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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Pointless to Return?: Journey Into Space, Fifty-five Years Later

As you may have gathered from my inordinately prolonged silence, I am currently forced to carry on beyond the limits of cyberspace; the aforementioned power cable refused at last to charge the old Mac (apparently outmoded at age 3 ½), preventing me not only from filing my reports but from getting at whatever files I have not yet gotten around or taken the care to transfer. While I have experienced my share of computer mishaps and malfunctions over the past few years, familiarity with such high-tech lows does little to alleviate frustration.

Perhaps it is just as well that I am returning now, albeit without my customary prolixity, by taking a return trip into space, where, as the old movie slogan goes, “no one can hear you scream.” Well, never mind the outbursts. Besides, I spent the afternoon away from the web by dipping my brush into the watercolors (as evidenced above) to mark another special occasion.

BBC Radio 4, where radio drama is still alive and, some claim, well, was being original today by offering . . . a sequel. Now, considering that entertainment these days is synonymous with recycling, that hardly seems anything to get excited about (even though, I, too, am looking forward to keeping up with the Indiana Joneses next month); but this sequel is certainly a departure—rather like the first return to Tara or the reopening of Bates Motel.

Nearly 55 years after its premiere on 21 September 1953, the science fiction serial Journey Into Space is being revisited, with author Charles Chilton, now in his 90s, picking up the threads of a yarn left dangling in suspended animation decades ago. “Journey Into Space: Frozen in Time” (available here until 18 April 2008) reintroduces listeners to Captain Jet Morgan, now aged 72, lost in space after over forty years en route to Earth (the first adventure, “Operation Luna,” was set in a futuristic 1965). Morgan is played by David Jacobs, the announcer for the 1953 series and the only surviving cast member of that production.

According to this week’s issue of the Radio Times, the original Journey “marked the last time radio drama ever got higher ratings than television.” A shame, really, considering that imaged sci-fi dates so poorly and is often mind-numbingly dull. The nostalgic charm of Doctor Who, currently back for another season on BBC TV 1, eludes me entirely.

Then again, I always thrill to the chance of letting my mind’s eye set the scene; and if the Journey is unlikely to attract quite the crowd lured to the tube by that overrated quack, it may yet succeed in getting the next generation of science fiction aficionados attuned to the non-imaged that has to be imagined, to the thrill of listening, of experiencing adventures in time and space as they were once offered by series like Dimension X and X Minus One.

It sure has been a while since that first outing into space. Back then, the merry crew dared to challenge their oxygen supply by enjoying an extra-terrestrial cigarette break. None of that nowadays, when staying alive for its own sake (or the sake of the ailing health care system) is deemed more important than those small pleasures of everyday living. Who needs aliens, forced as we are to distance ourselves from the past to become strangers to our former selves. . . .

Unfortunately, the BBC only gets it half right. Who, after all, remembers that first Journey Into Space? Whereas BBC TV 3 recently broadcast all three previous Indiana Jones adventures, the radio audience is not given a chance to catch up, being left in the dark as to the voyage thus far. A potentially thrilling reunion is rendered well nigh pointless, and certainly far less poignant. Luckily, recordings of the 1953 series are still extant—and you do not have to wait for the BBC to open its vaults. So, if you decide to get defrosted, you are better off to go back in time and start where it all began, during that troubled ”Operation Luna.”

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"I wandered lonely [in a crowd . . .]"

I have celebrated a great many anniversaries here; and the birth of William Wordsworth, 7 April 1770, would sure be among the most deserving of my—or anyone else’s—taking note. Yet a far more intimate anniversary is on my mind tonight, hard-driven to distraction as I am in the fear that my old Mac is once again giving up the ghost after two reincarnations. This time around, the ghost-busted machine refuses to recharge, and, in a race against the time of its expiration, I am spiriting away whatever signs of my life might otherwise remain secreted within its juiceless shell. To paraphrase Dryden, I must pound the keyboard while it is still hot, but shall have to polish the issue at leisure, hardware permitting. So, what is the occasion for my ad hoc bowdlerization of one of Wordsworth’s most famous poems? On this day, 7 April, back in 1985, I first stepped into the noisy wilderness of Gotham, this “Tapestry” of sound that Norman Corwin and other radio experimenters captured or recreated for their virtual tours. Touring in the flesh, I, too, became engrossed in its soundscape, walking around town with a borrowed tape recorder and, having returned home, experience it anew in the quiet of the four walls that could no longer shut me up. Compared to the shiny, fenced in theme park it is today, Manhattan was still a fairly hostile jungle during those days, but all the more exciting for being dark and devious and full of unthought-of dangers.

Little did I know that within the course of three short weeks, my rather miserable adolescent existence would get such a kick in the well-ironed pants. How could I ever forget the delights and the dread that awaited the innocent abroad who was far too blasé for his own good? I had a lot to learn, and those twenty-one days were a crash course in survival, which I very nearly flunked: giving all the dough I had left for my trip to a team of confidence tricksters, being invited by a stranger on the street to see the Modigliani he claimed to have in his mid-town lair and not finding the promised masterpiece but myself violated instead, and, still capable of the love I had never experienced and the trust in humanity I nearly lost, falling under the spell of a charming young waiter at jazz bar on Spring Street who would turn my head and the mousy curls on it into something curiously yellow. The physical scar (previously scratched open here) was hidden from view; but those neon locks signalled to everyone back home that the boy who returned was not the one who had gone out into the world:

I wandered lonely in a crowd
That walked on by with dreads and frills,
When all at once I, too, stood out,
With locks like golden daffodils;
Beside the cabs, beneath the streets,
Alive and dancing (mercy, Keats!).

Indifferent as the stars that hide
Yet shimmer to discerning eyes,
They brushed in Harry’s new-found pride
Against the margin of their lies:
Ten thousand saw them at a glance,
When my head’s tossed, who’s got a chance?

The weaves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling pates in glee:
A fellow could not but be gay,
Show colors true for all to see.
I gleamed—they gawked—yet dreamed no more
What change those locks would have in store:

But now, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in somber mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the sight of solitude;
My older self to memory thrills,
And dances like those daffodils.

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Disappearing Acts

“Last night, I couldn’t sleep, and lit the light to read. I saw the bulb go out. It faded out, as though the power went off by slow degrees.” This is one of the voices describing the disconcerting events that occurred “At Midnight on the 31st of March.” It is the dramatization of a story in blank verse by Josephine Young Case (published in 1938) which, the result of fortuitous timing or a bad case of literal-mindedness, was broadcast on this day, 31 March, back in 1943. It was one in a series whose literary aspiration was signalled by its title Author’s Playhouse (just where to place the apostrophe I am not quite sure). A transcript of the broadcast may be perused here; while an excerpt of the original work has been shared and discussed here by a fellow webjournalist). “At Midnight” is a peculiar, disturbing look at a small-town community dealing with the disappearance of the world its members knew or thought to have known, had created for themselves, learned to accept as binding or let shape them without questioning its nature.

“Our lights went out at midnight,” another speaker recalls how the end of their world began. “And the radio programs died out, too. And I’ve got a battery set. But I couldn’t get nothin’ but static.” A third one marvels that, beyond their village, there were no “towns at all. Not any house or road. Only the river, and the creeks, and the trees.” “At Midnight” offers no solutions, no explanations. It is the vanishing of a world with which those who used to inhabit it are forced to deal.

Tuning in, I was not only reminded of our current spell without a drop of heating oil or my remoteness from the city I once called home, but of a threat to all I knew or wondered at when, as a child, I overheard my parents talking about a prediction that the world would come to an end before dawn, leaving me to ponder an unfathomable chaos. “And what will come to us?” another voice “At Midnight” echoes the distant fears none but a thoughtless adult would call childish. “Yes, where will we be?”

“At Midnight” encourages us to rethink what we generally consider the end of the world—the end and the ends of our life. The show, an adage has it, must go on, as it had to on 1 April, back in 1946, when Noah Beery, scheduled to appear with two of his family members in a Lux Radio Theater production of Barnacle Bill, died shortly after the rehearsals. Producers of the well-oiled Lux program found an immediate replacement, with brother Wallace and niece Carol Ann clinging like the titular organism to their comedy vehicle so that it could take off as scheduled. Noah Beery’s voice now speaks to us from the beyond as, in this rare case, an transcription disk, unaired and long-forgotten, has given it a now public afterlife.

“Yes, where will we be?” I keep thinking as I go on making a largely unheeded record of the lives I know, and lead, and dream of . . .

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Once Over “Lightly”?

My blood is running cold tonight; and the chiller responsible for it is no mere work of fiction. Our house has all the comforts of a mausoleum. The faucets are spouting glacial water; and “daylight savings,” which went into effect last night, meant no appreciable gain in solar heat. We ran out of oil, and, except for the benefit of a fire blazing in the living room, are feeling the want keenly, as hail the size of chickpeas pelted our conservatory roof this afternoon. So, reaching for a certain volume in my library with hands in gloves, like a thief anxious not to leave incriminating fingerprints, was quite beyond playacting. Never mind the melodramatic embellishment. Warmth was the effect I was after.

There is something comforting (and very British besides) about sitting by the fire while contemplating cold-blooded crimes as perpetrated by the villains of a cozy whodunit. The aforementioned John Dickson Carr is the man of this frigid hour. His “Dead Sleep Lightly” was first broadcast on this day, 30 March, in 1943, with noted theater actor Walter Hampden, screen star Susan Hayward, and Lee Bowman (who would play opposite Hayward in Smash-Up) in the leads.

As I picked up the script (published in an anthology of the same title), I wondered how its production would measure up to the words on the page. As it turns out, the published script differs significantly from the play as broadcast in the United States. Revising it for a British audience, the author did not simply go once over “Lightly.”

To begin with, as Carr biographer Douglas Greene points out in his foreword, the BBC script (produced on 28 August 1943 as part of the series Appointment with Fear) is considerably longer (about thirty percent). Carr struggled with twenty-odd minute frame allotted for his puzzlers when they aired on Suspense, a brevity that forced him to be simplistic or otherwise render his plots overly complicated. Like most Carr thrillers, “The Dead” invites listeners to figure out not only whodunit, but how it was done. On the air, the mysteries could not be quite as confounding yet fair as they appear on the page, where, undisturbed by the ticking of the studio clock, readers may gather clues and ponder them at leisure.

That said, the lengthened script is not any more intricate in its construction than the shorter dramatization. Removed from the romantic mist of atmospheric sound effects, its clues are strewn in plain sight. Nor does the provision a guide (Gideon Fell, Carr’s serial killer-catcher) enhance the thrill of the hunt. The US version does without such a voice of authority, a detective who examines the facts for us and solves the mystery in due course; instead, those tuning in find themselves in the company of the parties most immediately affected.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” With these apposite words the Suspense drama gets underway. We are at a funeral on a rainy spring morning; but the buried body is not the one referred to in the title. We are being misled or meant to stumble upon something along the way, just like crotchety Mr. Templeton (or Pemberton, as Carr renamed the character in his revised script). The man has just been confronted with his none too comforting past, a moral blot that the British version darkens to the point at which American broadcasters generally draw the line, in fear of offending the puritanically overzealous among the public they were meant to serve. The victim, you see, is no honorable fellow and might well deserve persecution. In the more sentimental original, he may just have the ghost of a chance at redemption.

Fair play or foul, “The Dead” is made for airplay. There is a disembodied voice at the cold heart of it all. What I appreciate most about listening and not having to turn the pages on a day like this is that, while taking it all in, I can keep these icy digits up my sleeves . . .

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Give Me Liberty and Give Me Love

So, Carole Lombard and Clark Gable got married on this day, 29 March, back in 1939. Ginger Rogers tied the proverbial knot with someone or other in 1929; dear Molly Sugden, whom most folks today know as Mrs. Slocombe, a woman closest to her pussy, was Being Served, be it well or ill, with a license to wed in 1958; and the to me unspeakable ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair proved that he had popped the question fruitfully by walking down the aisle with someone named Cherie. It is a time-honored institution, no doubt; and one that has protected many a woman before her sex was granted the right to vote; but it is concept I find difficult to honor and impossible to obey nonetheless (which explains my love for the first three quarters of the average screwball comedy, the genre in which Lombard excelled).

Republicans should be appalled by the very idea of such sanctioning from above—but they are generally too narrow-minded to realize or mind, having little regard for what lies outside the norm protected by law, the norm that is a mere construct of law.

Let’s face it, what has government to do with the union of two consenting adults, whether for the purpose of business, procreation, or recreation? It is, or ought to be, a legally binding contract that, even if is was got into romantically or else for reasons of stability intended for the safety of the issues that may (or very well may not) result from such a bond, and thus a matter of business, however romanticized.

As Francis Bacon put it, the

most ordinary cause of a single life, is liberty, especially in certain self-pleasing and humorous minds, which are so sensible of every restraint, as they will go near to think their girdles and garters, to be bonds and shackles. Unmarried men are best friends, best masters, best servants; but not always best subjects; for they are light to run away; and almost all fugitives, are of that condition.

Even the most fleeting acquaintance with historical facts will tell you that marriage is chiefly a matter of politics and trade. Love does not require securities, even it it is often without granted rights and legal protection. Indeed, some of the strongest relationships and greatest partnerships were forged in the face of and as a response to oppression and persecution. I have little respect and less love for an institution which itself is not merely the product but the cause of oppression. Keep the rice and boil it!

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The Everlasting “Huh?”: Thoughts on Being a Member of Estate 4.0

Herewith, my five-hundredth entry in the broadcastellan journal. Without making a big to-do about it, I shall mark this occasion by summoning the irascible, inimitable Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), whose carte de visite (pictured) lies among the books and papers in my attic room, the “Sage of Chelsea” whose house in 24 Cheyne Row I can be seen inspecting below. Featured here as a character in a radio play about Margaret Fuller, America’s first female foreign correspondent (“The Heart and the Fountain” [28 April 1941], Carlyle had much to say about the press, to which he referred as the “fourth estate.” Perhaps, that makes us web journalists the estate 4.0. What is our role, our place, our worth? Whether derided, courted or ignored, we carry on surveying and opining, spreading and reprocessing what goes for news these days. In my case, chiefly old news.

According to Carlyle, “fourth estate” is no mere “figure of speech, or a witty saying,” but “a literal fact,” and a “very momentous” one at that. Publishing one’s thoughts, the Scottish philosopher-historian remarked, “is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable.” What might he have said about the phenomenon of web journalism? I shall put a few words in his mouth, a cheekiness duly signalled by brackets, and update his thoughts as expressed in Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840):

Writing brings [publishing]; brings universal everyday extempore [publishing] as we see at present. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures. The requisite thing is, that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite. The nation is governed by all that has tongue in the nation: Democracy is virtually there [. . . ]!

On all sides, are we not driven to the conclusion that, of the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful and worthy are the things we call [Blogs]! Those poor [digital bits and bites, . . . ] what have they not done, what are they not doing!—For indeed, whatever be the outward form of the thing [. . . ],

is it not verily, at bottom, the highest act of man’s faculty that produces a [Blog]]? It is the Thought of man; the true thaumaturgic virtue; by which man works all things whatsoever. All that he does, and brings to pass, is the vesture of a Thought. This [modern world], with all its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One—a huge immeasurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, [cars, highways], and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick.—The thing we called [digital bits and bites] is the purest embodiment a Thought of man can have. No wonder it is, in all ways, the activest and noblest.

All this, of the importance and supreme importance of [bloggers] in modern Society, and how [web journalism] is to such a degree superseding the Pulpit, the Senate, the academia and much else, has been admitted for a good while; and recognized often enough, in late times, with a sort of sentimental triumph and wonderment. It seems to me, the Sentimental by and by will have to give place to the Practical. If [bloggers] are so incalculably influential, actually performing such work for us [. . .] from day to day, then I think we may conclude that [web journalists] will not always wander like unrecognized unregulated Ishmaelites among us! Whatsoever thing, as I said above, has virtual unnoticed power will cast off its wrappages, bandages, and step forth one day with palpably articulated, universally visible power.

Perhaps, I am squandering this magical potential, the thaumaturgy of casting myself broadly, by writing obscurely on the obscure, all the while revelling in my own obscurity. And yet, without romancing the scale, the struggle and the thrill of writing seem to outweigh any desire I might have to be read, let alone understood . . .

