100 New Yorkers of the 1970s Part 4
I meet Franz on a July afternoon after a practice at Giant Stadium. As we sit talking in the locker room, many of his teammates walk by and wave to him or call his name. He is an extremely popular fellow both on and off the field -- which explains why 72,000 people showed up for a game last May commemorating Franz Beckenbauer Day. With his courtly manners, he has rightfully earned the nickname "Kaiser Franz."
He could speak almost no English when he arrived in New York less than two years ago at the age of 31, but has learned remarkably quickly. "My mind was, soccer in the United States, it's easier to play. But it's not so easy as I expect," he says, in his slightly hesitant but perfectly understandable speech. "You have so different things, like Astroturf. You have to play in the summertime. It's so hot. You have to make big trips, like to Los Angeles. Sometimes it's more difficult to play here than in Europe."
When asked to compare soccer with American football, he says, "You can't compare. It's a much different sport. As an American footballer, you must be not a normal man. You must be maybe 200 pounds, and 6 foot 3, 6 foot 4 or 5. Everybody can play soccer -- big, tall, small -- if he is skilled enough, if he has the brain to play.
"I started when I was 3, 4, 5 years old. I don't know exactly. But you know, after the war, n.o.body has money. Soccer is the cheapest sport. No courts, nothing. So we all start to play soccer, and after I was 10 years old, I went to a little club in Munich. When I was 13 years old, I moved to Bayern, Munich, and when I was 18, I was a professional."
Franz smiles at the mention of Manhattan. "When I signed the contract, they asked me where I wanted to stay. In the suburbs? I said no, I want to stay in the city. A friend of mine knows a businessman who lives beside the Central Park. He is most of the year outside the country. The apartment was free, and he let me have it for six months. I was very lucky. I like to walk around the park to watch the people. I have been to Lincoln Center a few times, and of course different shows on Broadway.
But I never saw a city like New York. You have so many good restaurants. It's unbelievable."
During the off-season, Franz does some promotional work for both Mercedes-Benz and Adidas, the sporting goods company that manufactures, among other things, a Franz Beckenbauer soccer shoe. As a result, Franz, who will be 33 next month, is not at all worried about his future.
"You know, when I started with soccer as a professional," he explains, "I had an aim. I said when I'm finished with soccer, my life will be different. I can say, 'I want to do this and this,' and not 'I must do this.'
When I finish my career, I would like to go through the United States in a mobile with my family, to see all the states. That's for sure."
WESTSIDER HIMAN BROWN Creator of the _CBS Radio Mystery Theater_
5-10-80
During the 1930s, a comedy called _The Rise of the Goldbergs_ was second only to _Amos & Andy_ as the most popular radio show in America. Its success was due largely to the efforts of a young man from Brooklyn named Himan Brown, who co-produced the series, sold it to NBC and did the voice of Mr. Goldberg. He had started in radio drama while in his teens, and soon after graduating from Brooklyn Law School as valedictorian, decided to make radio, not law, his career.
During the next three decades, as producer of _Inner Sanctum Mysteries_, _The Thin Man_, _Grand Central Station_, _Nero Wolfe_ and other series, Brown became the Norman Lear of radio. But by 1959, it was all over: the last network radio drama was forced off the air by the onslaught of television. Brown, however, kept up a personal crusade for radio, pounding on the desks of every broadcast executive he could reach.
Fourteen years later, in January 1974, his dream was realized, and radio drama was reborn with the _CBS Radio Mystery Theater_.
The 52-minute show, it turned out, was long overdue. Within weeks, CBS received 200,000 fan letters from listeners. Currently the _Radio Mystery Theater_ can be heard in New York on Monday through Friday at 7:07 p.m. on station WMCA (570 AM). It is heard seven nights a week on approximately 250 other stations across the country. Brown, the producer/director, oversees every phase of the operation, from hiring the writers and actors to directing and recording sessions from a control booth at the CBS studios.
"I have never stopped believing," he says, "that the spoken word and the imagination of the listener are infinitely stronger and more dramatic than anything television can offer." He is a silvery-haired, distinguished looking gentleman with a mischievous twinkle in hie eye and an endless capacity for humor. Ruddy-complexioned and vigorous, dressed in a gray pinstripe suit and a crimson tie, he approaches his work with an infectious enthusiasm.
