The Age of Plastic
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television THE AGE OF PLASTIC MARVIN KITMAN People, "starring, as CBS put it, Phyllis George, was cancelled on November 9. (With the new fall shows being kicked off the air faster than you...
...She was so high, in fact, they could have scraped her off the studio ceiling...
...You know," Ashe said, "I also want to do an Eric Sevareid on the evening news once a week...
...Tiegs...
...Phyllis George was forced on People and on CBS...
...With reporters pushing closer and closer in the excitement of getting a story, Evans, who happened to be standing at the front of the press group, found himself trapped right under George (Miss Texas...
...The Phyllis George who anchored the video version of the wildly successful Time-Life publication, for example, was no longer the Phyllis George we all knew and loved—the one who hosted the Miss America beauty pageant on NBC last September 9. She was wonderful that night of nights, singing and dancing and displaying all her fabulous talent...
...The new one—who made her debut on the first episode of People (September 18), had black hair...
...But my inside source tells a different story...
...It dos not matter that you fail, so long as each flop is grander than the last...
...On People all she got to do was conduct interviews and try to act bright...
...At the end of their talk, she leaned over and kissed him, thereby perhaps starting a new trend in boob-tube journalism...
...Why, then, did it fail to capture the imagination of the American television viewers...
...A bad idea whose time has finally come, was how one trade writer described it...
...Still, the program is worth talking about...
...Now, this girl looks like she is being led around the stage by a seeing-eye dog...
...Yet she is not making much progress toward being Barbara Walters...
...This seemed to make her depressed, very subdued, and flat as last night's ginger ale...
...We thought it was extruded vinyl...
...I make fun of Baba Waawaa, but you really have to respect her when she interviews...
...But that was the old Phyllis George...
...George's experience on People, therefore, only enhances her potential as the eventual replacement for Walter Cronkite...
...It's important for America to have beauty and winners.' I knew from that day on that Phyllis George would be a great football expert and a TV star with her own show...
...Thus, in the premiere we saw three minutes of Studio 54, where a private party was being held in honor of Farrah Fawcett-Shampoo...
...In a brazen attempt to turn her into a credible an-chorwoman, a serious journalist, this person probably told her to be more sedate, more sober...
...The audience's attention span...
...You must be able to listen and think simultaneously, too...
...He was right...
...The geniuses behind this enterprise were producers David Susskind and Charlotte Schiff Jones...
...Moreover, picking George sounded like one of Susskind's kind of fresh ideas...
...Jones is a former ABC secretary who seems to have risen in the business fast enough to get a nosebleed...
...u nder these circumstances, People should have been a rousing hit, the first magazine for small people with small minds...
...He was the one who, when advising Dustin Hoffman about his future, said, "I have one word for you—plastics...
...Thus, for any young girl who is dreaming of a career in TV journalism the words of the old guy in The Graduate are useful...
...True, in this crowd Pauley of NBC Today is a genius...
...It takes more than beauty, a set of good teeth (or the name of a good dentist), a winning smile or personality...
...Besides, TV is a mini-medium...
...These two put their heads together and realized that all of life can be condensed into three minutes...
...he even called his company Talent Associates Ltd...
...When the newspaper critics viciously attacked the three-minute—concept, charging that it lacked depth, the producers responded by doing longer stories—sonic running as much as four or five minutes...
...Jane Pauley...
...None of them will ever be Walters...
...Phyllis George and her artistic advisers thought she could do it...
...CBS had to lure her back from NBC Sports...
...The executives' minds...
...It has also made possible Cheryl Tiegs, whose previous training was in commercials, where she played the lips and eyes in the "Cover Girl" cosmetics line...
...I was reminded, too, that she was one of the few to win temporary possession of the diamond crown without the benefit of three names (as in Billie Jo Goldberg and Lulu Belle Schwartz...
...Holy Jack Linklet-ter...
...She didn't even get to act dumb, as on her long stint on NFL: Today, the CBS Sports pre-football half-hour where she made her name as a journalist...
...Perhaps she had qualifications back in Chicago that we don't know about...
...Her exuberance was even evident on the first People pilot, a single episode made by the Home Box Office people last season and presented as a special on late-night TV...
