Category: Radio

Posted on

Out of Service: YUkon 2-8209

I hadn’t dialled YUkon 2-8209 in a while. And when I did so today, I realized that the number was about to go out of service. I managed that final call, but the gal on the line, a sassy number named Candy Matson, was hardly herself. The gal from San Francisco was obviously flustered and admitted to being too “confused” to know just what she was saying. At a loss for words? It’s certainly not the Candy that had become so irresistible to thousands of strangers who tuned in each week to hear the dame with the Ann Sothern comfort in her timbre as she talked herself in and out of precarious situations involving assorted felonies. And talk she did. Hers was the kind of tongue that could arrest even my philandering ear.

To radio historian Jack French, who devotes a chapter of his Private Eyelashes to her adventures, Candy Matson, YUkon 2-8209 was “undoubtedly” the “best radio series featuring a lady detective.” Perhaps, she was not quite a lady. “My name is Candy Matson,” the crime-solving siren introduced herself in April 1949 (an audition recording for the series’ 30 June 1949 premiere), and got straight to the point of her enterprise:

I like money. Lots of it. That’s why I became a private eye. And, too, you meet such interesting people. Mostly dead. But, getting back to the cash angle, that’s why I took on the Donna Dunham case. I knew it was full of dynamite. But a girl has to eat now and then, maintain a penthouse on Telegraph Hill, and keep the moths out of a few mink coats. Doesn’t she? Sure. And a shot fired into your room from across the street at three in the morning is just one of those occupational hazards.

Then, how come Candy was so beside and unlike herself on this day, 21 May, back in 1951? The independent spirit had been knocked out of her; and the screwball banter between the high-heeled gumshoe and Police Lieutenant Ray Mallard, who, as French reminds us, was not initially conceived as a love interest for Candy, made way for connubial cooing and the silence that ensues. During her first outing on the air, she had dodged a bullet; but it was an arrow that ultimately did her in.

To French, Candy’s gushing “in the style of a soap opera ingénue over Mallard’s marriage proposal” made for a “tepid climax to an otherwise remarkable series.” Sure, Candy and Ray could have gone on Nick and Nora-ing it for a while; but even the Charleses were eventually encumbered with a thin man of their own.

Besides, Candy was not cut out to be sidekicked around. She enjoyed the rare distinction of having rather than being an assistant, paired as she was with the cultured, at times boozy, and apparently queer photographer Rembrandt “I squirm with intrigue!” Watson, a sort of aging Asta dubbed by an ersatz Karloff. Mallard, meanwhile, rarely got closer to the titular heroine than an imaginary lover like Mr. Boynton . . . until our Miss Matson set out to solve her final case, which opens with her foreshadowing chase after him.

NBC’s ear Candy being stashed away in the keep of matrimony, that 1950s signpost of homebound subordination, of picket-fenced in independence, the lovely voice of Natalie Masters—who was married to the program’s producer—simply dissolved in tears as she accepted the ring and the retirement plan that came with it. That’s what I call giving your devoted followers the third finger, left hand.

A year later, realizing that Candy’s death by marriage might have been premature, producer Monty Masters gave the gal a new if still bell-ringing number (Yukon 3-8309) and tried to start all over again, keeping the police lieutenant and cancellation at bay. “Every time we even get near the subject of matrimony, Mallard ducks,” Ms. Matson sighs as if her marriage had never happened. By that time, however, it was a case of an admiring crowd divorcing the medium. Broadcasters, sponsors, and manufacturers alike began courting a public eager to get a load of the kind of candy that radio had been dangling before their mind’s eye. Boy, did they get the wrong number!

Posted on

Does Every Cinderella Project Have Its Midnight?

Well (I am saying “well” once more, for old times’ sake), broadcastellan is entering its fourth year today. It all began on 20 May 2005, when I decided to keep an online journal devoted to old times, good or bad, to the culture that, however popular, is no longer mainstreamed, but, as I explained it in my opening post, marginalized or forgotten. Looking at broadastellan through the lens of the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine,” you will notice a few changes; but, overall, things are just as they were when I set out. Except that I am much more at ease and far less concerned about my online persona, its definition and reception, more fully aware of my status and the consequences of casting myself in the role of marginalien as I have come to accept and embrace it. No, it wasn’t this way right from the start.

