I neglected to write anything last week when longtime newsman-commentator George Putnam passed away at the age of 94. Mr. Putnam was a fixture of Los Angeles television for most of my youth and there were periods when the ratings suggested he held the attention of the city. He probably deserves to be remembered for more than his blustery, arrogant on-camera style which served as co-inspiration for Ted Baxter, the pompous newsman played by Ted Knight on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Baxter was an amalgam of Putnam and the other L.A. newsman who seemed to think his delivery was more important than any story he reported, Jerry Dunphy.
I never met Putnam for any longer than a brief handshake and some minor pleasantries but I was around him on two occasions. It's probably not fair to judge an entire man on two encounters so maybe these were not typical…but I have this theory about newspeople and pundits, which is that it's all an act. They may or may not believe what they say but if saying it seems to yield success in fame or finance, they keep on saying it louder and louder so the act becomes the message instead of the other way around. It simply becomes too lucrative not to believe one's own bull. Once you become a darling of the left or the right, your base expects you to deliver and you can't afford to let them down for even a second. It's bad for business.
I was around Putnam once in the newsroom of KTLA, the L.A. TV station that employed him for a very long time. I wanted to see the building because Warner Brothers cartoons had once been made in it and I had this notion that I'd glean some understanding or connect with Bugs and Daffy by touring their former home. It turned out there was nothing of the sort to see, nothing of the sort to learn. But I did see George Putnam scurrying around, urging his copywriters to redo the script for that evening's broadcast to give him more theatrics to "sell." (I think he even used that word.) It was a lot like Ted Baxter telling Murray that all those unpronounceable names of foreign leaders were playing havoc with his performance.
And then I spent an evening on the stage where Putnam and the KTLA news team did their 10 PM broadcast live. At the time, it was an odd format — a half-hour or so of news, then the rest of the hour was a segment called Talk Back with a live audience invited in to debate the headlines with the team. It mostly consisted of Putnam not letting anyone talk back. Those who approached the audience mike were usually rather foolish-looking (and sounding) hippie-types — this is 1971 or thereabouts — trying to offer lame talking points about Vietnam or Richard Nixon. Putnam never let them finish, interrupting to ridicule their appearance and — always — suggest their political views could only be the result of too much smoking of "funny cigarettes." At home, it looked like cheap theatrics and in the studio, seeing Putnam drop the act during commercial breaks, it looked even cheaper.
I was on that stage because it was being shared by a gent named Larry Vincent, who under the name "Seymour" was our local horror movie host. Mr. Vincent's show, for which I was writing gags, was using the same tech crew, before and after the newsguys needed it for their program. It was amusing to me that the cameras were capturing Putnam in the news set describing what was going on in Washington and then they were going to swing around, face the other way and videotape Seymour in the horror movie set introducing The Brain From The Planet Arous starring John Agar. There wasn't all that much difference.
Anyway, that was when and where I formulated my view…that we give media personalities who deal in news and opinion too much credit for being thoughtful and candid, and that most of them are just saying (and often believing) what advances a career. I have seen little since then from Liberals or Conservatives to dissuade me from that belief…and it started with George Putnam.
Putnam was truly becoming a figure of self-parody by '73 when KTLA dropped him. He flirted with other local stations and briefly co-hosted an amazing show with Mort Sahl on KTTV called Both Sides Now. It was kind of like the Crossfire of its time — an ostensible Liberal and a righteous Conservative debating through each day's guest(s) — but it didn't work. Sahl didn't think or talk in sharp, simple bullet points. He rambled around topics, discussing nuance more than supposed hard truths and he wasn't predictably Liberal, sometimes arguing Putnam's side of an issue better than Putnam did. It was like two men attempting to have a dialogue but lacking a common language.
After a few weeks of that, Putnam was gone — quit or fired, depending on who you believed. Sahl ran the show alone for a while and though a single host seemed to belie the basic premise, he actually did a better job of presenting Both Sides Now than when George had been aboard. But ratings plunged without Putnam and then Sahl decided to turn the program into an ongoing infomercial for Jim Garrison's revelations about the Kennedy Assassination. That was when every single human being in Southern California stopped watching.
By then, George Putnam was beginning a very successful post-TV career on radio, doing a show again called Talk Back where, at least whenever I tuned it in, he was still not letting anyone talk back. That was probably a great place for him. I don't think his routine would have played well on television any longer, especially after Ted Baxter made that kind of newsman seem like a joke. On radio, I think all those guys are jokes but it seems to work there…or at least it draws an audience. It is to Putnam's credit that he had one up until the end. How many people who make it to 94 can you say that about?