Category: Radio

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“Madagascar Madness”; or, It Takes a Houdini to Get Out of That One

Tickled by Canary Feather’s account of being an accompanist for silent movies, I was in the mood for another non-talkie. The term may be unhappy in its connotation of lack, yet seems preferable to “silent movie,” considering that, prior to the late 1920, the sound for motion pictures was supplied by those playing the piano or the organ; even sound effects artists and entire orchestras were not unheard.

Having had my fill of non-talkie comedy of late, I chose a melodrama likely to wear out the most resourceful and nimble-fingered of pianists: The Master Mystery a 1919 thriller underscored by Stuart Oderman, whom I have often heard and seen playing the piano to movies screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Intolerance, Grandma’s Boy, and Caligari—Lillian Gish biographer Oderman has articulated them all.

In the case of The Master Mystery, the pianist must have been relieved that his accompaniment was being recorded, rather than performed live. However fragmentary, the film still runs an epic 238 minutes. With an attention span shortened by broadband and a clock ticking down the last minutes of the day, I was resolved to take in this thriller as it was conceived; that is, as a weekly chapter play.

From the first instalment, I expected little more than an exposition, an introduction of the main characters, and the obligatory cliffhanger. After all, The Master Mystery stars the famed escape artist Harry Houdini (previously encountered on a boat about to go over Niagara Falls).

Now, I pride myself in not readily throwing in the remote control; but The Master Mystery, with its secret identities, its corridors and hidden caves stalked by an pre-RUR automaton, and its cases of Madagascar Madness—proved too complex to master at that late hour. The opening title card should have been ample warning. The “Foreword” reads:

International Patents, Inc., is a firm whose vast fortune has been made by inducing inventors to trust the marketing of inventions to their care and after obtaining sole rights—they suppress the manufacture of these inventions—much to the financial gain of the owners of already existing patents.

However intriguing, this is hardly the most effective way of opening a chapter play. We have not yet been introduced to any of the characters, but are confronted instead with a corporation and with legalities not quite the stuff of melodramatic action. Equally frustrating is the introduction of characters by indirection, that is, as a name on a title card not referring to the character shown. The secretary of businessman Peter Brent, for instance, is identified as being “secretly in the service of Balcom,” before we are shown the latter.

My own shortcomings aside, was it writerly ineptitude that caused me to get lost in the muddle? Was it owing to the fragmentary state of the surviving print, segments of which have been “rearranged” to create the “illusion of completeness”? Or was it, perhaps, all part of a shrewd design? I was determined to fill in the blanks with whatever notes I could find. Notes? How about an entire book!

In May 1919, Masters of Mystery was published as a novelization co-written by Arthur B. Reeve, one of the scenarists credited as the “authors” of the serial. Yes, viewers lost in the maze from which only Houdini could extricate himself were promised a key to it all in the form of a tie-in book, replete with stills from the film. I wonder just how many moviegoers resorted to a purchase in hopes of mastering this Mystery?

Here is how the opening title card is translated into some semblance of a narrative:

“I will see Mr. Brent,” insisted the new-comer, as he pushed past the butler. “Mr. Brent!” he cried, advancing with a wild light in his eyes. “I’m tired of excuses. I want justice regarding that water-motor of mine.” He paused, then added, shaking his finger threateningly, “Put it on the market—or I will call in the Department of Justice!”

Brent scowled again. For years he had been amassing a fortune by a process that was scarcely within the law. For, when inventions threaten to render useless already existing patents, necessitating the scrapping of millions of dollars’ worth of machinery, vested interests must be protected.

Thus, Brent and his partner, Herbert Balcom, had evolved a simple method of protecting corporations against troublesome inventors and inventions. They had formed their own corporation, International Patents, Incorporated.

Their method was effective—though desperate. It was to suppress the inventor and his labor. They bought the sole rights from the inventor, promising him glittering royalties. The joker was that the invention was suppressed. None were ever manufactured. Hence there were no royalties and the corporations went on undisturbed while Brent and Balcom collected huge retainers for the protection they afforded them.

Thus Brent Rock had come to be hated by scores of inventors defrauded in this unequal conflict with big business.

