David Susskind: A Televised Life

Very rarely a great interview opportunity lands in my comments section. Such was the case when Stephen Battaglio, author of David Susskind: A Televised Life, posted a comment in a recent Susskind post of mine. From there, I contacted Battaglio and he agreed to do an email interview about  the book (here’s its official description): “David Susskind was the first TV producer to become a TV star. His freewheeling discussion program, Open End, later known as The David Susskind Show, brought the turbulent issues of the 1960s and the wild and often wacky social trends of the 1970s into the nation’s living rooms at a time when viewing choices were scant. Susskind grilled everyone from a Mafia hit man to transsexuals to a famously hilarious Mel Brooks. His legendary interview with Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War inflamed both the political and media establishments and would have made his name if nothing else did … David Susskind: A Televised Life is as much a chronicle of a glamorous time in the entertainment industry as it is a biography of one of its most colorful, important and influential players.” My thanks to Battaglio for an immensely enjoyable and insightful discussion about Susskind.

Tim O’Shea: This book grew out of a piece you wrote for the NY Times back in 2001, what motivated you to grow it into a book?

Stephen Battaglio: I had wanted to write a book about the history of television. When I researched the story about Susskind, I realized that he was a great vehicle to tell the story of the medium in its early years. What I didn’t realize until I researched the book, was that his personal story was so dramatic. I think it will surprise readers who thought they knew him.

O’Shea: You interviewed more than 150 of his peers–among them were there any that really surprised you in terms of the insight or clarity they provided?

Battaglio: People’s perspectives on Susskind depended on their relationship to him. Some were jealous or resented him for taking credit on projects he didn’t have much to do with – which is the nature or producers. But people who worked at his production company, Talent Associates, loved the experience. He was an exciting guy to be around. He encouraged risk-taking.

O’Shea: Were any of them reticent to discuss him, but warmed to opening up after you gained their trust?

Battaglio: Jean Kennedy, the woman who produced his talk show for 28 years. She was always very protective of Susskind and it took more than a year to get her to cooperate with me. Her health was failing as well. When she finally decided to talk with me it was only over the phone, even though she lived close by in Manhattan. Her memory on the early years wasn’t great, but her insights and voice were really vital to the story. She died in 2009 on December 19 – which is Susskind’s birthday. I’m sad that she never got to read the book.

O’Shea: As noted by this New Yorker review, Susskind’s talk show was never a serious money maker, but yet he still did it. Why was he so dedicated to the show for so many years.

Battaglio: Today, there are hundreds of channels and talk shows. During Susskind’s era, there were only a few and he had one of them. It was a platform to promote himself, his projects and satisfy his own curiosity about the world. Performing on the air came easy to him. It was another way to distinguish himself from other producers.

O’Shea: Of course, as your book reveals, he was more than a talk show host. As you note, he “fought the network practice of blacklisting, exposed audiences to provocative subject matter and introduced great actors such as Sir Laurence Olivier to TV. Two of his landmark network series, East Side/West Side and N.Y.P.D., shattered the casting color barrier…” In researching his career, which was the riskier gamble for him, bucking blacklisting or the crossing the casting color barrier?

Battaglio: If conservative sponsors such as DuPont and Armstrong learned that Susskind was using blacklisted writers on the shows he produced for them, they would have dropped him fast and that would have been the end of Talent Associates. In 1964, Susskind had a series canceled – East Side/West Side - because southern CBS affiliates were dropping the show due to the casting of Cicely Tyson and the show’s focus on urban issues involving black Americans. I report in the book that he could have had the show renewed if he fired Cicely Tyson. The failure of that show didn’t stop him from casting Robert Hooks in N.Y.P.D., a cop drama for ABC. By that time, the networks knew they had to give black performers more opportunities.

O’Shea: This recent New York Times review observed that Susskind’s professional and personal relationship with women was complicated. That’s not to say he did not promote and advance the careers of some women. How hard was it to grasp his attitude toward women overall?

Battaglio: Everyone who worked with him knew he was a compulsive womanizer. But he liked the company of women and saw women as an untapped resource of talent. He could hire them, pay them less and get great value out of them because they were grateful for the opportunity. Having a lot of women work for him and being a womanizer created an interesting set of office politics, which evolved over time. It makes for some interesting stories in the book.

O’Shea: How hard was it to gain substantial access to Susskind’s personal papers? Can you share some of the highlights of insight you gained from his papers?

