Fifties (31 page)

It was a marvelous time for him. He was being paid five thousand dollars a week to do what he knew best and what he probably
would have done for nothing. (People who called him at home would have to listen to five or six jokes before they could get a word in.) In 1951, fearing that he would go to a rival network, NBC signed him to a thirty-year contract for $200,000 a year. It was at precisely that moment that he started to slip. In part he was done in by the coaxial cable. Its coming meant television was reaching into smaller towns and rural areas. People there were not native Berle fans, and his flip references to New York neighborhoods and stores fell on alien ears. As his ratings began to decline, he became more manic than ever, rushing across the stage feverishly interrupting other acts. For his fifth season, 1952–53, the format of the show was changed. Goodman Ace, a talented comedy writer, was hired. There was to be more form, less freewheeling by Berle himself, the very thing that in the beginning had seemed to make the show so popular. It ended up fifth in the ratings for that year, and Texaco dropped its sponsorship. By 1954–55 he had fallen to thirteenth, and the next year he was in charge of a show that went on every third week. In 1955 he was dropped from the show. Eventually, NBC worked out a new contract in which his annual salary was cut to $120,000 a year and he was allowed to work on other networks. Berle became the first figure to experience both the power and the volatility of television. The highs were higher than anything in the past, and it generated an astonishing intimacy between performer and audience. But because of that intimacy, the audience could be fickle and a star could descend just as quickly as he rose. It was a lesson that various entertainers, actors, and even politicians were going to learn the hard way.

FOURTEEN

T
ELEVISION WOULD CHANGE MORE
than just the face of comedy and entertainment. Politics was soon to follow, and from then on politics became, in no small part, entertainment. The first political star of television was a freshman senator from Tennessee, intelligent, shrewd, but also awkward and bumbling. No one would have accused Estes Kefauver of being, in the phrase that came to haunt many a television figure in the coming years, just another pretty face. His face was, to be kind, plain. Nor was Kefauver particularly eloquent. Speaking in front of groups, both large and small, he often stumbled. Words escaped him; awkward pauses punctuated his sentences. Part of his success with ordinary people, thought his senatorial colleague Albert Gore, came from the fact that he was so awkward and uncomfortable as a speaker that listeners felt a responsibility to help poor old Estes out.

If at first he appeared something of a caricature—the hillbilly who came to Washington—in reality he came from an extremely privileged old Tennessee family. He was well educated, a graduate not only of the University of Tennessee but of Yale Law School. “I’ve met millions of self-made highbrows in my life,” his friend Max Ascoli, the editor of
The Reporter
magazine, once said of him, “but Estes is the first self-made lowbrow.” He was also extremely ambitious. When Kefauver was first elected to Congress in 1939, Lee Allen, the head of Kefauver’s local Democratic committee, turned to him and said, “Well, Estes, you’re a congressman.” Kefauver pondered the idea for a minute and then answered, “Lee, they’re a dime a dozen.”

From the start, it was clear that he was different from other Southern senators in that racial prejudice offended him and he would not accept the traditional conservative position on civil rights. It was true that he came from a border state where racial attitudes were not as harsh, and it was true also that he saw civil rights as a matter of conscience. In large part, though, his more liberal stance came from his own soaring ambition and desire to hold national office. As early as 1942, as a junior congressman, he broke with the Southern Democrats in Congress by voting against the poll tax. That had provoked the bile of the virulent racist from Mississippi, John Rankin, who stood on the House floor, pointed his finger at Kefauver, and said, “Shame on you, Estes Kefauver.”

