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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Larks, Turkey(s), and the Not-so-friendly Skies

Well, Jell-O again! To me, these past four weeks offline seemed like a summer hiatus, except that they were unscheduled and open-ended. Still sustaining and not in pursuit of a commercial sponsor, I am less certain than ever of an audience (save those lost souls who happen upon these pages in hopes of finding some dirt on—or salacious images of—Lois DeFee, a lesser-known burlesque queen I once mentioned in passing). I wonder who took my place during the interim and whether I will succeed in reclaiming my none-too-prominent slot. Just what has kept me so long (I hope that someone set apart from the apathetic might ask)? Here is the long and very nearly short of it.

After some two-and-a-half weeks of playing broadbandit in New York City, piggybacking rather than coffee-shopping for internet access to so little avail as to manage to file only a single report while on location, I returned to Wales to find our wireless network collapsed, the router having given up the proverbial ghost during a summer storm. And now, just as things are sliding back into their groove, I am taking off again for a weeklong trip to Istanbul. Not that air travel, let alone to Turkey, is a particular delight these days of tourism-targeting terrorism.

Air travel has always been rather uncomfortable; present security measures are even less comforting. Despite several checks and hassles, I still managed to board with a bottle of mouth freshener, which, much to my embarrassment, I discovered at the bottom of my hand luggage while fishing for my generally dormant cellular phone. I sunk into my seat feeling like a felon in flight, at least until I settled down to an episode of Tallulah Bankhead’s Big Show a New York pal of mine had shared with me.

It is with some delay, therefore, that, starting tomorrow and leading up to the fifth anniversary of the World Trade Center attack, I carry on with my NYC impressions as they relate to old-time radio, including accounts of my tour of various second-hand bookstores, landmarks and museums, a review of the rather radiogenetic musical The Drowsy Chaperone, assorted remarks about the construction of the Second Avenue subway and the current state of Yorkville (my old neighborhood in Manhattan). The news, such as they are, won’t be altogether current; but then again, I am forever catching up with the out-of-date and my own life need not be an exception.

Indeed, I find it difficult to gather experience and gather my thoughts at the same time. It is far easier when the experiences about which I write are lived vicariously, through radio plays, books, or movies; I gather, it is easier to gather thoughts along with dust. The time is ripe for some house cleaning and perhaps even some reventilating of the old broadcastle I am keeping here. Not only will I catch up with some of my favorite internet journals, but I will also make a few long overdue additions to my mossy blogroll.

The above image, meanwhile, constitutes the latest addition to my collection of Claudette Colbert memorabilia. While in New York City, I purchased the Cecil B. DeMille Collection, containing three of Colbert’s films (one of which, Four Frightened People, I reviewed for the Internet Movie Database earlier this year). And, more than two decades after discovering and losing sight of Mitchell Leisen’s Hands Across the Table (mentioned here), I could once again soak in the bubbles of this frothy charmer, along with Leisen’s Big Broadcast of 1938 about which I will have more to say in the none too distant future.

All this by way of reintroduction. However small the interstice until I take flight again next week, it sure feels good to spend some time sweeping the dust out of my cyberspatial niche . . .

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Manhattan Transcript: Why Oliver Stone Left Me Cold

Well, I am back in town. Getting here (from Wales) was a considerably less sentimental journey than Oliver Stone’s journeyman tribute to the city and its indomitable spirit—and a far more telling reminder of the changes resulting not just from the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center but the subsequent efforts in the so-called war on terror. At our airports, unlike a court of law, we all are presumed guilty unless proven innocent. After a sleepless night in Manchester, England, I was being questioned regarding my passport, asked to provide evidence of my stay in the United Kingdom—the country where I now live and from which was about to leave.

Although issued in London and stating my residence as being Wales, my German passport marks me as a visitor, a cosmopolitan spirit, or some such suspicious subject. Airport (in)security has made international traveling considerably more challenging of late, given the current security alerts and precautionary measures at UK and US airports. Far more than a series of inconveniences, air travel has become an endurance test for a free world locked in a system of terror and liberties impounding counter-terrors.

