A Million Memories of ‘Playhouse 90’

Director John Frankenheimer was quoted the other day as saying the happiest years of his long and distinguished career were his years with “Playhouse 90” (“Anthology of Memories,” Calendar, Oct. 3).

May I add that the happiest years I had as a television critic for The Times were the years of “Playhouse 90.”

One cannot imagine the joy one had as a professional viewer of this windblown medicine show called television to be able to deal every week for four years with the depth, the quality and sometimes the disaster that was the weekly “Playhouse.” I was in on the beginning of it in 1956 when Rod Serling, who wrote the first two plays, was in shock because he was told he had to write them in seven acts (to allow for commercials). “How can you write a play in seven acts?” he wailed.

And I was with producer Herb Brodkin (later producer of “The Defenders”) when he told me in 1961: “They’re killing off ‘Playhouse 90’! They can’t do that.” I saw CBS President James Aubrey and echoed Brodkin: “You can’t do that!” Smiled Aubrey: “Oh, can’t we?”

Actually, the best years of the “Playhouse” were over then because it was no longer live--tape and film had come in and the days of live television were history. And why did doing the plays live mean so much?

Marty Manulis, who launched the “Playhouse” and produced the first two years, explained it. He said (as I recall) none of the network brass in New York nor the ad agencies or sponsors got around to reading a script until the week before it went on the air. They would scream over transcontinental telephone: “You can’t do this!” Said Manulis: “I would tell them the play had been in rehearsal for three weeks and either it went on or they would have 90 minutes of empty air.”

So they could do things. They could do “Judgment at Nuremberg.” They could do “The Comedian.” They could do “The Plot to Kill Stalin,” “Child of Our Time,” “The Miracle Worker,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” “A Town Has Turned to Dust” and Serling’s indictment of television: “The Velvet Alley.” And the play that everyone remembers, but few saw when it was shown: “Requiem for a Heavyweight.”

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I think the play I remember most vividly was Faulkner’s “Old Man,” with Geraldine Page, when Frankenheimer flooded the basement of CBS here to create live the Mississippi River at flood stage. When Paul Muni couldn’t remember his lines in “Last Clear Chance,” Frankenheimer fed them to him via shortwave. (Frankenheimer was only one of many fine directors on the “Playhouse,” among them Franklin Schaffner, Fred Coe, George Roy Hill, Robert Stevens.)

Down the pike they came, every Thursday, week by week; some were wonderful, some were awful, many, like “Nuremberg” and “Days of Wine and Roses,” were turned into movies (rarely is it mentioned that they were first television plays). There were idiotic happenings, like the sponsoring gas company eliminating the word “gas” from Hitler’s ovens, like Charley Bickford, playing a whaling captain in the last century, being told he couldn’t shave with a straight razor because an electric razor was a sponsor (ah, how Bickford roared!).

The actors were a theatrical galaxy from Ethel Barrymore and Charles Laughton to the young Robert Redford. Some surprises: Errol Flynn in one of his last performances; Jack Benny, Ed Wynn and Johnny Carson in dramatic roles.

The pressures of the program burned up producers. After Manulis’ herculean two years, they rotated producers, among them John Houseman, Fred Coe and Brodkin.

About producing “Playhouse 90,” Manulis once told me: “It’s simple; you rehearse three weeks, do the dress and make the changes sponsors and the network demand, you do the performance for the East Coast, you go home and watch the kinescope for the West Coast, you cut your throat and go to bed!”

And yet it vanished as you watched it. Charles Coburn, veteran of hundreds of plays and movies in his long career, once nodded off in an armchair between the dress and the performance. A stagehand awakened him: “Mr. Coburn, don’t you know this is opening night?” “It’s closing night too,” Charlie said.

* “Playhouse 90” was one of the classic programs honored in the current William S. Paley Television Festival of the Museum of Television & Radio.