Mature drama and true-to-life details are hallmarks of his unique crime show

The phone jangled in one of the 12 divisional stations of the farflung Los Angeles Police Department. A weary desk officer picked it up. "Police," he intoned.

A woman's excited voice cried: "The neighbors upstairs are having a terrible fight! I think you'd better send Sergeant Joe Friday over right away."

"He's not attached to this station, lady," said the officer, "we'll send a-"

"I want Joe Friday! What station is he attached to?"

"Lady," said the long-suffering policeman, "I like Friday, too. But he's attached to the Los Angeles station of the National Broadcasting Company."

Such demands are not uncommon in the area where the fictitious but authentic Police Sergeant "Joe Friday" operates. He is Jack Webb, a dark-complected, flat-voiced radio and television actor, creator of Dragnet, one of the most famous and certainly the most realistic of all radio-TV programs.

Dragnet, simply, is the slightly dramatized reenactment of a genuine case from the bulging files of the Los Angeles Police Department. Ever since its inception on radio in June, 1949, it has been pushed toward the top by the polls. The TV show, originated in January, 1952, has followed suit.

Dragnet's success has been attributed to the fact that it is unique among radio or TV shows, most of which follow a time-tested (and time-worn) formula. It is similar to others only in that a crime has been committed and inevitably the criminal is brought to justice; there the similarity ends. Dragnet has no blare of trumpets, no satisfied smiles, no pat on the back from the D.A., no theatrics, absolutely no heroics.

Underplayed from start to finish, with a noticeable absence of planted clues or takers, Dragnet manages week after week to generate a mood of gripping suspense. It does so through a combination of extreme realism, deceptively simple camera work, and a scenario that finds people talking like people, rather than the stereotypes usually created by script writers.

Webb plays the lead; he has written a few dozen of the scripts and has edited and revised the rest; he directs and co-produces, and he owns the controlling interest in two companies which run it: Mark VII, Ltd. and Dragnet Production Company.

"That Dragnet stuff makes me homesick," said one retired New York police captain. "Sometimes it even makes me wish I was back on a beat." Such praise from the longest arms of the law in the nation is matched by the opinion of the lay audiences.

"I guess the public likes it," says Webb, "because we're interested in the casual person involved in crime, the bystander who often suffers and is not responsible. We try to hold interest. We don't preach, teach or send a message—and we pitch for the 30-year-old mind. We think we have a solid, ebtertaining show for mature people."

First written for radio, then transferred to film for TV, the Dragnet programs are culled from the unnumbered millions of closed police records. So far, 2,500 have been worked over for radio possibilities by a special three-man Los Angeles police detail on their days off. A fourth policeman is called in to help with the TV show, and Dragnet always tries to get the one who worked on the actual case. "They and the program technical advisors have shown us everything from how to hold a gun to cracking a safe," says Webb. Since cases come in to the LAPD at the rate of hundreds a day, the supply of human malfeasance is infinite.

"The tough part is, Webb remarks, "that most crimes and criminals arc dull. We have to skim the cream for drama."

A certain amount of each script is fictionized, and events are often rearranged for dramatic effect, but the presentations are admittedly almost perfect. Scripts run more than 60 percent questions: sentences are rarely more than ten words long. There are long and pregnant pauses, interspersed with irrelevant chatter from witnesses and homely bits of business like picking the teeth or scratching for dandruff.

Action is limited to slogging, dogged research by the pair of detectives who may go after the kid who stole $2 worth of candy or $10,000 worth of heroin. Webb has used more than 100 "fresh faces" of men and 50 of women—mostly from radio, "because they trust me. Picture people have used their faces so long, they always do the same thing. People should look like people. Who's to say who's a killer?"

Webb generally herds his actors into a straight-line, low-key naturalism which drives a few listeners mad and others into ecstasy. One letter: "The frustration of the actors gives us shingles." Another: "Wringing tears from my eyes is no mean accomplishment." A third, from an ex-policeman: "Not one of your shows has been a clinker."

Though Dragnet violates every known law of drama, it creates its own mood by a kind of personalized immediacy. Perhaps the best explanation for the suspense is the fact that each individual in the audience feels that he, personally, might be involved in such a case. It did happen; innocent people as well as criminals got messed up, and it could happen to anyone.

