Author: Harry Heuser

Born and raised in Germany, educated in New York City (BA, MA, PhD), Harry Heuser is a writer, exhibition curator and lecturer.
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Miss Austen Regrets . . . What?

Given the present interest in Jane Austen, the person and her fiction, BBC One is likely to attract a sizable audience tonight with its biographical drama Miss Austen Regrets (previously broadcast in the US). According to the current issue of the Radio Times, which declares it to be the “Drama of the Week,” the film is concerned with Austen’s final years, which should leave many of those tuning in to this “Whatever Became of Jane?” tale rather less than elated. As such, it is a laudable project that stands apart from the Becoming Jane stories preferred in Hollywood. What might she have to regret, though, that Doris Day of the literary world? Surely not the fact that she remained what used to be termed a “spinster”?

While I rather prefer the more robust novels of the Brontës, or the Schadenfreude of Fanny Burney, I was only too pleased to be going on a literary tour in search of Austen’s homes in the south of England. Shown here are three of the author’s residences I have visited (or merely walked past) since moving to Britain in the fall of 2004. Chawton, in Hampshire (above), Bath (center), and Austen’s final home in Winchester (below).

Miss Austen may be unable to lunch these days; but at Chawton, the exterior of which is featured in the film, you can gawk at cups and spoons that may (or may not) have belonged to her family. Traveling, to be sure, is no substitute for reading; nor, for that matter, is listening to dramatizations of her works, of which there are many.

Although she is particularly popular in these early days of the 21st century, Austen has long been considered a most adaptable novelist. Her lively dialogue renders novels like Pride and Prejudice ideally suited to the stage and screen, while, on the radio, even the epistolary form of her earlier, posthumously published Lady Susan constitutes no impediment. The novels adapted for US radio during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s are Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey (NBC University Theater, 15 October 1950), as well as Pride and Prejudice.

On this day, 27 April, in 1941, Jessica Tandy was heard in a Great Plays production of Pride and Prejudice, subsequent adaptations of which starred Joan Fontaine (Theater Guild, 18 November 1945) and Angela Lansbury (University Theater, 20 February 1949). In whatever truncated form, the story was also presented on Studio One (12 August 1947), Romance (first on 13 June 1944, numerous times thereafter, and shared online here), the James Hilton-hosted Hallmark Playhouse (8 July 1948) and the syndicated 1940s program Favorite Story.

Would Austen have made a good radio writer? This is a question once posed and answered by William Morwood, a writer who scripted episodes of series like Murder at Midnight, The Shadow and the daytime drama Road of Life. In an article written back in 1986 for Persuasions, the Journal of the Jane Austen Society, Morwood quipped that “Austen had a real potential as a daytime serial writer.” In the case of Pride and Prejudice, however, she made the fatal error to bring the story to a “happy ending” after what would serve as material for no more than perhaps three years on the air. In daytime there could be no final and happy endings short of a cancellation.”

The ending that Gwyneth Hughes, the writer of Miss Austen Regrets, conceived for the novelist’s personal story fully justifies the title. I am still not convinced, however, that Austen should have had anything to be remorseful about. We, on the other hand, would have reason to feel sorry for ourselves if Austen had married and raised a family rather than giving up for adoption the issue of her mind and heart’s imaginings.

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Hitler or Miss: When Nazis Take a D(r)ubbing

The last time I was greeted with ’Allo ‘Allo! (1982-92), I was stepping into the Carne Di Hall in Budapest. As the restaurant sign already warned me, I was in for the slaughter of languages and had to prepare for the Wurst. I was too busy though poring over the menu to ponder whether a British sitcom set in Nazi-occupied France might be in poor taste. Sipping my instant coffee this morning, I once again caught a few snippets of the show when I came across this item on the BBC News online. According to the report, Allo ‘Allo! has by now aired in forty countries—but I did not grow up in one of them. You see, was born and raised in Germany.

Before moving to the US, I was unaware just how popular The Sound of Music is elsewhere; I had never seen it. Before relocating to Britain, I had never even heard of The Colditz Story (1955), without a screening of which it would not be Easter in the United Kingdom. Coming of age in West Germany, I was being sheltered from words and images that would make my grandparents uneasy. I may not have gotten stuck behind the Wall, but the world’s views of my grandfatherland were being carefully filtered for me all the same. Some decade and a half after its last original episode aired in Britain, ’Allo, ‘Allo! is being readied for its Deutsch debut. Is it springtime for Hitler in Germany? Is it all right for the offspring of Hitler’s children to laugh at the extreme right? Are my fellow countrymen and women ready to redefine the “Camp” in Concentration Camp? I am not sure whether Germans find it difficult to laugh at caricatures of their former selves because they cannot make light of their past or because they so desperately want to feel proud of themselves.