It seemed right for me to go see World Trade Center on its opening night here in New York City, especially since some of the proceeds will go to charity. I lived in Manhattan on the day of the attack and the anguish of its aftermath. Reminders and memorials far more eloquent and than Stone’s film lined the city’s crowded if quiet streets—candles on the doorsteps, “missing persons” photographs on the walls, and distress signals in the faces of those lingering among strangers whose presence offers some reassurance that the world had not yet come to an end. Today, the World Trade Center site (pictured above, in a photograph I took last Tuesday), is a gash in the cityscape bespeaking the pathology of terror.

Telling the events of that day from the perspective of first responders and their families, Stone’s World Trade Center struck me not merely as sentimental but spurious. Denying the politics of terror and offering instead something akin to Backdraft with a “based on a true story” tag, the film plays a game of “Good cop, bad Capra” with those who are most anxious to attack it. It refuses to be sensationalistic, but falls far short of making much sense of matters so staggering to most of us. It has nothing to share beyond the uplifting message that the human body can endure great pain if sustained by a will to live.

We all are living and fighting for the basics, for the love of someone or the passion for something—including those in our midst who love to hate us and are willing to be consumed by and give their lives for that love. It is the realization of the potential destructiveness of fierce attachments that makes terrorism such a frightening presence in our lives. It is this disconcerting realization that World Trade Center leaves out of the picture, thereby falsifying an historical event that gave rise to the passion-stirring and hate-begetting war on terror.

Unlike the riveting United 93, Stone personalizes the event, embedding the extraordinary in ordinary stories of everyday middle-class and endorsed-as-traditional family living. With a narrative structure fit for a Lifetime television movie of the week and performances so perfunctory as to collapse under the burden of sentiment they are supposed to carry, World Trade Center is an abject failure in Hollywood storytelling.

Turning a landmark event into a Hallmark card, it even manages to reduce the eponymous structure and the smoke rising from its rubble look to a poorly executed CGI effect. Given the footage we have all seen and shed tears over, this faking was most distressing to me. Then again, even the homeless and the streetwalkers—stock figures meant to suggest urban grittiness in films set in the metropolis—came across like so many Hollywood extras dressed up for the occasion.

It was distressing that I could not be made to feel anything but dissatisfaction, having suffered so greatly on that day and being generally so receptive. Other around me even burst into uneasy laughter at the sight of Jesus holding a water bottle, an image of astonishing tackiness. It is telling that the most poignant moments in the film flickered before me in news footage of the world’s response to the attack, images of people who did just what I did when the towers came down: watch in horror.

These snippets also carry the political message that Stone’s dramatizations obscure: that the world’s love for America, so evident on the day of the attack, has been squandered and that neither our homes nor the world beyond are any safer in the age of counter-terrorism.

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The Next Voice You Hear; or, Blogging Away

The next voice you hear will still be mine; but it will come to you from the metropolis. Tomorrow morning, I am leaving Wales (my man and Montague, the latter, being more compact, pictured in my arm). After a stopover in Manchester, England, it’s off to New York City, my former home of fifteen years. Last time I was there, I found myself in the middle of an old-time radio serial (I Love a Mystery), the keeping up with which turned out to be somewhat of a chore, appreciated by too few. I also did not enjoy wireless access and was piggybacking wherever I could, a haphazard signal chasing that complicated the webjournalistic experience.

This time around I will suspend all regular programming and write instead about popular culture in relation to Gotham. I am planning to visit and report from various New York City locations where radio drama was produced, is being presented these days, or has been set. I’ll also conduct tours of second-hand bookstores, cultural sites that are fast becoming extinct in the corporately co-opted rental space for advertising opportunities that is today’s cityscape. In short, it will be an old-time radio travelogue.

I might also write about any play or movie I get to see while in town. Unfortunately, the Film Forum has decided upon a retrospective of swashbucklers, as well as a series of Buster Keaton features. Since I don’t care much about either (and went to see Keaton’s The General only a few weeks ago, with silent film music composer Neil Brand at the piano), I don’t think I’ll spend much time at the local movie houses, most of which play the fare that you get to see anywhere else in the western world or the non-hostile elsewhere. I’ll stack up on a few good DVDs while there, snatching whatever bargain I can get my hands on.

I might also flick through the US channels I miss here in the UK, such as the Independent Film Channel, Sundance, and Turner Classic Movies, which has scheduled a Carole Lombard day on August 17, and catch up on some of the television series I’ve read about on the web journals I regularly peruse. I might also take in a few Broadway or Off-Broadway shows. Whatever comes my way or catches my eye, you’ll read about it here.

