Les Crane (born Lesley Gary Stein; December 3, 1933 – July 13, 2008) was an American radio announcer, television host, and actor. A pioneer in interactive broadcasting, he is also known for his 1971 spoken-word recording of the poem Desiderata; he won a "Best Spoken Word" Grammy for it the following year. As host of The Les Crane Show from 1964 to 1965, Crane was the first network television personality to compete head-on with host Johnny Carson after Carson became a fixture of late-night television.
Biography Early life Born in New York, Crane graduated from Tulane University, where he was an English major. He spent four years in the United States Air Force, as a pilot and helicopter flight instructor.
Radio He began his radio career in 1958 at KONO in San Antonio and later worked at WPEN (now WKDN) in Philadelphia. In 1961, he became a popular and controversial host for the radio powerhouse KGO in San Francisco. With KGO's strong nighttime 50,000 watt signal reaching as far north as Vancouver, BC, and as far south as Los Angeles, he attracted a regional audience in the West. Variety described him as "the popular, confrontational and sometimes controversial host of San Francisco's KGO. Helping to pioneer talk radio, he was outspoken and outraged some callers by hanging up on them."
A late-night program airing weekdays from 11pm to 2am, Crane at the Hungry I (1962–63) found Crane interacting with owner and impresario Enrico Banducci and interviewing such talents as Barbra Streisand and Professor Irwin Corey.
Crane, along with KRLA general manager John Barrett, were the original people "responsible for creating the Top 40 (list of the most requested pop songs)," said Casey Kasem in a 1990 interview.
Television
In 1963, Crane moved to New York City to host Night Line, a 1:00 a.m. talk show on WABC-TV, the American Broadcasting Company's flagship station. The first American TV appearance of The Rolling Stones was on Crane's program in June 1964 when only New Yorkers could see it. At some point in 1963 or 1964, WABC executives changed the title from Night Line to The Les Crane Show. Throughout its run as a local show, viewer phone calls were included.Archival Television Audio catalog has details about a 1964 Les Crane telecast that is preserved with audio only; Viewer phone calls are part of the preserved sound. This was possible because of a ten-second broadcast delay that previously had been used by New York radio stations.Archival Television Audio catalog has details about a local New York radio broadcast with listener phone calls; it preceded the launch of Les Crane's TV show.
The New Les Crane Show debuted nationwide with a trial run (telecast nightly for a week) in August 1964 starting at 11:20 p.m. in east coast cities on the ABC schedule. In other time zones, the start time varied. It originated in one of the network's television studios on Manhattan's West 66th Street. The nationwide scope of the network show made incoming phone calls from viewers impossible with the technology that existed then. Network officials decided that each episode would be videotaped in advance, not live or almost-live as Crane's local show had been. The length of the delay with videotape is unknown decades later because research was not done when first-hand sources were alive. The New Les Crane Show was the first network program to compete with The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, which originated in New York prior to 1972, also with a videotaped delay before each telecast.
ABC network officials used videotapes of two episodes from the August 1964 trial run to pitch The New Les Crane Show to affiliates that had not yet signed up to carry the program. One episode featured the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald debating Oswald's guilt with noted attorney Melvin Belli, Crane and audience members. The other featured Norman Mailer and Richard Burton. Burton encouraged Crane to recite the "gravedigger speech" from Hamlet, and Crane did.Carey, B. "Television's New Bad Boy." Look November 3, 1964, pp. 111–4. Crane had learned to perform it during his time at Tulane University.
More affiliates signed up for a November relaunch of The New Les Crane Show, and Look ran a prominent feature story with captioned still photographs from the August episodes. One image shows Shelley Winters debating a controversial issue with Jackie Robinson, May Craig and William F. Buckley. A video clip from this telecast, preserved at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, indicates that the issue had to do with presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.
While some critics found Crane's late-night series innovative (indeed, two and a half years later The Phil Donahue Show followed a similar format to much greater success on a local station in Dayton, Ohio during its daytime schedule), his series never gained much of an audience.
The two videotapes that ABC used to pitch The New Les Crane Show to its affiliates in 1964 constitute most of the surviving video and audio of Crane's show. The UCLA Film & Television Archive has a digitized collection of clips from the Les Crane Show early episodes in August 1964. It was assembled using videotape editing equipment, difficult to use at the time, probably so network executives could use the collection of clips, in addition to the two entire episodes, to pitch the show to affiliates around the United States that had not yet signed up to carry the show.
