Category: Radio

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Return to Radio Street

Writing this journal, I often think of myself as being on the verge of extinction. A sense of pastness pervades my present, delayed responses to the supposedly bygone, with modern technology determining (and potentially terminating) my virtual presence. In my largely inconsequential musings on popular culture, I am perched on the edge of both nostalgia and history, dreading the irresponsibility and the impossible responsibilities of such territories foreign to me. At best, I can represent myself—and that but feebly, squeezed in as I am by the marginalia, the marginality of my interests, intellect, and imagination.

A quest of self between the nowhere of nostalgia and the distinct there—and therefores—of history? Somehow, that is not unlike riding the retro tram that takes visitors to Latvia through the nation’s capital, Riga. No wonder. I recently returned from there.

The “Retro Tram” takes you to the Jugendstil district, where you will find the largest accumulation of art nouveau architecture in the world (a designated World Heritage site); it also takes you to Riga’s garden city, Mezapark and its nouveau riche . . . past the Latvian National Opera, the Riga Latvian Society, the National Library of Latvia, past and through a series of cemeteries, all the way to the Riga National Zoological Garden. National! That elusive, loathsome, longing-inspiring notion.

Even though it numbers among the world’s less-than-happy countries, if a recent survey is to be believed, Latvia strikes one—or struck me—as a young nation eager to find and define itself. Wars, occupations, repressions of native culture and language, and now the surge (or scourge) of Western commercialism have made this a difficult and perhaps impossible project. One such commercial enterprise, the Retro Tram, takes you—the tourist—past sites revealing German influences and bygone splendor, while much of the old town seems like a theme park—or the construction site for one—featuring new buildings meant to reflect one past while obscuring a more recent, the horrors of which are reenacted or displayed in some of the city’s museums (the Occupation Museum, for instance). Are these places representative of the nation or placeholders for a national identity lost in (or to) the spirit of European unity?

It seemed appropriate that the tram is departing from and returning to a street whose name bespeaks or proclaims the quest for such solidarity, for union and the voicing of uniting ideas in a language that unites: Radio, McLuhan’s “tribal drum.” As I am returning now to Radio Street, to the subject that is right up mine, I struggle once more to make the past my present while steering clear of both the headlongevity of nostalgia and the impossible burden—the hubris—of history. All I can offer is a splash in the shallow puddles of my own reflections as I make my way down what, to me, is anything but Memory Lane . . .

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Taking a Name for Yourself: The Strange Case of Peter Lorre Vs. Peter Lorre

If only my father had been a serial killer. That’s what I thought, one afternoon, when I called the government office in charge of name changes. Regulations were so strict in Germany, the reason of doing away with your old moniker had to be something close to murder in the family. “We can only hope” is what I said to the bureaucrat on the other end of the line and, hanging up, gave up on the idea. I was just about to move to the United States and thought that it might be easier for me not to be “Harry Heuser” and face the prospect of being called “User,” as “Heuser” is so often mispronounced.

Now, I had no fancy alternative in mind; “Hauser” (as in Kaspar Hauser) would have done just nicely. I certainly did not try to free ride on someone else’s fame, faded or otherwise. That is what happened in the strange case of “Peter Lorre Vs. Peter Lorre,” a radio play by Michael Butts based on The Lost One by Stephen D. Youngkin; it premiered on BBC Radio Four this afternoon (1 September 2008) and was available here for listening until 7 September 2008. Having long had a fascination for the aforementioned Lorre, as well as onomastics, I was all ears.

“Peter Lorre Vs. Peter Lorre” is concerned with the final stage of the actor’s career, which coincided with those dark years in which aging Hollywood players found themselves crushed under the rubble of the old studio system that had cast them into stars. The 60s were cruel indeed; and many of the once highly paid players were reduced to accepting parts in low-budget horror films, about the only genre open to them. Sure, they could stop acting; but, for those who had made a living of it, this meant a kind of death; which is why many settled for gradual decay. In the case of Peter Lorre, who had been in the thriller business since his breakout role in Fritz Lang’s M, the decline had been more gradual still; he had been typecast so early in his career that he was soon reduced to caricatures. Just when Lorre was trying to push for a remake of M to restore the name he had made for himself, someone else was trying to claim it.

