There was no need to feel sorry for anyone on another famous show whose central theme was munificence. As long as people were strictly fictional characters, anything went. We could revel freely in their defeats, failures, and foolishness. I’m talking, of course, about “The Millionaire,” a show that earned its own unique spot in the popular consciousness and which resonates to this day. Ah. What a fine fantasy—to be so rich that you could be like a god on Olympus, entertaining yourself and satisfying your curiosity with your human “chessmen,” from the remove of your sixty thousand-acre estate. John Beresford Tipton was godlike in the most important way—we never saw his face. He was a name, a mellifluous deep voice, and a hand extending itself from the wingchair he sat in. A hand holding “…a cashier’s check for one million dollars.”
Ordered by his doctor to find a way to relax, Tipton has chosen a hobby beyond the reach of ordinary mortals—he carefully selects an experimental subject, bestows the tax-free fortune on him or her, then sits back and watches the fun. There are some requirements, of course, and a lot of us can recite them verbatim along with Tipton’s emissary, Michael Anthony: “It’s yours to do with as you wish. The only conditions are that you must not reveal the source of the money to anyone, except your spouse, should you marry. If you do, the money will be forfeited.”
The premise was an excellent one, promising infinite plots, and it got bright children thinking about the nature of money and the intricacies of human folly and wisdom where money was involved. You never knew at the beginning of the show whether the new “millionaire” was going to blow it or whether he/she would actually negotiate the shoals of sudden wealth. The basic message—that a huge windfall did not guarantee an end to one’s problems, and in fact was capable of creating new ones you never thought of and multiplying the old ones—was a revelation. A testimonial to the show’s durable charisma is the fact that even today, the ghost of Michael Anthony prowls the streets and walks among us, cashier’s check (adjusted, for inflation, to a billion) in his briefcase, a piece of paper with our name on it in his hand, searching, searching. And we know, we just know, that when he finds us, we will behave in a way that would gladden the heart of John Beresford Tipton and that we will prove ourselves worthy of his gift. And we still have one ear cocked for that knock on the door…..
Speaking of which, picture yourself a matron in your California bungalow in 1956 or so. Someone’s knocking. You open your door, and there’s a guy in a suit. There are actually two guys in suits, but the one who gets your attention is the one who does the talking, the one with the pleasantly homely, slightly droopy, seen-it-all-but-still-haven’t-completely-given-up-on-the-human race face. He holds up his shiny badge so you can look at it through your screen door.
“Mrs. Irma Johnson? We’re police officers. Mind if we come in?”
“I suppose not. What’s this all about?”
“We’d just like to ask you a few questions, Ma’am.”
“Well, come in, officers. Excuse my wet hands. I was just cleaning up. You know how it is.” The officers exchange looks.
“We know how it is, Ma’am.” The first guy holds up a photograph. “Do you know this man?”
You look at the picture while you dry your hands on your apron.
“Oh, I know him, all right. Ed, I think his name was. Yes. Ed Finley. He did some handyman work for me.”
“Do you remember when, Ma’am?”
“Oh, I suppose it was two or three months ago. I remember him because he stole some of my late husband’s tools from the shed. Right out from under my nose. And after I gave him a nice lunch. And homemade iced tea. My own recipe. Iced tea was my late husband’s favorite. I always made it fresh for him after he’d had a hard day’s work.” The officers exchange looks again.
“Do you know where Mr. Finley might have gone after you saw him last, Ma’am?”
“I have no earthly idea. Why? Is he in some sort of trouble?”
“You might say that.”
“Well, I’m not surprised. I always thought he’d come to no good. Especially after he stole my poor Harvey’s tools. What sort of trouble is he in?”
“He’s dead.”
Dunt-da-dunt-dunt! Dunt-da-dunt-dunt DA! This is the city. Los Angeles, California. My name’s Friday. I work here. I’m a cop.
Sergeant Joe Friday’s Los Angeles was the pre-freeway L.A., more like the L.A. of Raymond Chandler than the L.A. of fun ‘n’ sun and movie stars. But where Philip Marlowe inhabited a world of shadows, dim lights, neon signs, night and streetlamps, Joe Friday’s L.A., despite the fact that plenty of Dragnet scenes were filmed at night, always comes to memory in broad daylight, rather like a film-noir’s badly hungover morning after. It was a land of bungalows, seedy hotels, lonely widows, losers, petty crooks, disillusioned starlets, drifters and grifters, all starkly exposed under the merciless southern California sun. Jack Webb’s L.A. was, in its 50s TV way, heir to the L.A. of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. West’s masterpiece was written in the 1930s, by which time L.A. was already in steep decline from its golden apogee, already the City of Broken Dreams. By the 50s, it was ready for Joe Friday.
Jack Webb as Sgt. Joe Friday managed to convey a mix of hip, hardened and hopelessly square all at once. There was little fictional remove between Joe Friday and Jack Webb. If you read up on Webb’s life and times, you’ll find that he pretty much was Joe Friday. He grew up poor and fatherless in L.A, raised by his mother and grandmother. No wonder those Dragnet widows and old ladies in their little houses had such a ring of authenticity. He’d done radio in the late 40s, first playing a private eye and then doing an early pre-TV version of Dragnet.
Webb had an excellent ear for people’s banal conversational styles, and he had no illusions about humanity. A lot of people were just no damned good. Every show began with these enticing words: “The story you are about to see is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” With the TV show, which ran from 1951 to 1959, Jack perfected the clipped, economical style which would become his trademark. It’s said that he liked to have his actors read Teleprompters rather than memorize their lines, because it made them sound more like real people. And we lived for the show’s conclusion, where the “criminals” faced the camera, staring and squirming, while Jack’s voice intoned the details of their trials and imprisonment: “Felix Cooper is now serving a sentence of twenty-one years to life in San Quentin...” Then came the Dragnet theme with its relentless marching cadence while the credits rolled, and after that, the sweaty arm and hand pounding the “Mark IV Productions” logo—Clang! Clang!—into fake rock with a hammer. Awesome!
There was something of the hipster about Jack, something that communicated directly to kids of the post-war generation and which would go in and “take” as definitively as Elvis would. Never mind that he was all business, no-nonsense and all law ‘n’ order. He was definitely cool. What we kids couldn’t have known when we were watching the show was that Jack Webb was a huge jazz aficionado, and that he had a collection of over 6,000 jazz recordings. We didn’t know about the jazz riffs that Jack had in his soul, were too young to appreciate jazz anyway, but we were picking up on its essence in a placental sort of way when we watched Dragnet. Jack/Joe was a big part of the “cool” revolution that was happening in the 50s. How could a straight-arrow cop with an Eagle Scout outlook be such a big part of our still-forming definition of “cool?” Gene Sculatti, author of the Catalog of Cool, put it this way: “Dragnet,” Sculatti tells us, was “TV's equivalent of cool jazz, with dialogue like a bass solo.”
And he was still cool a decade later when he made his big comeback with “Dragnet ’67.” There was something lovable about Joe Friday’s utter contempt for scrungy hippies on bad acid trips.
Jack was the real thing, and never forgot his origins. He donated work and money to charities for widows and orphans. The LAPD once used Dragnet episodes as “training films,” and when Jack Webb died, too young, in 1982 (he was a three-pack-a-day man), he was buried with full LAPD honors and a 17-gun salute.
In his way, ol’ Jack planted the seeds of California Dreaming. For us, he was the stern-but-kindly authority figure we’d eventually rebel against, and we loved him.
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