Radio – Page 11 – Harry Heuser

20th Mar 2009

East If With Eagle

For the reward of a single dollar, readers of Movie-Radio Guide used to send in “boners”—fluffed or unintentionally funny lines they had caught on the air. On 29 Feburary 1940, for instance, Olive Doeling of Petaluma, California, tuned in to station KGO and heard Benny Walker (Benny Walker?) say: “Wish you could see her, folks. She’s lugging a saxophone almost as big as she is behind her.” Another buck went to a listener from Jackson, Mississippi, who reported the following exchange between Major Bowes and a contestant on his Amateur Hour broadcast from 7 June 1936:

CONTESTANT. I was a dressmaker’s model and then I married.
MAJOR. Wholesale or retail?

Reading lines like these makes me want to tune in the original program, to find the recording and hear for myself.

The other day, when I read that Mary Livingstone was supposed to have giggled “Jack, I’ll never forget the look on that ski house when it saw your face,” I wondered whether that was indeed what she had said and how her husband, the cast, and the studio audience had responded. Listening to a recording of the 25 February 1940 broadcast of the Jell-O Program, I heard no such fluff. “I’ll never forget the impression on your face when you crashed in the ski house,” Livingstone said instead. Had J. N. Lawrence from San Diego earned that dollar? Was the “boner” bona fide or bogus?

Well, before accusing any of those tuners-in, I had to remind myself that many of the live programs of the past were staged twice—once for the East Coast, then for the West. What J. N. Lawrence had picked up on California was not what anyone living East could have heard—or anyone listening to a recording of the East Coast broadcast.

How different the two broadcast could be was demonstrated on 20 March 1940, when a certain Mr. Ramshaw caused a riot on the Fred Allen Show. Mr. Ramshaw was a celebrated Golden Eagle who toured the US with his British trainer, falconer Captain C. W. R. Knight. The Captain was encouraged by Allen to let the Mr. Ramshaw fly around in the studio; but, as it turned out, he had little success in convincing the bird to return to him as rehearsed—and not until he had left his mark on the members of the audience assembled in studio 8-H, Radio City, New York.

Actually, as Allen recalled in Treadmill to Oblivion, Mr. Ramshaw had narrowly “missed the shoulder of a student who had come down from Fordham University to advise [Allen] that [he] had won a popularity poll at the school.”

Responding to a complaint from the vice president of NBC, a less than apologetic Allen remarked: “i thought i had seen about everything in radio but the eagle had a trick up his feathered colon that was new to me,” to which he added: “i know you await with trepidation the announcement that i am going to interview sabu with his elephant some week.”

There was no getting back to the script that evening; and the commotion that ensued was another forceful reminder that, for all his talent as a writer, Allen was in even finer feather when he did not have to stick to the ink from his mechanized quill. Now, winging it, or flying by the seat of one’s pants, was not condoned by those who footed the bill of comedy-variety programs and kept an eagle eye on their production. Everything had to be performed as scripted—and strictly within the time allotted for each number, sketch, and broadcast.

So, when Allen had to repeat his program three hours later—at midnight—for the West Coast audience, the spokesperson of Young and Rubicam, the advertising agency working on behalf of the show’s sponsor, did not permit Mr. Ramshaw to make an encore. The segment was out, and, as Stuart Hample (author of “all the sincerity in hollywood” told Max Schmid in a 4 November 2001 interview over WBAI, New York, Allen was forced to revise the script and remove the offending segment.

Allen defended his feathered guest by claiming that Mr. Ramshaw had resented the censor’s “dictatorial order” and, “deprived by nature of the organs essential in the voicing of an audible complaint, called upon his bowels to wreck upon us his reaction to [Mr. Royal’s] martinet ban.”

The feather “l’affaire eagle” added to Allen’s cap never got to tickle his West Coast listeners. Network radio programs may have had a coast-to-coast audience; but, be it an eagle, a turkey, or a lark, some of what took off or managed to escape in the East could never fly or land in the West.

Related recordings
Fred Allen Show, 20 March 1940

19th Mar 20093rd Sep 2024

Fa(r)ther?

Historically speaking, it is difficult for me to get the larger picture. When I express anything amounting to a weltanschauung, I go all philosophical. Perhaps, I live too much in the confines of my own peculiar everyday to engage with the political events and developments that shape my existence. Life in the United States has taught—or, at any rate, encouraged—me to live in and for the now, a modus of going about one’s affairs that is more personally rewarding even though it might not always be quite so socially or globally responsible. Seizing the day for the sake of that day and its glories alone is not something to which Germans, in particular, are prone; they are more likely to seize opportunities for the future, or another country, for that matter.

