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East Side/West Side was dark, harsh, often depressing and even hopeless. It was great.
East Side/West Side, "One Drink at a Time"
OB: January 27, 1964, 10 p.m. EST, CBS
This episode aired when I was 13 days old.
"Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
And that's how most people picture General George S. Patton--that speech from the movie "Patton," delivered by George C. Scott in his role of a lifetime. Most people who've never see actual footage or heard actual recordings of the real Patton, likely picture him, or hear him in their heads, looking/sounding like Scott. (Neither would've been true, of course.) And most people see this motivational speech as the ultimate example of gung-ho, up-by-your-bootstraps, no-excuse, flag waving patriotism, the giant flag behind him dwarfing him but still making him appear bigger than life. He was a tough guy and nothing and no one ever got in the way of what he wanted...not Rommel, no one, except maybe Patton's own bad behavior.
Almost no one would didn't already know better, would look at that and say, "Yes, definitely...I could see that actor as an inner-city social worker. He'd be perfect." The ones who would, could laugh at that very thought, since the first man to ever actually think that...was George C. Scott himself.
The role was Neil Brock, and the show was one of television history's greatest "brilliant but cancelled" poster children, East Side/West Side. During a television season which included President Lyndon Johnson declaring his "War on Poverty" in his annual State of the Union address, the man who would one day play Patton declared his own such war four months earlier.
The show appeared on CBS, in the fallout of FCC Chairman Newton Minnow's speech calling television a "vast wasteland" and challenging the networks to come up with better programming. CBS had founder and board chairman William S. Paley, who always prided himself on taking this to heart with critical favorites like The Twilight Zone, and CBS President Jim Aubrey, who had a more cynical view of what the public liked and served up Mister Ed and Gilligan's Island. So, from the outside, viewers saw a schizophrenic network. Still, Aubrey would let the high-quality fare get by if it delivered the numbers.
It was actually Aubrey himself who greenlit East Side/West Side, but you could argue he was tricked or forced into it.
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Scott, and the show, found each other. In 1962 he and United Artists announced a deal with CBS for a new TV show. But they didn't say what it was because, frankly, they didn't know. Scott didn't see anything offered to him that he liked. Scott, who channeled his own anger and depression into most of his roles, had a dead-end job at IBM and often got into bar fights before he got into acting. Scott had made a splash on Broadway, first playing King Richard III, then getting Oscar nominated roles in the movies "Anatomy of a Murder" and "The Hustler." While he wasn't crazy about television, he had appeared on The DuPont Show of the Month, Kraft Theatre, Naked City, The Virginian and even got an Emmy nomination for an episode of Ben Casey. Nonetheless, he agreed to star in a new series on CBS. In exchange, he'd be committed to the show for three years (unless it was cancelled), get $10,000 an episode, and (apparently the deal sweetener) some $70,000 would go toward Scott's pet project, the Theatre of Michigan, headquartered in his hometown of Detroit.
Scott's relationship with CBS was rocky from the start. He rejected the ideas they kept bringing him, including their preferred idea: an action series featuring Scott as a foreign correspondent. (Scott really hated that one in particular.) His rejection left the network, and Aubrey, semi-desperate, as it looked like Scott might violate his agreement. That's when David Susskind showed up.
Susskind is mostly remembered as a talk show host, the host of the innovative Open End and the longer running show with his own name. He also co-owned Talent Associates, Ltd., which had produced TV shows ranging wildly from the Wally Cox sitcom Mister Peepers to the anthology docudrama Armstrong Circle Theatre. Susskind turned to Robert Alan Aurthur, a live TV playwright, who found an old script about three social workers, reworked into a starring vehicle for Scott. Its title, East Side/West Side, referred to the two halves of upper Manhattan using Central Park as a boundary.
The pilot, "It's War, Man," actually aired later in the season, and while it was rather unlike the rest of the series, it did establish its premise. Scott and two other workers, were employed at the Community Welfare Service of New York City, a fictional, private agency. (Susskind chose to make the agency private for dramatic license, as a public agency would've been more limited.)