Backed by a coalition of the state’s more liberal newspapers, he decided to run against Senator Tom Steward in 1948 and, in the process, to challenge the powerful machine of boss Ed Crump in Memphis. The Crump machine responded by red-baiting Kefauver, inevitably comparing his record, as was the fashion in those days, with the radical congressman Vito Marcantonio (Will Gerber, Crump’s hatchet man at the time—who was better at political intrigue than at spelling—wrote his friend Senator Kenneth McKellar, “We are anxious to get everything we possibly can to show that Kefauver has been voting right along with Marc Antonio ...”). At this point Crump made a fatal mistake and claimed that Kefauver was a fellow traveler and a “pet coon for the Soviets.” Kefauver seized on the remark. The coon, he noted, was a uniquely American animal: “You wouldn’t find a coon in Russia.” In addition, he added, a coon was tough and could lick a dog four times its size. When Crump persisted with the charge, Kefauver said, “I may be a pet coon, but I ain’t Mr. Crump’s pet coon.” Soon the coon became his trademark. For a time Kefauver traveled with a live racoon, but
afraid that it might die on the campaign trail, he switched to a coonskin cap, a powerful symbol in a state that had given the nation Davy Crockett and Sam Houston. He won the election handily, dealing a severe blow to the Crump machine. A surprisingly well connected liberal senator from a border state, he was in a perfect position to be launched toward even higher office—the vice-presidency, at the very least.

On January 5, 1950, he took a first step in that direction by introducing a bill to investigate organized crime in the United States. He had become interested in it as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, after talks with a number of mayors who believed that racketeering was extremely well organized, operated on a national basis, and therefore was too powerful for local law enforcement officers to deal with. This was an explosive issue, because the kind of crime Kefauver was going after had deep roots in every big city, and those cities were controlled by Democratic political machines. Thus he risked alienating the most powerful kingmakers in his own party. Kefauver was being pushed on the issue by, among others, Phil Graham, the publisher of
The Washington Post,
and a major political gadfly and power broker in Washington. Graham was afraid that if someone like Kefauver did not take up the investigation, sooner or later a Republican would and it would be a huge political embarrassment to the Democrats. Kefauver at first seemed reluctant, but Graham uttered the magic words: “Don’t you want to be Vice-President?”

So, aware of the political pitfalls ahead but thinking he had received the go-ahead from top Democratic urban officials in the country, Kefauver took his crime investigation on the road. The committee scheduled hearings in fourteen cities and its investigation lasted ninety-two days. The hearings uncovered important new material, and there was a pattern to it: Everywhere he went there was something called organized crime, or the Mob, and it was invariably intertwined, either voluntarily or involuntarily, with some local Democratic administration. The longer the hearings went on, the less amused his fellow Democrats were, and among those least amused was that old Democratic loyalist (and product of a big-city machine himself) Harry S Truman.

On March 12, 1951, Kefauver finally arrived in New York City. No one had expected the New York hearings to be particularly important, but in fact they turned out to be a landmark, not so much in the history of crime or crime fighting as in the history of television and the coming of a national political theater. On a handful of
previous occasions television had covered hearings (for example, three years earlier, when the Senate Armed Forces Committee had considered Universal Military Training, and also the HUAC hearings on Alger Hiss), but the Kefauver hearings were broadcast nationally, a first for this kind of television.

Actually, Kefauver, who was hardly averse to publicity, had not sought to have his hearings covered by television and had no idea until the last minute that they were going to be. On March 12, 1951, they went live on a relatively primitive hookup, but it was national. It went to twenty cities in the East and the Midwest. Because television was so new, all programming was still quite limited, and that was particularly true in the daytime. The networks had barely gotten around to filling their evening slots, let alone morning and afternoon. By some estimates only 1.5 percent of American homes had television sets in use during the morning hours. That meant that any company could buy commercial time at that hour on the cheap. By chance,
Time
magazine was planning a subscription drive and decided to sponsor the telecast of the hearings, first in New York City and then in Washington, for fifteen days.

In a way, Kefauver’s timing could not have been better. A year or two earlier and there would have been no audience; a few years later, there might have been less excitement—for people might have been more blasé. In the New York area alone in the previous twelve months the number of homes with television sets had gone from about 29 percent to 51 percent. That meant that for the first time in any metropolitan area in any city in the world, there were more homes with television sets than those without. All over the city, and then in other cities, as his hearings continued, housewives called their friends up to tell them of this exciting new show.