In the old world, people tend to plan for what might happen in generations to come; they are anxious to map out what they presume to lie ahead, sometimes for as much as a thousand years. I suppose that, once those old world futurists went west to seek their fortune, they needed to learn to reconcile themselves to the vagaries of the wilderness, to fight everyday battles, to carve a niche for themselves right out of those woods.

In societies that have a medieval past in which the individual matters less than the tribe, fascism and communism are more likely to flourish than in the United States. Creating order out of the chaos that is time not yet present so as to provide for the future of one’s kind makes even genocide justifiable.

I wonder whether, had I been born American and grown up the in United States during the 1930s, I had possessed the foresight to anticipate just what this kind of mindset is capable of undoing and getting done. Would I have been an isolationist or urged for an involvement in the European conflict? Would I have been all peacetime business as usual or seen war as a way of insuring the future of an ideal?

I trust that, for all my shortsightedness, I would have seen right through a man like Father Charles Coughlin, who, back in 1939, continued to rail against the warmongers in the US. Using the microphone and Social Justice magazine as means of reaching the American multitudes, he went so far as to recruit school children for his cause. On 19 March 1939, the notoriously anti-semitic priest offered prizes to any youngster—Christian, Jew, or gentile—who could best express reasons to stay out of a foreign “entanglement” involving military action. One answer suggested by the announcer of Coughlin’s radio addresses, who was also a spokesperson for Social Justice, hailed economic sanctions as a modern mode of warfare.

In 1936, Father Coughlin could still count on a popular magazine like Radio Guide as a forum to pose a challenge to “Franklin Doublecross Roosevelt,” the President he had staunchly supported some six years earlier. By 1940, Coughlin’s influence was vastly diminished, his motives questioned, his hypocrisy exposed. In an issue of Radio-Movie Guide for the week of 16 to 22 March 1940, news editor and radio historian Francis Chase, Jr. shared the outcome of his investigation into Coughlin’s mysterious absence from the airwaves on 4 February of that year when a “series of cryptic and intriguing announcements” informed the listening public that Coughlin “would not appear to speak and intimated that dire and sinister forces were at work to prevent his addressing the radio audience.” Chase’s subsequent

investigations showed that neither [station] WJR nor the Coughlin radio network had censored Coughlin’s address. Neither had the Catholic Church nor the Federal Communications Commission. The inescapable conclusion to be drawn, therefore, is that Father Coughlin, and Father Coughlin alone—was responsible for the weird performance after exhorting, through his announcer, all listeners-in to telephone their friends and get them to their loudspeakers.

Apparently, Coughlin was determined to present himself as a martyr threatened to have his tongue cut off by those who did not like what he had to say. Among those who very much liked what Coughlin said—and who liked what his staged disappearance from the airways might imply—where the editors of Hitler’s Völkischer Beobachter, who sneered that, in a so-called free America, Coughlin was facing censorship for the “truths” he dared to speak.

Was Coughlin, who envisioned a fascist “Corporate State” to do away with what he argued to be a corrupt United States, consumed with the larger picture in a foreign frame? Or was he, Canadian-born and barred from the Presidency, picturing mainly himself in whatever frame suited him best or was most likely to accommodate him?

However far-reaching or far-fetched his scheming, much of what the far-righteous Father espoused Chase demonstrated to be personally motivated. When Coughlin denounced the worshipping of the “God of Gold,” for instance, and argued it a “Christian concern” to restore silver to “its proper value,” the US government disclosed that the Thunderer of Royal Oak owned “more silver than any other person in Michigan.” While loudly condemning “Wall Street gambling,” Coughlin was known to have played the stock market.

Sure, even the larger picture—a vision, however ghastly or inhumane—is only a reflection of the minds that conceive it; but in how far are the likes of me, whose frame of mind is too narrow or too feeble to get hold of that larger picture, content to be framed by the masterminds who seize the opportunity of creating, mounting and authenticating it?

18th Mar 200921st Dec 2024

“. . . a world between two sounds”; or, the Librarian Who Turned Up the Volume(s)

I could not have faulted anyone for brushing me off with a terse “none of your lip,” considering that my kisser had taken on the appearance of an over-boiled frankfurter abandoned during a picnic invaded by flesh-eating ants.

Luckily, sight at the time mattered less than sound, and the painkillers had not entirely divested me of whatever powers of articulating my ideas I yet possess. Yesterday morning, during a meeting with administrators at the local university, interest was once again expressed in a course I had proposed a few years earlier. I fancifully titled it “Writing for the Ear,” which was meant to distinguish the module from more traditional classes in radio writing as they are still being taught here in Britain.