“Some fruitcake has filed a deposition,” his agent, Lester Salkow, informs Lorre, “He wants to use your name.” Determined to have this threat to his identity “stopped,” Lorre was puzzled nonetheless. “Why would anyone want to be me?” The “anyone” in question was Eugene Weingand, a Hollywood-based real estate salesman born in Germany in 1934.

“How would you feel,” the judge asks Weingand, “if your name was Peter Lorre and someone came in and wanted to use that same name after you developed it for a period of over thirty years?” To this Weingand made no reply; but, as Butts’s play has it, it got Lorre thinking and caused him to re-examine the worth of his name, not merely as a handle for salables but as a synecdoche of the self.

Weingand’s petition was rejected; yet, after Lorre’s death in 1964, he took the actor’s name for appearances in film and on television (in Get Smart, for instance), eventually settling for colourful parodies of Lorre’s ghoulish screen persona in cereal commercials. Weingand even claimed to be Lorre’s son, adding “Jr.” to his assumed name. Having just fast-forwarded through Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966) and spotted him in the scene shown above, I cannot deny the resemblance.

Nor can I deny the resemblance of Lorre’s voice to that of British character actor Stephen Greif, who is remarkable in one of the two title roles. So torn and identity crisis tormented is the aging Hollywood star he portrays that you might as well say that Greif is heard in both of the title roles. “Strange,” Lorre comments on Weingand’s story, whose statements he reads, slipping into the role of the deluded man to whose ambitions his life in the public eye gave birth.

 “I feel I know him,” Lorre tells his agent. Having so long played roles he would rather disown, Lorre could not bring himself to calling his namesake an impostor.

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Radio at the Movies: Manslaughter (1922)

Radio was little more than a craze back in 1922; but the radio and the microphone were already prominently featured in Cecil B. DeMille’s Manslaughter, released in September 1922, some ten months after US Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover declared the medium to be useless for point-to-point communication, thereby paving the way for broadcasting while leaving hobbyists in the dust of centralized, scheduled entertainment and the big business it was meant to promote. That same year, comedian Ed Wynn made his first foray into radio, the first drama presentation went on the air, and the first commercial went out to anyone equipped with headphones and crystal sets.

The reception was often poor; and critics were not enthusiastic either. One commentator, having just witnessed one of those early broadcast, remarked:

[W]e prefer to stumble downstairs and out again into the silent lanes to meditate on the civilization of 1930, when there will be only one orchestra left on earth, giving nightly world-wide concerts; when all the universities will be combined into one super-institution conducting courses by radio for students in Zanzibar, Kamchatka and Oskaloosa; when instead of newspapers, trained orators will dictate the news of the world day and night, and the bed-time story will be told every evening from Paris to the sleepy children of a weary world; when every person will be instantly accessible day or night to all the bores he knows, and will know them all; when the last vestiges of privacy, solitude and contemplation will have vanished into limbo.

It took a few decades longer for wireless technology to achieve what the reviewer predicted to happen by 1930; but it would not have surprised me if broadcasting had received a similarly unfavorable treatment in one of DeMille’s epics, in which the vices of modern society were frequently likened to the debaucheries of Rome in its fall. Not so.

Manslaughter, as told by DeMille, is a story of redemption in which both Lydia Thorne, the “speed-mad” socialite justly accused of the titular crime and Daniel O’Bannon, the principled District Attorney who sees to it that she pays for same are suffering the consequences of their actions. Rather inexplicably, O’Bannon has fallen in love with the selfish woman he is sending to jail, presumably because he can see her potential for good even though he accepts the duty of showing everyone how bad she really is.

Ultimately, the two are brought back together through the melodramatic expediency of fate and, having confessed everything else, confess their love. She has paid her dues to society and is thoroughly reformed; he has overcome self-destruction and despair. After all, this is a C. B. DeMille picture.

Before the lovers can run off together, the romance is delayed once more by an important announcement. This is where the radio comes in. O’Bannon has decided to run for governor; but one of his rivals for the hand of Lydia Thorne reminds him that she is a convicted criminal and won’t do as the wife of an elected official. Instead of being denounced and exposed by radio, in place to keep the public abreast of election results, O’Bannon grabs the microphone to broadcast a very personal decision.

