The Winner Is...

Price Waterhouse is now tabulating ballots for the coveted annual Uggy Award, honoring the season's most mortifying TV show.

The Georgies Awards telecast, a self-congratulatory outing for variety performers contrived for Ed Sullivan, was well ahead in the competition until last week, when the record industry's Grammy Awards show on ABC descended past all previous lows for tedium and tastelessness. But two major contenders for the Uggy still loom ahead. TV's own Emmy show always finds fresh ways to embarrass the medium, and though little has leaked about next month's Oscar cast, there is reason to take faint heart: the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award will be given, with a straight face, to Frank Sinatra.

The one show that on its past record is not in Uggy contention is Broadway's Tony Awards, which will be televised for the fifth year this Sunday on ABC. The Tony telecasts have been the class of the genre for several reasons. New York stage folk, unlike so many of the music crowd seen last week, are capable of reading cue cards, and they have the sensibility and wit not to be so mawkish in their acceptance speeches. But perhaps the major explanation for the supremacy of the Tony programs is the impresario who puts the evening together, Alexander H. Cohen.

As a stage producer, Alex Cohen has some prestigious credits (Home, The Homecoming) and some egregious flops (the most recent, the musical Prettybelle, closed in Boston this month). But, as the Tony show producer for the past four years, Cohen has achieved such eclat that Archrival David Merrick mischievously made a bid to take over the assignment--without a fee. The group that administers the awards rejected Merrick's offer and gave Cohen a new five-year contract.

I'm the Maid. Perhaps Cohen's major coup has been to corner more distinguished names than the competing award shows put together. He says, "You know how often on the Oscars some girl will rush up and make a speech that goes something like, 'I'm accepting this award for Mr. Rock Johnson. Mr. Johnson is in Duluth, but he asked me to tell you that I'm his maid, and that he loves you all very much.' " Cohen also manages to give honorary Tonys to stars who may not fit the contest categories but are likely to raise the Nielsen rating or deliver particularly urbane acceptance remarks. Leonard Bernstein foxed Alex in 1969 by wondering before a nationwide audience why he was there, having "contributed precisely nothing to the Broadway musical scene for twelve years."

It was a rare needle. In his 30 years on Broadway, Cohen has developed an unusually cozy rapport with his stars. He publicizes them lavishly, respects their artistic judgments, and is an all-round problem-solver. When Cohen's 1964 Hamlet, Richard Burton, and his wife wanted tickets to the Frazier-Ali fight, they naturally rang up Alex (he got them a pair, but they didn't go). "How do you treat a star?" asks Alex. "Like a star." That is a little difficult at the Tonys where everyone is a star. He can provide them all with limousines but not private dressing rooms and dressers. (In the 1968 show, Marlene Dietrich was spotted massaging Pearl Bailey's perennially aching feet.) Agents can also be a nuisance, carping just before air time that their client's intro is 37 words of praise shorter than someone else's.

But those ego irritations are minor compared with the production problems he faces in this week's show at the Palace Theater. Since it is the Tonys' silver anniversary, Cohen has not contented himself with the usual four or so numbers from current Broadway musicals. Instead, he is restaging, with minimum rehearsals, 25 classics from 25 years. Four-time Winner Gwen Verdon will do the ballet from Can-Can (1954). Robert Preston will sing Trouble (in River City) from The Music Man (1958), and 27 other stars will also appear--live--in a scheduled two hours.

By any rational theater standards, Cohen is overreaching himself. The Tonys telecast will be either a dark-horse winner in the Uggy race of such a smash that David Merrick will have no strategic choice but to pay for the right to replace Cohen.

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