On a typical weekday, Brown arrives at the sound studio at 9 a.m. with a batch of scripts under his arm, which he hands out to a group of actors a.s.sembled around a table. Many are stars of the stage or screen -- Tammy Grimes, Julie Harris, Tony Roberts, Fred Gwynn, Bobby Morse, Roberta Maxwell, Joan Hackett. "I get the best actors in the world, right here in New York," he notes with pride. "They work for me in the daytime and on Broadway at night."
As the cast members go through a cold reading. Brown interjects his comments: "Do a little more with that. ... Don't swallow your words there. ... Cross out that line." The actors laugh and joke their way through the session; Brown is the biggest jokester of all. Finally everyone takes a break before doing the actual taping. Brown calls his 91-year-old mother on the telephone and speaks to her in Yiddish for some time. Then he answers a questions about his discoveries in sound effects.
"In the 1930s I was doing _d.i.c.k Tracy_, a very popular show. For sound effects we had several doors. One of them screaked, no matter what we did to it. I like to think that door was talking to us, saying, 'Make me a star,'" he says with a smile.
The creaking door later became the signature for _Inner Sanctum Mysteries_, and is now employed as the introductory note for the _Radio Mystery Theater_, along with host E.G. Marshall's compelling greeting: "Come _in_." Himan Brown also created the sound of London's foghorns and Big Ben for _Bulldog Drummond_, the laugh of the fat Nero Wolfe, and the never-to-be-forgotten train that roared under Park Avenue into Grand Central Station.
When the recording session get underway, Brown observes the performers through the thick gla.s.s of the control booth as they stand around a microphone, reading their line with animation. From time to time he stops the action and repeats parts of a scene. "It's all spliced together afterwards," he explains.
In the late 1940s, Brown began to produce television dramas, such as _Lights Out_ and the _Chevy Mystery Show_. He built a large TV studio on West 26th Street for that purpose, which for many years he has leased to CBS for filming the soap opera _The Guiding Light_.
For most of his career, Brown has been a resident of the Upper West Side. The father of two, he is married to Shirley Goodman, executive vice president of the Fashion Inst.i.tute of Technology. He has long been involved in community affairs and charitable organizations, including the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, the National Urban League and the National Conference of Social Work. Brown is constantly in demand as a public speaker, a fund-raiser, and a creator of multimedia presentations.
His plans for 1980 include reviving the _Adventure Theater_, a children's radio with that he last did in 1977. "The best thing about radio drama,"
he joyfully concludes, "is that we can take you anywhere, unhampered by sets, production costs, locations, makeup, costumes, or memorizing lines, and make you believe everything we put on the air. ... The screen in your head is much bigger than the biggest giant screen ever made. It gives you an experience no other form of theatre can duplicate. It's the theatre of the mind."
FERRIS BUTLER Creator, writer and producer of _Waste Meat News_
4-7-79
Every Sat.u.r.day at 11:30 p.m., millions of Americans tune in to what is indisputably the boldest, the most innovative, and frequently the most tasteless comedy show on television -- NBC's _Sat.u.r.day Night Live_. But for the 400,000 residents of Manhattan who have cable TV, there is another program -- also aired at 11:30, but on Sunday evening -- that is, in its own way, even more offbeat.
Known as _Waste Meat News_, the half-hour satiric revue has been a regular feature of Channel D since April, 1976, when a young Westsider named Ferris Butler decided that he had the talent to write, direct, and produce his own comedy series, even without money and film equipment.
Time has proven him right: last year, _TV World_ magazine discovered, in a poll of viewers, that _Waste Meat News_ is the most popular comedy program on cable, out of 150 public access shows.
A tall, willowy, 27-year-old with a quizzical expression permanently fixed on his face, Ferris once worked as a part-time office boy at Channel 7's _Eyewitness News_, and there he came to the conclusion that "TV news is nothing but throwaway sc.r.a.ps, like sausages or hot dogs. ... Very little protein, like waste meat."
Many of the skits he conceives have the same format as "straight" news items, but have been twisted by his imagination into something outrageous. In place of the standard weather reports, for example, there is Ferris' "Leather Weather Girl," in which a girl is tied to a table, her body representing a map of the world.
The weather reporter, while telling about an impending onslaught of rain and snow, dramatizes his points by pouring a pitcher of water over the girl, smothering her with shaving cream, and finally applying a blow dryer to evaporate the messes while explaining that a warm air front will follow. Other skits include "Swedish Grease," "Music to Eat Rice By,"
and "The Adversaries," in which two actors wearing grotesque masks debate the question: should monsters be allowed to kill people, or just frighten them?
