TELEVISION : The Goldenson Years : The man who built ABC is still going strong at 85 and still has plenty of opinions on how the network should woo viewers

At 85, Leonard Goldenson, the man who built ABC into a major television force, has a smile and a twinkle in his eye as he sits down at a restaurant table at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Marina Del Rey.

“In this business, you’ve gotta shoot craps,” he says with youthful enthusiasm as he decries programming for “old fogies.” ABC’s programming must continue to focus on the 18-to-49-year-old audience, he says. “I’m an old man. I’m no longer our audience.”

But what about the fact that America is graying and the older generation controls most of the nation’s financial assets?

“That may very well be, but they don’t spend it,” he says with a laugh.

Goldenson, a Harvard graduate and former Paramount movie theater executive, who took over ABC in 1953 when it had only 14 primary television affiliate stations, is having the last laugh in a lot of ways.

As the last living patriarch of network TV--both NBC founder David Sarnoff and CBS titan William Paley are dead--Goldenson is a zestful, courtly survivor. On this day he has just completed a lengthy Q&A; session with the nation’s TV columnists during their winter press tour in Los Angeles, displaying energy, clarity and wit. His new book, “Beating the Odds,” has a publication date of Feb. 19. In it, he tells the story of ABC’s rise--and his own--tracing the remarkable growth of the once-ridiculed little network into a prime player in news, sports, entertainment and even cable (where it has interests in the ESPN, Lifetime and Arts & Entertainment channels).

Goldenson and United Paramount Theaters, which he headed, paid $25 million to buy ABC in 1953, a vast sum at the time. ABC had originated as one of two radio networks operated by NBC and then was bought by Life Savers magnate Ed Noble, from whom United Paramount purchased it. In the 1970s, ABC completed divestiture of its movie theaters.

Goldenson’s persistence and unflagging amiability in the face of NBC’s and CBS’ humiliating treatment of ABC in its early days is part of television lore. Sarnoff once suggested to Goldenson that ABC consider “taking the best shows off CBS and NBC and running them after we do.”

When Goldenson told Sarnoff that he intended to make an alliance with the movie industry because CBS and NBC had the great stars of radio under contract, Sarnoff said: “What, film? This is a medium of spontaneity. The public is not going to watch film.” Replied Goldenson: “I don’t think the public would care whether it’s on film or live. All they want to be is entertained and informed.”

Goldenson also had the toughness to deal with one corporate titan who had eyes for ABC--Howard Hughes. Goldenson went to the Federal Communications Commission, “and I said here’s a man that’s involved in gambling and nobody can reach him and it would be a disservice to the public to have a man like this take over a network.” ABC finally got an injunction halting the Hughes maneuver.

Now living in Longboat Key, Fla., but still chairman of the executive committee of Capital Cities/ABC, Goldenson continues to commute to the network’s New York headquarters to spend about a week each month. And his views on TV in the 1990s continue to reflect his attitude that “you have to choose not what you love but what the public loves.” And not even ABC--which is currently pressing No. 1 NBC for ratings leadership--escapes his criticism.

“Cop Rock,” for instance--the now-canceled musical police drama. “I thought it was terrible, from the start,” Goldenson says. He told the two top executives of Cap Cities, former chairman Thomas Murphy and Daniel Burke, that “it didn’t have a chance.”

“I said that about ‘Twin Peaks’ too,” Goldenson says. “Still feel that way. I think it’s a cult type of audience, not a mass audience. Too complicated. The average person can’t follow it. I approach everything from the standpoint of the public.”

As for “thirtysomething,” another ABC show with a devoted following, Goldenson says: “I told Tom and Dan I would have moved it off Tuesday night after the first year. It’s a cult audience (and will) never get more than a 21 or 22 share. We had a lead-in for the evening that was great--Roseanne Barr--and you lost your lead-in.” Goldenson thought that “thirtysomething” could be switched elsewhere “and carry its cult audience” with it. But, he says, “I didn’t win.”

How does Goldenson account for the appeal of Barr’s show, “Roseanne”?

“Blue collar. She relates to people in that state of life. You can’t get away from it. Doesn’t appeal to the articulate minority--I can tell you that.”

Sizing up all the networks, Goldenson also would like to see ABC’s “World News Tonight” expand to one hour (as it has done at times during the Persian Gulf War): “You do your headline service and then really go into the important thing of the day in depth--a David Brinkley type of thing or a Ted Koppel type of thing.”