Such impact gets its power from Webb's passion for realism. Research for each script commences with the writer going over to police headquarters and interviewing, tape-recording and observing. A photographer follows, recording every scene of the crime from every angle. Finally, the sets are reproduced in meticulous detail, down to the last dead fly or squirt of tobacco juice on the floor.

A real L.A. detective, wandering onto a Dragnet set for the first time, went rigid with surprise. "That's my desk over there!" he cried. Then, pointing: "Hell, those are my cigarette butts!"

Webb boasts an exact replica of the whole lower floor of the Police Department at City Hall—down to the nicks and holes in the furniture and the locks and handles on the doors, cast in lead from plaster molds of the originals.

The sets range from the spectacular to the minuscule: one portrayed a huge building gutted by fire, another a chase on an immense movie stage. Another show played a full 26 minutes in a small room with three men, a tape-recorder, paper and pencil, and a telephone: the relentless interrogation of a criminal loading to his confession.

Webb' s attention to detail is almost a mania. The actor's readings are checked against recordings of cops' voices for authenticity; from 6 in the morning to midnight, Webb goes over every foot of film. oversees every job on the picture. (His idea of a Sunday off is to go to NBC and tape four radio shows.) He spends endless time to get the movements of his actors just right—in one case, he used up most of an afternoon getting an actor to imitate a news photographer correctly.

Webb shoots about 10,000 feet of film for each 2,500-foot show—a four-to-one ratio that equals the finesse of a feature motion picture. His first 13 Dragnet shows were so carefully made that they ran over his sponsor's budget, and Webb had to ante up out of his own pocket to pay for them.

"We do 100 hours work for every one that appears on the screen," he says.

He knows what he wants; in one 13-show run, Webb never made a single retake. But he has redone scenes as often as 18 times. Webb likes to swoop in to close, close close-ups—sometimes where he shows only teeth chomping. His camera is nearly always on a boom and the lighting is twice as bright as for most, resulting in better definition and depth. Sets are lighted for mood. The cameras match it—slow, soft shots for muted tempo; fast, dramatic shots for action.

It is a truism of society that crime does not pay. But this grim fact of retribution has been so melodramatically reiterated that its force has been lost. By understated, careful attention to human detail, Dragnet has revived this energizing feeling. The current of inevitability is possibly the only thread common to each half hour.

The two police officers, once upon a case, follow through on all the tortuous, boring, commonplace incidents until they light upon some item—a fact, a remark, a clue—which suddenly illumines the whole. This is how all men, not merely the police, operate. Life itself is this kind of a play—without a badge.

The opening of a Dragnet show is casual; the ending may seem inconclusive. But the dramatic wallop is always present. The beginning may be Friday and his partner walking down a street, riding in a squad car, or merely conversing in an office. The end may be sending an old man who pretends amnesia back to his domineering wife with some practical psychological advice—and having him return perfectly content to be domineered; or chasing a murdering small-time Hollywood director onto the catwalk of a sound stage and waiting patiently below: "He wanted to be a director. Let him decide how to end it." It may only be Friday rewarding a secretary from the downtown police office for pretending to be a witness to a crime, in order to secure a confession front the criminal.

No particular point, moral or otherwise, is made in the Dragnet plays; none is attempted. Part of the fascination of the viewer can be laid to the fact that he is drawn emotionally into the hidden world of crime which constantly overshadows the city. A half hour of Dragnet is a wringing experience. "All we try to do is entertain," says Webb. "If you stick with us for 30 minutes without turning the knob, we're happy."

In his acting style, Webb runs the risk of becoming a stage detective for the rest of his career. By the expressive use of his immobile face, moody eyes and especially his deep authoritative voice, he is able to create an illusion of reality.

This is increased by the skillful use of terse narration to fill the necessary gaps in the telling of a case. Since any investigation covers several days or weeks—sometimes even months or years—grunts and gutturals, throwaway lines, and a rapid-fire style of speech are used frequently. Interruptions, half sentences, and even disregard of lines are welcome: as long as the actors' meaning is clear.

Webb likes whisking the camera in or out, producing a mixture of the commonplace and startling mannerisms of the characters. Friday brings a container of coffee to his partner, who drinks it and surreptitiously tosses the carton into the sand pot in the hall while waiting for an elevator; Friday leaves a drawer open in a searched room; they quiz an old man while he is killing flies with a spray gun; in the office, his partner discusses their meal at a delicatessen; a carnival tout nervously drinks pop while they speak to him.

