Sammy Cahn, a famous lyricist, was once asked, "Which comes first, the music or the lyrics?"
His response was, "Neither. First comes the telephone call."
The telephone call came from Joe Pasternak.
"Sidney, MGM just bought Jumbo for me. We want you to write the screenplay. Are you available?"
I was available.
Billy Rose's Jumbo had opened on Broadway in 1935. Billy Rose, one of the top producers on Broadway, was not a man to do things in a small way. He had taken over the huge Hippodrome Theatre at Forty-third Street and had rebuilt it like a circus tent, with the audience looking down at the "ring." Jimmy Durante and Paul Whiteman were in the show, Ben Hecht and Charley MacArthur had written the book, Rodgers and Hart had done the score, and George Abbott had directed. The creme de la creme all the way.
When the show opened, the reviews were excellent, but there was a catch. The production was so expensive that it was impossible for it to break even, let alone make a profit. It closed after five months.
It had been almost ten years since I was last on the MGM lot. Outwardly, it seemed to me that everything was pretty much the same. I was soon to learn how wrong I was.
Joe Pasternak had not changed at all. He still had the same wonderful exuberance.
"I have already signed Doris Day, Martha Raye, and Jimmy Durante. In order to get Doris, I had to make her husband, Marty Melcher, co-producer. Your old friend Chuck Walters is directing."
That was good news. I had not seen Chuck since we had worked together on Easter Parade.
"Who is going to play the male lead?"
Pasternak hesitated. "We don't have anyone yet, but there is an actor playing in Camelot on Broadway who might be right for it."
"What's his name?"
"Richard Burton. I want you to fly back to New York with Walters and take a look at him."
"Gladly."
It was when I went into the commissary to lunch that day that I received my shock. The same hostess, Pauline, was still working there. We greeted each other, and as she started to seat me at a table, I asked, "Where's the writers' table?"
"There is no writers' table."
"Well," I said, "then we'll have to start one."
She looked at me a moment. "Mr. Sheldon, I'm afraid you'd be very lonely. You're the only writer on the lot."
From a hundred fifty writers to, "You're the only writer on the lot." That's how much Hollywood had changed in the last ten years.
I spent the next few days working on an outline to adapt the story of Jumbo for the screen. On Friday, Charles Walters and I flew back to New York, to see Richard Burton in Camelot.
Camelot was a huge production also starring Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet. Moss Hart had directed it. Burton was brilliant in it.
The studio had arranged for Charles Walters and me to have supper with Burton after the show. We were waiting for him when he arrived at Sardi's. Richard Burton was larger than life - open and gregarious, filled with a hearty Welsh charm. He was well-read, intelligent, and had an eclectic mind. Burton was not a major star, but he was about to become one.
Since I had not had time to write down my story outline, I said, "I have nothing on paper yet, but I would like to tell you the story."
He smiled. "I love stories. Go ahead."
Jumbo was a romantic love story set against the background of a rivalry between two circuses. When I had finished telling Richard Burton the story, he was enthusiastic.
"I love it," he said, "and I'm looking forward to working with Doris Day. Call my agent and tell him to make the deal."
Chuck and I looked at each other. We had gotten our man. Everything was set.
The following morning, we returned to Hollywood. Joe Pasternak told Benny Thau to close the deal for Burton. Thau called Hugh French, Burton's Hollywood agent, and set up a meeting.
When they had exchanged greetings, Hugh French said, "Richard called me. He likes the project a lot. He's eager to do it."
"Good. We'll draw up the contracts."
"For how much?" Hugh French asked.
"Two hundred thousand dollars. That was the deal on his last picture."
The agent said, "We want two-fifty, Benny."
Thau, who was a tough negotiator, was indignant. "Why should we give him a raise? He's not that important. This part is a break for him."
"Benny, I have to tell you - he has an offer to do another movie. They're willing to pay him the two-fifty."
Thau said, stubbornly, "Fine. Let them pay him. We'll get someone else."
