David Dortort~The View From The Top
TV Guide~March 13, 1965

     David Dortort is a contented TV chieftan to whom even network nabobs speak softly, and for a good reason--he produces 'Bonanza'

     You are a Hollywood television producer and it is December, time for the crucial November Nielsen report, that terrifying "definitive set of ratings, which either seals your doom, sounds the alarm, or, if you are lucky, pronounces you fit to mingle temporarily with the Lucys, Marshal Dillons, and Bob Hopes of your world.  In only one part of town it is safe to say that calm prevails.  And that is in a shabby, two-story building on the southeast corner of the Paramount lot.  In Hollywood, where producer David Dortort, a soft-spoken, bespectacled man of 47, and his staff hold forth.  On his desk lies a copy of Daily Variety (Dec.  8), and it says, "In its sixth year...'Bonanza' topped the Neilsen list with the highest point spread over the field this season, it's 35.  8 being 6.  4 better than the runner up."

     'No Panic Button On Premises'

     It is amazing the changes this continuing supremacy has wrought in Dortort's life.  The panic button has been removed from the premises.  No network Dick Darings tramp through his offices, no irritating ukases snow him, no programming geniuses peer over the shoulders of his story editors, film editors, directors and production men.  The last of them left two years ago.  Mort Werner (he is NBC vice-president in charge of programming) thinks twice before he calls from New York, and when he does his tone is respectful; it better be, because he is trying to persuade Dortort to do another series.  He knows that Top-10 shows are the crown jewels of any network, and that 'Bonanza' is the gaudiest--and sometimes the only--adornment in the NBC tiara.

     Consequently, nearly everyone courts Dortort shamelessly, from heads of rival networks to the movie-making Mirisch brothers, for whom he will make a Yul Brynner Western.  On the lot he is the natural target for the prestige-gatherers, tyro producers and directors, out-of-work actors, agency men on the make, or simply wandering entourages of would-be-wheelers eager to check in at the palace.

     Because he enjoys the rarest of all TV commodities, autonomy, his show represents the taste, judgement, and creative ability of one man.  It is not too much to say that 'Bonanza', with its romanticized feudal father, it's earnest glorification of the all-male hearth and home, and its tendency to regenerate even its most despicable villains--is David Dortort, right down to the last pyschological nuance.

     Dortort is a shy, gentle man who has been seldom known to raise his voice to anyone below the level of a troublesome network vice president.  Far from being the ingenuous man his show would seem to indicate, he is in fact a defector of the ranks of the young intellectuals.  A product of the Murder, Inc., area of Brooklyn, he ran with the Atlantic Avenue gang, finally rising above his brutalizing scum beginnings to become one of the brightest young men ever to graduate from P.S. 178 and Boys High, and, at 15, the youngest freshman in the City College of New York.
"I developed one outstanding characteristic", Dortort reflected a few weeks ago.  "I learned how to run."

     'He Rode The Rails'

     During his 17th year he broke away from home and wandered around the country for five months, riding the rails.  But he returned to CCNY and was graduated in 1936.

     In 1947, after working at various jobs from food checker to civil-service clerk and serving in the Medical Corps for three years, Dortort published a sensitive novel which was embraced by the critics and ignored by the book buyers.  Max Lerner said he had "stayed up all night to read it."  "Burial of the Fruit", an agonizingly subjective account of the horror of his youth, was spiritually as about as far from the romance of the Ponderosa as it is possible to get.  It got him a movie contract to write a screenplay of his own book.  But "Burial" was never made.  "Too violent.  Too brutal", Dortort said.  "As a screenwriter, I knew nothing."

     Times got tough and he abandoned his subjective narrative style and to begin to "write for the world".  He became one of most profilic writers of movies ("The Lusty Men", "The Big Land", "Reprisal"), and TV films ("Climax!", "The Lineup", "Suspense", "Cavalcade of America").  He put out the subjectivity, the sensitivity, the realism behind him.  But he did not mingle.  He remained the loner the has always been.  What he ultimately replaced with was--'Bonanza'.

     'Pernell Was Being Difficult'

     Down on the set all hell was breaking loose.  The director, although a veteran of some 90 "Wagon Trains", was new to 'Bonanza', and Pernell Roberts, the Peck's Bad Boy of the Ponderosa, was showing him just how difficult a sagebrush Barrymore can be.  The sweat broke out in little nodules on the director's forehead.
     Dortort told him not to mind.  "That is just Pernell", he said.

     The leading lady was deep in trauma too.  It was her first big break with 'Bonanza', and things were not going well.  Her performance was too stiff.  She was having serious domestic problems, a death in the family, a tottering marriage.  More than once, the director had found her crying in the alley.
     Dortort drew her aside and told her not to worry, that things were improving.  Later in the week they did.

     Roberts sat slumped in a director's chair, an island of glower, drawing heavy black lines through the dialog with a stubby pencil.  Rewriting the script? "Yeah", Pernell said afflably.  "Trying to get some kind of honesty into it.  Whee!"
     Someone asked him if he'd liked anything he'd done this season.  "Sure", he replied.  "'A Thousand Clowns' on the road--it was a gas!"
     Dortort came up.  "Given' em' all those tough answers, Pernell?", he said smoothly.
     Across the stage, Dan Blocker and Mike Landon were too busy horsing around to notice. 

     In the office the phone rang.  It was Tom Sarnaff, NBC's top man in Hollywood.  He'd seen the answer print (a rough version of the final color film).  He liked it.

