“I could live my own life, on the air”: Ginger Rogers, Patriarchy Disincarnate, and the Raging Ageism behind AI

News these days being as dire as it comes, with the rise of fascism in my native Germany and my former second home, the US, foremost on my mind—with the related ascendance of AI and its foretold extermination of humanity thrown into the bargain—I am, as if clinging to bygone fictions to which I can yet subscribe in a willing suspension of disbelief, flicking through digitized copies of decades-old periodicals, as I have long been wont to do.

Granted, “reported” may be a bit of a stretch.  Granted, too, that these days, when traditional news outlets, who for too long have muddled reportage with commentary, are being called “fake” so that the phoniest of all presidential office holders in the United States does not have to endure the criticism he is bringing upon himself and thoroughly deserves—it matters decidedly less than the future of democracy now at stake that Hollywood’s promotion machine of yore predictably churned out material by less-than-reliable sources.  Nonetheless, when in comes to rags such as Radio Stars, a soupçon of suspicion is hardly misplaced.

Not that I had ever heard of Gladys Hall, who, soi-disant or otherwise, served as the reporter on the article in question.  The slightest bit of research will tell you that Hall (1891–1977) was among the more benign and benevolent of the tabloid journalists who made it their bread-and-butter to spread or manufacture “news” about the fiction of Tinseltown.  No doubt, her relative restraint is what makes Hall a lesser-known purveyor, make that perpetrator, of propaganda for which Hedda and Louella are still known to this day.

In the September 1936 issue of Radio Stars, Hall’s subject was Ginger Rogers, or, more precisely, the movie star’s attitude toward the competing but increasingly ancillary medium of radio.

Now, I have never made Ginger Rogers the subject of any of my 875 articles published here on broadcastellan, even though I mentioned her a few times.  I fondly recall as well hanging out with one of her greatest gay fans, a friend of Ginger’s then in his eighties, his dentures none too stable, trying, on his birthday, to get just across the street to Mary’s Crisis, a run-down piano bar in New York City’s West Village, in the company, no less, of actress Patricia Clarkson—but who am I, Cindy Adams?!

By the time the Radio Stars article appeared, Rogers was already an A-lister, if that anachronism may be applied to Hollywood in the heyday of the studio system before its collapse in 1962.

Apart from having been a supporting player in vehicles starring my favorite leading lady, Claudette Colbert, Rogers had already co-starred twice with Fred Astaire, with whom she became most closely associated in the 1930s as a silver screen performer, notwithstanding the fact that, before that fateful and fortuitous association, he had starred in enduring classics such as 42nd Street (1933) and Flying Down to Rio (1933).

Prior to Hall’s interview with her for Radio Stars, Rogers had appeared as well in two films set in the world of wireless: Professional Sweetheart (1933) and Twenty Million Sweethearts (1934), even though no mention is made of that in the article.

Why would a motion picture performer on the rise in the mid-1930s declare publicly that she would rather be on radio? It is a remarkable statement to make, to say the least.  But that is precisely what Rogers was claimed to have said in the 1936 article.

“For so many reasons,” Rogers reputedly replied when asked that question.  “Why” radio, I mean..

I’ll get jumbled up trying to explain them. First of all, because it would be something new for me.  And I always take a vital interest in anything new.  New countries, new people, new problems, new things to do, intrigue me! I dislike roots and rules of three and routines.

Not that radio was an entirely new medium for Rogers, who had performed on the air as early as 1931, on the now forgotten Conoco Listener’s Hour.  “Kinda funny of me to talk about what I shall do as a radio star!” Rogers reported scoffed.

Kinda polite to wait till you’re asked, don’t you think? Because I’ve never been asked.  I’ve never had any big radio offers.  I’ve done quite a lot of broadcasting as a guest artist, you know.  But I’ve never been on a real, sure-enough weekly program and no one has ever asked me to be.  Once, I took Leslie Howard’s place on the Shell Chateau.  I’ve been on Mary Pickford’s Parties from Pickfair broadcast.  I’ve done other broadcasts on the Shell.  I did a dramatic sketch on the Hind’s Hour.  On the Parties from Pickfair program I sang song I—ah, there—wrote myself.

Rogers, then, lamented the fact that she had not been offered her own series—as silent screen legend Mary Pickford had—on network radio.

