In “David Susskind: A Televised Life,” veteran media journalist Stephen Battaglio shares an inside look at producer and talk show host David Susskind, who helped define the television industry from the 1950s through the 1970s with such shows as “East Side/West Side” and “N.Y.P.D.” Read an excerpt:
On the evening of October 10, 1982, “The David Susskind Show” celebrated the start of its twenty-fifth season on television. The program opened with its light orchestral theme, “Gateway to the West,” played over a compilation of host David Susskind’s introductions from over the years. His sonorous, formal “Good evening” greeting never wavered, even as the black- and- white videotape of the program’s early days turned to color and his hair changed from flecks of gray to wooly white. “Right before your eyes you see a man age — you see the whole death process coming,” Susskind told viewers after watching his televised life flash by. It was not Susskind’s nature to look back and reflect. As a producer, he was addicted to the adrenaline rush that came from making a deal to put together a TV show or a film. He was always consumed by the desire to move on to the next project. He insisted he had nothing to do with his anniversary program, which had been planned by his wife, Joyce, and Jean Kennedy, the longtime producer of "The David Susskind Show."
As always, Susskind was dressed immaculately for his taping at the WNEW studio on the east side of Manhattan. He wore a crisp slate-colored designer suit, an elegant pink shirt, and a silk tie to match. Perched on a swivel chair on the show’s set, his shoulders slightly hunched, he looked a bit older than his sixty-one years and well beyond his days as the tightly wound, noisemaking, angry young man who railed against the timidity of the TV industry of the 1950s and 1960s. “I could see him visibly shaking,” said Jim Shasky, who was in the WNEW control room directing the show. “His hands were shaking. He wasn’t well.” But he became energized as he recounted taking on Nikita Khrushchev, facing off with furious feminists, and unleashing Mel Brooks’s hilarious revelations on being a Jewish son. His hands popped at the air with the rapidity of a featherweight boxer as he spoke excitedly. Susskind’s role in exposing a wide range of ideas, trends, and personalities to viewers at a time when their media choices were minuscule was indelible, and he knew it. The David Susskind Show rarely made any money over its long run, and by 1982 Susskind was covering the losses out of his own pocket. It was still worth every dollar for him to have a TV platform.
Joyce Susskind joined her husband for the anniversary program. Ten years younger than Susskind, she still had the high cheekbones and soft feminine look that made her one of Canada’s biggest TV stars since the 1950s, as Joyce Davidson. Several times during the hour, she gently took Susskind’s arm to steer him into a commercial break or another clip of a past show highlight. There would not be many more tender moments between them. In the following year, a tumultuous one in many ways for Susskind, the glamorous New York couple’s marriage ended.
The second half of the commemorative broadcast featured guests considered longtime friends of "The David Susskind Show." The lineup included Truman Capote, who made his first TV appearance on Susskind’s show, at the time called Open End. The writer had been the Susskinds’ neighbor at the UN Plaza apartment complex along the East River when it was a magnet for glitterati residents in the 1960s. He had spent hours in the Susskinds’ living room having drinks and gossiping with Joyce, who became a close pal. Gloria Rabinowitz, an associate producer for the show at the time, remembered how Susskind would corner Capote in the elevator and inveigle him into coming on whenever he needed a lively segment.
Capote was joined by Norman Mailer, who over the years had sparred on the program with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and was once banned by station management in the 1960s because of his volatile reputation at the time. Rounding out the group was Anthony Quinn, a Susskind favorite since the early 1960s, when they made the film "Requiem for a Heavyweight" together, and actress Maureen Stapleton, who had recently won an Academy Award for her work in the film Reds. It was the kind of hodgepodge panel that was typical in the early years of Susskind’s show, a modern-day salon where accomplished actors, writers, and journalists could get together for unguarded, freewheeling conversation.
Shortly before the taping began, Susskind’s associate producer, Dan Berkowitz, had gone to the station’s makeup room where he typically had guests sign release forms. “The door was closed, which it never was,” he recalled. “And I had to get the releases from everybody. I sort of knock- knocked, opened the door, and there was Truman Capote, sobbing into Maureen Stapleton’s ample bosom. We were basically saying, ‘We’re ready to go.’ And I just looked at them. And she just looked at me and mouthed the words ‘Give us a minute.’ ” Capote’s health had been in a major decline. He looked dissipated and out of it. Yet he still managed to be impishly funny on Susskind’s program that night, especially when recounting his pronouncement that rich people were different because “they eat little tiny vegetables.” Norman Mailer told the story of how he was convinced he would be the alpha guest on a literary panel Susskind put together with him, Capote, and a frightened and shy Dorothy Parker that aired on January 18, 1959. That night, Susskind had become impatient with Mailer’s provocations that “all politicians are whores” and started looking at his watch. “All right,” Mailer said to himself, “David isn’t satisfied. I’m going to sit back and see what kind of show he has.” Mailer stopped talking. “It was the greatest mistake of my life,” he said. When the topic of "On the Road" author Jack Kerouac was raised before the panel, Capote disposed of the beat writer in five words: “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” The power of the putdown spoken by Capote in his bizarre, nasal voice reverberated among New Yorkers who watched, much to the massively egotistical Mailer’s dismay. Mailer admitted that the response to Capote made him feel “like an actor who thought he was the star and suddenly the next day they said, ‘That featured player is fantastic.’ ”
Many such moments of Susskind’s earliest talk shows existed in memory only. In the 1950s and 1960s, TV stations considered videotape too expensive to use only once and then store. The reels were regularly degaussed and then used again. Susskind’s evenings with such luminaries as James Baldwin, Lionel Trilling, Alan Jay Lerner, Roald Dahl, Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, Isaac Stern, Preston Sturges, Bertrand Russell, Adlai Stevenson, Claire Booth Luce, Bette Davis, and dozens more were gone forever. Quinn remembered one of those occasions in 1961 when he appeared with Tennessee Williams on a panel described in the TV listings as “Interesting People with Strong Opinions.” The playwright had “too much tea,” he said, and passed out on the actor’s lap.
Dan Berkowitz had started working on "The David Susskind Show" in the late 1970s, when the program often alternated between serious discussions with powerful and influential figures in politics and business and people who traveled along the fringes of society. On his first day on the job, Berkowitz called whorehouses to find johns willing to come on and talk about why they paid for sex. His next task required him to wrangle an appearance by Jody Powell, President Jimmy Carter’s press secretary. Berkowitz believed he had seen everything during his six years with the program, but he always remained fascinated by how Susskind and Jean Kennedy could pull together a disparate group of important big names and have them talking candidly on television as themselves. “One of his great gifts is that people like that loved coming on the show,” Berkowitz explained. “Because they knew that they could talk about anything. Secondly, that the conversation would be kind of intelligent. Where else would you get to sit down with Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Anthony Quinn and David Susskind and just say, ‘Hey, let’s talk about stuff ’? Maybe if you went to a dinner party in one of their houses.”
For Susskind, the weekly session in front of the camera was the only constant in his tireless and turbulent career as a New York mogul responsible for thousands of hours of television, much of it outstanding, some of it groundbreaking. More than once, that career appeared to be on the brink of oblivion. There were often maelstroms of conflict surrounding his impossibly prodigious output. He publicly blasted the TV networks and Hollywood hierarchies that didn’t always support his risk-taking attempts at innovation. His angst over achieving perfection on screen and balancing artistic ambitions with financial solvency was palpable. His compulsive philandering made marriage and family life precarious. David Susskind’s life was worthy of a show of its own.
Excerpted from “David Susskind: A Televised Life,” by Stephen Battaglio © Copyright 2010. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.