Having earned my doctorate and relocated from New York City to Wales, I felt the want of continuity. I was reluctant to immerse myself in Welsh culture, let alone its language, for fear of not being able to recognize myself as the cosmopolitan I had impersonate with some success for most of my adult life. The dissertation was placed on the shelf; and my career alongside it. Still, I was not done with American popular culture as I had rediscovered it during years of research.

Not having been able to ride my hobbyhorse all the way to the bank, I thought I’d start parading it here on this busy commons. I sure wasn’t ready to put it out to pasture and wash my hands of it with the soap derived from its carcass. Initially, I might have been confused about the purpose of such a vanity production. I wanted this mare to be petted, even though I was prepared to take it out for others to deride. Nowadays, I am mainly writing for myself, for the kick I get out of being kicked by it into the thicket of research and the paths of (re)discovery.

Whenever I see a show, watch a movie, read a book, or listen to a radio program, broadcastellan encourages me to make it relevant to myself, to investigate and connect—and on the double at that. Right now, I have eight books before me, all designed to warrant my title. After all, it was the aforementioned Eve Peabody who declared that “[E]very Cinderella has her midnight.”

Eve Peabody, the self-proclaimed American blues singer who arrives penniless in Paris, posing as a Hungarian baroness, no less. I’ve always related to this Cinderella’s identity crisis—and admired the sheer ingenuity with which she made it all happen all over again. In the words of Ed Sikov, she proves “tremendously elastic,” a quality that prompted New York Times DVD reviewer Dave Kerr to remark on the “unpleasant degree” to which writer Billy Wilder was obsessed “with the theme of prostitution.”

“I thought that Eve Peabody was a very interesting character,” director Mitchell Leisen remarked. “You see, there’s a bit of good and a little bit of bad in all of us.” Yes, Leisen’s Midnight, like all proper Cinderella tales, has an edge; and, at last, it is being brought into digitally sharp focus. Earlier this month, the screwball comedy Elizabeth Kendall referred to as the “ultimate girl-on-her-own fairy tale” was released on DVD, perhaps in anticipation of the by me dreaded remake starring one Reese Witherspoon.

Since Britain has not caught up with this gem, it shall be one of my first purchases next week when I shall once again (and probably again and again) take the train down to J&R Music World. What with our UK DVD/VCR recorder refusing to accept my US tapes, I have long waited for this moment to catch up with what Ted Sennett has called “one of the best and brightest romantic comedies of the [1930s].” Of course, there’s always the radio.

On this day, 20 May, in 1940, stars Claudette Colbert (pictured above, in an autographed magazine cover from my collection) and Don Ameche reprised their roles in this Lux Radio Theater adaptation (>which you may enjoy by tuning in the Old Time Radio Network). Perhaps, though, the wireless is not the proper medium in which to appreciate a Leisen picture, distinguished as his work is for what James Harvey calls “that look of discriminating opulence.”

Still, you get to hear some of the best lines in romantic comedy, albeit soften at times to appease the censors. For instance, when confronted with a cabbie eager to take her for a ride, even though she confessed to having nothing but a centime with a hole in it to her name, she offers to pay him for driving her around town while she goes hunting for a job. “What kind of work do you want?” he inquires. “Well, look,” Eve replies, “at this time of night and in these clothes I’m not looking for needlework.”

Like Eve, I have gone round in circles (apart from the proverbial block). The ride may not amount to much to many, but this is not why I keep on mounting this hobbyhorse of mine. It is the sheer pleasure of taking my mind for a spin. And, to answer my own question, there is still time for a few jaunts. After all, it is not quite midnight . . .

Posted on

They [Got] What They Wanted: or, We Postpone This Wedding

Starting next week, I shall once again take in a few shows on and off Broadway. In the meantime, I do what millions of small-townspeople used to do during the 1930s, ‘40s, and early ‘50s—I listen to theater. Since the 1920, such makeshift-believe had been coming straight from the New York stage, whether as on-air promotion or educational features. Aside from installing an announcer in the wings to translate the goings-on and comings-in, it took the producers of broadcast theatricals some time to figure out what could work for an audience unable to follow the action with their own eyes. When that was accomplished, in came the censors to determine what could come to their ears. The censors were in the business of anticipating what could possibly offend a small minority of self-righteous and sententious tuners-in who would wield their mighty pen to complain, causing radio stations to dread having risked their license for the sake of the arts.