So, to borrow from Archibald MacLeish’s “The Fall of the City” (previously discussed here), the next “broadcast comes to you from the city,” technology and the general vagaries of life permitting. I hope you’ll tune in.

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“Dark World”: Arch Oboler Makes Paralysis Sound Like Paradise

Nothing ends a joyful gathering more abruptly than an emergency phone call. We were taking in the sun on this mild afternoon here in Ceredigion when one in our party was being told that her mother had a wasp in her tea and was rushed to the hospital. I refrained from relating the story I had been told a few months ago during our trip to Cornwall, where I heard that the same dietary supplement had meant the end of a beloved pet. Best wishes and hopes for a speedy recovery was all I could impart at parting. True, I prefer looking on the bright side and make light of dark matters—an approach to life it has taken me decades to adopt. Still, sometimes the bright side is downright garish and irritating, a neon artifice that cons or comforts none. Take the story melodramatist Arch Oboler shared with US radio listeners on this day, 3 August, in 1942.

The play was “Dark World” and was soundstaged for the anthology program This Is Our America. Heard in the leading role was screen actress Kay Francis, who is enjoying considerable critical attention these days and is being celebrated in one of my favorite webjournals, Trouble in Paradise. On that August day back in 1942, Ms. Francis had several million Americans in her spell—but what a dizzying one it was.

As might be expected, particularly given the title of the series in which it was featured, “Dark World” is a comment on the horrors of warfare. It certainly was a change from the jingoism of the day, delivered by the creator of the fiercely pacifist and similarly themed “Johnny Got His Gun,” adapted by the same playwright. And yet, Mr. Oboler was one of the chief advocates of hate as a motivator in wartime; and “Dark World,” which was first produced nearly two-and-a-half years prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, is ambivalent, which is the academic term for murky and muddled.

“Dark World” opens as two nurses lean over and contemplate the body of a dead patient, the paralytic Carol. “I just don’t get it!” one nurse tells the other. “All the time you’ve been on the staff, I’ve never seen you act this way over losing a case! And especially this one—blind—paralyzed—helpless. . . .” “That’s just it!” her colleague responds. “For twenty-five years—from the hour she was born—Carol Mathews had nothing but loneliness and misery! And then to die like this—never having known anything but darkness—it isn’t fair—it isn’t fair!” Has Carol’s existence been worthless? Is her death a relief? It is the dead woman herself who has the last word on the matter:

Hello, Amy. . . .  Hello, Amy. . . .  No, you can’t hear me, can you? And yet I must speak—while I’m still here close to you.  You said I’d never known anything but darkness. . . . You’re very wrong, Amy.  There was never any darkness in my world. How cold there be? The skies that I saw never clouded.  The flowers never faded.  The trees were always green and fresh.  I saw a lovely world in my darkness, Amy—lovely. . . .

It was a world inhabited by the words of Victor Hugo and Joseph Conrad, “and all the rest,” Carol insists; “theirs weren’t just words printed on white pages as you read them to me! They were white, flaming magic that carried me so far away from here—to the sea. . . .” It was a “world of space and freedom, where each man had a dignity of self so great the he could not bear the hurt of other men who are all as himself.”

Carol’s friends were the “Brownings—oh, such charming people—and Shakespeare—I used to argue with him! And Keats”; and “Walt Whitman—yes, he was here, too. . . . He taught me not to be afraid!” and “Schubert and Brahms and Mozart and Tschaikowsky—all of them—my friends!”

Carol claims to have “made a world” in her” darkness,” a world “where everyone walk in loveliness—where things were as they might some day be.” Thanking the nurse for her pity, she reminds her that “pity is for those who have nothing—and I had a world where all was beauty.”

Is “Dark World” advocating isolationism? Is it a perverse escape fantasy in which passivity, however involuntary, is deemed preferable to resistance and strife? In the triumph of mind over matter, Oboler’s play celebrates the medium; and in its sentimentalizing of inaction, it takes the side of the radio audience, those having stories read to them, stories that take on a life in the imagination of each receptive listener. It was the very passivity and solitary play that most propaganda drama, including Oboler’s own, worked hard to combat.

