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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Choice Words; or, When a Mac Crashes (Again!)

In written communications, I generally refrain from cursing. I am not sure why so many web journalists feel compelled to express their emotions—even their apparent lack thereof—in terms referring to certain uses of the male sex organ or the issue of our daily excretions. I gather that both spell relief, as does the act of swearing. We all have to get it out of our system once in a while; and I am not one to recommend mealy-mouthing the unsavory by resorting to equivalents of a truculently tossed paper napkin; such disingenuous substitutions have been the curse of radio drama.

Back in 1938, for instance, a production of O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Beyond the Horizon met with a storm of protest when it was broadcast over NBC’s Blue network. As Francis Chase Jr. recalls in his Sound and Fury (1942), the FCC forced an affiliate in Minneapolis to justify such language under the threat of refusing to renew its license after a single listener complaint about exclamations of “Hell,” “Damnation,” and “For God’s Sake.”

To be sure, I am under no obligation to act in the public interest; and somehow I cannot bring myself to avail myself of defused verbal missiles like “darn,” “drat” or “shucks” (the last of which I, as a German, would have trouble pronouncing during moments of distress). That said, I don’t hold with those who believe that mentioning acts of penetration renders the thought expressed more penetrating. If I censor myself here, it is because I am trying to come to grips with whatever has me by the throat as my hands flit across the keyboard, erasing as much as they produce.

I do not have to recreate verbatim what escaped my lips some time ago, as long as I manage to capture the feeling of that moment. Writing it down does not just mean getting it out; to me, it must also mean getting over it. It is a chance to let go of something rather than to let oneself go all over again and make a display of the discharge. Writing is the process of cleaning up, which is not to say that it is the concealment of disorder. Posture and composure become especially important when life seems to be in the very process of . . . decomposing.

What has been breaking down of late is the non-matter of my online existence. Another Mac has crashed—and that a mere three months after the previous wipeout (as lamented here). Never mind that I have learned little since the last incident and that many a souvenir has gone down the virtual sewer. What I noticed is that the crashes occurred while using iRecord, the software with which I copy audio files on the web. As a lover of radio programs, I use it quite a lot. Make that past tense.

To have one’s computer hard disk erased in the attempt to store what is fleeting is beyond “ironic” (another word I dislike). It is a rotten business, being shipwrecking for one’s love of the airwaves. The phrase “blistering barnacles” comes to mind. Indeed, most of Captain Haddock’s celebrated curses will do nicely just now.

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The Women Who Saved My Reputation

Close, but no big star. That’s what I’ve always felt when I come across Hollywood actor George Brent, the kind of actor I happen upon merely because he happens to be in something or opposite someone I care to see. Capable, certainly. Likable, perhaps; but Brent is lacking in the charisma, the je ne sais quoi that turns mere mortals into icons. There he was again, last night, at the close of a particularly quiet day (another one without telephone or internet here at our cottage). His dashing entrance notwithstanding (a rescuer on skis), I cannot say that I watched him. I sort of look past him, usually at the women with whom he had the fortune to be paired.

In My Reputation (1943, but not released until 1946), the woman in question is Barbara Stanwyck. Now, there’s a leading lady that is impossible to overlook; and in My Reputation she is particularly lovely. Perhaps, a little too lovely to be the questionable woman the title suggests her to be. I was reminded of Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?, a novel that tends to make readers go “What’s to forgive?” After all, Stanwyck’s character is a widow, not a bigamist. I suppose the Shakespearean Instruct My Sorrows, the title of the novel on which this romance is based, did not strike Hollywood producers as enticing enough.

What saves My Reputation are those minor players that manage to make a major impression in the few minutes they are allotted on the screen; they are supporting in the truest sense of the word. There’s Eve Arden, for instance, in the kind of role she filled in Mildred Pierce; her confidence and wit are always welcome. She often seems to be on her way to a party of her own and you wish she could have handed you an invitation; instead, she picks up her gift and dashes off. Cecil Cunningham walks on memorably, and Esther Dale is comfortingly efficient as the maid. And then there is Lucile Watson.

What a woman! In her expressions of disdain and her haughty delivery, Canadian-born Watson (1879-1962) bears a strong resemblance to Patricia Routledge, best known to television viewers as Hyacinth Bucket (of Keeping Up Appearances). And yet, as Stanwyck’s mother she remains formidable both in her dignity and her indignity, rather than appearing ludicrous in her pretensions. Just watch how she rebuffs the impertinent Brent, how she makes Stanwyck squirm in the above scene. It isn’t her stare alone that compels you to take notice. Hers is a voice made for lectures on etiquette and the uses of conventions. A voice that insists on being heard and heeded. A voice … for radio.

