From a cluttered corner at CBS headquarters in New York, Andy Rooney sips day-old coffee from a plastic Harris Tweed mug and grumbles about his “over­night” success. It took 64 years to get here, and like money, it’s “a pain in the tail,” he insists. It cramps his style when he meanders through hardware stores, is a source of embarrassment down at the lunch counter and sometimes causes him to miss the bus to work.

“A writer should be sitting over in the corner watching the dance and not be out there dancing,” he muses. “I’m not too keen about my recent well-knownness; I don’t han­dle it very well. If somebody comes up to me on the street and says, ‘Hey, I like your stuff,’ well, I can’t hate that. But it never stops there. Pretty soon he wants to be my best friend. I tend to be rude to people like that.”

He comes by his crustiness natu­rally. He’s one of the last of the trench-coat journalists who covered the Big War—World War II—for the print media. He was Sergeant Rooney then, a veteran of several bombing missions and the Stars and Stripes reporter who landed on Nor­mandy Beach four days after D-Day to document the invasion of France. Hardly a suave TV personality in the Dan Rather-Peter Jennings tra­dition, he looks more like a preppy leprechaun with John L. Lewis eye­brows and a fondness for growling at strangers. His bite has earned him a reputation as CBS News’ resident curmudgeon, but his bark is more fun than fact. During a recent 60-minute interview with the SatEve Post, he was downright hospitable as he shared insights, the day-old coffee and all the comforts of his in­famously cluttered nest.

“Sit down, sit down,” he urged, beckoning to a black vinyl chair that had a suspiciously gimpy leg. I sat, and the leg gave way and sent me flailing toward a floor strewn with size 8′/2 EEE shoes, maps destined someday for a wall and a family portrait of somebody else’s family.

“I’ve got to fix this chair,” he muttered resolutely from a squat position as he examined the now splintered leg.

He means it. An avowed do-it-himselfer, he prefers to fend for himself and refutes the notion that celebrity status translates into clout. Forget the limousines, the house on Long Island, the cadre of secretaries poised to take a letter. He commutes daily from Connecticut via train and bus, pecks out his own correspon­dence on an Underwood typewriter three years older than he is, builds furniture and bakes bread. He and wife Marguerite still live in the same house where their four children grew up.

“We paid $29,500 for it, and I have no intention of moving out,” he says.

His home away from home—the modest cubicle in the CBS building on West 57th Street—has a decided­ly less permanent air to it. A hodge­podge of books are stacked every which way on shelves behind his desk and beg to be arranged. A gold-colored statuette, representing some lofty award for past accom­plishments, reclines on its backside atop the books and close to a large box labeled simply “Jane’s stuff.” Pictures, yet to be hung, lean against a sway-backed couch.

“Just move in?” I ask.

He nods affirmatively and adds: “Ten years ago.”

The decor is eclectic—a function­al jumble of treasures that smacks of the owner. Lampshades tilt uniformly off-center, mounds of paper threaten to obscure the desk; an LBJ-Lady Bird commemorative plate is tacked to the wall, and a grouping of black-and-white Holly­wood publicity pictures invite visi­tors to test their knowledge of film trivia. But it’s no contest. Rooney explains the “celebrities” are ac­tually Columbia Studio’s rejects— starlets who didn’t make it big in show biz.

To this unlikely haven comes a network-news crew each week to tape “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney,” the wildly successful p.s. to television’s top-ranked show, “60 Minutes.” The humorous commen­tary has earned two Emmys since becoming a permanent feature of the show in September 1978. And that’s not bad for a low-budget operation.

“I don’t move a thing,” says Rooney. “It’s been a strange union problem because they say we’ve got to have a set decorator. But we don’t have a set. We shoot right in here. See that microphone? It runs into Bob Forte’s editing room. Believe me, we don’t fuss with this thing. Sometimes the cameraman will say there are too many white papers on the desk—causes a glare—so I toss some yellow paper on top and say, ‘Is this better?’ Sure, we make con­cessions; but it’s very homemade. Remarkably homemade.”