Dark is the world in which a case of paralytic blindness may be presented as a prelapsarian vision.

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Fiddle/Sticks; or, When Broadway Comes to Town

Well, there’s milk in the old cow yet. The cash cow that is Fiddler on the Roof, I mean, which started giving in 1964 and ran for a record-breaking 3,242 performances. Forced to abandon the town of Anatevka, Tevye and his neighbors have travelled the world to inhabit the small but rich territory that is the theatrical stage. One of those theaters giving a temporary home to the Fiddler is the Arts Center in Aberystwyth, Wales, where the plight of the Russian Jews and their threatened “Tradition” are now being re-enacted by a mostly Welsh cast, headed by Welsh-born Peter Karrie in the role of Tevye.

Karrie (“The World’s Most Popular Phantom”) performed in the same venue last summer, when he impressed me with his sensitive portrayal of Fagin in Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (as discussed here). This time around, the show truly revolves around him, which is somewhat of a problem for his fellow actors, who can’t hold a candlestick to him. Karrie is a musical actor; he does not merely saunter or dance across the stage to belt out tunes like the familiar “If I Were a Rich Man.” Even with a microphone coming unglued and protruding from his cheek like a handle on a paper bag, he is thoroughly convincing and engrossing.

Holding up well enough opposite him as his wife is Andrea Miller, who takes on Golde with a long-faced, comical severity that reminds me of Edna May Oliver. Her sentimental duet with Tevye, “Do You Love Me?” is one of the highlights of a show whose greatest shortcoming is that it is rather devoid of darkness. After all, the pogroms, the razing of entire villages and the exodus of the Jews from their Russian homes, are not to be treated like an occasion for so many routinely staged showstoppers. This Fiddler came across like a Jewish version of Pride and Prejudice, with hard-up Golde, like Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennett, trying to get her five daughters married to well-to-do suitors while her permissive husband caves in to the youngsters’ concept of matrimony as a union of loving partners.

Central to this plot is the matchmaker Yente, a role originated by Golden Girl Bea Arthur (whom I last spotted autographing DVDs at a Manhattan bookstore). In this production, a shtick-figure of a Yente slips in and out of her Yiddish accent. Less fitting still were most of the wigs and beards, rendering the Rabbi, as performed by a juvenile, so laughable as to compromise the sincerity of the entire production. Now, Aberystwyth is a summer resort for Hassidic Jews, who take over one of its beaches during the month of August. Should any of them venture out to see this production, as directed by BAFTA-award winning Michael Bogdanov, they might very well hiss this unfortunate miscast off the stage.

Studying the playbill, I came across one intriguing radio dramatic connection–a wireless connection I invariably seek and find without fail. Apart from Andrea Martin, who is an award-winning writer of radio plays, the playbill names Arnold Perl as the man by whose “special permission” the Tevye stories of Sholem Aleichem were adapted for Fiddler.

I am not sure how Perl got to acquire the rights to these late 19th/eary 20th-century tales; but, as a writer whose old-time radio play “The Empty Noose” commented on the inconclusiveness of the Nuremberg Trials (as mentioned here), he was undoubtedly drawn to them due to their special cultural and political significance, a heritage of horrors now playing itself out in the uneasy compromise that is Israel, a heritage that Bogdanov, himself a descendant of Ukranian Jews, merely fiddles with his amiable roof hoofers for the sticks.

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Many Happy Reruns: Herman Melville and M. R. James

Well, August is coming across a lot like autumn. Fierce winds, cool temperatures, and short intervals of rain put an end to the July heat here in Ceredigion, Wales. Undoubtedly, I will return to hothouse climes next week, when I am back in New York City, where, on this day, 1 August, in 1819, a child was born that would eventually become one of the most celebrated authors of the 19th century: Herman Melville. Moby-Dick, his most famous work—a story everyone knows but a book hardly anyone reads—was filmed, starring Gregory Peck, not far away from here in the Welsh town of Fishguard, where, last summer, I had the misfortune to drown a cellular phone.