While the perfunctory prose suggests that the book is not always better than the movie, I was at least caught up with the story and prepared to follow Houdini as he gets in and out of scrapes to a score by Stuart Oderman . . . next week.

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A Mind for Biography: Norman Corwin, “Ann Rutledge,” and Joan Fontaine

Yesterday, Joan Fontaine celebrated her 91st birthday. Now, I have no idea how the Academy Award winner marked the occasion; but I’ve got a suspicion that, on the twenty-seventh return of the day, Ms. Fontaine was perusing a script. Not such a startling surmise, I suppose, given that the star was particularly busy back in 1944, what with the release of Frenchman’s Creek (directed by the aforementioned Mitchell Leisen and last remarked upon in connection to my trip to Cornwall) and the work on her upcoming picture The Affairs of Susan (1945).

The script that would have been foremost on her mind, though, was not a scenario. It was what used to be called a radario: a dramatic script for radio. Not just any old script, mind you, but one written by the best in the business—the indefatigable Norman Corwin (now 98).

On this day, 23 October, in 1944, Joan Fontaine was heard on the Cavalcade of America program in Corwin’s “Ann Rutledge,” a gentle love story that historians tend to dismiss in a footnote. There is some doubt whether Ann Rutledge was indeed “The Girl Lincoln Loved,” which is the alternative title of Corwin’s biographical play. In his notes on the published script, the playwright remarked that, when commissioned to dramatize the romance between Rutledge and the man who would be President, he

decided to make it as simple as the story of the girl herself.  [His] decision was influenced by the fact that not enough is known about Ann to get a writer into complications anyway.

What is known is that she was the daughter of a tavern-keeper in New Salem, that she had several brothers and sisters, and that she was in love with one John McNeil before she took notice of Abe Lincoln.

Unable to rely on Carl Sandburg, who does not furnish his readers with further insights, Corwin needed to approach history with the open mind of the poet. He rejected the adaptation of Abe Lincoln in Illinois, since it insisted that Rutledge never loved anyone but McNeil.

Acknowledging this lack of ocular proof and inspired by the gaps it leaves for us to fill with meaning, Corwin’s biography of Ann Rutledge does not so much reconstruct the young woman’s story as it conjures continuations and alternate endings in the listener’s mind. The scripted and the spoken are merely the skeleton key that gives us access to a maze of passageways.

According to Corwin, the cast of the original production, which gathered exactly four years earlier, on 23 October 1940, was very much moved during the reading of the script, so much so that the great radio wit wondered whether we “was a tragedian and didn’t know it.”

Death is not tragic, of course, unless one ponders the opportunities that are lost along with the life. What might have become of Rutledge with Lincoln at her side? What might have become of Lincoln with Rutledge at his? And how might Lincoln’s character have been influenced by this loving companionship? It is a play that invites speculations about First Ladies, lasting impressions . . . and Joan Fontaine.

“Ann is no easy role,” Corwin commented, giving much credit to Jeanette Nolan for reviving her during the first production. Joan Fontaine certainly achieves nothing less. Hers is a spirited performance, rather than the once-over lightly attitude with which many a star deigned to lower herself to the microphone.

So, if I were a biographer with nothing else but “Ann Rutledge” to go on, I would guess that Joan Fontaine spent her twenty-seventh birthday with a woman in mind who did not live to see twenty-three.

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Radio at the Movies: Golden Earrings (1947)

Placing Mitchell Leisen alongside Hollywood’s top flight directors is likely to raise eyebrows among those whose brows are already well elevated. Most others will simply shrug their cold shoulders in“Who he? indifference, a stance with which I, whose shoulders are wont to brush against the dusty shelves and musty vaults of popular culture, am thoroughly familiar by now. Respected for his knack of striking box-office gold but dismissed by his peers, the former art director was not among the auteurs whose works are read as art chiefly because it is easier to conceive of artistic expression as a non-collective achievement: something that bears the clearly distinguishable signature of a single individual. Their careful design aside, little seems to bespeak the Leisen touch, which is as light as it is assured. Stylish and slick in the best Paramount tradition, a Leisen picture stunningly sets the stage under the pretense of drama; otherwise, it has few pretensions.

