Morning
I was only two pages into this rather lengthy novel about the early days of American television before I said to myself, “Dave Garroway. This book’s about Dave Garroway.”
Mr. Garroway, no longer a household name, was the first host of NBC’s Today show in the 1950s, an easy-going sort of fellow just perfect for morning TV. In Wetherell’s alternative history of the period, it is Alec McGowan who is the genius who conceives of the Morning television show (network not specified), complete with trademark glasses, bow tie, and closing signature.
But tragedy befalls McGowan much earlier than it did Garroway. His biographer, whose notes and narrative to himself make up the book, is the son of McGowan’s sidekick, and his primary goal is to determine what precisely led to that fateful day in 1954. We, the reader, gradually learn what that tragedy was.
Wetherell is a superb writer, and in this book he recreates the blissful days of small-town radio in the 1940s and the wonderfully hectic world of national TV in the 50s, as it simply created itself from scratch. Absorbing reading, in other words, marred only by the overly graphic descriptions of the bacchanalian revelries McGowan and his crew fell prey to. Necessary, perhaps, from the author’s point of view, but still distasteful.
