Television: The Regency Firing

For James Thomas Aubrey Jr., 46, president of CBS-TV, the weekend promised to be a good one. He had gone to Miami to celebrate Jackie Gleason’s 49th birthday, fully aware that his presence was itself a salute to Gleason’s TV success. For Jim Aubrey was always conscious of his power.

A Princeton graduate (cum laude, ’41), conventionally handsome, inwardly tense and outwardly relaxed, he was the boy wonder who stepped into his job five years ago and played the complex, competitive, split-timing game of network programming with such relentless drive and consummate skill that by last year eight of the top ten Nielsen-rated night shows bore CBS’s eyeprint, as did all ten of the top daytime entries.

His choices, of course, had cheapened TV. But by commercial standards, he was a success, and CBS paid him a $124,000 salary, plus $100,000 bonus and an option on 65,000 CBS shares (worth $2,995,000 last week). He had the touch, or thought he did, though he was far more overbearing than a really successful man need be.

The legends of his ruthlessness were many. It took him just two minutes for a curt “Not a chance” to dash weeks of work on a new format by Garry Moore. He often told the tale of how he had called in a vice president, allowed him to ramble on for 35 minutes, then abruptly told him he was through.

No Elaboration. But on this Friday afternoon in Miami, James Aubrey was not planning to fire anyone. The Gleason party, complete with June Taylor dancers, was over. The TV king was ready for a good time. And then the telephone in his Fontainebleau suite rang. It was New York, and it was someone with enough authority to order him back immediately. No weekend, no pretty girls, no fun; instead, airport, jet, worry.

At 1:30 Saturday afternoon, still brushing the sunshine out of his hair, he was in Manhattan’s Regency Hotel with CBS Board Chairman William Paley and CBS President Frank Stanton, a onetime psychology professor whose somewhat academic manner is quite a contrast to Aubrey’s sleek flamboyance. The session lasted 30 minutes, and almost no one knew it had taken place. But at 3 Sunday afternoon, Stanton sent a terse telegram to New York papers that Aubrey had “resigned,” although his “outstanding accomplishments need no elaboration; his extraordinary record speaks for itself.”

Arms Twisted. It might have been expected that a tough boss would be toughly sacked. But the real show-biz touch was to leave everything else to gossip and speculation. The first reaction was to invoke the adage that he who lives by the ratings can die by the ratings. A year ago, CBS’s Nielsen rating lead was 22.5 to NBC’s 18.8 and ABC’s 17.6. But all this season the three networks have been in a near dead heat. Had Aubrey lost his magic? He had once made a purseful of profits from sows’ ears such as The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction. But this year ABC had doped out Aubrey’s own patterns and produced hits like the gimmicky Bewitched and the slyly prurient Peyton Place. Moreover, the outlook for next year was not good. Big CBS sponsors, such as Lever Bros., General Foods and Bristol-Meyers, took hunks of their business elsewhere.

But even in the fickle world of TV, a major network is not likely to panic because its rating lead has been shaved to a hair-thin .5 of a point. After all, Jim Aubrey was still one of the most aggressive, arm-twisting goal-line fighters in the trade. So there must be another reason, and attention soon centered on Aubrey’s old crony and nightclub companion Keefe Brasselle, 41, a sometime actor who had a single success playing the lead role in 1953’s The Eddie Can tor Story.

Bore & Bomb. Two years ago, Aubrey tapped Brasselle to host a summer-replacement variety hour. It was an unqualified critical and popular bore. But Aubrey persisted. This season he gave Brasselle’s Richelieu Productions a contract for three new shows, The Reporter, The Cam Williams Show, and The Baileys of Balboa. Brasselle had barely any experience as a TV producer, but Aubrey bought all three shows without even seeing a pilot film, an almost unheard-of vote of confidence for even an established program packager. All three bombed out; The Reporter was canceled after 13 weeks, and both Williams and Balboa are scheduled to be dropped.

Variety, which hears a lot of showbiz scuttlebutt, reported: “For at least three months, industry insiders had expected that Aubrey’s relationship with some program producers . . . could well cost him his lofty CBS-TV position.” And the Federal Communications Commission was planning to turn the guns on the network stranglehold over programming (see following story). One of its specific interests: the relationship between network executives and independent producers.

The Ratings & the Ax. But even the Aubrey-Brasselle tie-up wasn’t sufficient reason. So, much of the post-firing gossip centered on Aubrey’s private life. He was married in 1944 to Actress Phyllis Thaxter; they had two children (now 18 and 11), and in 1962 got a Mexican divorce. Not all women swooned in Aubrey’s presence, but he radiated a detective-story maleness—and, after all, most of the babes he met were in show business too. His manner and deportment brought an occasional remonstrance from Stanton or Paley, but Aubrey was unconcerned. “How can Paley ax me,” he said to a friend, “when I’ve made him $40 million? As long as I build the stock and drive the ratings up, no one’s going to give me a hard time.”

But Aubrey was no longer driving the ratings up, and he was far more vulnerable than he suspected. Insiders say the decision to drop him was probably made two weeks ago, before Paley left for a Nassau vacation. But with next year’s program scheduling still in its final, hectic stages, it was decided to wait.

Then, abruptly, the timetable was moved up. The New York Times’s Jack Gould said the immediate cause was a “personal matter”; Variety suggested “private detectives were involved.” CBS suddenly discovered it needed Aubrey like it needed a broken arm. Wednesday night Paley flew in from Nassau. Thursday the decision was reached. Friday Aubrey was summoned. Saturday he was out. It was all so fast, in fact, that his successor, John Schneider, was not even asked to take the job until the day of the firing.

“I was as surprised as the next guy,” he admitted. Manager of CBS’s New York station for only five months, and before that manager for six years of the Philadelphia station, Jack Schneider, with no network experience, was a deep dark-horse choice. “They simply decided to skip a step with me,” he explained. The reason was quickly apparent. By his own admission, “One of the things I have accomplished is to create an atmosphere in which everybody can get along.”