Tag: TY

Is D.J. of ‘WKRP’ Bound for Cultdom?

From New York Times – 8 December 1979

No, he does not look like Erik Estrada or any of the other usual American male television idols. His blond hair is thinning, his forehead is heavily lined, and underneath the sunglasses he almost always wears deep pouches ring his eyes. He does, in fact, look slightly dissipated.

Yet when Howard Hesseman walked down the Avenue of the Americas the other day, many passers‐by did doubletakes, beamed and pointed at him. Several of them shouted, “Hey, Johnny Fever, is that you?” One man even grabbed him and hugged him. And Mr. Hesseman said he was still recovering from the surprise of being ardently kissed twice by a fan,a woman, while he was trying to eat brunch in San Francisco.

The 39‐year‐old Mr. Hesseman plays the freewheeling counterculture disk jockey Dr. Johnny Fever on the popular CBS‐TV series “WKRP in Cincinnati.” He and Loni Anderson, who plays the station’s blond receptionist, are the leading characters on the series, which last week ranked sixth in the Nielsen popularity ratings.

Virtually a Cult Figure

Mr. Hesseman, virtually a cult figure these days, is causing commotion in Manhattan because he is in town to be the host of “Saturday Night Live” tonight at 11:30 on NBC. A former member of San Franclsco’s famed improvisational group the Committee, Mr. Hesseman said his “Saturday Night Live” stint was “like going borne, except your cousins have moved into the house. “Saturday Night Live” is the logical media outgrowth of what the Committee and Second City were doing 10 and 15 years ago, and I’m really thrilled they asked me to do the show.”

Sitting in a restaurant over a plate of sea bass, which he ordered because he said be liked “a fairly tasteless fish,” Mr. Hesseman bantered with a fawning waiter and then talked about his battles with the CBS censors, who he said were afraid of the “counterculture aspects” of his character.

Dr. Johnny Fever, as Mr. Hesseman makes clear in his portrayal of the disk Jockey, has ingested a fair share of drugs in his lifetime. He is one of the first characters on commercial television to openly espouse a style of life alien to much of middle America.

Alcohol and Drugs

“I think maybe Johnny smokes a little marijuana, drinks beer and wine, and maybe a little hard liquor,” Mr. Hesseman said. “And on one of those hard mornings at the station, he might take what for many years was referred to as a diet pill. But be is a moderate user of soft drugs, specifically marijuana.”

“The network, needless to say, is terrified about that element,” he added. “But by no means am I advocating drug use. I understand the fears. I have a fair share of friends who are dead because of drugs, or close to it. I just think the fears are overblown.”

Mr. Hesseman, who favors the decriminalization of marijuana, said he did 90 days in the San Francisco County Jail in 1963 for selling an ounce of marijuana — a conviction that was later thrown out for entrapment. When asked if he still used marijuana, he smiled and said, “It’s sort of a residual hobby.”

The six‐foot, 165‐pound actor, who was wearing a plaid wool shirt with a matching plaid necktle and black denim jeans, said he was upset CBS was moving “WKRP” from its 9:30 P.M. time slot on Mondays to 8 o’clock. When the show came on the air last year, it faltered in that time slot and was dropped for a while.

‘Some Sophisticated Issues’

“None of us feel we’re doing Shakespeare or Strindberg or anything,” he said, “but we don’t feel we’re an 8 o’clock show. We’ve dealt with some sophisticated issues, like the boss’s wife getting pregnant at the age of 47, and things like that can’t be too fascinating to young viewers.”

He added that he thought pitting “WKRP” against NBC’s “Little House on the Prairle” and ABC’s “Laverne and Shiriey” would result in all three shows dropping from the top 20.

Mr. Hesseman is well qualified to play a counterculture disk jockey. Back in 1967, while be was a member of the Committee, he worked Saturdays as a disk Jockey for San Francisco’s pioneering underground rock‐and‐roll station, KMPX. “Most of my friends said I wasn’t that good,” he said. “I have pretty eclectic tastes, and I got into some pretty bizarre riffs on the radio. I was terrified of the technology, and I knew nothing about running the boards. There was none of Dr. Johnny Fever’s amphetamine‐euphoria approach to the weather reports.”

Because of his real‐life deejay experience, Mr. Hesseman said he adlibbed all of Johnny Fever’s on‐the‐air patter, and also picked the records to be played.

