WHERE THERE’S LIFE, THERE’S . . . LIFE’S TV SHOW

Life, the weekly picture magazine, and television, which killed it, have always had a peculiar fascination each with the other, the fateful attraction of victim and executioner.

Life and Time sponsored and largely staffed television’s first primitive coverage of a presidential election, the Truman-Dewey contest in 1948.

When Life turned 21 in 1957, “Omnibus” and its host, Alistair Cooke, celebrated the magazine’s coming of age with a kind of docudrama on how the week’s issue was put together. The staff played themselves, and the editor, Ed Thompson, mumbled for the camera as he did during layout sessions in real life.

That show, which historically speaking proved to have been a celebration of the magazine’s late middle age, was a live broadcast. (How time flies.) Martinis smuggled in in Thermoses appeared during the long wait between rehearsal and air, and a shambles was only narrowly avoided during the show itself, which at that point was regarded as a hilarious adventure by some of the participants.

Now Life, its first issue dated Nov. 13, 1936, has turned 50, and once again television has celebrated the anniversary. A glossy, starry two-hour special hosted by Barbara Walters airs tonight at 9 on KABC Channel 7.

It is heavy with Hollywood, as Life always was and, reborn as a monthly in late 1978, still is. There are congratulatory interviews with Shirley Temple, Jane Fonda and Liz Taylor and, remarkably, a few quick excerpts from the audiotape of Marilyn Monroe’s last interview, given only two weeks before her death.

“I’d like to state here and now fame is fickle,” Monroe says. (The article was to be about fame.) “It stirs up envy, fame. Who does she think she is, Marilyn Monroe. Kind of thing, you know? It’s not everything. It’s like caviar . . . if you have it every day, you know. Too much caviar.”

Yet the voice is perky and sensible. Monroe sounds in these brief seconds like someone who has figured out the place of caviar in a balanced diet, not someone who has been sickened unto death by it.

In early October, a few thousand of the magazine’s staffers and closest friends filled the Radio City Music Hall for a taped ceremony that becomes the mortar for the special. The editors announced what they called Legend awards, presented to a dozen of the living and the dead who have figured in the magazine’s pages, from Sir Winston Churchill and the Kennedy family collectively to Bob Hope and Pablo Picasso by way of Ernest Hemingway and Muhammad Ali.

Deserving as the chosen are, the anxious aromas of ratings and publicity embrace the choices. Were there only actresses among the eligible women? (The elect are Audrey Hepburn, Helen Hayes, Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren. Were there, on the other hand, no actors, no Duke, no Coop, no Jimmy Stewart? Have Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt been gone too long or were they insufficiently Life-liked? The voice is the voice of Life, but the hands are the hands of network television.

The most affecting moments of the show have less to do with fame than with reality. There is a reunion with Dr. Ernest Ceriani, the country doctor from Kremmling, Colo., who was the subject of one of W. Eugene Smith’s most memorable picture essays. Thirty-six years later, Dr. Ceriani is still practicing, salty, tireless and reassuring, in his Colorado town. He may be the special’s most welcome guest.

Photographer Gordon Parks has a pleasant reunion with a slow-talking Muhammad Ali, whom he covered in the fighter’s great days, and another reunion, via tape, with Flavio, the starving, dying boy Parks found in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. The magazine’s readers, unbidden, donated more than $30,000 to bring Flavio to the United States for treatment, and he is now alive and well in Rio, married and a father.

Some of the editors and contributors, including Norman Mailer, seek to explain the magazine’s remarkable impact in its prime, an impact born of the show business stuff in part, but more, in the long run, by the power and duration of its images of the real world and of uncelebrated men and women at war and at peace.

But the magazine has always had uncommon access to the private moments of the celebrated. Sen. Ted Kennedy notes on the special that Life became a kind of scrapbook for the Kennedy family. The TV camera, playing over the stills from the courtship of Jackie to the tumult in the Ambassador Hotel kitchen the night Bobby was shot, demonstrates just how true that was, in triumph and tragedy.

Despite itself, the special feels less like a birthday party than a melancholy requiem for the old weekly Life (1936-1972) that was. What is significant from the show as from memory is the evidence that it was the power to communicate and not the capacity merely to entertain that gave the magazine its vast and not since equaled appeal.

Peter Kunhardt, whose father Philip was one of Life’s managing editors, was senior producer of the special; Av Westin was executive producer and Roger Goodman directed. Bill Conti did the music.