Susan Schafbuch was in seventh heaven seated next to Hollywood hunk Tom Selleck at the gala dinner that climaxed last year`s annual meeting in Los Angeles of CBS` more than 200 affiliated stations.
Selleck was among about 75 celebrities at a dinner that boasted live music by the Temptations and ended a three-day, party-filled gathering whose total expense, as usual, was about $2 million.
Well, Schafbuch was back home in Portland, Ore., last week as husband Mick, head of Portland`s KOIN-TV, came here to a dramatically altered annual conclave that was pruned by about $1.5 million.
Spouses weren`t invited, and Mick Schafbuch brought his sales manager for a generally no-nonsense, even dour, conclave that focused mostly on the business of a besieged industry-from marketing new shows to convincing Congress of regulatory changes helpful to the networks.
Celebrities? You could have used the FBI to find more than a handful. Actress Connie Sellecca was among the few at this year`s dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, joking that her rather revealing attire was a sign of the times.
”It`s another CBS cutback: the lining in my skirt,” she deadpanned shortly before entertainment was provided by a little-known Manhattan cabaret group, Forever Plaid.
So you listened to the earnest but uninspired oldies sung by Forever Plaid and watched male executives ogle Sellecca like sex-starved prison inmates.
But you easily could have seen this stripped-down, two-day, few-frills meeting as resembling, at least superficially, a somber stag party for battered males-battered by their declining advertising revenue and viewership amid fierce competition.
Sipping a drink at a run-of-the-mill cocktail party, Johnathan Rodgers, who oversees the five stations owned by CBS, said, ”This is the future.”
”The financial realities have hit all of us,” said the Chicagoan. ”We have to put money into program development and talent acquisition, not fancy dinners and free cocktails.”
”Welcome to the no-frills, American-plan, package tour convention,”
said Howard Stringer, president of the CBS/Broadcast Group.
Stringer knows as well as anyone that the affiliates and the networks need each other. Affiliates carry a network`s programs, receiving large payments from the network that might amount to 30 percent of total revenue for a station. The two sides usually operate under two-year deals.
A station`s financial value is enhanced by a network affiliation, but nothing precludes its switching networks or going independent. Networks seek to keep affiliates happy, but also disciplined, because a network is hurt when a station either doesn`t run (”clear” in network lingo), or delays airing, certain shows, perhaps opting for more lucrative syndicated shows.
`Tiffany` dims
The CBS meeting served as fitting reflection of a new Age of Austerity-perhaps even a Year of Living Dangerously Cheap-in a famous American industry. Belatedly, the free-spending networks are aping other industries in downsizing and ditching traditions that might seem excessive.
Few corporate gatherings have been as traditionally lavish as the separate annual affiliate meetings of CBS, NBC and ABC.
And CBS, the ”Tiffany Network” founded by William S. Paley, led the way during decades when running a network was a virtual license to print money, and an advertising sales department merely had to pick up the phone and take the orders from clients.
CBS boasted fancy lunches and dinners for 700 or 800 people; expensive gifts, often from Tiffany & Co., for executives and spouses; fresh flowers, perhaps $30,000 or $40,000 worth, placed everywhere; trips to stars` homes and Disneyland; a live circus in the hotel parking lot that once featured three elephants; and entertainment from Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow, among others.
Reporters shared the wealth. Dawson ”Tack” Nail, a veteran reporter-editor for the trade publication TV Digest, has gone to these meetings since 1964 and recalls being routinely picked up by limo at his suburban Virginia home and flown, first class, to the meeting, sometimes held in Hawaii.
The limo, air fare and hotel charges were all picked up by the network.
When CBS wanted to celebrate a new $1 billion contract to broadcast major-league baseball last year, it held a softball game. It didn`t just go to a public park but exhibited a certain panache, procuring an empty Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles for the amateur contest.
Tony Malara, who has one of CBS` tougher tasks as affiliate relations chief, was at the game and had a ball. He was also convinced that the ways of the past, the almost indiscriminate use of limos and fancy hotel suites, had to end.
”To do what we always did when we`re laying off hundreds and changing lives would be totally inappropriate,” said Malara, who must mix the sternness of a reform school teacher with the social skills of someone with a Ph.D. in Cocktails and Long Lunches.
But he also knows that CBS is largely in the entertainment business and
”it`s just not another business.” The sort of glitz that can seem wayward to accountants can serve ”as a reminder that we`re in show business.”
Salute to cable
That made for some close calls this time. Although Malara believed that many stars at the traditional closing dinner would have been important in
”giving people a sense that people on the screen were real,” it just wouldn`t be right this time-at least not until fortunes turned for a network that lost $156 million in last year`s fourth quarter alone and recently eliminated 400 positions.
It was thus both understandable and ironic that to the extent that CBS highlighted any ”stars,” they came from its institutional soul, the once-hallowed news division best associated with Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.
Key on-air personnel ranged from the best-known and perpetually most-criticized Dan Rather to the lower-profile troupers, like reporters Phil Jones and Rita Braver.
But skeptics could wonder.
The spotlight was turned on its journalists at a time when the news division operates under tight fiscal restraints and its long-term prospects aren`t clearly rosy. Rather`s evening news broadcast trails those of ABC and NBC in ratings, and the half-hour newscast increasingly seems a dinosaur in a world of CNN and two- or three-hour local newscasts each afternoon.
An unwitting example of a basic tension: A day before the division was lauded here for much of its Persian Gulf coverage, Mick Schafbuch made an address, as head of the affiliates` own board, in which he noted that the war ”catapulted CNN into the front ranks” and ”showed the lure of single-minded niche cable.”
The news division does do much fine work, but can viewers, especially a younger generation, differentiate between CBS` recitation and analysis of daily events and, say, CNN`s quick-and-dirty ”Headline News” version? No doubt, CNN gets much greater bang for its buck.
The TV leap
Among those taking in the whole affair with a definite sense of revolutionary change was Stuart Martin, founder of WCAX in Burlington, Vt. He felt oddly at home in the Waldorf-Astoria, since he attended the first affiliates meeting, here, in 1952.
Back then, the attendees were, like Martin, mostly radio station owners who had to be convinced that even starting a TV station was a good idea.
Martin, 78, did start his TV outlet two years later and has come to every affiliates meeting since. He especially recalls bashes thrown by Paley, including lunches at Burbank Studios turned into mock Wild West towns just for the few hours.
He still has some of the fancy gifts, such as leather luggage with his initials, Tiffany crystal bowls and gold cuff links.
Was that money well spent?
”If you had it, yes,” said Martin.
The New Englander always saw the gatherings as the network`s
”insurance” in case ratings dropped and a rival network knocked on an affiliate`s door. That happened to him, but he always remained firmly in the CBS camp.
The camp`s head counselor is now CBS Chairman Laurence Tisch, the phenomenally successful investor who is seen by some as a bloodless budget-cutter. Clearly, Tisch`s personality and corporate manner are more at ease with the type of gathering, replete with 6:45 a.m. breakfasts and three-hour sales manager sessions without a break, that played out here.
Yet he said that he and top aides would review the meeting`s success in a week or so and mull what to do next year. (Curiously, similarly embattled NBC will head to Hawaii for its 1992 affair after a skimpy 1991 version.)
Stringer wrapped up Friday by quoting Albert Einstein to the effect that one should try to be not merely a man of success but one of value.
”Is the Tiffany Network back?” he asked.
”Nostalgia is a seductive liar. But we can be the new CBS.”