While, in broadcasting, the year 1936 is not commemorated as much as 1926—which saw the formation of network radio, with NBC being founded in May 1926 and launched, six months later, in November that year—radio had, for better or worse, emerged by the mid-1930s from its experimental phase, and programming developed apace with the inauguration of long-running network series such as the anthology series Lux Radio Theatre (1934–55), in which Rogers would star eleven times, beginning in October 1936. and Cavalcade of America (1935–1953), with the thoroughly radiogenic Columbia Workshop about to make its premiere in November 1936.

To be sure, none of those anthology programs relied on a single performer for its distinction, the presence of Cecil B. DeMille as host and ostensible producer-director of Lux Radio Theatre notwithstanding.

On the air in 1936, starring in their own programs, were enduring personalities such as Bob Hope, Burns and Allen, Fred Allen, and Jack Benny, with some performers, among them crooners Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee, already having demonstrated longevity in broadcasting by that time.

[i[n the first place—and though I’m probably not the first person to think of this angle—it’s the only theatrical career which can certainly be as long-lived as the person having the career.  For ability doesn’t age.  It mellows and matures with age and experience.  Only the body ages, and the face.  And the face and the body are not on exhibition on the air.  And so, unless I should be struck dumb at sunrise, I could keep on broadcasting until the last dance step had danced away from these dancing feet, until this ole red head becomes an ole grayhead.

An “ole grayhead”? Rogers was still in her twenties when the article appeared.  And yet she was concerned and apparently outspoken about ageism—the sexism of the system at a time when female stars enjoyed greater marquee value than their male counterparts—and what we would now call “body shaming.”

I want to get away from dancing, too much of it, anyway.  I started in pictures as a dramatic actress.  People seem to have forgotten that.  I want to do dramatic work.  And on the air, I could.

Rogers expressed frustration about the arduous work demanded of her as a singer and dancer in motion pictures while “dramatic” parts were withheld from her.

We spend weeks, Fred and I, just rehearsing.  We spend many more weeks in production.  After that, we have to stand by for even more weeks for possible retakes.  We have not only to dance and to sing but we have to speak lines, to dress and to look as well as possible.

Roger’s enthusiasm for radio was predicated on the assumption that radio was “easier” than motion pictures—easier, for one, because there was less pressure on appearances and less need for rehearsals, as performers could play their parts script in hand.

“I’ll memorize my lines as I do for pictures,” she vowed.  “I’m a fairly quick study and I would make it my business to be quicker for the air.  Nonetheless, radio to her appeared less demanding, which may not have been the smartest way of auditioning for the medium.

Once I had learned the ropes, what kind of a microphone suits me best, the distance I should stand from the mike and so on—it would come fairly easily, I think.  Just as, when you first make pictures, you have to consider timing and spacing and what your best camera angles are and what they are not—and after a time, all such mechanics become second nature.

Those “mechanics” aside, Rogers reasoned, a career in radio would not tie her to the motion picture colony but would enable her to move more freely:

I could live almost anywhere I might feel like living, if I were a radio star—anywhere in the United States, that is.  I could plug in from New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington—wherever I happened to be when my broadcast went on.  As it is I have to stay in Hollywood, whether I like it or not.

“I happen to like it,” Rogers was quick to add.

It’s home.  And so it’s no real hardship.  But there are times when my feet sprout little wings and I’d like to be off and away.  There are times when the wanderlust has to be downed.

“Oh, I’d love it” Rogers reportedly sighed when contemplating the relative and imagined freedom of radio.

I could live my own life—on the air.  I could go to town … I could play around in overalls without a prick of conscience.  I could gain ten pounds and who cares? I could have some time to stay at home and be domestic—something I’ve never been able to do! I could have some fun with other girls as other girls do.  I could shake off the Sword of Damocles.  I’d never have to think: ‘the life of a star is five years.’

In the mid-1950s, by which time radio had been “abandoned,” in Fred Allen’s words, “like the bones at a barbecue,” the Hollywood system still permitted Rogers, then in her forties, a few starring roles, among them the crowd-pleasing Technicolor noir Black Widow (1954), the cost-effectively claustrophobic Tight Spot (1955), and the box office bomb that was RKO’s The First Traveling Saleslady (1956), with which Rogers unwittingly brought down the former home.