Morning

As restless, middle-aged biographer Alec Brown sets out to write the definitive portrait of early television pioneer Alec McGowan, whose remarkable rise to success had been cut short by his puzzling on-air murder, Brown is forced to come to terms with his relationshipto his own estranged father, Chet Standish, who has spent nearly fifty years in prison for McGowan's murder. 50,000 first printing.

One

Morning wasn't morning until McGowan came to town. This would have been the
early autumn of 1950, that difficult corner year between then and now. He'd
done well with his evening show in Chicago, but he was convinced that
nighttime would be the slums of TV, and in any case his affairs had caught
up with him and it was time to move on. New York, summoning him like that,
seemed the providential next step. Yes, he had done well in television. No,
he had not forgotten the great romance of his life. Yes, he still had lots
left to prove. On that late September day when he got off the train in
Grand Central, tipped the porter to carry the one bag that was all he had,
walked up the ramp to daylight, stood there staring at the slick bronze of
the skyscrapers, as awestruck as any rube, he teetered on that most
appealing and vulnerable of points: a young man on the verge of making it
in the big splashy American way.

For what was morning before he confronted it, seized it, spun it all
around? An intermission between night and day, the neutral ground
separating nightmares from daydreams, reality's launching pad, hope's
fragile hour-the one moment in the day when if you felt courageous and
energetic and hopeful the sun backed you up. It was a time when people went
first thing to appraise the weather, suck in fresh air, stoop down to touch
the dew, rise again and stretch. It was a time when chores were still
performed before breakfast, cows milked, sidewalks shoveled, faces scrubbed
behind the ears. Wives pulled on robes and went outside to cut flowers for
the breakfast table, waved to neighbors doing the same, then went in to
break eggs into cast-iron skillets with thick cuts of ham. Kids played
outdoors, got shouted at to get ready for school, propped their bikes up
with kickstands, ready to zoom off the moment they finished. Cats scratched
at screendoors to get in or out. Dogs fetched newspapers. Roosters still
crowed. The city, the town, the village came once again to light.
Morning was the cards you'd been dealt by fate. You woke up and felt
lonely, circled your hand around on the sheets trying to summon up a genie
who would rescue you, then forced yourself to plunge back into another day
alone. You woke up beside someone you hated, bitterness a sandpaper collar
around your neck, cutting off your breath. You woke up beside someone you
loved, and reached for that familiar warmth and pulled it closer, no hurry
now, content to linger in the sweet, lazy hollow of awakening. And yet even
here you felt a little hunger, if you were lucky. Just enough vacancy in
the heart for the day to fill.

There was radio, but it was only music, or farm reports, or weather,
nothing that stopped you, made you sit down. Seven now and you were
showering. Seven-thirty and the first swallow of juice. Eight and the
morning paper. Eight-thirty and outside to the car or the station or the
tractor, joining the mainstream, everyone in lockstep, eyes squarely
forward on the day. But until you left home all you wanted from the rest of
the world was to know it was still there, and you could get that in those
little sounds and rumors that leaked in from outside. Birdsong in elms.
School buses changing gears. The clink of milk bottles on the stoop. Sun
edging through curtains. The soft summoning whistle of trains. Everyone did
morning differently, and yet everywhere it was the same. You woke up to who
you were in your narrow, most essential denomination, who you were when you
were alone, the larger world for ninety minutes be damned.

All this was in morning until McGowan regarded it, sensed everything was
not well there, turned it to his purpose. A morning so rich and textured
and unbroken, and yet all it took was for the right man to come along at
the critical moment, stare fixedly out into its depths, clear his throat to
its deepest baritone, peer down those horn-rimmed glasses, talk, and it all
shattered apart.

Hence this biography etc.
Explain here in intro how he's remembered, but barely now. Aging boomers
mostly, the ones who as kids pressed close to the screen as they waited for
breakfast, hoping the picture would stop rolling, squinting at the
fuzziness to try and make it go sharp. They remember the chimpanzee, of
course. They remember the clumsy sidekick, Chet Standish, and all the
beautiful Morning girls, including Lee Palmer, prettiest of all. They
remember the window on 49th Street, the people outside mugging, waving,
holding up little signs with the names of their hometowns. They remember
how McGowan met his end. A good many claim they saw it happen, were
actually watching that last morning, and there are those who still remember
how it seemed to change everything from make-believe to all too real. The
early shows weren't taped, so little did anyone regard them, and the later
ones, on Electronicam or Kinescope, were either destroyed when more modern
taping methods became available or dissolved into acid while in storage.
What survives is barely a thousand feet of film from four years of
programming. As the film disappeared, as even smoother, more relaxed hosts
succeeded him on the program, the memory of McGowan disappeared, too, and
so only someone in their late fifties is old enough to actually remember
what he looked like on the tube.

