"My Name's Friday. I'm a cop."
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The bums, priests, con men, whining housewives, burglars, waitresses, children and bewildered ordinary citizens who people Dragnet seem as sorrowfully genuine as old pistols in a hockshop window. By using them to dramatize real cases from the Los Angeles police files—and by viewing them with a compassion totally absent in most fictional tales of private eyes—Webb has been able to utilize many a difficult theme (dope addiction, sex perversion) with scarcely a murmur of protest from his huge public.
He has not found it easy to cash in on this vast and uncritical acceptance. NBC, which he now hates as the captive Grecian maiden hated the mustachioed Turk, refuses to pay more than a niggling $28,000 a program, although the network extracts a total of $3,000,000 annually from the show's sponsors (biggest contributor: Chesterfield). A few months ago, however, Webb finally found a way out of this financial dilemma; to the Music Corp. of America last year he sold the rights to 100 completed Dragnets and to 95 more which will be filmed in the future. The price: approximately $5,000,000. Webb gets half.
Poverty & Slime. Jack Webb's present fame and financial independence are in-triumphant contrast to a boyhood which he likes to say was spent in "poverty and slime." His mother, Idaho-born Mrs. Maggie Smith Webb, was divorced shortly after he was born. She took the baby and her mother to California—first to San Francisco, and then, as her money dwindled, to a shabby apartment in Los Angeles. They had a bitter struggle. Jack nearly died of pneumonia when he was four. Afterward he suffered with asthma so racking that Maggie or Gram often had to carry him pickaback upstairs.
Homely, weak, forbidden to play with more robust children, often left alone while the two women worked, he developed his own kind of compensation. "Any time I looked out the window," his mother recalls, "my boy was looking in the trash cans. He was always searching for something, but he didn't know what. He used to say, 'But Maggie, there might be something down there.' "
His groping, tireless search did not stop as he grew older and stronger. The Webbs were on relief in the 1930s; Jack tramped forth daily with a brown paper bag to collect the wilted carrots and beets that were handed out through public agencies. But at Los Angeles Belmont High School he edged into amateur dramatics, drew cartoons for the school yearbook, and as a senior beat out the football captain to become president of the student body.
Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill. World War II intensified his hunger for expression, fame, applause and riches. In 1943, after four years of clerking in a men's clothing store, he joined the Army Air Force as an aviation cadet. At Minnesota's St. John's University, where he took preliminary training, he wrote, produced and acted in two U.S.O. variety shows which convulsed the uncritical birdmen-to-be. He went on to Tulare and Taft, Calif., but was a clumsy pilot. He soloed but was washed out during primary training (although he sometimes claims, in moments of imaginative reminiscence, to have flown B-26 bombers) and found himself a buck private running a typewriter at Del Rio, Texas.