Television

The Museum of TV and Radio: Like the Louvre, full of video and sound

By Alessandra Stanley
New York Times
07-04-2004

NEW YORK — There is the first presidential campaign ad shown on television: Eisenhower Answers America, from 1952. There’s also the first reality show, Queen for a Day (1956), and the first sitcom ever to show a married couple sharing a bed (Mary Kay and Johnny in 1947). Viewers can watch old black-and-white sitcoms like Topper or Farrah Fawcett’s screen test for the 1975 sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter. But most visitors request Seinfeld or The Simpsons. The Museum of Television and Radio on West 52nd Street in Manhattan is a little like the Louvre. It was made into a museum by a Robespierre-like visionary tyrant, William S. Paley of CBS, and most first-time visitors just want to see the Mona Lisa. Or, in this case, I Love Lucy. The urge to request shows that are almost always in reruns no longer baffles the scores of museum experts who help visitors find their shows on library computers. "Most people don’t look for the interesting obscure stuff," Sean Foley, a museum librarian, explained with a pained smile. "They look for what they can remember." A bizarre repository of 20th-century American history and pop culture, the Museum of Television and Radio is a wonderful place to spend a rainy afternoon — or a beautiful sunny Sunday. (There is a branch in Los Angeles as well.) The interiors are sleek, simple and soothing, and every day screening rooms offer a broad range of special showings — anything from compilations of television’s great moments to the famous "Eye of the Beholder" episode of The Twilight Zone in 1960. The museum collection has more than 100,000 commercials, and radio and television programs. Visitors can browse the museum computers and make their selections in a softly lighted library lined with Al Hirschfeld cartoons. But the archives are not all-encompassing. There are delightful finds, and also surprising omissions. Visitors can watch Billie Jean King cream Bobby Riggs in three straights sets in their 1973 battle-of-the-sexes tennis match. But the museum does not have a tape of the moment during the 1986 World Series when the ball ran through the Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner’s legs. The museum has the famous 1969 confrontation between the novelist Jacqueline Susann and the theater critic John Simon on The David Frost Show, as well as Norman Mailer’s ugly blow-up at Gore Vidal on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971. However, you won’t find Cavett’s famous interview with the novelist Mary McCarthy in 1980, in which she mocked the playwright Lillian Hellman ("every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’"), which led to their legendary feud and lawsuit. Nowadays, no master tape of a show, no matter how insignificant, is thrown away; in the era of the Internet and cable, everything has resale or rerun potential. But 30 and 40 years ago, even great shows were sometimes lost or destroyed. A little like the film buffs who mourn the 10 missing reels of Erich von Stroheim’s masterpiece Greed, TV aficionados and museum directors are in despair that there are no copies of the maiden episode of the Tonight Show With Johnny Carson or the first Super Bowl. That said, the database — and the archives — is still a work in progress. The computers that visitors rely on are relatively slow and constraining: neither I nor the helpful librarian who came to my aid could find an episode of the game show featuring Charles Van Doren, the contestant at the center of the rigged quiz show scandal of the late 1950s. (David Bushman, a curator, found it later.) The library does not yet offer visitors Internet access so they can look up such information on Google or IMDB. Nor does the museum Web site (www.mtr.org) allow consumers to browse its collection online. If viewers want to find out whether the museum has a copy of the only musical Cole Porter ever wrote for television (Aladdin, on CBS in 1958) without making the trip to 52nd Street, they must call the museum inquiry line between 4 and 5:45 p.m. (It does.) The Museum of Television and Radio is at 25 W. 52nd St., Manhattan. Museum hours: Tuesdays through Sundays, noon to 6 p.m. (to 8 p.m. on Thursdays). Closed today. Admission: $10; students and 62-plus, $8; children under 14, $5. Information: (212) 621-6800.