The Tall Gambler

The most exciting television performance of 1954 may have taken place behind, rather than in front of, the TV cameras--in the office of NBC's president and thinker-in-chief Sylvester L. ("Pat") Weaver Jr. A lanky, ingratiating man of 45 who towers (6 ft. 4 in.) above his L-shaped desk. Weaver talks in a cascade of nonstop sentences that sometimes sound like high-flown doubletalk. Sample: "Speaking communications-wise, you believe that in order to have pride and the creative restlessness, your social responsibility as management is to see that every opportunity is used to expose people to things in which they have expressed no interest, but in which, you as an information optimist are committed to believe, they would have expressed interest if they had been exposed to them." Translation: TV can and should bring culture to the masses.

Weaver's big act for the year was the TV "spectacular," the costly, splashy televised conglomerations of high-priced talent. On these shows NBC has staked prestige and resources in the hope of changing the nation's viewing habits. The NBC spectacular that flashed on screens for 90 minutes last week brought song, dance, comedy, Sonja Henie on ice, and the incomparable Jimmy Durante ("Gimme some No-Cal champagne!"). It was the eighth and best of Weaver's big gambles. But it was not final proof that the spectacular, at $200,000 or more apiece, is going to pay off for NBC with the public, with the critics and with those all-impor-tants of radio-TV, the advertising men.

Magazine-Concept. Committed to still more spectaculars between now and June, Weaver last week was candid: "We're still in the learning process. The advertisers are still on the sidelines watching and waiting. We think the whole pattern will create a psychology among program buyers to put the heat on us to expand. So far this is not true." But he was undismayed. In creating NBC's Today some two years ago, Weaver fooled the experts and persuaded as many as 10 million Americans to watch their TV sets at 7 a.m. That launched his so-called "magazine-concept"--i.e., a lot of advertisers buy spots instead of all of the show. "Today was almost laughed out of existence by the critics," says Weaver. "Home began slowly too. No one believed Tonight would be a network success." The magazine-concept of advertising is now commonplace in TV.

A Dartmouth Phi Beta Kappa whose brain seethes with slogans, ideas and erudite remembrances, Weaver was a zooming success in the advertising business. For one thing, he not only could get along with American Tobacco's late, volcanically eccentric George Washington Hill, but he could even argue with him.

It's a Deal. A rare combination of huckster hustle, athletic endurance and intellectual curiosity keeps Weaver thinking, talking and grinding out long memos on subjects far beyond NBC's practical problems of the moment. "We are talking long-term vitality," he explains as he spouts notions for vast, if often vague, future enterprises. The public will not accept culture in large doses, Weaver believes, but through his spectaculars and other major NBC shows, he thinks that small injections of ballet, music and other serious arts have been paving the way for larger and larger doses. "This is integration of great cultural entertainment that at this point the general public does not like. By integrating it into lighter forms, we think we've been able to create an audience for it ... If Sol Hurok did an evening of unforgettable music, it would be the sort of thing we want . . . We could sit down right now and say, Okay Ernest Hemingway, it's a deal."

Weaver has already launched a "Wise Old Men" series to bring such elders as Bertrand Russell, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Bernhard Berenson onto TV screens, and he likes to talk of whole future programs devoted to cultural events. But Weaver's principal preoccupation is still the problem of turning his gamble into a success among televiewers and advertisers.

In the cutthroat confines of what Weaver likes to call "the high executive level" of radio and TV, there is no certainty that such a gambler can count on being around long enough even to see the last throws of his own dice. But if that was worrying NBC's Weaver last week, he did not show it. He had brought the excitement of the year to the business, forced his competitor CBS into some spectaculars of its own (although that is never admitted), and jarred the advertising men out of their rut.

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