Unfortunately, radio adaptations of Hollywood films like My Reputation had no use for supporting actors, most of whom were replaced by repertoire players like Janet Scott, who was heard in Watson’s part in this Lux Radio Theater production from 21 April 1947. Even when, in this Screen Guild production of Watch on the Rhine (10 January 1944), Watson was given a rare chance to share the microphone with the film’s stars, Bette Davis and Paul Lukas, the script was so severely condensed that her supporting role was reduced to a mere cameo.

Far more interesting are Watson’s personal recollections in this tribute to Ethel Barrymore on Biography in Sound; having played opposite and observed Barrymore on the stage, Watson remarked that she “learned an important lesson in acting”:

When thousands came nightly to be thrilled by her magnetic voice, I was watching something else: the way she listened to the speeches of her fellow players.  And I thank her now for any knowledge I have of what is perhaps the highest art of an actor: the art of beautiful listening.

My Reputation makes plain just how well Watson had learned that lesson; at the same time, the supporting actress claims the center of the stage, defying us to ignore her. More than the leading lady herself, Watson, as Mrs. Kimball, makes you understand Stanwyck’s character: a repressed woman struggling to let go; not to let herself go, exactly, but to let go of the past when forced to confront an uncertain future after the death of her husband.

It is Watson’s performance that explains the pressures and strictures this blameless woman has always been up against. After all, Mrs. Kimball does not simply try to save her daughter’s reputation—she defined it.

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Based on Untrue Stories; or, When Jolson Sings Again

”Hooray for Hollywood!” The big-screenings over at our house have finally resumed. As shared here, the projector gave up the ghost last fall, during the climactic scene of I Want to Live!, when the bulb imploded with a bang. I inaugurated the arrival of its replacement with a screening of The Jolson Story (1946) and Jolson Sings Again (1949), two hugely popular Columbia Pictures that reportedly raked in a combined $15 million—a lot of dough in those days. Now, I’ve never much cared whether or not a movie is “based on a true story”; to me, such a claim is certainly not an endorsement. It reeks of Lifetime entertainment, or some such exercises in exploitation. That is probably why I wasn’t half as irritated as I might otherwise have been watching the suspect Jolson Story, which, dramatically speaking, is really not much of a story at all.

The Jolson Story is so bland and uneventful, it makes Till the Clouds Roll By look like an exposé. For anything compelling, one would have to turn to the real-life stories of Jolson’s stand-ins, Larry Parks and Scott Beckett, whose careers were subsequently nixed by dirty politics and personal turmoil. One of the few “true” incidents in the Jolson Story, allegedly the one that sold the project to Columbia president Harry Cohn, was the has-been treatment Jolson received from the Hillcrest Country Club in Beverly Hills, for whose benefit he was signed on as a closing act, scheduled at an hour so advanced that few members of the audience could have been expected to remain in their seats. It sort of makes for a made for Hollywood comeback story; but it is hardly given the Star Is Born treatment.

Never mind. At least you get to hear the real Jolson (whose image I previously appropriated for a picture of my own) sing much of his best-known material, for the delivery which he used to disguise his face anyway. What really puzzled me was the sequel. I am not sure just how to read it. Not that I mind reading it in several ways at once, which—its foreshadowing of Jolson’s death in 1950 aside—is the reason the sequel intrigues me more than the pale “original,” or however you want to call the 1946 version of a faked and faded copy of Jolson’s life story.

A biopic self-conscious about its dubiety, Jolson Sings Again is coy about its artifice. “Let’s agree on one thing at the start, boys,” the film’s Jolson character tells the Hollywood producers interested in turning his life into a movie.

I don’t think anybody cares about the facts of my life, about dates and places. I’ll give you a mess of ‘em, you juggle them any way you like. What matters is the singing a man did and the difference that made.

Now, is this inspired bit of reflexivity an apology or a proudly displayed poetic licence? How brazen of the sequelmakers to quell our disbelief by making up for the make-believe of the first film with a faked endorsement from a false Jolson. But then, the true Jolson—who starred in the Lux Radio Theater versions of Story (16 February 1948) and Sings Again (22 May 1950)—had agreed to the project and made a tidy $5 million profit. It seemed to me as if I had followed up the “true story” death row drama of I Want to Live! with Jolson’s last cry of “I want to live on like this.”

