Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [109]
Incidentally, a number of actresses specifically request our cameramen not to take extreme closeups, because under the intense glare of the studio lights, such shots can be extremely unflattering. But the youthful and velvet-skinned Carol isn’t one of them. She is one of those to whom no camera angle and no lens distance is detrimental.
But controversy is the ingredient that usually enlivens At Random. With such a heterogeneous mixture of guests as ours, some disagreement is inevitable. And within the limits of tastefulness and pace, controversy usually illuminates subjects as no mouthings of mutual admiration ever could. Fortunately, with the caliber of guests we have always enjoyed on At Random, there has never yet been a conversation that degenerated into a noisy donny-brook. (Even the drunk actor I mentioned earlier left us with dignity.) Like the mature, well-informed people they are, At Random guests know how to disagree for the stimulation of it, without becoming violent or vituperative.
And there have been some monumental disagreements!
One brilliant controversy involved the Reverend John Banahan, Director of the Radio-TV Department of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, and harmonica-player Larry Adler. Banahan is an unusually articulate spokesman for his faith. And Adler, although I hadn’t realized it before the show began, is apparently an atheist.
“How do you know there is a God?” Adler challenged Father Banahan at one point.
This set off one of the most stimulating debates I have ever heard on television!
And another time, actress Peggy Cass and Northwestern University political scientist William M. McGovern were face to face across our table. I had known that McGovern was an outspoken political conservative, but I hadn’t realized Peggy was such a zealous liberal. She and McGovern were soon clashing over the approach to several controversial issues, in which Peggy, whose love of wisecracks masks an impressive knowledge of history, easily held her own.
Among other provocative political debates on At Random was one between Norman Thomas, the eloquent former Socialist Party candidate for President of the United States, and ultra-conservative attorney Clarence Manion, formerly of Notre Dame. And still another memorable contest took place between Victor Reuther, brother of the United Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther, and conservative Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. There was no question of “equal time” in these controversies: the issue was met squarely and openly, and the adversaries were on their own.
One of At Random’s many outspoken arguments concerning mass communications and race relations received extensive coverage in Variety. This involved an impassioned dispute between playwright Lorraine Hansberry (a former Chicagoan) and movie director Otto Preminger. The issue was whether such Preminger films as Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess reinforced erroneous stereotypes of Negroes and thereby retarded progress in race relations. Preminger declared that Miss Hansberry, in believing that such films were anything but beneficial, was a “minority of one.” Lorraine, on the other hand, contended that the basic premise in the plots of such pictures was the “exaggerated sexuality” of the Negro and that this misrepresentation not only caused “great wounds,” but was also “bad art.”
Another At Random show that made news was the program featuring Nobel Peace Prize-winners Lester B. Pearson, Phillip Noel-Baker, Sir Norman Angell, and Lord John Boyd-Orr.
But it was my old friend, former President Harry S. Truman, who made what probably ranks as the most significant headline to date to stem from the