asking about it until the children were in bed. Then I told my story. It
would be five days a week at the frightening hour of eight o’clock in
the morning. Hope took the whole thing in and accepted the situation.
But we both had strong misgivings.
I went to work. Each book had to be read and pondered the night before I
reviewed it. Asking myself of each volume what in essence it was really
about, what meanings and values it pointed to, was the crux of the
matter and a most difficult undertaking. Every morning I delivered my
presentation and then ran to the bookstore. I came home at six, had
dinner, and started preparing for the next morning. It was impossible to
entertain or to see friends, and I was half dead from lack of sleep.
Finally, to lessen the strain of five shows a week, Red suggested that
Hope appear with me on the Friday shows for a question and answer
session, cutting the formal reviews to four a week. Again it took some
persuading—Hope would have nothing to do with it unless she “looked”
right, “sounded” right, and could offer questions that were sincere and
significant. She did all of these things superbly and for the next three
years appeared with me every Friday.
Still, it was a grueling task. I wanted to give the very best I could
each day, and I felt that I was being drained. But what was really
killing my drive was the suspicion that I was working in a vacuum. After
all, who could be viewing my dissertations on the problems of man and
the universe at eight in the morning? I decided it would probably be
appreciated all around if I quit like a gentleman. So one morning, after
about eight weeks of giving my all to what I judged to be a totally
imaginary audience, I interrupted whatever I was talking about and said,
“You know, I don’t think anyone is watching this program. I’m very tired
of peering into two red eyes and talking books just for the sake of
talking. I believe I’ll quit.”
What I really meant to say, of course, was, “If anyone is watching,
won’t he please drop me a note and say so.” But it didn’t come out that
way. I walked out of the studio thinking it was all over.
To my great astonishment, Quinlan soon reached me by phone at the shop,
saying, “What are you trying to do? Get me killed? The phone has been
ringing here all morning with people demanding to know why I’m firing
you! Did you say that on the air?”
I hastened to explain and told him what I did say. The following day
hundreds of letters arrived. I suddenly realized that I had an audience.
Hope and I were thrilled and went to work with renewed vigor. The mail
continued to grow. At eight a.m. people were viewing and listening and,
of all things, writing to me—not only housewives, but also teachers,
librarians, doctors, lawyers, occasional ministers. Newspaper columnists
became interested and reviews were flattering to a point where I was
afraid I might begin to take myself seriously.
Another thing was also happening. Although I never mentioned on the air
that I had a bookstore, people began to call the store asking for books
I had reviewed. Other bookstores found that Books and Brent was
stimulating their business, and some of them, particularly in outlying
areas, took it upon themselves to write notes to the publishers about
what was happening. I began to wonder if what the book business needed
generally wasn’t a coast to coast TV bookshow.
Not long after these thoughts had formed in my mind, Pete DeMet asked me
to come and see him at the hotel where he was staying. When I arrived, I
found his room filled with men ... some kind of important meeting was
just breaking up. Finally they dispersed and I was able to sit down with
Pete. He told me he wanted to create a TV book of the month show, which
he was ready to back to the hilt. He would investigate the possibility
of getting the major publishers to pay for some of the time—the rest
would be sold to other sponsors. Apparently he and his organization had
the genius required to market such a thing. In any event, his gospel was
“success” and he evidently saw in me another way to be successful.
I always had mixed reactions to this powerful, heavy-faced man with his
white silk shirts and his, to me, mysterious world of promotional
enterprise. He had been in the automobile business and subsequently
acquired ownership of successful network shows, particularly in the
sports field, and no one seemed to doubt that he could do anything he
set his mind to.
He was always forthright in his relations with me. He boasted that he
had never read a book and never intended to, but he saw in my work a
vision of something he wanted to be part of. But he also insisted: “If I
take you on, I own you.”
Contracts were being drawn up, but Hope and I decided that although the
amount of money being offered me—$130,000 for nine months of work—seemed
extraordinary, the only thing to do was to turn the offer down.
