Category: Radio

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". . . it’s been a good day": A Cake for Mr. B

Yes, it’s been a good day. Yes, sir, a good day. Started out that way. When I woke up, the warm, friendly smell of breakfast was drifting upstairs, and the blossoms of my cherry tree were tapping against the windows. Mmm. Lying there, I felt seventeen. Until Marilly’s voice bolted upstairs . . .

Mayor, aren’t you ever coming down to breakfast? It’s gonna be stone cold!

. . . and my years were upon me again as Marilly’s voice called me back.

Thus opens a wistful episode of The Mayor of the Town, broadcast on this day, 28 April, in 1943. The sentimental comedy starred the aforementioned Lionel Barrymore in the title role and Agnes Moorehead as his daydream-terminating housekeeper Marilly. Moorehead’s voice (last remarked upon here) sure could shatter illusions. None tuning in could have mistaken Barrymore for a teenager, though. While the microphone withheld much that a camera could not hide, Barrymore sounded as if the road of his life had seen better days and that, along the way, loads of dust and rubble had gotten lodged in the traveler’s voice box. The actor’s vocal chords not only bespoke the age we insist on calling true but also befitted the part of a man with plenty to look back on through the rear view mirror of his mind.

During the course of his “good day,” the Mayor encounters many a youngster—an inquisitive boy, a lovelorn adolescent, a young husband, and a father-to-be—whose doubts and cares recall to him the challenges faced by his former self. A whole life is condensed into the span of a few hours, further compressed to fit the time slot allotted for a single broadcast.

Yes, it’s been a good day. I kept seeing myself over and over in those kids. But what man doesn’t see himself in every real boy? And then, at noon, I performed a wedding, and I saw myself again. Young and in love and full of ideals . . .

Leaving his housekeeper well out of earshot in the company of her suitors (among them, another Lionel, the gravel-voiced Stander), the Mayor drifts in and out of reflections on youth and age as the goes about his daily business in Springdale. “My, how things do repeat themselves,” he muses, as he recalls bidding farewell to his love to go into battle, just like those thousands of young men and women who where then going out into the theaters of war.

“Too much nostalgia isn’t good for anyone,” the Mayor checks himself as he, a widower now, is reminded of his wedding anniversary. “I could stand a little vinegar to mix with all that honey.” Yet just as his character tells his housekeeper to “get out the sulphur and molasses,” the cast and crew of the show break into “Happy Birthday.” A cake was being brought in, the announcer explained to those listening at home. Yes, all along, while the Mayor reminisced, the actor who brought him to life with his well-worn voice was celebrating an anniversary of his own.

“Mr. Barrymore” Moorehead addresses the star of the program,

we of the cast of The Mayor of the Town want to give you our best wishes on your sixty-fifth birthday. We’re especially pleased your birthday falls exactly on our broadcasting day, for we’d like all our listening audience to join in our celebration. Springdale and its people are very real to us, and very near to our hearts. But nearer to us is the one who represents it all: our dear friend, Mr. Barrymore. So, Mr. B., we offer you our thanks for the many pleasant hours we’ve had with you and wish you many happy returns of the day.

Then paying his respects to Mr. B is the year’s Academy Award winning “Best Actor” and president of the Screen Actor’s Guild—the aforementioned James Cagney—who reminds us that this was not only the anniversary of Barrymore’s birth, but also the “fiftieth anniversary” of his

first appearance on any stage; because, friends, fifty years ago today, one of the most loved actors of stage, screen, and radio made his debut in Kansas City appearing in The Rivals, with his grandmother, the great actress Mrs. John Drew.

After such sentiment and cheer, the broadcast—itself as old as Lionel Barrymore was then—concludes with the “sulphur and molasses” supplied by the makers of Rinso, sponsors of the program, whose spokesman was called upon to bring home the realities a gentle comedy like The Mayor of the Town could only gloss over. The announcer reminded listeners that it had not been such a “good day” elsewhere, that many a celebration had to be scaled down or postponed for the duration (“save waste kitchen fats”—”yes, those homely meat drippings make explosives”), and that many a youth, such as the “American flyers executed by Japs” that day—would never get a chance to wax nostalgic . . .

