Legend of Manie

In show business, palship never reigns but it pours. To a very few show folk--Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Irving Thalberg, Variety Founder Sime Silverman--has gone an uninterrupted outpouring of vocal, tearful affection. This week a new name was added to the roll of comradely love when a clutch of top entertainers, including Bob Hope, Sid Caesar, Rosemary Clooney, Perry Como, Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra, Jack Webb and Betty Grable, performed at union minimum rates ($265 each) in a 90-minute NBC telecast in honor of the late Manie Sacks. The show's title: Some of Manie's Friends.

Who was Manie Sacks, a man scarcely known outside the trade, to have attracted so much high-powered devotion? Wiry, long-faced Manie (pronounced Manny) was a longtime recording executive for Columbia Records, later a vice president of both NBC and RCA, and he died last year of leukemia at 56. Says RCA Board Chairman David Sarnoff: "He was the most selfless man I ever knew." Frank Sinatra credits him with "a closetful of right arms." Adds Variety Editor Abel Green in a bathetic burst: "His was the unashamed opening of the pores of human kindness."

After starting out in the dress business in Philadelphia, Sacks charged into radio and public relations. As A. & R. man (artists and repertory) beginning in 1940, he coralled Sinatra, Shore, Benny Goodman and Harry James for the Columbia label. When he left for RCA ten years later, most of his stable followed him loyally. Later, his duties as NBC vice president in charge of TV programing and talent still consisted largely of coddling performers, listening to their troubles and shrewdly guiding their careers.

Legends of Manie's considerateness sprout all over show business. One night, the story goes, Bachelor Manie wanted to get away from a girl who had a yen for him, lied that he had to fly to Detroit. Smitten, the girl offered to ride out to the airport with him. Rather than hurt her feelings, Manie wearily went to La Guardia, boarded a plane and flew to Detroit. A little more than a year ago, goes another story, Comedian Danny Thomas went to him for help with a project to benefit leukemia victims; Manie plunged into the project without letting anyone know that he was dying of the disease himself. This week's TV show, which raised more than $200,000 for leukemia research and other work by the Emanuel Sacks medical foundation, was predictably sentimental, sincere and enthusiastic. Said Singer Tony Martin of Manie: "He's beginning to sound like the Albert Schweitzer of show business."

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