Friday and his friends get tired; they are sometimes frustrated; they lose their tempers. But they never forget their position in the scheme of things: servants of the people who realize that patience and observation will eventually crack a case.

"I set it up this way," explains Webb, "because I wanted it to be as real and close as some friends dropping in to your living room to visit."

He never rehearses his cast. "We have a run-through on the stage and that's all. That way we get a spontaneity and freshness which would be impossible to retain if we worked it over."

Though grimness and unrelieved tension is a trademark of Dragnet, violence is kept to a minimum. In a cross-section of 50 TV shows, less than 20 shots were fired by both criminals and police. In one, a murderer was induced to confess by subjecting him to a mild form of the third degree—a hearty meal of acorn steaks and yogurt in a vegetarian restaurant.

Realism again: "Cops don't usually get into shooting matches," says Webb. "Ninety-nine times out of 100, the criminal doesn't go melodramatic when he's caught—he's just relieved that it's all over."

Another real-life ingredient: Webb never explains the technical police terms scattered throughout the program. Samples: "M.O.", modus operandi, the way a criminal mind works; "Code Three," red light and siren; "package," criminal file; "mama-sheet," file summary; "211," robbery; "R&I,'' record and identification.

Webb always wears the same button-down shirt and a black knit tie. "I figure cops don't make enough to have too many shirts," he explains. He also wears two-tone suits and a belt gun—"because that's what L.A. plain-clothes cops usually wear. And I'm just a cop."

In slightly more than four years, Dragnet has burgeoned from no more than an idea to a vast business enterprise. The Sunday radio version is on the full NBC network, and the Thursday TV presentation appears on 80 stations. Dragnet has a comic strip running in 35 papers, and its producers are thinking of a full-length movie as well as foreign syndication. Friday guns, badges, fingerprint kits and police games may be licensed for sale on the juvenile market if they are authentic and in good taste.

The weekly programs embrace a budget of about $32,000—$5,000 for radio and $27,000 for TV. One TV episode ran to more than $43,000, but Webb—spurred by the anguished shrieks of the sponsor—cut the cost. Now, Webb reportedly pays all costs above the contract limit of $30,000.

Webb himself draws an estimated $75,000 yearly for his share. His two partners—Stanley Meyer, ex-theater man, and Mike Meshekoff, ex-agent who has been Webb's friend for five years—are poring over yacht catalogues, and "Frank Smith," Webb's detective partner on Dragnet, owns five gas stations.

The career of Jack Randolph Webb has been as dogged as his detecting. His personality is evident in his set, down-drawn mouth, transformable by a likable grin. Now 33, he got his first part in a high-school production in Belmont, California, 18 years ago. He got a scholarship to the University of Southern California, but never used it.

He worked in a steel mill, sold clothing, and devoutly attended little-theater activities. He got a radio job filing transcriptions for nothing a day at KEHE (now KECA) in Los Angeles. and acted as aide to an early-morning disc jockey. This brought Webb considerably less than his $160-a-week steel job, and he felt conscience-stricken, having a mother and a blind grandmother to support.

The draft cleared things up. Webb was in the Army Air Force for three years, first as a captain piloting B-26's, then as instructor. He never got overseas and a few months before VJ Day, in 1945, got out on a dependency discharge. In San Francisco he corralled a stint as staff announcer on KGO, then fell into the lead on a show called Pat Novak for Hire, portraying "a simile-spouting private eye," and lasted for 22 weeks.

When the writer, Richard Breen, left the show to go to Hollywood, Webb drifted south, too. "My inherent laziness," he says, "worked in my favor until I was about washed up in pictures."

Then the Dragnet idea came. Webb says he thought of it after playing his first hit on the screen, the part of "Lt. Lee Jones" in a 1949 picture called They Walk by Night. Ultimately he visited NBC and got them to cut a 30-minute record for $2,000. It was accepted and went on the air. After eighteen weeks, Fatima cigarettes, made by the makers of Chesterfield, sponsored the show, and Chesterfield took over two years later when it began national distribution of its king-sized cigarette.

At first, the cooperation of the L.A. police was hard to get. Their closed-case files had been used as research material for writers' flights of fantasy where the cops were either dumb or super-sleuths. Webb won the good will of Sgt. Marty Wynn and two additional LAPD sponsors: Sgt. Vance Brasher and Capt. Jack Donohoe. With this trio, he started the series.