As for the competition, Goldenson thinks NBC has had “a wonderful five-year run” as the network ratings leader, but that it has allowed too many series with “border edge” popularity to continue for too long: “You can outlive the popularity of a program. You can’t be so in love with these programs that you don’t (drop) them when you should. You’ve got to shoot craps.”

A firm believer that the network system will survive because it still delivers more than 60% of the viewing audience to advertisers, Goldenson thinks that even last-place CBS will pull through, especially if it can finally come up with 8 p.m. hits that provide strong lead-ins for its other shows.

“They have Monday night now--they’ve locked it in pretty well,” he says of the CBS lineup that includes “Designing Women” and “Murphy Brown.”

With CBS the only network lacking an umbrella parent company in the age of conglomerate takeovers, how does Goldenson size up its situation?

“I think it’s really going to depend on their ability to put money back into their programming,” he says. “That’s the name of the game. Larry Tisch (chairman of CBS) is a very good friend of mine. I played tennis with him for years. He’s not a broadcaster really. He’s a businessman, smart as a whip. And whether he will adjust to the broadcasting field, I cannot say. I think he will. But he’s got to think as a broadcaster rather than as a businessman.”

Commenting on CBS’ recent buyback of more than 40% of its stock from shareholders, Goldenson analyzes it this way: “Basically, they have about $3 billion in cash. They’re taking $2.1 billion to buy back stock. So they’ll have roughly $900 million. If they lose money on baseball and a few other things, they’re not going to have the $900 million.

“I just felt that picking baseball up is merely short-range thinking. They were doing that maybe to pacify their affiliates. Well, you can’t program to pacify your affiliates. You’ve got to make a plan and regiment yourself into following that plan.”

Then there’s Fox. Goldenson likes it. It reminds him of ABC in its early days--and how it had to struggle against the big guys. One of his ABC graduates, Barry Diller, is chairman of 20th Century Fox. And Goldenson says if he were 25 or 30 years old, Fox is the kind of network he’d look for.

“I think it’s got potential. They’re really copying the same thing that we did when we started,” he says. “I kid Barry Diller all the time--I said, ‘You ought to pay us a royalty for doing what you’re doing, because your cartoons (“The Simpsons”) are similar to our ‘Batman’ and ‘The Flintstones’ of that period. And appealing to the young families of America was our philosophy, and you’re trying to do offbeat things, which we tried to do.’

“It’s a sound principle--going after young families, trying to counter-program wherever you can, trying to come up with some kind of innovation--and take chances. I don’t know that I would have moved ‘The Simpsons’ to Thursdays (opposite ‘The Cosby Show’), but they were brilliant in doing what they did.”

Diller, who joined ABC 25 years ago and helped develop the miniseries form for TV, is one of the network’s prized alumni. Michael Eisner, now chairman of Disney, joined ABC the same year--1966. Brandon Tartikoff, chairman of the NBC Entertainment Group and the architect of the network’s five-year run at the top, went to work for ABC in 1973.

Goldenson still watches all the new series each fall, but summertime also has his eye--he thinks it’s crucial that the networks develop vacation-time shows to halt viewer defection because of reruns. Recalling his days in the movie-theater business, he says:

“In the summertime, motion pictures were dead. Then a little thing called air-conditioning came along, and all of a sudden motion pictures became highly important in the summertime. I’d make the same analogy here. Basically, we have got to find a way in the summertime for television to do something that definitely will take hold. We’re giving it away in the summertime.”

The new foreign ownership of studios such as Universal and Columbia also concerns Goldenson: “They might want people running those production companies who are interested in product that will appeal to foreign countries rather than people in this country. You’ll turn viewers off under those circumstances. They may not want to relate to things happening overseas.”

In 1986, at the age of 80, Goldenson arranged a merger in which Capital Cities took over ABC for $3.5 billion--an astute move in which he protected his network’s future by turning it over to successful broadcasters who were his friends. Not long after, NBC was purchased by General Electric. To Goldenson, there is no doubt which network came out better.

“In the case of G.E.,” he says, “NBC is merely a very small part of that total picture, whereas in our case, Capital Cities/ABC is the important part of Cap Cities. And that, to me, is highly important.”