Show Business: Hubble Bubble

Six days of the week and late into every night, Hubbell Robinson drives himself and his underlings with the kind of awesome energy that has made him TV’s biggest producer. Sundays at his Beverly Hills home he likes to relax by donning a topee or a menacing German combat helmet and a British officer’s short jacket and moodily marching about with his poodles (names: Hedda and Louella) and his vast television dreams. Occasionally, his reverie may be shattered by a cry from his third wife,* blonde Musicomedienne Vivienne (Pal Joey) Segal: “For heaven’s sake, Hub, take off that damn helmet!”

Nowadays few people except Wife Vivienne would dare talk so impiously to Hub Robinson. At 54 he bosses the flashiest, costliest series in television: the Ford-sponsored NBC lineup of 39 weekly go-minute spectaculars. With a budget of $15 million, Hub Robinson can recruit some of the brightest players and producers—as he proved last week in his third Ford special, Henry James’s eerie classic,

The Turn of the Screw, brilliantly directed by John (Playhouse go) Frankenheimer and starring Ingrid Bergman. Actress Bergman ran a shuddering range of emotions, from schoolmotherly affection for two children placed in her care, to sheer terror of two black ghosts that possess the children, to cold determination to fight the dead and save the souls of the living.

How to Catch Stars. To get his star, Hub Robinson had flown to Scandinavia, tempted Actress Bergman with a reported $100,000, plus ownership of the show in Europe. While in Europe, Robinson also talked Alec Guinness into making his U.S. TV bow (scheduled Nov. 10) by captivating him with a comic short story about a Machiavellian bank clerk. For forthcoming Ford specials, Robinson has also hooked Jack Benny, George Burns, Marian Anderson, Leonard Bernstein, Jimmy Stewart, Ethel Merman. Coos one Robinson recruit, Roz Russell (whose coldness to TV he thawed by offering her a thumping $100,000 for the first Ford show): “Hubbell is the Eisenhower of the TV world, because he can assemble a team and delegate authority.”

Whether Robinson’s parade of big names can come near to sustaining a Bergman level of virtuosity for a full season is a question of performance. Two weeks ago Robinson came close to failure with The Jazz Singer, starring Jerry Lewis. But Producer Robinson has a reputation for imagination and drive, carved as program boss of CBS, a job he held for a dozen years, until last summer. It was Robinson who patiently brought along young producers and writers, prodded them to “think offbeat,” helped develop such CBS shows as Playhouse go, See It Now, Twentieth Century. At CBS, suave and slender (5 ft. 8 in., 150 Ibs.) Vice President Robinson also became known as a cold, meticulous personality, given to $250 Dunhill suits. He sometimes interrupted business conferences to twit an aide for wearing the “wrong” shoes or socks.

Heaven Help Us. Schenectady-born and Ivy-bred (Phillips Exeter Academy ’23, Brown ’27), Hub Robinson started out three decades ago as a copy boy with advertising’s Young & Rubicam. His caustic brilliance soon propelled him through the script department to vice president and boss of all Y. & R.’s radio programing (Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Burns and Allen). That began a string of vice presidencies: the old Blue Network in 1944; to Foote, Cone & Belding in 1945; to CBS in 1947. This year, when Robinson was passed over twice for CBS promotion and word went round that he would never be top banana, he walked out to form his own packaging firm.

Robinson ramrods his firm with a remarkably small staff (only three key assistants, including a lawyer), works out of New York and Hollywood offices. His detractors -assert that he is not “creative” but merely a first-rate editor of other people’s ideas. In that complex editing job (he is lining up four new series in addition to the Ford program), Hub Robinson seems to rely on guidance from on high—at least in the view of visitors, who are disconcerted by his habit of staring past them out the window. “What’s Hubbell doing?” asked one caller who caught him constantly peering at the sky. “Shhh,” said an aide. “He is looking at cue cards.”

-First: TV-Radio Scriptwriter Terry Lewis

(1940-48); second: Singer Margaret Whiting,

with whom he lived for only three tempestuous months in 1948-49.