I had previously turned down an offer to teach a course in writing for the medium, as I have no experience in developing scripts aimed at those in charge of productions at the BBC.

Besides, today’s technology makes it possible for anyone to have a voice in the forum, to podcast talks and engage in sonic experimentation. With these opportunities in mind, I outlined a course exploring the relationship between the spoken and the written that would make those who express themselves typographically alive of the value of sounds and the potentialities of silences.

Too much of the most eloquent prose and sonorous poetry is being silenced. Words written hundreds of years ago are still being pored over, but they are far less frequently voiced and heard. In classroom and study, printed words are scrutinized, paraphrased, underlined, crossed out, and annotated; they are dissected like so many toads in the imaginary garden, well before they get a chance to let out a single distinctive croak.

Lending your own voice to written lines is an act of resuscitation—of breathing life into the thoughts of those who came before you, of triggering a startling echo in what was assumed to be a soundproof vault. Silences, too, speak volumes, especially when they enter into a dialogue with the spoken and the sounded.

Someone who had a lot to say on the subject of the word made sound was Archibald MacLeish, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet who, from 1939 to 1944 served as Librarian of Congress. Before being appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Public and Cultural Relations, MacLeish brought to radio a series of lectures titled The American Story. At a time of global conflict, the program was designed to emphasize

the experience in common of the American peoples, the story set down in the accounts of those who knew the American experience at first hand or were part of it. Whatever their race may have been, or their faith, or their language.

In other words, it took a scholarly approach to what Carmen Miranda accomplished in the conga line of duty. On this day, 18 March 1944, NBC presented “Between the Silence and the Surf,” the eighth broadcast in the series. It related the settlement of the Americas, from Plymouth (as recorded by William Bradford in the 17th century) to Brazil (as documented by Lopez Vaz in the 1580s). I recently rediscovered the program while digitizing my collection of audio tapes; the published scripts, meanwhile, have been shared online. The printed words bespeak the poet’s mission of giving voice to the lost and long unsounded, to lives shelved and shut away in our repositories of knowledge:

SOUND. A slow surf, the hush of the waves withdrawing.

NARRATOR. And the wind’s sound in the grass or in the brush or in the forests where they still must go.

SOUND. The wind in the coarse grass and the solemn trees.

NARRATOR. The world of the first settlements was the narrow world between the silence and the surf, between the water and the wilderness—between the past cut off by water and the future closed by distance and by danger—but not closed.

According to the April 1944 issue of Radio Age, MacLeish “poured an immense amount of painstaking research,” into this series; and in “addition to the laborious research and authentication,” he included the

most important fillip—his own brilliant style of the prose poem, a style which has won for him the accolades of the literary world. Each line read on the broadcast is a part of this poetic narrative style, giving each program a dramatic sweep so necessary in producing the effect desired.

Yet while the poet claimed to have aimed at creating “new forms of radio expression,” rather than adhering to the formats of “conventional radio drama,” critics were not uniformly enthusiastic, arguing the productions to be “overloaded with conversation” and “self-denyingly austere.” Such gainsayings are representative of the bias toward dramatization and dialogue as opposed to lecture or oratory, no matter how many individual speakers were employed to deliver it.

In the foreword to the published scripts for the series, MacLeish defended his minimalist approach by reasoning that “radio’s unique function and unique opportunity” was simply to convey speech instead of presenting words, “artfully blended” by means of “[s]killful devices,” to “produce dramatic effects”:

Because radio is limited mechanically to sound, and particularly to the sound of speech, radio is capable of a concentration of speech itself, the text itself, which can give words a life and a significance they rarely achieve outside the printed pages—and which they achieve there only for the most gifted and fortunate readers.

The word, to MacLeish, was the beginning and the end. As a documentarian and poet, he inhabited that “world between two sounds,” listening, recording, and readying himself to speak with force and deliberation. His American Story is the story of humanity’s struggles for survival, for voice and representation.

Our daily existence, like that of the first settlers, is this “narrow world between the silence and the surf,” between the calm and the roar, between tumult and tranquility. Our lives are a string of moments waiting to be seized for having our say, periods of stillness, voluntary or imposed. We may chronicle our times and leave behind piles of documents to be poured over or neglected by future generations; but it is the sound we make now and the space we leave for listening that define the present we must fill with meaning as we rage against the silence to which we are ultimately condemned . . .

