M. Clay
Adams: An old-fashioned success story
We've
all heard those romantic Hollywood stories. The handsome kid who
was walking down the street, only to be discovered by a casting
agent and made a star. The young girl who brought the coffee just
as a director was thinking about who would be the lead in his
next movie -- and from that day on, people brought her the coffee.
M. Clay Adams '32, who directed television phenomenon Victory
At Sea, had his own romantic Hollywood break: He was involved
with Claire Trevor (photo at right), who went on to win a best
supporting actress Oscar for Key Largo.
Okay, understand that the couple had been going out long before
Trevor ever got to Hollywood, and Adams' first film job didn't
exactly put him in an executive's chair. No, Adams was a studio
executive's assistant, which meant he would be pouring the coffee,
thank you.
The job also meant he'd have a chance to learn the business.
For this, he said "thank you" to his boss Sol Wurtzel of 20th
Century Fox. Now 96, Adams lives in New Jersey and is long retired
-- though not from life. He emails and surfs the Internet daily,
a technology he caught onto in the youth of his 80s. Despite keeping
his mind focused on the present, he can't help but look back at
all he witnessed.
"When I was in Hollywood, I made a series of short subjects
for RKO called 'Picture People,' which depicted the off-screen
private lives and hobbies of the stars," Adams recalls. For
one show, he took newlyweds Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz to Palm
Springs to show audiences this desert hideaway spot for movie
stars. He rented a tandem bicycle for the famous couple, and they
rode around the town while Adams filmed the various sights. "I
often boast that this was the first I Love Lucy."
Adams once worked with a different type of luminary. In 1946,
Albert Einstein had agreed to appear in a small segment of a film
by the J. Arthur Rank Organization, one of Britain's biggest movie
makers. Because Einstein lived in the United States, the company
asked RKO to film that segment. Adams got the assignment (see
photo, above).
The physicist was friendly and unassuming, says Adams, "with
a surprisingly cute sense of humor." But when Adams asked Einstein
to pretend to be working on one of his mathematical formulas,
"He looked up at me with an obvious glint in his eye and said
in his well-known accent, 'Pretend? I do not pretend.' At
the end of the day, when he handed me back some sheets we had
used, I noticed that mathematical equations were scrawled all
over them. . . . Kidding, I told him I didn't want to walk off
with any of his secrets. Without missing a beat, he said, 'I
do not have any secrets -- only the United States government has
secrets.'"
The corners of his mind also echo with other memories, including
the endless screams of zealous Beatles fans screwing up the audio
feed for one of their rare concerts, a Shea Stadium event that
Clay produced a segment of for The Ed Sullivan Show.
Or Adams' own endless laughter while serving as producer on the
comedy classic Sergeant Bilko with Phil Silvers.
But before Adams would become a producing legend, he would do
time in the Navy during World War Two and would later be asked
to direct that war's most stirring recording, Victory At Sea,
a 26-episode television documentary that had audiences glued to
their seats during the small screen's infancy.
It's often been called propaganda, and although Adams admits
that earlier propaganda military films he shot prompted the opportunity,
he says nobody outside of his team ever had editorial control
in the making of Victory At Sea. "Yes, it was partly
through [RCA's] David Sarnoff's friendship with the Secretary
of the Navy that we gained access to all of our combat film footage
of World War Two," Adams says, "but we were not pressured in the
slightest by the secretary or anyone else to make the series a
vehicle for the Navy."
The pressure really mounted from trying to put the
production together, and that's not even referring to 60-million
feet of footage needing to be cut down to just over 60,000. "The
main difficulties were at the very beginning, trying to come up
with the right format for the series," Adams says. "Before I came
aboard, Henry Salomon, the producer, who had impeccably good taste
but had never made a movie or television show before, had already
hired the famous English novelist C.S. Forester to write the scripts
for what NBC then called 'The Navy Project.'" When Forester turned
in his script for the first episode, says Adams, "it was the size
of a novel and was about a series of obscure Naval events that
no one had ever filmed."
Adams says it took delicate maneuvering to get Salomon to understand
one important thing: "In a motion picture documentary, it's only
possible to show events that are already on film, and that the
pictures must determine the script -- not the other way around."
Another major difficulty on NBC's $500,000 production came from
the voice-over talent. "The Hollywood actor Robert Montgomery
was originally slated to narrate Victory At Sea," Adams
recalls. "When the time came to show Montgomery the edited version
of the first episode, Salomon arranged a screening for him." The
print was full of scratches from being dragged around the editing
room, but Adams says it did have the continuity the team wanted.
Montgomery, however, didn't see it that way.
"When the lights came up at the end of the screening, Montgomery
turned to Salomon and ripped into him in the cruelest way I have
ever witnessed. He told Salomon he was unfit to be the producer
of the series, that he would never condescend to do the voice
over for such a horrible piece of film making, and that the whole
series should be abandoned or started over."
Not exactly a propitious start, but luckily Richard Rodgers,
of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame and the composer of Victory
At Sea, found one more way to be of service. "The Robert
Montgomery situation turned out to be a blessing," Adams says. "When
Salomon and I were at lunch with Richard Rodgers, we told
him about it. He said that he had a young understudy for Yul Brenner
in his Broadway show The King and I who had an excellent
voice and suggested that we try him out as the narrator for Victory
At Sea. The young understudy was Leonard Graves, who later
won all kinds of acclaim for the series."
