What Happened, Baby?

"Sarge, baby, you're a real swinger," cried Murray the K, hoisting his Beatle boots onto Sargent Shriver's walnut conference table. What was Murray the K doing in the office of the Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity? Well, he had an idea for reaching the U.S.'s more than a million school dropouts and unemployed kids with a TV program that would really grab them where they lived. Where they lived, said Murray, was with the Supremes and the Righteous Brothers and Cannibal and the Headhunters. And in between sets, Murray would "lay on them some good words." Shriver bought it--all of it, even Murray's favorite flip phrase, "It's what's happening, baby," as the title.

"About to Throw Up." One hard day's night over the whole CBS network last week, the big-beat spectacular happened just the way Murray planned it. A breakneck succession of 23 Scopi-tone-like acts in 90 minutes. A bill reading like Billboard's "Hot 100" and sounding, to adults, like 76 air hammers. The Ronettes playing stickball on Manhattan's Mott Street. Little Anthony and the Imperials mock-"bopping" on the stage of the Brooklyn Fox. Gary Lewis and the Playboys blowing up a squall on the beach at California's Abalone Cove. The continuity was Murray frugging from one surf-or cityside location to the next or jumping into Michigan's River Rouge or plain flipping his trademarked straw lid.

As for the laying on of the words, the critics took care of that next day. Only they weren't good. The unanimous verdict: Sarge baby, and CBS, which picked up the tab for the time and the $250,000 production cost, had been taken in by self-promoting Murray the K. "Uncle Sam done flipped his wig," said the New York Herald Tribune. Republican Congressmen were indignant --in fact, "almost incandescent in their fulminations," reported Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen following a G.O.P. policy-committee luncheon. Colorado's Republican U.S. Senator Gordon Allott phoned CBS President Frank Stanton and announced, "I am about to throw up."

"Get Outta My Face." Murray's defense was that the sort of show that would have pleased the critics and Congressmen would have made no dent on the "out-of-school, out-of-work, out-of-luck kids" that the poverty program was all about. "You can't play a sonata or a fugue and hope to reach kids when a majority of them can't even read or add properly. How many critics and politicians bothered to check with our special audience to find their reaction?" Murray had a rebuttal, too, for those who complained that his low-pressure, nonspecific word pitch said little more than that "this Government of ours really cares about you--they do think you're what's happening." The only hope of grabbing problem teenagers is not to "crowd" them, said the K. "If you try to tell the kids what to do, they'll say, 'Get outta my face.' "

Murray Kaufman, as only the K's bank manager knows him, is something of an expert in the field--he was a dropout himself 25 years ago from The Bronx's DeWitt Clinton High ("Man, you feel you gotta bust out"). Further, as a disk jockey who is both widely syndicated (he claims 106 stations) and well connected (he is known by his fans as "the Fifth Beatle," and has been included in the Beatles' impending movie), he should know what's happening. His show for Sarge's Office of Economic Opportunity had almost as big a rating as the two opposing programs (Ben Casey and Alfred Hitchcock) combined. What next? How about a rumble, televised live . . ?

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