Les Crane

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 jet 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 Seattle, Washington, 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 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. The program debuted nationwide with a trial run (telecast nightly for two weeks) in August 1964 starting at 11:15 p.m. on the ABC schedule and titled The Les Crane Show. It was the first network program to compete with The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

ABC network officials used kinescopes of two episodes from the August 1964 trial run to pitch the show to affiliates that hadn't 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.

More affiliates signed up for a November relaunch of The Les Crane Show, and Look (American magazine) 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.

While some critics found the late-night series innovative (indeed, five years later The Phil Donahue Show would follow a similar format to much greater success in daytime), it never gained much of an audience.

In late June 1965, following a three-month hibernation, The Les Crane Show was retitled ABC's Nightlife. ABC network executives removed most of the controversy and emphasized light entertainment. Producer Nick Vanoff started forbidding guests from broaching controversial topics. After the summer 1965 run, the network relocated the show from New York to Los Angeles. The Paley Center for Media has available for viewing the first 15 minutes of one of the last episodes before ABC finally cancelled ABC's Nightlife in November 1965. Crane can be seen and heard delivering his monologue, joking about words that could be censored and bantering with his sidekick Nipsey Russell.

The two kinescopes that ABC used to pitch The Les Crane Show to its affiliates in 1964 constitute the only surviving video and audio of Crane's show. An archive of source material on Malcolm X has only the audio of the civil rights leader's December 1964 appearance. Audio of Bob Dylan's February 17, 1965 appearance has circulated, and been transcribed but the picture is gone, and still photographs do not exist.

The National Archives has a transcript of the August 1964 Oswald/Belli episode in its documents related to the JFK assassination that were declassified and released publicly in 1993 and 1994. Most Les Crane Show episodes pictured in the Look feature story, such as the one with Winters and Robinson, were destroyed in their entirety, including the sound, and what the participants said is unknown today.

Les Crane's confrontational interview technique, along with a "shotgun" microphone he aimed at audiences, earned him the name "the bad boy of late-night television", though critical opinion was divided. The New York Times' media critic Paul Gardner considered him an incisive interviewer who asked tough questions without being insulting. One critic who did not like his show found Crane's trademark shotgun microphone distracting. "Each time he points this mike into the audience, it looks as though he's about to shoot a spectator." (Laurent, 1964) Nearly every critic described Crane as photogenic. One described him as "a tall, handsome and personable lad..." (Smith, 1964) Crane was unable to dent Carson's ratings, and the show lasted 14 weeks before ABC executives transformed it into the more show-business-oriented ABC's Nightlife.

In addition to Dylan, who rarely appeared on American television, Malcolm X and Richard Burton, Crane's guests had included Martin Luther King, Ayn Rand, Judy Collins, George Wallace, Robert F. Kennedy, and the voice of radio's The Shadow, Bret Morrison.

Immediately after the November 1965 cancellation of ABC's Nightlife, Crane tried acting, but his career was brief. He appeared in the film An American Dream (1966), based on the Norman Mailer novel, and made a few guest-star appearances on network television shows, including a 1966 appearance on the western series The Virginian.

Folksinger Phil Ochs mentioned Crane in the lyrics of his satirical 1966 song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal".

Some sources say that Crane gave the rock group The Mamas & the Papas their name, but this is disputed in other sources, including John Phillips' 1986 memoir, which says he and Cass Elliot (both founding members of the group) came up with the name while they were watching a television news segment about the Hells Angels. (see Bronson, 2003)

Les Crane was known as an advocate for civil rights, and was praised by black journalists for his respectful interviews with such black news makers as Muhammad Ali (Young, 1968).

Crane was one of the first interviewers to have an openly gay guest, Randy Wicker, on his television show, in January 1964. But when Crane tried to invite members of a lesbian advocacy group, the Daughters of Bilitis, to be guests on his show in June 1964 during the period when WABC broadcast it locally in the New York area, WABC officials ordered him to cancel the booking, and he did.

After Crane's final television appearance in the 1970s, he refused to discuss his television career and did not respond to queries about his copies of the two surviving kinescopes of his late night ABC show from 1964.

Later career

In 1968, he was back on the West Coast, hosting a talk show on KLAC in Los Angeles. Critics noted that in the style of the 1960s, he now dressed in a turtleneck and moccasins, sprinkling his speech with words like "groovy." ("Communicasters," 1968). However, he was still doing interviews with major newsmakers and discussing topics like civil disobedience, hippies and the rising popularity of meditation. (Sweeney, 1968) He also did some local TV talk. Crane left KLAC when the station switched to a country music format.

In late 1971, the 45rpm recording of Crane's reading of Desiderata reached No. 8 on the Billboard charts. It became what one writer called "a New Age anthem" and won him a Grammy.

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."

In the 1980s, Crane transitioned to the software industry and became chairman of The Software Toolworks, creators of the three-dimensional color chess series, Chessmaster and the educational series Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Toolworks was also responsible for such games as The Original Adventure and the PC version of Pong. The company was sold and renamed Mindscape in the early 1990s.

Marriages

Crane was married five times. His fourth wife was Gilligan's Island actress Tina Louise, who he married in 1966 and divorced in 1971. They had one daughter, Caprice Crane (b. 1970), who became an author, screenwriter and television producer.

Crane died on July 13, 2008, in Greenbrae, California, north of San Francisco, at age 74. He had been living in nearby Belvedere, California with his wife, Ginger, at the time of his death.