And so it was that instead of starring in Jumbo, Richard Burton signed to do Cleopatra, met and fell in love with Elizabeth Taylor, and together they created an exciting new Chapter in Hollywood romantic gossip. My theory is that if Thau had paid the extra fifty thousand dollars, Richard Burton would have done Jumbo and married Martha Raye.
We signed Stephen Boyd for the male lead and the picture was ready to roll. The cast was brilliant. Doris Day was perfect for the part of Kitty Wonder. Stephen Boyd was excellent and Martha Raye was a delight. But my favorite was Jimmy Durante.
Durante had started as a piano player. He had opened a nightclub and formed an act with two other performers, Jackson and Clayton. An insight into Durante was that when he decided to go solo, he kept his former partners on his payroll. He loved to tell stories about the past and I never heard him say an unkind word about anyone.
My screenplay was approved, and production began. Everything went smoothly during the shooting. When the picture was released, Jumbo was nominated for the Writers Guild Award as the best-written American Musical of the Year.
My agent, Sam Weisbord, called me.
"Sidney, we just sold Patty Duke to ABC."
I certainly knew that name. At the age of twelve, Patty Duke had gotten the role of Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, had taken Broadway by storm, and when the movie was made, had received an Oscar.
Sam continued. "We already have a time slot. Wednesday nights at eight. We're calling the program The Patty Duke Show. Everything is all set. But we have a problem."
"I don't understand. If everything is all set, what's your problem?"
"We don't have a show."
They had sold it on Patty Duke's name alone.
"We want you to create a show."
"I'm sorry, Sammy," I said, "the answer is no."
In the early sixties, people who worked in motion pictures looked down on those who labored in television. When television was in its infancy, the networks had gone to the studios. "We have a great new form of distribution," they said, "but we don't know how to create entertainment. Why don't we become partners?"
The answer was simple. The studios had their own means of distribution. They were called theaters, and most of the studios owned their own chains. They were not about to get involved with an upstart technology that they considered a passing fad. The studios were so anti-television that they would not even permit their stars to be televised going to a movie premiere.
I had been conditioned by that attitude, and I remembered my experience with Desi, so it was natural for me to say, "Sorry, Sammy. I don't do television."
There was a pause. "All right. I understand. But as a courtesy, would you have lunch with Patty?"
I saw no harm in that. As a matter of fact, I was curious to meet her.
We arranged to have lunch at the Brown Derby. Patty was accompanied by four agents from the William Morris office. She was then sixteen years old, smaller than I had expected, and very vulnerable. She sat next to me in our booth.
"I'm very happy to meet you, Mr. Sheldon."
"I'm happy to meet you, Miss Duke."
We talked during lunch and her shyness seemed to disappear, but her vulnerability remained. She held my hand during lunch, and it became obvious to me that she was hungry for love.
Patty had had a terrible background. It was like something out of a Charles Dickens novel. Her mother was psychotic. Her father was a drunk who abandoned the family. At age seven, Patty had moved in with her manager, John Ross, and his wife, Ethel, who were living in an upstairs cold-water flat. Patty had never had a family.
Before The Patty Duke Show, John Ross was a struggling, small-time manager. His clientele had consisted of minor character actors. Among them was a young actor named Ray Duke.
One day, Duke came to Ross and asked him if he would represent his young sister, Anna, who had done no acting up to that time. Ross met the seven-year-old girl and agreed to handle her.
A few months later, when Anna's home life became unbearable, the Rosses agreed to let her move in with them, and promptly changed her name to Patty. The order had come from Ethel Ross, who declared, "Anna Marie is dead. You are Patty now."
John Ross read that a play called The Miracle Worker was going to be produced on Broadway, and he decided that Patty Duke would be right for the part of Helen Keller, a blind, deaf, and mute girl. He coached Patty for months. When she finally competed against a hundred other girls and won the part, their lives changed completely. The day after the play opened, John Ross's unknown young client had become an overnight star.
Ross began receiving offers for Patty for thousands of dollars a week. Instead of knocking on producers' doors and begging them to hire his clients, Ross was being wooed by producers, directors, and studio executives. He could not believe his good luck.
When lunch was over, I realized how taken I was by Patty. I found her irresistible.