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Miss Austen Regrets . . . What?

Given the present interest in Jane Austen, the person and her fiction, BBC One is likely to attract a sizable audience tonight with its biographical drama Miss Austen Regrets (previously broadcast in the US). According to the current issue of the Radio Times, which declares it to be the “Drama of the Week,” the film is concerned with Austen’s final years, which should leave many of those tuning in to this “Whatever Became of Jane?” tale rather less than elated. As such, it is a laudable project that stands apart from the Becoming Jane stories preferred in Hollywood. What might she have to regret, though, that Doris Day of the literary world? Surely not the fact that she remained what used to be termed a “spinster”?

While I rather prefer the more robust novels of the Brontës, or the Schadenfreude of Fanny Burney, I was only too pleased to be going on a literary tour in search of Austen’s homes in the south of England. Shown here are three of the author’s residences I have visited (or merely walked past) since moving to Britain in the fall of 2004. Chawton, in Hampshire (above), Bath (center), and Austen’s final home in Winchester (below).

Miss Austen may be unable to lunch these days; but at Chawton, the exterior of which is featured in the film, you can gawk at cups and spoons that may (or may not) have belonged to her family. Traveling, to be sure, is no substitute for reading; nor, for that matter, is listening to dramatizations of her works, of which there are many.

Although she is particularly popular in these early days of the 21st century, Austen has long been considered a most adaptable novelist. Her lively dialogue renders novels like Pride and Prejudice ideally suited to the stage and screen, while, on the radio, even the epistolary form of her earlier, posthumously published Lady Susan constitutes no impediment. The novels adapted for US radio during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s are Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey (NBC University Theater, 15 October 1950), as well as Pride and Prejudice.

On this day, 27 April, in 1941, Jessica Tandy was heard in a Great Plays production of Pride and Prejudice, subsequent adaptations of which starred Joan Fontaine (Theater Guild, 18 November 1945) and Angela Lansbury (University Theater, 20 February 1949). In whatever truncated form, the story was also presented on Studio One (12 August 1947), Romance (first on 13 June 1944, numerous times thereafter, and shared online here), the James Hilton-hosted Hallmark Playhouse (8 July 1948) and the syndicated 1940s program Favorite Story.

Would Austen have made a good radio writer? This is a question once posed and answered by William Morwood, a writer who scripted episodes of series like Murder at Midnight, The Shadow and the daytime drama Road of Life. In an article written back in 1986 for Persuasions, the Journal of the Jane Austen Society, Morwood quipped that “Austen had a real potential as a daytime serial writer.” In the case of Pride and Prejudice, however, she made the fatal error to bring the story to a “happy ending” after what would serve as material for no more than perhaps three years on the air. In daytime there could be no final and happy endings short of a cancellation.”

The ending that Gwyneth Hughes, the writer of Miss Austen Regrets, conceived for the novelist’s personal story fully justifies the title. I am still not convinced, however, that Austen should have had anything to be remorseful about. We, on the other hand, would have reason to feel sorry for ourselves if Austen had married and raised a family rather than giving up for adoption the issue of her mind and heart’s imaginings.

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The Hard Way, Another Way

Now, what’s wrong with this picture? This is what I thought last night when I screened the Vincent Sherman-directed melodrama The Hard Way (1943). From the title credits, showing those diamonds and pearls, it seemed obvious what it takes to get rich in the fashion suggested by the title. The image is, however, somewhat misleading. While hardly an abject failure, The Hard Way somehow seemed too soft. It is essentially a draft for Mildred Pierce, or might have been.

