Street Gang by Michael Davis Read Free Book Online Page A

the literary crowd that frequented the baronial estate at Sands Point, Long Island, the compound brought to mind The Great Gatsby, and for good reason. In his 1925 meditation on the sociology of wealth, F. Scott Fitzgerald patterned Jay Gatsby’s fictional mansion after the Swope residence.
    Cooney became a weekend regular at Sands Point, where on a summer’s day, the Swopes might entertain a swirl of authors, statesmen, comedians, stage actors, and the wits and sages of the Algonquin Round Table. An afternoon guest list might include Averell Harriman; Robert Moses; Harpo Marx; Martin Gabel and his wife, the actress Arlene Francis; CBS founder William Paley; and his friend and chief competitor, RCA president General David Sarnoff.
    At one weekend party, Maggie Swope urged Sarnoff to take notice of this new arrival in town. General, she said, “Joan is such a nice girl. You have to give her a job.”
    Joan, flattered and a bit embarrassed, suggested that she might be useful in the press department at RCA. “In those days, publicity departments were always hiring people who had been on newspapers,” Cooney recalled.
    “Fine,” Sarnoff said. “Come interview at RCA.”
    A position quickly opened up for the fresh-faced friend-of-a-friend of the Swopes. 11 “My path was always marked by encounters with strong men,” Cooney said. “No one could understand why the General had brought me in, and rumors attended me. The General had a twinkle in his eye, and he was rumored to be a ladies’ man. And like so many great men, he was a real presence when he walked into a room. Men like that emanate some sort of electrical current. Everything stopped.
    “But I was this innocent—a Candide, really—who was being thought of as an extremely sophisticated, manipulative, ambitious person, probably sleeping with the General.”
    Cooney wrote press releases to churn up coverage of Sarnoff’s frequent speeches, many of which addressed advances in communications technology and the advent of color television. But while she may have cashed a paycheck from RCA during her early years in New York, it didn’t provide enough earning power to actually buy a television, the very product she was paid to promote. When she needed to see something on TV, she borrowed a key to a downstairs neighbor’s apartment. “Clyde was out most nights, and certainly wasn’t around in the daytime,” she recalls. “He’d say, ‘When I’m not home, look at whatever you want.’ So I started going down. It was not so long ago in my life that I had been an actress, so I still cared a lot about drama.”
    Her next professional move was, in essence, a company transfer, moving after nine months from the more corporate public relations responsibilities of the parent company to RCA’s bourgeoning broadcasting wing, NBC Television. She wrote press releases about the network’s frothy lineup of daily serials, euphemistically renamed “day dramas” by NBC’s visionary programming chief, Sylvester “Pat” Weaver. 12
     
    Corporate parsimony and rigidity explain, in part, why Joan did not ultimately make a career of it at NBC. When she transferred over from RCA, company rules limited her new salary at the network to no more than 15 percent higher than what she had been making for the parent company. It did not take much sleuthing for Joan to discover that she “was making half of what everybody else was making [at NBC] and having a hard time [with my] living expenses.” Her boss, Sid Igus, said, “I get it, but there’s nothing I can do about it except to help you get out of here.”
    That he did. With a phone call to a friend at United States Steel Corporation, Joan Ganz had another one of those star-kissed employment moments, walking into a publicity job for the United States Steel Hour , CBS’s twice-monthly live anthology series that won an Emmy for Best Dramatic Series in 1955. The steel company itself, not CBS, had hired Joan—at a substantial