And its fans were hardly limited to critics. When Victory
At Sea first started airing in October 1952, the ratings
were so phenomenal that the only person contracted for royalties
at the time, the composer Rodgers, is even rumored to have earned
more money from the documentary than from all the songs he ever
did with Hammerstein.
What the episodes earned for television viewers is immeasurable
in comparison to television today, says Jill Olmsted, associate
professor of broadcast journalism at Washington, D.C.-based American
University. "Victory at Sea and programs like it were
the kind of events that everyone would talk about the next day,"
she says. "Television had so few stations and programs to offer,
that what it did have would dominate. There's no question that
these programs shaped public opinion in a way nothing could today."
From Director To Producer
While it didn't directly make Adams a fortune, Victory At
Sea paved the way for the second chapter of his television
career: producing. Working for CBS in New York from 1952-1960
and rising to the level of director of film production, he produced
countless TV shows, many of them pilots. This was sometimes difficult
because many actors and writers lived on the West Coast, where
television is almost exclusively shot today. However, Broadway
was still booming at the time. "There were a large number of excellent
stage actors and writers who preferred to remain in New York,"
Adams says. "For example, Reggie Rose, who was later the creator
and chief writer of The Defenders for me, wrote
the famous live television show Twelve Angry Men in New
York."
And, luckily, Phil Silvers was a New York guy. Sergeant
Bilko, the most successful series Adams would work on while
at CBS, was the comedic story of a manipulative Army man who always
managed to stay afloat because of his conscience. From spot-on
delivery to physical comedy, Silvers was magic in front of the
camera and a pleasure behind it, Adams says. But he also wonders
if the real talent always got its due. "Nat Hiken was the most
creative show person I have ever known. He not only created the
tremendously funny Sergeant Bilko for Silvers, but wrote,
cast and directed most of the early and best shows of the series,"
says Adams, who produced the show for the bulk of its four-year
run.
"Hiken was also frighteningly daring -- as when we did a show
straight through in front of a live audience with a monkey playing
the leading character. Or another show in which Phil sneaks
a horse onto the base. With anything possible for the show to
get completely out of hand in the middle of filming it, Nat would
come up to the sound control room and calmly look down and watch
the show being filmed while doing a New York Times crossword
puzzle."
As the 1960s began and it was now certain TV was more than a
fad, Adams decided it was time to strike out on his own. Clayco
Films, which he would own and run for more than a decade, saw
him become the executive in charge of production for such successful
shows as the aforementioned The Defenders with Robert
Reed (of later Brady Bunch fame) and The Doctors
and the Nurses. Although both those shows ran for multiple
seasons, it was coming aboard as a producer of the timeless The
Ed Sullivan Show that stands out on this portion of Adams'
resume. Working for the man who said, "We've got a really great
shewwww for you," Adams learned that Sullivan was much savvier
than most talk show hosts. Take Cuba, for example.
"When Fidel Castro was advancing through the
Cuban mountains with his rebels on his way to taking over the
government in Havana," Adams says, "Sullivan was somehow able
to arrange for an exclusive interview with Castro. This,
of course, had to be done on film, so I put together a small film
crew to fly to Cuba with him. At the sleazy hotel in the mountains
where the interview took place, we were immediately confronted
with the fact that there was no electricity to run our camera
and sound equipment. Fortunately, at the last minute,
someone found a water fountain that was plugged into an electric
outlet, and that saved the day."
Like many people, Adams remembers Sullivan mostly for the talent
he brought to the show -- but that didn't just include acts that
were popular at the time. "He called me one day to meet with him
and Jim Henson, who he had just had on his show with his Muppets,
back when Henson was a complete unknown," Adams says. "Ed wanted
the three of us to discuss a partnership to make a movie with
the Muppets. Never following through on his idea, we obviously
missed the boat on what would probably have been a highly lucrative
venture."
Comparing Children
Those
hot show lights finally dimmed for Adams, shown left at age 97,
who retired from the business for good in the 1970s with his wife.
But, no, it wasn't Claire Trevor. That romantic Hollywood story
flickered, as many so often do. Their friendship remained, however,
and Adams and his wife, Mary, visiting the famed Stagecoach
actress when she neared her 90s.
Today, as Adams surfs through the infant technology known as
the Internet, it leaves him little choice but to compare it to
another child mostly grown up. "Television has completely bypassed
being the great learning medium that it was originally intended
to be," he says. "In the early days of television, David Sarnoff
and Bill Paley, at both NBC and CBS, re-invested part of their
network profits into cultural programs for the public interest. NBC
employed Toscanini and left him to form the finest symphony in
the world, subsidized by NBC. Even Victory At Sea was
subsidized and put on the air without a commercial sponsor.
"By contrast, today's television has stretched programming to
the limits of bad taste with sex-oriented soap operas and even
prime time shows which parents are unable to keep their children
from viewing. When it's not sex, it's violence of the worst
order. It's carried over to the unregulated children's games that
follow the same scenes of shooting and killings that kids watch
every day on television."
A tough assessment? Maybe. Then again, Adams came from a time
when television was quickly produced, live and had rare second
chances, unlike today when programming has plenty of time to do
the right thing. For a man who accomplished so much and worked
with so many of the greats, mediocrity was a channel he rarely
had to watch.
* * *
Eric Butterman is a New York-based magazine writer and creator
of the seminar "Better Business Writing: From E-mails To Everything
That Makes You Money." He can be contacted at ericbutterman@yahoo.com.
(April 2006)
