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Home , Howard Hughes, Robert Blake (actor)

WHO'S WHO VOLUME I, BROADCAST 18 as broadcast over the CBS TELEVISION NETWORK Sunday, June 12, 1977 10:00 - 11:00 PM, EDT

With CBS News Correspondents Dan Rather and Charles Kuralt and Barbara Howar

"BARETTA TALKS TOUGH" (ROBERT BLAKE) - Produced by Igor Oganesoff "SWIFTY" (IRVING LAZAR) - Produced by Read Jackson "AFTER " () - Produced by Jon Wilkman "ALL ABOUT YVES" (YVES ST. LAURENT) - Produced by Christine Ockrent "ON THE ROAD WITH CHARLES KURALT" (COLONEL C. COSBY KERNEY) Produced by Charles Kuralt; Associate Producer Jonnet Steinbaum

PRODUCED BY CBS NEWS

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©MCMLXXVII CBS Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DAN RATHER: Good evening. I'm Dan Rather, with Barbara Howar» and Charles Kuralt reporting from On The Road. Here are some of tonight's stories of people other people talk about: Swifty Lazar, agent of the superstars - but he himself is the name to drop; Yves St. Laurent, the nervous Michelangelo of high fashion; Clifford Irving, the man who invented Howard Hughes - he's back at the typewriter again; and Robert Blake, the star of "Baretta", takes a two-fisted approach to the debate over television violence. f\ [Music - film montage of WHO'S WHO personalities featured on this broadcast] 41 [•ANNOUNCEMENTS] ["BARETTA TALKS TOUGH"] RATHER: Violence on television - that super-heated public issue - is one of those questions with at least three sides. This story is not an attempt to cover them, It's about one person - an extremely interesting man who's passionately convinced that both of the other sides are wrong: the American Medical Association, PTA and other parent groups for trying to eliminate violence on the tube; the networks just as wrong for having already sharply reduced it. Our subject is Robert Blake. He's the parent of two pre-teenage children himself, and he's also the star of "Baretta". When a citizen's group rated shows currently on the air in order of their violence, "Starsky and Hutch" came first, second was "Baretta"i [Excerpt from "Baretta"] In case you haven't watched regularly, there's a lot of action in "Baretta". Action is the word television people use when they're talking about violence. [Excerpt from "Baretta"] We had a long talk with the star, the bad boy of television himself Robert Blake. ROBERT BLAKE: Well, I tried to invent a character that was close enough to me so that I could be myself at least part of the time, and he's kind of half my Idealized image and half my real self. All the things I want to be, all the things I never was, and some of the things I am. \ RATHER: Well, okay. That's what you'd like to be — tough guy, slap people around, into macho, into violence. BLAKE: What? Ni, ni. Ni, ni, ni, ni. No, no, not at all. I mean, I don't think Baretta's that, and I don't want to be that. When you're a street cop and you deal— As a matter of fact, whfen you're on the streets, I don't care if you're selling hotdogs or selling your body or whatever you're doing, you'd better know how to handle yourself, because the streets are a very scary and dangerous place, and I like to, and I think it's important to, make that point on television. If I do an episode that teaches children that they should stay home and not go out and hit the road and hit the streets, and to that end I have to have a fourteen-year-olfi girl raped, I've got 20- or 30-million kids thinking twice about whether they should leave home or not. [Excerpt from "Baretta"] Now, I see other shows that are strictly violence for violence's sake. I see-- the same thing exists in movies, but I don't think we use violence for violence's sake on "Baretta". I— It's usually there to make a point. RATHER: Is there pressure on your show to— to write the violence out of it? BLAKE: Sure. — RATHER: Do they say, look, you can hit a guy twice on the show, but you can't bounce his head on the concrete? BLAKE: Well, the latest rules - and