So I went to see Pete and told him the deal was off. The money was
wonderful, but so was my marriage, my personal life. I couldn’t see
myself catching a plane to the West Coast on a moment’s notice, only to
be told that I was heading for the East Coast the following week. There
might be some excitement in such a frenetic pace, but I was getting too
old for that sort of thing, and I didn’t need the pace and the noise to
persuade me that I was living.
My would-be benefactor looked at me as though I had gone out of my mind,
but he let me go without any further badgering.
By this time I had become more than a little intrigued with the Frank
Buck approach to capturing live talent. On the next occasion DeMet
pressed me to sign the contract, he assured me that I wasn’t nearly as
good or important as I thought I was. They were not at all certain, he
said, of my “acceptance” in various markets, and furthermore there was
threat now of replacing me altogether: some people felt that a Clifton
Fadiman or a Vincent Price with a “ready-made” or “built-in” audience
would be distinctly preferable to someone completely unknown outside of
Chicago. It would take a lot of adroit PR work to build up the ratings
for an unknown.
I couldn’t contradict him, and happily I did not feel smart-alecky
enough to tell him, “Go ahead and get those fellows if you think they
can bring a book to life better than I can.” I simply refused to sign
without the consent of my wife.
That night I was in the midst of reporting the day’s events to Hope when
the phone rang. Hope answered. It was for me: Pete saying, “Can I come
over? I _must_ see you now.”
A half hour later Pete was with us, going through the entire proposition
and concluding by saying, “You’ll do everything I tell you to do, and
you’ll make a fortune. We’ll all make money.”
Hope looked Mr. DeMet squarely in the eyes and said, “Money isn’t the
God of this household and at the moment I can’t say I enjoy being here
with you.”
In the stunned silence that followed, I was seized with a feeling of
terrible embarrassment over our attacking Pete DeMet on a level so
totally removed from his frame of reference or the very principles of
his existence. A few minutes later, Pete got his hat and left. I was
sure the whole thing was finished.
As it happened, it was just the beginning. One of our best friends, in
or out of television, was the late Beuhlah Zackary, producer of “Kukla,
Fran and Ollie” and as fine a spirit as I have ever known. She used to
say to me, “If I can only discover exactly what makes you tick, I’ll
make you a household name throughout the nation.” Had she lived, I’m
convinced she would have done it. In any event, it was Beuhlah at this
point who saw merit lurking somewhere beneath the high pressure and
convinced Hope and me that we should explore the matter further. Finally
we consented to go ahead, provided Jack Pritzker act as our attorney and
read every line of every paper (including the dotting of i’s and the
crossing of t’s) before it was signed. Things were agreed upon to
everyone’s satisfaction, and I was in the Pete DeMet organization.
I had confided in Hardwick Moseley at Houghton Mifflin about the
enterprise and he wrote to me (in March of 1959): “I do hope the DeMet
deal on Books and Brent goes through and that you get your rightful
share of the plunder. You know I always expected something like this. I
am delighted that it is happening so soon. When you get time why not let
me know a little of the detail. If we can get you on in the high grass
and a variety of stations everywhere it will be the best thing that has
happened to the book business in years because you do sell books.”
It seemed a long time since Hardwick had lifted me from the depths by
writing me that I _had_ to remain a bookseller, no matter what.
But everything fell through from the very beginning. The money Pete
hoped to raise from the publishing industry failed to materialize at
all. Television does not sell books, the publishers chorused. From my
end, I was assailed by doubts because I was never invited to present the
proposition to the publishers with whom I was most intimately
acquainted. From Pete’s end, there was anger and frustration when the
industry would not buy something which he was convinced might prove
their economic salvation. He decided to look for other markets.
Production was scheduled to start in September. But by this time other
things had taken precedence over Books and Brent. Pete entered into a
real estate promotion to develop a kind of Disney wonderland in New York
called Freedom Land. His lawyer, Milt Raynor, wrote to me in flattering
terms about myself and the book project, but indicated that for the time
being the undertaking would have to be shelved.