Perhaps, the reception of Heil Honey, I’m Home! is going to be the ultimate test. Even the British considered that one too hard to stomach. Then again, so much depends on the dubbing; and when it comes to pop cultural imports, Germans do quite a bit of cleaning up.

I realized that when I first watched the Marilyn Monroe comedy The Prince and the Showgirl in its original version. The German translation does away with all the German, turning Monroe’s character into a French-American. ‘Allo, ‘allo? Whatever historical context there was in The Prince —the Balkan crisis leading to World War I—is being erased to leave nothing but a fairytale. Now, the original is mostly that, but you’ve got to wonder at the pains the German film industry took during the late 1950s to change the background of this innocuous piece of popular culture so as to keep from those who came to see a bombshell any memories of bombs and shell shock.

Germans get edgy when confronted elsewhere with language that recalls their past. I remember going to Coney Island with my sister. We walked past the famous rollercoaster; and when I told her its name, she thought it “geschmacklos” (“tasteless”). The word Cyclone reminded her of Zyklon B, the poison with which our grandparents’ generation had exterminated thousands of their Jewish neighbors, colleagues, and relations.

This afternoon, BBC 2 broadcast Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), the spy thriller whose premise it was that VE-Day had not taken care of the Nazis altogether. Not having seen it since the 1999 Hitchcock centenary screenings at the MoMA, I am going to revisit Notorious in a moment; and I shall keep in mind that, when the film premiered in Germany, it was reduced to the story of drug smuggling.

To leave no doubt as to the kind of villainy depicted, Notorious was retitled “Weisses Gift” (“white poison”). How can a people get the picture if it does not get the sound to go with it?

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The Hard Way, Another Way

Now, what is wrong with this picture? That is what I thought last night when I screened the Vincent Sherman-directed melodrama The Hard Way (1943). In the title credits, vaguely reminiscent of the extravagant remake of Imitation of Life (1959) in its display of girl’s best friends, the moral of the film seems clearly foreshadowed, especially for audience’s watching The Hard Way upon its initial release, in the relative austerity and climate of restraint during wartime.

Just what does it take to get such sparklers? Apparently, it takes a woman hard as rocks, who insists on having it her way but, rocks and all, is bound to fall rock-bottom hard. That is where we meet Ida Lupino’s character, who is fished out of the water after an attempted suicide.

As it turns out, the opening credits are misleading, even if the narrative eventually falls into a predictable groove, coming full circle. While it tells a rags-to-riches story, The Hard Way is not about material enrichment. It is about ambition, the desire to escape a life of hardship. Or is it about sibling rivalry? Or selflessness put to the test?

The Hard Way somehow seems too soft, like Lupino’s dreamy eyes. I mean, Baby Face (1933) it ain’t. Then again, this is coded Hollywood. The Hard Way plays like a draft for Mildred Pierce (1945): a woman struggling and scheming behind the scenes so that a younger relative may have that new dress, the big break, her name in lights—all, that is, except the same man. The scenario calls Joan Crawford and Ann Blyth to mind; and, indeed, those two would have fared better in this show-biz vehicle than the rather too sensitive Ida Lupino and the altogether too plain Joan Leslie.

The problem is that rooting for Lupino’s Helen Chernen is easy, and it gets in the way of the misogynistic rationalizing that a woman without a man does not live a life worth living. I kept hoping that, instead of pushing her sister onto the boards, Helen would finally push her off them and take the lead herself. Who, I ask, would pick Leslie over Lupino, unless, perhaps, for a cow-milking contest?

Nor did I buy Jack Carson (who also co-starred in the aforementioned Mildred Pierce) as a suicide; robust and none too philosophical, his Albert Runkel struck me as too much of a trouper to call it quits that way.

The only player that is cast perfectly in The Hard Way is Gladys George as the washed-up, boozy Lily Emery (pictured opposite Lupino above, in what to me is the film’s most affecting scene). George brought to the show the brand of pathos that an old-fashioned backstage backstabbing melodrama requires, and watching Lupino push her where she wants her makes you wish there had been more of this sort of intrigue along the way.