17th Mar 2009

What You Might Find While Down in the Mouth

If I’ve been keeping my trap shut lately, it’s on account of some festering crumbs in my cake hole. Sure, I can jaw away about most anything, but I’ve got to have the mind and the mandible to do so. For days now I have been plagued by mouth ulcers that are putting a muzzle on my spirits—not the kind of oral culture I generally engage with in this journal. My gums are following economic trends, making me feel ever longer in the tooth. My left cheek, in turn, might lead you to believe that, in an effort to dodge the downturn, I managed to squirrel something away for a day on which I may mercifully hide my mug under an umbrella. Meanwhile, my taste buds have started to sprout and my lower lip, Angelina Jolied out of all proportions, is suggestive of a law suitable botch or a risk taken by the likes of Maxie Rosenbloom.

Always one to self-diagnose and over-the-counter medicate rather than to seek the professional opinion of someone who, like a satirist with a stethoscope, makes a career out of scrutinizing us at our most unsightly, I have been pondering my condition and its causes. Though I cannot rule out trauma resulting from vigorous brushing recently recommended by my hygienist, I am not inclined to blame my current state on the stress produced by our impending move; if I were quite so readily distressed, I would hardly have survived my previous transplantations. Besides, I have always resented being thought of as a mere tangle of nerves in need of careful rewiring.

I have a long history of allergies, though; and given that my symptoms began to occur following a dinner outing last week, it might well be that my sores are a reaction to something passing my lips that night. Heretofore, my catalogue of allergens has been limited to felines, grass, and dust. Now, that hasn’t kept me from cat-sitting, of which you can make a career in New York City, or from relocating to one of the grassiest spots on the planet; and it certainly did little to convince me to take out the feather duster more often than the snot rag or the inhaler.

I was told early on by the still extant half of the temporary connubial unit responsible for my coming into being—and for getting the heck away from whence I hail—that allergies are an aberrant mental state and that cycling to school through the cornfields or mowing the lawn were activities I could handle if I only put my mind to it. True, I have always been mildly allergic to physical labor; but that was in part due to the damage I saw it inflict on the body, the mind, and the spirit.

My father’s religion was social Darwinism, in the practicing of which he drank himself to death. It would have been futile to convince him that an undistilled grain could be as lethal as a distilled one and that what doesn’t kill you instantaneously does not necessarily make you any stronger in the long run.

I had not planned on delving into my personal history, medical or otherwise. As is often the case, such memories are squeezed out of me by the mere twisting of the dial. Listening to Fred Allen’s 1937 St. Patrick’s Day broadcast, I was reminded of the kind of book I would have liked to have thrown at certain parties aforementioned.

Fred Allen is always good for a few laughs, however painful their elicitation. Annotating his quips can prove more rewarding still. Well before the hosts of our present day chat shows, satirist Allen raided the daily news for his weekly radio programs. In his Town Hall News (“sees nothing, shows all”), Allen commented on the goings-on in New York City, on politics, the economy, on culture high and low. Here is the first of the 17 March 1937 Town Hall News bulletins:

New York City, New York. Dr. R. P. Wodehouse, speaking at the American Institute of General Sciences, claims that hay fever and asthma are increasing in this country. Dr. Wodehouse says clearing up of native vegetation and its replacement by alien plants will add to number of victims.

Allen’s reading of this news item is followed by a skit demonstrating the wide-ranging effect the predicted rise of allergic reactions might have on the afflicted urbanite. This time, though, I was more interested in Allen’s source than in his take on it. My curiosity being immune to ulcers, I soon caught up on R. P. (no relation to P. G.) Wodehouse and his endeavors to “win the secret of a weed’s plain heart” (a quotation prefacing his 1945 study on Hay Fever Plants).

I wish R. P. Wodehouse had been a household name where I grew up; but, as the good doctor reminds me, by quoting John James Ingalls, “grass” is the “forgiveness of nature.” I’ll have to learn to let it grow over my own family plot—and concentrate instead on finding out how to avoid another catastrophic invasion of my oral flora. To cure my foul mood, a generous dose of Fred Allen is indicated . . .

9th Mar 2009

Elbows and Audacity

Unlike my imperialist, Anschluss-eager ancestors, I am not anxious for Lebensraum, the supposed deficiency thereof justified many acts of ruthless expansion. If I lack living space, I tend to shrink-fit myself back into it; instead of elbowing my way out of a tight squeeze, I grab and ditch whatever the chosen niche cannot hold. The size of a pad has always been less important to me than its position or the pal who shares it. For much of my adult life I did not have as much as a closet to myself, let alone a room to call my own. Letting go of stuff has been both essential and elementary. True, I never possessed much that could not be replaced or that required ample room to place it in. A few photo albums, personal letters, and an old teddy bear—little else of mine has double-crossed the Atlantic as I, the disloyal Teuton, migrated from the Rhineland to the East River, from Manhattan to rural Wales.

