Spoilers. See it first.
A story in one of those "Whatever Became Of...?" books from several years ago convinced me without aiming to that Sammy Hogarth is a thinly veiled composite of the top two or three TV comics of TV's Golden Age. (No names please.) In that book, a second string comic who did a lot of TV in the 50s talks at length, with deadly, convincing examples, of the bloated egotism, vanity and ugly cruelty of THE names of early TV comedy. "The really big ones" he said "they were all b****rds."
That certainly describes Mickey Rooney as Sammy Hogarth to the letter. Once you accept the premise --that over-the-top success breeds monsters of the ego-- it is easy to get swept up in a paranoid who-was-he-really? guessing game. Is Rooney as good as he is at playing Sammy because he IS Sammy? (After all, success and wealth came to him a a very early age, and he apparently had the kind of women most red-blooded American Male's dream of on tap throughout his 20s and 30s.) --Or is it another non-comic air personality, of the legendary and ultimately self-immolating high temper, a saint before the camera, a beast behind the scenes, whose rise and fall was encapsulated for all time in the contemporaneous Face In the Crowd? Clearly, turning over all the stones in the field is madness. Sammy is a postulate.
As central as Sammy is to the experience of The Comedian, the story isn't really about him. It's about Al, Sammy's harried head writer, a middle-aged man who finds himself at a personal crossroads. Deep in a lucrative career most of his peers would kill for, he has come reluctantly to the realization that he doesn't have what it takes anymore. His co-writers are carrying him; he is acting mostly as editor, passive catalyst, critic and executive comedy writer. The crushing grind of turning out huge volumes of material on the tightest schedules has used up whatever he may have had. --Or maybe he never had it to begin with; Al is never sure. (Friends say this character was the great Rod Serling himself, always unsure of his own talent.)
Whatever his perceived personal inadequacies, Al recognizes and savors brilliance when he sees it. Years before, he crossed paths with an aspiring young comedy writer named Davey Farber. Farber wrote knockout stuff; Al says he (Al) would be dining daily on Farber's dust, were his rival-aborning/idol alive now. But Farber was killed in WWII. Al keeps an original set of Davey's unused, unsubmitted scripts from the old days in a locked drawer in his office. Why? --To commune from time to time with a kindred spirit and dead friend/mentor/demon? --As insurance against the day when inspiration fails him, and he has to come in contact with the Godhead via the service entrance? To steal the work of somebody better than he ever was? Your answer to this question is as ultimately just as crass and condemning or as shaded and empathetic as you want it to be. Al's relationship with the image of Farber isn't exactly love/hate, but it is masochistic, and he probably hates himself for the emotions those scripts bring out in him. Every time he removes those scripts from his hiding place, he bathes in his own failure. He admires Farber immensely, while feeling stung that he could never be one of the brilliant ones, like the long departed author of his hard-copy inspiration. It's his connection with Farber that will eventually put him to the test.
Sammy's brother Lester is the comedian's home base foil. For all the abuse Sammy heaps on everyone else-- and that's plenty-- he saves the very best for family, as people will. Lester is the brunt of the savage monologue that opens Sammy's show every week. Lester's wife is beginning to hate him for taking it lying down. He is squeezed tight between the allure of a cushy sustaining spot on his brother's payroll and his wife's impatient shame at a husband who got everything he will ever own by submitting to his brother's public mistreatment. Lester's desperate search for a way out of the non-stop humiliation and threatened end of his marriage sets things in motion that will force Al to finally deal definitively with his dark secret.
Into a charged situation sashays gossip columnist Otis Elwood, a dilettante and foppish slimeball, with fur-collared great coat, crisp fedora and shades he never removes. His pompous and high-blown everyday speech betrays his inflated image of himself. But right off, despite all the creep cues thrown our way, we share one undeniable affinity with this 'villain' that prevents us writing him off: We despise Sammy every bit as much as Elwood does. Like him, we ache to see the little weasel fall. It may be hard for modern audiences to realize the kind of power the Earl Wilsons, Luella Parsons, Hedda Hoppers and Walter Winchells used to wield. But they did, and Elwood is no far-fetched deus ex machina. Lester hates Elwood, mumbling into his collar at the beginning of act one "He thinks he's God or somethin'." He will turn to Elwood before the play is over, for leverage against Al and his brother and for salvation from his personal hell.
The obsessions of the main characters are essentially Serling's: career (as in how to earn a dollar and retain one's dignity), place in society (as in one's ultimate deemed status in the human community), the nature of talent, and the question of the importance of legacy. In Serling's world, it isn't a question of wanting to fit in and keep up with the other corporation men. Materialistic failure is always an option for Serling. But to be a nonentity, to do something that causes you to slip through the cracks of human memory, is not.
If anyone wants to see what all the talk over TV drama from the Golden Age of television is about, this is the place to start.