It seems that DeMille was courting the new medium to prepare for his role as host and ostensible producer of the Lux Radio Theater, for which the story was adapted in 1938, with Fredric March reprising the role of O’Bannon he had played opposite Claudette Colbert, DeMille’s favorite leading lady, in the remake shot in the year so dreaded by the reviewer of that early broadcast back in 1922. Herbert Hoover’s comments notwithstanding, in DeMille’s Manslaughter, the radio is still very much a communication device. O’Bannon broadcasts unannounced and unrehearsed, just as he makes up his mind about Lydia Thorne. Unlike motorcars and their freewheeling owners, radio was fast without being loose.

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Officers’ Disagreement: Gregory Peck Prepares for Future Fights

“The eternal providence has appointed me to watch over the life and death of all thy creatures. May I always see in the patient a fellow creature in pain. Grant me strength and opportunity always to extend the domain of my craft.” That is what was left of the Oath of Maimonides when it was uttered, on this day, 28 August, in 1945, on The Doctor Fights, a radio series dramatizing the challenges of physicians operating in the theater of war. Gregory Peck read those lines with a dignity becoming the profession; at the same time, he lifted The Doctor Fights above the dubious status of an infomercial for the pharmaceutical concern sponsoring the series.

The program was fast losing its edge, now that World War II had officially come to an end. The Doctor was fighting his last ratings battles; but the fight for dominance of the world market was just getting under way. “With the rest of America,” the sponsor, Schenley Laboratories, was looking “with great expectation toward the limitless afforded by peace. Opportunities for bettering the lot of all mankind.”

As anyone knows who has watched The Third Man, war-devastated Europe was a crippled, corrupted, and cadaverous body aching for medical treatment; and announcer Jimmy Wallington spelled out where the opportunities lay for improvement and profit: “One of the greatest among these gifts of medicine is Penicillin. Born of war, this promising drug will contribute much toward making a peacetime world in which disease and suffering reach a new and all-time low.” No mention is made of the all-time lows in the field of advertising, which hit the airwaves for the first time on this day, 28 August, back in 1922.

The Oath of Maimonides, which may be of German origin, is uttered in many variations; but most of them argue the physician to have been appointed to “watch over the life and health” of the human race, not over its “life and death.” This is a peculiar phrasing, given the program’s sponsor. Should doctors merely stand by and “watch over” people’s death, or do their utmost to see to its prevention? Perhaps, the war had been turning the Oath into a curse, as doctors were called upon to heal those who were prepared and ruthless enough to cause them harm.

Such a story is the “Medicine for the Enemy,” the episode scheduled for 28 August 1945. Purportedly, it is the “true story of Lieutenant Commander Harry Joseph,” whom Peck portrays and who is interviewed at the close of the program. As a medical officer aboard the destroyer USS Osmond Ingram, Joseph is low on penicillin, but faced with the duty of having to care for the thirteen Germans who survived the sinking of their submarine.

“What if one of our own men’s injured before we get back to port,” the doctor confides in the captain, “and the only medicine that can save him has been used up on enemy prisoners?” He is reminded that it is “up to [him]” to make such decisions. Clearly, the Oath has been revised for such occasions of watching “over the life and death” of “creatures” foreign and hostile.

Foreign and hostile they are, those Nazi prisoners, men who would rather die than be treated by a non-Aryan. “The first time since I’ve been a doctor,” Joseph tells the German commander, a man twice blinded, by hatred and acid, “I’m not sure I care.”

The medical officer realizes that, in order to heal the body, he has to fight as well the ignorance and arrogance of the proud Nazis, applying “doses of truth, backed up by facts. That was the treatment used in combating the disease.” In dispensing this “anti-toxin for fascism” along with the Penicillin administered on behalf of the sponsor, Peck that was doing so, the actor who portrayed Joseph was preparing for the roles for which he became famous.

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Little Noisemakers: Hedy Lamarr, Winifred Wolfe, and Lili Darvas

“Are you willing to undertake a dangerous mission behind the enemy lines, knowing you may never return alive.” Thus opens Cloak and Dagger, an early-1950s radio series dramatizing the experiences of OSS (Office of Strategic Services) agents during World War II, “ordinary citizens who to this question answered ‘Yes.’” On this day, 27 August, in 1950, Cloak and Dagger presented “The Black Radio,” a story “suggested by actual incidents” concerning an “OSS agent who broadcast allied propaganda from behind enemy lines.” A radio thriller about radio? I had to tune in, of course, but got distracted by a little incident very early in the story.

