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Out of 60-odd cameras and a vast spider's web of cable, the three TV networks wove a panoramic view of Inauguration Day that lasted more than five unsponsored hours and cost $360,000 in canceled commercials alone. But the most memorable picture was the simplest: the un precedented, waiter's-eye view of the President of the U.S. munching his lunch with his wife and four friends, Vice President and Mrs. Nixon, Senator and Mrs. Styles Bridges. The President dug heartily into what NBC Commentator Richard Harkness described as a "trencherman's lunch," sipped ice water, chatted animatedly (but out of the viewer's earshot) during the bare half hour that the day's tight schedule allowed them at a buffet luncheon in the Capitol. At one point he reached for the salt, did a double take as another hand beat him to it from out of camera range; the hand hastily restored the salt to Ike's reach, and he got it on his second try, only to be reproached by Mamie for sprinkling too much on his roast beef. The three networks dawdled over the lunch scene like small boys glued to knotholes in the ballpark fence, finally drifted away one by one with a few evident—but wholly unnecessary—qualms over what, as ABC Commentator John" Daly put it, "is, after all, something of an intrusion."
In the eight years since CBS's Studio One first came to TV, it has accumulated more honors than any other dramatic show on the air. For a long time it was accepted as the yardstick of good TV drama. But in the past year, the big, full-hour productions have slipped in quality, also lost ground in the ratings to rival
Robert Montgomery Presents. Last week, armed with an old but unproduced Fred Coe favorite, The Five Dollar Bill, Studio One lived up to CBS's high promise of a "new look." Writer Tad Mosel deftly limned the character of a sensitive young boy (well played by 20-year-old Actor Burt Brinckerhoff) struggling for his identity against the fumbling demands of his father (Hume Cronyn) and the solicitous affection of his mother (Jessica Tandy).
*Who for "a lifetime devotion to letters . . . as poet, author and scholar" last week won a prize of $100 and a gold, muse-littered medal from the Poetry Society of America.