Few established playwrights attempted to re-write for radio. One who dared was Kenyon Nicholson, whose Barker, starring Walter Huston and Claudette Colbert delighted Broadway audiences back in 1927 (and radio audiences nearly a decade later). On this day, 19 May, in 1946, the Theatre Guild on the Air presented his version of Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted, with John Garfield as Joe, Leo Carillo as Tony, and June Havoc (pictured) as Amy.

Now, I have never seen a stage production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning They Knew; nor have I read it. Like most tuning in that evening, I would not have known about the tinkering that went on so that the story involving a doomed mail-order May-December romance could be delivered into American living rooms—were it not for Nicholson’s own account of what it entailed to get They Knew past the censors.

Nicholson got to share his experience adapting They Knew, one of his “favorite plays,” in a foreword to his script, which was published in an anthology of plays produced by the Theatre Guild on the Air. According to the inexperienced adapter, his “enthusiasm for the job lessened somewhat” as soon as he began to undertake the revision:

“Radio is understandably squeamish when it comes to matters of illicit love, cuckolded husbands, illegitimate babies, and such; and, as these taboo subjects are the very core of Mr. Howard’s plot, I realized what a ticklish job I had undertaken.”

After all, Messrs. Chase and Landry remind us, as the result of a single listener complaint about this adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, which retained expressions like “hell” and “for god’s sake,” several NBC Blue affiliates were cited by the FCC and ordered to defend their decision to air such an offensive program. Nicholson was nonetheless determined “that there could be no compromise. Distortion of motivation as a concession to Mr. and Mrs. Grundy of the listening public would be a desecration of Mr. Howard’s fine play.”

It was with “fear and trembling” that Nicholson submitted his script. Recalling its reception, he expressed himself “surprised to find the only alteration suggested by the Censor was that Joe seduce Amy before her marriage to old Tony.”

The “only alteration”? Is not the “before” in the remark of the pregnant Amy—”I must have been crazy, that night before the wedding”—precisely the kind of “compromise” and “[d]istortion” the playwright determined not to accept? Nicholson dismisses this change altogether too nonchalantly as a “brave effort to whitewash the guilty pair!” Rather, it is the playwright’s whitewashing of his own guilt in this half-hearted confession about his none too “brave” deed.

The censors sure knew what they did not want those to hear who never knew what they did not get.

Posted on

Cowcatchers and Hitchhikers: The Technique of Radio Writing

This one’s been around and seen hard times. A tattered dust jacket bespeaks much work and long neglect. And now that I got my hands on it, I expect it to be in my service for years to come. To be sure, Luther Weaver’s Technique of Radio Writing (1948) is no eye candy. It does not strive be shown off in talks around the coffee table.

After all, its subject matter is the business of broadcasting, of producing commercially viable scripts that, once flung out of the voice box and into the proverbial ether, come to the ears of the multitude who are to be coddled and cajoled all the way to the store.  The Technique of Radio Writing is very much concerned with commerce. It does not wax philosophical about the potentialities of radio; instead, it provides information about the industry, its workings, opportunities and limitations.

According to Weaver, it is pointless to lament the fixed slots that make it easy for the networks to sell time for advertising. “Time, or the lack of it, is a great nuisance to new writers in radio,” he acknowledges; but writers who protest such limitations “might just as logically protest against the sonnet’s requirement of 14 lines.”

Weaver urges writers to

remember the value of Anglo-Saxon words, staunch and sturdy: they can be depended upon to make your meaning clear in the way a Grant Wood painting makes a corn shock stand out ion a rolling Iowa farm. Words of Anglo-Saxon origin are usually short, crisp, direct, easy to say, easy to listen to, easy to understand. You’ll find them valuable in your work.

Making things plain, Weaver does not shy away from the vocabulary of the trade, but explains the at times colorful jargon. A “cowcatcher,” for instance, is a

commercial announcement “coming on first,” that is, preceding the opening of the program itself.  Note that it is on a different product or service from the product or service that appears in the commercials inside the program itself, but it is made or offered by the same sponsor.  Frequently it is known as an “allied “ product.  Similarly, a hitchhiker is a closing announcement, one that comes in after the regular program is finished. Both [. . .] are within the program time of the sponsor.  They vary in length, but common practice usually holds them to less than 1 minute.