Perhaps, it is this sense of freedom from dead weight, this longing be without belongings that attracted me to the theater of the mind. Back in New York, crammed into small quarters I knew I had to vacate before long, I began to collect the immaterial, the non-stuff that gathers no dust: plays written for the ear, tales unfolding on the air. Practically all of them are now stored on a single laptop . . . except for that impractical drawer full of plastic cases, the magnetic tape that can only hold so much and, of itself, so little attraction. Audiocassettes, I mean.

A mere decade ago, when I was writing my PhD dissertation (at a “desk” that doubled as a dining table), I had not yet caught on to the disencumbering economy known as mp3. Dozens of cassettes, purchased from various vendors of old-time radio recordings, were piling up in my digs, no matter how much I tried to preserve space by dubbing them from 60 to 120-minute tapes. To this day, many of those tapes still fill a large drawer, well out of earshot now that my Mac serves as my receiver, my library, and my annex.

Over the years, I have been able to replace many of them with digital recordings shared or sold online, albeit at a loss of fidelity. The ones that remain are of the rarer sort, the highbrow and experimental kind with which I set out to sell my study to academics reluctant to conceive of radio dramatics as literature. Most of these plays have been published on the paper that bestows upon them a watermark of distinction—a bias in favor of ink over air that bolstered my argument that the works of Archibald MacLeish, Alfred Kreymborg, Norman Corwin and Morton Wishengrad are indeed “oral literature,” an unfortunate oxymoron to which we resort when referring to the airborn(e) words whose life exceeds the margins of the printed page and the boundaries of the “wooden O.”

Along with music and poetry, the boxed-in cassettes encase the voices of old friends, the sounds of distant places and past lives. To get them out of their timbered limbo I recently downloaded Audacity, software that converts old tape to new files. For the past two weeks now I have done little else besides dubbing, editing, merging tracks, removing imperfections and changing the speed of recordings—all with a single-minded diligence that leaves little room for doubt: you just can’t get Germany out of this old boy.

And why save all this space now that we are about to move into a house roughly three times as large as the old one? Perhaps, I am not such a free spirit after all—just too lazy-boned to lug all that excess baggage. Could it be that what elbow greaseless me appreciates most about being at play in the theater of the mind is that it does not require the shifting of scenery? Be that as it may: I hope shall not long lack the time to make room for the stale air that is my element and the out-of-dating that is my métier.

27th Feb 20092nd Aug 2024

For the Love of Brian; or, The Gospel According to Judith Iscariot

In a few weeks, all going according to plan, I shall be moving west, to the Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth—a short move long in the making. Once in town and halfway settled, I shall set out to uncovering whatever pop-cultural past it has—you know, Liz Taylor slept here, Ben Gazzara filmed there; that sort of thing. When it comes to broadcasting, the prized hobbyhorse in my imaginary stables, no connection shall be too tangible to warrant my far-fetching it.

The other day, I missed out on a fine opportunity to introduce the place when BBC Radio Wales aired “Aberystwyth Mon Amour,” an adaptation of the comedy-noir thriller by Malcolm Pryce, the first in a series that continued fancifully with Last Tango in Aberystwyth and Don’t Cry for Me Aberystwyth. Dazzled by the likes of Carmen Miranda and Lucille Ball, I neglected to study the Radio Times for something of local interest.

Some travel notes and theater reviews aside, my life in Wales has not as yet been a significant aspect of my writings. All the same, it gave life to this journal. Not long after relocating here from New York City, when I did not seem to figure in the landscape, let alone signify in the culture, I decided in my isolation and estrangement to share what I knew or cared to remember—and it has been a comfort to me.

A few years ago, I posed here with my copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth. Back then, what felt unbearable was the burden of my own lightness, the feather-weightiness of my existence in the relative obscurity of a rural community to which I could or would not relate. Being here did not exactly feel light; but the town made some effort to lighten up a bit today.

After thirty years, Aberystwyth lifted a ban on the screening of the supposedly blasphemous Monty Python satire Life of Brian, currently ranked among the top 250 films on the Internet Movie Database. According to the BBC, its decriminalizing will be celebrated with a charity event attended by three members of the cast: Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Sue Jones-Davies. It was Jones-Davies—the love of Brian, Judith Iscariot—who made it happen. After all, she is the mayor of the town now; and by lifting the ban on her screen image, she also improved the image of Aberystwyth as a place that isn’t too heavy-handed in its dealings with the lighthearted and the irreverent. That’s some relief to me . . .