The epitome and pinnacle of Leisen’s dream factory output is Golden Earrings (1947), a sumptuously lensed romance that makes Nazi Germany look like fairyland, replete with quaint villages, enchanted forests, and lusty gypsies. It is a false image conjured up by the words of a paramour with pierced ears. For the darker side of the tale, nearly hidden from view, we are referred to McLuhan’s “tribal drum”—the radio.

One of those gypsies is played by German expatriate Marlene Dietrich, who approaches the brown-face role of Lydia tongue-in-famously-hollow-cheek. To Leisen, Dietrich “was the most fascinating woman who ever lived,” as he later told David Chierichetti, the chronicler of his career. Cast as reluctant lover, Col. Ralph Denistoun, is Ray Milland, whose lack of regard for his older co-star only enhances the screwball dynamics of this improbable coupling. Sheltered by and disguised as one of her kind, Milland’s Romani wry officer is on a perilous mission to evade his Nazi pursuers and get hold of a formula for poison gas, the kind of weapon that would exterminate thousands of gypsies.

Having previously been captured by the Nazis, Denistoun owes his escape to the master race’s slavish devotion to their master’s voice. He takes full advantage of a radio address by the Führer, guaranteed to distract his captors. The scene in which the Nazi officers rise to hear Hitler’s speech and fall at the hand of their prisoner is an apt metaphor for blind faith and mass-mediated control. Unlike those gypsy earrings, the silence of a people whose ears ring with the brass of Teutonic rhetoric is not golden. A mind closed to independent thought and voices at variance, Golden Earrings suggests, is readily silenced. To be sure, this is retrospective romance; and, its ersatz gypsies roaming quite freely, Leisen’s film shows nothing of the silencing perpetrated by the fascists.

Leisen was not about to denounce the medium he had romanced in two of his earlier revues, The Big Broadcast of 1937 and its 1938 follow-up. Instead, Golden Earrings confronts nationalistic, state-run radio with a distinctly American voice of commercial broadcasting. In the narrative frame, the English officer is seen relating his story to Quentin Reynolds (pictured here with Milland), a news commentator known for his on-air missives to Doktor Goebbels and Herr Schickelgruber.

Rather than spouting anti-Axis propaganda or post-war wisdom, Reynolds is shown as a receiver, a listener tuning in to the wondrous adventure of the strangely un-British Englishman who has come under the influence of a nomadic culture foreign to his people. It is a tall tale a commentator like Reynolds, who would later be libeled in the Hearst press for his alleged lack of patriotism, is not obliged to debunk.

The frame permits Leisen to construct Golden Earrings as a romance, told as it is from the perspective of an unconventional officer summoned by his gypsy love. It is all so fabulously escapist that the enormous gamble of glamorizing Germany so soon after the war paid off without causing much offense. That, in short, is the Leisen touch.

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A Nose for Business; or, This Woman Has Issues

You know you’ve got money to spare when you can afford to hire someone to do the sneezing for you. Save your nostrils, keep the tissue! Just call Hildegarde Halliday. That is what NBC did back in the 1930s and ‘40s, when Halliday was the Durante of sound effect artists. Radio actors were fortunate to have their proboscis blown by proxy whenever the script demanded the feigning of a common cold or an attack of hay fever. On this day, 20 October, in 1940, stage actress Halliday demonstrated her skill on Behind the Mike, a weekly half-hour that promised to take listeners inside the studio to reveal some of the tricks of the radio dramatic trade. Billed as “radio’s own show,” the aforementioned Behind the Mike dramatized and promoted the business by telling audiences what was involved in putting together a national broadcast, in selling it to a sponsor, or in prepping a studio audience.

“We’ve had many people on this program who make their living from radio in strange ways” announcer Graham McNamee opened the 20 October 1940 broadcast, referring to assorted animal imitators and baby criers (like my fictional Aunt Ilse). “But our next guest makes her living in radio in a way that tops all of them.” Halliday claimed to have “done all kinds of sneezes,” making herself heard on the variety programs headed by Rudy Vallee and Robert Benchley, as well as on daytime serials like Aunt Jenny.

“Oh, I can sneeze like all get-out if I just imagine very hard that I have a cold and chill,” the jovial Halliday tells the host (pictured above). To illustrate the afflatus the afflicted are to her, Halliday enacts in monologue a scene at a cocktail party she attended. Listeners are treated to a severe allergy attack, the sounds of which I know only too well. The sufferer lets out a few terrifying atchoos (a rather feeble onomatopoeic substitute, as it turns out), along with some choice words of political wisdom.

