Les Crane (born Lesley Gary Stein; December 3, 1933 – July 13, 2008) was an American radio announcer, television host, and actor. A pioneer in interactive broadcasting, he is also known for his 1971 spoken-word recording of the poem Desiderata; he won a "Best Spoken Word" Grammy for it the following year. As host of The Les Crane Show from 1964 to 1965, Crane was the first network television personality to compete head-on with host Johnny Carson after Carson became a fixture of late-night television.
Contents
Biography
Early life
Born in New York, Crane graduated from Tulane University, where he was an English major. He spent four years in the United States Air Force, as a pilot and helicopter flight instructor.
Radio
He began his radio career in 1958 at KONO in San Antonio and later worked at WPEN (now WKDN) in Philadelphia. In 1961, he became a popular and controversial host for the radio powerhouse KGO in San Francisco. With KGO's strong nighttime 50,000 watt signal reaching as far north as Vancouver, BC, and as far south as Los Angeles, he attracted a regional audience in the West. Variety described him as "the popular, confrontational and sometimes controversial host of San Francisco's KGO. Helping to pioneer talk radio, he was outspoken and outraged some callers by hanging up on them."
A late-night program airing weekdays from 11pm to 2am, Crane at the Hungry I (1962–63) found Crane interacting with owner and impresario Enrico Banducci and interviewing such talents as Barbra Streisand and Professor Irwin Corey.
Crane, along with KRLA general manager John Barrett, were the original people "responsible for creating the Top 40 (list of the most requested pop songs)," said Casey Kasem in a 1990 interview.
Television
In 1963, Crane moved to New York City to host Night Line, a 1:00 a.m. talk show on WABC-TV, the American Broadcasting Company's flagship station. The first American TV appearance of The Rolling Stones was on Crane's program in June 1964 when only New Yorkers could see it. At some point in 1963 or 1964, WABC executives changed the title from Night Line to The Les Crane Show. Throughout its run as a local show, viewer phone calls were included. This was possible because of a ten-second broadcast delay that previously had been used by New York radio stations.
The New Les Crane Show debuted nationwide with a trial run (telecast nightly for a week) in August 1964 starting at 11:20 p.m. in east coast cities on the ABC schedule. In other time zones, the start time varied. It originated in one of the network's television studios on Manhattan's West 66th Street. The nationwide scope of the network show made incoming phone calls from viewers impossible with the technology that existed then. Network officials decided that each episode would be videotaped in advance, not live or almost-live as Crane's local show had been. The length of the delay with videotape is unknown decades later because research was not done when first-hand sources were alive. The New Les Crane Show was the first network program to compete with The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, which originated in New York prior to 1972, also with a videotaped delay before each telecast.
ABC network officials used videotapes of two episodes from the August 1964 trial run to pitch The New Les Crane Show to affiliates that had not yet signed up to carry the program. One episode featured the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald debating Oswald's guilt with noted attorney Melvin Belli, Crane and audience members. The other featured Norman Mailer and Richard Burton. Burton encouraged Crane to recite the "gravedigger speech" from Hamlet, and Crane did. Crane had learned to perform it during his time at Tulane University.
More affiliates signed up for a November relaunch of The New Les Crane Show, and Look ran a prominent feature story with captioned still photographs from the August episodes. One image shows Shelley Winters debating a controversial issue with Jackie Robinson, May Craig and William F. Buckley. A video clip from this telecast, preserved at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, indicates that the issue had to do with presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.
Later career
Crane had another acting part in 1967, starring as Jack, the leader of three detectives in I Love a Mystery, a pilot film for a proposed television series based on the popular radio show that had aired from 1939 to 1944. His colleagues were portrayed by Hagan Beggs and David Hartman. The series wasn't developed, and NBC aired the film in 1968. Crane made a guest appearance on Ironside, in the episode "Force of Arms", playing himself, a newscaster.