As I thought of an alternative cast for the film, I once again availed myself of the theater of the mind, being that radio dramatizations routinely recast plays made famous on stage and screen (as previously discussed here). The Lux Radio Theater version, presented on 20 March 1944, offers this arrangment of Hollywood players: Miriam Hopkins as Helen, Anne Baxter as her younger sister, Katie, Franchot Tone as the man loved by both, and Chester Morris as the hapless Runkel.

Host Cecil B. DeMille sets the scene with the kind of intimacy for which Lux was famous. It truly brought the stars home:

The Hard Way is a drama of tempestuous emotion.  We’ll go backstage, into the life of the theater, behind the scenes of glamour, to discover what one woman’s ambition can do to those she loves.  There’s always a fascination for me in a story of the theater.  All my life has been spent there.  From the time I was six or seven years old and hung around backstage, watching my father and David Belasco at the business of staging plays.

The strident, temperamental Ms. Hopkins, well remembered, no doubt, by many Lux listeners from her recent success opposite Bette Davis in Old Acquaintance (the 2007 Broadway revival of which I reviewed here) brings to the role of Helen what the more sophisticated and emotionally complex interpretation of the character by Lupino denies us: a single-minded ruthlessness.

It is convenient to observe in hindsight that the scheming big sister backstage, fighting for the kind of parts she could never get, was more ideally suited to Hopkins, whose days as a leading lady were pretty much over.

Hopkins would not make another movie for half a decade and instead would take either supporting roles or appear in B-pictures thereafter. Still, Hopkins has the kind of intensity that, in the close-up medium of film, can appear shrill and overbearing, but that works well on the stage, where she starred during those days in plays like The Skin of Our Teeth (1943) and The Perfect Marriage (1944).

To be sure, Lupino comes from an old theatrical family; but in The Hard Way, her performance seems too understated for the kind of histrionics fit for that toothsome stew of the sensational and the sentimental, the kind of potboiler that, for all its misogyny, was once known as a woman’s picture.

Not that the Lux production is pitch perfect. Its main fault lies in its use of an omniscient narrator to string together the episodes of Helen’s life.  No longer is it she who, from her deathbed, recalls the past after having so desperately attempted to drown it; instead, the teller of tales is DeMille, who sets the scene for the leads to inhabit—until the next commercial break, that is.  Anyone hoping to abandon the formula of a program designed to sell soap would, like the washed-up Helen Chernen, fail the hard way. 

Ultimately, The Hard Way lacks the energy that makes films camp.  It is as if Lupino did not quite know what motivates Helen or else did not believe in and accept the motivation she was dealt with.  It is as if she herself asked, as I did, “Now, what is wrong with this picture?”

[I watched The Hard Way again on 31 Jan./1 Feb. 2026, after which viewing this blog entry was edited.]

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“Mine ear, I thank it, brought me to thy sound”: Will Shakespeare and the Radio

“Wanted: A Radio Shakespeare!” That is the title of an article in Radio Broadcast, published in the spring of 1926. Radio drama was still in its infancy back then, and those fed up with the theatrical entertainments on the air were quick to point out what many would claim thereafter: that Shakespearean drama was an excellent model for unseen theatricals, being that the bard relied less on scenery or physical action and more on words to create characters and tell their stories.

“In the time of Elizabeth there were no stage-sets such as we know them today,” Gordon Lea remarked in his 1926 study Radio Drama and How to Write It. “I dare to believe that the scene supplied by the imagination of the audience in those conditions gave Shakespeare’s texts a fuller significance than many an elaborate setting of more modern times.”

To commemorate the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth on this day, 23 April, in 1564, I am going to consider playwright’s fate on commercial radio, whose producers, as The Magnificent Montague drove home, were less concerned with the cultural than with the popular. Then again, Shakespeare could always be relied upon to assuage those who looked upon radio with disdain and who listened far less frequently than they talked back. Among the Shakespearean plays readied for the airwaves were The Taming of the Shrew (soundstaged for the John Barrymore Theater on 26 July 1937, Hamlet (presented by the Theater Guild on 4 March 1951), Othello (adapted for Suspense as a two-parter broadcast on 4 May and 11 May 1953), as well as Julius Caesar (in a Mercury Theater production already discussed here).