It was a letdown. But the irony of the thing was that a promotional
genius like Pete could be so fascinated by the publishing field and what
might be done for it, and then so totally discouraged by the supineness,
invincible ignorance, and general reluctance of an enormous, potentially
very profitable industry to take even modest advantage of the only
advertising medium that might bring it before the public. Pete found
only one publisher actively encouraging. The rest were negative.
This was the idea they were offered: I was to review, on a network show,
books selected by myself from the lists of all publishers. In our
experience in Chicago, although I rarely, if ever, suggested that anyone
rush down to his neighborhood bookstore (if any) and buy the book in
question, every bookstore in the area felt the impact of my lectures.
The instances in which my own store sold hundreds of books in a week
because of a review I had given were fantastic—and more frequently than
not the very large downtown stores considerably outsold my own shop on
the same volume, for I was not engaged in self-advertising. This is
something unique in our day, but not in publishing experience, for
Alexander Woollcott used to have the same effect through his radio
broadcasts. He was, of course, a national figure ... but not in a
popular sense until he went on the radio. Publishers were aware of all
this, but they were not convinced.
Pete was convinced. He believed in me because he saw the results of the
job I was doing in a very difficult city and saw no obstacle to doing at
least as much in other cities. He was an entrepreneur, but perfectly
willing to try the idea of wedding television to culture. Actually, I
was never a party to any of the planning, any of the strategy, any of
the meetings held with publishers or their representatives. To this day,
I know nothing of what actually went on. I was just the talent, and all
I knew was that there was a clause in the contract that required Pete to
put the show on the road no later than September 30, 1959, or else I was
free to return to my local television commitments. The option was not
picked up, and that was that.
As I mulled the whole thing over at Bark Point, a comment of my father’s
kept running through my mind: “When is a man a man? Only when he can
stand up to his bad luck.”
Of course, there was no saying whether the luck was really bad—only that
what I envisioned for the future was certainly being held in abeyance. I
came back for another year of Chicago television, much like the year
before, except for the feeling that I was bringing more experience to
it.
It was the letters that kept me persuaded I was right. In spite of the
hour, with wives kissing husbands off to work and mothers frantically
preparing breakfast and dressing children for school, people were
listening and, in increasing number, writing. Greater numbers of people
were searching for answers to forgotten questions, or driven, perhaps,
back to fundamental questions and to restating them. Hope and I found
all this mail a tremendous stimulus. We returned to our city routine.
Every evening I came home from the bookstore, had dinner, played or
talked with the children, then sat down to read, while Hope read or
knitted or mended or listened to music. At midnight we took a short walk
to the corner drugstore with Mr. Toast, our Golden Retriever, and had a
cup of hot chocolate. These moments were the best of the whole day.
Getting to the studio in the morning was never easy, and on Fridays when
we made the mad rush together it was more than usually frantic. Hope is
not easy to awaken and would be engaged, more often than not, as we
raced across the street like maniacs toward our parked car, in the final
acts of dressing, zipping up her skirt, straightening her hair, trying
to find her lipstick. Sometimes we barely made it ahead of the
cancellation period—five minutes before showtime, but we always managed.
Then when the ordeal was over, it was perfectly delicious to go out for
coffee, swearing solemnly, absolutely, never again would we oversleep
... until the next time.
But why were we doing it? The financial rewards for an unsponsored,
sustaining program simply bore no relation whatever to the effort
involved. Finally Quinlan called me in and suggested that since the
networks didn’t seem interested, it might be a good idea to form an
organization and see if I couldn’t sell the show myself.
Hy Abrams, my lawyer and tennis partner, and his brother-in-law, David
Linn, often used to ask why I didn’t do anything about promoting the
show, to which my answer normally was: “Do what?” But now, with Red’s
insistence, I had a feeling that perhaps the time was ripe. Perhaps in
the present era of political, economic, and spiritual confusion, people
might be becoming worried, harassed, clipped, chipped, agonized enough
for a return to reading. They might be susceptible.
David was all for it, and we called a meeting, bringing together, as I
recall, Ira Blitzsten, Sidney Morris, Adolph Werthheimer, and my
brother-in-law, Milton Gilbert. I made the presentation, outlining not
only the prospect but also the likelihood of absolute failure. Together
we created the Stuart Brent Enterprises and hired a man to run the show.
