Red Buttons died the other day.
Don't worry, this won't be another boomer elegy for the Borscht-Belt comics we saw on Carson. I was no big fan, really remember Buttons only for one role, that of the paratrooper whose chute snagged on a church steeple in the 1962 D-Day epic, The Longest Day. And, yes, I was vaguely aware of him as a supple-faced comedian doing antic bits on talk shows. But his obituary surprised me, and provided one of those plus-ça-change moments I've come to love.
The flame-haired Buttons, born Aaron Chwatt, had one of those Here Today, Gone Tomorrow, Back Next Week careers in the 1950s that presage the familiar contemporary cycles of fame and rehab. It testifies, too, to the power of the young medium of television, that Buttons, awarded a variety show to compete with Milton Berle's, abruptly became a national superstar, before anyone had conceived of that word. Buttons had appeared on TV, notably on Berle's show, but the Oct. 14, 1952 debut of his own show set the young TV nation a-buzz. "Later that evening, switchboard operators at the network reported one of the biggest and most enthusiastic responses to a single program they had ever received," Mervyn Rothstein wrote in The New York Times obituary.
Movies and radio had already conspired to create the "overnight sensation," so Buttons could not have been unaware of fame's fickleness. His catchphrase, every bit the "You're fired!" of its day, was "Strange things are happening," but he had no idea how strange or how swiftly:
The success didn't last. As the second season began, television audiences lost interest in Mr. Buttons, and his ratings dropped. Frantically seeking to rediscover a winning format, he hired and fired writers almost every week, among them Larry Gelbart and Neil Simon. The revolving door for writers—163 of them over two years—became a standing joke in show business. Nothing helped. The ratings kept plummeting, and his CBS show was canceled.
Then, in 1957, director Josh Logan asked Buttons to appear in the movie Sayonara. The comedian won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for playing an airman in postwar Tokyo who marries a Japanese woman (Miyoshi Umeki, who also won an Oscar). And Buttons was back. He went on to appear in a number of films, in Dean Martin's celebrity "roasts," and on TV shows, including a role last year on E.R., reprising one he'd created in a 1995-96 arc. And he played Vegas.
Our little town, of course, has played its part in reviving or sustaining numerous showbiz careers. Frank Sinatra was washed-up until he won an Oscar in 1954 for From Here to Eternity, but it was his Rat Pack years that distinguish his career today, constituting something of an enduring Vegas brand. By most rock enthusiasts' accounting, Elvis Presley squandered the bounce from his 1968 "comeback special" on NBC by installing a rhinestone-caped parody of himself in Las Vegas. But naturally those years define the King today.
Buttons never became a Vegas icon, but he remains an example of television's role in minting popularity. When he launched his show in 1952, about 20 million American households had televisions, or roughly 45 percent. That had swollen a third, from 15,000,000, in one year. By 1955, when Red Buttons was so 1952, household penetration was nearly 65 percent. (It hit 98.1 percent in 1985 and has remained at 98.2 since 1999, according to Media Trends Track at tvb.org). The Red Buttons Show actually had higher viewership numbers in its second season, and slipped only from 11th to 12th in the top 30 list.
This speaks to the volatility of the viewership market as household penetration exploded, but it also says something about the notorious and continuing jitteriness of ratings-obsessed network executives.
In the early 1950s, only two networks, CBS and NBC, ruled the ratings, and their impact on society, and the psychology of celebrity, cannot be overstated. But yesterday the watercooler, today the blog. Much has been made about our splintering into niches in the 500-channel universe, and about how the Internet and gaming further reduce television's impact. Nonetheless, in 2004 we devoted 1,546 hours-per-person to television viewing, according to tvb.org, compared with 176 for the Internet and 77 for video games.
Television still makes and breaks stars, only now it has its own celebrity-index industry, as well as its own rehabilitation industry, a.k.a. Oprah. Tom Cruise, no doubt, will return to the queen's studio to atone for his last career-troubling appearance. (Should we now speak of "jumping the couch?")
We hear a lot about the impact of media on our lives, and about how different our lives are from those of earlier generations as a result. But TV built on the celebrity-making machinery of radio and earlier technologies, and to some extent, it works the same way today.
And that's my final answer.
Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website, www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.