I get these pink sheets every day and I do funny things with them - the latest rule is there will be three acts of violence in every hour show, and I think it's „ one act for every half-hour show, and so just— you know, for Jives, I was saying, well, what is violence? You know, I see shows on television that have a 25-minute chase sequence that ends with "I gotcha*"-and that's not violent. But if BaretHa takes a guy in an alley and says tell me what I want to know, because there's a human life at stake and I'm going to put your nose out of Joint, that's violent. It takes three seconds. But they can have, you know, the Bionic Woman pushing over fifteen buildings and Jumping through the moon, but that ain't violent. It's all Jive, man. It's all nonsense. RATHER: But who puts out this pink slip? You get a pink slip that says this is the— the rule for this week? BLAKE: The network, yeah. Well then, you know, the Fecterales come down here when the pink slip is not adhered to and 4then they sit in the office and they start saying: I said you can only have three acts of violence. And I said you can pack it to Pittsburgh. And we go back and forth, and then I go do what I want. \ \ ' RATHER: If you want to put eight acts of violence in— in the hour, you do it? <» BLAKE: That's right. I got to live with me. I know if the show has a point of view. I know what the show is saying to people, and if it requires violence to make the point, then that's what I do. And if they don't like it, they can take it off the air. [Blake on the set]r Read me the part later on, where I tell the old guy . , . RATHER: There's no question who runs "Baretta". On the set and off, Robert Blake is in charge. He often changes whole sections of a script, putting his personal imprint on each scene. BLAKE [on the set]: Quidk notes. The end, number one . . . RATHER: He's in fact one of the writers of the show, though he claims he can hardly read. In high school, he was repeatedly thrown out for making trouble. He began to learn his way around a movie set in 1939 in the "" series. And his first major role was as one of the killers in the film . * BLAKE [on the setJ: —[Indistinct]— "You got a right to live. I was wrong for telling you to put him away." Now, that's got to be the exact tenor of that scene. RATHER: What Blake says about the clampdown on violence is not happening Just on one network. All three - CBS, NBC and ABC - have similar policies. Is your series already getting less violent? BLAKE: No, not since the first five or six episodes. There's a lot of heat. See, television is a perfect foil; it's a marvelous tool, because it can't fight back. And you got to look good if you criticize television. It's like criticizing the press. You got to look good criticizing the press, because there's nothing— you don't have no enemy. Nobody can come back at you. Everybody Just runs and hides, and that's what happening to television. I don't think^tH^ people pay a lot of attention to violence one way or the other. RATHER: Then why is there so much of it on television? BLAKE: Why is there so much of it in movies? Let's see, is there really a lot of it on television right now? How many dramatic shows are left on television, when you think of all the soap operas, all the comedies? There's a lot of this fantasy violence - you know, the Bionic kind of violence- in those kinds of shows. I don't know what you— See, there— there's realistic violence, there's fantasy violence, there's nonsense violence - like - there's all kinds of it. And there's all kinds of it in every kind of drama. I'm convinced that, you know, violence is a very important, dynamic tool of any kind of drama. Where would The African Queen be without violence, or the threat of violence? Where would Sierra Madre be without the violence? Where would the whole point of On The Waterfront be without violence? RATHER: You don't mean to say - or do you - that there is no direct causal relationship between violence on television and th^ rise of violence in this country? v* 4