Ideas for skits, says Ferris, come to him any time of night or day, now that he has "stopped working at any legitimate job. I watch a lot of television. But most of the time, I meander around the streets and just think.
"I remember when I got the idea for the foreign language cursing detector. I was sitting on a bench in the park, smoking gra.s.s, when some foreign tourists came and sat down, and started talking about me in German like I was a b.u.m. And I thought, why not have a portable siren that goes off whenever a swear word is spoken in any language?"
He describes himself as "a very unregimented person who can't jive with the mainstream industry." This accounts for much of the spontaneity in _Waste Meat News_. The performers sometimes don't see the scripts until the taping session. Each segment requires several run-throughs before it is smooth enough to be filmed. Frequently the filming goes on far into the night. Although the show is done with a single camera and half-inch videotape, the final result makes up in charm what it lacks in professional gloss.
"Maybe I'm a little rough in the way I produce it," says Ferris, "but I'm being a pioneer and I'm not worried about perfection as long as the audience has a positive reaction."
His cast is an irregular group of about 15 unpaid actors and actresses, most of them young. Two current stars of _Waste Meat News_ are Pat Profito, a master of comedy who injects an infectious vitality into all of his performances, and Laura Suarez, a Stra.s.sberg-trained actress and former Playboy Bunny who frequently portrays the naive s.e.xpot who crops up in many of Ferris' sketches.
Most of the filming is done on the Upper West Side -- usually on the street or in someone's apartment, but also in such diverse places as stores, restaurants, the waterfront, boiler rooms and lobbies. A recent skit was shot at a Westside swimming pool; it features Pat Profito as a swimming instructor who teaches three bikini-clad beauties his "jump-in-and-swim"
method, in which he pushes them into the pool and expects them to swim instinctively, or drown.
Ferris, who grew up in Queens and Brooklyn "and departed as soon as was possible," studied filmmaking at New York University under Martin Scorsese and was encouraged to pursue comedy writing. For the past five years he has been married to Beverly Ross, a composer with many hits to her credit including "Lollipop."
It's 10 seconds before midnight on Sunday evening. Time once again for Ferris to bid his viewers goodnight. "And remember: stay alienated, stay wiped out, and stay wasted."
EASTSIDER SAMMY CAHN Oscar-winning lyricist
3-10-79
"I've never written a song that didn't almost write itself," says Sammy Cahn, one of the world's most successful lyricists of popular songs. "I'm like the catalyst. It's like I start the boulder down the hill, but after that, there's only one place it can go. I'm always thrilled by the adventure of finding the lyric and leading it to a happy conclusion. If I come to the slightest impa.s.se, I've learned to stop, and look around and see what needs to be done around the house. Then I come back, and it's so easy.
You can't go into combat with a lyric."
Over the past four decades, his songs have received four Oscars and more than 30 Oscar nominations. Among his numerous. .h.i.ts, written in collaboration with six different melodists, are "Three Coins in a Fountain," "Love and Marriage," "Call Me Irresponsible" and "Let It Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!" His musicals include _Anchors Aweigh_ and _High b.u.t.ton Shoes_. As a performer, he has the distinction of making his Broadway debut in 1974 at the age of 60, in a one-man show with backup musicians t.i.tled _Words and Music_, in which he sang his own material and told colorful stories about his life and career. For his performance, Sammy won the Outer Circle Critic's Award for Best New Talent on Broadway, as well as a Theatre World Award. Since then, he has been in great demand all over the country as an entertainer.
Small, wiry and energetic -- he describes himself as "all gla.s.ses and mustache" -- he is utterly without pretension, and seems as much at home with strangers on the street as he is with royalty (last year he sang for England's Prince Charles). He manages to embrace both worlds by involving himself in many projects simultaneously.
Born on "the lowest part of the Lower East Side," he now has an apartment in the East 60s with his wife t.i.ta, a fashion designer. He has another residence in Los Angeles, and spends about the same number of days each year in the two homes.
Recently Sammy completed the songs for a new cartoon film of _Heidi_ and a series of songs for _Sesame Street_. He also works as a consultant for Faberge, and has a large office in the company's East Side headquarters. As president of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Sammy devotes much of his time to publicizing the non-profit organization's museum on the eighth floor of One Times Square. It is open Monday through Sat.u.r.day from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and admission is free. He recently met with the producer of the Broadway musical _Annie_ to discuss writing a new musical. He gives generously to many charitable causes.