A woman struggling and scheming behind the scenes so that a younger one may have the new dress, the big break, the easy life—but not the same man—does call Joan Crawford and Ann Blyth to mind; and, indeed, those two would have faired much better in this glossy, showy vehicle than the rather too young Lupino and the too plain Joan Leslie. I kept hoping that, instead of pushing her sister onto the boards, Lupino’s Helen Chernen would finally push her off them and take the lead herself. Who, I ask, would pick Leslie over Lupino, unless, perhaps, for a cow-milking contest?

Nor did I buy Jack Carson (who also co-starred in the aforementioned Mildred Pierce) as a suicide; robust and none too philosophical, his Albert Runkel struck me as too much of a trouper to call it quits in that way. The only player to be cast perfectly in The Hard Way is Gladys George as the washed-up, boozy Lily Emery (pictured opposite Lupino above, in what to me is the film’s most effective scene) . George brought to the show the sort of pathos an old-fashioned backstage backstabbing melodrama requires.

As I thought of a new set of stars for the film, I once again availed myself of the theater of the mind, being that radio dramatizations routinely recast plays made famous on stage and screen (as previously discussed here). The Lux Radio Theater version, presented on 20 March 1944, offers this alternative group of players: Miriam Hopkins as Helen, Anne Baxter as her younger sister, Katie, Franchot Tone as the man loved by both, and Chester Morris as the hapless Runkel.

Host Cecil B. DeMille sets the scene with the kind of intimacy for which Lux was famous. It truly brought the stars home:

The Hard Way is a drama of tempestuous emotion. We’ll go backstage, into the life of the theater, behind the scenes of glamour, to discover what one woman’s ambition can do to those she loves. There’s always a fascination for me in a story of the theater. All my life has been spent there. From the time I was six or seven years old and hung around backstage, watching my father and David Belasco at the business of staging plays.

The strident, temperamental Ms. Hopkins, well remembered by many Lux listeners from her most recent success opposite Bette Davis in Old Acquaintance (the 2007 Broadway revival of which I reviewed here) brings to the role of Helen what the brainier, more sophisticated Lupino withheld. It is convenient to observe in hindsight that the scheming big sister backstage, fighting for the kind of parts she could never get, was more ideally suited to Hopkins, whose career as a leading lady was pretty much over. Hopkins would not make another movie for half a decade, and take either supporting roles or appear in B-picture thereafter. Still, Hopkins has the kind of intensity that, in the close-up medium of film, can appear shrill and overbearing, but that works well on the stage, where she starred during those days in plays like The Skin of Our Teeth (1943) and The Perfect Marriage (1944). True, Ms. Lupino comes from an old theatrical family; but in The Hard Way, her performance seems rather too understated for the kind of histrionics fit for that toothsome stew of the sensational and the sentimental, the kind of potboiler once known as a woman’s picture.

Not that the Lux production is flawless. Its major fault lies in the narration. No longer is it Helen who recalls past sins after having so desperately attempted to drown them; instead, the teller of tales is Mr. DeMille, the omniscient director, who sets the scene for the ladies to inhabit (until the next commercial break, that is). Of course, anyone hoping to rework the established structure of a slick, commercial program like Lux would, like Helen Chernen, try and fail The Hard Way.

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“Mine ear, I thank it, brought me to thy sound”: Will Shakespeare and the Radio

“Wanted: A Radio Shakespeare!” That is the title of an article in Radio Broadcast, published in the spring of 1926. Radio drama was still in its infancy back then, and those fed up with the theatrical entertainments on the air were quick to point out what many would claim thereafter: that Shakespearean drama was an excellent model for unseen theatricals, being that the bard relied less on scenery or physical action and more on words to create characters and tell their stories.

“In the time of Elizabeth there were no stage-sets such as we know them today,” Gordon Lea remarked in his 1926 study Radio Drama and How to Write It. “I dare to believe that the scene supplied by the imagination of the audience in those conditions gave Shakespeare’s texts a fuller significance than many an elaborate setting of more modern times.”

