Les Crane

Les Crane (born Lesley Stein; December 3, 1933 – July 13, 2008) was a radio announcer and television talk show host, a pioneer in interactive broadcasting who also scored a spoken word hit with his 1971 recording of the poem Desiderata, winning a "Best Spoken Word" Grammy.

He was the first network television personality to compete with Johnny Carson after Carson became a fixture of late-night television.

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.

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.

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.

The program debuted nationwide with a trial run (telecast nightly for a week) in August 1964 starting at 11:15 p.m. on the ABC schedule and titled The New Les Crane Show.

It originated in a television studio in midtown Manhattan.

Each episode was videotaped in advance, not live, with the length of the delay unknown decades later because research was not done when first-hand sources were alive.

ABC network officials used kinescopes 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.

More affiliates signed up for a November relaunch of The 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.

While some critics found Crane's late-night series innovative (indeed, two and a half years later The Phil Donahue Show followed a similar format to much greater success on a local station in Dayton, Ohio during its daytime schedule), Crane never gained much of an audience.

The two kinescope films that ABC used to pitch The Les Crane Show to its affiliates in 1964 constitute most of the surviving video and audio of Crane's show.

The UCLA Film and Television Archive has a digitized collection of clips from the Les Crane Show early episodes in August 1964.

It was assembled using 16 millimeter editing equipment, probably so network executives could use the collection of clips, in addition to the two entire episodes, to pitch the show to affiliates around the United States who had not yet signed up to carry the show.

An archive of source material on Malcolm X has only the audio of the civil rights leader's appearance with Crane on the night of December 28–29, 1964.

Their conversation starts with Crane saying he has interviewed Malcolm before.

Details of their previous encounter are unknown.

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.

Crane's daughter Caprice Crane has said she believes her father saved until he died a kinescope of this entire episode.

In late June 1965, following Crane's three-month absence from television, The Les Crane Show was retitled ABC's Nightlife, sometimes advertised in newspapers as Nightlife, and it returned to the late-night schedule of the ABC network, still originating from New York.

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 ended, network executives relocated the show from New York to Los Angeles, and the fall season began there.

The Paley Center for Media has available for viewing the first 15 minutes of one of the last episodes before executives finally cancelled ABC's Nightlife in early November 1965.

Crane can be seen and heard delivering his monologue, joking about words that could be censored (He mouthed them silently or technicians silenced them) and bantering with his sidekick Nipsey Russell.

Audio of Bob Dylan's February 17, 1965 appearance is circulated online, and transcribed.

Videotape of that broadcast was erased but still photographs and a snippet in silent 8mm film survive.

At least two YouTube uploads include the best possible reconstruction of the telecast.

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.

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.