Narrated by Larry Haines as Major Mark Lange, “The Black Radio” opens in the “big gadget room” at the OSS headquarters in Washington. It is a quiet day when, all of a sudden, one of Lange’s colleagues grabs his arm and, warning him about an air raid, detonates a small device in his waste basket. Just a prank among co-workers. The latest OSS gadget, Lange learns, is “a little noisemaker” about the size of a lemon, “great if you are in a tight spot and want to start a riot,” his colleague laughs. “We call it the Hedy Lamarr.”

The real Hedy Lamarr, of course, was more than a “little noisemaker.” Not only was she an accomplished Hollywood actress, but an inventor as well. Together with theaforementioned composer George Antheil,, Lamarr (seen above with Ish Kabibble and Kay Kyser at a Command Performance broadcast) developed a patented radio control for torpedoes, based on the principle of “frequency hopping”; but the navy would not have anything to do with the invention . . . at least not until the patent had expired.

And yet, “The Black Radio,” along with a few other episode of Cloak and Dagger, is not the kind of he-man adventure you might expect from a series so titled. It was penned by short story writer Winifred Wolfe, who, aside from being for a time the head writer for the television soap opera As the World Turns, became known for her stories about career women. “Ask Any Girl”—she knew their stories. Perhaps, Wolfe was merely commenting on the sexism in the work field when she exploded that little crack about Lamarr. “The Black Radio” does have a formidable woman at its center.

Major Lange is sent to Germany to weaken resistance with black propaganda by cutting in on the local Nazi stations to tell the people of Freiburg the kind of stuff the OSS wants them to hear. This was to prepare for the US invasion of Germany. The “Black Radio” in that strategic region was already manned, Lange learns. Or, rather, it was womanned—and the agent, Lucille, has not been heard from in over three months.

Our narrator begins to fantasize about Lucille, imagining her to be young and beautiful. It is here that Wolfe plays a trick on the Haines and the audience—for Lucille has “neither been slim nor young for longer than [she] can remember.” She once “taught history in grade school; now she was “helping to make it.” For this, she is prepared to die.

A well-crafted episode in the Cloak and Dagger series, “The Black Radio” recalls Charles J. Rolo’s reports on the “pirate stations” broadcasting in “defiance of the Nazis.” In Radio Goes to War (1942), a signed copy of which is in my library, Rolo “recount[s] episodes in the melodrama” of what he calls “one of the most thrilling chapters in the history of underground movement.”

Ever since the outbreak of war, mysterious voices supposedly broadcasting from within Nazi-controlled territory have periodically been picked up by vigilant listeners. [. . .] If any of these stations was really operated inside of occupied Europe, it was a suicide venture. Modern technical equipment makes it an easy matter for engineers of the German radio to detect the whereabouts of a bootleg transmitter.

“The Black Radio” and its operators do not escape detection. Featuring the voices of Barry Kroeger (as a Gestapo clerk), German-born Stefan Schnabel, and Adolf Hitler (in newsreel footage), the play is rendered particularly poignant by the casting of Lucille. Heard in the role is Hungarian-born stage actress Lili Darvas, the Tony-Award nominated wife of playwright Ferenc Molnar, with whom she was forced to emigrate to the United States in the 1930s. Wolfe’s play gave Darvas an opportunity to impersonate a freedom broadcaster making some noise from within.

As it turns out, Wolfe reserved a strong supporting role as well for “Hedy Lamarr. The “little noisemaker” ends up creating a riot in the place where most people would expect Lamarr to work her magic: in a crowded movie theater.

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Radio at the Movies: To Please a Lady

She played tougher than anyone else in pictures, and she was better at it. She could get a guy to fall for her and a fall guy to do anything for her, be it to lie, cheat, or kill. To please her was a dangerous game; but to displease her was a deadly one. She could make puppets of men; Charlie McCarthy was just target practice. I’m talking Barbara “Baby Face” Stanwyck, of course, the kind of social climber who shoved the ladder right into the face of those far from selfless fellas who lined up to give a gal a helping hand. In To Please a Lady (1950), Stanwyck proved that her very lips could kill. Well, as newspaper columnist Regina Forbes, Stanwyck had the means to finish the job properly: a microphone, a broadcasting studio, and a weekly radio program.