"How would you like to come to my house tonight and have dinner with Jorja and me," I asked her.
She beamed. "I'd love to."
Jorja was just as enchanted with Patty as I was. She was bright and vivacious and kept us laughing throughout the evening.
As Jorja and I were talking, we suddenly realized that Patty had left the table. I got up to see where she was. She was in the kitchen, doing the dishes. That clinched it for me.
"I'm going to write a show for you, Patty."
I got a big hug and a whispered "Thank you."
I decided that if I was going to have my name on a television show, I wanted to be able to control the quality of it. I held my first meeting with the producers.
"We're delighted that you're going to do the show, Sidney."
"Thank you."
"In addition to being the creator, you'll be the story editor, and supervise the other writers."
"I don't want any other writers."
They stared at me. "What?"
"If I am going to do this show, I want to write it."
"Sidney, that's impossible. We have an order for thirty-nine shows, one show every week."
"I intend to write them all."
They looked at each other, horrified. It was only later that I learned why. No one in the history of television had ever written every script for a weekly half-hour comedy show.
"Is this negotiable?"
"No," I said.
"You have a deal."
Not until months later did I learn that the day I signed the contract, they had hired four other writers to write scripts, so that when I came to them and said, "I don't have a show for next week," they could hand me the scripts and say, "Here you are."
Because Patty was underage and California child labor laws were so strict, we decided to shoot the show in New York, where juveniles could work as many hours as their producer wanted them to.
Jorja, Mary, and I moved back to New York.
Creating a television show for Patty Duke was a challenge, because she was so extraordinarily talented that I did not want to waste her abilities. I hit on the solution of having her play two parts - twin sisters: one a bouncy, outgoing, New York girl; and the other her demure sister from Scotland, who had been separated from her at birth.
Bill Asher was signed on to produce and direct, and he suggested that we make them cousins instead of sisters, to explain them having grown up at a distance from each other. That worked just as well for me.
The Patty Duke Show was produced at an old television studio on Twenty-sixth Street, twelve blocks from the theater where I had worked as an usher and a barker. It was not the best of neighborhoods. One day, a secretary was hired to begin work at nine o'clock. At ten o'clock, a large rat ran over her shoe. At twelve o'clock, she was accosted as she went to lunch, and at one o'clock, she quit.
I had already written half a dozen teleplays in advance. Now it was time to start casting. We got lucky.
The studio signed William Schallert to play Patty's father, Jean Byron to play her mother, Paul O'Keefe for the part of Patty's brother, and Eddie Applegate to play Patty's suitor.
The first day of production, Patty started a ritual that went on until the end of the show. Every morning, before shooting began, the entire cast and crew lined up and sang "Good morning to you. Good morning to you. We're all in our places with bright shiny faces."
It was an interesting sight to see the hard-bitten crew, some unshaven, most in T-shirts, line up to earnestly sing this children's song. Outwardly, Patty was one of the happiest stars in television. It was not until three years later that I learned the truth.
There was an inherent danger in having an actor play two roles. If the audience could not distinguish which character was performing, the confusion could be fatal. In order to avoid this, we dressed Patty in casual attire and made Cathy's clothes much more formal. To further insure that there would be no confusion, I gave Patty dialogue and actions suitable for a young, energetic extrovert, while I made Cathy reserved and proper.
When I saw the first day's rushes, I knew that all our precautions had been unnecessary. Patty did not depend on the clothes or the dialogue. She became each character.
I was having a problem with the network. They had assigned an officious young man whom I'll call Todd as the liaison for ABC. Every Monday morning he came into my office and his greeting was always the same. "I read your latest script. It stinks. You're giving the network a disaster."
The last straw came when we were on the scoring stage, recording the music for the first show.
The studio had hired the talented Academy Award-winning arranger and composer Sid Ramin. When the first music take was over, Sid and I were talking at one end of the stage. I looked over and saw Todd hurrying toward us. He stopped in front of Sid and said loudly, "Your music is the only good thing in this show."
That afternoon I put in a call to an executive at the network.
By the following morning, Todd had disappeared from my life.