For the show Rooney generally sits at his desk in front of the jammed bookshelves and to the right of LB J and Lady Bird. He peers over horn-rimmed half-glasses and addresses issues close to home, wherever home may be. Viewers sel­dom notice the “set” since his words command their full attention. He’s the folksy philosopher who un derstands little things. He manages to say what others only feel, and this ability has established a kinship with “60 Minutes” aficionados. Often sage, sometimes silly, always suc­cinct, his messages zing in on truths common to everyone. He can evoke chuckles when he sounds off on de­signer jeans and tears when he com­ments on the pain of growing old. The most common topics become special under his treatment, and his way with words has swelled the ranks of Rooney followers to such proportions that a brief Sunday-evening fix of his humor just isn’t enough. Fans have turned in in­creasing numbers to his three-times-weekly newspaper column—now syndicated in 324 publications—and to his books, the most recent, And More by Andy Rooney, a bona fide best seller of 1 million copies in hardback and 2 million in paper­back. Still, it’s television exposure that has brought about the star status and the high visibility he finds so disagreeable.

“I’m irritated that some people think I only got successful when I did ’60 Minutes.’ I was doing things I was proud of 20 years ago,” he grumbles. “Fame is an overrated quality. I don’t think nearly as high­ly of well-known people as I did before I was one. And money. It’s a lot like fame. Overrated. Oh, I en­joy having $150 in my pocket in­stead of $32 or $19, but that’s all. Money is a pain in the tail. I’m no good with it—I don’t know what to do with it.”

Unbelievable? Not so, says Mr. Rooney, although he concedes per­haps once fame wasn’t quite as dis­tasteful as it is today.

“I did a piece once called ‘Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington’ about seven or eight years ago,” he re­calls. “It was a good piece—an hour long. I remember the next morning a guy came up to me at the bus stop and said he had seen the show and had really liked it. I was pleased. That was about the last time I was pleased.”

His impatience with fame is caused partly by his inability to understand why he deserves it. He refutes all claims that he’s better than Buchwald, more wry than Rog­ers or in the same genre as Menken, Twain or Thurber.

“That’s  baloney. Buchwald  is funnier than I am; Menken and Twain were so much smarter. No, I reject that. I’ll never last as they have,” he protests. “What I do is easy; I can’t believe it’s special or different. But it’s a delight—the most fun I have. I enjoy making it clear to people that we are so basi­cally the same for all our differ­ences. I can’t get over the fact that there is a common thread that runs through all of us. We share so many characteristics. It makes the world a little less lonely place to be, and I like that feeling.”

His talent for tugging at the com­mon thread comes from his ability to totally tune into his subject. Heightened perception, he calls it, and it’s available on command. He explains that when he has to write a column or commentary, he merely turns up his tuner and grabs hold of something he might otherwise over­look. He looks at the subject head-on and dissects it. When the writing is done, the antennae retract and he reverts to being a tourist.

If this perception is a natural gift, it’s been carefully honed by the down-home Hoosier, Borge was veddy sophisticated, Levinson was folksy Jewish and Godfrey was, well, just Godfrey.

“Writing for those guys was a ter­rific lesson. I’ve probably borrowed something from all of them. They were tough; there was a lot of argu­ing. It was highly competitive get­ting your stuff into the mono­logues,” he admits. “There’s no writing more precise than the kind that has to provoke laughter. You know you’re hitting people when they laugh. It has to pay off, and the positioning of words is so important in triggering it.”

Joke writing led to collaboration with Harry Reasoner on several CBS News specials. Rooney pro­vided the words and Reasoner added the voice. Not until he joined the Public Broadcasting Service’s “The Great American Dream Ma­chine” did Rooney actually go on camera himself. Afterward, he was contacted by an advertising-agency talent scout who wanted him to nar­rate a headache-remedy commer­cial. That told him a lot about his voice, he quips.

