ROBERT SAUDEK IS DEAD AT 85,
A PIONEER OF CULTURE ON TV
Having served as alchemist in chief of what is often recalled as the golden age of television, Mr. Saudek went on to help keep the luster of the 1950’s alive, first as the founding president of the Museum of Broadcasting and later as the head of the division for motion pictures, broadcasting and recorded sound of the Library of Congress.
By the time the Ford Foundation asked him to direct its experimental TV/Radio Workshop in 1951, Mr. Saudek, then a Harvard-educated ABC vice president, had established himself as an innovative network executive specializing in high-minded radio documentaries. These illuminated issues like the Marshall Plan, urban slums, public education and American Communism.
It is not exactly clear what the foundation had in mind when it put him in charge of the workshop and gave him his head, but what it got was “Omnibus,” an often daring 90-minute weekly celebration of Mr. Saudek’s wide-ranging interests and his determination to share his enthusiasm for music, art, theater and fun with the masses.
After all, as a child in Pittsburgh, where his father was an orchestra conductor and his mother a symphony violinist, Mr. Saudek, who sang in the Harvard Glee Club, grew up with a love of great music. He saw no reason why it or other arts should be reserved for a cultural elite.
As a producer in an entertainment medium whose massmarket appeal had been defined by Milton Berle’s wearing a dress, Mr. Saudek knew what he was up against. But he also knew how to use the leverage of celebrity and sheer talent to make a cultural point.
Yes, he once had Jose Limon dance “The Moor’s Pavanne,” but his idea for a segment on dance as a man’s game was not to show men in tights. It was to get Mickey Mantle, Johnny Unitas and Sugar Ray Robinson to demonstrate their famous athletic motions while Gene Kelly translated them into dance. And when Mr. Saudek presented “Oedipus Rex,” he had the “Omnibus” host, Alistair Cooke, prime his viewers by pointing out that more people would see that single Sunday performance than the cumulative total of all the people who had seen all the previous productions over 2,500 years.
Not all his programs won raves. Some purists, for example, were aghast when he presented a radically abbreviated, 90-minute version of “King Lear,” but that was Orson Welles in the title role.
As television’s first great impresario, Mr. Saudek gave Leonard Bernstein his first star turn (expounding on Beethoven’s Fifth, with the opening bars painted right on the studio floor) and introduced Jacques Cousteau to the world of television. He also gave television viewers their first looks at Agnes de Mille, Leopold Stokowski, Peter Ustinov (as Dr. Samuel Johnson), Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Pablo Casals, Artur Rubinstein, Marian Anderson, Isaac Stern, Yehudi Menuhin, Igor Stravinsky, Glenn Gould, Danny Kaye, Yo-Yo Ma and Dr. Seuss.
In an age of pioneering television, “Omnibus,” which went on the air in 1952, operated so far beyond the frontiers of conventional programming that it was passed like a hot potato among the three networks. And except for a season or two, it was considered too advanced for prime time but was relegated to the culture gulch of late Sunday afternoons. There it proved so addictive that it disrupted dinner schedules in every time zone.
No wonder. He cast his imaginative net so wide it was hard to tell what Mr. Saudek would dream up next. Over its eight seasons, regular viewers might see a demonstration of a new X-ray film one
week, a witch-doctor dance another week and in between an original play by William Saroyan, an essay on Maine lobstermen by E. B. White, an S. J. Perelman look at Hollywood, and Bert Lahr in George Bernard Shaw’s “Androcles and the Lion.”
After the Ford Foundation withdrew its support in 1957, on the assumption that “Omnibus” had established itself and could go it alone, Mr. Saudek formed his own production company, which kept it alive until 1961. Then it finally sank beneath the waves of a network demand for programs that appealed to the widest possible audience.
Before accepting William S. Paley’s commission to establish the Museum of Broadcasting (now the Museum of Television and Radio) in 1974, Mr. Saudek produced other acclaimed programs, including “Profiles in Courage,” “Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic” and “S. Hurok Presents.” He won 11 Emmys and 7 Peabody Awards.
A small, wiry man (“a dime among nickels,” as he put it), Mr. Saudek had an aversion to pomposity and such a penchant for wit that when he and the New Yorker writer John Bainbridge got together swapping knee-slappers, their peals of laughter would draw a crowd.
When Mr. Saudek’s children went through his files after his death, they were not surprised to find that their father, who had been singing “Guys and Dolls” in his hospital room a few days earlier, had a folder labeled “Fun.” It included a full-page Library of Congress memo on how to use a telephone hold button.
Mr. Saudek is survived by his wife, Elizabeth; four sons, Richard of Montpelier, Vt., Christopher of Lutherville, Md., Robert of Atlanta and Stephen of Lexington, Mass.; a daughter, Mary Elizabeth Jaffee of Lexington;14 grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
March 17, 1997