To Please a Lady makes you wonder what Stanwyck could have done with a regular radio broadcast; she certainly could have out-Hoppered—and, out-Hoopered—Hedda, who simply didn’t have the voice to match her name. That said, Regina Forbes is not quite as eager as Hopper to pick up any name dropped in her lap.

“But you can’t go to Newark tonight,” her secretary exclaims as Forbes rushes out to get a story that piqued her interest. Never mind that she already had an appointment with “Margaret.” “What about Margaret?” Forbes asks. “You know,” she is reminded, “the one who sings.”

That, if you require a footnote, is a reference to the aforementioned Margaret Truman, the President’s daughter. And Forbes had no qualms about standing her up to get the dirt on a disgraced speed racer (smug-as-ever Clark Gable), who, like Forbes, stops at nothing to be first at the finish line.

To Please a Lady is a contrived story, and one that is told none too well. So, as the camera follows Gable for another spin around the track, you get to fantasize about Stanwyck’s voice and the radio and . . . hang on, there’s Ted Husing. Best known for his sportscast, the CBS announcer was also heard on an early Eddie Cantor program and its successor Rhythm at Eight, starring Ethel Merman; an excerpt of a routine for the latter is reprinted in Husing’s book Ten Years Before the Mike (1935).

Of the “grand trouper” Merman, Husing says:

While admitting that television will double her value as a radio performer, I still think she is radiates personality over the air. Her speaking voice is vibrant with health and youth, and is highly individual, while her singing tones are thrilling. What more can you ask of a radio personality?

Television doubling the value of a radio performer? Obviously, this was written before radio took the corner around which it was assumed to be lurking all those years. And when it got there, round that bend, it crushed the competition. While radio was still not yet quite defeated as a dramatic medium back in 1950, there are signs of an impending crash in To Please a Lady.

Forbes may still have her radio program, and Gable as an avid listener, but she gets her news from television, which introduces her to Gable’s mug and convinces her to rush out to interview him. She may still be in a position to knock them dead with the lashings of her tongue—inducing one of her victims to commit suicide—but it is television that is giving her ideas.

Voices like Husing’s were fast becoming a mere adjunct to the flickering images on the small screen, filled as it was with the dust in which it left the art of giving you a mind’s eye view of it all through speech alone. You know, the thousand-and-one words it presumably takes to approximate a single picture.

My Eyes Are in My Heart, Husing told his former listeners in his second autobiography, published in 1959. And so they were. The book was written after he had gone blind. Stanwyck, around that time, was embarking on a career as a television actress and personality, which, aside from guest appearances, ranged from hosting an anthology series bearing her name to playing matriarch Victoria Barkley on The Big Valley. By then, plays for listening had all but vanished from US radio.

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In Clover . . . or Out?

“Broadway. It’s a swamp that’ll drag you, breath by breath, into its shadowed pools. Or it’s a meadow shining with golden light. It’s a place and a time and a loneliness that reaches out for you, then beckons you into an airless room and locks the door. You get out or you don’t. Either way, it’s Broadway, my beat.” That was the opening of the final episode of Broadway Is My Beat, which ended its run as a summer replacement for The FBI in Peace and War on this day, 25 August 1949. Final episode? Not in hindsight, of course.

The series (which I previously discussed here) would return to CBS radio, eventually, and run for another five years; but most of the listeners tuning back on that evening in August had no clue. “You get out or you don’t.” Was detective Danny Clover going to get out of the black hole of summer, the “airless room” that was the slot allotted to programs on probation while the shows that sold were on hiatus?

A man dies in silence and in dark, and a city sets up a shrieking clamor, and you’re part of it.  You ride a scream through the crowded, heat-heavy streets.  And then you hit a dead end, and it’s a building, and a room at the top of the building.  And it’s a man lying in the center of the room while other men take notes on the history of his dying.

Executives, no doubt. Is Danny Clover to vanish into the dark of the city, to be silenced in the shrieking clamor of the network schedule, hard hit as it was by the coming of television, on which sponsors were ever more likely to lay their bet. It is hardly a coincidence that writers Morton Fine and David Friedkin concocted for their final outing that summer a story involving the death of a popular yet generally despised author—a murder perpetrated in a locked room, bolted from the outside.