Again the idea was to sell the thing to the publishing industry. The
project hardly got off the ground, yet our case seemed an extremely
sound one.
To begin with, we surveyed a thousand letters that had been written to
the Books and Brent show. A summary of the survey showed:
Of the 1000 letters read, 705 or 70.5% had bought one or more
books due to Stuart’s review. Some writers had bought as many as
ten books. Many listed the books bought and several enclosed
sales slips.
Of the 1000 letters read, 107 or 10.7% planned to buy in the
near future. Many of these pointed out the difficulties of
buying books in the suburbs, where there are few bookstores.
Of the 1000 letters read, 188 or 18.8% wrote “keep up the good
work” type of letters. There were requests for book lists,
particularly from librarians. A number suggested starting a book
club.
Libraries, bookstores, and publishers were represented. The
letters showed a good cross section of the community, both
economically and age-wise.
David Lande, of Brason Associates, a distributing agency for publishers,
helped the cause by writing to Mac Albert, of Simon and Schuster, a
letter that said: “While this may not be news to you, I thought you
might be interested in knowing that the Stuart Brent book review program
has caught on like ‘wildfire’ in this area. Our personal experience has
been that Stuart Brent has made more best sellers than Jack Paar. If
this is good information for you, use it—if not, we’re still good
friends.”
I went to New York and had an opportunity to talk with Mr. Simon, of
Simon and Schuster, along with other editors, publishers, and
booksellers. Mr. Simon said, “I like you because you are not interested
in the I.Q. of man, but in his C.Q.”
“What, sir,” I said, “is the C.Q.?”
“His cultural quotient,” he replied. Then he said: “The book business is
exploding. We have a lot of new schools, a lot of new libraries. So long
as we believe that a child must attend school until eighteen years of
age, we will need a great many textbooks. People are hungry for a lot of
new things. Books are one way of appeasing that new hunger. No matter
where you go or how small the community, you will usually find a new
library building and new schools. The book business has a new, great
future. We need more good writers to fill the need for books these days.
That’s our problem, finding new writers, good writers.”
Most of the major New York publishers and some of the smaller ones
bought time on Books and Brent to help initiate its showing on WOR-TV.
The pre-taped half-hour shows made their debut simultaneously in New
York and Los Angeles on September 12, 1960. In the October 26 issue of
_Variety_, the showbusiness weekly, Thyra Samter Winslow said: “The best
of the new live shows is certainly Stuart Brent, who reviews books, and
books only, daily Monday through Friday, on WOR-TV.... His style is
easy, intimate, calm, interesting. Who knows? He may give just the
fillip needed to cause a renaissance of reading by the home girls. And
about time, too!”
In Chicago, Paul Molloy, the _Sun-Times_ columnist, who had followed
this apparent breakthrough with great enthusiasm, commented on the
record of 2,700 letters received during the first four weeks of the
broadcasts. “More interesting,” he said, “than the plaudits, however, is
the fact that Brent went out on his own and sold the show because he’s
convinced there’s a market for it. Most broadcasters aren’t, but they’ll
have to come around to it. For 2,700 letters in four weeks is a lot of
reaction. Even The Untouchables doesn’t touch this record. For my part,
I find Brent the most scholarly and at the same time most down to earth
teletalker in Chicago today. I’ve yet to leave one of his shows without
having learned—or at least thought—something.”
But in spite of all the good sendoffs, TV syndication of Books and Brent
failed to pick up the additional sponsorship necessary to make it a
going concern. Hal Phillips, program director of KHJ-TV in Los Angeles,
wrote: “After much discussion and consideration, we have determined that
we will not be continuing with the ‘Books and Brent’ series after
Friday, December 2, 1960. This in no way reflects upon our feeling of
the top quality and standard of the program. The decision is based upon
the lack of sales potential, etc. We have liked this series and have had
fine viewer response from it and regret that we will have to discontinue
these programs.”
This time, when my venture crumbled, I did not feel affected too deeply.