“I hope he doesn’t get besmirched,” the none-too-ladylike sneezer tells her friend, the wife of a congressman. “I always say politics are so common, what with letting everybody vote. No, I don’t know a thing about politics, but I do know what I like.”

Such sentiments are uttered more frequently than “Gesundheit,” no doubt, which is why elected governments are rarely as healthy and sound as they ought to be. And however poorly we are represented due to our lack of care at the sickbed of our democracies, we cannot rely on someone like Hildegarde Halliday to perform the suffering on our behalf . . .

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“Whoops,” There They Went

No, I am not referring to the millions of dollars and pounds that have vanished into thin air during the current stock market upheaval. I am just concerning myself with thin air. You know, the kinds of programs and personalities that kept folks from falling into a great depression of their own in the months following the collapse of the stock market back in 1929. Movies and magazines aside, radio was the chief source of entertainment during those bleak days; yet whereas periodicals are generally well archived and films of the period are receiving attention from scholars and pre-code aficionados alike, few of the shows then on the air can still be appreciated today. As a lover of the old cat’s whiskers, I often resort to rivalling media to get an earful of network radio’s earliest offerings.

In September 1930, Theatre Magazine started to acknowledge radio as a source of dramatic entertainment; in his column “Listening Room Only,” novelist Howard Rockey set out to explore the still new medium in its relation to the stage. According to Rockey’s opening remarks for the October edition, the “début” of “Listening Room Only” had repercussions in the “broadcasting studios. “Apparently,” Rockey remarked, “it has been discovered that at least a percentage of the radio audience is possessed of more than moron intelligence.” Although “radio-drama is still at a low ebb, its accomplishments and its potentialities are claiming the serious attention of those who rule the destinies of the microphone.”

So, what were tuners-in destined to receive back in the fall of 1930? Aside from The Rise of the Goldbergs, few names will sound familiar even to those intimately acquainted with radio dramatics. Producers of radio entertainment still had a lot to learn, particularly since getting shows on the air frequently meant transporting them there from other media. The transfer was often unsuccessful and the results at times unintelligible, as was the case with The Whoops Sisters (pictured above), a comedy sketch “based on a cartoon by Peter Arno—whom Rockey calls the “author of the first radio flop dictated by an audience that could not understand him.”

Rather more successful was Forty Fathom Trawlers. Rockey commends it as

a breathless continuation of sea-tales by James Whipple, a writer commandeered by radio from Hollywood’s script factories. Some of these incidents are original, while others are adaptations of famous nautical stories. Stirring adventures are related about the captain’s table by Brad Sutton, a veteran actor whose stage career goes back to the days when he appeared with Lillian Russell. In the interests of greater realism, one of these instalments was actually broadcast from the cabin of a schooner at sea. The dialogue was sent ashore by short wave, picked up by Columbia and rebroadcast from coast to coast. But so cleverly is the essential background obtained with artificial sound effects that it has been found more effective to play these dramas on a studio stage.

Little remains of Forty-Fathom Trawlers, aside from a couple of scripts (available here) and Whipple’s own comments on the program. Not that any of Whipple’s many other radio efforts ring a bell these days. For NBC, he wrote Dutch Masters Minstrels, The Fortune Teller, The Melodrama Hour, Romance Isle, and Neapolitan Nights; for CBS, he wrote and produced, in addition to Trawlers, series titled Close-ups, Mrs. Murphy’s Boarding House, Around the Samovar, and The La Palina Club Smoker. As news commentator Lowell Thomas remarked in his Foreword to Whipple’s How to Write for Radio (1938), its author wrote and produced “more than two hundred radio programs.”

Forty-Fathom Trawlers must have been an exciting bit of ear-play. While the broadcasting schedules of the networks were awash with such experimental programs, few bothered to preserve them for later generations who find it increasingly difficult to fathom that drama could come flooding into your mind unseen, without having to pass inspection. Ever since television ran the good ship radio aground, those with a passion for the airwaves have had to grab at any bit of flotsam and jetsam coming their way. Reading columns like Rockey’s, I realize that I am barely knee-deep in those waves . . .

