After Appomattox

Nobody will ever know who really started it. It may well have been an obscure vaudeville comedian, after Appomattox or after Yorktown, who first used the joke during a desperate split week in Manchester or Dublin. The joke involved someone's trying to rent a cottage with a W.C. (water closet) and being misunderstood by someone else who thought that by some tortured leap of the jokemaker's imagination the letters stood for Wayside Chapel. Thus, the W.C. was nine miles from the house, could be visited only twice a week, etc. -- endless possibilities. Little could the unsung, unremembered hero foresee that his creation would one day produce a major crisis in the American entertainment world, comparable at the very least to the firing by Arthur Godfrey of Singer Julius La Rosa or the appearance of J. Fred Muggs more or less alongside Queen Elizabeth II on Dave Garroway's show -- and more, that it would become in some quarters an issue of free speech, the soullessness of big corporations, the decline of public morality and perhaps the future of the democratic system.

On his Wednesday night show, Jack Paar considered using the venerable joke, debated with himself (as he later recalled) about whether it was fit for the air waves, won the debate, and proceeded to tell the story. At 10 p.m., the taping of his show completed, Paar went home to Bronxville. And that was the moment when history pointed a relentless finger at Ernest Lee Jahncke Jr., a broadcasting veteran (for 15 years vice president at ABC) who had been brought to NBC after the quiz scandals to serve as director of the network's Department of Standards and Practices.

Guardian Jahncke viewed the Paar tape and decided stanchly that the 4.J,-min. se quence must come out. After a quick check with still-unnamed NBC superiors, but without a word to Jack Paar, the tape cutters started snipping. When the show went on the air, the Wayside Chapel, the water closet and Narrator Paar were replaced by a news broadcast. But what followed made all other news -- even wine, women, and cash for disk jockeys, even the French atomic blast in the Sahara --seem insignificant on Page One.

"I Am Leaving." After a day's restraint (he merely called NBC's action "idiotic") Paar appeared for the taping session of his next show. For the first 15 minutes, there was business as usual -- bright, light, laugh ing. But soon after the show was due to "go network" and spread from New York cross country, Paar's smile petered out. "All right," he asked. "Are you ready?"

He was not questioning NBC's right to cut out the story, said Jack, although he considered it inoffensive. But no one had even consulted him, and now his public would think that he had committed "some terrible obscenity." Still the network would not let him clear his name by running the censored tape. The corners of Paar's mouth began to turn down. His voice broke. His eyes leaked. He had wrestled with his soul for 30 sleepless hours, he said through half-suppressed tears, and he had finally come to a lonely decision: "There must be an easier way to make a living. I am leaving the Tonight show." Abruptly he got up and did just that.

"No Guts." For almost a minute the audience applauded in sympathy. Then suave Announcer Hugh Downs took over and nimbly walked a tightrope between gentlemanly criticism of NBC and gentle disagreement with Paar. Comic Orson Bean came on to denounce the "dehumanized" network that had neither "loyalty" nor "guts." Comic Shelley Berman chimed in with a call for Paar's fans to march on Radio City with pitchforks. Later, Bean struggled to get the thing into better perspective. "Listen," he said, "the network doesn't stink as a network. It stinks as a human relationship outfit."

Soon the human relations outfit had to make a public relations decision: Should the tape containing Paar's walkout and all the criticism of NBC be put on the air? It should, decided NBC, and to show how human it could be, it even invited the public to be sure to tune in.

The country took it big. Pro-Paar calls and wires poured into NBC headquarters. Mickey Rooney, who had only recently been involved in a liquid feud with Paar (TIME, Dec. 14), offered Jack a job in a Rooney-owned tire factory. A political-button manufacturer put aside his campaign slogans to produce a lapel ornament that read "Come Back Jack." At Bowie race track, an in-and-outer named Randy-paar, after Jack's daughter, got into the spirit of things and paid $15 to win.

A New York Post editorial promoted Paar to a lonely maverick fighting for the Bill of Rights. And the New York Jour nal American's TV critic, Jack O'Brian, countered Paar's argument that his studio audience had approved of the joke. That, pontificated O'Brian, was no moral judgment; after all, "a majority killed Christ."

"I Am Free." Such bathetic flights aside, it was plain that the Wayside Chapel was not the best possible place for Paar to fight for the Bill of Rights. It was equally plain that NBC had raised a fuss -- perhaps in a deliberate attempt to get freewheeling, free-talking Paar into line -- over a story far milder than many other things heard on previous Paar shows or elsewhere on TV. But NBC was in no mood to lose a topnotch performer -- and moneymaker. All week long newspaper re porters haunted Paar's suburban home in Bronxville, recording every sob and sigh. According to Paar, even NBC President Robert Kintner and NBC Chairman Rob ert Sarnoff had tried to reach him by phone. "They're not bad people as net work executives go," said Paar, but he would not talk to them, hoped to leave on a long vacation. Then he told another story -- this time about a poor man who owned only one cup and broke even that one day. As it shattered, he said: "At last I am free." And that, added Paar portentously, "is how I feel."

NBC promptly suggested that it might repair the cup. A conciliatory letter from President Kintner reminded Paar of the other people on his show who were affected by his walkout. "I hope you will think of all of them, Jack, and decide to come back to us." At the same time, NBC was insisting that it would hold Paar to his fiveyear, $200,000-a-year contract.

TV gossips inevitably whispered that the whole affair had been a phony from the start, nothing but a carefully planned publicity campaign. It was an unconvincing rumor for various reasons, not the least of them being the fact that no net work flack has that much imagination.

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