Owing to the CBS Radio Workshop, we even get an audience with the immortal bard whose stained-glass likeness (shown above) faces me whenever I step inside my library to reach for a piece of pulp. Conjured up for an interview broadcast on 24 February 1956, he was asked: “Who wrote the plays of William Shakespeare.” Not one of those “Who was buried in Grant’s tomb?” kind of questions, to be sure.

Hermia’s words in Midsummer Night’s Dream downplay the challenges of being sightless. A keen ear will succeed where the eye is rendered useless:

Dark night, that from the eye his function takes,
The ear more quick of apprehension makes;
Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense,
It pays the hearing double recompense.
Thou art not by mine eye, Lysander, found;
Mine ear, I thank it, brought me to thy sound.
But why unkindly didst thou leave me so?

Radio listeners need not be left in the dark. They find an audio guide in the narrator, a voice we can trace to the chorus in ancient Greece. From Shakespeare, the wireless playwright may freely borrow the aside, a convention much used in Victorian melodrama, but considered outmoded in 20th-century theater. In radio, those whispered confidences gained force and significance.

Tuning in, we are being addressed, as if singled out, to receive privileged information, although often from the mouths of questionable personages with much to answer for. On the radio, the soliloquy became a convention in soap operatics, causing James Thurber to sneer:

The people of Soapland are constantly talking to themselves [. . .]. The soap people also think aloud a great deal of the time, and this usually is distinguished from straight soliloquy by being spoken into a filter, a device that lends a hollow, resonant tone to the mental voice of the thinker.

Whether it attests to the bard’s radio readiness or simply suggests a conservative approach to his works, adaptations for radio rarely went beyond abridgments. On the air, listeners were presented with a Streamlined Shakespeare, with mere scraps from King Lear, snippets from Romeo and Juliet, or digests of As You Like It.

“Poor Hamlet, he has never been so interrupted” the narrator of Norman Corwin’s “Seems Radio Is Here to Stay” sighs facetiously as the engineer in the broadcasting studio effect the prince’s execution: “Stand by to hear a Dane evaporate.” There was that time, though, when Hamlet went his own way, escaping the play that takes his name.

How would Shakespeare have fared as a radio dramatist, dealing with that special brand of patronage known as advertising? Just listen to his misadventures in Hollywood, as imagined in this Jerome Lawrence-Robert E. Lee comedy, in which a frustrated “Mr. Shakespeare” (voiced by Vincent Price) discovers that one of his plays is being considered as a “summer replacement for Milton Berle,” to be called A Date With Juliet.

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“. . . originally written for Bette Davis”: Arch Oboler’s “Alter Ego”

Get ready for a few bumpy nights. As anyone watching Turner Classic Movies UK is aware, Bette Davis is currently “on tour.” The expired thespian is even scheduled to make appearances at our local Arts Centre here in Wales, albeit not to account for her assault on Welsh culture in The Corn Is Green.

Apparently, the announcement of a retrospective of her films, reels now making the rounds in Britain, did not strike promoters as being sensational enough to herald the coming-to-town of one of filmdom’s most celebrated emoters. Even with their eyes shut and her trademark peepers out of the picture, Davis still managed to wow them on the radio, inspiring the medium’s foremost melodramatist, Arch Oboler, to write plays especially for her. One such author-artist collaboration, “An American Is Born,” I have already discussed here.

A still greater tour-de-force was “Alter Ego,” a psychological thriller inspired, no less, by a study published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. The play was first produced by the Texaco Star Theater and broadcast on 5 October 1938 with Davis in the role of a young woman compelled by an inner voice to kill her lover.

Retitled “Another World,” the psychodrama was subsequently presented on Arch Oboler’s Plays (28 July 1939), with character actress Betty Garde in the lead.

On this day, 22 April, in 1945, “Alter Ego” was once again sound-staged under its original title, in a production that was part of the anthology series Your Radio Hall of Fame (which, at the time of this writing, was made available by Jerry Haendiges on his website Same Time, Same Station).

The play was introduced by its grandiloquent author, Arch Oboler, whose ego was big enough for any number of alters. Oboler was quick to point out that “Alter Ego” was “originally written for Bette Davis”; but since the Radio Hall of Fame paid “tribute to radiO” and was no doubt on a tight budget, the play was performed on that the occasion with “two of radio’s outstanding actresses”: Ann Shepard and Mercedes McCambridge (pictured above and previously commemorated here).