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Songs, Lies, and Audiotape: Margaret Truman Daniel (1924-2008) on the Air

Having just learned of the passing of Margaret Truman Daniel, the former US President’s only daughter, I am going to conjure up her voice by listening to some of the radio programs on which she was featured. Truman made her broadcasting debut in Detroit, back in 1947; she started out as a pianist, then turned to singing.

Fade to black: Margaret Truman Daniel

To most Americans, of course, she was, first and foremost, the First Daughter. Could she pull off a career on the strength of her vocal chords, people wondered, or was it all a matter of pulled strings? Fully aware of this debate, Truman was often in on the joke, an act that made her a welcome guest on what, in the early 1950s, was the biggest show on radio. Tallulah Bankhead’s Big Show.

On 3 December 1950, Truman faced the acerbic Bankhead for the first time. “I suppose you’re all a-wondering how we were able to get such a prominent personage as Miss Truman to be guest on our program,” quipped the celebrated hostess. “Well, really, all it took was a telephone call. I called a certain party, and that party called another party, who in turn called another party. Uh, naturally, these were all democratic parties.”

On the same broadcast, Truman was also confronted with Fred Allen. Sharing the microphone with the seasoned if semi-retired radio wit proved quite a challenge for the still inexperienced Truman.

Truman. How do you do, Mr. Allen?

Allen. Well, how do you do? It’s certainly a pleasure. But, please, don’t call me Mr. Allen. Call me by my given name.

Truman (imitating Bankhead). All right, Daaahling!

Bankhead. This girl has the makings of a Milton Berle.

Truman. Fred, I’ve been an admirer of your radio program for a long time.

Allen. Well, thank you. But where were you when my option came up back there in 1948?

Truman. In 1948, we were busy with an option problem ourselves.

Allen. Yes, but that option was renewed for another four years. You were lucky you didn’t have a quiz show running against you. And, by the way, Miss Truman, I’m surprised you don’t have a radio program of your own.

Truman. Oh, I can’t do anything well enough to have my own program.

Allen. Oh, on radio that’s no handicap.

When Allen insists that Truman ought to have her own variety program, Bankhead feels threatened:

Allen. Say, uh, this might be an idea, Margaret. Now, how about doing a big variety show, about an hour and a half program, and get the biggest names in show business. Why, you could be the mistress of ceremonies.

Bankhead. Just a moment! That’s my program. I don’t mind standing here without any lines, but I simply refuse to stand here without a program.

Truman. Oh, don’t worry, Tallulah. I wouldn’t dream of doing a program like that.

Bankhead (at her huskiest). And why not, Daaahling?

Truman. Well, I don’t think I’m old enough.

Bankhead. Whaaaaaaat!

Three months later, on 4 March 1951, recent Time magazine cover girl Truman was back on the Big Show. “Aren’t you Charlie’s Aunt,” Allen’s wife and sidekick Portland Hoffa inquired, mistaking Truman for the sister of Britain’s reigning monarch. “Love Is Where You Find It,” Truman trills after a confrontation with Ethel Merman, then learns about the harmonica from Herb Shriner.

“I’m an actress now,” Truman declared upon her return to the Big Show on 6 May 1951. A week earlier, she had played opposite James Stewart in a Screen Directors Playhouse production of Jackpot (26 April 1951), a satire on the excesses of commercial radio. Bankhead condescended to give Truman the title role in “Advice to the Little Peyton Girl,” a dramatic sketch based on a story by Dorothy Parker. Yet the emphasis was decidedly on the “Advice” and the one proffering it, not on the “Girl”; as the young woman’s “older, wiser, and oh-so-understanding confidante,” Bankhead devoured the scene.

Sharing the microphone with experienced performers, Truman was not so much propped up as shown up by them. The following year, for instance, the successful recording artist was called upon to sing opposite Gordon MacRae on the Railroad Hour in the operetta “Sari” (17 March 1952), an adaptation of Noel Coward’s Bitter Sweet. The words “Pretty boys, witty boys, you may sneer” come to mind. Perhaps, Truman, or Bankhead’s script writers, had been right. She did not quite have it in her to be a radio personality. Guesting five times on the Big Show, however, she proved herself a genial team player.