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Ham and Accents

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. The Lady Astor Screen Guild Players have a surprise for you tonight.” Such a promise may well have sounded hollow to many of those tuning in to the Guild program broadcast on this day, 27 March, back in 1944. That it was grandiloquently voiced by the avuncular-verging-on-the-oleaginous Truman Bradley, whom American radio listeners knew as a voice of commerce, hardly imbued such a potential ruse with sincerity. And yet, the program is indeed a surprise, and a welcome one at that. The broadcast is a rarity in scripted radio comedy: one of those occasions when ham is not only sliced generously but consumed with gusto. Granted, I may be somewhat of a hypergelast, the kind of fellow Victorian poet-novelist George Meredith denounced as a fool who laughs excessively. Still, believe me when I say in a voice that has nothing to advertise but its own taste, poor or otherwise: this is one is a riot.

Affable character actor Jean Hersholt, then President of the Motion Picture Relief Fund and star of his own sentimental radio series (Doctor Christian), takes over from the announcer to introduce the players for the evening. You can buy a line from a man like Hersholt. His is a thick, honest-to-goodness accent that sounds trustworthy compared to whatever slips from the trained tongues of promotion.

Tonight, he tells us, “we have Barbara Stanwyck, Basil Rathbone, and director Michael Curtiz, three of filmdom’s outstanding personalities who will offer. . . .” At this moment, Hersholt is cut short by the one who generally occupies that spot, the man entrusted with the dearly paid-for delivery of cheap assurances.

“Uh, just a minute, Jean,” Bradley interjects, “I thought that Jack Benny was supposed to be one of the guests here tonight.” This exchange sets up the slight comedy known as “Ham for Sale,” a fine vehicle for Jack Benny, the master of comic deflation, the jokester known for his largely unfulfilled aspirations as a thespian and classical musician.

According to Hersholt, Benny got “a little temperamental”; so he will not be heard on the program. Hersholt’s recollections give way to a dramatized account of Benny’s response to the proposed broadcast. “I haven’t got anything against you, Jack. But you’re a comedian; and, frankly, I don’t think you have enough dramatic ability to play the lead opposite Miss Stanwyck.” Upon which the slighted comedian sets out to win the part.

The hilarity generated by “Ham for Sale” is not so much scripted than delivered. Greatly responsible for the kicks you’ll get out of this broadcast is the highly regarded, Oscar-winning director of Casablanca, whose Hungarian accent is so pronounced and to radio listeners’ surprising, that it causes Benny to ad-lib and Stanwyck to scream with utterly infectious laughter.

According to Herbert Spencer’s “The Physiology of Laughter” (1860), mankind (or, homo ridens) response in this way when expectations are suddenly disappointed and an excess of energy in our nervous system is discharged in the muscular reflex of laughing. It seems that, as an actress, Stanwyck expected Curtiz to have a great, controlling presence; instead, while to some extent in on it all, he became the hapless brunt of Benny’s jokes: “Between Hersholt and you, I don’t understand anything.” Perhaps, it is the kind of “sudden glory” Thomas Hobbes denounced as a “sign of pusillanimity.” But it sure feels good to salt this “Ham” with your own tears.

It wasn’t exactly a fresh cut. The sketch had already been presented once before (on 20 October 1940), with Benny trying the patience of Edward Arnold, Ernst Lubitsch, and Claudette Colbert. Yet Colbert appeared to have been too controlled an actress to let anything interfere with her live performance that evening; nor did Lubitsch’s accent trigger as many not altogether intentional laughs as that of his fellow director. It is Stanwyck’s reaction to Curtiz’s line readings (just hear him exclaim “stop interrupting”) and Benny’s extemporising to the occasion that makes “Ham for Sale” such an irreverent piece of Schadenfreude.

Relentless and immoderate, laughter here is a response to the “mechanical” (in Bergson’s sense), to the orderly and overly rehearsed—the minutely timed, predictable fare that so frequently went for on-air refreshment.