I continued with my daily broadcasts from WBKB, fully prepared to accept
their demise also. By this time I had a realistic sense of the pressures
to which this industry is subject, and I knew this was a world in which
I could not afford to get involved. At the end of my third successive
year, the rumors began to circulate. Then Danny Schuffman dropped a hint
at lunch one day. Danny has been carefully schooled in the diplomacy of
the television jungle and unless you were listening with a third ear you
would probably never catch the veiled meaning of the innocent remark.
After all, while nobody questioned the public service value of the show,
the fact remained that the “rating” was at a standstill and there was
apparently no possibility of getting a sponsor. At the same time that an
estimated 20,000 were viewing me, 46,000 were supposed to be watching
something on another channel, 61,000 on another, and 70,000 on still
another. The competition must be met. The parent company in New York
wants higher ratings. The stockholders want higher profits. Five days a
week is too much exposure anyway. Books and Brent has had it. In a world
about equally divided between those who are scared to death and those
too bored to do anything anyway, the soundness of these operational
judgments can scarcely be questioned.
When, finally, Red Quinlan got around to telling me all about this, I
knew what was coming and offered no objections. It would have been
inconceivable for us to part except as friends. And my mild, husbandly
trepidation about breaking the news to Hope proved utterly groundless.
She was simply delighted.
During the last weeks of my daily broadcasts, I planned every show with
the greatest care and instead of reviewing new and popular fiction and
non-fiction, I chose the most profound works that I felt capable of
dealing with. In succession, I talked on Mann’s _The Magic Mountain_,
Proust’s _Remembrance of Things Past_, Joyce’s _Ulysses_, Kafka’s _The
Trial_, Camus’ _The Stranger_, Galsworthy’s short story, _Quality_,
Northrop’s _Philosophical Anthropology_, Hemingway’s _The Old Man and
the Sea_, _Hamlet_, _Job_, _Faust_, and _Peer Gynt_, Fromm’s _The Art of
Loving_, Erickson’s _Childhood and Society_, Huxley’s _Brave New World_,
Dostoevski’s _Crime and Punishment_; _Four Modern American Writers_, and
Stendahl’s _The Red and the Black_. It was a pretty wild course in
Western literature and the results were astounding, not only in viewer
response, but also in the run on these books experienced by bookstores
throughout the city and the suburbs.
Demand was particularly sensational for Father du Chardin’s _The
Phenomena of Man_, also included in this series. A check of bookstores
in the area showed sales or orders of approximately 900 copies in a
single day. Over 2300 copies of this one title were sold in less than
one month. Our shop sold almost 600 copies. A. C. McClurg’s reported:
“We had 375 copies of _Phenomena of Man_ on hand before Brent’s review.
By 3:30 that afternoon we sold them all and wired Harper and Brothers
for 500 more.” McClurg’s had moved only 150 copies of the book during
the previous five months.
When I reviewed _The Red and the Black_, we had only ten copies in stock
at the shop (in the Modern Library edition) and sold them out
immediately. We tried picking up more from McClurg’s, but they too were
sold out. I then called one of the large department store book sections
to see how they were doing. The clerk who answered the phone said, “No,
we don’t have a copy in stock. We’re all sold out.”
“Was there a run on the book?” I said.
“Yes, as a matter of fact there was.”
“Can you tell me the reason?”
“Yes, you see they’ve just made a movie out of the book.”
He almost had me persuaded until I checked the theatres. There was no
such movie—not playing Chicago, anyway.
Since I continually counseled men and women to accept life, to live it,
to change themselves if necessary, but never to turn against creation or
to abandon love and hope, never to fall for the machine or the
corporation or to look for Father in their stocks and bonds, I was
hardly in a position—even armed with the facts and figures—to try to
fight the organization for the saving of Books and Brent. I did,
however, two weeks before the series ended, take the audience into my
confidence and explain the situation as fairly as I could. Mr. Quinlan
had my talk monitored and agreed that I handled the matter with
sincerity and truthfulness. There was nothing Red could do—he was tied
to an organization that was too impersonal to respond to the concerns of
a mere 20,000 people. We understood each other perfectly on this score.