For the Kefauver hearings contained innately explosive drama. There, live and in black and white, were the bad guys on one side, looking very much like hoods, showing by the way they spoke and in other ways they never quite realized that they were part of the underworld; on the other side were Kefauver and his chief counsel, Rudolph Halley, the good guys, asking the questions any good citizen would about crime. Estes Kefauver came off as a sort of Southern Jimmy Stewart, the lone citizen-politician who gets tired of the abuse of government and goes off on his own to do something about it.

On March 13, Frank Costello, alias Francisco Castaglia, reputedly the leader of organized crime in New York, testified. Costello had little in the way of an actual criminal record, but step by step he
had moved from apprentice to bootlegger to slot-machine operator to gambling-house owner. He had been Lucky Luciano’s top lieutenant, and when Luciano had been deported, Costello had taken over as America’s top racketeering figure. By 1950 his influence at Tammany Hall was pervasive. As he became more successful, he diversified his business interests, moving into more legitimate fields. By this time he seemed, or at least wanted to seem, perfectly respectable. As such, Costello objected to the cameras showing his face. “Mr. Costello doesn’t care to submit himself as a spectacle,” his lawyer noted. After some consultation the committee agreed; his face would not be shown. A television technician suggested showing Costello’s hands. That proved truly devastating. Those hands relentlessly reflected Costello’s tension and guilt: hands drumming on the table; hands gripping a water glass, fingers tightly clenched; hands tearing paper into little shreds; hands sweating—all the while accompanied by the words of the committee’s relentless pursuit. Costello’s attempts to represent himself as merely a businessman who had made a success in the new world were not convincing. The television lights were hard on his eyes, he claimed. It was time to go home. He walked out, to be followed by a contempt subpoena.

Some 70 percent of New York City television sets were on, which gave the hearings twice the ratings achieved by the World Series during the previous fall. People in the other cities hooked up were also mesmerized. The newspapers wrote stories about husbands coming back to find the housework unfinished, their wives glued to the television set and wanting to talk only about the inner workings of the mob. In New York, Con Ed had to add an extra generator to supply the power for all the television sets. The editors of
Life
magazine understood immediately that American politics had changed. “The week of March 12, 1951, will occupy a special place in history,”
Life
wrote. “The U.S. and the world had never experienced anything like it.... All along the television cable ... [people] had suddenly gone indoors ... into living rooms, taverns and club rooms, auditoriums, and back offices. There in eerie half-light, looking at millions of small frosty screens, people sat as if charmed. For days on end and into the nights they watched with complete absorption ... the first big television broadcast of an affair of their government, the broadcast from which all future uses of television in public affairs must date.... Never before had the attention of the nation been so completely riveted on a single matter. The Senate investigation into interstate crime was almost the sole subject of national conversation.”

Estes Kefauver became America’s first politician to benefit from the glare of television—even though the hearings had been devastating to his own party. They had shown that it was almost impossible to tell where the power and influence of the mob ended and that of the city officials began; former mayor Bill O’Dwyer, newly minted as Truman’s ambassador to Mexico, admitted that he had knowingly appointed men with connections to organized crime to high office. (Some of Truman’s aides thought that O’Dwyer should resign immediately, but Truman, a man of old-fashioned loyalties, would have none of it.) Kefauver immediately went on the lecture circuit and made a handsome additional income. Magazines competed to put him on their covers. He appeared as a mystery guest on the television show
What’s My Line?
and gave the fifty-dollar fee to charity. Hollywood wanted him for a bit part in a Humphrey Bogart movie called
The Enforcer.
He put his name to a ghostwritten four-part series for the
Saturday Evening Post,
“What I Found in the Underworld.” His book, written jointly with Sidney Shalett,
Crime in America
was on
The New York Times
best-seller list for twelve weeks. Something of an erratic husband and a womanizer (Capitol Hill’s nickname for him was the Claw, for his habit of groping women in Senate elevators), he was chosen father of the year. A poll of 128 Washington correspondents placed him second only to Paul Douglas in ability.