Sam's Comeback

Mark Twain once said: "When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not." Last week NBC's Project 20 movingly remembered what happened to Mark, from his Hannibal, Mo. boyhood in the 1840s to the day of his death, exactly 50 years ago. Mark Twain's America followed the technique of Project 20's earlier and equally successful Meet Mr. Lincoln, used some 1,000 old photographs to bring back the patch of U.S. history Samuel Clemens helped needle into place. The pictures of the Old West, which attracted Twain as both reporter and prospector, were so penetratingly authentic that they easily got the drop on Hollywood, by comparison made farcical charades of Gunsmoke or Have Gun, Will Travel.

Just as effective were the pictures of scenes back "East," where Mississippi River boats were even more fantastic than the legend they left behind. Director Donald Hyatt contrasted long, sweeping shots through their chandeliered salons with pointblank stares into the close-set eyes of floating card sharks. Then, from Hawaii to Egypt, the show followed Mark Twain following the innocents abroad, set the Eton-collared little Lord Fauntleroys of late 19th century America against the Huckleberry Finn of then and all time. Like a big frog always about to make a prizewinning jump, Sam Clemens stood out against his background: as a young man with lean cheeks, darkish hair and misleadingly humorless eyes, or as a snow-headed Connecticut Yankee, strutting in the cap and gown he had worn when Oxford University conferred upon him a Litt. D.: "I like the degree--but I'm crazy about the clothes."

In and out of popularity since his death, Mark Twain is now on the crest of a revival that is spreading fast through show business and publishing. M-G-M is about to release a wide-screen version of Huckleberry Finn (with Eddie Hodges as Huck and Pugilist Archie Moore as Jim). Before season's end a total of four major TV shows will have documented or dramatized various parts of the writer's life. From Cambridge, Mass, to Berkeley, Calif., presses have been rolling out books on Twain. Actor Hal Holbrook has already given more than 1,200 performances of his one-man show, Mark Twain Tonight!, in more than 250 cities. An added measure of Mark Twain's enduring success is financial. Although he nearly always had to scramble for money, had miserable luck as an investor (he sank thousands into a futureless typesetting machine, turned young Alexander Graham Bell away from his doorstep without a cent), the author's estate last week, as reported to a Connecticut probate judge, was worth a figure approaching half a million dollars. In 1959 Mark Twain earned $57,691--mainly for his daughter Clara, now Mrs. Jacques Samossoud of San Diego, Calif.

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