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Condolence Note. Last fall NBC again began its season a week ahead of CBS and went on to open up a large gap. Everything seemed to go sour for Dann. When he picked up the Get Smart series after NBC dropped . it, he told Star Don Adams, "If you don't win your time period, I'll quit my job." When the show began limply, Klein sent Dann a condolence note, reading: "Pray for Mike Dann's babies." Klein was referring to the fact that Agent 99 was pregnant with twins to "hypo" the ratings, but Dann misunderstood the wisecrack as a slur on his capability to support his own three children.
By the end of the so-called "first season," NBC was so far ahead it called a victory press conference. Bright yellow buttons were passed around, proclaiming HAPPINESS is BEING NO. 1. Unhappiness, at that point, was being Mike Dann. "I've never known what it is to lose," he kept muttering. "I've never lost a season." In mid-January, with NBC .5% in the lead, Dann made his move. He assembled 60 aides from both coasts and announced "Operation 100." He picked the name because there were 100 days left to turn the season around, and because "the creative colony would respond to the emotion of it."
Gamble on a Queen. Mike's Manhattan men met at 9 each morning in his office. At lunchtime, he put in a conference call to his Hollywood team. And at home he talked from 8 to 9:30 every night to Perry Lafferty, his L.A. vice president. Among them, they devised 104 changes in 100 days—including the sprucing up of existing shows. Ed Sullivan, having an anemic year, scheduled an all-Beatles evening, a Holiday-on-Ice special, and a night in Army hospitals (à la Bob Hope).
The 104 changes included the scrubbing of Get Smart for seven straight weeks. In its place went some respectable non-fiction shows and a CBS News special on Expo '70. Mike's master stroke was scheduling a rerun of the movie Born Free at 7 p.m. Sunday and having Dick Van Dyke introduce it; that gave it the third-highest movie rating in history (after The Bridge on the River Kwai and Hitchcock's The Birds). At 8 the next morning, on the basis of a special national sampling, Mike phoned London to buy the sequel, The Lions Are Free, for a bargain-basement $75,000. A year before on NBC, it had pulled a 25.4 Nielsen; on CBS, with a big promotion push, the rerun hit 26.4. Another Dann gamble was to throw in African Queen, which had run many times on local TV, though not since 1960; it scored 26.9 in the Nielsens.
By about the 60th day of Operation 100, CBS reckoned that it had caught up with NBC. All too well aware of what was happening, Klein officially announced in Variety: "NBC no longer desires to continue the competitive rating game. Our season ended March 22." An NBC official confessed later that "this was a gag, just part of our humble effort to drive Mike crazy." Perhaps it worked. It was at that point that Dann made his impulsive phone call to NBC President Goodman. And one day, when he ran into his NBC programming counterpart, Mort Werner, on the street, Mike grabbed him and blurted: "What are you sonsobitches trying to do to me?" Replied Werner: "Mike, Mike, how about saying hello first?"