Panegyric for Person to Person

The excellent Broadway show Goodnight, and Goodluck did an admirable job showing the pivotal nature of Edward R. Murrow’s news broadcast, See It Now, especially in combatting McCarthyism. But it gave short shrift to the show’s more glamorous but less consequential cousin, Person to Person. In fact the dialogue indicated that hosting the show was a chore for Murrow, something he did just to please the network.

I protest!

Person to Person was a pioneering celebrity interview show. Murrow, seated comfortably in his New York studio, smoking his trademark Camel cigarette, would interview famous people in their well-appointed homes. His guests included baseball player Roy Campanella, President Harry Truman and revolutionary Fidel Castro (probably not such a well-appointed home).

His show was watched by hundreds of thousands of people. And one of those people was my grandmother, Helen Teisch.

My mother’s mother (aka Bubbe) was the daughter of one of the many Galitzianer tailors who followed this trade in Eastern Europe. The family lived in Krakow, an old and distinguished city with a thriving Jewish population. Family lore says my grandmother sang in the Yiddish opera and might have joined the Polish opera if she had not been prevented by her orthodox parents.

Instead, she married my grandfather, who had been sent to work for her father as an apprentice tailor. They most probably would have remained in Krakow until Hitler and his minions sent them to die in Auschwitz. But my grandfather’s sister, Sheindel, (mother of another Jewish immigrant, the Nobel prize-winning physicist I. I. Rabi), didn’t want her younger brother to be drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army and sent him the money for passage to the United States.

Life in New York City must have been somewhat traumatic for my grandmother. The culture she was now immersed in was not particularly friendly to religious Jews who observed Sabbath and the kashrut laws. She did not speak English. She likely found it difficult making her way around such a big city.

But when my grandmother was not cleaning the house, raising her children or cooking (her gefilte fish is legendary), she watched television. And her favorite show was  Person to Person.

Why would a woman with only a rudimentary grasp of the English language, living in an apartment house in Brooklyn be interested in the lives and homes of the rich and famous? Person to Person provided my grandmother (as well as thousands of other immigrants) an entry into the strange and perhaps frightening new country she was living in.

Person to Person was aspirational. A few of the people Murrow interviewed, like John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie, were born into wealth. But most were individuals who earned their fame through hard work and talent. Actor Kirk Douglas was the son of a ragman. Actress Marilyn Monroe spent most of her childhood in foster homes and an orphanage. Producer Mike Todd was one of nine children born to Polish-Jewish immigrants.

These celebrities, who were the children of immigrants, who had broken the color line, who had risen above and beyond abuse, showed everyday Americans they too could achieve the American dream.

The final episode of Person to Person aired in 1961. It is up to us to keep the American Dream alive.