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Politics and Plumbing

Doesn’t Republican rhetoric sound tired these days? The material isn’t fit for Vaudeville. The same old folksy (make that fauxsy) references to the mythical Joe Sixpack or average Joe, plumbing and otherwise. Shouldn’t that at least be the average José by now? It all strikes me as so 1950s in its white picket-fenced-in parochialism. Tuners-in are treated to the same bromidic anecdotes that are meant to stand for what supposedly matters or to distract from what truly does.

To candidates like McCain and Palin, what matters surely isn’t the presumably average Joe or Jane, at least not as anything other than statistical figures adding up to a sufficient number of votes. What matters to Republicans is the maintaining of a status quo serving those at the top who, if they deem it fit, let a few crumbs fall from the table at which few sit and most serve. Republicans tend to appeal to our meanest instincts, greed and selfishness, for which reason they rely on the lowest common denominators in their campaign speeches and their less-than-reassuring assurances.

No new taxes? “Read my lips,” perchance? The line is familiar, even if the letdown seems to have been forgotten by most. Less government? Tell that to the average Janes whom you deny control of their own bodies and destinies. I, who might have been a US citizen by now had it not been for conservative politics, would rather have big government than a world controlled by large corporations whose profit-marginalization of humanity is not only harming national economies but, what should be more important to us than mammon, our shared, global ecology.

Joe the Plumber? Sure, he exists. That does not make the figure any less of a fiction, a campaign speech commodity. Listening to the final Presidential debate, I was reminded of a certain “expert plumber” who stood up against a ruthless politician clawing himself into office; a cat, no less. Back in 1940, when socialism was not quite the dirty word that it is today, playwright Arthur Miller (a revival of whose All My Sons opens on Broadway tonight) created such fierce opponents in his radio fantasy “The Pussycat and the Expert Plumber Who Was a Man” (previously discussed here).

Tom, the Pussycat in question, is a questionable campaigner who shrouds his feline identity in threats and promises; he gets elected mayor in a nasty contest relying on the exposure of past wrongs in the lives and careers of elected officials, however irrelevant such revelations might be to the act of governing.

Tom aspires to the Presidency . . . until he is confronted by a fearless plumber, a citizen who exposes him for the sly customer he really is. Beaten, Tom returns to his home. The “difference between a man and a cat,” he concludes,

is that a cat will do anything, the worst things, to fill his stomach, but a man . . . a man will actually prefer to stay poor because of an ideal. That’s why I could never be president; because some men are not like cats. Because some men, some useful men, like expert plumbers, are so proud of their usefulness that they don’t need the respect of their neighbors and so they aren’t afraid to speak the truth.

As long as there is cream there will be cats that keep their paws on it while they purr about prosperity for all. Send in some stout-hearted plumbers who refuse to be campaign fodder and, rather than having pulled the fur over their eyes, set out to realize the ideal of draining the arteries in which the cream is clotting. And don’t let cream-licking felines make you believe that an ideal such as this is nothing but the stuff of pipe dreams . . .

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Banks (for the Memories)

“How do you want it?” the stern-looking woman inquired. “In tens,” I said, because I needed it that way. She was a bank clerk behind a counter; and I was referring to the denomination in which a portion of my savings was to be returned to me. I sounded like a masochist saying it; but, stepping into the money market in tense times such as ours, you must really be a glutton for punishment. As someone who still counts his savings in tens, I am not among the afflicted. Still, what with that whiff of October 1929 in the air and Iceland at the center of an international incident, you’ve got to be in hysterics to be laughing all the way to the vault.

Could an economic bust be a boon for the sit-at-home, dim-the-lights medium of radio? Of all commercial enterprises catering to our need for news and entertainment, it was the wireless that experienced a boom during the Great Depression. Radio profited from the closing of Broadway shows and the demise of Vaudeville. And while programs on the air advertised plenty of products, they came to your home free of charge; unlike today’s cable and satellite receiver, the old cat’s whiskers did not require a subscription. Even the equipment could be assembled cheaply.

Be it Wall Street laying an egg or enemy planes dropping bombs, the poor cousin of television truly comes into its own when the world is in turmoil. To be topical, for once, I am listening to a few classic programs featuring assorted banking woes.