Being shown up by your hostess is bad enough; worse still is when you are the hostess and the guests don’t show up. This misfortune befell Truman on the premiere of her next radio venture. Along with Mike Wallace, the gal from Missouri was to host Weekday, a six-hour, five-day-a-week daytime variety program also starring Martha Scott and Walter Kiernan. Imitating the successful Monitor, Weekday promised drama, music, and chat.

On the opening program, back in 1955, Truman announced Eddie Fisher, her “star companion” for the day. “Hi Eddie!” she opened; but Fisher did not respond. As Slate and Cook recall in It Sounds Impossible (1963), the chats were partially recorded. That is, Truman did not get to talk to her guests, but was expected to simulate her scripted interviews, with the control room feeding her a recorded voice, an experimental technique called “‘stop-start’ taping.” Eddie was not stuck up; he was just a tape getting stuck.

Such difficulties notwithstanding, Truman stuck with the show until 1956, picking up a regular television assignment nearly a decade later. She may not have hit the Jackpot, but she maintained her media presence long after her father and his party had been voted out of office.

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The Baby Crier

“Don’t tell me how to shpeak in dat microphone. For crying out loud, wasn’t I not in de show bisserness?” I had offended her and felt sorry. I could tell that she was offended because her English got a lot worse whenever she just about had it with people. Tante Ilse was right, of course. She had been in show business. And she sure knew how to handle a mike. After all, back in the 1940s and early ‘50s, her line of business had been radio. Radio drama, to be exact. An unlikely business for a woman like Ilse Hiss, who had come to New York in the mid-1930s—from Prussia, with no more than seven words of English and an utter disregard for dental fricatives. Anyway. This is her story; hers and Opa Heini’s.

To get that story, I had placed a small recorder under her nose. As you can see from my portrait of her, it was some schnoz. She didn’t mind the sketch, even though she was quick to point out that there was “something wrong” about that left eyebrow. There was something wrong about it, all right. She didn’t have any. Back in the ‘30s, Tante Ilse shaved, waxed or whisked them off to look more like the leading ladies of the day. You know, Harlow, Lombard, Dietrich. Marlene Dietrich was her brother’s favorite. What am I saying? Favorite! Heini was crazy about the “fesche Lola.” Crazy enough, in fact, that, when the star of the Blue Angel left Germany, Opa Heini packed his suitcase and headed for America. It wasn’t a political statement; he was pining. And although he never got to talk to Dietrich personally (he was too shy, I guess, and too busy making a living besides), his romance with America never ended. Unlike his American-born stepson (my louse of a father), Opa Heini was done with Germany, especially since his older sister had come over to join him. They were the best of friends, those two. And more, I sometimes thought.

Anyway. About that left eyebrow. It never grew back, and Tante Ilse pencilled it in every morning, right before breakfast. After half a century, her hand had become pretty shaky, which is why that arch began to resemble some kind of tribal design, a tattoo of a snake slithering desultorily along after a generous helping of mice. Maybe that’s why I made her nose look a little bigger than it actually was. To distract the eye. I had no intention to caricature or ridicule her. Not Tante Ilse.

So, there was that tape recorder with the built-in microphone under her nose now. It wasn’t the kind she had been used to. Tape recorder, listen to me. Gosh, sometimes I feel as ancient as Tante Ilse. This all took place in the early 1990s, the interviews and what followed. We had met for our weekly Kaffeeklatsch in the stuffy, keepsake brimming living room of her Upper East Side apartment, sipping, what else, coffee (with the “real” condensed milk she wouldn’t do without). In those days, Yorkville was still a very German neighborhood. Tante Ilse (“Tante” is German for aunt, even though she was, strictly speaking, my great aunt) was happy to talk about the past. There seemed to be no sad chapter in her entire life story, aside from the loss of her brother. But that would come a little later. And if you think that this serenity made her a boring person to talk to, you are very much mistaken. Tragedy doesn’t make you interesting; it’s how you manage to dodge it.

She had a giant scrapbook in her commodious lap, filled with clippings from newspapers and magazines, chronicling an age now thought of as golden. Come to think of it, it’s the book that gave me the idea. To interview her, I mean. I was going for my Master’s then, in Theater History. After taking a good and long look at that album, I surprised everyone in the department when I declared that, instead of transgender issues in Elizabethan comedy (or some such topic), I would be writing about the “theater of the mind.” That’s radio drama, in plain English. Back then, few people were talking about it, let alone study it in earnest. Maybe I wasn’t in earnest, either. Not about the degree, at least.