A “block” of sales patter could “easily run to 3 minutes or more,” considering that the various advertisements—even in the age of sponsorship in which a single product became associated with a particular show—followed “in direct sequence: closing commercial, hitchhiker, station-break announcement, cowcatcher, opening commercial of the next program.”

In the years after the Second World War, commercialization was a hotly debated and much deplored fact of American living. As Weaver reminds us, future President Eisenhower referred to commercials as a “language that clinks sweetly in our ears”; to “hear commercials on the radio,” he argued, “means America.” Citizens, on the other hand, were voicing their objections.

While the networks tried to “knit the hitchhiker into the show itself by recurring theme music,” “[s]ome stations,” responding to complaints, decided to “bar both cowcatchers and hitchhikers on shows under their own control.”

By today’s standards, broadcasters of the mid-1940s still showed moderation when rendering their ostensible service to the public. According to Weaver, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) recommended that an hour-long program not exceed six minutes of commercial copy. The recommendation was followed by CBS, which stated the “length of copy regulations on the rate card of its company-owned stations” as being six minutes per hour after 6 PM, with nine minutes of commercials for each morning and afternoon hour.

Nowadays, it seems, the cow has run away with the boys and gals in the business of catching our attention while milking the tired medium of television for all it might once have been worth. Is it any wonder that so many of us are taking a hike and hitch alternative rides?

Posted on

"I’ve been around, it’s been well advertised": Among the Radio Stars of Today

Wanting to put a face to a name—that is a widely exploited weakness common to radio listeners. Studio broadcasts, picture magazines, and touring shows supplied what those tuning in were led to think of as being in need of supplementation. There is thrill and satisfaction in getting the picture, in finding out whether it matches the one a voice imaged forth. Another one of my recent additions to my library of books on so-called old-time radio is such a supplement to our mental portrait galleries, a catalogue of all those radio personalities with whom Americans were so intimately acquainted in the 1930s and ‘40s.

Robert Eichberg’s Radio Stars of Today (1937), on which I first laid my greedy hands while researching my dissertation at Hunter College in New York City, is rich in photographs of those luminaries now dim who used to brighten the days of millions during the years of the Depression and the Second World War: The Easy Aces, Fred Allen, Amos ‘n’ Andy, Jack Benny, Major Bowes, Bob Burns, Burns and Allen, Eddie Cantor, Bing Crosby, Jessica Dragonette, Nelson Eddy, Helen Hayes, Guy Lombardo, Lily Pons, Dick Powell, Kate Smith, Rudy Vallee, and Irene Wicker are among the household names Eichberg dropped and placed into captions.

Passing the likenesses of Walter Damrosch, Lowell Thomas, and Robert “Believe It or Not” Ripley, my wandering eye was arrested by the sight of Virginia Verrill (pictured, left, next to her mother, erstwhile Vaudeville actress Aimee McLean). The name did not sound any chimes. “Vee,” as Eichberg informs us, “made her debut at the age of three, singing with [orchestra leader] Paul Whiteman,” who was a “friend of her mother’s.” By the age of thirteen, she was heard on local broadcasts and, a year later, was “doubling for Barbara Stanwyck.”

What readers back then could not have known, even an altered hairline did little to secure her leading lady status in Hollywood. Her film career, begun at the age of sixteen, did not take off; producers noted that Verrill “screened too much like Myrna Loy.” They noted, too, that she could “double” for those in need of a dubbing. It is hardly a path conducive to fame.

Loy’s looks and Hollywood’s trompe l’oreille may have stood in her way to stardom on the screen; but the largely invisible Verrill nonetheless made a name for herself on radio, to which her inclusion in Radio Stars attests. Verrill was heard on 1930s programs like Socony Sketchbook, Wonder Show and Log Cabin Jamboree. Just today, two of her Socony performances were brought to our ears courtesy of the Old Time Radio Researchers Group and their latest contribution to the Internet Archive.

Airing on 14 June 1935, the very first Socony Sketchbook broadcast features teenaged Verrill’s rendition of “Reckless.” Songwriter-composer Johnny Green did not hesitate to give Verrill the credit due to her:

Hollywood made that tune famous through the picture of the same name starring William Powell and Jean Harlow. Virginia Verrill did her part to make it famous, too, for it was her singing voice you really heard in the film.

