Pioneer on screen but tormented off

Affirmative action gets a lot of buzz these days, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court. If cultural rainbows enrich classrooms, however, they also benefit newsrooms and the public they serve.

Yet there’s never been affirmative action in television, where some minorities still get a raw deal. And where, on a July evening 25 years ago, a troubled, complex, magnetic man named Max Robinson appeared on ABC and became instantly famous as America’s first African American anchor of a major network weeknight newscast.

“First and last,” said Milt Weiss, an independent producer now aching to get a documentary or movie made about Robinson, who succumbed to AIDS in 1988 at age 49, after his career had disintegrated.

When David Brinkley died recently, he was drummed out by a cortege of memorials praising his shaping contributions to TV journalism from the mid-1950s on. Robinson, whose plume of national stardom flamed just briefly, is largely forgotten, even though his media life offers valuable signposts for evaluating the present.

Weiss has pitched Robinson’s story to several cable networks through his L.A. company, Cry Havoc Productions. “Everybody loves it,” he said, “but nobody feels it’s right for them yet.”

Say what? A doc or film biography, to say nothing of a book? Good plan, great plan, for Robinson’s story is captivating on numerous levels, from human interest to his encounters with racism, and deserves much more than a footnote.

Weiss, who had his own long, fruitful career as a journalist and admired and got to know Robinson well as his producer at ABC News, would call this story “Color Bars.” And on any list of projects demanding to be made, such a documentary or movie ranks near the top.

Anyone who met Robinson, as some of us on the TV beat did, found him imposing. He was tall, handsome and polished and spoke with a deep, resonant voice that commanded authority. And in front of a camera? As Weiss says, “he filled the screen.” Of course, that can be said of many news anchors, including human holograms who project powerfully on the screen but have a pretty good day if they get their shoes tied in the morning.

Yet beneath Robinson’s sheen, says Weiss, was the keen intellect of a man who thought about the universe, read avidly and collected African art. “He was one of the most positive role models and images of blacks coming into American homes,” Weiss recalls.

Eminent black images galore permeate today’s culture, from members of the Bush administration to media figures. And there’s no evidence, by the way, of a conspiracy to bar blacks from the marquee anchor jobs occupied by ABC’s Peter Jennings, CBS’ Dan Rather and NBC’s Tom Brokaw. The fact is, there have been no openings. Chipping into Mt. Rushmore would be easier. When Brokaw steps down, as he is scheduled to do in December 2004, his designated successor is Brian Williams, who is white.

Weiss calls Max Robinson “the Jackie Robinson of network television news.”

Well, almost.

The Big Three network color barrier had already been broken on a correspondents’ level by the time ABC News President Roone Arledge chose Robinson as the Chicago-based third man in a revolutionary “World News Tonight” anchor troika that also included dependable Frank Reynolds in Washington and dashing Jennings reporting from London. And another black journalist, Bernard Shaw, would shortly follow Robinson as a national anchor at CNN.

Then as now, however, ABC, CBS and NBC featured the highest-wattage TV anchor hot seats. As Weiss tells it, Robinson ultimately wilted under the intense pressure of being a black pioneer in a white-hot beam. And his decline -- which began long before he became ill -- wasn’t pretty.

“He wanted to be the best anchorman he could be,” said Weiss, whose decade as a senior producer for “World News Tonight” included 3 1/2 years in Chicago with Robinson, who had arrived after enormous success as a local anchor in Washington, D.C.

Robinson often complained about ABC stories not having a black perspective. “But he could never find the balance,” Weiss said, “the comfort zone of which hat to wear, which role to play, given that he had this huge pulpit and a lot of people wanted him to support their causes.”

Among them, fellow Chicagoan Jesse Jackson, who would drop in on Robinson at work unannounced and lobby him for his latest initiative, Weiss said. “They all meant well, but they all contributed to this mayhem in Max that led to his self-destruction, and finally the cumulative pressures on him became too much to bear.”

Although Robinson appeared indestructible, in other words, he was also fragile, tormented by personal demons and, despite the booming confidence he projected, low self-esteem. He once gave Weiss a book on human psychology that he had inscribed: “To Milt, who with ABC will find all he needs to know about madness and delusions.”

“I think he was hinting at the pressures he felt,” says Weiss, “almost to say, ‘Help me, if you can.’ ”

Many of Robinson’s critics saw him as arrogant. Others found him wanting because, unlike Jennings and Reynolds, he had relatively scant reporting experience and came from local news.

Weiss says there was definitely a dark side to Robinson, who married three times and had four children. “A lot of women would approach him, and he was not the most faithful of husbands. Also, he dealt with the pressures by drinking too much at times, and he ultimately took too many drugs. I never saw him with illegal substances, but he did have a lot of tranquilizers prescribed by doctors that he would use to escape from it all.”

Nor did he take it well when Arledge dumped the three-anchor system after Reynolds died in 1983, made Jennings ABC’s primary anchor in New York and sent Robinson off to Washington to front newscasts on weekends. After gaining release from his ABC contract, he was hired as an anchor by WMAQ-TV in Chicago. “He began calling in sick and not showing up,” said Weiss. “He didn’t last there very long.”

The story gets grimmer, including a call Weiss got from Robinson in 1986, saying he was depressed and planned to take his own life. That didn’t happen. By then, perhaps AIDS had entered the picture.

Weiss says Robinson didn’t want his illness revealed until after his death. He said he wasn’t surprised that Robinson had AIDS. “I’m not suggesting he was homosexual,” he said. “But the last months of his life, he was very indiscriminate about his sexual habits.”

In Weiss’ Robinson archive is a tape of him making a public appearance shortly before he died, bent and gaunt but still retaining what had carried him so far in his career. “The body was frail,” Weiss said, “but the voice was still big.”

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.