Ten Stars.
A story in one of those "Whatever Became Of...?" books from several years ago convinced me without aiming to that Sammy Hogarth is a thinly veiled composite of the top two or three TV comics of TV's Golden Age. (No names please.) In that book, a second string comic who did a lot of TV in the 50s talks at length, with deadly, convincing examples, of the bloated egotism, vanity and ugly cruelty of THE names of early TV comedy. "The really big ones" he said "they were all b****rds."
That certainly describes Mickey Rooney as Sammy Hogarth to the letter. Once you accept the premise --that over-the-top success breeds monsters of the ego-- it is easy to get swept up in a paranoid who-was-he-really? guessing game. Is Rooney as good as he is at playing Sammy because he IS Sammy? (After all, success and wealth came to him a a very early age, and he apparently had the kind of women most red-blooded American Male's dream of on tap throughout his 20s and 30s.) --Or is it another non-comic air personality, of the legendary and ultimately self-immolating high temper, a saint before the camera, a beast behind the scenes, whose rise and fall was encapsulated for all time in the contemporaneous Face In the Crowd? Clearly, turning over all the stones in the field is madness. Sammy is a postulate.
As central as Sammy is to the experience of The Comedian, the story isn't really about him. It's about Al, Sammy's harried head writer, a middle-aged man who finds himself at a personal crossroads. Deep in a lucrative career most of his peers would kill for, he has come reluctantly to the realization that he doesn't have what it takes anymore. His co-writers are carrying him; he is acting mostly as editor, passive catalyst, critic and executive comedy writer. The crushing grind of turning out huge volumes of material on the tightest schedules has used up whatever he may have had. --Or maybe he never had it to begin with; Al is never sure. (Friends say this character was the great Rod Serling himself, always unsure of his own talent.)
Whatever his perceived personal inadequacies, Al recognizes and savors brilliance when he sees it. Years before, he crossed paths with an aspiring young comedy writer named Davey Farber. Farber wrote knockout stuff; Al says he (Al) would be dining daily on Farber's dust, were his rival-aborning/idol alive now. But Farber was killed in WWII. Al keeps an original set of Davey's unused, unsubmitted scripts from the old days in a locked drawer in his office. Why? --To commune from time to time with a kindred spirit and dead friend/mentor/demon? --As insurance against the day when inspiration fails him, and he has to come in contact with the Godhead via the service entrance? To steal the work of somebody better than he ever was? Your answer to this question is as ultimately just as crass and condemning or as shaded and empathetic as you want it to be. Al's relationship with the image of Farber isn't exactly love/hate, but it is masochistic, and he probably hates himself for the emotions those scripts bring out in him. Every time he removes those scripts from his hiding place, he bathes in his own failure. He admires Farber immensely, while feeling stung that he could never be one of the brilliant ones, like the long departed author of his hard-copy inspiration. It's his connection with Farber that will eventually put him to the test.
Sammy's brother Lester is the comedian's home base foil. For all the abuse Sammy heaps on everyone else-- and that's plenty-- he saves the very best for family, as people will. Lester is the brunt of the savage monologue that opens Sammy's show every week. Lester's wife is beginning to hate him for taking it lying down. He is squeezed tight between the allure of a cushy sustaining spot on his brother's payroll and his wife's impatient shame at a husband who got everything he will ever own by submitting to his brother's public mistreatment. Lester's desperate search for a way out of the non-stop humiliation and threatened end of his marriage sets things in motion that will force Al to finally deal definitively with his dark secret.
Into a charged situation sashays gossip columnist Otis Elwood, a dilettante and foppish slimeball, with fur-collared great coat, crisp fedora and shades he never removes. His pompous and high-blown everyday speech betrays his inflated image of himself. But right off, despite all the creep cues thrown our way, we share one undeniable affinity with this 'villain' that prevents us writing him off: We despise Sammy every bit as much as Elwood does. Like him, we ache to see the little weasel fall. It may be hard for modern audiences to realize the kind of power the Earl Wilsons, Luella Parsons, Hedda Hoppers and Walter Winchells used to wield. But they did, and Elwood is no far-fetched deus ex machina. Lester hates Elwood, mumbling into his collar at the beginning of act one "He thinks he's God or somethin'." He will turn to Elwood before the play is over, for leverage against Al and his brother and for salvation from his personal hell.
The obsessions of the main characters are essentially Serling's: career (as in how to earn a dollar and retain one's dignity), place in society (as in one's ultimate deemed status in the human community), the nature of talent, and the question of the importance of legacy. In Serling's world, it isn't a question of wanting to fit in and keep up with the other corporation men. Materialistic failure is always an option for Serling. But to be a nonentity, to do something that causes you to slip through the cracks of human memory, is not.
If anyone wants to see what all the talk over TV drama from the Golden Age of television is about, this is the place to start.
Ten Stars.