Closed Mike Night

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Timothy Noah at TNR on the late Mike Wallace (1918-2012):

People are commemorating Mike Wallace's death at 93 by quoting his entertainingly rude questions. But unlike many askers of rude questions, Wallace often got pretty interesting answers, especially early in his career, before famous people learned to be careful about what they said on television. The University of Texas' Harry Ransom Center has an archive of many of these early interviews from The Mike Wallace Interview, a TV program Wallace hosted from 1957 to 1960. In between retrospectively hilarious and appalling pitches for various cigarette brands (an insinuating swirl of tobacco smoke rising incessantly from his right hand), Wallace peppered his guests with wonderfully blunt (but seldom discourteous) questions. The clips are a reminder that television was in many ways more interesting when it was "primitive" than after it "matured." Wallace, to his credit, retained a fairly "primitive" style for the remainder of his career, and though he could occasionally be faulted for theatricality, he never lost his bluntness (except with Ronald Reagan, perhaps because Reagan's wife Nancy was an old Wallace friend). But the world surrounding Wallace grew more careful, and it got harder to get celebrities to say anything interesting. At the same time, America's concept of celebrity shrank to include only show business figures. People exerting genuine influence over America's political and intellectual life got relegated to PBS, C-Span, and National Public Radio. Big-time commercial television with any pretense to higher purpose predeceased Wallace; prestige became a luxury the networks could no longer afford. May both rest in peace ...



Leonard Ross

12/21/1957

Leonard Ross, a 12-year-old California school boy who won a total of $164,000 on the game shows The Big Surprise and The Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Challenge, talks to Wallace about the effects of quiz shows on children, school, politics, eggheads, spanking, mothers, and Santa Claus.*

*Wikipedia: He committed suicide [1985] in the pool of a California motel. From a Maureen Dowd post-mortem, NYT: The Early Death of a Bedeviled Genius:

... He graduated from high school at 14 and entered Reed College in Portland.

... said [Michael] Levine [the former president of New York Air who now teaches at the University of Southern California], "...You had the feeling he had been an adult since birth."

Mr. Ross began to see a psychoanalyst at Yale, but he hid whatever problems he was having behind a demeanor of infectiously high spirits.

"He was a cross between Portnoy and Woody Allen," said Peter Passell, a roommate at Yale who is now a member of The New York Times editorial board. "He just acted like your garden-variety neurotic. He was immensely ambitious, immensely energetic, full of ideas, and always hustling."

Benno Schmidt, the dean of Columbia Law School, who became friends with Mr. Ross at Yale Law, called him a genius. "I've never seen anybody grasp problems as quickly and see the implications on so many different levels. And, unlike a lot of extremely smart people I've known, he was an extraordinarily generous person to those of us who were slower or less able to see as much."

He had a dazzlingly original sense of humor that could make connections between James Joyce and McDonald's commercials, between ancient history and comic books.

"His playfulness was the thing that made the later turn so bizarre to people who knew him," said Jeff Greenfield, a media critic for ABC-TV who was at Yale Law then. "You meet some people and see there's a dark cloud over them. With Lenny, it just wasn't there."

Friends had trouble keeping up with his conversation, which was laced with references to wildly unrelated things. "He never wanted to say anything in an ordinary way because he was afraid of being banal and he was always jumping ahead," recalled Leonard Chazen, a partner in a New York real-estate firm.

He was always taking on a new project -memorizing 30 words a day in the Spanish dictionary or inventing a board game. And he was always juggling ideas, some brilliant, some wacky, everything from elegant ways of borrowing money to a plan to buy unfashionable art and then inflate its value by loaning it to museums ...