“For crying out loud,” she repeated, this time with a chuckle that made the fleshy folds below her chin resemble those of an agitated turkey. “What is it?” I asked, relieved that she had recovered her good humor. “I vas in the bisserness djust for that: for crying out loud!” How true, I thought. After all, Tante Ilse had been a professional “baby crier.” What kind of job is that, you ask? Believe me, it made me wonder, too.

“You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” I prompted her, teasingly, letting the tape run at last. And, after humming a few bars of the Crosby standard, she began telling it all as if I had never heard it before. Sure, I could have told it myself by then. But Tante Ilse told it best. What a phoney, I thought to myself, without the slightest sense of remorse. This wasn’t about research. This wasn’t about getting a degree. Why not admit it: I had come to be told a story . . .

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“Ich weiss . . .”: The Certainties of Zarah Leander

“Es ist unmöglich, von Edgar Wallace nicht gefesselt zu sein,” the German translation of a famous publisher’s slogan goes. Never mind the author, whose name, to me, is synonymous with a long series of neogothic film shockers produced in Germany from the late 1950s to the early ‘70s, starring, the enigmatic Klaus Kinski aside, the by then soured crème de la crème of German cinema. It is not the author or the actors but the catchphrase that came to mind today. The original—the assertion that it is “impossible not to be thrilled” by said writer—is decidedly less expressive.

But then, English so often is, compared to the directness of the emotionally charged German language, whose dictionary, largely free from sterilizing Latin, lays meaning bare like a wound bleeding with the memory of deeply felt sensations. “Sehnsucht,” “Weltschmerz,” “Leidenschaft”—I know of no equivalent vehicle in the English lexicon with which to convey quite so forcibly the shattered frame of an agitated mind! The exclamation point, an expedient in punctuation to which I rarely permit myself the resorting, is meant here to imply at once the passion evoked by the German and the frustration of approximating it as my mother tongue sticks itself out at me.

Let us not get tongue-tied. “Gefesselt” loosely translates into “captivated” or, so as not to be loose about what is tight and binding, “tied up” and “enthralled.” What could be more enthralling than the timbre of Zarah Leander? Who could capture longing better than she? Enthralling, yes; but listening to Leander, I can feel rope burn—the sensation of struggling to loosen a restraint. A desire to put a name and voice to my feelings (described in the previous post) compelled me to go in search of her online, the internet being a lifeline for those who, like me, have struggled and failed to sever their ties from the culture into which they were born.

Leander, of course, was a leading lady in Third Reich cinema. As such, her voice and image are both riveting and repulsive to me. Like my present wavering and uncertainty, the figure of Zarah Leander, spellbinding as it may be, spells ambiguity and contradiction. To begin with, Leander was not German; she had Jewish ancestry; a homosexual friend wrote some of her best-known songs. And yet, she was in the service of fascism, implicated in song, as the jolly crowd of Nazis listening and swaying to one of her signature tunes, “Davon geht die Welt nicht unter” in this clip from Die Grosse Liebe (1942) drive home.

Knowing this, I still feel like the blond boy sitting by her side as she teases him that he could not possibly know the most basic sensations—the smell of hazelnuts or an icy wind against one’s cheeks (a song performed, no less, in in a film by the man who would be Douglas Sirk). Wrapped up in her presence, “Schatten der Vergangenheit” (shadows of the past) are crowding in on me.

Zarah Leander is telling me more about myself than I have had the guts to digest at times. By the 1970s, she had become a queer icon, appropriated by the crowd that the regime she tacitly endorsed used to send off to the camps. “Kann denn Liebe Sünde sein?” (Yet can love be sin?) she famously sang, which became—or indeed was conceived as—a song of gay longing. I did not want to be reminded of that liberation, either. In the confusion of a childhood spent in the awareness that I would be unlike the men who desire women sexually, there was no assurance in the taking possession of her in the name of the love then thought of as having to remain unnamed.

Tonight, Leander’s performances are strangely reaffirming. There is “something understood” in her voice, in the lyrics and their delivery. She knows, her character claims in this song, of a future miracle (“Ich weiss, es wird einmal ein Wunder geschehn”), in her voice a conviction her tears seem to belie. I have no need of miracles. Instead, I glory in the wonder of feeling intensely, of being alive to my conflicting emotions, my fears and longings. Recognizing those feelings, I suddenly know myself again . . .

