Television: Review

Bride and Groom: The invitation was marked FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE and read: “One of the biggest show-business weddings of this era will take place when Shirl Conway, the musical comedy and TV star, and Composer Bernie [Vanessa] Wayne, will be married over the NBC network from 2:30 to 3 p.m., in the Studio Chapel. Guest list: Lena Home, Faye Emerson, Julie Wilson…many other celebrities.” On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, as announced. Shirl and Bernie were married—under a sky of klieg lights in Manhattan’s RCA building, before a TV audience of about 3,000,000. “We have so many friends through the country,” Shirl explained, “this way they can all be here.” The best man called dapper, cutawayed Bernie “a worn-out wolf”; and Shirl, swathed to the neck in a white jersey Murray Hamburger original (retail price: about $275), giggled nervously. “I feel like the most rank amateur that ever got before a camera,” she said. A veteran of the Sid Caesar shows. Shirl performed in fact like an old pro, even shed a tear for the close-up lens. Viewers met Shirl’s niece, who had come via “Northwest Orient Airlines, famous for imperial service,” and the announcer just had time to remind the best man about the “Keepsake rings” before a bonging of bells led into a plug for Jan Murray’s Treasure Hunt. After a cantor’s blessing and wish for “health, happiness and togetherness,” the bride and groom moved out of the canvas-and-wood chapel set, and a little cartoon man popped on-screen and chanted: “Alka-Seltzer, speedy Alka-Seltzer, bound to please you, take it for relief.” In the “reception room” the announcer intoned: “Let me show you some of your wedding gifts: I’m sure you’ll find nothing cooks like a Tappan range. This portable sewing machine features an automatic lubricator; for entertaining in the home you’ll love using this Gallo rollcart. This Samsonite luggage is the first luggage made of magnesium.” There was the “Underwood portable with the golden touch,” HIS and HERS golf bags (Shirl: “I promise to lose”), “famous carpets from the looms of Mohawk,” a poodle from a “famed” Peekskill kennel, then Keenan Wynn in a scene from Wagon Train. “Do I turn my back on the camera?” asked Actress Shirl incredulously as she mounted the “staircase” to toss her bouquet. It was caught by a boy. Bride and Groom is going off the air this week.

Person to Person: Professionally mute Harpo Marx talked so freely before air time that Host Ed Murrow playfully opened the show with: “I hope it’s not your intention to monopolize the conversation this evening.” It was not. On the air, Harpo ogled the camera with idiot grins and adroit grimaces, whistled replies between his fingers, blew smoke bubbles at Murrow and sadly plucked at his harp. But, in the lifelong tradition of “inviolable mutism.” he was noisily silent. Tumbling over the furniture in his Palm Springs home, fright-wigged Harpo was as much a problem to chatty Mrs. Marx (exActress Susan Fleming) as he was to

Murrow. Trying to give viewers an insight into Harpo’s more serious side, she explained: “Actually he is a very quiet man, philosophical. He uses his head.” Behind her back, the camera caught 64-year-old Harpo standing on his head in the middle of the room.

Kraft TV Theater: After more than ten years of fighting the ratings battle for Wednesday night, TV’s oldest drama series finally got around to dramatizing it. Kraft called the play The Battle for Wednesday Night. But Scriptwriter Robert Van Scoyk, who used to write for Jackie Gleason, clearly fixed his view on Sunday night and its two warring clans, the Sullivans and the Aliens. On either channel the image was poor. Jack Oakie’s ogling, leering Bill (“Hello, you beautiful people”) Brogan was a gusty old buffoon eating high off the ratings when the opposing network decided to fight him with a popular young singer (Earl Holliman). The singer had to survive Madison Avenue metaphors (“Throw Wednesday night in his lap and let him kick it around”) and a scourge of publicity beaters who manufactured a cheap exchange of insults (“This feud is all that’s keeping you alive”).

But he took to the fight with gusto. The rival performers matched each other acrobat for acrobat, lady fiddler for lady fiddler, fight champ for fight loser (as Sullivan and Allen did after the Patterson-Rademacher fight) and, in the end, even blow for blow. When the singer socked the comedian, remarked one character, “it was like George Washington spitting on the American flag.”

It was all a good idea, poorly executed. Only the roguish mugging of Movie Comedian Oakie, who at 54 should not have to worry about a rating, kept Battle above the lower echelons of taste that often characterize the actual rivalry on which it was modeled.