Mission: Impossible

"When I really believe in something," says hard-driving NBC Documentary Producer Lucy Jarvis, "nothing stops me." Her television credits justify the bravado. In 1962, she cajoled Nikita Khrushchev into letting her film a special inside the Kremlin--a privilege never before permitted even the Soviet network. The following year, she collared France's Cultural Affairs Minister Andre Malraux and demanded: "If Khrushchev trusted me, why can't you?"--and gained TV's first penetration of the Louvre. If guile or gall does not work, there is always main strength. Once when a Tokyo airport functionary tried to prevent her from covering an arrival scene, she simply let the poor fellow have it on the back of the neck with a karate chop.

Last week the irresistible force was at least slowed down. The project was an NBC documentary advertised as "Dr. Barnard's Heart Transplant Operations." Immediately after the Washkansky operation last month, Mrs. Jarvis set about gathering material for a program to be pegged to the next such event. She shot biographical background footage on Surgeon Christiaan Barnard, interviewed his friends and medical colleagues, and filmed Barnard and his team as they performed open-heart surgery. She also discussed with Barnard the technical problems of covering the next heart-transplant operation, and came away with the impression that he would permit filming from behind a glass partition in the operating room.

"Shut Out." Then came the flurry of demands for Barnard's presence. CBS paid his air fare to the U.S. so that he could be interviewed on Face the Nation (TIME, Jan. 5)--and, according to CBS News President Richard Salant, donated $5,000 in a charitable gesture to the Christiaan Barnard Research Fund. Suddenly, says Lucy Jarvis, "we found ourselves shut out. We could hardly get near him"--although Barnard did appear on NBC's Today show.

In any case, "to protect the network," Lucy Jarvis negotiated an agreement with Barnard's next patient, Philip Blaiberg, and his family. NBC would pay the Blaibergs $9,000 for exclusive interviews before the surgery, $25,000 for exclusive movie and still pictures of the operation itself, and $16,000 for exclusive post-operation coverage. Was this the start of an internetwork auction? Decidedly no, says CBS's Salant. "We did not bid for anything, and we didn't offer anyone anything. We don't believe in payments for rights to a hard-news story. Dr. Barnard doesn't belong to anybody, he belongs to the world." For its part, CBS was determined to get its cameraman into Barnard's next operation along with NBC's.

Sneaked Stills. As luck--and medicine--would have it, neither network got in. The Blaiberg operation came up too fast, and Barnard barred all film crews from the operation. A Cape Town fashion photographer, posing as a medical student, did sneak into the operating-room observation gallery and grabbed some stills; NBC attorneys got a temporary injunction prohibiting him from "selling or disposing" of them. A doctor who had brought his subminiature camera into the operation also took a few pictures but handed them over to Barnard after a reprimand.

At week's end NBC televised an hour documentary on Master Surgeon Barnard--without any transplant footage.

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