On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
Onlelevision after the revolution BY MARVIN KITMAN I have seen people drinking on television before. When Jackie Glea-son appeared on a 90-minute David Frost special earlier this season, he...
...Krauss refused...
...A few weeks ago, on an educational television show called News-front...
...Ten minutes later, the dregs of the coffee drained, the King of Miami said, "Where's the broad with the booze...
...I got a load on just watching Gleason finish four cups of coffee...
...By not rushing right over, the cops missed an excellent opportunity to arrest an educational tv station's tape machines, which would have raised an important legal issue...
...One student of American civilization, Dick Cavett, recently predicted that the kids will soon be "plastered" and, ultimately, "stewed...
...Norman Dorsen, the law professor—who, although a member of the debate opposition, appeared to be taking both sides— was not whispering anything in Rubin's ear about his legal rights...
...But I assume one reason is that Merv Griffin requires you to be a card-carrying member to talk on his cbs program...
...Thus it was necessary for the woman to leave the phones and change channels to verify the claims of an orgy on Channel 13...
...I understand you are having a pot party on the air," one police captain said to the wndt telephone operator...
...Well, I had visions of the cops busting through the studio doors and arresting him for possession...
...When the producers of Newsfront were trying to set up their debate, Jerry Rubin reportedly listed as one of his non-negotiable demands that a copy of his new book be held up by the host...
...For the 30 minutes or so that Rubin was presumably under the influence of pot, he remained the same rude, belligerent, immature, incoherent person the now generation has come to adore...
...The revolutionary had verbally assaulted and physically pushed the moderator on the air...
...All the police and I had to go on was Rub-bin's firm testimony that he was smoking grass...
...In the First Amendment furor over the way cbs handled Hoffman's choice of clothing for the evening of March 28, it is easy to forget the fact that he went on the Merv Griffin Show to plug his book (which will be nameless, to express my support for those who favor destroying the system of plugging books...
...This instance of electronic cowardice cheated viewers of the chance to see Hoffman, the revolutionary, shilling his book like any other doctrinaire capitalist writer...
...Many viewers at home, it turned out, believed Jerry Rubin...
...It was a widely advertised debate between members of the New Left (Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and Rennie Davis) and the Old Left (James Wechsler of the New York Post, Richard Rovere of the New Yorker and Professor Norman Dorsen of the NYU Law School...
...The debate ended with the Rubin-Hoffman-Davis team clearly outpointing Wechsler-Rovere-Dor-sen by alternately ridiculing, bullying, ignoring, and nonsequituring their elders...
...That I seemed to be the only one excited about the event left me with several alternatives to consider: (1) Rubin was not smoking marijuana, as advertised...
...When Jackie Glea-son appeared on a 90-minute David Frost special earlier this season, he opened the interview by observing, "I see you have provided the necessary...
...Though Rubin may have been smoking marijuana then, the law reads that the police must catch the violator in possession of the stuff...
...After it was all over, and the winners were eating hamburgers provided by the Eastern Educational Network, Rubin took Krauss aside...
...Perhaps it was a cheap grade," I suggested...
...He lifted a coffee cup of the necessary to his lips, and smacked them audibly...
...Hoffman, I learned the other day, is a new member of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (aftra), one of the more wealthy and conservative unions...
...4) maybe it's legal to smoke marijuana on television, but not in public...
...Before appearing on the Newsfront debate— a golden opportunity to radicalize millions of moderate tv viewers— he insisted on a $100 honorarium...
...I was experiencing a new high in educational television entertainment...
...3) everybody was too stunned to mention it...
...Nothing wonderful was happening to him...
...I can't give you a definitive answer...
...What did I expect to happen to Rubin when he lit up...
...Unlike the old liberals, your Wechslers and Roveres who keep repeating the rhetoric of the past...
...A few days later I asked the moderator of the program what really happened in the studio that night...
...He just lit a match to the necessary and said, "I'm stoned out of my mind...
...Rubin chewed up the remainder," Krauss recalls...
...How did we do...
...Krauss finally remembered another bit of incriminating evidence...
...At first I found myself contemplating the language gap developing among members of the drug culture...
...He did not ask the host, Mitchell Krauss, if it was all right to smoke...
...At the butt end, something happened that the cameras did not show the viewers at home...
...If Rubin, Hoffman and Davis were merely kidding around, I suppose the only disenchanted viewers would have been the millions of kids who sincerely believe that, whatever their personality quirks, the three always tell it like it is...
...Rubin, Hoffman and Davis passed the joint among themselves during the debate...
...The first case of a man smoking marijuana on television had an odd smell about it...
...A tv director or some other news department functionary could have shot Oswald in the back...
...And as soon as the square world discovers its words have been preempted, the cool world promptly drops them...
...A cheap thrill ran down my spine...
...I haven't asked Abbie why he joined the forces of reaction at aftra (he isn't known for his straight answers...
...At wndt, one of the 16 educational tv stations in the East carrying News-front, the switchboard lit up with phone calls from the precincts...
...The show had been taped a week earlier...
...He was no advertisement for smoking marijuana...
...Krauss, a nominee for an Emmy award in television journalism this year (he lost), replied, "I just don't know...
...Somebody who was at the show that night recalled that Hoffman held up the book, attacked his publisher for changing a few lines of type and, for the coup de grace, threw the book at Griffin...
...I heard Jerry Rubin, the noted revolutionary, announce that he was about to turn on...
...But all we saw was the gun...
...Rubin asked his vanquished host...
...Why is it that they always use words borrowed from the liquor fanciers ("high," "stoned," "bombed") to describe their condition of euphoria...
...Carrying around one's book to television shows ranks high among the more humiliating aspects of writing these days...
...Mitchell Krauss said he didn't know whether Rubin actually was smoking marijuana...
...It reminded me of the Kremlin's painting Beria out of pictures after the purge, as if his crimes would cease to exist...
...Jack Ruby may have looked guilty on television when he shot Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963...
...one of the sales points for grass is that it makes you a beautiful person...
...You were great," Krauss assured the revolutionary hero...
...The Newsfront program was not, as you might think, a discussion of drugs...
...Rubin proved to be a poor dialectician, but he certainly knew how to elevate the debate...
...So much has been said about the stupidity of the cbs decision to black out—actually, on color sets it was a blue-out—Hoffman and his flag shirt...
...Rubin showed up for the taping with 10 copies of his book anyway—an example of the excesses of revolutionary fervor...
...The means justify the ends...
...But even if they lied about the marijuana, it would not be any significant betrayal of the revolution, since one of its goals is to destroy the system, and the broadcasting system perpetuates so many evils in society...
...However, I can say that I didn't get that overwhelming aroma one usually gets when marijuana is being smoked...
...Still, I've become a little uptight about the extreme measures revolutionaries of the Hoffman stripe are taking to destroy the electronic media...
...As I watched him smoke the joint, I began to grow alarmed...
...2) he was smoking it, but so was everybody else on the panel, leaving nothing to talk about...
...They called police stations all over New York City to report the incident...
...A tv tape is only circumstantial evidence...
...Something the police don't know about the behind-the-scenes affairs of educational television is that the switchboard operator always keeps the traditional tv set in the reception room tuned to commercial stations...
Vol. 53 • May 1970 • No. 11
