20 Years on the Honor Roll

When “The Kennedy Center Honors” premiered on CBS-TV in 1978, producer Don Mischer didn’t think the two-hour special, honoring achievements in the performing arts, would last more than a year.

“It was a show on prime time on commercial television that had an eight-and-a-half-minute violin concerto,” recalls Mischer, who served as the show’s director for the first nine years and rejoined the “Honors” in 1991 as co-producer with founder George Stevens Jr. Louis J. Horvitz directed the show this year for the fifth time.

“We had a seven-minute opera. It had classical music, mixed up with popular things. I said, ‘This is great television but knowing what the commercial marketplace is like it probably won’t survive.’ ”

Not only has it survived 20 years, the “Kennedy Center Honors” has been the recipient of five Emmy Awards and the George Foster Peabody Award.

“CBS has really supported the show,” Mischer says.

Over the decades, the “Honors” have paid tribute to an eclectic group of artists, including Sidney Poitier, Kirk Douglas, Peter Seeger, Johnny Carson, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Stephen Sondheim, Gregory Peck, Mary Martin, Bob Hope, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, Frank Sinatra, Arthur Miller, Cary Grant, Tennessee Williams and Fred Astaire.

This year’s show, which airs tonight, celebrates the contributions of actress Lauren Bacall, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, actor Charlton Heston, singer Jessye Norman and dancer Edward Villella. Walter Cronkite returns as host of the 20th annual special, taped Dec. 7 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

Among the participants paying homage to the recipients are Christine Baranski, the Miami City Ballet, Gregory Peck, Sidney Poitier, Lynn Redgrave, Bruce Springsteen, Joanne Woodward and Sam Waterston.

For the first time in the show’s history, the president will come onstage--President and Mrs. Clinton will join the honorees, past honorees and a cast of more than 700 for the finale of “America the Beautiful.”

The evening opens with Redgrave extolling Heston: “As an actor, Heston truly becomes the great man he’s played before the world.”

Heston is also surprised by a performance of his favorite song, “More I Cannot Wish You,” from “Guys and Dolls.”

“We started with one solo voice, a tenor,” Mischer says, “and then we revealed four more singers and then more singers until we had 160 male voices up there singing the song. He was touched.”

*

Dylan, Mischer says, seemed a bit overwhelmed with the festivities, which include a tribute by longtime fan Peck, who describes him as “Lincolnesque,” and a performance by Springsteen of “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”

Among the other high points are Tony Roberts and Gregg Edelman’s duet “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”; Baranski singing “Welcome to the Theater”; and Audra McDonald and Brian Stokes Mitchell performing “Wheels of a Dream” from “Ragtime.”

Stevens, who also writes the special, was running the American Film Institute when he created “Honors” with the late Nick Vanoff. Honorees are chosen each year from the suggestions of an artists’ committee of 100. “The executive committee of the Kennedy Center, which is made up of about 18 people, meet and vote and come up with the five honorees,” says Stevens during a break in the editing of the special.

“The most important thing about the ‘Kennedy Center Honors’ is it is a way for our country to recognize quality in the performing arts,” says Lawrence Wilker, president of the center. “It is a way of recognizing a lifetime of quality achievement, of recognizing people who have left a lasting legacy in the performing arts.” The event also serves as a fund-raising benefit for the Kennedy Center.

Stevens and Vanoff made basic decisions about the gala that have stuck for 20 years, “like not putting the orchestra in the pit, but onstage,” Stevens explains.

They also thought it was imperative that television had to keep a low profile.

“When television comes into an event like this, it can totally contaminate it, take it over, set the tone and destroy the mood,” says Mischer, a 13-time Emmy Award winner who created and produced the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, produced “The Tony Awards” from 1987-89, produced and directed the acclaimed special “Motown 25: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” and the PBS special “Baryshnikov by Tharp.”

“They fought from the very beginning to have a low profile, which made it tough for me as director. I remember several times saying to George, ‘Look, if I can’t get one camera in the center of the house someplace, I don’t think I can actually do this for television.’ But they held firm.”

In the beginning, Mischer recalls, the 11 cameras were so discreetly located that audience members didn’t even realize the show was being taped. “There were no cameras visible on stage,” Mischer says. “The cameras are all around the periphery and in the back. There are no times taken for commercial breaks. It is done like a theatrical show. There are no cue cards, no TelePrompTers.”

*

Those paying tribute to the honorees are allowed to write their own material. “We are more comfortable with Sidney Poitier coming out with his notes,” Stevens says, “because he is not doing ‘Hamlet.’ They are saying what is on their mind.”

“Sometimes we like to surprise honorees,” Mischer says. “For Johnny Carson we brought the Nebraska Cornhusker Marching Band to Washington and they came in playing the Nebraska fight song down the aisles. He was very overwhelmed.

“For Harry Belafonte,” Stevens adds, “we had Archbishop Desmond Tutu come from South Africa. That was a breathtaking moment.”

Both Mischer and Stevens have noted over the years that the male honorees tend to cry more during their tributes than the female recipients. “We sit there for months anticipating what it’s going to be like for the honorees sitting up there, to some extent the measure of our success is how well these people respond,” Mischer says.

“When we are doing the show George is out on the floor kind of sensing how it is going and we talk together about when to cue things. I’m in the truck watching these cameras focused on the honorees. We feel great when one is touched and moved. It’s like we’ve done our job.”

But there have been a few times when the honorees just didn’t respond at all to the proceedings.

“Remember James Cagney?” Mischer asks Stevens, who promptly begins laughing.

“When James Cagney was up there in the box, he didn’t respond a whole lot,” Mischer recalls. “John Travolta came out. Mikhail Baryshnikov came out. Finally, Cronkite came out to the center stage and started talking about something and Cagney nudged the honoree next to him and said, ‘That’s Walter Cronkite.’ You could read his lips!”

* “The Kennedy Center Honors: A Celebration of the Performing Arts” airs tonight at 9 on CBS.