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Gone Garbo

Well, let’s skip it. The convivial “Well,” I mean, with which I have been wont to begin my posts for over two and a half years now. Things haven’t been well for quite some time, and I hardly feel gregarious enough to have use for such a hokey opening. For once, I am not going to assume the well-worn persona of the casual, nonchalant reporter or produce another impersonal, labored piece of prose commemorating the birth of a celebrity long deceased. That will have to wait.

This journal has been in somewhat of a shambles since my return from New York and London, during which carefree time of easy living I was reminded—if any reminder were needed—that I am truly an urbanite at heart. Matters were not helped when I fell ill soon after coming back to the countryside; nor has facing the first month of the year, bleak and blank as it looms before me, ever felt like a particularly uplifting or inspiring period to me. Renewal? I have yet to sense it.

I feel my isolation keenly at times, and sometimes I appear to be revelling in it as if in a state of martyrdom. Now, by calling this period—and I sincerely hope it is just a phase—Garboesque, I am already in defiance of this journal, Garbo being the only major Hollywood actress not to appear on the radio, the medium to whose stars, stories, and strictures broadcastellan is devoted.

For a moment, feeling either overmastered by the task of keeping up with myself (the recent posts from Gotham and the Big Smoke having been mere placeholders, some of which I have at last begun to fill, as in the case of my getting caught in The Mousetrap), or feeling reluctant to look back, being wary and weary of nostalgia, I contemplated putting an end to broadcastellan. Only, saying “farewell” sounded rather too melodramatic, and, I nearly felt but certainly still hoped, rash and premature.

Its arcane subject matter and frosty euphuisms notwithstanding, this is a personal journal. It has to matter to me before it can matter to anyone. And recently I have been unable to matter much to myself. Not taking myself too seriously has generally been an asset to me; but you can take not taking yourself seriously too far, at which point you drift into a desolate place reverberating with the hollow laughter of self-contempt.

Let us say—or permit me to say it on behalf of myself—that, speaking Garboesquely, I have been in my Two-faced period, a wavering to which those less anxious to find just the right expression or indifferent to the joys of such a challenge refer as crossroads; but I have decided to go on, falteringly and doubtfully, instead of calling it quits without having half the cold heart to disguise such a move as the height of dignity . . .

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Bookshelf Cowboy

Well, howdy. His handsome mug is before me whenever I grab a book from my shelves. Randolph Scott, Series two, Number 385 of Zuban’s “Bunte Filmbilder” (a German line of cigarette cards, issued in 1937). I caught a glimpse of Scott this afternoon when I turned on TV, switching channels for an update on the stock market, the Heath Ledger autopsy, and whatever else made news today. Rage at Dawn (1955) was playing on Channel 4. Checking the Internet Movie Database, I realized that it might have been shown in commemoration of Scott’s birth, on this day, back in 1898.

Now, my frequent encounters with him in my library notwithstanding, I rarely come across his appealing phizog. This is mainly because I don’t care much for the genre in which Scott made his mark. Stagecoach aside, which to me is more of a small-scale Grand Hotel on wheels, I rarely watch Westerns (even though a certain—if unlikely—Texas Lady is prominently displayed in my bedroom). True, Scott co-starred in My Favorite Wife and played opposite Marlene Dietrich on two occasions; but otherwise, there isn’t much on his extensive resume that appeals to me. So, I am once again twisting the dial, the ether being Hollywood’s parallel universe.

Sure enough, apart from recreating his roles in Pittsburgh and Belle of the Yukon, Scott can be heard co-starring aforementioned Texas Lady, Claudette Colbert, in an adaptation of Preston Sturges’s ”Palm Beach Story” (15 March 1943), filling the shoes of Joel McCrea. He was to do so again, a few months later, when McCrea did not appear, as scheduled, on the Cavalcade of America program, starring in the propaganda drama ”Vengeance of Torpedo 8” (20 September 1943).

While he did not get much to do or say in the rather dull rehash of Palm Beach Story, Scott was given a chance to prove his comedy skills on a number of occasions. Opposite Gene Tierney, for instance, he was cast in “A Lady Takes a Chance” on the Harold Lloyd hosted Old Gold Comedy Hour (unfortunately no longer available in the Internet Archive). For more laughs, Scott joined Paulette Goddard for a parodic “Saga of the Old West” on Command Performance (21 June 1945). Assigning the parts, Goddard declared: “Randy, you play yourself. A real, two-gun cowboy.”