Losing a chance to keep in touch with humanity—that is not altogether un-Melvillian. Melville’s yarns, apart from his early Omoo and Typee, are not primarily seafaring adventures. They are stories of the forlorn, of friendlessness and frustrated ambitions. Teaching American literature in New York, I once assigned Melville’s novel Redburn, a devastatingly triste tale of a young man unable to establish meaningful and fulfilling personal relationships. It is a subject to which Melville returned frequently in his work, his Kafkaesque story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” being a prime example. It is also a fine example of literature being well served by radio; and such instances are quite rare.

Those adapting literature for the airwaves were often asked to synopsize popular pieces of 19th-century fiction, to produce hurried rehashes that rarely captured the varied aspects, let alone the experience of epic tomes like Moby-Dick. The far shorter story of “Bartleby,” however, was well translated for radio by the creative team of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. As the host of the series, Ronald Colman, told listeners of Favorite Story back in the late 1940s (the series was transcribed and syndicated, rather than broadcast live on network radio), “The Strange Mr. Bartleby” was an obscure work of fiction. It was owing to actor Robert Montgomery, who allegedly chose it as his favorite, that the story was picked up by Favorite Story and dramatized starring William Conrad and Hans Conried (as Bartleby).

As a short story, it is far more suitable for a twenty-minute dramatization than the novels that were generally bowdlerized in the process. Despite the changed title (the word “scrivener” being deemed rather too quaint and alienating, no doubt), Favorite Story‘s rendering of “Bartleby”—a dark tale in which communication failure is having a “dead letter” day—is probably the most satisfying and faithful Melville adaptation heard on American radio.

A similar success in adaptation may be reported in the case of another author born on this day (in 1862), a spinner of a very different sort of yarn: M. R. James, who shares his first name with our terrier, Montague (pictured). Still somewhat outside the canon of western literature—a canon that now includes Frankenstein and Dracula—James is a highly regarded teller of antiquarian ghost stories.

A decade before it was adapted for the movies, his “Casting the Runes” was readied for radio by Irving Ravetch and John Dunkel. With a score composed by the recently deceased Cy Feuer (commemorated here), it was heard on the thriller anthology Escape on 19 November 1947. Unlike Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, which exists in two versions and points up the Curse of visualizing terror as horror, the sound-only adaptation is both literate and liberating, depending on the listener’s imagination rather than showy yet inadequate special effects.

was often and not unjustly accused of playing fast and loose with literary classics. It reduced novels like Moby-Dick to skeletons best left in the closets of those who were commissioned to strip the meat from the bones of such meaty fictions. Shorter works like “Bartleby” and “Casting the Runes,” concentrating on one central idea and exploring a key situation involving a few main characters, fared considerably better on the air. These two plays are worthy of the men who conceived them without a microphone in mind.

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Celebrated East-West Menace Starts Out Selling US Magazines

Well, I hadn’t intended to continue quite so sporadic in my out-of-date updates, especially since a visit to my old neighborhood in New York City is likely to bring about further disruptions in the weeks to come, however welcome the cause itself might be. A series of brief power outages last Friday and my subsequent haphazard tinkering with our faltering wireless network are behind my most recent disappearance. It is owing to the know-how of this creative talent that broadcastellan is now back in circulation. So, it seems fitting that, upon returning today, I should commemorate the career of a man who was particularly adept at vanishing, of casting his voice, and of having a laugh at matters least laughable: The Shadow. After all, he first went on the air on this day, 31 July, in 1930.

As expert Anthony Tollin relates it in The Shadow Scrapbook, the invisible man with the menacing laugh was at first little more than a radio announcer—a mouthpiece for Street and Smith, a company specializing in the cheap thrills of magazine fiction. While radio had little drama to offer during those early days of network broadcasting, its promotional prowess had long been proven by sharks, shysters, and shamans alike. As is often the case, the advertisement took on a life of its own, as tuners-in were more intrigued by the voice than by the product it was called upon to peddle. So, The Shadow was rushed into the limelight and, after being promoted to the narrator of Street and Smith’s Detective Stories, stories, became a bona fide superhero in print and on the air.

As the Orient—that is, the US concept of such non-Western territory with traditions predating the old world of Europe—was then all the rage, The Shadow is somewhat of a Fu Manchurian candidate, casting himself under an imported family tree from which branches dangle the wise Charlie Chan, the magical Chandu, and the sly Mr. Moto.

