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Home often strayed far from it. Arlene and Hugh and, probably, Phyllis toured the world, visiting Carl Sandburg on his North Carolina farm, doing several shows from Japan, covering Grace Kellys marriage to Prince Rainier in Monaco. Once, before a live TV camera, Francis descended to the Pacific Ocean bottom off Santa Catalina in a diving bell, Francis AP obit noted. Something went wrong and the bell shot to the surface as Francis screamed. Regaining her composure, she quipped, Wow, now I know what it feels like to be a champagne cork.
The show lasted only three years but left many spoor trails. It showed that there was a place for substantive talk on daytime TV, and that it could elevate as it entertained. With its discrete segments and special reports, Home was also a progenitor of 60 Minutes and other magazine-style news shows. (Francis was listed as host and managing editor, as Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather would be on the CBS Evening News.)
For the show, Phyllis, according to the Sun, produced segments on all sorts of topics, including theater, religion, and a series on education, Inside Our Schools. She continued at NBC for another decade, also working on Dinah Shores prime-time variety hour. Even when the Jenkinses moved from Manhattan to Santa Monica, Phyllis produced occasional interviews for TV.
AN ARTIST AND A GENTLEMAN
Mary met George Clarke Jenkins in 1977, when she was in Hollywood with her colleague, author Carlos Clarens, to research a Museum of Modern Art exhibition called Designed for Film: The Hollywood Art Director. I remember that, on her return, as she told me about the gifted production designers she had met, she said of George, He looks like a movie star! She wasnt exaggerating. In ascot and blazer, with his warm, chiseled features, George Clarke Jenkins has always been a handsome fellow. I imagine his easy smile lighting up the movie screen, his strong hands caressing a large glass of sherry in the dining room of a sophisticated comedy. But he chose life behind the scenes, and made art of it.
I started out in the theater — a good start, in many ways the best, he said in a 1977 interview, because the discipline of the theater is so demanding. Coming to Broadway as assistant to the legendary designer Jo Mielziner on the Harold Rome revue Sing Out the News, he became his own designer with Fats Wallers Early to Bed. His set for the long-running play I Remember Mama caught the attention of Samuel Goldwyn. Goldwyn shipped him to California to design The Best Years of Our Lives, which won the Oscar as the years best picture. His first time out, George had helped visualize a classic.
He was a hands-on designer. He had loved the theater because you work with the stagehands on a more intimate basis. He did the same when he came to Hollywood. He recalled entering the Goldwyn Studios for the first time and being assigned the worst office in the building. But although I didnt know it at the time, it was the best office for me. I was right next to the 15 men at the studio who were actually going to do all the work. I got to know them and their abilities; familiarity bred respect. I wasnt a distant or imperious art director — I was right in there with them all the time. And they helped me a lot, too.
Meeting George, you saw how a gentleman artist can create immediate rapport, with stars or stagehands. That dapper congeniality must have made him instantly appealing to Phyllis when, after shuttling between Broadway plays and Hollywood movies, mostly for Goldwyn, he returned full-time to Manhattan in 1953. (Though his time away from movies coincided with the years of the blacklist, Georges long vacation from film was voluntary and non-political.) When Phyllis was producing daytime TV shows, George did some designing for New York-based TV dramatic series; according to one Website, he also directed a Four Star Playhouse episode.
This was in addition to an impressive and exhausting list of theater credits. A check of his Broadway credits on IBDb shows that in the 50s and 60s he designed 29 plays and shows, fully a dozen of which (Bell, Book and Candle, The Bad Seed, The Desk Set, The Happiest Millionaire, Two for the Seesaw, Once More, With Feeling, Tall Story, The Miracle Worker, Critics Choice, A Thousand Clowns, Wait Until Dark and The Only Game in Town) were made into movies.
George married Phyllis in 1955; they were happily together nearly a half-century. He treasured long-term professional relationships as well. He did six pictures while under contract to Goldwyn. He designed 11 films directed by Alan J. Pakula, including Klute, The Parallax View, All the Presidents Men (an Oscar for Best Art Direction), Sophies Choice and Presumed Innocent. He made two films with James Bridges (The Paper Chase and The China Syndrome) and three with Arthur Penn (The Miracle Worker, Mickey One and Night Moves). There would have been a fourth, but in 1966 George wanted to insure that his set for Wait Until Dark was properly translated in the movie version. So he reluctantly turned down the project Penn wanted him to design: Bonnie and Clyde.
See a George Jenkins film and you instantly and unconsciously move into the world he created. If a Jenkins set seems more livable than most, its partly because George designed sets at the same size as theyd be in real life, instead of much larger, as was the custom in Hollywood. (William Wyler, the veteran director of Best Years, said hed never seen that before.) It brought a verisimilitude to the films look and a veracity to the acting; performers could live in the sets he made. Thats how this man of the theater helped movies move toward realism — while still creating some great-looking sets, like the huge office set in Presidents Men and the tawdry diner and adjacent house in The Postman Always Rings Twice.
More and more movie work lured George and Phyllis back to California in the early 70s. In a way, though, Georges soul never left Broadway. Theres a piece of it — a George Jenkins set — on display right now. In the revival of the 1976 comedy Sly Fox at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Richard Dreyfuss and his co-stars are cavorting on a meticulous duplicate of Georges original design.
FRIENDS
They were Santa Monicas golden couple — perhaps silver, for Georges wavy mane of hair — entertaining friends old and new in their Kingman Street home. Across the street was the landmark Deco mansion built for MGM design chief Cedric Gibbons and his then-wife Dolores Del Rio; Phyllis got the current owners to allow us to visit it. The enclosed garden of the Jenkins home was the site of marvelous parties, often to benefit Amnesty International. (She poured thousands of hours, on both coasts, into that worthy activity.) When it came to fund- and consciousness-raiding, Phyllis was a party magnate and magnet. Everyone came for the good cause and stayed for the good company.