So, for the first time in history, a TV series documented life at a social agency, its main character a social worker. Elizabeth Wilson played Frieda “Hecky” Hechlinger, Brock's boss who often deferred to his judgment on most matters. The groundbreaking role of secretary (and occasionally, social worker) Jane Foster was played by Cecily Tyson, in a rare regular role for an African American actress at the time.
Stephen Bowie's writeup of the series appears to be the definitive reference dealing with the show, and most of the information here comes from his website. It's a comprehensive history that describes the show's production in great detail, which turned out to be every bit as turbulent as the world it wanted to describe. The temperamental Scott often fought for more realism, but also found himself at odds with some of the greatest writers in the business. Scott, and the show's producers, were always at odds with the network, considering the show's subject matter, its dark, gritty style of looking at it and the fact that Jim Aubrey was more of a Petticoat Junction fan.
The good news for the show was that it was placed on CBS' lineup with a beloved, highly rated show as its lead-in. The bad news: the show was placed on Monday nights, the night most people start their work weeks and perhaps the least likely night of the week when an audience would want to view this kind of show. And the lead-in in question: the show's polar opposite, The Andy Griffith Show, a comedy set in a small town where everyone wanted to look out for each other. It wasn't exactly the kind of audience that would be in the mood to stick around for a weekly exercise in inner-city social Darwinism, not after spending a happy half-hour in Mayberry.
We definitely weren't in Mayberry anymore.
Scott and a number of the writers, producers and directors, were perfectionists, so script revisions on the set would become a recurring theme on this show. Director Ralph Senesky describes in his blog how he and the actors, including that week's guest star, Carroll O'Connor, did their own rewrites to make a couple of scenes work on the series' second episode, "Age of Consent." O'Connor played a cop who found out his 17 year old daughter was having sex with her 21 year old boyfriend, so he called the cops and filed charges for statutory rape. It was daring for the time and eyebrow raising even now, and had a bittersweet ending. Senesky also says his one and only episode was otherwise drama-free, and came apparently before the turnover and upheaval that would mark the series' run. At one point the story editor and many of the writers, were people who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
The show prided itself on pushing envelopes and taking stands, with Scott and the staff vs. the network and sometimes vs. each other. And the episodes tackled some tough issues for that time and a few even for now. The episode "You Can't Beat the System" found Brock trying to help a Korean War veteran with post-traumatic stress syndrome. "No Wings at All" was about a couple coping with a son who was mentally retarded (written by Allen Sloane, himself the father of an autistic child); "My Child on Monday Morning" directly addressed autism.
Perhaps the series' best and most highly acclaimed episode, "Who Do You Kill?" may have been its most controversial. It attracted a lot of hate mail and angry phone calls, even threats. A number of affiliates, including WAGA-TV, Channel 5 in Atlanta, refused to air it. The episode featured a young James Earl Jones as Joe Goodwin and Diana Sands as his wife Ruth. Don Goodwin tries to find a dignified job that isn't menial; Ruth helps out by waiting tables. But they're basically trapped in their poverty by a system that tries harder to protect people already benefiting from it. If that's not enough, in the show's most shocking twist, their baby is bitten by a rat in their tenement, and dies when Joe has trouble finding someone to help get him to a hospital. Ruth suffers a breakdown and refuses to go to the funeral, while an angry Joe considers violence. The script has not only sharp, political commentary but also delves into the characters of Joe and Diana showing them alone at home...a rarity in 1963. The script won and Emmy and a Writer's Guild award.
"No Hiding Place" took on the practice of "blockbusting," as a wealthy liberal couple welcomes a black family to the neighborhood. Unfortunately, shady realtors try to convince the other whites in the neighborhood to sell their homes due to declining property values...only to resell them to affluent blacks at much higher asking prices. The show made news when a scene showing Scott dancing with guest star Ruby Dee was cut due to a fear of offending affiliates. Scott gave interviews in which he blasted CBS and called them "cowards."
