The Fifties

by David Halberstam

Soon there were advertising slogans reflecting the thrust of the business: “Give Mom a Night Out,” and then “Give Mom a Night Off.” These were, as Fred Turner, Kroc’s heir to the company later noted, the forerunner of the famous McDonald’s slogan “You Deserve a Break Today.” Kroc understood that the McDonalds were taking advantage of a phenomenon—the instant suburbs, where millions of Americans were now living.

They were not, most assuredly, family people, and he saw McDonald’s as predominantly a family restaurant. The people who would eat at a downtown McDonald’s might well be bums or, worse, and they might damage the image of his restaurant.

The fat content was between 17 and 20 percent. It was served with a quarter-ounce of onion, a teaspoon of mustard, a tablespoon of ketchup, and a pickle one inch in diameter. There was, in Kroc’s mind, something beautiful about a hamburger as opposed to, say, hot dogs.

The hamburger, he liked to say, could be assembled on his terms, but people were determined to have hot dogs their own way. That demanded a condiment station, which the McDonald brothers had eliminated—rightly, in his view—as the messiest place in the whole restaurant. Above all, he wanted consistency so that a hamburger in California would be an advertisement for one in Chicago or New York. If the McDonald brothers had built the perfect hamburger stand, Ray Kroc envisioned the perfect nationwide chain. The trick was to impose his will upon independent owners, which took an odd combination of pure democratic instinct and totalitarian will. Kroc brooked little in the way of dissent, and he expected everyone to work as hard as he did.

There was a certain contradiction here: Kroc wanted highly individual small-time owners to risk all their savings in classic American entrepreneurial style, but he wanted those same people to obey all the rules emanating from Chicago headquarters.

Clearly, the latter came to be the most important qualification. His philosophy had an almost Orwellian quality to it. In 1958 he told the McDonald brothers: “We have found out, as you have, that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them in a hurry. Even personal friends who we know have the best of intentions may not conform. They have a difference of opinion as to various processing and certain qualities of product.... You cannot give them an inch. The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization [or] he shouldn’t go into this kind of business.”

checking things out, then going into downtown Chicago, working all day at his headquarters, trying to expand the network, and then stopping back at night to close and clean up. “Every night you’d see him coming down the street, walking close to the gutter, picking up every McDonald’s wrapper and cup along the way,” said Fred Turner, who started as one of Kroc’s first grill men and later became chairman of the company. “He’d come into the store with both hands full of cups and wrappers.

Years later an advertising man named Barry Klein came by the headquarters to work out some proposals. Klein, in the style of his profession and the times, wore his hair long. Everyone waited for Kroc to explode, but he merely swallowed his anger and muttered to a colleague, “That SOB better be good.” Executives in the main office were to leave their desks clean at the end of the day. Every day, the windows at all McDonald’s had to be cleaned, the parking lot had to be hosed down, and the garbage cans scrubbed. Mopping of the floors inside was a continuous process.

He called a man named Waddy Pratt, the regional dealer for Coke, and said, “My name’s Ray Kroc and I’m opening a restaurant and I want to sell Coke because it’s the best goddamn product there is.”

The only ethic he knew was hard work, and he saved every bit of money he made, no matter how small. According to Kroc, family responsibilities were an important part of the Bohemian ethic: Children (not the government) were to take care of their parents and grandparents as they grew older. To the day he died, Ray Kroc harbored a bitter grudge against Franklin D. Roosevelt because of Social Security.

There were frequent letters to the wives of McDonald’s employees imploring them to be thrifty: cigarettes should be bought by the carton; socks, toilet paper, and toothpaste should be bought in quantity and on sale. “When beef, steaks, and chops are extremely high,” he added in one letter, “it certainly seems logical to use more fish, fowl, casserole dishes, and things of that sort that really have more flavor and save a lot of money.

He was a fanatic about quality control, and he became furious if he thought an owner was buying substandard ingredients. The Department of Agriculture permitted up to 33 percent fat in hamburger meat, but Kroc kept it much lower, and he kept beef additives out.