     It was not always like this.  On the strength of Dortort's success as producer of 'Restless Gun', with John Payne, NBC pegged him as an expert on Westerns, and hired him to produce 'Bonanza', the first color series owned in its entirety by the network.  But the format he devised did not send the network's top brass into spasms of joy.

     Dortort's ideas were simple he explains: "Most Westerns are full of cowpokes in dusty cowtowns.  How about the glories of the West? The lakes, the mountains, the cool clean air? Also I was concerned about the damage television was doing to the American father image.  He was being portaryed as a weakling and idiot.  I wanted to reinstate him.  " He decided to cast with unknowns.  NBC blanched.  "TV makes its own stars."  The show opened, with Dortort's casting, in the fall of 1959, to lukewarm notices and even more tepid ratings.  Before long the march of the fixers through Dortort's office became thunderous.  He came into direct conflict with NBC's programming chief, David Levy (who today is executive producer of 'The Addams Family').  Levy thought the show (he says today), "inept".  The trade papers pronounced 'Bonanza' in mortal trouble and a couple of high-priced show doctors arrived in the person of Martin Rackin and John Lee Mahin, veteran movie writers, who, says Racklin, were "rather embarrassed by it all."  Dortort was saved only by an upswing in ratings.  It took him nearly four years to clear out the herd.

     At lunch in the commissary, discussed the strange case of Pernell Roberts, the disgruntled Cartwright who had declared he intended to leave the Ponderosa permanently.  "The problems, all his rudeness, his impossible conduct, and lack of professionalism.  I would forgive all that if he would come back.  He is that good."

     Tay Garnett, the veteran movie director, put it, "You don't break up a winning backfield."

     Lorne Greene came by, fresh from Australia.  He was full of triumphal tour and the startling success of his record , "Ringo".  "It's number one in Billboard this week", Greene said.

     'The Perfect Bonanza Image'

     "The perfect 'Bonanza' image", commented Dortort as he left.  In a viewing room, while watching the day's films, Dortort shrugged off the fact that Roberts had insisted on reading then learning his speech to the ranchers.  "What can you do?  He says that Adam Cartwright would make notes."

     In wardrobe, he looked over guest-star Cesar Romero's clown costume for the following week's show.  "Borelli is firey, but fun; I hope you play him that way", he said to Romero.  An actress wearing tights, Ilze Taurins, surprised him with a dazzling set of legs that he had not known she had.  He told her, "The part should please you.  You are a tease, a woman of passion."

     He cautioned Gerd Oswald, the new director, "I like the idea of letting Romero go broad, but do not let Lorne get into a competition with him."

     Back at the office, he called in Jimmy Lane, his associate producer, and made a shooting switch, necessary because Dan Blocker had been invited to the White House reception for Prime Minister Harold Wilson on Monday night.  Next he made short work of an agent.  The agent was not very original.  "I'm giving you first crack at it, David", the agent said.  "But you gotta read it over the weekend.  I promised it at Warners on Tuesday". 

     Writers for 'Bonanza's' pool of 50-odd began to wander in.  To one he said, "The idea might be a little corny, fellas, but you've got to let the audience in."  Another had come a cropper with his motivations for a character Dortort liked.  "Too fuzzily pyschological.  Let's try the other side of the coin.  Something simpler...like this..."

     He was interrupted by story editor Frank Cleaver.  A crisis had arisen.  Mike Landon wouldn't play the fight scene in his bare chest.  "Mike's funny that way", Dortort said.  "Let me talk to him, Frank."

     It was late evening at the end of a long week, David was feeling reflective and confidential.  He talked of what he used to be, thin, skinny, pale, and running; of his wife of 22 years, Rose, a gentle girl from a better part of Brooklyn; of their home in Beverly Hills; of his daughter, Wendy, now a student in Paris, and of his teen-age son, Fred, in many ways a carbon copy of his father, brilliant--with problems.

     He talked of his own father.  "He was a marvelous man.  I love him dearly.  I would not hurt him.  I tell people he was an insurance broker.  This is not strictly so.  He ran a little candy store and it failed.  This is why we moved from Far Rockaway to the tenements when I was seven." There was a pause.  "Mother bore the burden.  She was a saint."

     "Can you imagine?", he said, "how reckless it would be for such a boy to announce he was going to be a writer?  I have never quite freed myself of it."

     "I had a temper then.  It was the Little Joe in me.  It came out when I faced authority.  Then there are the times still when I feel as Pernell does.  I'm bright.  I'm sharp, intuitive, and quick--what is wrong with people?  Can't they see I'm the only man with integrity in this town?"

     I noticed that his directors and writers frequently turned out to be fellows with hard-luck stories, or the young ones with big ambitions and the vague looks.  "I pick up strays", he says, "the Hoss in me, I guess."

     I idly suggested that perhaps Ben Cartwright and the Ponderosa, last stronghold of the solid conventional values--and indeed, the whole of 'Bonanza'--were nothing more than a pyschological projection; its creator's own personal wish-fulfillment right down to the last impregnable technicolor acre.  He smiled, "My father's name is Ben", he said.

     Outside he placed his brief case on the front seat of a Cadillac and turned to say goodnight.  "About Pernell", he said, "I could understand him better if he were planning to stop being an actor.  But he isn't.  One day I may go back to serious writing myself.  But I am a slum boy who sometimes feels he's trying to be something he shouldn't, and I have learned one thing.  When fortune smiles, best not kick it in the teeth."


     ~By Dwight Whitney