Yakety-Yak

"If you can't stand an hour of literate, intelligent conversation, then I urge you to go see your minister, your priest, your rabbi, or your psychiatrist: you are deathly sick." The speaker was Alexander King, sometime adman, artist, editor and dope addict, who has turned the kind of anecdote-flavored coffeehouse talk that has long been familiar in his home town (Vienna) into a highly successful TV act. His garrulous appearances on the Jack Paar show helped boost his current bestseller, Mine Enemy Grows Older, a book of amusing, scurrilous reminiscences. His often witty, sometimes vulgar, hour-long weekly talk show on Manhattan's WNTA-TV (says he: "I speak foully in public and private too") is the latest example of a growing TV trend--conversation.

Network and non-network stations all over the U.S. are producing talk shows, but none has done it with the insistence of WNTA, whose bustling, baldish supervisor, Ted Cott, seems to operate on the assumption that TV has already accomplished what its gloomiest prophets long ago predicted: killed the art of conversation on the other side of the picture tube.

In addition to Monologuist King, Cott fills his Newark studios with an impressive line-up of talkers. Producer David Susskind has no time limit at all on his Sunday-night round table, Open End (TIME, Nov. 24), and it usually rambles on for two hours. Mike Wallace, the waspish interviewer of a few seasons back, conducts half-hour sessions Monday through Friday. Bishop Fulton Sheen holds forth on Tuesdays, New Jersey's Governor on Sunday, Beauty Consultant Richard Willis Monday through Friday; Fannie Hurst's Showcase follows Willis. Henry Morgan snarls at his sponsors Friday evenings. Actor Martin (The Rivalry) Gabel presides at a limping, 1 1/2 hour discussion on Thursdays, will soon be replaced by Songsmith and Play Doctor Abe Burrows. With 33 hours of such programming every week, WTNTA devotes 40% of its air time to talk. Says Cott: "We're trying to create a nonfiction station."

By taping his talk shows, Cott hopes to feed them to the rest of the stations affiliated with the National Television Association (he has already sold Bishop Sheen to N.T.A.'s Minneapolis station). By next week Stripper Gypsy Rose Lee will be ready with a show: "Singing, dancing and lots of chitchat." And aging (59) Alex King, though his health is precarious, shows no signs of running down. "I'm under constant sedation for high blood pressure," says he. "Gandhi and St. Ignatius Loyola had high blood pressure too, and we all started with sinful lives. I'm preparing for sainthood."

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