All those Americanized adventurers and much-relied-upon crime solvers owe some of their mystique to an element of the sinister or suspicious, even though this quality became diluted and, in the case of Charlie Chan, was obscured over the years whereas Mr. Moto was sent on leave when the allure of the extra-occidental seemed irreconcilable with the cultural reorientation of the US after Pearl Harbor and the expediencies of wartime propaganda.

Lamont Cranston, as listeners of The Shadow were told each week, had brought back a secret from the Orient—the hypnotic power to “cloud men’s minds so that they cannot see him.” He revelled in this invisibility, the hunt, hide and seek it made possible; as his menacing laugh suggests, he was no kindly Mr. Keen, no detached Sherlock Holmes, no matter-of-fact gumshoe. He enjoyed feeding his enemies the “bitter fruit” borne by the “weed of crime” and of feasting on its juices, on employing powers which, on this day in 1938, for instance, helped him to catch a group of western diamond mine raiders with the aid of a non-western sage turned servant who passed on “The Message from the Hill,” through “mental telepathy, the oldest wireless in the world.”

It is a telling case of a Hollywood identity crisis that screen villain Bela Lugosi first played Chandu’s archenemy and then returned to impersonate the radio original himself in subsequent movie serial sequels; nor should it be surprising that someone as typecast to play outcasts as Peter Lorre was chosen to play Mr. Moto. The duality—the duplicity—of Easterners gone West or Westerners under Oriental influences suggests something adulterated, ominous, and forbidding. It is a spinning forth of yarns like Dracula and The Green Goddess, stories of an East that not so much meets West but infiltrates it or insinuates itself.

Perhaps, in today’s global market, the Shadow might have started out as a hawker of Japanese electronics, the hardware of choice with which western media produce latter-day broken blossoms of diplomacy. It strikes me as disingenuous or incongruous, at least, that melodramatic Orientalism is deemed politically incorrect while demonizations of Iran and North Korea and the anxieties triggered by Communist China, by a distant Asia or Arabia—a far or middle east—are being propagated by a West that glorifies diversity but relies for its cultural survival and economic supremacy on demonstrations of its vulnerability, on images of threatened borders and threatening barbarians.

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"Chained" to the Mike: Joan Crawford Goes Live Reluctantly

Well, they come to the remotest of spots, spreading their words—or the word—undaunted by the indifference or hostility with which they are greeted. Jehovah’s Witnesses, I mean. This morning, I’ve been listening for about an hour to two of these travelling preachers, one of whom likened our lack of receptiveness and knowledge to sitting in front of a broken television set. Actually, the two reminded me of radio announcers: hawkers with a mission who come into your home (or as near as you let them) to sell you ideas and convince you to tune in tomorrow—a tomorrow so protracted it might have been conceived by a soap opera writer if it weren’t quite so blissful.

Radio announcers, of course, were being paid for delivering promotional messages they did not compose; and it sufficed for them to feign conviction and enthusiasm in their pushing of ideas, services and products. Rather than turning the dial or twisting the doorknob on those Witnesses and their ill-concealed prejudices, I kept listening to their mythological broadcastings, even though my life at present is so serene that I do not long for another or any hereafter.

We are being sold so many mass-marketed keys to happiness that, when one of them finally fits into the lock, the confounded peddlers and their less-than-satisfied customers importune us to question whether we’ve got the right door. Once achieved, happiness is reduced to a token of stupor or proof of lacking ambition, a mark missed rather than hit. After all, there is business in creating desire and none in realized contentment.

Now, the elusive happily ever after is an illusion often smashed to great effect. The creators of melodrama, the theater of the contested status quo, turned the struggle for a joyous or secure future into a chief generatrix of storylines. The characters of melodrama often seek happiness by looking for something not belonging to them and find it by discovering that what they want is close by, however obscured by conventions or removed from their everyday by the chains of society. In all this strife, melodrama often insists on destiny, on a path chosen not by us, but for us, a path to be discovered instead of forged.

On this day, 27 July, in 1936, Joan Crawford stepped behind the microphone she dreaded to struggle against such conventions—and succumb to others—by recreating her role of Diana (or Dinah) Lovering in Chained, which was adapted for a production of the Lux Radio Theater.