Jack Benny pinching a penny, safecrackers at work in an episode of Gang Busters, or hapless yokels like Lum and Abner offering financial services, radio gave the public an earful of what, for the most part, it didn’t have: money, and the trouble that comes it with, especially when it goes.

Given the prudery of radio entertainment, it is probably safe to assert that misdeeds for dough outnumbered crimes of passion on the air, unless that passion exhausted itself in a peck on the cheek, however embellished it might get in your mind. Mr. Keen may not have been a Tracer of Lost Profits, but radio thrillers were nonetheless teeming with have-nots trying to get some without resorting to the legalized gambling known as the stock market.

“Please, would you come to the bank with me. Please,” a woman urges, with distress in her voice.

I, I’ve asked so many people, but they won’t listen to me. You, will you come to the bank with me? No, don’t turn your head. Please don’t go away. Listen, if I tell you very carefully why I want you to come to the bank with me, you will come, won’t you?

Another terrified investor? A demented clerk trying to get you to open an account? Well, wait and hear. It is the opening of a Lights Out! thriller cheekily titled “Come to the Bank” (17 November 1942). As playwright Arch Oboler explains, it is “the story of a woman who, for strange reasons soon apparent, is determined to get us to the bank.” These days, as empty bank vaults are about as spine-chilling a setting as a crowded morgue, the above plea makes for an intriguing premise indeed, especially if the concept of a presumably solid depository and a final resting place are being equated.

“Come to the Bank” is the account of a woman robbed of her savings as well as her sanity, insisting as she is that the missing man she cared for is “entombed” in the wall of the titular institution. “This is your last warning,” a psychiatrist tells her, “You are to stay away from the bank. You are to behave yourself as the good, intelligent citizen you normally are.” If he were alive today, shrewd Mr. O would milk his scenario for all it is worth.

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Pitch-Hitting; or, When Dietrich’s Not Herself

My grandmother refused to listen. She would walk out of the room whenever Marlene Dietrich appeared on the small screen. “She betrayed our country,” Oma would say, referring to Dietrich’s departure for Hollywood about the time the fascists came into power. Actually, Dietrich left a few years earlier; but the Nazis sure failed to lure her back. What a loss it is to turn a deaf ear to what aforementioned radio actor Joe Julian called “an exotic accent” and a “strong voice-presence.” Working with her in Dietrich’s lost radio series Café Istanbul (1952), Julian got a “glimpse behind the public image” and discovered

a woman of strength, warmth, and intelligence, yet so spontaneous that when, during a rehearsal, she overheard one of the actors express doubt that the rest of her body [she was in her early fifties by then] was as youthful as her famous legs, she ripped open her blouse to prove him wrong.

On this day, 8 October, in 1939, Dietrich could provide no such proof of her health and vitality. Scheduled to appear on the Screen Guild program that night, she was forced to call in sick due to a severe cold that, according to Roger Prior, host of the show, had halted the shooting of Dietrich’s comeback feature Destry Rides Again. The star had tried to honor her commitment, but had lost her voice entirely during rehearsals. In what must be one of the most inept voice-overs in Hollywood history, the Screen Guild producers replaced her with . . . Zasu Pitts.

It was all for laughs, of course. After all, Pitts’s voice had about as much sex appeal as fingernails being painstakingly filed . . . with a blackboard. And by casting Pitts opposite the less-than-expressive Gary Cooper, the Guild made the most of this emergency situation. “Is that Marlene Dietrich?” Cooper inquired. The affirmative only produced a terse “Well, so long.” Trying to explain the situation, Prior informed Cooper that “Zasu has Marlene Dietrich’s lines.” “Not from where I’m standing,” Cooper retorted. Together with Bob Hope and the actress billed as “Marlene Zasu Dietrich Pitts”, he nonetheless condescended to co-star in the sketch “The Girl of the Woolly West; or, She Was Wearing Slacks, So She Died Like a Man.” It sure made audience’s anxious for Dietrich’s return.

