Biggest Show on Earth

Most TV-set owners end a long stretch of daytime televiewing with an obscure sense of guilt, as if they had sneaked off to a movie in the middle of a business day. But last week, as millions sat glued to the telecasts of the Manhattan hearings of the Senate Crime Investigating Committee, televiewing was for once accompanied by a glowing sense of civic purpose.

The hearings were bigger than Berle.* The research firm of Videodex reported that 69.7% of New York's sets were turned on--more than twice as many as during a weekday World Series ball game last year. Brooklyn's Red Cross chapter had to ask Senator Estes Kefauver to urge its women workers to go out and push a fund-raising campaign drive instead of sitting home watching TV.

Superb Tailoring. What kept the huge audience rooted to its chairs was a modern morality play combining elements of such medieval pageants as St. George and the Dragon and such movies as Little Caesar.

On the side of virtue stood the committee's sharp, relentless counsel, Rudolph Halley, and the senatorial members of the committee who sat in New York. Opposed was a sullen collection of superbly tailored racketeers, gimlet-eyed gamblers, dumb cops, venal politicians and slick lawyers who looked as though they had trooped in from Hollywood's Central Casting bureau.

For characterization, the real-life TV show was better than the movies. When lush Virginia Hill ("I didn't keep any books or accounts or anything") left the witness stand to a patter of applause, televiewers felt they knew all they needed to know about the free-spending, fur-bearing ex-waitress. Similarly, an urbane, aging Republican politician named Charles Lipsky revealed himself as a road-company Machiavelli hopelessly fascinated by criminal and political types ("I just loved to study Joe Adonis"). And Frank Costello, refusing to have his face televised, and finally refusing to talk at all while the cameras concentrated on his fidgeting hands, emerged as a wire-pulling colossus, a sort of bogus Bernard Baruch of the underworld.

Resigned Shrug. Equally memorable in TV's gallery was grey-haired, impeccable Joe Adonis, who needed only a highball to pose as a gentleman of distinction; pudgy Bookmaker Frank Erickson, who never got beyond the fourth grade ("I refuse to answer on the grounds that it might intend to criminate me"); Water Commissioner James J. Moran, a granite-jawed Irishman clearly following some elaborate, personal code of honor that the common run of mankind would never comprehend; and the virulent clash of words and wills between New York's ex-Mayor William O'Dwyer and Senator Charles Tobey.

Minor characters were as sharply etched: a woebegone, moonfaced Puerto Rican accepting his impending arrest for perjury with a resigned shrug; an ex-Navy lieutenant commander, nervously eager to please, repeatedly and irrelevantly reminding the committee that he had been wounded in the South Pacific; a prim Fire Department receptionist who kept painstakingly correcting his own grammar.

Not all TV men cheered the smash success of the hearings. How, they wondered, would televiewers like returning to the insipidity of the average daytime TV show? Surveying the dismal audience captured by programs that stayed on the air, they had the feeling that TV had suddenly gotten out of hand. Of course the hearings could be sponsored as a public service (TIME sponsored them over ABC), but many advertisers hesitated about .using a Senate Committee for the selling of soap.

The viewers of last week's great show were, by turns, amused, incredulous and indignant at the testimony. Most of them could echo Senator Tobey's hope that some day "TV might become a great public forum and a real means of furthering government of and by the people." About the only dissenters: thousands of small fry who protested vainly to their staring parents that they wanted to see Howdy Doody or Six-Gun Playhouse.

* Apparently on the theory that 42-year-old Milton Berle will be at least as funny when he's 70, NBC this week signed him to a 3O-year contract "running into seven figures."

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