Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (16 page)

Neuman discussed his findings with the executive personnel of the two shows, Norman Felton and David Victor of
Kildare
, and Leonard Freeman of
Novak
. Like the vast majority of people who are otherwise well informed and knowledgeable about current affairs, Neuman and his colleagues at M-G-M had absolutely no idea of the magnitude of the V.D. epidemic. They had assumed, as most people do, that the discovery of the penicillin cure in 1943 had pretty much eradicated these diseases.

They learned that following a steep drop in the incidence of V.D. during the middle fifties, it staged a comeback and is today a far more devastating killer than respectable, well-publicized diseases like smallpox and polio. That over the last six years infectious syphilis has tripled in the fifteen- to nineteen-year age group; teen-agers alone account for six hundred new cases of V.D. each day. That one thousand Americans die each month of V.D., and many more become blind, deaf, and insane. That of cases treated by private physicians, only about 11 percent are reported to public health authorities.

“The really frustrating thing is that today, for the first time in history, total eradication of venereal disease is a practical possibility, because a quick and certain cure
does
now exist,” said Neuman. “The tragedy is that the people simply aren’t getting the facts—and especially the young people.” He was particularly struck with the inadequacy of V.D. education in the nation’s public schools—in many areas nonexistent, in others spotty and often sadly ineffective. “Too often it’s left up to an embarrassed gym teacher who shows a few slides,” he said. “The only state with a competent system is Oregon, where they start in the sixth grade, and consequently the V.D. rate there is extremely low.”

As the M-G-M production team investigated further, they were evidently seized with some of the crusading zeal of the health department workers who day in and day out wrestle with the problem of getting the facts about V.D. to an ignorant and apathetic public.

“We all felt obligated by the nature of the subject to do something about it,” said Neuman. “It was a marvelous, rare opportunity to perform a public service.” Leonard Freeman emphasized the need to remove the social onus that is attached to this particular disease, “so a young person would feel free to go to a doctor at the beginning. People should realize it’s not the victim that’s abhorrent, it’s the disease. The terror of syphilis is that the symptoms are so brief—and painless. The victim can sit it out for two weeks, and then the symptoms disappear altogether—but he becomes a carrier, he isn’t really cured. The disease goes underground but reappears in later life in the most deadly forms. The reasons for doing the show, to bring this to the light of day, seemed to us quite indisputable.”

Furthermore they were convinced that the unusual and intriguing format of the proposed two-part drama, in which the stars of
Novak
and
Kildare
would appear together in both shows, would have increased the viewing audience enormously. “It would have been damn good showmanship and would have sprung the ratings way up, which means the life of the show,” said Newman. “I have the same contempt for the ratings that everyone else has, but they’re a fact of life, you have to live with them.”

The next move for the producers of the two shows was to sell the idea of the two-part drama to the NBC officials in New York.

“Knowing the wariness of the networks in tackling this sort of subject, we realized it must be extraordinarily well and carefully done,” said Freeman. “Neuman submitted an extended, unusually detailed outline of the drama so there’d be no surprises for the network—all the cards were on the table. The network considered the outline long and painfully, then gave the go-ahead, but with a proviso that there would be no carte-blanche approval until they saw the finished script.”

This, it seems, was a departure from usual procedure. Generally proposals for episodes are accepted or rejected at the outline stage, after being considered by NBC’s Programming Department for entertainment value and the Standards and Practices Department which rules on “matters of taste and propriety.”

The draft screenplay, having won this tentative approval, was next subjected to the searching scrutiny of various experts. It was vetted for medical accuracy by public health educators in Atlanta, Washington, and Los Angeles; for English usage by a panel of the National Education Association (which acts in an advisory capacity to the
Novak
program); and for “taste and propriety” by NBC’s own Broadcast Standards Department. The painstaking work of these groups is evidenced in a formidable stack of correspondence suggesting improvements in the draft.

