TELEVISION: Aloha & Ballyhoo

"The better the junket, the worse the show" is an axiom in the entertainment business. Movie and TV companies have lately transported planeloads of correspondents to Ireland (for the premiere of Walt Disney's Darby O'Gill and the Little People), to Tucumcari, N. Mex. (for the shooting of CBS-TV's Rawhide), and to practically anywhere else a travel-minded reporter would want to go. The latest and possibly most lavish junket was under way last week when ABC-TV took eleven reporters and four pressagents to Hawaii to publicize its new, $3,600,000, hour-long adventure series, Adventures in Paradise, which starts next month.

At Honolulu's Royal Hawaiian Hotel there were leis, typewriters, notebooks, cartons of cigarettes and monogrammed matches in each reporter's $2;-a-day room. Everyone also got an hour's interview with Adventure's official author, James (South Pacific) Michener, and a chance to learn that all Michener sold the network were outlines and a few short stories from which other writers would work out segments of Adventure.

For five days the reporters were left alone to play on the beach, in nightclubs, on neighboring islands, but then came the grim moment when they had to sit through a partial screening of one Adventure episode. It was quickly apparent that all the shooting had been done around Hollywood, not Hawaii. Hero Gardner McKay, who has had more advance publicity than most established stars, proved himself a performer with all the animation of a monkeypod; his face, said one reporter, looked "like a death mask of Gary Cooper." The plot line spun itself out as the story of Adam Troy, Korean war veteran, who dreams of Texas while piloting his schooner Tiki past such hazards as a pigeon-breasted murderess peddling a hot black pearl. The Tiki and Captain Troy are also headed for a hurricane, an engine-room fire, a rock fight on Pitcairn Island, a death struggle with a gigantic eel—if the show lasts long enough on the air.

Just before he left Hawaii, TV Columnist John Crosby summed up for his freeloading comrades: "The author of Adventures in Paradise doesn't actually write it. The Islands of the Pacific are the setting, except you never see them. The star gets fan mail from a lot of people who have never seen him act." As for Author Michener, said Crosby: "He is the Edna Ferber of the South Pacific."