These controversial episodes did not make Jim Aubrey happy at all, especially considering that he wanted Cicely Tyson off the show. Just her presence, apparently, was generating angry mail (that and the fact she was treated as an equal by the white characters). George C. Scott had a different idea--he wanted his character to fall in love it Tyson's character and marry her, something that was unheard of in 1963 television (and in real life, even illegal in multiple states at the time).
Alas, these pieces of groundbreaking television are mostly unavailable. The series has only been rerun once, on the Trio cable network in the early 2000s as part of their Brilliant But Cancelled series. And only one episode is currently available (to me, anyway, since I can't get to a broadcasting museum anytime soon). It's a fairly rough copy, apparently recorded on the longest speed from a DVD player, from the Brilliant But Cancelled series. That means the video is fuzzy and Kenyon Hopkins' jazz score comes off very warbly. But it's all we have.
It's the series' 16th episode to air, "One Drink at a Time," originally airing at 10 p.m. on January 27, 1964, immediately after the episode of The Andy Griffith Show in which Barney buys a motorcycle. In the opening moments of the show, we see a homeless woman loading pieces of cardboard into an old baby carriage. She's Molly Cavanaugh and she's played by highly acclaimed actress Maureen Stapleton. She walks into a bar where her friend Sam (J.D. Cannon) and his buddy Billy are being thrown out because they're out of money. She says "Hiya, hubby!" He blows up and tells her to quit calling him that, he's not her "hubby." Out on the street, his friend Billy sees the carriage and says "Hey Sam! Jug money!" They run off with Molly's cardboard as she haplessly takes off after them. Barney, his motorcycle and Mayberry have all now clearly disappeared from our rearview mirrors at this point; we're now on the streets of New York watching an ugly display of social Darwinism along desperate people.
Cut to the show's open with Hopkins' jazz instrumental, mimicking the subway we see George C. Scott presumably riding home from work at the end of another day, darkly lit to fit the show's tone.
While I'm describing atmosphere, I should say a word about the noirish look at the streets of New York. Jack Priestley was hired as the show's director of photography, replicating the look that won him two Emmys on the just-canceled ABC series Naked City. It's a look that serves its purpose, giving us such a sad world for these characters, almost as if it's a "thrift store" society cast aside by an earlier society, as if the Great Depression never ended. It's a dark world even in the middle of the day. I can't imagine what this show could've possibly looked like in color. But the "look" was only one reason for the hire, according to Bowie's website. Don Kranze, the executive production who hired Priestley, later recalled, “I knew that Jack had shot in all kind of impossible situations in Naked City, all over the city, under any condition you wanted. And he was a very calm type fellow. And I knew that with Mister Vesuvius [Scott], you’d better have that type of fellow. Cause things on a set get a little bit edgy after ten, eleven, twelve hours.” The show so prided itself on realism that it often sought out some of the nastiest locations to spotlight. A TV Guide article once quote Scott arriving at a truly awful-looking alley to shoot a fight scene, declaring, "Boy, this is terrible--it’s great!"
As the show resumes, the baby carriage full of cardboard flats gets wheeled into a recycling center, where the guys demand to know how much money they can get for them. Molly, who's used to dealing with the guy and getting a little more money, is shut out of the conversation, as the manager hands them 40 cents, which the men keep for Molly's cardboard. They're headed to get something to drink, and we can clearly see alcoholism is playing a very important role in this episode. But this is not going to be a traditional episode about alcoholism...these characters, Sam in particular, are end stage alcoholics and they're going to buy paint thinner at a paint store. Molly tries in vain to stop him, begging him to hold out for some wine.
It's a rather shocking thing to see, these two men passing around a can of paint thinner. Yet, the idea of an alcoholic drinking dangerous chemicals was actually played for laughs a year earlier, on an episode of NBC's Car 54, Where are You? featuring guest star Larry Storch. This time, however, it's portrayed in all of its truly ugly glory. We're not meant to laugh, we're meant to gasp and cover our mouths.
Molly comes to the CWS office and speaks to Neil. She explains her boyfriend's addiction to wood alcohol, how he started out "cutting" it with water but eventually started taking it straight. "I just can't stand to see him fall face down in the street and have them tie that white tag around his wrist," she tells him. When Neil explains the CWS isn't set up to cure substance abuse, Molly says, "I don't want to stop him from drinking, I want to stop him from dying." She simply wants to stabilize his life and get him a better grade of alcohol, like say, a cheap brand of wine.
Molly wants to get on welfare, but she can't be eligible unless she has a permanent address...and she can't keep a permanent address without the welfare money. When she explains that she's found a place to live for $12 a week...then explains they'd each pay the $12...Neil suddenly acts very skeptical. When she starts to leave, leaving it up to Neil to believe her or not, he tells her there's an "emergency fund" for shelters...and reaches into his pocket to hand her $23. She says she can find the rest, and leaves to find Sam.
Sam and Billy are finishing off the rest of the wood alcohol along with a friend named Harry, who's wearing a coat and what appears to be a captain's hat. We very quickly hear Harry's story...he was actually an attorney before alcohol destroyed him, and actually wanted to take a low-wage job picking potatoes in New Jersey but was too drunk to show up for work. Harry is so drunk he can barely walk as the three run out of thinner. Sam even checks out a can of shoe polish, which he finds empty, before the three hit up a pedestrian for more money. As they pass around whatever they bought with the money, Harry collapses onto the ground, dead. Sam notes, "Harry was really looking to get out of this town," as he and Billy take his hat and jacket.
A quick cutaway to the CWS office has Neil calling the hotel where Molly was supposed to check in, and finding out she never did. He declares he's been taken.
When Molly tries to get Sam to come to the flophouse with her, we hear a lot of their back story. It turns out the two have been together for years, all over the country; at one point they shared a room in Omaha, while he worked as a meat packer, and another time they had an apartment in El Paso overlooking the Rio Grande, where he proposed to her. "You took off to get the license and I didn't see you for 19 days," she notes. She also gets upset when she realizes he has Harry's jacket and hat (she knew Harry), saying this is as low as Sam has ever sunk. "You never took the clothes off a dead man before," she tells him. Sam responds that Harry himself took the hat off another dead man. Reluctantly, Sam agrees to go to the hotel and even swears off paint thinners, bay rum, hair tonic, antifreeze "or even canned heat." (Yes, this guy is pretty hardcore.)
When she catches Neil dozing in his office after hours, he gets up in her face and says he wishes he could shake that $23 back out of her. He demands that she put whatever's left of that money on his desk. She responds by throwing the hotel keys in front of him. A surprised Neil promises to get her welfare application started, and she admits she's there for "another touch." So Neil hands her some grocery money. Not only does she have a big heart, Molly's special talent appears to be street-honed negotiating skills.
We next see Sam and Molly...and Billy...in the hotel room. She announces she has "breakfast" and he hurries into the room, only to be disappointed to find coffee. Neil shows up at that point with a hot plate and some pots and pans. He says welfare will only pay for lunch and dinner, so she can use what he brought her to make coffee in the mornings. He also stresses to Sam, if the welfare agency finds out he took as much as a nickel from Molly for booze, they'll cut her off.
When he finds Billy in the next room, Neil starts looking around for anyone else "getting in on the cut." Sam is not happy. "Sir, you've got an insulting way about you, you know that?...You think because you put Molly in the way of a few dollars you can come marching in her like you was a visiting minister?" Neil shoots back, "What would you like for me to do? Pat you on the back with a gentle hand of leniency, and tell you what a clever little man you are?" After Neil leaves, Sam and Molly eventually agree to throw Billy out, and Molly promises to get him "a jug."
The next morning at breakfast, Molly pours Sam some coffee and suggests they "make it real," actually get married. She says the welfare people might give her more if she's married, and he can prove he's too disabled to work. All Sam keeps asking for is "a jug," showing the big difference between the two. Molly's vision of the future involves a fresh start in a new world; Sam's begins and ends with his next jug.
At a chance meeting in a bar, Billy finds an old friend, Teddy Larson, back from out of town and looking for a place to stay. (Teddy is played by Richard Schaal, a character actor remembered for roles in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda; this is his first TV appearance.) Back in the apartment, Sam starts looking for something he can drink. He starts to throw the hot plate in frustration, but then unplugs it and puts it in a bag, along with the pots and pans Neil brought in. This is the point where Billy shows up with Teddy Larson, and talks Sam into renting him the room they are renting. This is a devastating sequence that intercuts with Neil and Molly at a fruit market buying produce for the kitchen, Molly even fussing with the vendor over one of the apples. As she's doing that, Billy even unscrews all of the light bulbs from a light fixture as the two leave the apartment cleaned out except for Teddy Larson. We actually see them dash across the very street where Neil and Molly are buying fruits and vegetables.
Obviously, Molly is upset when she arrives, finds everything missing, and Teddy Larson holding up a receipt and trying to insist that's his apartment. Molly swears Sam has made a dunce out of her for 20 years but no more, but changes her mind when she realizes he's with Billy and will therefore be on wood alcohol again in no time. She and Neil start looking for him, even find the hotplate that's already been sold, and find Billy passed out in a bar. She then finds Sam passed out in the grass behind the building, next to an old shack. She gets him to the shack and tells Neil it's all Billy's fault. But that's not how Neil sees it. He says it's all Sam, and Sam may very well have some kind of death wish. "For 20 years you've been a mourner standing over that corpse," Neil says. "This man senses life in you, Molly, he can't endure it."
This appears to end Neil's, and our, involvement in the story of Molly and Sam. "I don't hold it against you, you're right to give up on us," Molly tells Neil. Molly begs Sam to come back to the hotel, so he won't catch pneumonia. She reminds him the room is still paid up until the end of the week and is heated. Even though he's ruined her chances to get on welfare, she's still at his side. "I hung onto you all these years, if this is all I can get, that's it," she says. As they leave, Sam turns to Neil and says, "Hey Senator? You ever have a woman talk to you that way? Do that for you?" Neil watches as the two walk off into the streets of New York. He, and the audience, know Sam will die soon and Molly, the eternal optimist, will likely lose her own will to live as a result.
This episode turns out to be not what I (or likely most other viewers) would expect. There's clearly no happy ending, no moral about the misuse of alcohol. In fact, the episode itself, in the end, wasn't even about alcoholism. It wasn't Sam's story, it was Molly's, and about what happens at the very bottom of society, the social Darwinism that plays itself out between self-destructive people like Sam and caring, responsible people like Molly. It explains why good people like Molly miss so many breaks, due to the tough characters they keep as company...and why they even keep them as company.
One final note about this episode: during the filming, the crew actually saw a man lying on the sidewalk. Don Kranze recalls what happened next: “Someone says, ‘Move him out of the shot.’ I said, ‘No, don’t move him out of the shot, he’s fine. Leave him. Why would you move him? He’s there, it’s beautiful, that’s real.’ Now they go over to this guy. He’s dead. I was ashamed! I’m saying, ‘Don’t move him,’ and actually the guy was dead. Then someone comes to the set, and says, ‘John Kennedy has just been shot.’” When Maureen Stapleton broke down in tears, the production shut down.
Hopefully, that wasn't this shot.
