The Minneapolis Star from Minneapolis, Minnesota • Page 15

A TT7 The Minneapolis Star Tuesday, Feb. 3, 1981 IB Jim Klobuchar Scott casts the weather of Today' in a new light -li i missed the compliment. Someone walks by the open door. Scott leaves a dead-serious discussion of contracts in midsentence, to call out "Hewwb!" and make kissing sounds. On television, however, rcott'.

oh-so-personal personality something. Namely, personal contact. A lot of "Today" loyalists found him especially hard to swallow during his first weeks, before he actually was a celebrity. He averaged 800 letters a week, about half of them critical. "It was disastrous," Scott said.

"I got letters: 'Get that fat slob off the air. Who do you think you are? If we want comedy, we'll watch Bob Hope. You've ruined our program. We used to love to It's 'cause I was so loud. I mean, I'm big, and big people have a tendency to turn people off sometimes." But Scott answered all of his critics and toned down his act.

Now, he says, "almost all of it is good mail." "And my act: I do those plugs, and they have a tendency to create mail." Then just how does Scott decide which potluck dinner will get the now famous 5-second plug worth thousands in free advertising. "Oh, in all honesty," says the supreme arbiter, "if something really bizarre comes in, like somebody sent a fish from Guam, frozen, a 40-pound fish one time Pan Am shipped it air freight on ice naturally you're gonna do that rather than somebody's little papier-mache doodad. "But, the one thing we do is make an effort a very conscientious effort for our own, self-serving benefit to cover regions. During the whole week we'll hit almost every state in the union. There's a method in that.

Otherwise, we try to be relatively fair, meteorologically speaking. No pun intended." NBC didn't build Scott's community bulletin board. He wheeled it Scott Tarn to Page 3B v' fv If tZ, I .4 By KARL VICK Tha MinneapolU Star Willard Scott's hard eyes watch out for a non-stop mouth. A quick, smart, rather fat man, he seems to have something of the common touch. Seems to.

Scott's touch has been one of TV's pint-sized controversies since he appeared as the "Today" show's forecaster a year ago, barreling through the weather and plugging a high school "function" in Fairfax, Va. The debate followed him to Como Lake Friday, where Scott called out the forecasts from the predawn darkness of the St. Paul Winter Carnival precisely the sort of civic celebration Scott would plug, with a grin and a wiggle of the eyebrows, somewhere between the storm brewing in the Cascades and yesterday's record high in Tempe, The New Yorker's TV critic calls Scott a phony populist. Scott is no populist. He's an entertainer.

He loves the spotlight. He adores having an audience. Whether the audience loves Scott is yet to be decided. At least he shows up for inspection now and then. "I think, in my case, I am a hustler," Scott says, looking quite frank without his toupee.

"I love it. Like, this is hustling, in my polite way. I like people. I like to go to different towns. I'm trying to this is one of them get the show out of New York, get my act out of New York, at least once a month.

Go visit the affiliates. Go down the street, say hello." Hard to swallow Scott says "hello" a lot. Partly, no doubt, because greeting is the first duty of the St. Paul Winter Carnival Celebrity Grand Marshal. But partly because he is Willard Scott.

And Willard Scott is aggressively friendly. In person, that's great. Most people get a charge out of being noticed by a celebrity. A woman opens the door to WTCN-TV's conference room. Scott turns to her: "Hi! How are you? Beautiful!" He says it so fast she might have Barbara I've had an old-fashioned crush on Lew Ayres ever since he first walked into my life as "Young Dr.

Kildare" at the Saturday afternoon movie. I told him so when we finally met last week during his visit to Minneapolis, his hometown. And then I sat down and wrote letters to a couple of my old friends to assure them that Ayres was just as soft-spoken and charming as we had dreamed on those Saturday afternoons back home at the Uptown Theater in Des Moines, Iowa. (Our crowd sat in the fourth row from the rear on the left side, eating Milk Duds, of course.) In those days, Ayres as Kildare persuaded all the junior high girls in the audience to marry young doctors. Curiously, my husband was a premed student before he ST Star Photo by Steve Schluter The entertainer With or without his wig and boutonniere, "Today" weatherman Willard Scott loves the spotlight and enjoys having an audience.

"I think, In my case, I am a hustler," he says. "I love it." Flanagan Ayres, he's human; to her, divine Oh, the I fearsome; teen-ageri An expert on teen-age tactics and disruptive behavior confided in his audience in Chaska Monday night that he looked in a thesaurus for synonyms for obnoxiousness. He said he found offensive, disagreeable, disreputable, contemptible, despicable, vile, loathsome, repugnant, scrubby, revolting, gross and repellant. "Now," he said, "have I missed anybody's kid?" The response was a montage of sighs, smirks and grimaces. But nobody raised a hand.

Everybody's teen-age kid seemed adequately covered. The man next explained he would reveal not only why teenage people are obnoxious but how they can be headed off from these pursuits. Nobody moved. He could have offered the compass heading to the Fountain of Youth and not achieved a more rapt congregation. The expert said it got down to a matter of the teen-age kid's impatience to reach adulthood, his or her search for responsibility and room.

If the parent seems to be impeding that, the kid gets obnoxious. He gets obnoxious because by then he has drilled some test cores in the family's interaction turf and discovered that when he talks or behaves disagreeably he is very often left alone. "If he's bad enough," the psychologist said, "people don't want to be around him. That means he's got privacy. He's done it by repelling people, driving them away." A woman told him she liked a neat house and sometimes went into the kid's room to tidy it up.

