James T. Aubrey

James Thomas Aubrey Jr. (December 14, 1918 – September 3, 1994) was an American television and film executive. As president of the CBS television network from 1959 to 1965, with his "smell for the blue-collar," he produced some of television's most enduring series on the air, including ''Gilligan's Island'' and ''The Beverly Hillbillies''.

Under Aubrey's leadership, CBS dominated American television, leading the other networks NBC and ABC, by nine points and seeing its profits rise from $25 million in 1959 to $49 million in 1964. ''The New York Times Magazine'' in 1964 called Aubrey "a master of programming whose divinations led to successes that are breathtaking". Aubrey had replaced CBS Television president Louis G. Cowan, who was dismissed after the quiz-show scandals. Aubrey's tough decision-making earned him the nickname "Smiling Cobra" during his tenure.

Despite his success in television, Aubrey's abrasive personality and ego led to his firing from CBS, amid charges of misconduct. Aubrey offered no explanation following his dismissal, nor did CBS President Frank Stanton or Board Chairman William Paley. "The circumstances rivaled the best of CBS adventure or mystery shows," declared ''The New York Times'' in its front-page story on his firing, which came on "the sunniest Sunday in February" 1965.

After four years as an independent producer, Aubrey was hired by financier Kirk Kerkorian in 1969 to preside over Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's (MGM) near-total shutdown, during which he cut the budget and alienated producers and directors, but brought profits to a company that had suffered huge losses. In 1973, Aubrey resigned from MGM, declaring his job was done, and then kept a low profile for the last two decades of his life.

Early life and career

Born in LaSalle, Illinois, James Thomas Steven Aubrey was the eldest of four sons of James Thomas Aubrey Sr., an advertising executive with the Chicago firm of Aubrey, Moore, and Wallace Inc., and his wife, the former Mildred Stever. He grew up in the affluent Chicago suburb of Lake Forest and attended Lake Forest Academy, Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, and Princeton University. All four boys, James, Stever, David, and George, went to the same schools; his brother Stever became a successful advertiser at J. Walter Thompson before heading the F. William Free agency. While at Princeton, all four brothers were members of the Tiger Inn eating club. "My father insisted on accomplishment," Aubrey recalled in 1986.

At Princeton, Aubrey was on the football team, playing left end. ''The New York Times Magazine'' described Aubrey as "6-foot 2-inch with an incandescent smile", with "unrevealing polar blue eyes". ''Life'' magazine described him as "youthful, handsome, brainy, with an incandescent smile, a quiet, somewhat salty wit, and when he cared to turn it on, considerable charm. He was always fastidiously turned out, from his Jerry the Barber haircut to his CBS-eye cufflinks." One producer said, "Aubrey is one of the most insatiably curious guys I know." He graduated in 1941 with honors in English and entered the United States Army Air Forces. As part of his degree, Aubrey completed a 196-page long senior thesis titled "Fielding's Debt to Cervantes and the Picaresque Tradition."

During his service in World War II, Aubrey rose to the rank of major and taught military flying to actor James Stewart, who was a licensed civilian pilot. While stationed in Southern California, he met Phyllis Thaxter, an actress signed to MGM, whom he married in November 1944. Thaxter's first role was as Ted Lawson's wife in ''Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo'' (1944), and her final film was as Martha Kent, in the 1978 ''Superman''. They had two children, Susan Schuyler "Skye" Aubrey (1946–2020) and James Watson Aubrey (born ''circa'' 1953). The couple divorced in 1962.

After being discharged from the Air Force, Aubrey stayed in Southern California; before his marriage, he intended to return to Chicago. In Los Angeles, he sold advertising for the Street & Smith and Condé Nast magazines. His first broadcasting job was as a salesman at the CBS radio station in Los Angeles, KNX, and soon went to the network's new television station, KNXT. Within two years, Aubrey had risen to be the network's West Coast television programming chief. He met Hunt Stromberg Jr., and they developed the popular Western series '' Have Gun, Will Travel''. They sent their idea to the network's chief of programming, Hubbell Robinson, and as journalists Richard Oulahan and William Lambert put it, "the rest is TV history." Aubrey was promoted to manager of all television network programs, based in California, until he went to ABC in 1956.