Everyone in this country, he thought, had a car and a family, and sooner or later everyone had to go somewhere. Dorothy Wilson listened to him with growing trepidation—when Kemmons Wilson said he was going to do something, he did it. “How many of these motels are you going to build?” she asked nervously. He felt she was laughing at him. “Oh, about four hundred,” he answered. “That ought to cover the country.” “And,” he added, “if I never do anything else worth remembering in my life, children are going to stay free at my motels.”

He was absolutely sure it would be a success. “I like to think that I’m so damn normal that anything I like, everybody else is going to like too. The idea that my instincts are out of line just doesn’t occur to me,” he once said. That was the beginning of the modern American motel chain, a phenomenon made inevitable by America’s growing love and dependence on the road.

At the time of his trip to Washington, he was already a millionaire from his home-building business, but he lived so unpretentiously that no one but his banker knew for sure. “The things that Kemmons does now that he has money,” one friend noted later in his life, when he was worth some $200 million from the motel business, “are the exact same things he would be doing if he didn’t have money.”

Wilson measured the rooms of the different motels his family stayed in, and by the time he got back to Memphis, he knew exactly how big a motel room should be: 12 feet by 30 feet, plus a bathroom.

few days later Bluestein delivered the sketches, and at the top of the drawing he had written HOLIDAY INN. Wilson asked him where he had gotten the name. “I saw Bing Crosby’s Holiday Inn on television last night,” Bluestein answered. “It’s a great name,” Wilson said. “We’ll use it.” If

As a boy, Kemmons held many jobs: He sold the Saturday Evening Post; he sold popcorn at movie theaters; and he became the pinball king of Memphis. He was surprisingly successful in all these pursuits, and before he was twenty he made good on a long-standing vow: He built a house for his mother.

In the years after the war, Wilson became very successful, building perhaps two hundred houses a year in the $7,500 to $12,000 range. He owned a lumberyard on the main drag from Memphis to Nashville, a prize location.

Wilson was lucky that his colleagues did not take him up on it. Why so few had signed on always puzzled Wilson; his idea was so simple, he was sure. Gradually, it dawned on Wilson that they did not see the world around them changing—the numbers of highways growing and automobile travel increasing.

They were not men who wanted to explore life,” he said later. So he came up with a new idea: He would become the head of Holiday Inns, franchise them to others. (In his mind—there is no proof of this—he became the first man to franchise ownerships of this kind in the country.)

America was finding its way to Kemmons Wilson’s doorsteps. Not only would there be more and better highways, but with the coming of the cloverleaf and the bypass, travelers could avoid going through cities altogether if they wished. This was another benchmark in the decline of inner-city hotels.

At one point a young man got up and asked Marion Isbell of Ramada, “Mr. Isbell, what criteria do you use for picking a location?” “It’s really simple,” Isbell answered. “All I do is go into a city and find out where Kemmons Wilson has a good Holiday Inn and I put a Ramada Inn right next door—it’s a good system and it really works.”

AS THE BOOMING POSTWAR economy changed the face of American business, a technological breakthrough transformed the communications industry, sending powerful shock waves through all levels of the society. By 1949, radio was on the verge of being overtaken by television as a commercial vehicle.

The moment Fred Allen learned of television, he hated it. He called it “a device that permits people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who can’t do anything.”

Of one network executive who always seemed to be looking down, he asked, “Why don’t you look up?” he asked. “Is it because you’re ashamed, or did you play quarterback for Yale?”

Much of his humor was topical. Of a movie star who went to church in dark glasses, Allen said, “He’s afraid God might recognize him and ask for his autograph.” It was an age when it was still permissible to poke fun at ethnic foibles.

Perhaps his most celebrated stunt was his bogus feud with Jack Benny, then the country’s top-rated radio comedian. It started casually enough. Allen had made a humorous remark about Benny. Benny, sensing the possibility of fresh material, picked up on it. Soon it escalated. They would appear on each other’s shows to trade insults. “You wouldn’t dare talk to me like that if my writers were here,” Benny once said.