An archive of source material on Malcolm X has only the audio of the civil rights leader's appearance with Crane on the night of December 28–29, 1964. Their conversation starts with Crane saying, "This interview is going to be a little difficult for me to do because I know Malcolm. We've done shows together before. He's been a guest of mine on a couple of different occasions. We've had telephone conversations of length and interest." Details of their previous encounters and phone conversations are unknown. In addition to the Malcolm X archive, a business called Archival Television Audio has this recording.Archival Television Audio catalog It also has sound recordings of Crane's local New York television show from 1963 and 1964 that amplified phone calls from viewers, possibly including Malcolm. (ABC network employees discontinued the phone calls because the limitations of telephone technology ruled out incoming calls from viewers nationwide.)
Audio of Bob Dylan's February 17, 1965 appearance is circulated online, and transcribed.See for instance, in and Videotape of that broadcast was erased but still photographs and a snippet in silent 8mm film survive. At least two YouTube uploads include the best possible reconstruction of the telecast.
The National Archives has a transcript of the August 1964 Oswald/Belli episode in its documents related to the JFK assassination that were declassified and released publicly in 1993 and 1994. Crane's daughter Caprice Crane has said she believes her father saved until he died a kinescope of this entire episode.
The collection culled from various episodes (preserved digitally at UCLA Film & Television Archive) includes a short clip from the episode with Shelley Winters, Jackie Robinson, May Craig and William F. Buckley. All except Craig got a lot of airtime voicing opinions of presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. A transcript of this episode does not exist. The UCLA collection excludes Malcolm X, evidently because the collection has only clips from August 1964, and he appeared in December 1964.
Crane aimed a "shotgun microphone" at studio audiences to allow home viewers to see and hear non-famous people participate in controversial discussions with notable people. This plus Crane's interview technique earned him the name "the bad boy of late-night television." The profile in the Look magazine edition of November 3, 1964 called him "television's new bad boy," but critical opinion was divided. The New York Times''' media critic Paul Gardner considered him an incisive interviewer who asked tough questions without being insulting. One critic who did not like his show found Crane's trademark shotgun microphone distracting. "Each time he points this mike into the audience, it looks as though he's about to shoot a spectator." Nearly every critic described Crane as photogenic. One described him as "a tall, handsome, and personable lad...."
In addition to Dylan, who rarely appeared on American television, Malcolm X and Richard Burton, Crane's guests on The New Les Crane Show included Martin Luther King Jr., Sam Levene, George Wallace, Robert F. Kennedy, the voice of radio's The Shadow, Bret Morrison (air dates and other episode details unknown for these five guests), Ayn Rand (night of December 15–16, 1964) and Judy Collins (same night as Rand, separate segment).
Crane was unable to dent Johnny Carson's ratings, and his show lasted 14 weeks before ABC executives canceled it and then made Crane one of several hosts of the more show-business-oriented ABC's Nightlife. Late-night viewers did not see him for four months, while ABC's Nightlife featured other hosts. During that period, prime-time viewers saw him as an actor in a guest-star appearance on Burke's Law, also on ABC. It was filmed in Los Angeles. Crane returned to New York for the videotaping of his first ABC's Nightlife appearance, telecast on the night of June 28–29, 1965. Muhammad Ali appeared with Crane and his co-hosts that night.
With ABC's Nightlife, network officials continued to use videotape to delay the telecasts. Possibly alarmed by Ali's statements on the first telecast hosted by Crane, they proceeded to remove most of the controversy and emphasized light entertainment. Producer Nick Vanoff started forbidding guests from broaching controversial topics.Israel, Lee. Kilgallen. Delacorte Press, 1979, pp. 401–2 After the summer 1965 run ended, network executives relocated the show from New York to Los Angeles, and the fall season began there. The Paley Center for Media has available for viewing the first 15 minutes of an episode from shortly before executives finally cancelled ABC's Nightlife, which happened in early November 1965. Crane can be seen and heard delivering his monologue, joking about words that could be censored (he mouthed them silently or technicians silenced them) and bantering with co-host Nipsey Russell.
Soon after the November 1965 cancellation of ABC's Nightlife, Crane returned to the acting he had started with Burke's Law, but his career was brief. He appeared in the unsuccessful film An American Dream (1966), which was based on the Norman Mailer novel, and made a few guest-star appearances on network television shows, including a 1966 appearance on the western series The Virginian.
Folksinger Phil Ochs mentioned Crane in the lyrics of his satirical 1966 song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal".