The Minneapolis Star from Minneapolis, Minnesota • Page 29

Variety IB The Minneapolis Star Wednesday, June 18, 1980 w' V--" John Carman Jim Klobuchar 1 Star Illustration by Davis K. Matheny Clear the road for Tracy, 73 Tracy Chase's wife is named Myrtle, which has a nice, sturdy sound. It conveys qualities of reason and forgiveness and a reluctance to panic all virtually demanded in a woman married to Tracy Chase. She was disrupted in her home in Sauk Centre last night by a telephone call from an interrogator in Minneapolis while her husband, 73, was in the final movements of slicking his black wing-tip shoes. The shoes are part of Chase's uniform as a full-service personality.

He wears them both for pleasure and for high voltage adventure. You can locate Tracy Chase by his black wing-tip shoes whether he is dancing at the Coliseum In Sauk Centre or bicycling 80 to 100 miles a day for six days, which he is plotting this week. "He's going on the bike ride again," she confirmed. "He's been training at the Coliseum, doing theschottische." Far from fretting, she seemed gratified. It could be worse.

Chase could be getting Into shape at the disco, which he has considered. Chase made his debut in the Jaunt With Jim people's expedition last year as the oldest cross-country biking rookie in the galaxy. His reputation established, he now modestly concedes he is ready for superstar status. Who's going to argue? A year ago he arrived at the first-day staging area outfitted with a railroad cap, Bermuda shorts, black socks, the wing-tips and a hearing aid. The spectacle startled the riders, half of whom were convinced the man had stumbled into the wrong group en route to a masquerade party.

The notion vanished an hour later when the entourage neared Buffalo and Chase asked what was that faint buzzing sound. "A freight train," explained his neighbor. He rode with unmistakable charisma and aplomb. Barnyard animals routinely ignore most passing bicycle trains. But when Chase materialized, cows stared inquisitively and seemed to demand an explanation.

His appearance gave him a strange immunity to shagging dogs. By the afternoon of the first day, hotrock teen-age riders had stopped smirking and began asking Tracy Chase what it was about him that seemed to bewitch the animals. "Cows aren't any different than people," he said. "They get tired of looking at Adidas and black biking shorts. Naw, it ain't my shoes.

It's the railroad cap. It fits in with the country. You can't fool the cows." ucie's having a ball. New news working for WTCN WTCN-TV (Channel 11) boosted Its ratings by switching its early evening newscast to 5:30 p.m., but still trails KSTP-TV (Channel 5) and WCCO-TV (Channel 4) by wide margins. The Nielsen and Arbitron ratings for May also indicate that Channel 4 has the most popular local newscast at 6 p.m.

and that Channel 5 remains on top at 10 p.m. Channel 1 1 has poured resources Into Its news department ever since early 1979, when the station prepared to relinquish its Independent status and became an NBC network affiliate. But WTCN-TV has had alarmingly small audiences for its news programs. In an effort to perk up the ratings, Channel 11 withdrew from the 6 p.m. competition with Channels 4 and 5 in April, rescheduling "NewsCenter 11" for 5:30.

"The NBC Nightly News" was moved to 6 p.m. Ratings data for May are the first since the switch. They show some upward movement for Channel 11. Arbitron said 13 percent of the audience watches the 5:30 newscast on Channel 1 1, up from a 7 percent share of the audience for the 6 p.m. newscast In February.

Nielsen said the early newscast rose from a 7 percent to a 10 percent share of the audience. Channel 1 1 still lost the time period all of its competitors. Arbitron said, "The CBS Evening News" on Channel 4 led with a 36 share, followed by ABC's "World News Tonight" on Channel 5 (24 share) and "The Dick Van Dyke Show" (20) on KMSP-TV (Channel 9). Nielsen said the CBS newscast was viewed by 37 percent of the audience, the ABC newscast by 24 percent and "The Dick Van Dyke Show" by 23 percent. Neither NBC nor Channel 11 had appreciably higher viewing levels for any of its newscasts than independent Channel 9 does for Its 9:30 p.m.

"Prime Time News." Channel 9's average audience shares at 9:30 were 11 (Arbitron) and 12 (Nielsen). Channel 4 controlled the entire time block from its "5 p.m. Report" weeknights to 7 p.m., when network programming begins. The following figures show the Arbitron audience shares and then, in parentheses, the corresponding Nielsen shares for May. 5 p.m.: "The 5 p.m.

Report, WCCO-TV, 32 (29); "MASH." WTCN-TV, 30 (27); "The Brady Bunch," KMSP-TV, 17 (20); "Ho-gan's Heroes," KSTP-TV, 16 (20). 6 p.m.: "The 6 p.m. Report," WCCO-TV, 33 (32); "Eyewitness News," KSTP-TV. 30 (31); "Tic Tac Dough," KMSP-TV. 19 (19); "The NBC Nightly News," WTCN-TV, 1 1 (9).

6:30 p.m.: "PM Magazine," WCCO-TV, 39 (38); "Prisoner: Cell Carman Turn to Page 2B Arnaz conquers Broadway, takes on Hollywood By DORIS KLEIN i Independent News Alliance LOS ANGELES They played Lucie Arnaz's song on Broadway last year, but this year Hollywood isn't playing along so nicely. Arnaz left the hit musical "They're Playing Our Song" this spring to co-star with Neil Diamond in a remake of the Al Jolson film classic, "The Jazz Singer." The film has been plagued by dissension from the start, through no fault of Arnaz's. Disagreements over the film's concept, changes of directors and screenwriters and the rumored nervousness of singer Diamond in his first film role have boosted the film's cost from $8 million to $14 million. But with $42 million in guaranteed bookings, EMI, the film's backer, doesn't appear worried yet. And the 28-year-old star is an eternal optimist.

For one thing, she says, she feels she's the perfect choice for the part. "Mollie, the agent, is me," she said. "She's honest. She says what she thinks. She doesn't tell you one thing and mean another." Arnaz, first choice for the role, couldn't accept the part initially because she was committed to the Broadway musical.

Deborah Raff in got the part. When Raffin quit the show during one of the many rewrites, Arnaz was approached again and persuaded to take the role. Arnaz scoffs at some of the. "I read in one column that the film had to be 90 percent reshot when I joined it," she said during a day off at her Los Angeles home. "That's nonsense.

The film was half-finished. Sure there were changes in the script. There are in every film." The original film, made in 1927, is a landmark in the industry. Based on Samson Rafaelson's stage play, "The Jazz Singer" was the first talking motion picture. It starred Al Jolson as Jack Robbins.

Danny Thomas made one remake of the film and Jerry Lewis did another for television. This latest version has been somewhat updated. It is the story of Jess Robin (Diamond), the son of a cantor (Laurence Olivier) who turns from family traditions to become a pop singer. This time around the love interest is a tough-but-honest agent (Arnaz), not an actress. Love of Lucie's "Neil and I have a great time working together," said Arnaz.

"The other day, he and I and our makeup men were crammed together in the honeywagon (trailer bathroom) going over our lines. We were kidding and laughing so hard, people must have wondered what was going on there. "I started to walk out and there Arnaz Turn to Page 5B We brooded that Chase might disappear after the first day, when it rained sheets for an hour and a half and then shifted to 90 degrees Klobuchar Turn to Page SB Lucie Arnaz with her fiance, Laurence Luckinbill Terra firma has no hold on sci-fi's Mr. Space The late chief of the Soviet space program said Russia had become the seacoast to the universe. For centuries what they have really yearned for is a warm-water port they can use all the time.

Now they have one: the rest of the universe. Ben Bova 99 said, 'there's this Sen. Joseph McCarthy in Wisconsin who would nail us and you to a cross if we published a book that said the Russians are smarter than we So that book never saw the light of day. Bova was encouraged to write another nothing to do with politicsset in the far future, which he did and which was published. It was so wretched that the only copy of it he has today is a Japanese translation.

In 1957 the Soviets launched the first space satellite, Sputnik, and the Americans countered with Project Vanguard. Bova was working on the Upper Darby (Pa.) News at the time, and sweet-talked himself into the public relations position of junior technical editor for the project. Long before Sputnik was launched, von Braun had told President Eisenhower that his team of Army engineers and technicians could put a satellite into orbit around the Earth. But Eisenhower wanted a rocket developed for non-military purposes to emphasize the peaceful uses of space. Sputnik and the subsequent failure of the Vanguard rocket, however, left Eisenhower no choice but to turn to von Braun.

On Jan. 31, 1958, the Jupiter rocket lifted off, carrying a 30-pound satellite called Explorer into elliptical orbit. It was the first success of the American space program and the realization of a new age. "We got to the moon 1 1 years later, and everybody said what are we going to do now? We relaxed because the space program was sold as a race, getting to the moon was seen as competition against the Russians. The Russians took one look at the United States, saw we were charging right past them and told us they weren't interested in going to the moon anyway.

And we bought the lie. Bova Turn to Page 5B By CHRISTOPHER EVANS Mlnnetpolli Star Staff Writer About the same time Wernher von Braun was making Hitler happy with the V2 rocket, a baby Ben Bova was sitting in a planetarium in Philadelphia waiting for the lights to go out. Click. The universe right there on the ceiling of the Franklin Institute. Just the thing to get the juices jumping, the very feeling von Braun probably had watching his 46-foot, olive-green Wunderwaffen scream off into space and blow cities such as London and Antwerp into the near Stone Age.

Too late to stem Germany's loss, but bringing closer the vision of the universe Ben Bova saw on the ceiling. The very vision, in fact, that sucked him into a slipstream of science fiction culminating 35 years later here, in The Star newsroom. The promotion circuit calls. Bova is here selling his magazine, "Omni," a stellar shot-in-the-arm for the hi-tech junkie and friend of the flying vampire toad, nothing too far out for these boys, always on the edge of tomorrow, taking on space in a way von Braun never could. They were alike though, Bova and von Braun, both apostles of the universe; they just went about getting there differently.

When von Braun came to the United States after the war, the scientific community had pretty much written rocketry off as being impractical. Atomic bombs were huge and needed a plane such as the B-29 to carry them. Given the technology, the idea of building a long-range rocket capable of carrying such a payload with any reliability was discounted. The Soviets, however, continued their experiments. The nuclnar bomb was made smaller, and by the early 1950s American intelligence reports showed Soviet St I1 is XT' A v- rockets were hitting pickle barrels from several thousand miles away.

The United States had the V2 and its descendants, which they were using simply as high-altitude sounding rockets. By the time Bova had written his first science-fiction novel, the Russians were beginning to explore outer space and the Americans, still in the space Stone Age, panicked and implemented a crash program to put Nstronauts on the moon. The Americans eventually beat the Russians, and Bova, student of science in his first flight of fiction, had pretty much predicted tne Apollo space program. "The editor of the publishing house was kind enough to call me in and say, 'This isn't as bad as a lot of the stuff we do publish. It's just got a silly plot, but we don't mind After all that's what they thought science fiction should be.

the editor Star Photo by Steve Schluter Ben Bova i i.