Radio-TV mirror (Jan-June 1954)

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Name Address City m -State Today With Garroway (Continued from page 62) I remember seeing one of those shows, laughing myself sick, and next day trying to explain it to a friend. I had to give up after a few false starts. I couldn't remember what Garroway had talked about, except that it was refreshing and funny, and I couldn't describe the sets, because there were hardly any. Well, there was — a hallway with a lot of doors in it, and people kept running in and out of them in the most hilarious way — but I couldn't just say that and prove my point. Perhaps it was the very absence of distracting scenery and lots of high-priced talent, and the very need for ingenuity and originality, that made it so good. Dave's present show is rapidly becoming as sharp as the Chicago offerings, but you can't help feeling, as you look at the bigger orchestra, the many sets and all that talent, that Dave and Charlie Andrews might be better off — and happier — with a bare studio, a stepladder and a merely brilliant idea. Dave Garroway himself is a fascinating guy. The more you learn about him, the more you respect him as a human being and as an artist. I'd never met him until I went to a rehearsal of one of his once-aweek evening shows. On the way up Park Avenue to the 106th Street studio where he was rehearsing, I passed the building where he has his penthouse. I thought about that, and the very comfortable way his original "family" were living now. Charlie Andrews, his writer and producer, was ensconced in something just as smart in Beekman Place, and others who had stuck with Garroway were "roughing it" on lower Fifth Avenue. I watched Dave rehearsing his Friday night show for a while, talked to Andrews and other people intimately involved with the show. I strolled into a control booth and watched how the rehearsal looked on the camera. One of the writers struck her forehead with her fist as the rehearsal progressed, and cried out, "Oh, Lord; it's not right! Nothing is right!" I agreed with her. Brian Aherne, the guest star of the show, had been asked to make a funny by showing his face in the face of a clock and having a tic, one eye blinking, as a comedy finale. When I left, Mr. Aherne had said, dubiously, "Well, I don't know." The director had countered, "Try it, huh? Let's see how it looks." The show turned out all right. I'm blessed if I know how. In all probability, Dave Garroway was the one who managed to pull it together. This is his forte. That day, he had been wandering around the studio as unconcernedly as if everything were going smoothly and the director wasn't a new one, with only a week on the job. The whole place was a madhouse. Sound booms turned up in the middle of a haunted-house set, nobody seemed to know what he was supposed to do, and you couldn't take a coming your way soon: step without tripping over some cables. Yet, out of the melee emerged Dave, shirt-sleeved and rumpled but smiling and charming. His was the only voice that wasn't raised. He remembered the hallway with the doors the minute I mentioned it. "Yes, that worked beautifully, didn't it? That was the Slipping Around number. Actually, this haunted-house thing today is much like that, only this is vastly more complicated. Now people have to go in and out of fireplaces and Lord knows whatnot." It was all a far cry from the evening in March, 1948, when Dave and three friends met in his one-room apartment in Dearborn Street, Chicago, to create something out of nothing. Of the friends — Charlie Andrews, Edie Barstow and Bob Banner — who gathered there, one was an English instructor, another a dancer, another an advertising man. Together they created the Dave Garroway TV show which eventually landed the "family" in New York. But, just as that initial conference created a show which delighted everyone, it was growth for Dave, from out of his original beginnings, when a stroke of luck took him out of the straight announcer category into the "entertainment" side of radio. That period came for Dave two years before when NBC casually tossed him a late disc-jockey show because he was the only staff announcer who didn't live 'way out in the suburbs. Dave has always been a jazz lover — and just how much of a jazz lover is borne out by the fact that when the Hot Club of Chicago, an organization of jazz afficionados with lots of enthusiasm but a low entertainment budget asked him to emcee their concert for a fee of $15, he jumped at the chance. "I remember that evening," one of his oldest friends said the other day. "Gene Krupa was the guest of honor, and he simply took over the stage. Dave didn't get a chance to open his mouth all evening. He retired to a spot in front of the bandstand without $15 worth of resentment, and enjoyed himself immensely." The limelight is not something Dave Garroway has to have. At forty, Dave lives a bachelor existence. Once married to Adele Dwyer, a girl whom he had known previously in college and whom he later married in Chicago, he has a daughter named Paris. It was a war marriage and, during the period when Dave was in the Navy, the two grew apart. Because Dave is a serious, thoughful good human being who takes the marital vows for what they are— the pledge of two people to live and be together the rest of their lives — he has not re-married. When the right person enters his life, he undoubtedly will. Meanwhile, Dave Garroway concentrates on the shows that bring you pleasure— The Dave Garroway Show and his Today. TV-RADIO ANNUAL for 1954 with latest, most intimate stories on NEWS EVENTS . . . NEW SHOWS . . . Biographies and Pictures of Your Favorite Stars! Ask your newsdealer to reserve your copy now