“Gee, Johnny, you shouldn’t have mentioned that,” Verrill adds coyly before performing her number. Yet, as those in radio knew, it pays to be “well advertised” (to quote a line from the song). Nor does it dull the Milky Way when one star washes the hand of another. A week later, on the 21 June 1935 broadcast, Verrill got the chance to return the favor by reminding listeners that her latest song—”How Can I Hold You Close Enough?”—was “written by the pianist-composer Johnny Green.” I might as well give them both a hand before I return to flicking the pages of Radio Stars, especially since Green passed away on this day, 15 May, in 1989.

Posted on

Notes on a “Note”: Milton Allen Kaplan’s Radio and Poetry

“If radio literature is worth study and analysis, it must be filed, classified, and catalogued accurately. The variety of programs would necessitate an intricate library system in order to permit a student to find such categories as poetry, music, historical drama, documentaries, readings, adaptations, and discussions.” Thus remarked Milton Allen Kaplan in his 1949 study Radio and Poetry, one of the most recent additions to my library of books on American broadcasting. To this day, such catalogues remain inaccurate and incomplete, at best, even at the Library of Congress or the broadcasting museums in New York and Chicago. Radio verse plays, in particular, are an immaterial thing—a nothing—of the past; they are almost entirely forgotten or ignored, especially in the teaching of literature and drama.

Literary critics seem to assume that, since radio was chiefly an advertising tool, the spoken yet scripted words that aired had only the most tentative connection to the arts. The study of what presumably were mornings with Stella Dallas, afternoons with The Lone Ranger and evenings with Jack Benny should be left to cultural historians whose trade it is to dig into the trash heap of Western civilization.

When Radio and Poetry was published, network radio was pretty much dead as a medium for verse. Even the most distinguished practitioners, Norman Corwin and Archibald MacLeish, found the networks less than accommodating. Corwin, of course, had come under suspicion by the House un-American Activities Committee and, in 1949, left CBS to write and produce plays for UN Radio instead. Only a few short years earlier, his works had been heard by tens of millions and were deemed vital to the war effort.

As Kaplan points out, Corwin was “the first poet brought up with radio,” as opposed to being among the “notable poets who turned to radio.” While not recruited, he was often importuned to write occasional verse, to speak to and for the nation, to erect aural monuments in commemoration of the momentous.

On this day, 13 May, in 1945, Corwin’s “On a Note of Triumph” was once again produced; the aforementioned play had originally been heard on V-E Day (8 May), which it was expected to celebrate. “Coming as it did at a climactic moment in our history,” Kaplan remarks, the play “won nationwide attention, and was rebroadcast, published, and transcribed.”

Corwin did not altogether embrace his role as a national chorus in the theater of war; and the “Note” he struck was hardly a positive one. Instead, it is cautiously optimistic, daring to consider the future rather than seeing victory as a happy ending to a drama staged with a cast of millions. The “Note” was also one of Corwin’s last major plays; the “triumph” of peace gave way to the whispers of anti-Communist hysteria and further war cries in Korea, the conflict that would not trigger any poetic responses on US radio. “So they’ve given up,” the play opens. “. . . on radio,” Corwin might as well have added after V-J Day.

Norman Corwin, who recently turned 98 (and whose 97th I commemorated here), is hardly unheard of today. His V-E Day broadcast was subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin (2005). Still, his name is not frequently uttered among those whom Kaplan sought to engage, the literary scholar and educators whom he encouraged to consider radio plays as aural art.

Indeed, Kaplan’s study, long out of print, is just about as triumphant as the medium upon whose life it depended. Radio verse being a dying art back then, Radio and Poetry was doomed to be buried alongside it. The author’s enthusiasm seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

“Today,” he concluded in a passage sounding very yesterday,

we have many aspects of poetry on the air—the advertising jingle, the popular song, the cadenced prose of the announcer, the verse play, the radio opera.  Tomorrow, as our audiences comes to demand more and more of the medium and as that medium changes, what new aspects will be revealed, what new alliances effected, what new forms developed?

Heard any new “radio opera” or “verse play” lately? Apparently, those jingles and popular songs are the notes triumphant . . .

Posted on

The Guardsman Takes a Coffee Break

”I am sure that Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne will never forgive me for what I did to this play,” Arthur Miller commented on his radio adaptation of Ferenc Molnar’s The Guardsman. During rehearsals, the celebrated acting twosome stopped reading the to them familiar dialogue and stared at his script “as though a louse had crawled over it. A new series of lines! A whole new scene!” Such is the business of writing for radio, which also involves watching your language and having the curtains lowered for you by those who demanded a prominent spot to push their wares.