Alec McGowan? Sure, the one who started the Morning show, the man with
glasses. Talent? Nothing obvious. Looks? Interesting, our mothers used to
say, with a certain look in their eyes. There was all kinds of stuff. The
chimp in diapers. That Chet guy stumbling into things, getting his words
wrong. The clocks showing what time it was all over the world. The smart
lady with the warm smile and the short hair, the one who was so obviously
nuts about him. His slogan, the sign-off everyone imitated. A lot of
educational stuff, too, though it's hard to say just what. Our dads put it
on when they got up in the morning and our moms turned it off when it was
time to go to school. Only when we left they turned it back on again,
because we caught her once and she blushed all red.

The fifty-year-olds grope, they squeeze their hands into fists and reach,
as if to pull from the ether what it was they found so compelling, and yet
only the shrewder ones come close to pinning down the secret of his
extraordinary success. A lot of people have spent their lives staring at a
television screen, but Alec McGowan was the only one who devoted his life,
right down to its brutal last seconds, to staring intently back out.

Support this with quotes. Intro blending into first chapter. Starting with
Jay etcetera and so forth. Thumbnail bios or blend right in?

Barbara Jay (1922-). Came to KDKA in Pittsburgh after stint with radio ad
agency in Evanston, then moved to New York with network. Head writer,
Morning , 1950-53. Later formed independent production company. Emmy for
writing/producing documentary "Behind the Mask" exposing obstetricians
without licenses, 1963. Adjunct professor Columbia Graduate School of
Journalism 1965-92. Interview of 5/9/99.

Living out on Long Island like so many from early days. Southampton, house
built by bootlegger on bluff above pitch pine. Bright morning, wind
bringing in sunshine with surf, tossing both across rocks. Tall woman as in
pictures, only in pictures seems somehow older thanks to flouncy
skirt/thick lipstick/high heels; 1950 in drag (save that line). Now
jeans/leather vest/short hair, coming to door with boxer puppy in arms,
scolding it and kissing at same time.

Seventy-seven, she says right off. Horny as ever and backs this up with
grin. Strong forehead and chin are what's left from picture, except
everything in between has gone leathery. Voice burred by too many
cigarettes-a voice that snaps/crackles/bangs like an old manual typewriter.
What you have to remember, she says, is that smooth didn't work in those
days. The resolution was terrible, the matrix. Put on one of these pretty
boys you have nowadays and it would have been like watching scrambled eggs.
Crude didn't work either. There was this big thing about how we were being
allowed into people's homes and you had to look a certain way to pass
muster. The educational function, too-we took that very seriously. If you
go back you'll notice the first ones who made it big looked like professors
with bow ties and hankies.

That's who Abramsky was searching for. A host who could be seen through the
blur, someone handsome in an unusual way and more or less intellectual.
Namely, McGowan, who had made a big splash in Chicago. He had a forehead
that would have done justice to Einstein, but below that his shoulders were
wide as DiMaggio's, and no one, no one, ever looked better in a
double-breasted suit. He had a sleepy expression-only a little more awake
than you were yourself, and that went down easy.

His glasses were the big thing, of course. His trademark. He had horn-rims,
which must have been among the first pairs-everyone wore rimless before
that-and it made him interesting right off the bat. He didn't need them. He
needed them, but only tinted because the klieg lights were so strong. They
were big with the audience right from the start. He put them on, it was
like he was putting on the entire McGowan. In the Chicago days sometimes he
took them off on camera, like he was thinking and the only way he could do
that was suck on the earpieces. He was thinking, I can vouch for that, only
in those days it was about whether to screw the script girl or the
assistant grip. But it was the sexiest thing you ever saw, like he was
taking his clothes off right there on camera. Those were the days when most TV sets were still
in bars, and they claimed the moment he took them off youcould stand outside any...