To eat or not to eat. That was the question in the “Val Dane Case.” His room was “like a tomb,” Clover comments; except that it was “loaded with food, all jarred.” Canned food, waiting to be consumed. Food, food, everywhere, but the author “died of starvation.” Even his ghost has to laugh at this irony. Dane’s ghost writer, Lyle Brooks, that is, who is in “convulsions of hilarity” about the conclusion of the whole rotten business of penning The Great Fake, Dane’s latest piece of fiction, without receiving the credit promised to him. “What does it matter if his exact words are remembered?” a yogi observes with a equal lack of remorse about the dead man’s career.

The shady mystic who was Dane’s titular Fake is mum about the outcome of the case, a case of a murder whose victim was not blameless in the death of his own child. Only the ratings could tell whether the Beat should go on; and when the less-than-neat case is considered done and dusted, the narrating detective muses: “How do you fill it in reports, how do you make statistics out of it and file it in a ledger? How do your write sorrow as a number? How?”

Fine and Friedkin’s Broadway Is My Beat was known for its fanciful rhetoric; but “The Val Dane Case” was all metaphor . . .

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To Hear, to Belong, to Submit: The Volksempfänger Turns 75

Nowadays, the concept of not having a voice is so alien to most of us Westerners that we fool ourselves into believing that what we are saying is of consequence, that because words are sent into the world they may also change it. We are too used by now to telecommune via phone or internet that the one-sidedness of broadcasting strikes us as downright barbaric. Why listen and be still when we can chatter and twitter, why take in a thought when we can put out a great deal of thoughtlessness with the greatest of ease? Publishing online or opining about world events on our slick mobiles, we are apt to believe that we have the world at our lips and by the ear. We are given gadgets—or, rather, we purchase them at considerable cost—that encourage us to exhaust ourselves in gossip while permitting others to check that our talk is indeed idle.

The talking disease is the talking cure of our modern society: the comforting illusion of having the power to say anything, anytime serves a system that, if our words mattered, would have to resort to more drastic acts of silencing.

Back in early 1930s Germany, Bertolt Brecht rejected radio as a distribution apparatus, a machine through which the few addressed the many, generally in the guise of speaking on their behalf. The German for broadcasting itself is misleading.  “Rundfunk” (literally, sparking around) hardly captures the one-sidedness of transmission. Brecht was looking forward to the day in which broadcasting could be a system of exchange, the kind of wireless telephony now available to us, at least technologically speaking.

Instead, German radio cut off all means of response other than compliance. It removed from the dial any voices that might utter second opinions. Effectively, it removed the dial itself by tuning the public to the official channel, and to that channel alone. Today, 18 August, the Volksempfänger turns 75. It was not simply the furniture of fascism.  It was its furnisher.

The Volksempfänger (the people’s receiver) fed Germans with whatever was in the interest of the Reich, that is, the governing body rather than anybody being thus governed. This privilege of being talked down to, of being shouted at and being shouted down, was offered at a discount—a discount that ended dissent in the bargain. Dictatorships, after all, depend on dictation.

Brecht had reason to be wary of broadcasting, a means of listening that precluded response. Does not the German language suggest that the German people are prone to being led by the ear? The German for “hearing” is “hören,” a related form of which is “horchen.” Both are the root of a great many words, and some weighty ones at that.

Take “gehören,” for instance, which means to belong, while “verhören” means to interrogate. “Hörig sein,” in turn, means “to be submissive,” and “gehorchen” means to obey. “Auf jemanden hören” means to pay heed. Remove the “jemand” (the anybody), and you have “aufhören,” which means to end, as free speech did when the Volksempfänger became cheaply available to anybody.

Today, we have the opportunity to receive as well as broadcast. We can take in hundreds of channels and put out millions of words. It calms many of us to the point of not speaking up. We can, therefore we don’t. A system that does not take the microphone away from us, that permits us to air our concerns, must be fair system. Why listen to anyone who tells us otherwise? Well, “Wer nicht hören will muss fühlen,” a German saying goes. Its meaning? Those who don’t listen shall feel the consequences.

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“How’dja Like to Love Me?”: Baby Rose Marie Turns . . . She Is . . . Well, Here She Is!