...This is truly the age of plastics...
...On Television THE AGE OF PLASTIC MARVIN KITMAN People, "starring, as CBS put it, Phyllis George, was cancelled on November 9. (With the new fall shows being kicked off the air faster than you can say "Freddy Silverman," the whole 1978 season may one day be written off by scholars as a figment of this critic's imagination...
...The talent...
...Sandy Hill and Cheryl Tiegs on ABC's Good Morning America...
...Susskind was the greatest brain active in television when I was a kid...
...You would have needed search-lights from a gala premiere on Broadway to find her...
...Some people have explained the meteoric rise of Phyllis George by saying well, what other woman interviewers are around...
...The only thing we could do was to offer her her own show...
...Everything in it is supposed to be small...
...She was really up for that one...
...All the important stories of the week were to run three minutes...
...No doubt somebody connected with the creative side of the widely bally-hooed TV magazine deserves the credit for bringing Phyllis down...
...Doing his duty as a journalist, after the bathing suit competition he joined the crowd around the finalists, displayed on a platform three steps up...
...Looking at her thighs," the Harper's correspondent recalls, "I was finally able to ask her my question: 'Miss George, don't you feel this is a little bit of a cattle contest?' She patted me on the head, and said, 'There, there, you'll get over it...
...I was not among those objecting to the shorter format...
...Unfortunately, interviewing is a special talent...
...Three minutes of Phyllis George can be an eternity—like the segment where she took a mobile unit to interview some poor ole country boy millionaire folksinger down in the bay—ous of Louisiana...
...She was picked a couple of seasons back as the replacement for Barabara Walters because she sounded the most like Barbara Walters...
...After all, time is relative...
...What do you say Walter?' " He never posed the question because he knew what Walt would say, but he continued: PHYLLIS GEORGE "The problem is, Ashe and the others, they think they really can do it...
...Hill...
...At any rate, the cancellation of People does not mean the end of Phyllis George...
...Her performance evoked for me her own queenly reign as the 1971 Miss America...
...Television is run by the theory of ostentatious failure...
...She did not sing or dance...
...Pauley...
...She has the advantage of every electronic device modern technology is capable of plugging into her ears...
...You have to learn how to do it, provided you're capable of learning in the first place...
...It's about time a TV mag had the courage to do an expose on this area...
...Of course, some people fault Suss-kind, the reported guru behind the project, although People's potential as a hot TV property was first discovered by David Frost...
...And she kept that edge throughout the whole show...
...My source projected what might have happened next: "I call Walter [Cronkite] and tell him, 'We can get Ashe on the tennis if we can promise him once a week on your show...
...The blame, I think, has to be pinned on Phyllis George, who must have come across to the public as putting on airs...
...The problem was," my source explained, "that George was going to go to NBC for more money on their Sunday football show...
...She has put a lot of years into developing the craft...
...That woman could do it all...
...A writer friend of mine, Eli Evans, was at Atlantic City that year covering the pageant for Harper's magazine...
...The thing is we didn't realize in the late 1960s that the old boy was talking about people...
...We also witnessed three minutes of the other big story of the week—Suzanne Somers of Three's Company trying on lingerie in some department store...
...Whatever they may think in network board rooms as they study the TVQ's (surveys on the recognizability and popularity of performers), the ability to interview well is not God-given...
...For the heart-warming story of Phyllis George a classic rags to riches saga of the Miss America who became Miss An-chorwoman without knowing anything, except the right peoplesays a lot about what TV journalism has become and what it does to its "stars...
...The invention of Phyllis George, as I believe Marshall McLuhan's wife first suggested, has made obsolescent pros like Pauline Fredericks...
...To further illustrate his point, he told me how Arthur Ashe came into CBS Sports to talk about doing expert commentary on tennis...
...As for People itself, it was supposed to be a TV glossy with a difference...
...In this context, 180 seconds of People is the equivalent of War and Peace...
...it used to be a vivacious, kicky fun-loving red...
...The talent is always holding you up these days...
...Or look at it from another angle: In the old days (1968-70), the best things television had to offer were the fascinating, powerful, funny, visually evocative statements made on Madison Avenue that lasted for 60 seconds...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 1