Nine years later to the day, on 8 October 1948, Dietrich was once again sick—and scheduled to appear on the air. This time, though, she was able to perform her role, cast as she was as the ailing Madame Bovary in the Ford Theater presentation of the novel as adapted by NBC staff writers Emerson Crocker and Brainerd Duffield . Sure, you’ve got to take Madame Bovary with “a pinch of power”; but you won’t be sorry to hear Dietrich breathe her last on the occasion. Besides, who could expect fidelity in the case of Emma Bovary?

“If some of Flaubert’s delicate delineation of character was missing from ‘Bovary’-on-the-air,” critic Saul Carson remarked, “Marlene Dietrich more than made up for this loss in literary flavor by her superb acting in the lead role.” Hardly carrying the chief burden, Dietrich was supported that night by Van Heflin and Claude Rains. “Too often, film stars rely on their screen reputations to cover slipshod work in radio,” Carson conceded; “but these people performed as artists who respected the medium as well as the vehicle.”

If Dietrich’s in it, just about any vehicle will do for me. Unfortunately, the extant recording does about as much justice to her timbre as Zasu Pitts. As for you, grandma, who saw trains depart for the concentration camps without making a noise, I’m just sorry that fascist propaganda robbed you of your senses . . .

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He Calls Them As He Hears Them: Joseph Julian Remembers

“The small but rich body of radio literature, which [Norman Corwin] brought so lovingly to life, lies languishing in a few libraries and second-hand book shops, under the titles Thirteen by Corwin and More by Corwin—a great shame and deprivation for the present generation!” My sentiments, entirely. Not my words, though, which is why I had to slap quotation marks on them. The man who said so was Joseph Julian, a once highly acclaimed and sought-after radio actor who starred in a number of plays written and directed by Corwin during the early-to-mid 1940s. Today, Julian’s memoir, a copy of which I recently added to my own library of out-of-print books on broadcasting, is one among those “languishing” volumes, a forgotten voice from a medium whose dramatic potentialities have remained largely unsounded since the late 1950s.

This Was Radio came out in the mid-1970s, a time widely deemed ripe for a reassessment of the aural medium and its derelict theater of the mind. Rather than waxing nostalgic—thereby squeezing the last few bucks out of a defunct business which, back then, most American adults still recalled experiencing first-ear, and fondly at that—Julian takes readers on a trip down memory lane that leads into neighbourhoods they would not get to hear about on an official tour.

His Corwinian class acts aside, Julian appeared on thriller programs like The Falcon, The Shadow, Inner Sanctum, Mr. Keen, Broadway Is My Beat, and The Mysterious Traveler. He was first heard on The March of Time, but as an also-ran-off-the-mouth, in re-enactments that called for crowd scenes. Briefly, he served as a sound man, during which stint he learned what noise a human body produces when it is turned inside out.

I can imagine just what kind of sounds emanated from Julian when he learned that the same thing was happening to his career. An established actor by the early 1940s, Julian remained highly successful throughout the decade, until, in 1950, his name appeared in Red Channels. His career as a radio actor declined rapidly; by 1953, his annual income had dwindled to a mere $1630.

Barred from work at CBS, Julian fired back by filing a lawsuit for libel. Character witnesses during Julian’s 1954 trial were Edward R. Morrow (last talked of here) and the aforementioned Morton Wishengrad. It was “an ugly period in American life and in mine,” Julian comments. His “urge” was “to skip over it”; but he felt a

responsibility as a victim to record some of what [he] went through. A whole new generation hardly knows that such a thing ever happened. But the fact is it could easily happen again if we relax our vigilance in defending our freedoms. Control of broadcasting is one of the first major objectives of those who would take them away.

His lawsuit was dismissed; thereafter, Julian virtually unemployed until William Fitelson, a theatrical lawyer and executive producer of the Theater Guild’s US Steel Hour television series staged one of the actor’s own plays in December 1954. Julian’s fortunes changed as quickly as they had declined; and he once again “getting calls for radio acting jobs.”

Without bitterness, Julian tells it as it is. About Myrna Loy, for instance, he remarks that, “if she had to win [her radio] role in a competitive audition with radio actresses, she wouldn’t have been there. Her voice, isolated from her other attributes, was dull and flat. She was selling her name, not her art.” More problematic still was it to perform a dramatic scene with Veronica Lake, who had such a weak, wispy voice” that the sound engineer could not get her and Julian “in proper balance.”

