David Shrensky writes…
A quick question for you: In telling a Welcome Back, Kotter story, you mentioned being present at one of the Battle of Network Stars tapings. Was that the one where Robert Conrad went nuts about an apparent violation that Kaplan made in a relay race? Any recollection of that and/or do you think it was staged a la today's "reality shows" to make for "good TV?" I watched a YouTube clip of it and Conrad seems out of control while Kaplan is collected and even gracious, despite some wild histrionics and Conrad's ridiculous tough-guy persona. (I won't even begin to speculate about Conrad's remark about being German and killing Telly Savalas and Kaplan.) Any insight into what was "real" and what was played up for the cameras?
I wasn't at that one, though I heard about it from Gabe. That was the first one and I was present for the second one where they had the same three team captains and billed it as a "rematch" or a "grudge match" or some sort of match. What I observed was that the contest took a certain amount of reality and built upon it in all directions. Robert Conrad, as captain of the NBC team, was indeed very fierce about winning.
The whole thing was something of a hoot for Gabe Kaplan, who headed the ABC team…and Telly Savalas, who captained the CBS team, did it with an attitude of "How soon can I get my check and leave?" But Conrad acted like if Grizzly Adams didn't win the kayak race for the NBC team, they would all have to do the only honorable thing and commit Seppuku with the plastic knives from the buffet.
The producers were constantly inventing on the fly because the stars, to a great extent, had the power to demand rule changes any time two out of three captains agreed. For instance, at the one for which I was present, there was originally a rule that in the "dunk tank" event, each team captain had to sit in the tank and potentially/probably get dunked in the water. Savalas and Kaplan both refused so that rule was rewritten on the spot.
There was another rule that said that the captains would decide which celebrities on their team competed in which events but that each celebrity had to participate in a certain number of them. The captains had not selected the members of their teams. The producers, I was told, had trouble getting stars to agree to participate so it pretty much came down to a question of "Who can we get?" Mr. Conrad felt he'd been stuck with a team containing too many "stiffs" (i.e., poor athletes). No one else thought so but he did and he demanded the right to not play some of them at all.
Kaplan and Savalas refused to go along with this as a rule change…and Conrad basically said, "I don't care what the rules say" and he threatened to walk if anyone made an issue of it. Lynda Day George was on his team and he was refusing to assign her a single event despite the producers telling him he had to. I overheard one of them saying to him, "Hey, at least put her in the dunk tank. That doesn't take any skill and she'd look great wet." I think he finally agreed to let her throw a few balls in that event in exchange for some other rule change he wanted. To a great extent, I think he was just being loud and argumentative because it did usually result in getting what he wanted. He is not a stupid man.
That dunk tank was emblematic of the whole project. A star from one team sat on a perch in the tank. Stars from another team would hurl softballs at a target and if they hit it dead-on with enough force, the star on the perch was dropped into the water. It was not difficult to hit the target but not all hits resulted in dunking. Part of the appeal of the whole enterprise, everyone knew, was seeing female stars in clingy nylon athletic wear get wet…and also certain males who seemed smug and in need of dousing.
Insofar as determining points towards who would win the overall game, the event was honest…but the producers did have a secret switch they could use to dunk anyone. Insofar as I could tell, they did not use it to alter the outcome of the event but did use it to make sure that, for the sake of what you call "good TV," certain people did drop if someone hit the target.
So the contests were relatively honest but I'm not sure that the presentation was. My memory is that in the one for which I was present, ABC had it won well before all the events were over but when it aired, it seemed closer. Several events I know were not telecast and it seemed to me that a couple were rearranged. The teams finished in the true order but if you watched it at home, I think you saw ABC win it on the last event instead of an hour or three earlier.
The Kaplan/Conrad race at the previous Battle was…well, first, let's show everyone what that was all about…
As I understand it, Conrad's upset was real, though he and the producers exaggerated it a bit for the show, and some arguments that first occurred off-camera may have been restaged for the cameras. I think Gabe said that the idea for the one-on-one relay race came from him because he was a pretty good runner and he knew he could beat Conrad…and also that Conrad couldn't refuse it without looking chicken. So yes, there was some reality there. And there's no question Conrad lost fair-and-square.
That was a fun weekend. If I get some time in the next day or three, I'll post some other things I recall about it, including an interesting encounter with Howard Cosell and a moment when I kinda/sorta tried to "pick up" one of the ladies on one of the teams and got one of the nicest, most civilized "get lost" responses a man has ever received. Maybe I'll even tell you how I wound up in the National Enquirer or one of those tabloids.