The Los Angeles Health Department corrects Dr. Gillespie’s discussion of symptoms: “It might be well to qualify Gillespie’s statement, ‘In the infectious stage syphilis is
often
simple to detect and diagnose.’ ”

The National Education Association punctiliously corrects Mr. Novak’s English: “Improve Novak’s English to ‘here
are
a couple of unsatisfactory slips.’ ” “Novak’s ‘you sure need something’ is too slangy and should be changed to ‘you
certainly
need something.’ ” “Novak should say, ‘
whom
would they suspect,’ not ‘who.’ ” “Novak seems to be imitating Jimmy Cagney with his reply of ‘yeh’ to Dr. Kildare.”

And Joyce’s French: “Joyce should say to her French teacher, ‘simplement,
mon ami
,’ not ‘amant,’ which means ‘lover.’ ”

And Mr. Peoples’s arithmetic: “Forty-eight out of one hundred eighty school days is closer to
twenty-five percent
than thirty percent.”

The Broadcast Standards Department anxiously urges prudence all down the line: “In the speech ‘God knows how many unreported cases,’ please delete ‘God’ and substitute ‘
who
.’ ” “As is your custom, please exercise caution when showing the interns staring appreciatively at the group of nurses passing by. In addition, please eliminate Dr. Tyler’s speech, ‘If she is not anybody’s kin—and nobody’s sister—I would like to scrub with her.’ ” “Please delete ‘sexual intercourse’ and substitute ‘
relations
.’ ” “Please delete ‘a case of syphilis’ and substitute ‘
this disease
.’ ” “Please delete ‘your friendly backend’ and substitute ‘
back
.’ ”

The finished script, pruned, pared, trimmed, tidied, polished, and sterilized, successfully cleared the NBC Standards and Practices Department, generally the last hurdle in the long obstacle race for writer and script. All was set in motion for production; Franciscus and the other leads had already learned their parts—when the word came. NBC had decided to kill the whole project.

“You’re never told
who
decides these things. Nobody wants to stand up and be counted,” said Leonard Freeman. “There was no memorandum with somebody’s signature on it; we learned of the decision through a telephone call from the local NBC man who had got the word from New York.” Neither, apparently, were any specific reasons given the producers for the sudden veto—merely the mysterious observation that the plays “were not in the best interests of the viewing public,” and that the subject was not suitable for the early hour of the
Novak
show. “The ironic part of that reasoning is that the very audience that motivated the careful and arduous preparation of the two-part script was the audience chosen by the network to be sheltered—namely, teen-agers,” remarked Freeman.

Understandably, the decision was received with anguish and frustration by the M-G-M producers, who saw the fruit of months of painstaking work arbitrarily discarded. “We pulled out every stop to persuade them to change their minds,” said Neuman. “I was on the telephone upside down and backwards,” said Norman Felton. “I believed in this project. But there was no recourse.” The Surgeon General’s Office sent a full delegation to New York to plead with NBC executives, and the National Education Association threw the weight of its million members behind a request for reconsideration, but without success. “There was some talk that maybe, possibly, at some future time NBC might do a documentary on V.D.,” said Freeman. “But obviously this would not have fulfilled the same purpose. As NBC well knows, teen-agers don’t watch documentaries. They are watched by only a tiny fraction of the viewing audience, by the more sophisticated people who are least in need of this sort of information.”

NBC now began to catch it from all sides. The
Saturday Review
, in an editorial entitled “NBC Turns Down a Golden Opportunity,” pointed out: “If delicacy is the issue with NBC’s Continuity Acceptance Department, it had better take a hard second look at much that goes out on its network. Sex at every extreme and brutality without precedent this side of the Grand Guignol are daily fare on television, including NBC.” The Los Angeles
Times
called the decision ridiculous: “Why NBC should believe TV drama is not to deal with society and life escapes us.”
Newsweek
said, “The network’s open mind slammed shut.”