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Do Bother to Knock: Richard Widmark (1914-2008) in the Broadcast Studio

“I can’t figure you out. You’re silk on one side and sandpaper on the other,” a puzzled Jed Towers tells the deranged young woman who caught his eye. The film, Don’t Bother to Knock (1952); the stars, Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe. Widmark, who died today at the age of 93, might have been describing his screen persona: abrasive and easily frayed if you rubbed him the wrong way. There is another side, as well, to Widmark’s career as an actor. He started out being all voice, invisible to his audience. He was an established radio actor who hit the big time in pictures with his breakout performance in 1947 with Kiss of Death (revived on the air in this Lux Radio Theatre production from 12 January 1948).

Widmark (shown here during a Theatre Guild broadcast, an image freely adapted from David R. Mackey’s Drama on the Air [1951]) entered broadcasting in the late 1930s. By the early 1940s, he had made a name for himself in daytime serials (Front Page Farrell, Joyce Jordan, MD) and proven his versatility in a number of plays produced by the prestigious Columbia Workshop. On Words at War, he was the narrator of “Gunners Get Glory” (9 May 1944), a dramatized account of a merchant ship torpedoed by a Nazi submarine. He was frequently featured on Cavalcade of America (here, for instance, in “The Man with the Cargo of Water” [12 September 1950]), Inner Sanctum Mysteries (in thrillers like “Make Ready My Grave” [23 April 1946]), and Suspense, where he was cast as “Mate Bram” (14 April 1952) in a chilling true-crime story of an amnesiac serial killer on the high seas who contemplates the horrors of the deed he cannot recall committing:

They put me in irons, locked in my own quarters. And here I’ll stay. There’ve been no more murders in the three days past, which does not stand in favor of another killer being aboard, and my being innocent. What I’ve written, my good friend, is the whole truth [. . .]. In my own mind, I am not convinced that I am guilty. For one reason, that however violent I’ve been, I have never killed before . . . before! Never . . . killed . . . before!

A few months later, after his performance in ”How Long Is the Night” (13 October 1952) Widmark was presented with the first annual “Golden Mike” award, being named “best actor” of 1951 by his peers, the regular radio performers who supported the guest stars on Suspense.

Like most film stars of the 1950s, Widmark continued to make occasional return trips to the broadcasting studio in adaptations of Hollywood movies (such as this Hollywood Soundstage production of “The Postman Always Rings Twice” [24 January 1952]); but aside from such standard fare, he was also heard in prominent parts of literary distinction, including the roles of anti-hero Winston Smith in an adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four on the Theatre Guild program (26 April 1953) and Iago in a two-part adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello that aired on Suspense (4 May and 11 May 1953).

In 1979, long after radio drama had become pretty much a thing of the past, or at any rate a marginal and neglected field of the performing arts in American culture, Widmark once more returned to the medium in which his acting career originated, performing in a number of plays soundstaged by the Sears Radio Theatre. Listening to his voice—”silk on one side and sandpaper on the other”—you can easily figure out why he was truly at home behind the microphone . . .

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Cleaning Up Her Act: Dietrich, Hollywood, and Lola Lola’s Laundry

Her name was Lola Lola. She was a showgirl. Never mind yellow feathers in her hair. Her dive wasn’t exactly the Copa. She was a practical kind of dame who worked up a sweat making those drool who followed her curves as she did her “Head to Toe” number over at the Blue Angel. She wasn’t the “Angel” . . . at least not until Paramount took her under its ample wing and transformed her into a goddess, a Blonde Venus whose heavenly body was beyond the touch of mortals. It was certainly beyond the thought of body odor.

 
Last night, as I watched Der Blaue Engel (1930), the German classic responsible for Marlene Dietrich’s career in Hollywood, I thought of that transformation and thought of it as a fortunate mistake. Fortunate because it gave us this iconic figure—slimmer, trimmer than that of the fleshy Lola—and a face that was all cheekbones and arched, pencilled brows. A mistake because all that glamour inhibited an actress who henceforth was thought of as a star, dazzling and distant.
 
In Hollywood, Dietrich was an exotic figure whose very voice spelled foreign. In Der Blaue Engel, she had an accent as well; but one that told German audiences that she was a girl of the streets and not a creature from Mount Olympus.
 
