Tick... Tick... Tick... by David Blum Read Free Book Online

Wallace to adjust to a new medium, a new home, and the high-powered lifestyle that came with a network television show.
    But after three years CBS pulled the plug on Mike and Buff. At the same time it became clear that the on-air bickering was a bit too real; Wallace and Cobb ended their marriage soon after the show was canceled.
    That left Wallace at loose ends in the summer of 1954 , until he auditioned for a Broadway show, got the gig, and embarked on yet another new career. He played the part of an art dealer in Reclining Figure, a comedy by Harry Kurnitz about an art collector who buys a forgery. In the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson noted that “Wallace does well with the part of a dealer who comes as close as possible to being on the level.” Not exactly a career-launching notice, but it led Wallace into a series of TV commercials. One in particular would come back to haunt him 40 years later as a crusading correspondent for 60 Minutes —hawking cigarettes for Philip Morris. He would later investigate the tobacco industry as part of a controversial segment about the addictive qualities of nicotine. “Where can you find a man’s kind of mildness except in today’s Philip Morris?” the suave Wallace asked, puffing smoothly on a cigarette. That became a trademark look for him, much as it had for the biggest star of network news at that moment, Edward R. Murrow.
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    Mike Wallace decided in 1955 that he belonged in Murrow’s profession; little more than a year later, he was hosting Night Beat on NBC’s New York affiliate. The show was an hour-long interview at 11 : 00 P.M. four nights a week, in which Wallace honed the in-your-face questioning style that would become his trademark. He loved hitting celebrities with provocative questions or, more often, provocative statements that they were invited to contradict. The first question Wallace asked on his first show (with New York’s liberal Democratic mayor, Robert F. Wagner) was, “How do you feel when the Herald Tribune calls you a do-nothing mayor?” (Wallace’s Republican leanings have since been well established.)
    It only got more interesting. “Mrs. Roosevelt, I think you will agree,” he said one night to Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “that a good many people hated your husband.” Given no room to move, Mrs. Roosevelt—and the audience at home—had little choice but to agree. Audiences loved Wallace’s confrontational style; it caught on so fast that less than six months later, ABC hired him away to do a half-hour version of Night Beat for a national audience on Sunday nights. He quickly became a force to be reckoned with; comedians like Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner were doing parodies of Wallace, and major critics were writing essays about his impact on the medium. “In a very real sense [Wallace] is a pioneer in electronic journalism of substance,” wrote the influential New York Times television critic Jack Gould. “He has shown how through the instrument of the TV close-up millions of set owners can gain a new insight into people and how and why they think as they do.” But the forward-looking Gould also warned: “By building carefully on a sound journalistic foundation he could achieve a lasting place in national TV; his present risk is that by pushing too hard he may prove to be only a fleeting fad.”
    Gould’s cautionary came true one year later, when ratings declined and Wallace’s flagging show lost its sponsors, and the network rescinded its pledge to keep him on the air once a week in prime time. Wallace took Night Beat to Channel 13 (then a small independent station in New York). By 1961 , it had fizzled completely.
    In 1962 , as his once-burgeoning career seemed to be settling into decline, Wallace was hit with a personal tragedy that would alter his career forever: the death of Peter, his oldest son. A 19