25th Feb 200916th Aug 2024

All Coming Out in the Time Machine Wash

Staying out of touch has never been easier. We’ve all got our personal teleporters to spirit us away from the here and now. Technology is making it possible for us to remove ourselves from our communities, to stay at home not watching the world go by. Instead, we can revel in bygone worlds. Hundreds of satellite channels are serving up seconds. Before you know it, you quite forgot what time it is that you just passed. Isn’t it high time for Sally Jessy Raphaël to stop gabbing? Eight years ago she went off the air; but there she is, chatting away on British television, her owl glasses unscratched by the sand of time.

Keep your finger on the remote control long enough and you’ll come across The Lone Ranger pursuing evildoers in perpetuity as if his name really were the Long-ranger. And there, cigarette holder in hand as in days of smoke-shrouded yore, is glamorous Lana Turner in the cliffhanger of Falcon Crest‘s second season; and these days, the hiatus will only last a few hours. Breakfast time will tell who ended up in that coffin (after twenty-five years, it will be new to me all over again).

“I don’t ask you to prepare for a new world—because I realize that a new world is here now.” H. G. Wells said that during one of his 1940s radio addresses. I caught up with him listening to Philip Osment’s adaptation of The Time Machine, into which you might still enter online before that portal closes on 28 February. I have recorded it, for future listening. The new world here now is a world in which time is out of joint, as old Hamlet might have said. As a species, we might well be running out of time; but that only encourages us to amble in the continuum. We keep on moseying in the fourth dimension so as not to face the things to come. Such are the hazards of the Time Machine Age.

The Internet? It’s a regular world wide cobweb! A sticky tangle of threads from which it is difficult to extricate ourselves once we get caught. That, for the moment, must suffice to account for my spasmodic writings this month. I am spending a great deal of time flicking through magazines like Radio-Movie Guide, hundreds of which have been digitized and are being freely shared online.

From the above issue (24 February to 1 March 1940), for instance, I learned what Myrna Loy’s masseuse rushed home to before Loy bought a portable radio to find out for herself (I Love a Mystery), how the Pot o’ Gold became a matter for the Department of Justice, or what John Kieran let slip on Information Please (“I frequently carry books on my person in strange places”).

Yes, keeping up with the out-of-date has sure gotten easier. Getting back has not . . .

24th Feb 20093rd Sep 2024

Fat Lies Tuesday; or, Time to Love and Time to Hate

This is a day for disguises, and a night of unmasking. A time to let yourself go, and a time to let go of something. A night to make an ass of yourself, and a morning to mark yourself with ash. Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Fastnacht. Back where I come from—Germany’s Rhineland—carnival is a major holiday, an interlude set aside for delusions, for letting powerless misrule themselves: laborers parading in the streets without demanding higher wages, farmers nominating mock kings and drag queens to preside over their revels; women storming the houses of local government to perform the ritual of emasculation by cutting off the ties that hang from the necks of the ruling sex. It is a riotous spectacle designed to preserve what is; a staged and sanctioned ersatz rebellion that exhausts itself in hangovers.

Sometimes, the disillusionment creeps up on you only gradually. Upon reflection, that wondrous “what if” begins to sound more like sobering “as if!” You may have had a good time—but, when it comes right down to it, you’ve been had.

As a political instrument, the radio is not unlike Mardi Gras. Tuning in after a day’s work is a carnivalesque experience—the partaking of a communal pancake made from the eggs with which you didn’t dare to pelt those who own most of the chicken. It is the allotted substitute for the half-forgotten voice that those content to listen tend to deny themselves. Broadcasting was, after all, an industry in the service of keeping things as they are or as they ought to be—according to those who operate (within) it.

Radio’s most prominent voices belonged to the fools and the tricksters—Ed Wynn, Baron Munchausen, and the irreverent, imaginary Charlie McCarthy; but during the lean years of depression and war, a period when the medium was at its most influential, radio also coaxed listeners into making sacrifices by driving home their frugality or fortitude could make a difference.

One such Atwater-Lent offering was “The Women Stayed at Home,” first heard on this day, 24 February, in 1940. It was written by Arch Oboler, the medium’s foremost melodramatist. If one contemporary source is to be believed, Oboler penned more than four hundred plays between 1935 and 1940 alone. The bulk of his output may be classified either as schlock or as propaganda; except that much of his work is not either, it is both.

There is jolly little cheer in “The Women Stayed at Home,” starring Norma Shearer, whose 1939 screen success The Women may well have suggested the title. Not that, aside from the performer and the spurious message of female empowerment, there are any similarities between those two vehicles. The opening scene of the latter is the “wind-wept” coast of an unspecified country:

It is night. For once the sea is calm. It waits ominously upon the edge offshore where sits a woman and an old man. For a long time they have sat quietly, but now woman speaks to the old man, and her words lift out to the sea on the rush of the wind. . . .