He returned to CBS, this time to both write and narrate such on-the-air efforts as “Mr. Rooney Goes to Dinner” (he added 14 pounds by the end of the assignment), “Mr. Rooney Goes to Work” and an oc­casional political commentary. Viewers related to his less-than-perfect physique (a pudgy 5′ 9″), his appearance (rumpled) and his voice (restrained whine). When the duel­ing duo of Shana Alexander and James Kilpatrick went on vacation from “60 Minutes” in the summer of 1978, Rooney was tabbed as the replacement. The temporary assign­ment became permanent the next year, leaving him little time for the longer, more in-depth stories he had always enjoyed.

“I miss reporting a lot,” he ad­mits. “But the fact is, I have be­come more valuable to myself and everyone else by doing more writing and less reporting.”

He stops, props his 8 1/2 EEEs up on his desk and engages in a little pipe dream: “You know what I’d really love to do?” he asks. “I’d like to throw myself into writing and reporting for Charlie Kuralt. I’d like to just give him my stuff. For one thing, he does things better than almost anyone in the business. Then I could slip back into anonymity. I’m telling you, it wouldn’t bother meat all.”

He loves the language and the agony of arranging and rearranging words, the shaking-out of a piece of writing until nothing remains except the emotion that propels it forward and makes it reach out and touch the reader or listener. The creative process is tough, causing him to rant, wring his hands and pace as his assistant Jane Bradford reads, edits and passes judgment.

“Jane checks everything I do. If I spell my own name she checks and makes sure it’s all right. She drives me crazy, but she’s very good. I make a lot of mistakes, and she keeps me from making a fool of my­self. The other day I was desperate to get my column done. I finally finished it and gave it to her to read, and she said it just wasn’t good enough. God, I knew she was right. I had to sit down and do it over.”

Even a bit of writing scrutinized and passed into print is not immune to Rooney’s self-criticism.

“I look at things I wrote ten years ago and think, ‘My gosh, how could I have done that?’ Then I look at things I wrote last year and think, ‘How could I have done thafl When am I going to grow up?’ ”

He claims he has a particularly difficult time ending things well, and that holds true not only for his writing but for his other passion, woodworking, as well. Both require patience—not his long suit.

“Actually, it’s a real shortcoming of mine. I guess I’ve gotten better at it in my column, but I’m a big woodworker and I’ve never been able to finish furniture very well, either. I’m interested in the idea of forming a table or a chair or a cab­inet, but then I don’t have the pa­tience to finish it the way I should.”

So immersed is he with his voca­tion—writing—and his avocation— woodworking—that he often de­scribes one in terms of the other. A particularly tough script is called “a real cabinetmakers’s job of writing.” His profession under­writes his passion, and his only splurge since he became a TV celebrity has been a $2,700 power saw. He used it to build, from scratch, a free-standing writing room at the family vacation com­pound in upstate New York. Week­ends from May to October are spent at the New York “cottage,” which is a sprawling, white colonial estate with two outbuildings—one for writing and another for woodwork­ing. From the first he churns out columns and scripts; from the sec­ond come tables and sideboards.

“My kids have a lot of my fur­niture in their houses. Sometimes I make it faster than anyone wants it. I’m not a natural woodworker, but I use good wood and have pretty good ideas. Boy, you talk about being self-taught. When I built my writing room I couldn’t get over how many mistakes I made. I fell off a ladder at one point, and that stopped con­struction for about a month.”

In many respects he’s self-taught in his writing craft, too. His ideas are good, his instincts are on target and if the words feel right to him, chances are he’s succeeded in build­ing a thought people can relate to. He takes care in choosing his topics and is particularly wary of subjects that might amuse the cosmopolitan folks of New York but elude resi­dents of rural America. He frets that a recent piece on the irritations of air travel only touched a small segment of his audience. He rejects the suggestion by a CBS coworker to use telephone answering machines as the object of an upcoming dia­tribe. “How many viewers have answering machines?” he asks.