To commemorate the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth on this day, 23 April, in 1564, I am going to consider playwright’s fate on commercial radio, whose producers, as The Magnificent Montague drove home, were less concerned with the cultural than with the popular. Then again, Shakespeare could always be relied upon to assuage those who looked upon radio with disdain and who listened far less frequently than they talked back. Among the Shakespearean plays readied for the airwaves were The Taming of the Shrew (soundstaged for the John Barrymore Theater on 26 July 1937, Hamlet (presented by the Theater Guild on 4 March 1951), Othello (adapted for Suspense as a two-parter broadcast on 4 May and 11 May 1953), as well as Julius Caesar (in a Mercury Theater production already discussed here).

Owing to the CBS Radio Workshop, we even get an audience with the immortal bard whose stained-glass likeness (shown above) faces me whenever I step inside my library to reach for a piece of pulp. Conjured up for an interview broadcast on 24 February 1956, he was asked: “Who wrote the plays of William Shakespeare.” Not one of those “Who was buried in Grant’s tomb?” kind of questions, to be sure.

Hermia’s words in Midsummer Night’s Dream downplay the challenges of being sightless. A keen ear will succeed where the eye is rendered useless:

Dark night, that from the eye his function takes,
The ear more quick of apprehension makes;
Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense,
It pays the hearing double recompense.
Thou art not by mine eye, Lysander, found;
Mine ear, I thank it, brought me to thy sound.
But why unkindly didst thou leave me so?

Radio listeners need not be left in the dark. They find an audio guide in the narrator, a voice we can trace to the chorus in ancient Greece. From Shakespeare, the wireless playwright may freely borrow the aside, a convention much used in Victorian melodrama, but considered outmoded in 20th-century theater. In radio, those whispered confidences gained force and significance.

Tuning in, we are being addressed, as if singled out, to receive privileged information, although often from the mouths of questionable personages with much to answer for. On the radio, the soliloquy became a convention in soap operatics, causing James Thurber to sneer:

The people of Soapland are constantly talking to themselves [. . .]. The soap people also think aloud a great deal of the time, and this usually is distinguished from straight soliloquy by being spoken into a filter, a device that lends a hollow, resonant tone to the mental voice of the thinker.

Whether it attests to the bard’s radio readiness or simply suggests a conservative approach to his works, adaptations for radio rarely went beyond abridgments. On the air, listeners were presented with a Streamlined Shakespeare, with mere scraps from King Lear, snippets from Romeo and Juliet, or digests of As You Like It.

“Poor Hamlet, he has never been so interrupted” the narrator of Norman Corwin’s “Seems Radio Is Here to Stay” sighs facetiously as the engineer in the broadcasting studio effect the prince’s execution: “Stand by to hear a Dane evaporate.” There was that time, though, when Hamlet went his own way, escaping the play that takes his name.

How would Shakespeare have fared as a radio dramatist, dealing with that special brand of patronage known as advertising? Just listen to his misadventures in Hollywood, as imagined in this Jerome Lawrence-Robert E. Lee comedy, in which a frustrated “Mr. Shakespeare” (voiced by Vincent Price) discovers that one of his plays is being considered as a “summer replacement for Milton Berle,” to be called A Date With Juliet.

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“. . . originally written for Bette Davis”: Arch Oboler’s “Alter Ego”

Get ready for a few bumpy nights. As anyone watching Turner Classic Movies UK is aware, Bette Davis is currently “on tour.” The expired thespian is even scheduled to make appearances at our local Arts Centre here in Wales, albeit not to account for her assault on Welsh culture in The Corn Is Green.

Apparently, the announcement of a retrospective of her films, reels now making the rounds in Britain, did not strike promoters as being sensational enough to herald the coming-to-town of one of filmdom’s most celebrated emoters. Even with their eyes shut and her trademark peepers out of the picture, Davis still managed to wow them on the radio, inspiring the medium’s foremost melodramatist, Arch Oboler, to write plays especially for her. One such author-artist collaboration, “An American Is Born,” I have already discussed here.

