Where Is the Line?

Congress got around to some formal worrying about TV's morals last week, with results that should have made many a TV comic envious.

The star performer, who launched the House investigation of TV: Congressman Ezekiel Gathings of West Memphis, Ark., who enlivened his testimony with an impromptu shimmy to demonstrate how a grass-skirted TV actress danced a hoochie-coochie. Said Statesman Gathings in breathless summary: "The rashest thing I ever viewed."

Colorado's Republican J. Edgar Chenoweth, a member of the subcommittee, was eager for facts & figures on TV's plunging necklines. "In boxing, if a man hits below the belt there is a foul," said Chenoweth, sententiously. "Now where is the line here?" After a thoughtful pause, Witness Gathings allowed it was "a hard matter to say just where the line should be," but hopefully urged that "reasonableness be the guide."

Alcoholics & Snobs. South Carolina's Democrat Joseph Bryson, a Baptist and an avid joiner (Mason, Shriner, Woodman, Redman, Junior Merrymaker, Moose and United Commercial Traveler), admitted that what he liked on TV was Fred Waring, Herb Shriner and "rassling." What he didn't like was the "wife-swapping" indicated by the introduction of a TV star (unnamed) which included the information that the star's current wife was "so-and-so." At this news, Colorado's Chenoweth again sat up and took notice. "Shows the actual exchange of wives, does it?" he asked intently. "Is that a common type of program?" Pleased by this alertness, Congressman Bryson nodded solemn assent.

A parade of Prohibition witnesses took up the cudgels against the Demon Rum. They charged that brewers have taken over TV with their "beercasting" because "they need a new crop of drinkers to replace chronic alcoholics." The witnesses also objected that TV advertising plays up the creamy frothiness of beer and ignores its alcoholic content. Dr. J. Raymond Schmidt, of the International Order of Good Templars, expressing fear of the snob appeal of TV, told a pathetic story of "a little tot who says to her mother, 'Why don't you drink such-and-such a beer like the fashionable ladies do?'" Questioning developed that Crusader Schmidt did not have too much firsthand knowledge of the effects of TV on tiny tots: he admitted he has neither a TV set nor any children.

Necklines & Blushes. Crime shows also got their lumps (in Gathings' words: "TV is a continuation of nothin' in the world but shootin' and killin' and stompin' on people in alleys"), but sex got by far the biggest play. Illinois' Republican Congressman Fred Busbey (who is both an Elk and a Moose) gave a resounding if not very relevant introduction to Chicago News Commentator Paul Harvey as "one of the greatest living Americans today" and one who has long been in the "forefront of the fight on Communism." Harvey attributed TV's woes to the fact that most performers are "steeped in the bawdy night life" of Manhattan. He insisted he was no prude but that things are so bad he has had to turn off one program (unnamed) "rather than blush in front of my own wife."

Elizabeth Smart, of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, digressed from denouncing beer to complain that she had seen some mighty low-cut necklines ("They dropped almost off the shoulder") and to disapprove of Groucho Marx's pretending to misunderstand a lady who said she was a skip-tracer.* Quipped Groucho: "You're a stripteaser? That's fine. I'm tired of this namby-pamby stuff."

Mostly, the television industry tried to pretend that the congressional investigation wasn't going on. But in Hollywood,

Groucho Marx could not resist cracking back. Said Groucho: "Television is cleaner than most American parlors. Sex was doing pretty well long before television was invented."

* Someone who tracks down evasive debtors.

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