Turns out that Scott got a chance to play the Ringo Kid, after all. On 4 May 1946, he took on John Wayne’s role in the Academy Award production of Stagecoach. Sharing the microphone with him to reprise the role of Dallas was Claire Trevor, radio’s original Lorelei Kilbourne of Big Town (whom I recently saw in Born to Kill).

To me, the more intriguing performances were Scott’s curtain calls, during which he got to address the audience. Having delivered his lines in the digest of “Palm Beach Story,” the actor was called upon to put his southern charm to work for the war effort, reminding the women on the home front that “it’s men like your own sons and brothers, your husband or sweetheart whom the Red Cross is serving. This year, don’t measure by ordinary standards. Make your contribution to the Red Cross War Fund just as generous as possible.”

“For most of us the war is a distant terror,” he told listeners of the Cavalcade broadcast, “until it is brought forcefully home by those very close to our own lives. Let’s match their effort at the front with ours at home. Back the attack with War Bonds.”

Of course, Scott’s commitment to the war effort went further than those appeals; he was, after all, a veteran of the first World War. And, like many of his fellow actors, he went on tour with the USO (an experience he shared with listeners of Hollywood Star Time).

Meanwhile, the gentleman from Virginia has gone back on the shelf. I shall see him again soon enough, as I reach for another volume on old-time radio. For this spur-of-the-moment tribute to him, Scott made me round up Cavalcade of America and Radio Drama by Martin Grams, as well as John Dunning’s On the Air.

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“. . . some day we’ll have a woman President”; Carole Lombard Predicts

Well, it may not sound outrageous or far-fetched today, but on 22 January, back in 1939, Carole Lombard, whom past generations may have called feisty without being accused of sexism, floored them with views on the role and future of women in the US. To be sure, Lombard was merely reading the script prepared for her; but there was conviction in her voice when she declared: “You can mark my words, Cary Grant. Some day we’ll have a woman President.” Together with Grant and host Ronald Colman, Lombard was featured on the aforementioned variety program The Circle, whose writers gave the punchline to her male co-star: “She’ll never be father of her country.” Upon which Lombard expounded on the “feminine point of view,” accusing Grant of “deliberately trying to belittle the idea and bemuddle the issue. If there’s anything I hate more than a belittler is a bemuddler, and you’re a bemuddler.”

“I didn’t say a woman couldn’t be President,” Grant protested. “I know how you feel about it,” Lombard countered; by this time, hilarity had given way to some serious pamphleteering. “You’re scared. A woman will only get to be President over your dead body, which might be a very good idea.” “Well, now look, Carole. I can’t answer for the rest of the men. But I’d probably vote for this hypothetical woman,” if only to “see what would happen.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what would happen,” Lombard replied, by now stirred enough to flub her lines:

If [. . .] women ran this world it would be a better world, if you really want to know.  It wouldn’t be such a sorry mess of a world.  It wouldn’t be the kind of a world that bombs kids in the street and taxes their [. . .] parents to pay for the bombs.  It [. . .] wouldn’t be a world where people would starve with surplus of stuff to eat around, and it would be a cleaner place, saner place, and a finer place. Because why? Because women are realists.  They wouldn’t permit war because everybody knows nobody can win a war.  They wouldn’t permit slums and filth and disease and poverty because those things cost everybody money.  Do you know what causes war and poverty? All right, all right, I’ll tell you.  Male stupidity, male sentiment and male greed.  Oh, I now women are greedy, too, but they know how to get what they want, you know.  They don’t let stupid sentimental considerations get in their way.  They wouldn’t start a war to get a new trade or raw materials or a swell head when they know darn well they’ll end up headless and bankrupt.  It all comes down to this: men are children and women are realists.  Take it or leave it, gents, take it or leave it.

Three years later, very nearly to the day, the star of To Be or Not to Be would give her life in the effort to rally support and funds for the war (as I mentioned here). Was Lombard, a regular in a Circle of male stars including Groucho and Chico Marx called upon to reaffirm the nurturing role men assign to the supposedly fairer sex, however vehemently the position was stated? Was she a mouthpiece for isolationists, her speech a product of “[m]ale stupidity, male sentiment and male greed”?

Parody or propaganda, the words Lombard hurled into NBC’s unevenly drawn—and quickly withdrawn—Circle make for one of the most intriguing moments in the history of US American network radio entertainment. As to the accuracy of her White House prediction, at least, we may be close to getting an answer.

