Three Reasons to Love New York — Part III

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He had the fine features of a leading man, and that’s what he was. He made his Broadway debut in December 1925, when Phyllis was a year old. A few years later, when the movies became the talkies, Kirkland was among the hundreds of stage actors lured west. He had a contract at Fox (“The Devil’s Lottery,” “Charlie Chan’s Chance” and the first talkie version of “Black Beauty”), but his two notable films were made at Paramount — where he co-starred with Tallulah Bankhead in George Cukor’s first solo directorial feature, “Tarnished Lady” — and MGM, where he got third billing (above Robert Young, Maureen O’Sullivan and other stars-to-be) playing the calf-like husband who can’t keep Norma Shearer from Clark Gable in the adaptation of O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude.”

Though Kirkland went Hollywood, Hollywood didn’t go him. Somehow, this fine-featured fellow with the light voice, wavy blond hair and earnest manner didn’t strike sparks with the camera. Within three years he was back on Broadway in 1933, as a member of the radical Group Theatre.

A patrician stage manner might seem out of place among all those urban, lumpen actors with revolutionary dreams — Luther and Stella Adler, Lee J. Cobb, Elia Kazan, Bobby Lewis, Clifford Odets, Jules (later John) Garfield — but the Group needed a leading-man figure, and Kirkland filled the bill. In “Men in White,” he played the doctor role that Gable would take in the MGM film adaptation the following year. He appeared in Odets’ “Till the Day I Die” and in the title role of “Case of Clyde Griffiths,” an adaptation of “An American Tragedy” staged by Lee Strasberg. After leaving the Group, Kirkland directed a few plays and wrote one Broadway flop. His most piquant credit was as the second lead in a revival of “Outward Bound.” The director: Otto Preminger.

Alexander was 44 when he married Phyllis, who was just 21. He had been married before, to the sophisticated stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. The Sun obit adds: “As reported the next day in the Los Angeles Times, Lee bore him a son on the very day he and Adams were wed” — December 1, 1944. What neither paper mentions is that the child wasn’t Kirkland’s; it was Preminger’s. The boy was first called Erik Kirkland, then Erik de Diego. When he learned his father’s true identity, the young man took the name Erik Lee Preminger. In his marriage to Phyllis, Kirkland did sire a child: Alexandra, known as Sandy.

Phyllis always had a theatrical energy — no great-lady airs; rather, a practical charm, an energetic poise that could make any impromptu sentence as persuasive as a speech from a Philip Barry comedy. At the time of her marriage to Kirkland, she was parading it on stage, “appearing in summer stock in New England,” the Sun obit observes, “as well as pre-Broadway engagements of more ambitious plays.” The Missing in Action Website, which highlights female pioneers in TV production, reports that Phyllis “showed her maverick nature by traveling war-torn Europe in a USO tour of Noel Coward’s ‘Blithe Spirit.’” So the co-starring of a stage veteran and a pretty novice gave a showbiz fizz to the Kirkland-Adams alliance. In his nationally syndicated column, Winchell gave space to the couple when they got married. And the same five years later, when they went phffft.

By then, Phyllis had jettisoned her dreams to be the First Lady of the Theatre. Instead, she became one of the prime women of TV’s Golden Age.

“HOME”

Yes, children, the phrases “TV” and “Golden Age” are not mutually exclusive. It was the early 50s, just a few years after networks began broadcasting full-time. Back then, a dozen evening series showcased original plays, and the skits on “Your Show of Shows” served up comedy caviar. But the gold quickly tarnished; by 1952 TV was already teetering between the elite entertainment it had been and the mass medium it was about to become.

Our golden girl, naturally, was on the side of quality. And to prove it, she had a McCall’s “Mike” award, given to executive who had performing signal public service for women. She earned it in 1952 for her pioneering work producing intelligent TV — a mixture of “Charlie Rose” and “Oprah” — for American housewives.

It all blossomed so suddenly; TV worked like that in its infancy. In 1951 Phyllis parlayed a research job at Theater Arts magazine into a stint producing a quarter-hour chat-fest, “Footlights and Klieglights.” The local NBC affiliate WNBT (later WNBC) paired Phyllis’ theater show with another 15-min. effort she produced, “Bringing Up Mother.” For most of the week, Phyllis said, the show offered “the usual junk presented for housewives,” while on Fridays it addressed serious issues. Four days of Martha Stewart, one day of Ms. magazine.

The Friday show quickly evolved into a half-hour daily discussion show, “It’s a Problem,” which NBC sent out to 18 other stations. Given Phyllis’ life of privilege, it’s not surprising that she was choosing topics less from personal experience than from her voracious curiosity. The Sun obit quotes her as telling the Times: “I could count only nine or 10 problems that I had experienced and was sure we’d run out of problems within two weeks. I was scared to death when I got the assignment and left immediately on a trip to Bermuda.” Apparently, she recovered in a trice. Soon she was booking such prominent guests as W.H. Auden, Pearl Buck and, in a move that stoked considerable controversy, birth-control crusader Margaret Sanger.

To some eyes, the show was too hot, or maybe too smart. In Variety, a reviewer of “It’s a Problem” pegged the show as “much too cerebral for a mid-morning spotting, and it’s doubtful if the program can win a viewing audience composed mainly of housewives who’ve got the day’s cleaning and shopping worries ahead of them.” Yet Phyllis was clairvoyant about issue-oriented daytime TV. She told the Washington Post: “Women want to hear about other problems besides how to fix flowers in a pot.” Jack Gould, the TV critic for the Times, agreed. In a 1952 roundup of the medium, he highlighted “It’s My Problem” as a show that “provides a thoroughly adult discussion of child psychology and family difficulties.”

In 1953, when “It’s My Problem” went off the air, Phyllis produced a lit-chat show, “Author Meets the Critics,” for New York TV station WOR. The following year, she hooked up with Arlene Francis for the daily hour-long show, “Home.” Arlene was already a TV celebrity as a panelist on “What’s My Line.” But she had been on Broadway since 1936, when she appeared in the original production of Clare Boothe Luce’s “The Women”; and in 1945 she starred briefly in the comedy “The French Touch” — sets designed by George Jenkins.

NBC had successfully introduced the morning show “Today” in 1952 and was about to launch “The Tonight Show” in late-night. “Home,” which premiered in January 1954, completed the trifecta, as another of Phyllis’ daytime programs aimed at flattering the intelligence and expanding the interests of its (mostly female) audience. Francis, with her breezy assurance and fabulous social-baritone voice, co-hosted the show with Hugh Downs. They interviewed guests ranging from Jerry Lewis to Helen Keller to Judge Joseph N. Welch, the Army’s attorney in the Army-McCarthy hearings that ended Joe McCarthy’s four-year run as the Capital’s chief witch-hunter. “We were an educational program,” Francis said later, “and the one it educated most of all was me.”

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