The woman is Celia. The old man is one of us—a listener. Shortly after her wedding, Celia’s fisherman husband perishes at sea. When war breaks out, she feels that she has nothing for which to live or fight. Being refused a chance to be of use to the community, she decides to drown herself. In the attempt, she happens upon a body in the water, the body of a man yet living—a “man from an enemy boat.”

Torn between her civic duty and her moral responsibility, Celia decides to be a nurse to Carl, the German stranger whose needs and gratitude imbue her with a sense of purpose that gradually turns into love. Aware of having placed Celia in a precarious position, Carl disappears; but Celia, no longer lonely, is convinced that he will return to her one day.

There was a market for such sentiment prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, when the isolationist lobby was still strong and outspoken responses to fascism were rarely heard on the air. In 1942, when the play was published, Oboler tried to justify its inclusion in This Freedom by arguing that “after a while, you find yourself hating too much”—a justification clearly tagged on since, back in 1940, even a prominent writer like Oboler could not get away with overtly opposing the policy of neutrality by inciting anger and directing it toward a foreign national target.

When the play was revived almost exactly four years later, in February 1944, the situation had long changed and the playwright was quick to adjust the message to suit the occasion that was Everything for the Boys, a variety program for American servicemen. Oboler had turned into a staunch advocate of hatred. That is, he argued it to be more effective to make Americans hate the enemy than love their own country. It was hate that got things done.

The pseudo-pacifist “Women,” now headed by Mercedes McCambridge, became a patriotic morale booster set in Norway under German occupation. The stranger washed ashore is now a British flyer (played by Ronald Colman). Celia’s dilemma: whether to hide the man or nurse him back to fighting form. After he is gone, a newly invigorated Celia declares: “I like to think that he knows I’m fighting now, too. For the good people. Some day the fighting will be over. It must end. He’ll come back to me. I’ll never be lonely any more.”

“The Women Stayed at Home” is clearly of the ready-mix, on demand variety; but it takes a comparative taste test to expose both versions as sham. Real conflict is reduced to melodramatic opportunity; genuine emotion whipped up to achieve whatever was expedient. Sure, there was a time to love and a time to hate—and Arch Oboler had just the words to paint the sign of the times in whatever color suited the mood.

When anti-war laments were popular, Oboler taught them be mindful of how Johnny Got His Gun and what good it did him. He introduced Americans to a “Steel” worker ashamed of being in the service of making war. “The Women Stayed at Home” betrays the opportunist who knew how to keep the pot boiling, a trader in sentiment who did not hesitate to discard supposedly outmoded principles like so many rotten eggs.

Whatever you give up for Lent, keep your integrity.

Related recordings
”The Women Stayed at Home,” Everyman’s Theater (24 Feb. 1940)
“The Women Stayed at Home,” Everything for the Boys (22 February 1944)

18th Feb 200924th Mar 2024

Under That Hat: The Life and Breath of Carmen Miranda

So iconic is this technicolorful Latina that she might not strike you, on the face of it, as the ideal subject for a sound-only documentary; but there she is, the life of Russell Davies’s “Carmen Miranda: The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat.” Once you remove that hat, you will find much to tip yours to as you listen to Ruby Wax, assisted by biographers Helena Solberg and Martha Gil-Montero, unravel the story of Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha, born one hundred years ago in the small town of Marco de Canaveses, Portugal. As Carmen Miranda, she came to represent not just her non-native Brazil, to which her family emigrated, but the whole of Latin America; and while what she became was larger-than-life, the “Brazilian bombshell” was not quite so large as to cover—or level—quite so much ground. It is the leveling that those proud of their origins and culture resent—and Brazilians, in particular, came to dismiss Hollywood’s All South-American girl as inauthentic, irregular, and downright ignominious.

The United States, of course, was counting on what it hoped to be a Pan-American appeal; it is what made the former milliner’s apprentice such a sought-after commodity during the Second World War. At the end of the war, she was reputedly the highest paid woman in the United States.

A romance born of hardship and ingenuity, a glittering success tarnished by rejection, an identity challenged by dislocation and enfranchisement, a glamorous life culminating in early death, the one-of-a-kind yet kind of universal story of “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” is the stuff of legend. Sure enough, that is what, according to the Internet Movie Database is what is about to come out of Hollywood any day now: Maracas: The Carmen Miranda Story.