A group of schoolchildren gathered outside Allen’s childhood home yelling for him to beat Benny for the good of Dorchester, Massachusetts. Eventually, the two met on Benny’s show for the big event. There was, of course, no fight, but only one program in history had been higher rated, a Roosevelt Fireside Chat.

Allen fell from his 1948 28.7 high to 11.2 in the same period. He tried to fight back. He arranged with an insurance company to award five thousand dollars to any potential listener of Stop the Music! who missed out on the phone call and the fabled prizes because he was listening to Allen. He did a skit called “Cease the Melody,” in which he handed out many prizes, and because most television sets were still in bars, the first prize was a television set, complete with a saloon and bartender to accompany

Instead, Allen became one of several hosts for a new variety show to air against Ed Sullivan (“Sullivan,” Allen had said sardonically but prophetically, “will stay on television as long as other people have talent”).

Whereas Allen’s humor was cerebral, satirizing the world around him, Berle’s work was about himself. He needed the audience to see him—what you saw was what you got.

The first political star of television was a freshman senator from Tennessee, intelligent, shrewd, but also awkward and bumbling. No one would have accused Estes Kefauver of being, in the phrase that came to haunt many a television figure in the coming years, just another pretty face.

Part of his success with ordinary people, thought his senatorial colleague Albert Gore, came from the fact that he was so awkward and uncomfortable as a speaker that listeners felt a responsibility to help poor old Estes out.

From the start, it was clear that he was different from other Southern senators in that racial prejudice offended him and he would not accept the traditional conservative position on civil rights. It was true that he came from a border state where racial attitudes were not as harsh, and it was true also that he saw civil rights as a matter of conscience. In large part, though, his more liberal stance came from his own soaring ambition and desire to hold national office. As early as 1942, as a junior congressman, he broke with the Southern Democrats in Congress by voting against the poll tax. That had provoked the bile of the virulent racist from Mississippi, John Rankin, who stood on the House floor, pointed his finger at Kefauver, and said, “Shame on you, Estes Kefauver.”

Kefauver seized on the remark. The coon, he noted, was a uniquely American animal: “You wouldn’t find a coon in Russia.” In addition, he added, a coon was tough and could lick a dog four times its size.

alone in the previous twelve months the number of homes with television sets had gone from about 29 percent to 51 percent. That meant that for the first time in any metropolitan area in any city in the world, there were more homes with television sets than those without. All over the city, and then in other cities, as his hearings continued, housewives called their friends up to tell them of this exciting new show.

On March 13, Frank Costello, alias Francisco Castaglia, reputedly the leader of organized crime in New York, testified. Costello had little in the way of an actual criminal record, but step by step he had moved from apprentice to bootlegger to slot-machine operator to gambling-house owner. He had been Lucky Luciano’s top lieutenant, and when Luciano had been deported, Costello had taken over as America’s top racketeering figure. By 1950 his influence at Tammany Hall was pervasive. As he became more successful, he diversified his business interests, moving into more legitimate fields.

The newspapers wrote stories about husbands coming back to find the housework unfinished, their wives glued to the television set and wanting to talk only about the inner workings of the mob. In New York, Con Ed had to add an extra generator to supply the power for all the television sets. The editors of Life magazine understood immediately that American politics had changed.

By chance, at almost the same time Time magazine polled the television industry for its annual awards and the Kefauver hearings won two; he also won an Emmy from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for special achievement in “bringing the workings of our government into the homes of the American people.” He could not attend the awards banquet but accepted the Emmy by phone from New Hampshire, where he was busy campaigning.

Politics, for the first time, was being brought to the nation by means of television. People now expected to see events, not merely read about or hear them. At the same time, the line between what happened in real life and what people saw on television began to merge; many Americans were now living far from their families, in brand-new suburbs where they barely knew their neighbors.

In 1954 Gardner Murphy, research director of the famed Menninger Foundation in Kansas, arranged a demonstration for some advertising firms in Chicago. He rented a suite at the Drake Hotel in Chicago, set up eight television sets in it, and then directed a team of social scientists to study advertisers and the programs they sponsored.