On this day, 9 May, in 1937, Molnar’s comedy was being served in the time an ulcers sufferer takes to have a coffee break. Make that a Chase and Sanborn coffee break, considering that the makers of said brew sponsored those weekly visits with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, host Don Ameche, and their sundry guests. Stopping by “to say hello” that evening were screen actress Ann Harding and W. C. Fields—one of them on the way out, the other by way of reintroduction.

Ann Harding, then starring with Basil Rathbone in the Agatha Christie-inspired thriller Love from a Stranger (1937) was to play the role of Marie in the Chase and Sanborn Hour’s instant version of The Guardsman. “[I]t was impossible not to recognize it,” Harding remarks; her character, of course, was not referring to the play itself, but to her thespian husband’s attempt at disguising himself so as to act the part of her lover. Considering that the connubial con-man was played by the less than subtle Don Ameche, there wasn’t much chance of catching anyone off guard.

Listeners did not know that Harding would not get—or seize—the opportunity to play anyone’s lover for years to come. Love from a Stranger would be Harding’s last picture for half a decade, and the man responsible for her prolonged absence from the big screen was right there with her in the broadcasting studio: Werner Janssen, a soon-to-be Academy Award nominated composer. Harding and Janssen were married that year.

Of course, it was not Janssen who upstaged Harding during that Chase and Sanborn broadcast. It was his former colleague . . . W. C. Fields. “Mr. Fields, I’m sure you feel at home because here’s your old follies piano player, Werner Janssen,” whose name the grumpy comic did not trouble himself to recall. Fields was making what Ameche announced as “his appearance since his serious illness” that had “kept him off the stage and out of pictures for over a year.” Fields entered into sparkling banter with aforementioned puppet Charlie McCarthy, an act that would translate into You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man (1939).

Fields was invited back the following week; but Ann Harding (pictured above in a scene from Double Harness) was passing The Guardsman on her way to the altar she eventually refused to “recognize” as a signpost for the end of a career. It is one thing to recognize a partner by his kiss (as Molnar’s Marie does); but to accept that contact as the kiss of death is quite another. Before fellow guests Lorenz and Hart sent listeners off on a “honeymoon express” bound for Buffalo, Niagara Falls and “All Points West” (including Ossining, or “Sing Sing”), Fields gave her an idea her what it meant to spend her days as a half-remembered better half. When introduced to her, he declared: “I know Miss Harding very well. How’s your partner, Mr. Laurel?”

Posted on

A Doctor in Spite of His Shelf

They are gone. I’ve finally done away with them all. My compact disks, I mean. As of last night, I placed all twelve thousand or so audio files in the iTunes library of my new MacBook (which I only dropped once thus far). Not that past experiences have made this an easy decision for me, given how vulnerable such digital memory is to erasure.

This time around, I backed up everything onto an external hard drive. Sure enough, just after completing this weeklong task (which, the exceptionally fine spring weather here in mid-Wales aside, accounts for my now broken silence), nearly two thousand of those imported files could not be played. Last night, I had to retrieve them, very nearly one by one, from some hidden folder and return them to the library so as to have them at my fingertips once more.

Such ready access is making it easier for me to get my ears on notable broadcasts and celebrate the anniversary of certain radio plays and players. “Train Ride,” for instance, a melodrama “written especially for Joan Crawford” (by Charles Martin, then producer of the aforementioned Silver Theater) and broadcast on this day, 7 May, in 1939. Crawford’s mike fright (already remarked upon here) made such live dramatics rare events indeed. In “Train Ride,” Crawford gets to play a role with which many a radio listener can readily identify: an unhappily married woman who falls in love with a voice other than her husband’s. It is a fantasy fit for a wife who is told to “go to bed with a book of love stories and a box of chocolates.”

Indeed, the two wire-crossed lovers vow never to meet unless the other is about to die. “Each of us has an illusion,” the voice tells her. “Why destroy it for the other?” So, when the two finally get together, the meeting is hardly a moment of unadulterated bliss. After all, her platonic lover, who turns out to be the speech writer for her politically ambitious husband, tells Mary that he working on a “more humane method of electrocution,” the kind of hot love seat he seems certain to take one day.

BIZ. Telephone rings. Receiver is picked up.

Voice. Hello Mrs. Crane.