He stays in touch with his audi­ence by living the normal life he champions. He avoids posh parties and the social set in an effort to pro­tect his averageness. At a time when TV programming is determined by ratings and demographic studies, he refuses to be influenced by scientific data. Don’t burden him with the number of house­holds tuned to CBS at 7 p.m. on Sundays. Don’t tell him which geographic areas of the country appreciate his humor most or which pock­ets of the population prefer a Lawrence Welk rerun.

“That’s the road to death,” he says of market studies. “It’s like trying to understand flight by dissect­ing the entrails of a robin. I would never study the num­bers. A good pilot knows how it feels to fly right.”

And after more than 40 years in the business, he’s flying higher than ever. He’s earned his stripes with a flight plan that has proved to be impeccable: From his cluttered vantage point, he looks out at the dancers and simply wings it.

From Our Archives: Sixty Minutes With Andy Rooney The Saturday Evening Post

Tom Selleck

Tom Selleck
Lucian Lupinski
March, 1987

We recently came across a cache of Lucian Lupinski paintings. Who was Lucian Lupinski? Lucian was an artist-in-residence who worked at the Post from 1973 through the late 1980’s. In the 1980’s, the Post often featured a current celebrity, politician or other notable on the cover and Lucian was great at painting portraits. It was a kismet-kind of combination. After trying to explain who Larry Hagman and Julio Iglesias were to the intern (with sudden inspiration, I declared: “Enrique’s dad!”), while going through the artwork, I was delighted to find the intern knew knew Tom Selleck. She exclaimed, “he was on Friends!” Yes, he was, but I feel sorry for any woman who doesn’t remember the twinkle in the eye of Magnum, P.I. Yes, ladies, the original painting is to swoon over. We will see that many of our 80′s celebrities are still active, including Selleck, who is currently starring as head of a family with a history of police service, and as police chief on the CBS series Blue Bloods.

Bill Cosby

Bill Cosby
Lucian Lupinski
April 1986

Happily, every generation knows Cos. The April 1986 issue of the Post declared that Bill Cosby arrived just in time to save the television sitcom. That is not an overstatement. “Cosby has rescued TV’s degenerating comedy situation by cleaning p the act and going back to the basics of love and laughter in family life,” the article noted. Who was ever so fun to watch with kids?

Elvis

Elvis
Lucian Lupinski
July/August 1985

Naturally, the young intern knew this one. Although he died in 1977, Elvis was on the cover in 1985 for a story called, “Legends That Will Not Die”. Boy, is that an understatement. Cheesy outfit or not, the legend of Elvis continues, twenty-six years after this cover. The legends in the article? Besides Elvis, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Babe Ruth and John Wayne. As legends that won’t die, those are good ones.

Vanna White

Vanna White
Lucian Lupinski
May/June 1987

“Great painting of Vanna White,” my young cohort exclaimed. Okay, totally unfair, Vanna. Anyone would recognize you because you haven’t changed a bit since 1987. Still looking stunning in her gowns, still the great smile, still turning those letters after all these years. How many of us can claim we’ve been in the same job since 1982?

Elizabeth Taylor

Liz Taylor
Lucian Lupinski
September 1987

Some “celebrities” even I had forgotten, but some will always be recognized by young and old (or, uh, middle-aged) alike. Artist Lupinski’s gorgeous, brown-eyed Clint Eastwood didn’t make the cover. There was a story on this mayor of Carmel, California in September 1987, but the cover was another Lupinski portrait: Elizabeth Taylor. Medically oriented in those years, the Post was big on the fight against AIDS, and Ms. Taylor was a dazzling spokesperson for that cause. Well, fine, I’ll just keep Clint all to myself.

Diane Sawyer

Diane Sawyer
Lucian Lupinski
April 1987

I was also pleased the intern instantly recognized Diane Sawyer. I think the Selleck and Sawyer paintings were Lupinski’s best. “Look how beautiful she is here!” I said, hoisting the original painting. “She’s still beautiful,” the intern replied simply. You know, I think there may be hope for this younger generation yet.