Seeking further information on the sequence of events, I obtained audience with NBC in the person of Mr. Robert Kasmire, whose weighty title is Vice-President of Corporate Information. Mr. Kasmire was vague about who had actually delivered the
coup de grâce
to the two-part drama. He seemed to remember that there were about five people, including himself, involved in the decision, and that there was at first a difference of opinion among them. The disagreement was not resolved in any formalized fashion, he said, no votes are taken in these policy meetings. “It is rather a matter of discussion and concession. Our judgment was on the side of caution.” I asked whether it would be possible to talk with somebody at NBC who felt deeply, as a matter of principle and rectitude, that the plays should
not
be shown, that to show them would be wrong and would do harm to the viewing audience. I should have liked to meet somebody who would defend this sort of position so that in all fairness his views could be set forth, but Mr. Kasmire was unable to produce such a person.

The finished script was rejected, he said, because “if the plays were to have substance and authenticity as a discussion of this serious problem, there would have to be reference to sexual intimacy and a certain amount of clinical detail. The question arose as to whether this was fit and appropriate as entertainment. The determination was made that it was not.”

This was getting curiouser and curiouser—for how could a play of substance and authenticity be written about syphilis
without
reference to sexual intimacy? “Some of us hadn’t considered that at the beginning,” said Mr. Kasmire uncomfortably. Was consideration given to asking the writer to rework certain passages? “Well, no; it would have looked silly to go back to the writer and say, ‘We can’t talk about sex.’ ”

Indeed it would, for the whole point of the script—and a major thrust of public health education about venereal disease—is to make it crystal clear that for all practical purposes sexual intimacy is the
only
way V.D. can be transmitted. The likelihood of becoming infected in any other way has been compared to the likelihood of being hit by a falling meteor. “Venereal disease is
not
spread from toilet seats or doorknobs or towels,” say the high-school pamphlets on the subject. At Harvard, Dr. Alfred Worcester, in his famous freshman hygiene course, used to drive this fact home in a slightly different way. Invariably a student would ask, “Can you catch syphilis on a toilet seat?” And invariably the good doctor would pause reflectively before replying, “Well ... I suppose you
could
, but it does seem to me it would be a rather uncomfortable place....”

I asked Mr. Kasmire who, exactly, among the viewing public might have been expected to object to the program; whether, for example, there were any particular religious groups that are known to take exception to this sort of subject being aired. No, said Mr. Kasmire; in fact, many of the protests against cancellation of the two-part play came from Protestant clergymen, and one of its strongest backers was Father Francis L. Filas, head of the theology department at Loyola, the well-known Catholic university. Would the sponsors have objected? Oh, no! They don’t interfere with the content of shows. The advertisers are not a factor; most shows are sponsored by a large number of advertisers. Who, then? “It’s hard to say.... I suppose, that section of the public that would feel the subject of V.D. is not a fit or suitable topic for an entertainment program.”

Feeling slightly dizzy from going round in circles, I asked whether Mr. Kasmire and his colleagues at NBC had reconsidered their decision to ban “The Rich Who Are Poor” after the Surgeon General urged them to do so. “No, there was no formal rediscussion of the matter.” A surprising answer. One might have thought that an official request from the government in a matter of vital concern to the nation’s health should have merited at least a little get-together of NBC policymakers to talk it all over. But apparently it was not thought necessary.

Mr. Kasmire went on to explain that the question of taste and propriety is in a sort of “gray area” of television. That is to say, decisions in this area cannot be black or white, there are so many imponderables....

In a last effort to get to grips with any real objections based on improprieties in the script, I asked Mr. Kasmire to mark the dirty passages in my copy. The script was returned to me with a note from Mr. Kasmire: “As I suspected, the passages I’ve put clips on will hardly qualify as ‘dirty.’ They do, however, represent the type of treatment—doubtless necessary to any valid dramatic treatment of venereal disease—that, it was felt, a great portion of the audience would find unsuitable within the context of family entertainment.” The marked passages, I found, included all of those portions of the script which dealt with venereal disease. Once more we had come full circle.

Sleuthing for the villain in the gray area is an unrewarding task. There is, it seems, no bloated cigar-smoking moneybags behind the scenes who declares with cynical grin, “What’s a few thousand syphilitic kids to me? I’ve got a million invested in this series.” There are nothing but good guys at NBC, who operate in a veritable quagmire of nervous niceness, anxious to please everybody and anxious above all not to give offense to that mysterious nonentity, “the viewing public.”