One-Man Telephone Hour

For an hour on NBC last week, Actor Art Carney kept dialing telephone numbers, bugging long-distance operators, playing the sole part in a TV play about a sinking alcoholic. Desperately using the phone as a lifeline to the real world, he talked to his exwife, his daughter, his new fiancee and some old friends; he drank and wept, offered the drunk's typical, hopeless apologies, made glib cracks, and laughed with the sound of wind crossing a row of empty bottles. Call Me Back, a creditable but excessively maudlin first TV drama by Gagwriter Tony Webster, helped Art Carney add a superbly handled tour de force to his impressive list of acting credits.

As Carney got more and more schnoggered, the recognizable and disturbing outlines of the character's burnt-out marriage, his homesickness for his child, and the utter failure of his career gave the story a kind of horrifying substance--when it was not interrupted by commercials, which brutally smashed the play's mood.

The grim wisecracks, masking solitude and self-pity, kept pouring with the bourbon. The best thing about his funeral, said Carney, would be the hernia his best friend would get carrying the casket. He called the friend's wife, told her to caution her husband not to say "funeralwise" at the service. Falling to pieces, he asked the operator to try Dr. Albert Schweitzer in French Equatorial Africa to see if he would make a house call. Opening a phial of sleeping pills, he named each one as he swallowed it: Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel, Gretel, the Three Bears. Toasting all the friends he never called back on the telephone, he turned the phial bottoms up and swallowed the rest of his life.

If the play seemed to be a sort of indirect, 1960 temperance lecture linking the arms of Carry Nation and Sigmund Freud, 41-year-old Arthur William Matthew Carney was a good man to give it. An ex-alcoholic, he has solved the problem himself.

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