The samba-infused first installment of this three-parter makes ample use of original recordings to highlight the performer’s early musical career. Considering that the next chapter is going to transport listeners from Rio to Hollywood, I wonder whether it is going to draw on the one source that, aside from shellac, is best suited to the medium—the sounds of Carmen Miranda’s life on the air: her samba lesson for Orson Welles; her dramatic scenes with Charlie McCarthy, or her joking with Tallulah Bankhead, Judy Holliday and Rex Harrison on The Big Show. Never mind that hat. She was the Lady with the Tutti Frutti voice, which is why she had her own radio program down south.

Carmen Miranda died on 4 August 1955, within hours after suffering a heart attack while performing on Jimmy Durante’s live television program. Could it be that our demand for visuals, our insistence to be shown what can be heard and felt more keenly in darkness, is what caused Carmen Miranda’s heart to stop its rhythmic beatings? A program like “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” offers us a chance to bring her into our presence, take her in as the voice, the breath that gave her life. We only need to make the effort to be all ears . . .

17th Feb 200916th Aug 2024

The Whole Ball of Wax: “Life With Lucy and Desi”

“She wasn’t the nicest person all the time,” biographer Tom Gilbert puts it mildly; but to say even that much apparently triggers complaints from many Lucy lovers, to whom journalist Mariella Frostrup apologizes in advance. Frostrup’s voice is enough to win anyone over, even though it might make at once forgive and forget what she is saying. Hers has been called the “sexiest female voice on [British] TV”—and the hot medium of radio only accentuates her seductive powers. So, where was I?

Right, “Life With Lucy and Desi.” It wasn’t all love and laughter—especially not for children. Actress Morgan Brittany recalls a scene on the set of Yours, Mine and Ours (1968) in which Ball lost her temper when one of the kids dared to laugh and ruin a difficult take. Native Americans in traditional garb and images of birds likewise irritated her, as did bodily contact. “She didn’t like people being near her,” Gilbert observes.

She wasn’t funny, and she wasn’t all that nice. That’s what those stepping behind the microphone for a new hour-long BBC radio documentary have to say about the “real” Lucille Ball, comedienne, businesswoman, and small-screen icon. Not exactly a revelation, to be sure; but you might expect less after reading the blurb on the BBC’s webpage for the program, which revises history by calling I Love Lucy “a zany television series which ran for twenty five years.” Well, let’s not heckle and jibe. The anecdotal impressions of those who can justly claim to have seen both sides of Ms. Ball make “Life With Lucy and Desi” a diverting biographical sketch, however moth-balled the gossip some twenty years after the actress’s death.

She seemed somewhat out of touch as well, even though she got to run the run-down RKO and signed off on Star Trek, a program she assumed, as Gilbert asserts, to be about performers entertaining the troops during the Second World War.

“Life” is further enlivened by numerous recordings from Ball’s career in television, film and radio. My Favorite Husband, I am pleased to note, has not been left out of this phono-biographic grab bag, even though the snippet from the radio forerunner to I Love Lucy airs without commentary; nor is it always clear what it is that we are hearing—no dates or episode titles are mentioned—the clip from My Favorite Husband, for instance, is not identified as being been taken from the 4 March 1949 episode—and the selections seem not merely random, but hardly representative of Ball’s finest moments in this or any medium. When you hear her sing “It’s Today” (from the stage hit turned film dud Mame), you’d wish someone would “strike the band up” to drown out the wrong notes.

The argument this documentary seems to make is that Lucy would not have been Lucy if Desi had not been Ricky. Ball had talent, Brittany concedes, but might have ended up like “Baby” June Havoc, whom Brittany portrayed in Gyspy—a fine performer who never quite reached stardom and who, though still living, is not nearly so well remembered today as to be celebrated—or critiqued—in a radio documentary of her own. She might just have remained the “Queen of the B’s.”

The inevitable Robert Osborne aside, the lineup of folks who knew or at any rate worked with Ball also includes “Little Ricky” Keith Thibodeaux, Peter Marshall (who walked out on a chance of working with Ball), Allan Rich (who played a Judge on Life with Lucy; not, as Frostrup has it, on the Lucy Show) and writer Madelyn Davis (formerly Pugh), who still gets fan mail for having created the durable caricatures that were “Lucy.”

No mention, of course, is made of Hoppla Lucy, viewings of which constitute my earliest television memories (Hoppla Lucy being the title of the German-dubbed Lucy Show). Long before I had breakfast with Lucy when truncated (make that mutilated) episode of her first and finest television series aired on New York’s Fox Five every weekday morning, a truncated version of myself sat down to watch Lucy bake a cake and making a mess of it. I haven’t watched it since, but can still tune in the laugh it produced. Who cares whether or not what I saw was the real Ball. I sure was having one.

Related recordings
My Favorite Husband (4 March 1949)