It is “definitely a play indigenous to the radio form,” Oboler commented on the published script. “In no other medium could the ‘two mind systems’ existing in the same body be portrayed as effectively.” That did not stop him from adapting “Alter Ego” for the movies, as was dutifully pointed out by Your Radio Hall of Fame host Clifton Fadiman. The Oboler-directed Bewitched (1945), in theaters at the time of the broadcast, starred Phyllis Thaxter in the role of the tormented Joan, with Audrey Totter lending her voice but not appearing onscreen as Joan’s alter ego, Carmen.

“Alter Ego” is a sensational play that, according to one contemporary critic, has all the subtlety of a sparring match. Before the duel can commence, playwright Oboler sets the scene: a cell in a state penitentiary, where Joan is awaiting her execution. Having no one to talk to about the inner voices that haunt her, Joan addresses her dead mother, promising to tell her “everything that happened.”

Joan’s ordeal started with the “boy next door,” Bob. Soon after her father announced their engagement, Joan (Shepard) is being possessed by a voice (McCambridge) commanding her to leave her husband-to-be and to stop fighting her impulses: “Give it up to me—your body, your mind. You must, you will. I won’t go back in the dark. I’ll live, I’ll live!”

Joan is at a loss to communicate even—or least of all—to Bob the strange urgings that she herself does not comprehend. When Bob refuses to let go of Joan, Carmen forces Joan to stab him to death with a pair of scissors by dictating the movements of the body she longs to possess.

Joan is tried for murder. About to be acquitted, she confesses to the crime of which she believes herself to be innocent. Knowing no other way out, she determines to conquer the voice within by giving up the body they both inhabited. Joan faces the gallows. After the trap is sprung, a soft-voiced Joan triumphs from the beyond: “You were wrong, Carmen—evil one—you were wrong. . . . Now there is peace.”

Apparently, Oboler deems the morose Joan—or any woman talking to an inner twin or a mother in the imagined hereafter rather than confide in a man to whom she is supposed to give her hotly contested body, a body altogether past cure, if indeed the desire to escape a sanctioned union is in need of one.

Advocating suicide in lieu of therapy, let alone a reform of the patriarchal system, the master of pop-psychology schlock shuts Joan up so as to keep her from speaking the mind she is argued to have been out of. I am surprised Ms. Davis did not take those scissors and, at the very least, cut the script to pieces.

Then again, unlike the actresses who followed her, she did get to take on a dual role, duel with a certain Joan, and rise to the challenge of upstaging herself.

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Travels with My Antenna

If I did not already have a past, the seaside resort of Brighton might be just the place to get one. Last night, I got back from a jaunt to the ever popular London by the Sea, and what now follows is the kind of literary travelogue with the keeping of which I amuse myself in these hours of homebound retrospection. This time around, I need not dip into the reflecting pool of personal reminiscences, considering that the former fishing village of Brighthelmstone is brimming with the wickedness of others. The local museum introduces visitors to many a story about the less than pious townspeople, vengeful dames like the Chocolate Cream Poisoner, and various murderous goings-on (such as the Brighton Trunk Murders) that give you a pretty good idea why the place lent its name to thrillers like The Brighton Strangler (adapted here for Suspense) and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, which famously opens with the line: “Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.”

Brighton sure is a hotbed of passion. After all, it was put on the map by Prince Regent George IV, who converted an old farmhouse here to erect his pleasure dome (pictured above on a bright Sunday morning) so that he might escape the strictures of the court and be with his unlawfully wedded wife, Maria Fitzherbert (“unlawful,” since soon-to-be-declared mad King George III did not give his approval).

“I’d like to be at the centre of all the devilry,” said the eccentric old woman with whom Henry Pulling got a “bizarre foretaste” of what it was like to Travel with [his] Aunt. Returning to the crime scene of Brighton Rock, Greene had his unlikely pair of travellers check into the Royal Albion. “Apparently,” Henry remarks, Aunt Augusta “had come first to Brighton when she was quite a young woman, full of expectations which [he was] afraid were partly fulfilled.” No doubt, Augusta had come to town for the same delights that attracted Jane Austen’s Lydia (in Pride and Prejudice, heard here in a Studio One production), namely to be at a “gay bathing place covered with officers.”

Like Greene’s free-spirited septuagenarian, we wanted to “be near the Palace Pier and the Old Steine.” So, we booked our room in the hotel next to the Albion, the stylish Royal York. According to last weekend’s edition of the Argus, Brighton’s local newspaper, the Royal York had just reopened after some eighty years, during which time it had housed government offices. Now, travellers can once again occupy rooms once slept in by Dickens, Disraeli, and Thackeray, who (in Vanity Fair) remarked that Brighton “always looks brisk, gay, and gaudy, like a harlequin’s jacket.”

In American radio drama, designed to supply a skeletal plot of classics like Vanity Fair (a thick volume condensed here for Favorite Story to play out in just under twenty minutes), such brightly hued capes are rarely captured in sound. Listeners were not so much transported to colorful locales as left to their own brushes. Without a map or an encyclopaedia at hand, it is difficult for anyone tuning in to picture a scene. Instead, listeners either pencilled in the missing detail or liberally applied the eraser of ignorance.

Sometimes, you just have to switch the old wireless off and spread your antennae to get a feel for what is wanting on the air . . .

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On Not Being Cross

Yesterday, standing before a small group of professionals at a writing seminar conducted by yours truly, I introduced myself by listing my credentials (a slight record, to be sure) and . . . accounting for my diction. I always feel that I ought to do so, rather than letting my voice speak volumes for itself and raising the eyebrow of doubt in the process. There I was, in that conference room in Mid-Wales, teaching English imported from America but first gathered at a German high school. However smooth, my spoken English is like a lumpy couch. You can tell where it came from, but there are obvious dents and tears suggesting a few uneasy relocations. Plenty of people have left their impression on it. It has been patched up a few times, but never properly upholstered. No matter how many adjustments have been made to it, for the comfort and convenience of others, it never quite fits into any place. Unfortunately, it is too old now to be traded in for another model.

What I wouldn’t give to sound like Halls of Ivy-leaguer Ronald Colman (last overheard here); or like Milton Cross, perhaps, the famed radio announcer born on this day, 16 April, in 1897. A former tenor, he was originally known to listeners as AJN, such acro-pseudonyms being the convention when he started out in broadcasting back in the early 1920s. By the mid-1920s, though, announcers had made a name for themselves. They were as familiar as the brands they were paid quite handsomely to praise. Cross’s voice, for instance, became associated with prestigious NBC programs like Information, Please (on the air on this day in 1940) and the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts (which, on this day, in 1938, was introducing thousands of listeners to Tristan and Isolde).

The closest I ever got to announcing was being a voice-over recordings reader in New York City; but the texts I read were in German, my native tongue having softened over the years so as to have lost some of its screen villain edge. Apparently, my sought-after melting pot blend was smooth enough not to evoke Stalag 17. Now, I have tried said tongue at podcasting; but it probably would have been unwise for me to pursue a career in network radio during those aureate days of broadcasting in the 1930s and ’40s. Listeners might have thought me a second-rate Baron Munchausen (“Vas you dere, Sharlie?”). Sure, I could have attended Everett Mitchell’s announcer school (above picture of which I found in an issue of Radio Guide for the week ending on this day in 1938). Designed to give students a chance at that $100/week job, the course included lessons in elocution and script reading.

Forget it. There was only one Cross, and I’ve to bear it. I’ll just sit back and listen to the second half of this Recollections broadcast, which features a recording of a speed-reading contest between Cross and fellow announcers Graham McNamee and Ben Grauer, with Rudy Vallee serving as referee. The script: stanzas from the aforementioned “Walrus and the Carpenter.” The tongue workout aside, it is an appropriate choice, given the Walrus’s advice to the men behind the mike called upon to say very little very swiftly, slickly to sell you anything:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.”

Zo, vhen do the picks get zer vings? This is Harry Heuser, signing off on a sunny afternoon half-way up in the Welsh hills.

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Radio at the Movies: Black Legion

Bogart and Moore tuning in

Sure, the radio has got me by the ears. That is old news to anyone who ever glanced at these pages or took a gander at my bookshelves. Truth is, I also make eyes at the old box whenever it catches them. Last night, I was in for an audio-visual treat. While not one of those 1930s productions designed to promote the ancillary medium (vaudeville extravaganzas like The Big Broadcast or its sequels), Archie Mayo’s Black Legion (1937) nonetheless makes great narrative use of the wireless, which plays a central role in telling the story of a workingman’s social decline and deviation. Let me give you a few “for instances.”

When we are introduced to Frank Taylor (Humphrey Bogart) as a family man, we get to see him with his son (Dickie Moore) at the console, sharing the thrills of a juvenile serial. Mother (Erin O’Brien-Moore) stands by, enjoying the spectacle of father and son happily glued to the set, a family ritual fit for a household strapped for cash. As Taylor, frustrated about his position, finds an outlet in blaming his hardship on immigrants who presumably cost him his promotion, he ignores junior and switches the channels, eager to hear an angry voice echoing his sentiments.

Staring at the radio

Rather than being portrayed as a purveyor of innocent entertainment, the radio is also shown to be an insidious force, a noisemaker spreading potentially noisome messages. Making headlines back in 1937, when Black Legion was filmed, was the story of a boy turned killer after listening to crime programs (like Gangbusters, for example). In this case, it is the adult who is susceptible to broadcast rants from invisible demagogues exploiting the inclusive medium of radio for the dissemination of their exclusive missives. Even when they materialize, those hatemongers remain invisible, shrouded in the hoods of the Klan. They are radio creatures, reaching the multitude while remaining impersonal and shielded from attack.

When Taylor joins the legion and turns to a life of hate-crime, the radio is indirectly responsible for his capture. It’s not quite The Tell-tale Heart, but the wireless sure gives the guilty and conscious-stricken man away when, at a diner, he listens to a news broadcast about a crime in which he was involved. Noticing the reactions of their fellow listener, the police officers taking a break immediately spring into action and apprehend the stranger in their midst.

Broadcasters then turn Taylor’s story into a fictionalized newscast, a semi-factual and far from objective dramatization akin to The March of Time, in which the part of the accused is being played by an actor, the judge’s gavel being the baton of the conductor as the music underscores the immensity of the crime. Once able to relax at the console, Taylor has become the next instalment of Gangbusters. Better remain the mute receiver of broadcast entertainment, Black Legion advises, than to become news fodder or the stuff of melodrama.

Movies like this remind me how ubiquitous and influential radio used to be in American culture, not merely as a source of entertainment, but as a former of public opinions and a forger of personal destinies.

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Good News: Seeing Judy Garland at El Capitan

Compared to seeing, listening is a solitary experience. What is going on in your head while you take in sounds is between you and your ears—a private world removed from the public place where noise, music, and talk are produced. True, you may be overhearing what those around you are saying while a performance is in progress; yet, unlike that frown you may want to bestow on those who won’t shut up, you cannot make ear-contact.

The sense of isolation—the remoteness against which producers of radio programs fought by placing live audiences in the studio to create an approximation of a shared experience for those tuning in at home—is especially pronounced when you put on your earphones to take in a recording of an old radio program, seventy years after those watching it have vacated the studio. So, it is good news when you, feeling quite apart, hear the voice of someone who has been there, a fellow in the audience whose response you are invited to share. Good News is the name of the show; and so is having an expert in the business of radio entertainment right there with you, eager to report.

On this day, 14 April, the Maxwell House Coffee-sponsored Good News of 1938 featured Judy Garland, who had yet to star in The Wizard of Oz, child actor Freddie Bartholomew, as well as veteran comedians Frank Morgan and Fannie Brice (whom you may hear in this recording of the program, retrieved from the indispensable Old Time Radio Catalog).

The word “show” a rather unsatisfying when applied to performances designed to be heard, not seen; but in this case I imagined BBC radio drama department head Val Gielgud watching the broadcast spectacle. As Gielgud noted in his diary (excerpted in his Years of the Locust, aforementioned), Gielgud went to the “El Capitan to see the Maxwell Coffee Hour broadcast with the Metro stars.” Comparing it to British radio entertainment, he called the program a “slicker, more gilt-edged version of our shows from St. George’s Hall.”

Not surprisingly, the “advertising inserts” seemed “silly beyond belief” to the visitor from Britain when, particularly when “read out by an announcer in front of a vast audience.” He was not immune, though, to Robert Taylor, who “comperèd with much charm,” and pointed out that “young Bartholomew stood up well to an interview with some aged editor [Bernarr McFadden] who was presenting him with a gold medal [for his performance in Captain Courageous, and fluffing horribly on his script.”

Gielgud marvelled how “all these stars” remained so

surprisingly amiable in their attitude to perfect strangers, who must as a rule bore them no end. It may be part of “the act,” but they seem quite without pretentiousness, while their manners are quiet and charming: Fannie Brice . . . Florence Rice . . . Judy Garland . . . and that amiable actor Frank Morgan.

Completing his radio day, Gielgud went to the Cocoanut Grove to see broadcast favorites Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy (“in terrific form”). So, Gielgud barely took note of Garland, who sings the duet “Why? Because” with Baby Snooks. Nor did he mention designer Adrian, who was interviewed on the program. Most surprisingly, perhaps, no mention was made of the play heard on he broadcast—“The Hebrides” by noted radio dramatist turned Hollywood director Irving Reis, with whom Gielgud would soon work on a production of the Columbia Workshop.

To be sure Gielgud was on somewhat of a whirlwind tour of Hollywood, and rather impressed by a certain leading lady. Once again in the company of Anna May Wong, Gielgud may very well have forgotten the birthday of his famous brother, John Gielgud, who was born on this day in 1904. At least, he was too distracted to make any mention of it.

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See Attached: The Memo That Ran Away With the Memorial

This glimpse into the workings of my mind is brought to you by the makers of forgetfulness, short attention span, and obsession. . . . This afternoon, I was determined to pay tribute to Thomas Jefferson, born on this day, 13 April, in 1743—preferably by listening to an old radio play. As I remembered, and correctly at that, I had just the book in my library: the first of two volumes of plays written for the Cavalcade of America. It includes “Thomas Jefferson: Pioneer in Education,” a playlet by Edward Longstreth and Kenneth Webb (a recording of which you may find here). Yes, I remembered correctly. What I had quite forgotten was that, two years ago, I had already commented on this play and its politics in some detail. I might not have been able to concentrate on such a tribute anyhow. What fell out of the first Cavalcade volume was the memo pictured above. Dated 28 October 1940, it reads:

Miss Bickford:

Mr. McKay thought Mr. Little would be interested in reading some of the shows Mr. Longstreth has written.

A. Canning

Somehow, I could not stop my mind from spinning yarns. Who were these people? And why was this memo still left in the book, as if Miss Bickford had just put it aside, indifferent to the recommendation? The only familiar name was Mr. Longstreth’s, author of the Jefferson play. Hugh McKay, I gather, was an advertising executive (surmises backed up by this essay on television actor Gardner McKay), and A. Canning the playwright’s agent. Anyway, I did not get much further than that; but, boy, did I keep looking.

Some of the most enjoyable experiences writing broadcastellan are adventures in research, something I didn’t quite set out to do, something unexpected and newly learned. In this case, I learned more about my personality. I did make an effort though, and read a few lines from Jefferson’s letters. This one, a letter to John Adams dated 5 July 1814, caught my eye:

I am just returned from one of my long absences, having been at my other home for five weeks past. Having more leisure there than here for reading, I amused myself with reading seriously Plato’s Republic. I am wrong, however, in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to go through a whole dialogue. While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself, how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this [. . .] With the moderns, I think, it is rather a matter of fashion and authority. Education is chiefly in the hands of persons who, from their profession, have an interest in the reputation and the dreams of Plato. They give the tone while at school, and few in their after years have occasion to revise their college opinions. But fashion and authority apart, and bringing Plato to the test of reason, take from him, his sophisms, futilities, and incomprehensibilities, and what remains? In truth, he is one of the race of genuine sophists, who has escaped the oblivion of his brethren, first, by the elegance of his diction, but chiefly by the adoption and incorporation of his whimsies into the body of artificial Christianity. His foggy mind is forever presenting the semblances of objects which, half seen through a mist, can be defined neither in form nor dimension. Yet this, which should have consigned him to early oblivion, really procured him immortality of fame and reverence [. . .].

While my ignorance in this case is not quite of the Socratic kind, I have long learned to live with this “foggy mind” of mine, this cerebral mine reverberating with its own limitations, the cave as theater—at play with the shadows it insists on turning into puppets set up to make a fool of myself. Never mind Miss Bickford. And while I would like to discover whether the sly Mr. Longstreth, who managed to turn a history lesson into a word for the sponsor, landed another assignment as the result of Mr. Canning’s epistolary appeal to Mr. Little, I make the most of ignorance by attaching myself to what I cannot quite make out. I let my imagination run away with whatever scraps it is dealt . . .

The preceding was brought to you by the makers of forgetfulness, short attention span, and obsession, who had a lot of say in the matter . . .