For all the good things about this episode--the writing, the heartbreak, the stellar acting by one of the great actresses, Maureen Stapleton--it's very dreary, and makes no pretense to be anything else. That's what made it less than a favorite to CBS President Jim Aubrey. In perhaps the most famous story about the show, even about George C. Scott himself, David Susskind's son Andrew tells what happened when his father and Scott when to hear an embarrassingly tone-deaf idea from Aubrey:
Now Scott said nothing. What he did was, he sat there, and he was carving the apple,My father got a call from Jim Aubrey saying, ‘I want you and George C. Scott in my office now, right away.’ George had quit smoking at this time, which only made him more ornery than usual. As an oral substitute, he had taken up peeling and eating apples. And he had a fairly impressive knife that he used to carve an apple. So my father and Scott showed up in Aubrey’s office, and Aubrey said, ‘You know, we get this research, and it’s too depressing. I want these characters out of Harlem and I want them on Park Avenue.’
and he would slice off a chunk of it and [yank it off the knife and shove it into his mouth].
My father said, ‘Jim. They’re social workers. There are no social workers on Park
Avenue. Their problems are in Harlem, or in Bed-Stuy, or in the rough, tough parts of
the city. That’s where the show is.’
Aubrey said, ‘I don’t give a shit. Get them out of Harlem. It’s depressing. Nobody wants to see it.’
They went back and forth and [my father] said, ‘Jim, we can’t. You know I promised George we would really do the series and be true to it. It can’t be done. We’ll be a laughing stock if we begin to do Park Avenue social worker stories.’
But CBS had the last laugh. The show's format did, indeed, change, and the show did get out of Harlem and Bed-Stuy. A politician character, Congressman Charles Hanson, was introduced during the season, and in the episode "Take Sides With the Sun," Neil decides he can do more good for New York City's poor by going to work on the congressman's staff. But the decision to cancel the show had already been made. The finale, "Here Today," is an allegorical story about the show itself. Neil tries to get some columns written by the congressman, published in a newspaper. The more highly read newspapers won't touch it but a small independent is willing to do so. Unfortunately, the columns alienate advertisers (the way the series' content caused problems with sponsors), and the editor pressures the congressman's staff for fewer editorials about rat-filled tenements. Ultimately the newspaper folds, and Neil, seeing a stack of letters from supportive readers, issues a final lament more for the series' real-life fans: "Don’t they count for anything? Don’t they have any say at all?”Back and forth and back and forth. And finally Scott, who’s been carving the apple, takes the knife and jams it in Aubrey’s desk. The knife is going, ‘Boioioioioinnnnnng,’ and he says, ‘The show stays where it is. Let’s go, David.’ And he left with the knife vibrating in Aubrey’s desk. That, I think, pretty much sums up the relationship of that show with that network.
So, the Jim Aubreys of the world appeared to win another round, with the "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public" bit. East Side/West Side and another acclaimed one-season wonder, ABC's Breaking Point, were both on in the same time slot as NBC's Sing Along with Mitch...which itself got canceled that year. Ultimately, there were actually no winners in that time slot.
East Side/West Side is still a milestone for television, paving the way for such later groundbreaking shows as All in the Family, Hill Street Blues and other shows that instead of distracting us with gimmicks or gadgets, challenged us to take a good, long, hard look at ourselves. If the show were to be remade today, it would likely still end up not on broadcast TV, but more likely a cable channel with a history of taking chances, like HBO, Showtime or AMC.
Except for the episodes seen on Trio, we have yet to ever see this show again. There's enough star power and reputation left to attract a DVD release I would think, but otherwise, this show's special place in history is that it took us closer to the poorest, most forgotten people in America, and perhaps flew too close to the sun in doing so. The quality makes us marvel that this ahead-of-its-time show only lasted a season; the volatile story on Bowie's website makes us marvel the show got on the air at all. Then again, crazier stories have come from behind the scenes of other forms of truly great art.
Availability: Other than the episode described above...none. MGM gained the rights to the show in the mid 2000s, but there's no word of any type of DVD release.
Next time on this channel: my second favorite show of all time.
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