Beach Bash

In Miami Beach last week, a delegate to the Republican National Convention quipped that every time he steps into a men's room, he makes a quick check to see if any TV cameras are watching. It is an understandable reaction. The men and machinery of television are everywhere.

Delegates streaming into convention headquarters in the Fontainebleau Hotel step over TV cables stretching like ganglia across the lobby. Cameras peep through potted palms, from cherrypicker cranes and every conceivable nook in Miami Beach's huge Convention Hall. Mobile units, zoom lenses at the ready, patrol the airports and rail terminals.

With 2,000 staffers, 238 tons of equipment and an outlay of $12 million, the network operation looked almost like a second invasion of Inchon. CBS, for example, deployed a helicopter, 20 office trailers, 270 rented cars, 13 Videotape machines, 300 monitors, 500 telephones and 22 huge tractor trailers that convert into studios on wheels. One indication of the impact that this saturation coverage is having on the convention is that the Republican National Committee has retained a TV consultant firm called TNT Communications, Inc. All last week the company's 40 image experts coached G.O.P. speechmakers in such niceties as what to wear (medium-tone grey, blue or brown suits), what not to wear (white shirts, checks and small patterns), and how to avoid the darting-eye syndrome when reading the TelePrompter. TNT provides "building blocks" for the shorter speakers to stand on, two lounges to keep them in a "restful mood," and individually styled "lighting for portraiture." The cosmetic hues for John Lindsay, for example, are designed "to make his blue eyes come out."

As for the professional on-camera men, Walter Cronkite will head up CBS's convention team, with added punditry supplied by Theodore White and punch lines by Art Buchwald. ABC, shunning the gavel-to-gavel coverage of the other two networks, will offer a 90-minute wrap-up each evening led by Howard K. Smith and supplemented by Guest Commentators Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr., who swore he would be on hand despite a broken collarbone, suffered in a fall when his 60-ft. yawl took a bad roll in a seaway. NBC will go with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. It will employ no outside '"experts" because, as one NBC producer says, "Who knows the story better than we do?"

At least one Miamian remains unimpressed. "You can bring in as many Republicans as you want to," says the night clerk at the Fontainebleau, "but it still won't be nothing like the last time Frank Sinatra was here."

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