Lake was handed a “separate microphone across the stage” so that the engineer could “could mechanically raise her voice level to mine.” However effective for listeners at home, her faraway whispers had Julian straining to hear his cues. “Especially since they had her facing front so the audience could see her famous peek-a-boo hairdo. Hardly the way to play an intimate love scene with a lady!”

Of the notorious Hummerts, who “grimly dominated their empire” of soap operas, Julian remarks:

There was something darkly foreboding about [them].  Their stiff presence always evoked a sense of insecurity.  And with good reason.  They had a reputation for firing actors who incurred their slightest displeasure.  And authors.  When Mrs. Hummert once told a writer that she wanted “God” on every page of a script, and his answer was “Who will we get to play Him?” he was fired on the spot.  And whey you were fired from one of their shows it was a catastrophe.  It meant being banned from all their nine or ten others that might be on the air at any given time.

Call him fortunate or not, Julian continued to act on the air well into the medium’s decline. On this day, 4 October, in 1959, he was heard on Suspense, one of radio’s last remaining drama anthologies, in the routine thriller “Room 203.” It is a far cry from Julian’s greatest work; but these days, almost any cry uttered on radio seems distant.

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Blind Medium: My Eyes Are in My Heart (1959) by Ted Husing

Sometimes, when my heart is not in in, my mind’s eye begins to stray. That was what happened a while back when I tried To Please a Lady. Tried to follow it, that is. The Lady in question is one of Barbara Stanwyck’s decidedly lesser vehicles, and the horsepower on display in it is not likely to get my heart a-racing. Still, as previously reported, it has what it takes to get me excited about even the dullest of features: a radio angle. When I spotted announcer Ted Husing in one of the racetrack scenes, I started to reread my notes on Ten Years Before the Mike, his autobiography. I do not own a copy of that one; and, looking for it online, I realized that the chances of my adding it to my library are fairly slim at the moment.

During my search, I did come across another book by Husing, one of which I had not been aware. Nor had I been aware, seeing Husing on the screen, that he was plagued by something he was hiding from the world, tormented all the more by keeping everyone around him in the dark. At the time To Please a Lady was shot, in 1950, Husing was suffering from dizzy spells and began dragging his right foot. Years of denial and secrecy led to several accidents, all of them the result of a tumor that grew, undiagnosed, on Husing’s brain. Six years on, having finally faced an operation, one of the biggest and highest-paid voices in radio lost his eyesight and the will to live.

All this and more is shared in Husing’s second autobiography, My Eyes Are in My Heart (1959). While much of his life in broadcasting had already been recounted in his first, the two decades that had elapsed between the publications—and the misfortune that befell its author—make the later reminiscences not only more retrospective but also more introspective. “My values then were superficial,” Husing reflects. “Since then, I have learned to separate the real from the false. But this took many years, much suffering and much re-evaluation.”

Like many people who enjoyed a life and career that is considered a success based on obvious measures of fortune and fame, Husing shows himself remorseful, believing his affliction to have been a punishment, and a just one at that. For having been ashamed that his parents spoke with a pronounced German accent, for instance. For not having been a good husband and father. For having been too enamored with celebrity.

Now, I’ve never bought this kind of argument. If such retribution existed, it would appear that any disabled person is a sinner at heart. Luckily, Husing keeps his humility well in check, telling many an amusing anecdote about his decades in broadcasting, dropping names like a traveller, eager to be the envy of his friends, drops picture postcards into a mailbox hundreds of miles from home. Has he really been responsible for the discovery or promotion of entertainers including Rudy Vallee, Guy Lombardo, Bing Crosby, and Desi Arnaz?

Ted Husing was chiefly known as a sports announcer. “Actually,” though, as he points out, he “logged far more broadcasting time on music and special events.” Today, his name does not ring a bell resonant enough to make the multitudes pay attention; but, back in the 1930s, ’40, and ‘50s, that bell could open the doors to the swankiest New York City nightclubs. Never mind those places. What makes My Eyes Are in My Heart such a fascinating book is the insight it provides into a by now lost world of broadcasting during what is often referred to as radio’s golden age. Reminiscing about the life of radio and his life in it, Husing not only knows but is what he talks of: a blind medium.

As for a certain tough to please Lady . . . she does not even get a mention.