The Emmy Awards

Actors started for the wrong exits and had to be turned around, others failed to pick up their cues, events ran more and more behind schedule. This was not a high school convention, but the tenth annual Emmy ceremonies of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, in which TV's most skilled practitioners hail the past year's best performances. Confessed Danny Thomas, the Hollywood M.C. on a Hollywood-Manhattan coaxial hookup: "They should never have comedians as presenters. Any comic on a dais figures he's got to do four or five minutes or the audience will think he's a bum." Milton Berle, TV's funnyman emeritus, quipped for 90 seconds longer than his allotted seven minutes. But like the man condemned to hang, Berle was as sassy as he liked, for there was nothing TV could threaten him with--the onetime Mr. Television has not had a steady job on TV since 1956. And without question, his nine minutes were the show's best.

In the past, the Academy has seemed in grave danger of handing out more Emmy Awards than it had members. Last week the winners' categories were cut down to 28. Even so, Comedian Jack Benny staggered visibly under the honor of having turned in 1957's "best continuing performance (male) in a series by a comedian, singer, host, dancer, master of ceremonies, announcer, narrator, panelist or any person who essentially plays himself." Of the westerns, current giants of the ratings, only top-rated Gunsmoke copped an Emmy ("the best dramatic series with continuing characters"). Other winners, as often attesting popularity or superior politicking as saluting true merit:

P:Best single show: The Comedian.

P: Best actor (single performance): Peter Ustinov in The Life of Samuel Johnson.

P: Best actress: Polly Bergen in The Helen Morgan Story.

P: Best dramatic anthology series: Playhouse 90.

P: Best public-service series: Omnibus.

P: Best new program series: CBS-TV's Seven Lively Arts, which died, unsponsored, last February after only ten lively weeks on the air.

To win her award as TV's best actress, Polly Bergen outpolled such veteran rivals as the theater's Helen Hayes and the movies' Teresa Wright, an achievement that could be explained only by the fast-developing herd instinct of telefolk that leads them to stick with their own. Polly's reputation has blossomed principally through coaxial cables. Neither Hollywood nor Broadway was impressed with her efforts as singer or actress, but then she signed up for a series of TV commercials for Pepsi-Cola, quickly became known the nation over as the Pepsi Girl. Here and there, now and then, Polly tried dramatic parts to no wide acclaim. The final transmutation of the Pepsi-Cola girl into TV's "best actress" was based on one dramatic performance.

Polly had been working for that performance ever since, back in 1955, a grey-haired lady approached her, after she finished a singing stint in the glittery Persian Room of Manhattan's Hotel Plaza, and said that Polly reminded her of Helen Morgan. Polly's admirer turned out to be Lulu Morgan, Helen's mother. Polly promptly bought the TV rights to Helen's life story, sold them at cost ($10,000) to CBS with the help of Freddie Fields, a Music Corp. of America vice president who is Polly's agent and husband. Polly, to nobody's surprise, was picked to star in The Helen Morgan Story on CBS's Playhouse 90.

At the time, Contralto Bergen got only modest praise for her portrayal of the tragic, wistful singer who epitomized a whole era's image of gently fallen women. But it marked the welcome end of the Pepsi-Cola girl. A shapely brunette with startlingly wide-set eyes of sky-blue, 27-year-old Polly now has her own biweekly variety show on CBS. So far, she has not attempted any new dramatic parts.

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