On December 16, 1956, American Broadcasting Company (ABC) president Oliver E. Treyz announced Aubrey would immediately become the network's head of programming and talent. ABC, the weakest of the three networks at the time, was a contender with a roster of affiliates and programs comparable to the early days of the Fox network. Aubrey later said, "at that time, there was no ABC. The headquarters was an old riding stable, but I went because BC chairmanLeonard Goldenson in effect said, 'Look, I don't know that much about TV, I'm a lawyer.' And he let me have autonomy." As vice president of television, a title which Aubrey gained before March 1957, he brought to the air what he recalled as "wild, sexy, lively stuff, things that had never been done before"; shows such as the Walt Disney anthology television series produced by The Walt Disney Company and shows produced by Warner Bros. Television such as ''Maverick'', a Western starring James Garner, and ''77 Sunset Strip'', a detective show starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

Oulahan and Lambert said that Aubrey scheduled "one lucrative show after another ..and for the first time, the third network became a serious challenge to NBC and CBS." Among the successes he scheduled were: ''The Donna Reed Show'', a domestic comedy; ''The Rifleman'', a Western with Chuck Connors, and ''The Real McCoys'', a rural comedy with Walter Brennan and Richard Crenna.Grossman, Andrew. "The Smiling Cobra."'' Variety VLife.'' June–July 2004. 68–73, 78. (Profile of Aubrey)

President of CBS: 1959–1965

Despite his success at ABC, Aubrey saw a limited future at the network and asked to return to CBS. He returned on April 28, 1958, initially as an assistant to Frank Stanton, the president of CBS Inc., which owned the network. Thomas W. Moore would later replace Aubrey at ABC. At CBS, Aubrey was appointed as vice president for creative services in April 1959, replacing Louis G. Cowan, whom CBS promoted to network president.

Aubrey was named executive vice president on June 1, 1959, a newly created position that was the number-two official at the network. His responsibilities involved general supervision of all departments of the CBS Television Network. On December 8, 1959, Cowan resigned, having been damaged from his connection to the quiz-show scandals. Cowan had created the show ''The $64,000 Question,'' and owned the company that produced it for the network, although Cowan denied he knew anything about the rigging of the program. Cowan's letter of resignation to Stanton declared, "you have made it impossible for me to continue." Aubrey was appointed to president the same day and elected to the board of directors on December 9, 1959.

Aubrey served as a successful president of the CBS Network for the next five years, increasing ratings and profits, from $25 million to $39 million. In the 1963–64 season, all 12 of the top daytime programs and 14 of the top-15 primetime shows were on CBS—the lone evening exception was NBC's ''Bonanza'', the first color one hour Western ranked number two. Oulahan and Lambert would later write in ''Life'' magazine:

In the long history of human communications, from tom-tom to Telstar, no one man ever had a lock on such enormous audiences as James Thomas Aubrey Jr. during his five-year tenure as head of the Columbia Broadcasting System's television network ..He was the world's No. 1 purveyor of entertainment.

Aubrey's formula

His formula was characterized by a CBS executive as "broads, bosoms, and fun," resulting in such shows as ''The Beverly Hillbillies'' and ''Gilligan's Island'', despised by the critics and by CBS chairman William S. Paley, but extremely popular with viewers. His former manager at ABC, Oliver Treyz, said of his programming: "Jim Aubrey was one of the most effective ever, from the standpoint of delivering what the public wanted and making money. He was the best program judge in the business." While Aubrey had great sense for what would be popular with viewers, he also showed contempt for them. "The American public is something I fly over," he once said.

Author David Halberstam called Aubrey, "The hucksters' huckster ..whose greatest legacy to television was a program called ''The Beverly Hillbillies'', a series so demented and tasteless that it boggles the mind." Columnist Murray Kempton described ''The Beverly Hillbillies'' as "a confrontation of the characters of John Steinbeck with the environment of Spyros Skouras," the chairman of 20th Century Fox. Despite the criticism of ''Hillbillies'', the program was popular with audiences. Nielsen ratings showed that 57 million viewers were watching the show—one in three Americans. Skouras was forced out of Fox by the company's board of directors in July 1962; Aubrey was rumored to be his successor, but he openly denied he had any intention of leaving CBS.

Another part of Aubrey's formula was ensuring that the commercial interests of CBS's sponsors were kept foremost in their minds. In 1960, he elaborated on this idea more when he told the Office of Network Study:

There is relatively little that is incompatible between our objectives and the objectives of the advertisers... Before sponsorship of a program series commences there is often a meeting between production personnel and representatives of the advertiser at which time the general areas of the advertiser's interest and general attitudes are discussed. A breakfast food advertiser may, for example, wish to make sure the programs do not contain elements that make breakfast distasteful. A cigarette manufacturer would not wish to have cigarette smoking depicted in an unattractive manner. Normally, as long as these considerations do not limit creativity, they will be adhered to.