Battaglio: Susskind had been donating his papers to the University of Wisconsin since the mid-1960s. The archive is open and other writers have used it for research. But no one had ever gone through it as thoroughly as I did with an understanding of what was in there. His appointment books and phone logs provided leads on stories that I was able to piece together or draw out of interview subjects.

Correspondence helped substantiate a lot of things I was told about his company, but there wasn’t a huge amount of it. The papers did give you a sense of the creative process at Talent Associates. There were a lot of wild proposals for shows that never got made. My favorite was for an interactive show called The National Sex Test.

O’Shea: I know Hulu airs some of Susskind’s old shows online, but do you think there’ll ever be a point where some of it will be released on DVD?

Battaglio: I doubt it. Susskind’s children control the rights to the shows. If they could have made money by restoring the shows and putting them out on DVD, it would have happened by now. I was told that Historic Films, which licenses the show for stock footage, was going to make digital downloads available at some point, but I don’t know where that stands.

O’Shea: In researching his talk show and the shows he produced, are there any in particular that grew to rank among your favorite?

Battaglio: The famous Jewish Sons show with Mel Brooks and David Steinberg is still funny 40 years later, and the back-story is told in detail in the book. The George C. Scott-Cicely Tyson series East Side/West Side has some truly amazing moments, especially when they shot out on the streets of New York in the 1960s. I’ve seen the powerful episode Who Do You Kill? – with James Earl Jones and Diana Sands as the couple whose baby dies from a rat bite – at least a dozen times, and I’d watch it again. A 1959 TV special, A Moon and Sixpence, with Sir Laurence Olivier, is also brilliant.

O’Shea: After spending so much time on a subject like Susskind, do you walk away from the process sick of the subject or with a deeper respect for him (or a mixture of both)?

Battaglio: I have written the first and what will probably be the only biography of Susskind, so I am linked to him for the rest of my life. But I really enjoyed living in his world during the four years I worked on the book. The people who’ve read the book who knew him said I succeeded in capturing his spirit and understanding his flaws. I’m still promoting the book with public appearances and radio interviews and probably will be for a while, since there will be a paperback edition later in the year. So he’s going to be in my head for a long time.

O’Shea: I was astounded to learn that Susskind worked with Scorsese, Altman and Pekinpah–how much are you able to delve into those three?

Battaglio: Susskind never worked directly with Sam Peckinpah, but his company, Talent Associates, developed Straw Dogs, which was produced by Susskind’s partner at the time, Dan Melnick. The project changed the course of his company, as told in the book. Martin Scorsese directed Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and the book tells how Susskind, the producer of the film, was banned from the set. Both films are covered in a chapter about how the movie business was changing during the 1970s, and the difficulty that Susskind had in adapting to it. Feature films were problematic for Susskind throughout his career even though he was involved in some very good ones (Edge of the City, A Raisin In the Sun, All the Way Home, Requiem for a Heavyweight, Lovers and Other Strangers, Fort Apache The Bronx).

I listed Buffalo Bill and the Indians in the appendix, but it was really not a Susskind film even though he is credited as executive producer. What happened was Susskind teamed with Paul Newman and his producing partner John Foreman to buy the play Indians by Arthur Kopit, for around $500,000, a staggering amount of money in 1969. The property languished for several years as Susskind was unable to get a decent screenplay written. He eventually got Dino De Laurentiis to take over the property and kept an executive producer credit. Once Robert Altman was hired to direct, he really took over every creative aspect of the production.

O’Shea: Not everyone has a blurb of endorsement from Kurt Andersen, how did that come to pass?

Battaglio: I worked for Kurt when he co-founded a media news Web site called Inside.com. I was very proud to have his name on the cover of the book.

O’Shea: Looking at the current talk show landscape, do you think there’s anyone close to doing what Susskind did with the medium?

Battaglio: There is a little bit of Susskind in quite a few of today’s hosts.

Charlie Rose is seen as the successor to Susskind’s style of doing serious lengthy chats with a variety of guests. Oprah Winfrey uses her talk show to promote her productions and topics and ideas that generally interest her. The confrontations you see on cable news shows really grew out of the kind of panels Susskind put together for his shows. There will never be anyone like him again. But in some ways, he’s never really left us.

I love a good interview, and Dick Cavett is a damn good interviewer. So is Charlie Rose. So a chance to watch the two of them talk (from back in 2001)–a good opportunity.

I hope you agree.