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t believe my ears, either. That is how I felt when I first watched International House (1933) and saw the sensational Baby Rose Marie belting out “My Bluebird Is Singing the Blues.” Watch out, Shirley Temple, I thought, this kid has got a little more octane; she’s more Maker’s Mark than Little Miss Marker, more moonshine than Sunnybrook. Today, that kid is celebrating her ( )th birthday. Her shoes may be on display at the Smithsonian in a few weeks; but, later this year, she is also going to be back on the screen—in a movie adaptation of the musical revue Forever Plaid. To find out more about the wunderkind from her own lips, I am tuning in to the first installment of a five-part interview with Rose Marie, recorded in 1999.

The interviewer, one Karen Herman, is about as dense as a pea souper, only far less absorbing; but the quondam phenom doesn’t seem to be phased by it, brushing aside or simply ignoring what she does not care to hear or answer: “Age is only good with wine and cheese,” she responds when Herman quizzes her on her date of birth, something “Baby” had to deal with right from the start of her career.

She also had to deal with doubters like me who, listening to her, imagined a rather more mature performer. “I never sounded like a child. I never had a Shirley Temple voice. Always had a Sophie Tucker type of voice,” Rose Marie commented. Now, that is a problem for a performer who is not seen. Sure enough, the singer-actress recalls, “people started writing in letters saying ‘that’s not a child, that’s a thirty-year-old midget.'” So, the alleged midget was sent on tour around the country.

Very little of Rose Marie’s many years on NBC radio is extant or readily available today. A clip from the 14 March 1938 broadcast of the Baby Rose Marie Show may be found here. Among the number is the catchy “How’dja Like to Love Me?” from College Swing (1938). Nearly a decade later, in 1947, “the little tyke who used to be in movies and on the air” was featured on Command Performance, hosted by a cheerfully daft Ken Niles, who was looking forward to holding her in his lap once again. Ginger Rogers set him right by describing Rose Marie to listeners as a “grown-up, luscious, attractive blonde.” “Well . . . ?” Niles replies rather salaciously and invites the guest to come up to his apartment to look at his rattles.

Mercifully cutting short the patter, Rose Marie sings “My Mama Says No, No” and, later in the program, goes back to the year 1926 BS (“before Sinatra) and does a swell Jimmy Durante impression (also heard on Durante’s own show).

This anniversary strikes me as just the occasion to reopen my Gallery of Radio Stars . . .

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Fight . . . Headache . . . Three . . . Ways

I’m fighting them any which way I can. Headaches! This time, though, nothing seems to work. And all the while, during a very nearly sleepless night, I’ve been torturing myself, thinking of the old Bromo-Seltzer train and its insistence that listeners to those Bromo-Seltzer sponsored programs “fight . . . headache . . . three . . . ways.” That meant taking care of stomach upset and jangled nerves into the bargain. Jangled nerves? I don’t know, but somehow that train whistle is the last thing you want to hear when you are under the weather (or whatever is firing up that blasted steam engine in my cranium these days).

The Bromo-Seltzer train was a menace, if you ask me; but it was also a marvel. It came to life through the magic of Sonovox, one of those fabulous if artistically insufficiently explored sound effects devices used in 1940s film and radio, where it was largely relegated to commercial duties. Its potential becomes no more apparent than in those insinuating drops of water dripping on A Letter to Three Wives (discussed here). As Time magazine described the invention in its 24 July 1939 issue, a recorded sound is “fed through wires to two little biscuit-shaped gadgets which are placed on each side of the throat against the larynx. These gadgets transmit the sound vibrations to the larynx, so that the sound comes out of the throat as if produced there.”

For comic effect, the novelty was used in the comedy-thriller You’ll Find Out (1940; mentioned here) and Disney’s Dumbo (1941). The Sonovox was also heard in The Falcon and the Co-eds (1943), and, rather more hauntingly, in the Joan Crawford-starring melodrama Possessed (1947; mentioned here). The swan song for the Sonovox appears to have been The Good Humor Man (1950), as a fellow web journalist shares it here, with a clip from the film.

The other day, I caught another glimpse of the Sonovox in operation while watching the The Reluctant Dragon (1941), a promotional tour of the Disney Studios filmed during the making of Dumbo, which was released early the following year. The proxy visitor taking the tour on our behalf is Algonquin Round Table wit Robert Benchley (pictured).

Tonight, though, it had better be a silent movie. Why not a stroll in Hitchcock’s Pleasure Garden, (1925)? After all, it is Alma Reville’s birthday.