The Whammy on Mammy

"Brainwashing!" cried Florida's Representative Donald Ray Matthews last week on the floor of the House. "Disgraceful!" roared his fellow Floridian, Representative Robert Sikes. The Congressmen echoed the outrage of the Stephen Foster Memorial Commission of Florida (state song: Swanee River) on learning that the nation's TV and radio networks have put Foster's lyrics in tune with the race-conscious times by banning such words as "darkies," "mammy" and "massa." From Tallahassee, Governor LeRoy Collins cracked: "Let's not put the whammy on mammy." On the other hand, the networks' practice was defended as "good taste" by prominent Negroes, whose pressures helped produce the ban in the first place. The networks themselves incredulously pointed out that this was the first complaint since they imposed the ban--all of 22 years ago.

The uproar underscored one of TV's growing headaches: it is constantly caught in the middle by the slings and arrows of outraged viewers--individuals and organized groups. This is an occupational hazard long familiar to Hollywood, which learned how sensitive all kinds of minorities can be to slurs, real or imagined. An avalanche of mail (NBC alone gets 3,000,000 letters a year) has convinced network executives that TV, because it shares the privacy of the viewer's home, seems to give offense and draw abuse even more readily.

"Dirty Digs." Nothing seems too trifling to pink a sensibility. NBC's files contain a letter in behalf of leather-jacket manufacturers, protesting the jacket's use as "a sort of TV shorthand" for juvenile hoodlums. In Kansas the Independence Reporter ran an editorial accusing the networks of airing "dirty little nonsensical digs" at Kansas. Wrote a Pittsburgh physician: "Why is it that whenever a TV situation calls for a pharmacist he is always a doddering old incompetent?" Complained a Las Vegas waitress: "Something [should] be done about always depicting a waitress as a hardboiled, gum-chewing, illiterate woman."

Humane societies objected not only to a lion tamer's use of a chair to prod a bored lion, but to the TV appearance of rabbits who looked vaguely unhappy. A civilian patriot thought that spoofs of barracks life on Phil Silvers' You'll Never Get Rich were tearing down the fabric of the armed forces. When a character in a drama announced that he would forgo his M.D. ambitions and settle for becoming a chiropractor, howls arose from chiropractors. Securities dealers and the New York Stock Exchange itself kick at the sight of a shady stockbroker, and Manhattan pawnbrokers (many of whom are of Irish extraction) squirm in writing at what they sometimes consider anti-Jewish characterizations.

"You Don't Like Father?" No TV star, however popular, is immune from the angry viewer. Garry Moore (real name: Thomas Garrison Morfit) once announced that he was giving St. Christopher medals to members of his staff. Some viewers, believing him to be Jewish, berated him for hypocrisy in giving a Catholic talisman. Others, taking him for a Catholic, admonished him for plugging his religion. Says Episcopalian Moore: "If you say 'Happy Mother's Day,' someone's going to write in and say, 'What's the matter? You don't like your father?' "

At NBC all the complaints find their way to Stockton Helffrich, 45, who as head of the network's continuity acceptance department also wields the censor's pencil. Says Helffrich: "If every special interest were to constitute a new entry in a list of taboos, we'd have to go out of business." Helffrich, like CBS's Herbert A. Carlborg, carefully weighs each beef and tries, where justified and feasible, to do something about it. For example, he makes writers, producers and directors aware of complaint trends and of requests by such groups as the American Foundation for the Blind, e.g., don't use cliches like "blind-drunk" and "blind as a bat." But he tries to resist most demands by touchy viewers, even risks letting "damn" or "hell" stay in a script if it seems unforced. "If we don't reflect the real world around us," he says, "radio and TV are going to be awfully dull, and competitively, we'll get clobbered."

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