In 1968, Les Crane was hosting a radio talk show on KLAC in Los Angeles. Critics noted that in the style of the late 1960s, he now dressed in a turtleneck and moccasins, sprinkling his speech with words like "groovy." However, he was still doing interviews with major newsmakers and discussing topics like civil disobedience, hippies and the rising popularity of meditation. Crane left KLAC when the station switched to a country music format.
For approximately nine months during 1968, Crane had two jobs: his KLAC radio show and a syndicated television talk show that originated from independent station KTTV channel 11 in Los Angeles. Outlets for this syndicated series included WTTG Channel 5 in Washington, DC, according to multiple television schedule listings in The Washington Post and The Washington Star when it was known as the Evening Star. YouTube has one entire telecast from this series, running time 48 minutes 25 seconds, with the YouTube title "The Les Crane Show August/Sept 1968." It consists of Crane and two guests, Joseph Lewis and Jack Lindsey, discussing the policies of California governor Ronald Reagan. As the episode exists in its entirety, it establishes that producers and syndication company executives did not include studio audience members in Crane’s conversations with his guests. In the 1960s, syndicated talk shows aired several days, or as much as a few weeks, after they were videotaped, and the broadcast date varied with each local television station, so those situations ruled out viewer phone calls. Why the syndication company bailed out of Crane’s show in 1968 was not reported by newspapers or trade papers for the broadcasting industry.
In late 1971, the 45 RPM single (music) of Crane's reading of the poem Desiderata reached number 8 on the Billboard charts. It became what one writer called "a New Age anthem." Crane's spoken word album that included the "Desiderata" track won him a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album.
Though Crane thought the poem was in the public domain when it was recorded, the rights belonged to the family of author Max Ehrmann, and royalties were distributed accordingly. When asked about the recording during an interview by the Los Angeles Times in 1987, Crane replied, "I can't listen to it now without gagging."
Marriages
Crane was married five times. The 1964 Look magazine profile includes a photograph of him with his second wife Eve (née Ford). The text of the article says he was helping raise the younger two of her three children from her previous marriage that had ended in divorce. Her oldest child was at boarding school in Oregon. Look photographer Bob Sandberg captured the two younger children watching their mother and Crane play the game of Go on the lawn of their home in Oyster Bay, Long Island.
According to Los Angeles Times entertainment columnist Hal Humphrey, the marriage of Crane and Eve Ford Crane, and his relationships with her three children, fell apart immediately after the February 1965 decision by network executives to cancel The New Les Crane Show and to fire him. During March, he traveled to Los Angeles to film his guest-star appearance on Burke's Law. He appeared in one scene of an episode titled "Who Killed the Card?" that was telecast on May 5, 1965.
On March 20, 1965, during Crane's visit to Los Angeles, at a discothèque called the Daisy Club, he met actress Tina Louise for the first time when screenwriter and television writer Paddy Chayefsky introduced him to her, as he told columnist Humphrey and as she told veteran Associated Press journalist Bob Thomas. This was during the first season of her success with Gilligan's Island. Though Crane's stay in Los Angeles was brief, a long-distance relationship between him and Louise developed. She provided Thomas, the experienced reporter, with details of how they maintained the relationship while their respective television shows kept them working on opposite coasts, (Nightlife placed him in New York for the summer of 1965) and each had only weekends for airline travel, without a vacation.
Les Crane and Eve Ford Crane divorced in 1965 before his interview with Hal Humphrey. In 1966, he married Tina Louise. Their only child together was Caprice Crane (b. 1970), who became an author, screenwriter and television producer.
Crane and Louise can be seen as actors in a joint appearance on a 1969 segment of Love, American Style entitled "Love and the Advice-Givers." By then, television viewers had not seen Crane hosting a talk show for a year. He and Louise divorced in 1971, during the peak of the success of his spoken word album that included the poem "Desiderata."
Death
Crane died on July 13, 2008, in Greenbrae, California, north of San Francisco, at age 74. At the time of his death, he had been living in nearby Belvedere, California with his wife Ginger.