"The main result," says Webb ruefully, "is that Chief William H. Parker is now called 'Joe Friday' when he goes to conventions."

Webb insists he chose the name "Friday" because he thought it was "anonymous," and points out that his partner's name on the show is "Officer Frank Smith."

Other mystery-and-murder melodramas are baffled by the taboos Webb has successfully circumvented: sex perversion, child matricide, juvenile delinquency, filthy picture-peddling, dope addicts, crooked police. One on traffic accidents had 50 prints requested by the National Safety Council for various showings. A Christmas program, which told of a nine-year-old boy being killed by careless handling of a .22 rifle, was snapped up by the National Rifle Association. Others are used regularly to instruct police trainees and, sometimes, insurance salesmen.

One program telling the story of a baby "found" in a bus station by a girl who later proved to be its mother, brought a flood of public protest. Her husband had been overseas with the Army two years and the child was eight weeks old. The script's tag line, spoken by the husband: "Take me to the hospital, I want to see my son."

The viewers complained that Webb had condoned adultery. "We didn't excuse it," Webb says. "We just reported it."

The walls and halls of the Dragnet headquarters in Hollywood are covered with scores of unposed pictures of Webb and his partner, along with virtually every TV and radio award in the business, plus citations from such dissimilar organizations as the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Elks. "No other show of the kind has chalked up such a record," says Webb proudly.

Shooting TV, Webb sits in a high director's chair labeled BOOBY TRAP. "I don't like doubling," he says morosely. "I'd rather just act; I'm no Orson Welles with chimes."

He is addicted to mordant remarks about others and himself. He calls his voice "unspeakable." On the acting of an inadequate thespian: "I've seen better performances through a glass-bottomed boat." He threatened to fire Bert Lynch, the photographer who has been with the show from the start.

"A little late after 50 shows!" said the surprised Lynch.

"I never make snap judgments!" snapped Webb.

Only four of his original crew and cast are with him today, but all who have worked with him boost the quality of his acting and directing. Their state of nerves, however, can be gauged from the fact that the group drinks as much as 800 cups of coffee a day.

Webb rarely blows his top with actors, but does with his crew. Excuses either bore or anger him—but a legitimate error never disturbs him. Once, the camera ceased to function for two and a half hours before the breakdown was discovered. Webb reshot the $1,800-hours without a murmur.

Webb's insistence upon realism, which brings him awards as a TV pioneer, also backfires. He gets dozens of traffic tickets from people who think he can "fix" them. Shooting one show in the Skid Row section of Los Angeles, a soggy wino watched Webb take in a suspect. "Oh, the poor man, the poor man!" he moaned, staggered in to help—and ruined the scene.

The prime reason for Dragnet's continued success—despite a record number of imitators—lies in Webb himself. He has procured a free, limitless source of material; and virtually his life is devoted to it. The sole time that Webb dropped his infatuation was when his wife had her second child. The news came just as Webb was about to finish the last two scenes of a show.

"He left right away and didn't come back for two weeks," says one of the crew.

Webb's home life centers around two daughters—Stacy, 3 and Lisa, born last November—offspring of a six-year marriage with Julie London, a 24-year-old film actress.

The Webb home in suburban Encino is a 12-room early-American house. There are three acres of ground—useful for the antics of Ben, a German police dog, and Patsy, a dachshund.

Webb's chief diversions at home consist of his remarkable 1,500-record jazz collection and an ancient player piano with 200 rolls of vintage music. He has two cars, both of them Cadillacs. His wardrobe is "mostly like that of a cop"—consisting of slacks, three sport coats and two suits.

Webb even follows a typical cop's diet, mostly of meat and potatoes, and hasn't gained or lost a pound of his 165 pounds for the last ten years. He is rarely sick: "I've only been in a hospital once and that was for double pneumonia when I was five years old."

Perhaps most symbolic of his drive are two decorations in his set dressing room. Among the antique and modern furniture, Webb has an enormous map of the layout of the LAPD; and above his dressingtable is an ancient oil painting of Rudolph Valentino. His best friends arc those associated with him in Dragnet, plus a couple of writers: "I've always envied writers."

No other figure in radio or TV has such a fanatic energy, such specialized knowledge, and such a will to participate and supervise. Webb and Dragnet arc probably TV's first great love affair. And from the way they are rolling ahead today, it will be a long time before they need to worry about any serious threat from competitors.

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