Diane is a secretary of a well-to-do, “middle-aged, but attractive steamship magnate.” She vows to marry him—once his wife consents to set him free. In the meantime, she falls in love with a younger man, played by Crawford’s husband, Franchot Tone, a man who poses a challenge, rather than showering her with affections. There is little excitement in the triangle, a routine love affair in which Crawford is blandly smooth, rather than edgy. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Crawford’s performance is that the actress, reputedly uneasy about speaking live before an invisible audience of millions (as previously mentioned here), displays no audible signs of mike fright.

Setting the scene with an apposite if contrived Hollywood legend, Lux Radio Theater host Cecil B. DeMille explains that Crawford and Tone, whom he had never before met professionally, were meant for each other by virtue of their ancestry. “Their romance, which began in 1933, was more than a courtship,” he suggests. “It was a coincidence which had its beginnings in 1798, when an undecided Corsican named Bonaparte was lighting the fuse that was to explode all Europe and an Irish patriot named Wolfe Tone was enlisting French aide in a revolt against England.” Sure, Ms. Crawford, who married the descendant of said Wolfe Tone, was born Lucille LeSueur; but the “little French girl” was born closer to Paris, Texas, than to the French capital.

Aided by the continuity writers of the Lux Radio Theater, DeMille was able to craft a compelling theme out of such historic strains, even if it meant to strain historic facts in the crafting. For all his vision, though, DeMille was no seer. Between the second and final acts of “Chained,” the famed director introduces Helen Burgess, one of his recent discoveries for the screen. She might have been groomed for stardom, but, as Billips and Pierce remind us in Lux Presents Hollywood, the on-air promotion was futile. The promising starlet died on 7 April 1937, shortly before her twenty-first birthday.

Crawford, meanwhile, kept returning to the microphone, relieved, no doubt, when the era of live radio drama came to an end in the late 1940s.

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We Now Resume Our Regularly Scheduled Life

It has been a week of local excursions here in Wales, days spent sunbathing and splashing in the radioactive sea, bookhunting in Hay-on-Wye (the world-renowned “Town of Books”), dining al fresco, stargazing outdoors and on screen, playing with Montague, our unruly terrier, and being among friends (even after having been critiqued with the candor I reserve for those who matter to me). The occasion of it all was a weeklong visit by my closest if mostly long distance friend, the fatherland I haven’t set foot on for seventeen years. It is to him that I owe the wonderful book pictured above, a splendid addition to my collection of Claudette Colbert memorabilia.

Whenever I venture out to Hay, I return home with a few treasures. This time, I added a book on Harold Lloyd (my favorite silent screen comedian, whose films The Kid Brother, The Cat’s Paw and Girl Shy we screened during the past few days), as well as a coffee-table topper on screwball comedies (a book which I had previously gifted to abovementioned best pal, but with which I was pleased to get reacquainted). However convenient and economic it might be to browse and shop online, the thrill of the hunt (as previously described here), is something a carnivore of a booklover like me does not like to go without.

Now, the people of Film Pictorial, a British publication, are full of it. Legend, I mean, which is a term I much prefer to trivia when it comes to describing pieces of nothing from which to weave whatever your mind is up to at the moment. Trivia is for the mercenary; legend for the mercurial. I shall raid said volume from time to time here on these virtual pages. Where else might you learn whether or not you have a “Film Hand” from a writer who examines the “long little finger on the hand of Katharine Hepburn” or the “thickish fingers” of John Boles and Warren William to tell their temperament and acting skills?

The book also contains longer articles on “The Gallant Life of Norma Shearer” and takes readers to the homes of stars like Harold Lloyd, Bette Davis, and . . . Gordon Harker? Robert Montgomery, meanwhile, debates, along with Jeanette MacDonald, “At What Age Are Women Most Charming” and Myrna Loy reveals her “Own Ideas.” It’s all glossy but telling gossip, which I am looking forward to sharing, along with old news from , over the next few days.

Of course, my week was not without pain and what there is of sorrow in my life, among which my tumble down the slippery steps to my room and the breaking down of our car are the most dramatic examples. My lower back and my left toe still ache; the car might not be salvageable at all. In a matter of weeks, I reckon, such woes—which led to dipped feet in cooling springs and a ride through Wales in an Auto Club truck—will be nothing but cheerful anecdotes to be shared among chums. For now, they are inconveniences, at most.

