Television: The Man Behind Harry

Harry Harry Reasoner, introducing a CBS-TV Essay on Woman: “This broadcast was prepared by men, and makes no claim to being fair. Prejudice has saved us a great deal of time in preparation.”

Reasoner, talking about bridges as cam eras frame the Verrazano Narrows span across New York harbor: “Man has made a sewer of the river and spanned it with a poem.” Reasoner discussing Americans’ fascination with automobile races: “They don’t come to see a crash, but if there were never any crashes they’d never come,” Because of such commentaries, Harry Reasoner is widely recognized for his wit and perception; in 1966 he received a Peabody Award for his droll television essays. Reasoner is indeed wit ty and perceptive, as he shows in the radio and TV scripts he writes himself.

But the TV essays were not all his, They were written by Andrew Rooney, 49, the most felicitous nonfiction writer in television. Much heard if not seen, Rooney won an Emmy this year for co-authorship of last summer’s impressive Of Black America, in which Bill Cosby recounted the century-long misrepresentation of the Negro by U.S. movie makers and historians.

Breakaway Biafra. The essay topics are rarely hard-news musts, and never flunk the Rooney colon test. Andy says he can spot an overly sober TV treatise merely by the colon in its title; for ex ample, “Somaliland: Case History of a People,” His specialty is the light TV essay that extracts the significant from the commonplace. Does it bother him that Reasoner gets all the glory and earns about $200,000 compared with his $60,000? “Harry has never actually sent me for coffee,” Andy jokes, “but he often says, ‘If you’re going to the cafeteria, get me coffee, will you?’ Then, as if to flatter me by suggesting we are equals, he does not offer to pay for his.”

Rooney has a ready explanation for his success with TV scripts: “It’s not so much that I write well — I just don’t write badly very often, and that passes for good on television.” The straight news shows, he says, are the worst, although he concedes that “distinguished writing there might be obtrusive.” Be cause of lack of tiniw, he feels, news writ ers get away with a shorthand glossary of minor cliches like “breakaway Biafra” or “oil-rich Kuwait.”

Slow Listening. Rooney’s rule of writing is to stick to short declarative sentences. He is forever quoting Thoreau’s comment that “If a man has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly like a stone to the ground.” He adds that “people talk faster than they listen, and you have to give them time to hear what you’ve said. Clever phrases make slow listening.” Andy contends that his veteran colleague Eric Sevareid has discovered that fact only in the past five years and has “improved immeasurably since.”

After wartime service with Stars and Stripes, Rooney spent the late 1940s freelance writing for books and magazines but turned to radio and TV when he discovered that he could not make a predictable living in print. He was concocting material for Arthur Godfrey, Garry Moore and others when CBS News President Fred Friendly in 1964 hired him away from show biz.

Rooney is a man of awfully good habits. At home in the suburbs, he bakes his own bread, churns his own ice cream and makes his own furniture: at the office he keeps special machines to shine his own shoes and press his own pants. Still, he always looks as rumpled as if he had spent the night on a bench in Grand Central Station. Another raffish touch is the 1920s Underwood typewriter on which he has written everything from his first book, Air Gunner, to the article in a recent issue of LIFE about who the real campus protesters should be: the parents who pay the tuition. He is a father of four children, aged 17 to 21, and the title of his piece was a heartfelt “Burn, Bursar, Burn.”

The underscheduling of news and documentary programming is Rooney’s main complaint about TV. He thinks a minimum of an hour at night of prime time should be available for public affairs. Among other things this would make room for more documentaries —without colons in their titles. “There is never a day a light documentary has to be on,” he says. “I don’t mean to complain, but I just wish insignificance had more stature.”