Right at the beginning of the film, Lola Lola gets a dousing; her image, that is, which is on display in a shop window. She seems in need of it; her life and trade being none too clean. “Mensch, mach Dir bloss keen Fleck,” she snaps at her short-tempered boss (“don’t soil yourself”), just before she sets out to reduce the respectable academic Dr. Rath (“Dr. Council”) to Professor Unrat (“Professor Refuse”). That is where that box of soap powder comes in, with which the showgirl washes her undies (as pictured above).
 
Those are Lux flakes, prominently displayed in the center of the frame. Some six years after the success of The Blue Angel, Dietrich once again became associated with the stuff, without having to come in contact with it. On 1 June 1936, she became the first actress to appear in the overhauled Lux Radio Theater, whose stage had been moved from Broadway to Hollywood. After slipping into the role of Amy Jolly in an adaptation of her first American picture (Morocco), Dietrich had a chance to sing Lola Lola’s signature song “Falling in Love Again,” perhaps as a plea to an audience rather less enthralled by her than poor Dr. Rath. In German, that had been “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt,” lines that translate as follows:

I am from head to toe
Ready for love
Since that is my world
And else nothing.

From head to toe, and every body part in between. Die “fesche Lola” was all flesh; what was returned to us from Paramount Olympus was a shape in shadow and light, a statue made of glamour and enlivened by suggestion. And when audiences were through adoring her, whether irritated by her anaemic vehicles or incensed by the bloodshed in Europe, it was tough for Dietrich to regain the earthiness she had agreed to renounce . . .
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The "universal language of mankind"; or, Do You Verstehen Surtitles?

According to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, our “universal language” is music. This might account for the international crowd at Budapest’s splendid opera and operetta houses; or perhaps it is ticket prices, which the locals are less likely to tolerate than the visitors in town for a good time. It is like that the world over, I suspect. New Yorkers are hardly the main audience for Broadway shows. What is on offer in any cultural center is largely owing to centrifugal forces. Is it the music that is universally understood? Or is it just that money talks without an accent?

Longfellow—who made above remark while on the subject of “Ancient Spanish Ballads”—is often quoted out of context. The “universal” is not meant to imply the absence or insignificance of regional or national idioms. We might all share a love of song without necessarily trilling the same tune:

The muleteer of Spain carols with the early lark, amid the stormy mountains of his native land. The vintager of Sicily has his evening hymn; the fisherman of Naples his boat-song; the gondolier of Venice his midnight serenade. The goatherd of Switzerland and they Tyrol, the Carpathian boor, the Scotch Highlander, the English ploughboy, singing as he drives his team afield—peasant, serf, slave, all, all have their ballads and traditional songs.

It is not local color you are likely to discover when stepping inside the larger venues, painted as they are in the color of money. What, I asked myself as I walked past a Finn in the foyer, is the intended audience for productions mounted by the National Hungarian Opera, where last year we took in the bewildering spectacle of Gone With the Wind, staged as a ballet to the music of Czech composer Dvořák, a pop-cultural miscalculation meant to foster good relations between Hungary and the United States. On offer this time around was Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa, in Czech, with Magyar surtitles. Is it any wonder I am getting Prague and Pest confused as I try to recall our adventures in theatregoing?

In such moments of cultural confusion the Pontevedrian embassy can generally be relied upon as a refuge for the historically challenged. Yes, the Pontevedrian embassy is always open for business. Said Graustarkian edifice was set up for our convenience at the Budapesti Operettszínház, where the ever popular Lustige Witwe (heard here in a 23 January 1950 broadcast of Railroad Hour starring Gordon MacRae) once more saved her make-believe nation (or was it Montenegro?) from bankruptcy and waltzed off with the less-than-patriotic Danilo (portrayed with brio by Dániel Gábor) into the bargain—all in Hungarian with German supertitles, which, much to my irritation, I caught myself editing.

Finally, we went to the ballet, where “universal” meant lissome girl dancing with scrawny boy . . . to canned music. “Can real friendship exist between a man and a woman, and if so, why not? Happiness and pain follows each other again and again until death comes,” choreographer Antal Fodor comments in his note on “A nö hétszer” (“Women Times Seven”). Sometimes, you just have to provide your own translation . . .