BLAKE: Oh, nonsense! Oh, my goodness! This country has some very serious emotional, social problems, particularly with the young kids. It's one of the first times in this country that the young kids have not had a cause, or leaders. They've seen their leaders killed out in the streets, and they see people do nothing about it. They've seen their President turn into a , and have everybody let him off the hook. They've seen all kinds of terrible things. They've seen their school- mates killed in a hopeless, helpless war. Now, if you wantto know what I care about, I really care about the kids in America, first of all. [Exeerpt from "Baretta"] And those kids, they don't haVe anything to look up to. They have no hope; there's no tomorrow for them. You can't tell them, you know, well, don't use dope, you know, and mama takes two Valium and a glass of booze every afternoon before they come home to keep herself cool. The kids are in very serious trouble, and those kinds of things lead to violence. When you don't have any love in your life, when you don't have any leadership, or guidance or help or hope, they lead to violence. [Excerpt from "Baretta"] When television brought the Vietnamese war right into the front room and parents were sitting there watching nineteen-year-old kids getting their guts blown out, and looking at their own kid and saying, hey, they could be next- that's what stopped the war. So I'm not sure that showing violence in itself is a bad thing. It has to be taken in the context. t [Excerpt from "Baretta"] RATHER: Listen, you're an actor, and a very wealthy one at that. Where do you get off talking about marijuana and what's going down on the street? What do you know about what's going down on the street? BLAKE: I was Involved with dope when wore pin-striped suits, and before television was even born. And I bought it and sold it and cooked it and cleaned it and hid it and shot it and ate it and did everything there was to do with it. I ain't never been a cop, but I've been involved with more cops than-- than most folks, and that's wftat Baretta comes out of. Sou know, a cop is Just some 25-year-old Jamoc with a blue suit and*a crew cut and a stick in hip hand. He don't know any more or less than you or I. And what America is doing is they are taking all of their serious social problems, like drugs, political rallies, delinquents, gang wars, and all of that - which are social problems, and need to be dealt with on a social level, Just like alcoholism. You need to have Alcoholics Anonymous, you need to be involved with it socially. They're taking all those profound social problems and turning them over to that guy with a stick in his hand, and saying, here, you fix it. We don't want to know nothing. We're paying you $200 a week, go out and do it. Pix everything. And he can't fix nothing. You know, Baretta is continually arguing with his boss about the whole idea of being a cop. 5 [Excerpt from "Baretta"] RATHER: Did you say earlier that you thought the battle was virtually over? That the trend is away from shows such as "Baretta"? BLAKE: No. I'm on the inside. I see the pilots that are being cancelled. I see the shows that are being leaned on, and in a year you're going to have nothing on nighttime television except situation comedies and soap opera. Well, Eddie's going steady with Betty instead of sleeping with Freddie, and well, do you think Martha should have that's all that's going to be le RATHER: Well, what's wrong with that? The people speak. People in their homes say»listen, too much violence on television. They put together pressure groups such as the PTA— BLAKE: ^[o, no, no. No. RATHER: — get Washington to muscle Hollywood. It all works. BLAKE: No. The people have not spoken. The people speak when they turn that dial. Those are the people. Not, you know, a half-a-dozen rich folks who happen to have the time and the money to go to Washington and bang on desks. There are millions of people out there with a dial, and those are the ones who speak. Those are the ones who gave "Roots" a 70 share. Those are the ones who loved "The Glass House". Those are the ones who loved the story on the migrants. Those are the people telling you#what they like about television. They're also the people who watch a Bronson movie when it's on or an Eastwood movie when it's on, but they're the same people that watch The African Queen when It's on. They tell you what they want. Not the— you know, the chicos that go to Washington and dance.. * RATHER: Would you have preferred to see the question of television violence forced to a legislative question - put down into law? BLAKE: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes, I would like to see it put on a ballot, anklet the people say we want restriction on television. » Before/the episode comes on, put an R or a G or an X or whatever, or we will give the FCC the right to tell us what should be on television. Or we will give the AMA the right to tell us what should be on television. That'll be the day. The AMA can spend a lot of time hocking all the mothers in America about how they're going to help their children by cleaning up the air waves, and the kids are breathing filthy air that's giving them cancer. And I have yet to see the AMA take on Detroit for the cars that they make, or take on the major food companies for the poison that they put in the foods. All they want to do is look good, so they turn to the PTA and say» well, we're going to help your children psychologically and clean up television. And that's awful, man, that's ugly. I would love it If the people would say,listen, I don't want my kids to watch 30 hours of television a week. I want them to only watch three hours. I want to be the parent. I want to be responsible for them. But they won't do that. They say, let them watch all the television they want, and by golly, it's television that's responsible for those kids smoking dope or going out and shooting each other- And that's sheer hypocrisy. [ANNOUNCEMENTS] ["SWIFTY"] BARBARA HOWAR: One of the television events of this year was the Nixon-Prost interviews, and one of the publishing events of next year, you can be sure, will be 's memoirs. Now, in the world of media, things like that don't just happen. They are negotiated by agents - people whose business is selling the talents of other people, of authors, , directors and the like. The man who put together Richard Nixon's book and television deal is the acknowledged king of agents - Irving Lazar, "Swifty" to his dazzling list of clients, who over the years included such superstars as Ernest Hemingway, Noel .Coward and - all of them gone now. But when Swifty hit the age of 70 recently, there was still a lot of star power left to help him celebrate. In one night at a chic New York restaurant, Swifty Lazar had assembled enough names to fill the gossip columns for days afterwards. Swifty's clients and friends, people acquired in a career that has spanned a half-century of show business and the literary world. MAN: can give a party, like this. HOWAR: Born in Stamford, Connecticut, Lazar paid his way through law school at night. By the time he was twenty-five, he was travelling the country booking talent as an agent for the Music Corporation of America. Characterized as the agent in the plays Will Suooeea Spoil Rook Hunter? and Breakfast At Tiffany's, Lazar has also been Immortalized in song. Words and music by Lazar clients Betty Comden and Adolph Green from the Broadway musical Belle Are Ringing. [Song over montage of still photos of stars] IRVING LAZAR: Moss Hart, George Kaufman, Maxwell Anderson; I gave them Paulkner, Hemingway - anybody they wanted. HOWAR: Lazar was dropping names as far back as 19*12. While a second lieutenant in the Army Air Force, he engineered what remains a legend in agents' folklore. Promising the names of stars he didn't know personally, Lazar arranged a meeting between Air Porce General Hap Arnold and playwright Moss Hart to produce a Broadway play. The result: Winged Victory. ' It played on Broadway for a year, was made into a movie, netted five million dollars for the Air Porce Relief Pund, and launched Swifty Lazar int^literary agent history. LAZAR: Murray, we're going to 75 Rockefeller Plaza. . . HOWAR: Lasar charges into work with the energy of a seventeen-year-old. He's chauffeuredfrom business meetings and working lunches.