Mary. Hello.

Voice. Why, you’re crying. What’s the matter?

Mary. Nothing.

Voice. Haven’t you got anybody to talk to? Your husband?

Mary. He hasn’t the time.

Voice. Talking is a medicine for sick souls. I’ll listen.

Mary. I can’t talk to someone I don’t know.

Voice. Why not try getting acquainted? I still promise never to see you.

However unsound the vehicle, Crawford’s flawless script reading and suitably emotive voice make this a smooth “Ride,” one that runs as scheduled without betraying the actress’s much talked of microphobia. “I loved your voice, and I wanted to hear it again” her soon-to-be soul-only mate tells her. “You see, it’s been . . . well, it’s been like a lost chord vibrating in my memory.”

Memory. Lost chords. Vibrations. That brings to mind my own uneasy radio romance. When I set out to research so-called old-time radio for my doctoral study (Etherized Victorians), I was apprehensive about writing on non-print matter. I was torn between the concrete and the intangible, the alleged permanence of script and the inconstancy of the spoken. It felt like an adulterous relationship whose boundaries I could not get in writing.

I was, after all, a student of literature, not performance; and compared to the activity of reading, listening sounded like cheating. Having studied the Victorians for so long, I found it difficult to conceive not having my nose stuck in a three-decker.

These days, my shelves are largely virtual. The plays and narratives, while scripted, exist only in sound. Let’s hope my library won’t deny me access and yield plenty of immaterial matter to go on about . . .

Posted on

“. . . that same young man in that same brown suit”: A "Jackass" Takes a Bow

For the life of me, I can’t turn a phrase. At least, not at a speed that would encourage anyone to keep up with me. I can’t seem to cut a line short enough to make it worthwhile anyone’s time or spin it fast enough to lasso in the crowds. By the time I’m done editing myself, everyone else has left the spot I failed to hit. As a matter of fact, I am still editing what you are reading now. I would have failed miserably in the days when radio demanded rapid-fire gags at a rate that prematurely aged funnymen like Lou Holtz, who had drawers full of them, and wrecked the nerves of his assistants (among them, the young Herman Wouk, aformentioned). “Take all the words in all the full-length pictures produced in Hollywood in a year,” Erik Barnouw calculated in 1939, “and you do not have enough words to keep radio in the United States going for twenty-four hours.”

Comedians and the largely anonymous writers who fed them their lines sure had to work fast; yet, energy aside, they also needed stamina to sustain an act through the seasons. Sure, you can get almost anyone to “Wanna buy a duck”; but to make it something other than a lame one and not to end up with egg on your face after a few weeks, let alone decades, requires some convincing.

That said, quite a number of comedians, most of them seasoned vaudevillians, enjoyed a long career on the air, a durability that, with a few exceptions, is foreign to today’s short-attention-spanned YouTubeans whose mental databases have been outsourced and replaced by all sorts of gadgetry (or re-call centers) designed to make us forget anything other than to heed those reminders of how to pay dearly, if conveniently, for our carefully nurtured deficiencies. Their mental faculties scattered along the hard drive, future generations may well be on too short a term with the world even to get a running gag. (As I was saying, my syntax just wouldn’t do for broadcasting.)

Celebrating his seventh year on the air, on this day, 30 April, in 1939, was Jack Benny, that perennial middle-age dodger from Waukegan. “Exactly seven years ago today a young man walked into a small New York broadcasting studio and spoke into a microphone for the first time,” announcer Don Wilson (pictured, above, to the right of comedian Jerry Colonna) told those tuning in to the Jell-O Program. There he stood, “that same young man in that same brown suit,” still shaking before every broadcast. “And that’s what worries me,” Benny confessed, “Now I shake and I’m not nervous.”

From the opening tune, “Man About Town”—the title of Benny’s latest film—the broadcast was to be a half-hour of . . . depreciation, an invitation for Benny’s writers to go to town at the man’s expense. That, in shorthand, is the Benny formula, an instantly recognizable persona that contemporary critics Jack Gaver and Dave Stanley termed the “whipping boy of the airwaves.” Benny’s first words on the air (uttered on 2 May rather than 30 April 1930) already signalled the fashion, but it also reminds us how successfully “that same young man in that same brown suit” retailored his act over the years:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jack Benny talking, and making my first appearance on the air professionally.  By that I mean I’m finally getting paid, which of course will be a great relief to my creditors.  I, uh, I think you don’t know why I’m here.  I’m supposed to be a sort of a master of ceremonies and tell you all the things will happen, which would happen anyway.  I must introduce the different artists who could easily introduce themselves, and also talk about the Canada Dry made-to-order by the glass, which is a waste of time as you know all about it.  You drink it, like it, and don’t want to hear about it.  So, ladies and gentlemen, a master of ceremonies is really a fellow who is unemployed and gets paid for it.

