Show Business: Only You, Merle Miller

Everyone in television is talking about Merle Miller, but only because he has been talking about them.

Miller, a reasonably well-known novelist (A Day in Late September, That Winter), wrote a pilot film for a TV series that would have premiered this fall. He failed miserably, but he has bounced back. He has just published a nonfiction, names-naming chronicle of his experience called Only You, Dick Daring! or How to Write One Television Script and Make $50,000,000.

Miller’s series, called Calhoun, was to be the story of a county agricultural agent engaged in a week-by-week struggle against boll weevils, nematodes, no-see-’ems, and other incorrigibles of the plains. Calhoun may have been a dog, but Miller’s book is a vivid and often hilarious account of how TV’s butchers can change any script into hamburger.

Berbers Wanted. The network was CBS. There, CBS-TV President James T. Aubrey Jr. is the supreme judge. As Miller draws him, he is a kind of pretty Torquemada. It was Aubrey who conceived the county agent series one day when he leaned back, closed his eyes, and murmured: “I see a man in a dusty pickup in the Southwest.” Corporate peasants were left to do the rest, for Aubrey is no writer, just a would-be writer, as Miller describes him. And would-be writers “are like eunuchs in a harem. They see the trick done every night and are furious that they can’t do it themselves.” In the end, after Miller had rewritten Aubrey’s story at least 3,000 times, Aubrey killed it forever, saying that he had never liked the idea anyway.

Another butcher was Dick Dorso, who was the Executive Vice President in Charge of Programming at United Artists Television. Dorso considered himself the world’s foremost authority on pilot films, according to Miller, and he had a standard lecture about them which begins: “In the first 30 seconds the pilot should go like this, ‘Fifty thousand murderous Berbers are headed toward Cairo, and only you, Dick Daring, can stop them.’ ” Dorso, according to Miller, repeatedly bragged that he had been successfully psychoanalyzed and did not need to be loved. Reacting to a fresh version of Miller’s story, Dorso would always say: “I love it. It’s just wonderful.” Miller learned to listen for the “but.””But,” said Dorso, “could I be the devil’s advocate for a minute? We’ve got to be frank with each other at all times, don’t we, and I don’t have to be loved . . . What CBS wants is a kind of friendly lynch mob scene.” Beads for Sale. Miller’s Jackie Cooper, who was going to play the lead in the series, is a picture of the modern actor as an “incorporated” millionaire, who seeks control of scripts, direction, and other aspects of production quite clearly out of his mental range. Cooper called Miller a great or beautiful writer about 100,000 times-then turned up one day with a new version of the script, written by someone else.

The annals of sycophancy include few scenes as good as Miller’s re-creation of a meeting at which Cooper recited his new Calhoun story line to Michael Dann, CBS Programming Director, and an important group of executives.

While Cooper talked, Dann rummaged through desk drawers, passed cigars, unpacked and repacked his briefcase and read memos. “The other executives,” reports Miller, “took notes on what Dann was doing and, on occasion, glanced at Cooper.” When Cooper had finished, “vicepresidential throats were cleared, vice-presidential feet were shuffled, hitherto ignored vice-presidential itches attended to, vice-presidential coughs coughed.” But not a word was said-until Dann finally said that the new version was great. For several minutes the room was a hubbub of cross talk in competitive praise of Calhoun.

“Dann asked the lesser executives if they had any criticisms or suggestions, but by that time it was clear that we were dealing with a classic of the caliber of Othello.” Some of Miller’s victims-Cooper for one-have said that Miller will never work in TV again. Yet last week ABC announced that Miller, an obvious masochist, is writing a TV play for a new drama series. It obviously will not be drawn from Dick Daring, which would make a much better TV series than Calhoun ever could have been-and would be even less likely to get produced.