As I have mentioned before, the weeks to come will be somewhat less than regular. On 7 August, I shall return, however briefly, to my old home in New York City. In the meantime, I resume my journal, hoping it will be appreciated by those who make it a habit to keep up with someone as gleefully out-of-date as yours truly, broadcastellan.

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Dark of Day: "Danger" and the Drama Invisible

Well, it was a scorcher of a day—the first I experienced here in temperate Wales. The unexpected heat brings back memories of my many summers in New York City and will prepare me for my return to the asphalt jungle this August. Moving to rural Wales from that bustling metropolis took more of an adjustment than adding a few layers of clothing; but anyone ready to weave life according to E. M. Forster’s motto “Only connect,” which is not a bad motto to live by, there is the comfort of that web of relations that, however remote or isolated you might believe yourself to be, will place you smack in the middle of the world, like a spider resting in the assurance that flies are bound to drop in, by and by.

Here is one such moment in the web in which I find myself. You might have to stretch your antennae a bit to get caught up in it.

Picture this: New York City, on this day, 18 July, in 1936. It’s the premiere of The Columbia Workshop, the most experimental and innovative of all the radio dramatic series produced during the so-called “golden age” of old-time radio. For that first broadcast, the Workshop revived what is generally considered to be the first original play for radio: The Comedy of Danger, by British playwright-novelist Richard Hughes, better known for A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), an adventure story that has been ranked among the hundred best novels of the twentieth century.

Danger is a sort of Poseidon Adventure staged in utter darkness; a spectacular melodrama of disaster involving three people about to drown in a collapsed coal mine. It is a scenario mined for the theater of the mind, evoked by sounds and silence alone. Danger was first produced by the BBC on 15 January 1924, but was still a novelty act when the Workshop chose it for its inaugural broadcast more than twelve years later. Back in 1924, US radio had no use for such theatricals, Hughes remarked in an article about “The Birth of Radio Drama”:

A few months [after the BBC production], finding myself in New York, I tried to interest American radio authorities in the newborn child.  Their response is curious when you consider how very popular radio plays were later to become in the States.  They stood me good luncheons; they listened politely; but then they rejected the whole idea.  That sort of thing might be possible in England, they explained, where broadcasting was a monopoly and a few crackpot highbrows in the racket could impose what they liked on a suffering public.  But the American setup was different: it was competitive, so it had to be popular, and it stood to reason that plays you couldn’t see could never be popular.  Yet it was not very long before these specially written “blind” plays (my own “Comedy of Danger” among them) began to be heard in America, and on the European continent as well.

Other than creating a situation in which the characters are as much bereft of sight as the audience, Danger has no artistic merit. It purports to be philosophical about death; but the fifteen minutes allotted for this piece of melodramatic hokum are hardly time enough to probe deeply, and much of the dialogue is ho-hum or altogether laughable.

What makes this seemingly generic if radiogenic play more personally meaningful to me is that it was written by a Brit of Welsh parentage, by a man who chose to live in a Welsh castle, and who chose, for this, his first dramatic piece for radio, a story set not far from the very hills where I found myself after these long years of writing in New York City about American radio drama. Is it a coincidence that I came home to the birthplace of radio drama?

“Goodness knows!” exclaims one of the trapped visitors,

I’d expect anything of a country likes Wales! They’ve got a climate like the flood and a language like the Tower of Babel, and then they go and lure us into the bowels of the earth and turn the lights off! Wretched, incompetent—their houses are full of cockroaches—Ugh!

In the background, Welsh miners face their fears by singing “Aberystwyth”—the name of the town near which I now reside. The Welsh, of course, are known for their oral tradition, for their singing and poetry recitals; their most famous poet is Dylan Thomas, author of the best know of all radio plays, “Under Milkwood.” It is here that American radio drama is still being thought of and written about: Rundfunk und Hörspiel in den USA 1930-1950 (1992), for instance, by fellow German Eckhard Breitinger, was written here, as was Terror on the Air, by Richard J. Hand, published in 2006. It is here, in Wales, that I started communicating with radio dramatist Norman Corwin; and it is here that, after a short break from my journal, I will continue my visits to the theater of the mind.

Yes, it is a web all right, even though I am not sure whether it was woven by or for me. I am merely discovering connections that, upon reflection, are plain to see and comforting to behold.