Dominance and controversy

CBS became so influential that when the fall schedules were announced, ABC and NBC would wait until CBS announced its rota before making plans to keep up, effectively making Aubrey programmer for all three networks. CBS enjoyed success with rural-themed sitcoms such as the ''Hillbillies'', ''The Andy Griffith Show'', ''Mister Ed'', ''Green Acres,'' and ''Petticoat Junction''. Paley highly disliked the CBS hit ''The Munsters'', part of a trend of fantasy shows at the time that included CBS's ''My Favorite Martian'' and ''Gilligan's Island''. Aubrey's "unwritten code" for programs was described in ''Life'' magazine:

Feed the public little more than rural comedies, fast-moving detective dramas, and later, sexy dolls. No old people; the emphasis was on youth. No domestic servants, the mass audience wouldn't identify with maids. No serious problems to cope with. Every script had to be full of action. No physical infirmities.

Exceptions existed, such as '' The Defenders'' with E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed as socially conscious attorneys, which ran for four years, or ''East Side/West Side'' with George C. Scott as a New York City social worker, which was cancelled after just one season despite receiving eight Emmy Award nominations. Aubrey defended charges of pandering to the public. "I felt that we had an obligation to reach the vast majority of most of the people," he said. "We made an effort to continue purposeful drama on TV, but we found out that people just don't want an anthology. They would rather tune in on ''Lucy''." Receptive of the nation becoming tired of high-culture programming and turning to sitcoms, Aubrey contributed to the " vast wasteland" of inferior TV.

In 1962, a United States Senate committee investigating juvenile delinquency held hearings on sex on television and called executives from the three networks. The chairman, Senator Thomas J. Dodd, blasted "an unmistakable pattern", and informed the executives "you all seem to use the same terminology—to think alike—and to jam this stuff down the people's throat." Dodd accused Aubrey of putting "prurient sex" in the program '' Route 66'' to boost ratings, and confronted him with the "bosoms, broads, and fun" quotation from a memorandum by CBS executive Howard G. Barnes following a meeting with the program's producers. Aubrey denied saying the phrase. He said that people in the business often shorthanded "wholesome, pretty girls" as "broads", and "attractive" as "bosoms".Sex Detours 'Route 66', Senate Probers Reveal
In the '' Schenectady Gazette'', May 12, 1962, p. 18, page found August 20, 2011. Another memorandum summarizing the same meeting, written by Screen Gems executive William Dozier, wrote: "There is not enough sex in the programs. Neither lead has gotten involved even for a single episode with the normal wants of a young man, namely to get involved with a girl or even to kiss her."

Management style

Aubrey was known for his fast decision-making, controlling and workaholic tendencies, putting in 12-hour days, six days a week. He endlessly read scripts, screened episodes, and ordered reshoots or changes made in the furniture and dressing of a set. Author Murray Kempton wrote that he would see six films every weekend and read three books on transcontinental flights. Kempton quoted a CBS executive, saying:

He read everything. Like he saw every movie. But he had the smallest world there could be. He'd watch a movie, and while everyone else was involved in the story, he'd say out loud "that kid could be the lead in a television program." He read everything sure. All the new fiction. What he didn't like was Bellow, Updike, Cheever, Salinger, Capote, and Mailer. He didn't know how to use them.

Oulahan and Lambert claimed, "Aubrey exercised his tremendous power with the canny skill and the ruthlessness of a Tatar khan." By 1959, Aubrey's treachery led the producer John Houseman to dub him "the Smiling Cobra". In December 1962, CBS announced it was spending $250,000 an episode on Houseman's hour-long drama on American history for the next season, '' The Great Adventure'', but on July 25, 1963, CBS announced Houseman had resigned. The producer told ''The New York Times'', "The kind of show they want is not what I wanted to produce", but attributed his departure to a simple difference of opinion, the ''Times'' reporter stating Houseman "expressed no criticism of CBS." The show ran for one season, 1963–64.

In his book ''Only You, Dick Daring!'', Merle Miller described how he spent five-and-a-half months trying to make a show with CBS for the 1963–64 season based on an idea of Aubrey's about a county agent. Aubrey would walk out of meetings without offering any constructive comments on Miller's program and the 19 rewrites he did of the pilot episode. Miller was assured by executives that Aubrey's silence meant things were fine; Kempton quoted a CBS producer telling Miller "this has nothing to do with a good script or a bad script. It has to do with pleasing one man, Jim Aubrey. Don't ever forget it", and Miller later learned of efforts by Aubrey to force him out. A pilot for the show, ''Calhoun'' and ''County Agent'', starring Jackie Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, was shot and put on the fall schedule, but the series was cancelled before it aired. Miller quoted an independent producer: "Aubrey's the most important man in television, in the history of television, maybe in the history of entertainment. He out-Mayers Louis B. Mayer ten times over."Miller, Merle. ''Only You, Dick Daring! Or, How to Write One Television Script and Make $50,000,000: A True-life Adventure''. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1964.

Aubrey's success caused him instability and he became more arrogant. He was abusive to the network's affiliates, advertisers, producers, and talent. Friends including producers Dick Dorso of United Artists, Martin Ransohoff