The way it used to be, Bing Crosby would park his old Lincoln coupe in the driveway by the NBC artists' entrance at Sunset and Vine in Hollywood. A dozen or so song-pluggers, who had been waiting for him, would surge forward, all smiles, call out "Hi, Bing," and wave lead-sheets of new tunes in his face. Then he would push his way through them without a word or a glance, their faces would fall, and Bing would disappear into the building and make his way alone down the long hall toward Studio B to start rehearsing the "Kraft Music Hall." The program would go on the air a few hours later, with Bob Burns and his bazooka, John Scott Trotter and his orchestra, two or three guest stars—people like Mary Martin or Victor Borge—and Ken Carpenter selling the cheese. And the whole thing would cost maybe $25,000. That's the way it used to be in radio.
The way it is in television, Kraft Suspense Theatre costs upward of $200,000 a week, which represents four months of conferences and script sessions, the work of top TV writers, producers, a battery of assistants to producers, other production executives, directors, cameramen and technicians, and the services of two or three stars, though hardly in the same class as Bing Crosby, Mary Martin or Victor Borge. For instance, Dana Wynter and Steve Forrest star in an episode entitled "That Time in Havana," scheduled for Feb. 11. And Ed Herlihy sells the cheese. Between "Kraft Music Hall" of fond memory and the present-day Kraft Suspense Theatre, which has been called "an oasis of drama in a waste-land of comedy," were 11 years, five months and 650 productions of Kraft Television Theatre and five years of Perry Como, who started out as a poor man's Bing Crosby, got rich at it, now does only half a dozen or so programs a year. Just as Como is the heir of Crosby in the Kraft hierarchy, so Kraft Suspense Theatre is the heir of the prestigious Kraft Television Theatre.
The latter, which introduced such stars as Grace Kelly, Jack Lemmon and James Dean, was TV's first commercial network program, the first sponsored show to go to the Midwest by coaxial cable and the first hour-long dramatic show in color. At one time it did two hour-long shows every week, but its beginnings were modest. Cal Kuhl of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, who worked with Bing in the "Music Hall" clays and is now sponsor's representative on Suspense Theatre, recalls that the early programs were done from an NBC radio studio, and if a show ran 56 minutes instead of an hour, or if it ran a minute or two over the hour, it really didn't matter: "We just called the network and told them we'd be a little under or a little over." Today, however, the logistics and split-second timing of Kraft Suspense Theatre would do justice to the Normandy invasion.
In mid-December four productions were shooting at the same time—"The Last Clear Chance," the story of two OSS operatives captured by the Germans in World War II, "Isn't Everyone of Us Beautiful?" which concerns a New York girl vocalist, her manager and a murder in a small town where they are playing a one-night stand; "The Silent Men," about a lawyer who gives up his practice to go after the killers of his wife; and "Rapture at Two-Forty," which has to do with the adventures of a young world traveler on the French Riviera. The variety of these episodes can be both a blessing and a curse.
James Duff McAdams, a 27-year-old assistant to the executive producer, says, "Writers like the great amount of freedom in the show. They're not burdened by continuing characters." But production executive Jon Epstein, who has spent half of his 36 years in television, says, "Where other shows have a basic cast, we have to start from scratch. When we did a show about the Strategic Air Command, we had to learn the Air Force for that one show. If you're doing a series like Steve Canyon, you have to learn the Air Force, too, but then you can use that knowledge every week." Executive producer Frank P. Rosenberg, says that, although Kraft Suspense Theatre has no continuing characters, "It has continuing characteristics—basically human characters that the audience can understand as human beings, put in suspenseful situations."
Rosenberg looks upon Kraft Suspense Theatre as movies. He never refers to its episodes as programs but as "pictures," and he says, "We try to make a picture that people would walk up to the box office and pay $2 to see." Production executive Jon Epstein sees Suspense Theatre as "a class product with mass appeal." Compared with past Kraft efforts, this may be an exaggeration: Suspense Theatre has neither the class of the old Kraft Television Theatre nor the mass appeal of Bing Crosby in his prime. But, looking at Kraft's record in more than a quarter of a century on the air, it is obvious that a program doesn't have to be a piece of cheese just because that is what the sponsor is selling.
TV Guide Magazine 1965-01-23 | Northern California
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