He said he was originally considered for the part of Herb, WKRP’s sales manager, a solidly Middle Western type who often wears plaid suits, a white belt and white shoes. “I could have played Herb, I’ve played that type many times before,” Mr. Hesseman said. “But I told them, ‘Johnny is the only one I’m interested in.”

Before “WKRP,” Mr. Hesseman was one of those character actors whose face, if not his name, was sort of familiar. Known as Don Sturdy while he was with the Committee, he took back his own name in 1971 when he was cast in his first movie, “Steelyard Blues,” with Jane Fonda. He also had small parts in “Billy Jack,” “Shampoo,” “The Sunshine Boys” and “Silent Movie.” He has also appeared in a number of television movies and had nmning roles as a patient on “The Bob Newhart Show,” the prosecutor on “Soap” and the psychiatrist on “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”

Mission From ‘The Jerk’

He was to have appeared as a rowdy carnival worker in Steve Martin’s coming movie “The Jerk,” which will open Friday. “But it’s gone, the whole thing was edited out,” he said. “I was disappointed, because I got to work with four other members of the Committee with one of my heroes, Carl Reiner. the scene is not sorely missed from film.”

Born in Salem, Ore., Mr. Hesseman Is single, after two failed marriages. He said he lived in a rented Hollywood bungalow, drove a 1964 yellow Oldsmobile convertible, and collected Oriental rugs and Buddha statues. He tries swim a mile a day, he said, to ward the effects of smoking two packs cigarettes daily.

The actor said that his goal was to work in films, and that he was under consideration for five or six major roles.

“Some are total departures from Dr. Johnny Fever, and that makes me happy,” he said. “One part I like is a community leader, a hail fellow well met, in a small Florida town. Now that’s really a departure from Johnny.”

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“I used to be shy about ordering a steak after I had eaten a steak sandwich,” he once said, “but I got used to it.”

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A.J. Liebling, a critic of the daily press, a chronicler of the prize ring, an epicure and a biographer of such diverse personages as the late Gov. Earl Long of Louisiana and Col. John R. Stingo died yesterday at Mount Sinai Hospital.

                Mr. Liebling, who was 59 years old, entered the hospital on Dec 19, suffering from bronchial pneumonia.

                In 1935, after about a decade of intermittent employment as a newspaperman. Mr. Liebling went to work for The New Yorker. Since then he had written hundreds of articles for the magazine, many of which later appeared in book form.

                He first came to prominence as The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent on the eve of World War II. Later he followed the First Infantry Division across North Africa and into northern France. Despite chronic gout, a degree of plumpness and extreme nearsightedness, he regularly accompanied combat patrols.

                In 1946, he took over the magazine’s “Wayward Press” department, first conducted by Robert Benchley. His perceptive, sardonic articles on such subjects as editorial campaigns for the end of meat price controls, news treatment of the Alger Hiss trial, and, more recently, the newspaper strike here, were widely read.

                He resided in Chicago for a while in the late 1940’s, and the resulting dissection, published in 1952 as “Chicago: The Second City,” still possesses the power of creating instant rage there.

                He considered Carl Sandburg’s poetic evocation of a brawling, enterprising city outmoded. Mr. Liebling said its cry had changed from “Let me at him!” to “Hold him offa me,” and suggested that the appearance of the city indicated it has been “plopped down by the lakeside like a piece of waterlogged fruit.”

                In an extended New Yorker profile that appeared in book form in 1953 as “The Honest Rainmaker,’ he told of Hames A. Macdonald, a man of many occupations who was at the time a racing columnist for The New York Enquirer und the pen name of Col. John R. Stingo. The colonel, now deep in his 80’s, is still a familiar figure in midtown cafes.

                Perhaps Mr. Liebling’s most widely read book was “The Earl of Louisiana,” which appeared in 1961, and was based, as usual, on a series of New Yorker pieces. Mr. Liebling took the rather unorthodox view that Governor Long, better known for his eccentricities, was the South’s most effective liberal in recent years.

                He had been an amateur boxer in his youth, although, as he observed, he was not in the Ernest Hemingway class for size, skill or literary attainment, This interest was reflected in accounts of major prizefights and sketches of ring personalities that appeared from time to time in the magazine.

