Camera Girl by Carl Sferrazza Anthony

Author:Carl Sferrazza Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2023-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

23 MASSACHUSETTS

October–November 1952

Worked on the paper [Times-Herald] all fall,” Jackie noted of her typical days in the months after Labor Day, 1952. “[I]t was an election year and I didn’t see too much of Jack.” When she did see him, however, it would significantly shift her understanding of him.

Along with the column, she was redrafting her documentary script. That past spring, she had intimated to Waldrop that the burgeoning power of television as a medium for entertainment might just hold for news, too. By autumn, she was enthusiastically embracing that vision. Everyone was. By the end of 1952, some twenty million American households had a television set, an increase of 33 percent from a year earlier, when Jackie first came to work at the newspaper. Over the same one-year period, American advertisers were spending 38.8 percent more money on television commercials, a total of $288 million.

The fifteen-page length of her script indicates that she intentionally wrote her Octagon House documentary for television, the standard rate being one page per minute of broadcast to be slotted into a half hour; half of the airtime was allotted for commercials. According to his wife, Martha, Stephen Walter “only made suggestions” to the script. He then approached several of his public relations clients and found one interested in underwriting her project; meanwhile, Jackie made her own connection with the local affiliate of CBS Television, WTOP, as a potential venue for broadcasting it. (She hadn’t been off base in asking Waldrop if the Times-Herald owned a TV station; two years earlier, the Washington Post had become part owner of the station.)

WTOP was known for its high-quality and early transmission of color programming. CBS Films had been created that year as a syndication service, capable of carrying local-affiliate programming to hundreds of other stations around the country. She submitted her rewrite to Stephen Walter, cheekily suggesting that, if a TV deal eluded them, she was willing to reconceptualize it as a two-hour dramatic feature-film script:

“Here it is. I have 50 million more facts but it would be a little heavy if I put them all in. I tried to put OOMPH in it with romantic suicides and lovers’ meetings… but I don’t think I jazzed it up enough. Don’t you think if CBS doesn’t want it, we could really pile it on and sell it to Louis B. Mayer as a co-starrer for Errol Flynn and Marilyn Monroe?”

Paralleling Jackie’s eagerness about television was Jack’s simultaneous foray into it. He’d already twice appeared nationally, on NBC’s Meet the Press on December 2, 1951, and on CBS’s Longines Chronoscope show, on March 12, 1952. Recognizing the potential of television to reach into every home in the state, Jack had conceived of a television show, Coffee with the Kennedys, to be aired in the late morning, targeting housewives. Cards were distributed to the thousands coming to the teas, encouraging them to sponsor “coffee hours” at home and invite their friends to come watch. Perhaps not coincidentally, in her column

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