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“Fortune . . . Danger!”: Weighing In on The Fat Man

Well, he had more than a slim chance of winning over the public when he first stepped on the the scales on this day, 21 January, in 1946, solving the mystery of “The 19th Pearl” (an anniversary also commemorated today by the unfaltering “Easy Ace”). His name, after all, was The Fat Man (also known as Brad Runyon); and he was allegedly fathered by the same guy who gave us The Thin Man. The connection exhausted itself in the contrast expressed in—and unabashedly exploited by—the title. The Fat Man was part of ABC’s “Monday night surprise package,” four programs the network added to its line-up of offerings. According to New York Times radio critic Jack Gould it was a “courageous venture.” Not quite so “courageous,” perhaps, considering that the producers of The Fat Man were banking on the public’s familiarity with the author of The Maltese Falcon, even though said talent had no involvement in the new series other than lending his name to it, for a considerable fee.

Of that, the press appeared to have been unaware, lest they were complicit in duping the public. Gould, at least, assumed the The Fat Man to be “from the pen of Dashiell Hammett, who except for a changed perspective on human avoirdupois, is still drawing liberally on the pattern set by his eminently successful Thin Man.” Not that he was particularly impressed, arguing that the “script left a good deal to be desired, being pretty wishy-washy in characterization and worse in motivation.” Deemed an “altogether different matter” was the second episode (“The Unfamiliar Face”), a “well-knit thirty minutes” for the fashioning of which Robert Sloane was acknowledged as “adapter and director.”

And yet, Gould argued, it was the performer in the title role who might “determine the program’s long-range fate.” Runyon was played by J. Scott Smart (pictured above, in an image freely adapted from a contemporary Life magazine article photographically recreating one of the Fat Man’s subsequent adventures). Gould called his delivery “casual,” at times assuming a “rather sing-song quality that does not always make for the best of listening.” Like Sydney Greenstreet (as Nero Wolfe), the audibly bulky Smart had a voice well-suited to the role of a criminologist who, the announcer reminds us, “tips the scale at 247 pounds.”

Rather more human than the average hard-boiled investigator, the apple-chewing Runyon is self-conscious about his physical appearances: “The only time you really feel [fat] is when you run into a beautiful woman.” In his first adventure, he does just that. Bidding farewell to his mother at Grand Central Station, he bumps into the proverbial—and as such dubious—damsel in distress to whose charms (enhanced by a slight case of Dietrich) our hero too willingly succumbs. “I don’t think it is wise to kiss strange women in stations, son,” his mother warns him. “Have you still got your watch?” “I’ve got more than my watch, ma. I’ve still got her bag.” And thus, the “Pearl” gets rolling. Not the freshwater kind, mind you, but not such a bad piece of custom jewelry at that.

Less than sparkling was the other thriller series premiering that night: I Deal in Crime, starring William Gargan (whom I last spotted in The Devil’s Party, as well as the Claudette Colbert vehicles The Misleading Lady and Four Frightened People). The prominent lead notwithstanding, Gould showed himself unimpressed:

[. . .] Ted Hediger’s script, most of which is a monologue, creeps along at a snail’s pace and boasts more than the accepted quota of the stock situation for the detective field. The central character of Ross Dolan would make any self-respecting gumshoe cringe, and matters are not helped by a rather lackadaisical performance by Mr. Gargan.

Listening to Gargan’s I Deal debut I am inclined to agree with the critic. As a disillusioned post-warrior returning to his old haunts in Los Angeles, Gargan is emotionally detached to the point of never-mind-the script-as-long-as-there’s-a-paycheck indifference, sounding like a dead cousin of Sam Spade‘s Howard Duff. Being thrown the catchy phrase “So what!” in the opening monologue, listeners are likely to repeat it emphatically, if only to drown out Gargan’s less-than-ideal monotone.

In any case, it is a rare treat to come across such reviews, listen to the program in question, and engage in a debate, equipped with a history of each of these shows. ABC’s The Fat Man remained on the air until 1951 (the year it was readied for the big screen, with Smart in the lead), whereas Gargan’s Crime dealership closed in the late summer of 1948. The other two programs thrown into the mix that night, Paul Whiteman’s rather too confidently titled Forever Tops (a recording of which is available here) and the comedy Jimmy’s Diner, starring Jimmy and Lucille Gleason, fared considerably worse.

To be sure, what killed the Fat one was not a lack of interest in his cases, but the blacklisting of its ostensible creator. Hammett spelled commercial success one day and subversive threat the next, which explains why so few noted writers of the late 1940s and early 1950s would bother to Deal in Crime or self-punishment on the radio.