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He studied ancient history at the Sorbonne, without much dedication, and became a scholar of the bistros and cafes.

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                A collection of his articles on boxing, titled “The Sweet Science,” was published in 1956

                In the middle fifties he revisited the old battlegrounds of the First Division, reacquainting himself with the delights of Calvados and Norman delicacies he described in loving detail in “Normandy Revisited,” which appeared in 1958.

                In “Between Meals,” published last year, Mr. Liebling cast an unaccustomedly tender eye on his growing up in Manhattan, trips to Europe with his parents as a child and his own student days in Paris in the early twenties.

                In October of this year, “The most of A.J. Liebling,” a selection from a dozen of his earlier collections, was published.

                Mr. Liebling never lost the reporter’s skill of recording facts accurately, but as his style matured it became convoluted, subtle and abounding in unlikely allusions. An account of a Sugar Ray Robinson fight, for example, might be a delicate embroidery on a theme suggested by a medieval Arabian historian to whom he was partial.

                Mr. Liebling bore the marks of the gourmet: an extended waistline and rosy cheeks. “I used to be shy about ordering a steak after I had eaten a steak sandwich,” he once said, “but I got used to it.”

                Abbott Joseph Liebling was born in New York on Oct. 18, 1904. His father, Joseph Liebling, was a furrier. The son later described him as embodying the Horatio Alger legend in reverse, making his money early and dying broke.

                The Son, who was generally known as Joe, was expelled from Dartmouth College for refusing to attend chapel. He enrolled at the School of Journalism at Columbia University, which he later said, had “all the intellectual status of a training school for the future employees of the A. & P.”

                Last May, though, on the school’s 50^th anniversary, he was one of 81 persons honored as distinguished alumni.

                His first job after graduation was in the sports department of The New York Times. One of his jobs was to compile basketball box scores, right down to the name of the referee. One night Mr. Liebling failed to get the official’s name from a high school correspondent and gave it as “Ignoto,” which is Italian for “unknown.”

                Deciding he was on to a good thing, Mr. Liebling stopped asking for the referee’s name. In the weeks that followed, Ignoto appeared at games all over the East Coast, sometimes several in a night. The sports editor made inquiries. He didn’t see the joke, and eight months after being hired, Mr. Liebling was dismissed.

                He went next to The Providence (R.I.) Journal and Evening Bulletin, where as a reporter and feature writer, he later said, “I oozed prose over every aspect of Rhode Island life.”

                In all he spent four and a half years there, interrupted by a year in Paris. He arranged to have his father finance the trip by telling him that he was thinking of marrying a cotton broker’s mistress. There he studied ancient history at the Sorbonne, without much dedication, and became a scholar of the bistros and cafes.

                He returned to New York in 1930. Not immediately finding employment, he hired a man to picket the entrance of The World, carrying a sign that read, “Hire Joe Liebling.” The city editor always used the back door, and it was not until the paper had gone out of business that Mr. Liebling caught on with the World-Telegram.

                Mr. Liebling wrote hundreds of feature stories during the next five years and gained the familiarity with off-beat New York that he continued to The New Yorker.

                He remained active until he entered the hospital a week ago, working on a study of the reaction of the southern press to the assassination of President Kennedy.

                Despite the considerable breadth of his published works, it is likely that Mr. Liebling most enjoyed his role as a press gadfly. His favorite themes were the diminishing competition and consequent loss of enterprise caused by merger and sales.

                In 1948, when the fist collection of “Wayward Press” articles was published, Mr. Liebling dedicated it “To the foundation of a School for Publishers, Failing Which No School of Journalism Can Have Meaning.”

                Mr. Liebling was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor by the French Government for his work as a writer on French subjects and as a war correspondent. He was the translator and editor of “The Voices of Silence,” a compilation of writings be members of the Resistance during World War II.

                He lived at 45 West 10^th and had a summer home at Easthampton, L.I.

                He is survived by his widow, Jean Stafford, the novelist, whom he married in 1959, and a sister, Mrs. Harold Stonehill. Two previous marriages, to Ann Beatrice McGinn in 1934 and to Lucille Hille Spectorsky in 1949, ended in divorce.

                Funeral services will be held at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Church, Madison Avenue and 81^st Street, at 1 P.M. tomorrow.