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by Frank De Blois
TV Guide
December 17 - 23, 1955
But despite the toil and trouble which accompanied that pioneer era, Montgomery, the first top name movie personality to enter TV full-scale, has few visible scars to show for his years of service.
Today, at 51, he remains a kingly figure: tall, still handsome, just a little paunchy. From his NBC office, high in a steel and concrete tower, he often looks down on mid-Manhattan and back across the years to the fall of 1949 when Robert Montgomery Presents was conceived.
"I was in England then," he recalls, "and the idea of doing a television show was a little remote. Nobody talked about TV in 1949 except the National Broadcasting Co. They talked to me, and I listened.
"The whole idea was stimulating. Here was an opportunity to present the best in plays, novels and short stories in an entirely new medium. It was an interesting challenge to a producer, director or actor."
Montgomery had accepted the challenge before. In 1924, he quit the apathetic life of an unpublished playwright for a small part in a Broadway play. Four years later, he left the stage for Hollywood, where he performed a succession of romantic roles with airy nonchanlance (one critic described him as playing his parts "without touching the handlebars.") In 1937, he established himself as a serious actor in "Night Must Fall"; in 1945, as a director of talent with "They Were Expendable."
"I came back to New York and met with the network people. We established a format, the one we have kept to this day, and we went right to work on the scripts."
Montgomery's first show, aired in January, 1950, was "The Letter," starring Madeleine Carroll.
The first few years were full of pitfalls. "TV's not what it used to be," Montgomery says wryly. In one show, an actor muffed his lines and the other members of the cast were forced to ad-lib for 10 minutes before he recovered. In another, a stagehand inadvertently left a ladder in full view of the camera, and there it remained, while the actors dodged under it, throughout the entire act. In a third, an absent-minded Montgomery, interviewing Teresa Wright, repeatedly called her "Martha."
"We had production problems that would kill a man today," he says. "We produced our show at 67th St. and Central Park West; our music came from Rockefeller Center, half a mile away; the commercials came in from Columbus Circle. We figured we were lucky if we got them all on the air the same night."
In the early days the cameras on Robert Montgomery Presents were forever conking out, the stagehands falling on their faces, the lights blinking with eerie inconsistency, some of the actors behaving like jittery magpies. Yet the show has missed only one performance--that, because of a studio strike.
With all their troubles, the early Montgomery shows helped establish TV as an entertainment giant. Like Studio One and Kraft TV Theater, they brought dramatic originality into the living room.
Today, as slick and smooth as the wax made by one of its sponsors, Robert Montgomery Presents tries to live up to its early aesthetic promise, with varying success. It has been consstently popular with viewers and sponsors, however, while more pretentious drama programs have fallen by the wayside. This, Montgomery feels, is because "We keep our standards high, we repond to our audiences and we try to keep a step ahead of their tastes. We aim for one thing: that intangible called 'quality.'
"TV acting is the toughest acting there is. It combines the problems of all the other forms: the sense of immediacy of the theater, the letter-perfect accuacy of the films, the ice-clear speech of radio. There is no room for temperament on TV."
Montgomery does less acting for two reasons. "One, I wear two hats. (He is an NBC executive, as well as president of Neptune Productions, producers of Robert Montgomery Presents.) Two, I feel I'm limited now as to the type of part I can play."
As an actor, Montgomery was known for his willingness to try unusual parts; as a director, for giving his actors freedom of action. As a television producer, Montgomery would like to be associated with a determination to avoid the hackneyed. Among his favorite TV productions were "David Copperfield," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," "The Lost Weekend" and "Victoria Regina"; future ones, he thinks, will surpass these.
Coming up are a drama based on the death of Albert Einstein, Archibald McLeish's "Fall of the City," a story of a heart attack with the camera itself as the protagonist and an unusual play about Abraham Lincoln.
He has little paitence with those who complain about "too much misery" in TV dramas. ("Let's let the audiences--and not just he critics--decide what's good and what's bad TV.") And he doesn't think there's anything wrong with the medium that a few good scripts wouldn't cure. ("TV is a pair of hungry jaws that you have to keep feeding with scripts.")
Montgomery feels he has been singularly fortunate in the actors he has employed on Robert Montgomery Presents. John Newland, his leading man for years, is now one of his leading directors. Gone are such familiar faces as Vaughn Taylor and Margaret Hayes, but they would be with him yet, he feels, were they not "the happy victims of success." Both have been called to Hollywood.
Only one actor, says Montgomery, has aked out on his show--a film star who blithely took off for Hollywood the day rehearsals began.
"That's what they call 'temperament,' I guess," says Montgomery, with a sigh, "and that's what, thank goodness, we don't have any more of on TV!"