richard Thomas, 35; Set Designer Henry May, 39; and Treasurer George

Benson, 50. Whether they are planning next season's treatment of Isaac Newton and the Age of Reason or debating the possible effect of Rabelais on a daytime audience, the associates always seem to have an impressive talent for making quality negotiable.

In his "Producer's Letter" about the firm's musical Christmas show last year, Saudek himself put it this way in a parody of Madisonese: "J. S. Bach never had it so good--rating-wise."

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