Classic Covers: 1980s Celebrities The Saturday Evening Post

If you are of the population not fortunate enough to have seen St. Elsewhere, it was the first of the modern ilk of medical dramas. What separated it from its predecessors was the reality with which it treated its subject matter. The television portrayal of doctors until that point was more in line with what we think of as super heroes. The patients always got better, the doctors never made mistakes, and everyone, as Garrison Keillor might put it, was above-average. The thinking of the time was, “Who wants to turn on their television only to be depressed? The advertisers certainly wouldn’t like that.” That strategy worked fine for many years, but it turned out not to work on the slightly-more-cynical younger generation. St. Elsewhere followed this new direction, and almost the entirety of the current hour-long medical genre owes its place on TV to “a show that ruined television.”

Welcome to the Multiverse

How does a show like this, with all the good it did for its craft, end up ruining television? The answer comes in two parts. The first is that St. Elsewhere was a very popular, and it continues to be well-respected among people who make decisions for television. The show did numerous crossover episodes where characters from one series appeared on St. Elsewhere or vice-versa. Crossing Jordan, Cheers, Boston Public, Chicago Hope, The Bob Newhart Show, M*A*S*H, and Homicide: Life on the Street are among the shows where this happened. Outside of this, there are shows that reference St. Elsewhere in a way that makes it clear they are intended to be in the same world. The hospital’s PA system on St. Elsewhere was used at various times to call doctors from other series, even though they were not appearing in that episode. The reverse of this was used on the Canadian show, Degrassi Junior High, where doctors from St. Elsewhere were paged through the school’s announcements system.

The crossovers don’t stop there, though. For example, you’ll notice that St. Elsewhere crossed over with Cheers at one point. This happened in an episode when characters from St. Elsewhere visited the Cheers bar. Cheers, being as successful as it was in its day, ended up creating crossovers with other series on its own. Cheers begat Frasier and another short-lived spin-off called The Tortellis. Since a crossover or spin-off is essentially a signal that the shows happen in the same television universe, all shows connected to Cheers in that way are also connected to St. Elsewhere. The same goes for all the other shows that St. Elsewhere crossed with. They are all, through common characters, happening in the same television universe.

In all, there are around 280 shows linked to St. Elsewhere. The oldest is I Love Lucy, which traces its lineage in this order: I Love Lucy, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Danny Thomas Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mad About You, Friends, Caroline in the City, Frasier, Cheers, and finally, St. Elsewhere. Current shows such as Lost, ER, CSI, Law & Order, and Heroes all have their own lineage tied to St. Elsewhere.

Life is but a Dream

The second part of the answer is the bit of trivia mentioned in the opening. In the final moments of the series finale of St. Elsewhere it is heavily implied that the entire series had been a dream of one of the characters. Dr. Donald Westphall discusses his son, Tommy Westphall, which includes this bit of dialogue:

“I don’t understand this autism thing, Pop. Here’s my son. I talk to him. I don’t even know if he can hear me, because he sits there, all day long, in his own world, staring at that toy. What’s he thinkin’ about?”

The next part, the answer to that rhetorical question, shows Tommy Westphall shake a toy snow globe containing a model of the show’s hospital, while real snow begins to fall over the real hospital.

This is the moment that may have ruined television. St. Elsewhere takes place in the same universe as over 280 other shows, and that universe was revealed to be entirely in the mind of Tommy Westphall. So the next time you watch I Love Lucy, Cheers, CSI, Lost, Heroes, The Andy Griffith Show, Law & Order, or any of the other shows connected to St. Elsewhere, keep in mind and take solace in the fact that they are at least two layers of fiction removed from our reality: They are the fictional creations of Tommy Westphall, an already fictional character. Most television, as it turns out, is more fictional than you would have thought.

If you’d like to explore Tommy Westphall’s multiverse on your own, this excellent site has complete documentation of the phenomenon that continues to be updated by contributors. You can take a look at the diagram of all the shows, and check the key to see exactly how they link together. If your friends are good enough at television trivia, you might be able to play a game of Six Degrees of Tommy Westphall.

The Show that Ruined Television The Saturday Evening Post