She thought that was acceptable. The kid didn't. He managed it so the room finally smelted so bad his own mother couldn't stand to go in and clean it. Now that, the psychologist said, is repellant. There is almost no other way to say it.

I admit divided sensations attending these sessions, and am not always a willing escort for my wife. On one hand, you certainly don't want to resist the chance to be educated about your delinquencies and obtuseness as an adult. On the other you have to confess your total unreadiness for the verbal and psychological gymnastics the counselor says you must perform to negotiate your way to bliss. He was Earnestly Bearded and Concerned, an agreeable guide into the thickets of teen-age strategies and parental futilities. The linchpin for family cordiality, he said, was the giving of responsibilities that would ease the candidate adult Klobuchar Turn to Page 5B winner Star Photo by Marlln Levisoo in 4500 Hats' neapolis even though the divorce of his parents when he was about 6 was "embarrassing," he said.

"I never knew what to tell my friends at Lake Harriet School, because in those days very few Godfearing people got divorced." While growing up, Ayres lived part of the time with his paternal grandmother, Agnes E. Ayer, a well-known Minneapolis piano teacher, and with his mother and stepfather, Bill Gilmore. He also remained friendly with his father, Lew a court reporter who played cello on the side in the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. "My first job when I was 10 was in the McKnight Building, where Flanagan Turn to Page 4B script Even Ayres, who was born Lewis Ayer in 1908, seemed surprised in recalling it. "I was 20 years old, had made one slapstick pie-throwing comedy and was awed by this sophisticated European woman of 23 named Garbo," he said.

"Although we kissed on the screen, we didn't associate much on the set. She really did remain aloof and alone. In those days the reason was that she didn't speak English too well. But what an actress! Look at those old films, and you'll see what a logical, unstylized actress she was. Her motivation as a character always came from deep within herself.

"I always thought it tragic that she abandoned her career so completely. She had so much more to give Ayres loved his boyhood in Min Children's Theatre's '500 Hats9 is big Kudos 9 switched to business administration. And he admitted that those Kildare movies were just as inspiring to junior high boys. I'm sorry that the Minneapolis. Film Festival didn't show a Kildare' film, complete with Lionel Barry-more as gruff old Dr.

Gillespie, and Laraine Day as the adorable nurse. Ayres, however, had made so many more important films, including the classic "All Quiet on the Western Front" (which was shown at the festival), "Holiday" and "Johnny Belinda." What is remarkable to me is that Ayres' first professional movie was opposite the fabled Greta Garbo in "The Kiss." It was the last silent film Garbo made. How Ayres got to that role from 44th Street and S. Upton Avenue in Minneapolis is almost a movie Star Photo by Tom Sweeney sang to Kudos winners nized for production and Bain Boehlke's direction. The first winner of the John K.

Sherman award for significant and continuing service to the Twin Cities theater community went to the Jerome Foundation of St. Paul. Participating in the program were master of ceremonies Dave Moore and a number of local actors, including host Paul Eiding, James Cada, Dianne Benjamin Hill and Garth Schumacher. Jon Cranney directed and Anita Ruth was responsible for the music. Among those presenting awards were Charles Nolte, playwright and professor of theater at the University of Minnesota, Sarah Lawless, managing director of the Denver Center Theatre Company, Barbara Field, literary manager of the Guthrie Theater, Jack Reuler, managing directorvof Mixed Blood Theatre, and Lou Bellamy, managing director of Penumbra Theatre.

Recipients of Kudos were: Lew Ayres John Peitzman I 1 By PETER VAUGHAN The Minneapolis Star The first awards ceremony for distinguished achievement in Twin Cities theater was held Monday night at the Children's Theatre and "The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins," a Children's Theatre went away the big winner. About 400 members of the Twin Cities theater community attended the 90-minute program of awards and musical entertainment sponsored by the Twin Cities Drama Critics Circle. Twenty-nine distinguished achievement awards, dubbed Kudos, were given in the fields of acting, direction, duction, playwriting, technical design and musical composition. Artistic work at 13 theaters was recognized in the awards. "500 Hats," which was produced at the Children's Theatre last spring and was the first-ever stage adaptation of a Dr.

Seuss book, brought awards to director John Donahue, writer Timothy Mason, set designer Jack Barkla and costume designer Judith Cooper. It also was cited for distinguished production. The Cricket Theatre production of "Wings," a play by Arthur Kopit about the effects of a stroke upon an aviatrix, brought awards to actress Patricia Fraser and lighting designer Michael Vennerstrom. It, too, received a production award. Other multiple winners were Theatre de la Jeune Lune's "Ubu For President," which brought an acting award to Vincent Gra-cieux and a production award, and the Theatre Perspectives production of R.C.

Sheriff's "Journey's End," which was recog New play Nancy Beckett, for "The Women Here Are No Different" at the Women's Theatre Project. Timothy Mason, for "The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins" at the Children's Theatre. Barbara Field, for "Caniille" at the Guthrie Theater. Production Cricket Theatre, for "Wings." Theatre Perspectives, for "Journey's End." Kudos Turn to Page 5B I 5 1 ummi iiiMnm f'- rn mi i- ri Paul Eiding and Dave Moore.