Gradually, such self-consciousness would become tempered with no uncertain vaingloriousness, and Benny (and his writers) left it to fellow cast members and rival comedians to make the fall guy trip. On the seventh anniversary program, even Fred Allen sent a wire, which Mary Livingstone somewhat less than dutifully read to Benny:

Livingstone.  Dear Jackass.

Benny.  Gimme that wire.  Mmm.  That’s “Dear Jack. As this is your seventh anniversary . . .”

The joke, however slight when quoted out of context, depends for its punch on a listener’s familiarity with the Benny-Allen feud. Audiences expected an acerbic note from a rival—but to be hearing it from those who worked with Benny, and on the occasion of his taking a bow to boot, gave the line a certain kick, one that was always directed at Benny’s posterior and conveniently administered by those nearest to him. Jackass? Benny was a regular piñata. The more direct the hit, the more likely the chances of hitting the jack(ass)pot.

Meanwhile, the anniversary of that celebratory broadcast is past . . . and I am still editing.

Posted on

I Was a Communist for Tallulah Bankhead

Memento Park, Budapest

Radio has always promoted other media, despite the competition it faced from print and screen. To some degree, this led to its decline as a dramatic medium. Producers made eyes at the pictures, neglecting to develop techniques that would ensure radio’s future as a viable alternative to visual storytelling. Television had been around the corner virtually from the beginnings of broadcasting; even in the 1920s, radio insiders were expecting its advent. So, the old wireless was often seen as little more than a placeholder for television, an interim tool for advertisers eagerly awaiting the day on which they no longer had to spell out what they could show to the crowd.

One of the last big hurrahs of radio during the early 1950s was The Big Show, a variety program hosted by actress Tallulah Bankhead (last revisited here). Sure, Bankhead promoted the movies—but on this day, 29 April, in 1951, she doubtlessly had something else in mind when she expressed herself “privileged to hear a portion of a truly great new Warner Bros. picture, starring Frank Lovejoy.”

According to Joel Lobenthal’s biography of the actress, Bankhead had a “phobia about communism,” largely owing to her Catholic upbringing. Yet, as George Baxt, a theatrical agent involved in booking talent for the program, tells it in The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case, a mystery set during those Big Show nights, her show struggled as a result of this anxiety and the forms it took.

Not Bankhead’s anxieties—the measures taken by fierce anti-Communists to blacklist (or at least graylist) allegedly subversive players. By the early 1950s, even comedienne Judy Holliday was considered suspicious, which did not stop Bankhead from welcoming her on the Big Show on several occasions.

By playing a scene from a soon-to-be-released spy thriller titled I Was a Communist for the FBI, Bankhead fought for the life of the Big Show, now that even she, the fierce anti-Communist, had come under attack. As Bankhead pointed out, I Was a Communist was a dramatization of the Saturday Evening Post stories based on experience of counterspy Matt Cvetic, whom Lovejoy “deem[ed] it an honor” to portray.

“It certainly brought home to me the patriotic devotion and the sheer guts that Matt needed to take that nine-year beating.” At this point, a voice is heard, off-mike, telling Lovejoy that “someone had to do it.” That someone, speaking to the listening audience, was none other than Matt Cvetic:

Well, Frank, maybe we’d better wait until the job is done before we start taking bows.  The job is far from finished.  We’re just beginning to fight back against the deadly, ruthless, highly organized Soviet-controlled conspiracy.  So, we’ve got a lot of fighting yet to do before we can rid ourselves of this greatest threat to the world of free men.  We’ve got to fight.  All of us.  All the time.

“Amen to that,” Bankhead responded enthusiastically as the crowd in the studio applauded. Threatened by the blacklisters and the menace of television, Ms. Bankhead knew she had to fight—for the good of the country and the good of her show. The Big Show went off the air a year later, just as the aforementioned radio version of I Was a Communist began its syndicated run . . .