THE IMPACT OF SUSSKIND

The sadness in someone’s passing is really a sadness for one’s self. For promises unkept, brave intentions gone crooked, for splendid beginnings that dribbled off to mean endings. So it was for me when I heard that David Susskind was gone. I suspect it was similar for certain others. Sometimes lives intersect, collide in flares of light and heat before wandering off into eccentric orbits. The obituaries correctly noted David’s impact on TV history; what they’re missing is the impact of David himself.

Prior to my meeting David I’d been a lighting designer, producer and director on Broadway, all of which left me in a state of frustration. What I admired was the writer, not his interpreters, and one day, with less than admirable hubris, I decided to be one myself. Whereupon I lucked into the Golden Age of Television. (The first play I ever saw on TV was my own.) After the third or fourth I got a call from David Susskind, whose name I knew only vaguely. He said, “I’ve been looking at your stuff and I think you should be working with me.” I was intrigued by that should be and went to see the man. He explained that I was headed for trouble.

“You’re pushing the limits,” he said. “You’re ignoring the sponsor and 50% of your audience. You’re assuming a demand for excellence that doesn’t exist.” He leaned back, smiling his basilisk smile, and added, “Except with me.”

He also told me I’d better get it through my head that TV was the ad business, a truth that should have been manifest but honestly hadn’t occurred to me. I’d been born and weaned in the theater, and, as David explained it, that was a horrifying handicap. “Face it,” he said. “Every work of quality you get on the air will be gotten there by chicanery, salesmanship or the pressure of minority opinion. Which is why you need me .”

Did someone say that first impressions are the most accurate? That someone’s a liar. My first impression of David was that he was pompous, a tad hypocritical, his smarmy smile the mask of a used-car salesman. I was wrong. The man was truly a happy warrior. He grinned in anticipation of battle, in the winning of it, sometimes in the losing--provided it was lost with panache. I thought his use of language pompous and sticky with hyperbole. Wrong again; he loved language and most respected those who wielded it with dexterity. I thought him arrogant in his claim that I’d find need of him, but a month later, when a metaphysical fiction of mine called “The Fog” was gutted by the sponsor, I recalled his words with new respect.

About that time David phoned to tell me that the Israelis had just captured somebody named Eichmann and the world didn’t know who he was or what the fuss was about, and could I write a dramatic documentary in one hell of a hurry to enlighten it? I jumped at it, unlayering the story in a growing ferment of fury. David lent his considerable clout in persuading publishing powers like Time magazine to open secret files to me; even arranging that I meet with Eichmann’s captor, Tuvia Friedman, who was hiding out, most improbably, in the Bronx.

Swatches of Holocaust film were wheedled or blackmailed from the military and spliced in. For the first time (to my knowledge) the horrifying story was told on television, no punches pulled. “Engineer of Death” appeared nationally on Armstrong Circle Theater, and the public shock was enormous.

One day I showed David a one-page outline I’d written, a highfalutin notion about Miguel de Cervantes intermingling with the character he’d created until the two somehow became one. The working title, for lack of better, was “Man of La Mancha.” David read it in two minutes flat, said, “There’s not a program in existence that’ll do this one” and in contradiction to his own words immediately ordered up a check as advance payment to me. “Get out of the country,” he advised. And, never reluctant to borrow from the best, he paraphrased, “Absent thee from felicity a while, but call me the minute you’ve got a first draft.”

I absented myself from felicity on the shores of Lake Maggiore in Switzerland where I sweated out six weeks on a TV play that simply wouldn’t yield to the strictures of TV, mailed the manuscript to Susskind and lit out for the fleshpots of Italy. Somewhere in Tuscany a cable caught up with me: PLAY SUPERB BADLY OVERWRITTEN CASTING LEE J. COBB AND ELI WALLACH GET BACK HERE SOONEST SUSSKIND.

We did it, the most ambitious live production on television to that date. Renee Valente produced, Karl Genus directed, Joe Papp was our stage manager and a then-unknown, Colleen Dewhurst, was the first woman to play Aldonza. I was peeved that David insisted on a change of title--I’d grown fond of “Man of La Mancha”--but it went on as “I, Don Quixote.”

Later, when I’d revised it for theater, where it belonged in the first place, I offered David the producership. He turned it down. Much later, when “Man of La Mancha” was in the sixth year of its Broadway run, I had drinks with David in the lobby of the Mark Hellinger where he said reproachfully, “You should have forced it on me.”

I wish I had. He certainly was midwife to its birth. Others admired the idea but only David ordered up a check and said, “Start writing.” I owe him, so very much.

Two things energized his life. One--surprising in such a sophisticate--was a passion for glamour. The other was a love of adventure. David just wasn’t happy without risk, danger, the chance for catastrophe or great reward.

“The Power and the Glory” promised all of them. Glamour in excess: Laurence Olivier to play the whisky priest; new boy George C. Scott his adversary; and for lagniappe there were Julie Harris, Patty Duke, Keenan Wynn, Roddy MacDowell, Cyril Cusack . . . the cast was a Who’s Who of Theater. As for adventure, we would build our jungle in the biggest studio in the East. Further, promised David, “We’re going to simultaneously tape it for TV and film it for theaters. So write it for both!” Leaving me to wonder, “How in hell do I do that ?”

In retrospect it may have been a case of overkill. What I remember best is not the production but an incident in rehearsal. I’d written a scene to be played between Olivier and Duke. It played well enough and Duke was superb. Olivier took me aside, asked what I thought of her in the scene. I said, “Wonderful!” He said, “That’s what I thought,” and, after pondering a moment: “Let’s kill the little darling, shall we?”

Patty, forgive me your untimely death in “The Power and the Glory,” a crime unconfessed until this moment.

My last go-round with David came of a call about 18 months ago when he asked if I’d come to New York for a talk with him “instantly.” I did. He said, “We’re going to do ‘The Power and the Glory’ again. New script. New production. We’ll shoot it in Mexico. My God, it’s timelier than ever! Look at Nicaragua, El Salvador.”

David didn’t look well. It wasn’t merely the normal attrition of time--there was a tremor in his head and hands, a hollowness in that splendid voice. I had the impression that he was playing David Susskind out of memory.

And I’d been looking around his new Fifth Avenue headquarters. Splendid. Expensive. But oddly unpopulated. In offices that might have accommodated 50, there were no more than a half-dozen people, most of them eyeing me hopefully.

I promised to write a new version of “The Power and the Glory.” I heard myself saying, “I’ll write it in a three-hour version so we can preempt a whole evening of prime time.”

“Great! How soon?”

I kept my promise. The script rests in the limbo of unproduced productions. I suspect that there it may stay; it would take a David Susskind to make it happen and he is no longer available.