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Blithe spirits: director Don Weis re¬ hearses Marcia, Peter for show. thus far kept the show on a remark¬ ably (for TV) adult level and Law- ford plays it as to the manner born. “At M-G-Mthe distressingly hand¬ some actor explains, “I never really got to do very much. I was a con¬ tract player, which meant they had to pay me every week whether I worked or not. So naturally they threw me into every role that bore even a remote resemblance to a young man. I kept wanting to do comedy and they kept saddling me with those ‘Tennis, anyone?’ bits.” .'\ solvent beachcomber who hates to work and hates even more the chore of reading scripts, Lawford came within 24 hours of letting Dear Phoebe get away from him. He had a number of TV scripts to read, all theoretically of series caliber, and Dear Phoebe was the one he kept shoving to the bottom of the pile—after all, some¬ thing called Dear Phoebe could hardly be for him. It was Pat Kennedy, then his fi¬ ancee, who finally read the script and told Lawford he had better do something about it. So he read it— the day before his agent had promised to send it back to Gottlieb. Lawford and Gottlieb hit it off im¬ mediately, to the extent that the actor signed in for a piece of the show and was even able to persuade Gott¬ lieb that his bride, daughter of the former ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Kennedy, was worthy of a small part or two now and again. Casting the female opposite Law¬ ford was not quite so simple. The role called for a female sportswriter, difficult to believe at best, and Gott¬ lieb wanted someone who didn’t look like just another Hollywood blonde. He wound up with a Universal-In¬ ternational starlet named Marcia Hen¬ derson, who had won the Theater Critics Award in New York for her portrayal of Wendy in the Jean Ar¬ thur version of “Peter Pan,” and who had also played “The Moon Is Blue” on the road. “But she wasn’t easy to get,” Gott¬ lieb ruminates. “I had to guarantee her six months’ worth of her U-I salary and put her under contract— just for the pilot film. If we hadn’t sold it, she would have wound up as the most expensive one-shot TV film star in history.” As it was, Gottlieb sold the show in record time to Campbell Soup, and his gamble that sponsors were ready for something other than the Lucy formula paid off. “I think we’re prov¬ ing that viewers, as well as sponsors, don’t necessarily insist that every show on the air be patterned after the most successful show. My hunch is that Pete is going to wind up as a real TV matinee idol. He’s doing the kind of comedy that Cary Grant and Melvyn Douglas and those boys used to do so well in the movies and which, for some reason, no one has seen fit to do recently.” Gottlieb’s enthusiasm is understand¬ able. It could be that in Dear Phoebe, NBC has come up with the new show of the year. 6