Nothing showed the power of this new medium to soften the edge between real life and fantasy better than the coming of Lucille Ball. In 1951 she was forty years old, in the middle of a less than dazzling show-business career.

Lucy and Desi Arnaz were an unlikely couple, not merely on television but in real life as well. If Lucy was to be a dizzy housewife, she deserved at the very least, in the minds of the CBS executives, a straight-arrow husband to put up patiently with her foibles, but no, she insisted that Arnaz be cast as her husband. The people at CBS, from Bill Paley on down, were appalled. So were the advertising people, who had a big say in the casting. Desi Arnaz was not exactly a household name; his English was poor. No one, a CBS executive told her, would believe a show in which she was married to a Cuban bandleader. “What do you mean nobody’ll believe it?” she answered. “We are married.” She remained adamant, and finally a reluctant Paley gave in. After the pilot was shot and shown to a high-level group of entertainment people in New York, they voted resoundingly against Arnaz. “Keep the redhead but ditch the Cuban,”

said the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein. He was told it was a package deal. “Well, for God’s sake, don’t let him sing. No one will understand him,” Hammerstein said. But Lucy understood something that the producers initially did not: Viewers certainly knew that Desi was her real husband, and that made the show itself all the more believable.

The first episode was called “The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub.” An announcer named John Stevenson introduced the show by speaking from the Ricardos’ living room. “Good evening and welcome. In a moment we’ll look in on Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. But before we do, may I ask you a very personal question? The question is simply this—do you inhale? Well, I do. And chances are you do too. And because you inhale you’re better off—much better off—smoking Philip Morris and for good reason. You see, Philip Morris is the one cigarette proved definitely less irritating, definitely milder than any other leading brand. That’s why when you inhale you’re better off smoking Philip Morris.... And now Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in I Love Lucy.”

although The New York Times critic was dubious—he thought it was all a bit lowbrow. That alone was enough to make the head of Philip Morris nervous, and the next day he called the people at his advertising agency to get out of the sponsorship. But he was advised to give the show a little time: He did, and it was not long before it was in the Nielsen top ten.

Lucy cut across all age groups. Children loved her, could readily understand her routines, and seemed to like the idea of an adult who seemed so childlike. In later years her shows would probably have been deemed sexist, and actually they were. In one way or another they were all a takeoff on women-driver jokes. Lucy could not really do anything right; she had a God-given instinct to get into trouble.

To everybody’s surprise, Desi was just as good, the straight man who was anything but straight. He knew exactly when to be appalled, and irritated or amazed, by her, by the fact that she had done it again. Traditionally, straight men did not get laughs, they were there to be the foil, but with Desi there was always some word or phrase he could mispronounce. That seemed also to soften the humor of the show; it was not just Lucy who was screwy, it was the two of them—and their neighbors, too. At the end, though, there was Desi embracing her, understanding her. All was forgiven, and everything came out all right.

But Desi went to Alfred Lyons, the head of Philip Morris, and suggested that if he and Lucy could not control the content, the show, then number-one, might slip. Lyons was so impressed he sent a note to Jim Aubrey, the president of CBS: “Dear Jim,” it began. “Don’t fuck around with the Cuban.” But they were not to use the word pregnancy. CBS held the line on that. Lucy instead was an expectant mother. That was more genteel. The first show on Lucy’s pregnancy aired on December 8, 1952. It was a typical episode: Lucy wanted to tell Desi in the most romantic way possible, but he did not seem to have time to listen. “I want to tell you something,” she says. “Uh-oh, how much are you overdrawn?” he replies. There are endless interruptions. In the end she shows up at his club, passes him a note that a member of the audience is about to have a baby, and asks him to serenade her. As the crowded nightclub audience watches, he realizes that he is the father, and his wife the expectant mother. CBS lined up a priest, a minister, and a rabbi to review all pregnancy scripts to be sure that they were in good taste. “It looked like a revival meeting around the place,” Lucy once said.