A still greater tour-de-force was “Alter Ego,” a psychological thriller inspired, no less, by a study published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. The play was first produced by the Texaco Star Theater and broadcast on 5 October 1938 with Davis in the role of a young woman compelled by an inner voice to kill her lover.

Retitled “Another World,” the psychodrama was subsequently presented on Arch Oboler’s Plays (28 July 1939), with character actress Betty Garde in the lead.

On this day, 22 April, in 1945, “Alter Ego” was once again sound-staged under its original title, in a production that was part of the anthology series Your Radio Hall of Fame (which, at the time of this writing, was made available by Jerry Haendiges on his website Same Time, Same Station).

The play was introduced by its grandiloquent author, Arch Oboler, whose ego was big enough for any number of alters. Oboler was quick to point out that “Alter Ego” was “originally written for Bette Davis”; but since the Radio Hall of Fame paid “tribute to radiO” and was no doubt on a tight budget, the play was performed on that the occasion with “two of radio’s outstanding actresses”: Ann Shepard and Mercedes McCambridge (pictured above and previously commemorated here).

It is “definitely a play indigenous to the radio form,” Oboler commented on the published script. “In no other medium could the ‘two mind systems’ existing in the same body be portrayed as effectively.” That did not stop him from adapting “Alter Ego” for the movies, as was dutifully pointed out by Your Radio Hall of Fame host Clifton Fadiman. The Oboler-directed Bewitched (1945), in theaters at the time of the broadcast, starred Phyllis Thaxter in the role of the tormented Joan, with Audrey Totter lending her voice but not appearing onscreen as Joan’s alter ego, Carmen.

“Alter Ego” is a sensational play that, according to one contemporary critic, has all the subtlety of a sparring match. Before the duel can commence, playwright Oboler sets the scene: a cell in a state penitentiary, where Joan is awaiting her execution. Having no one to talk to about the inner voices that haunt her, Joan addresses her dead mother, promising to tell her “everything that happened.”

Joan’s ordeal started with the “boy next door,” Bob. Soon after her father announced their engagement, Joan (Shepard) is being possessed by a voice (McCambridge) commanding her to leave her husband-to-be and to stop fighting her impulses: “Give it up to me—your body, your mind. You must, you will. I won’t go back in the dark. I’ll live, I’ll live!”

Joan is at a loss to communicate even—or least of all—to Bob the strange urgings that she herself does not comprehend. When Bob refuses to let go of Joan, Carmen forces Joan to stab him to death with a pair of scissors by dictating the movements of the body she longs to possess.

Joan is tried for murder. About to be acquitted, she confesses to the crime of which she believes herself to be innocent. Knowing no other way out, she determines to conquer the voice within by giving up the body they both inhabited. Joan faces the gallows. After the trap is sprung, a soft-voiced Joan triumphs from the beyond: “You were wrong, Carmen—evil one—you were wrong. . . . Now there is peace.”

Apparently, Oboler deems the morose Joan—or any woman talking to an inner twin or a mother in the imagined hereafter rather than confide in a man to whom she is supposed to give her hotly contested body, a body altogether past cure, if indeed the desire to escape a sanctioned union is in need of one.

Advocating suicide in lieu of therapy, let alone a reform of the patriarchal system, the master of pop-psychology schlock shuts Joan up so as to keep her from speaking the mind she is argued to have been out of. I am surprised Ms. Davis did not take those scissors and, at the very least, cut the script to pieces.

Then again, unlike the actresses who followed her, she did get to take on a dual role, duel with a certain Joan, and rise to the challenge of upstaging herself.

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On Not Being Cross

Yesterday, standing before a small group of professionals at a writing seminar conducted by yours truly, I introduced myself by listing my credentials (a slight record, to be sure) and . . . accounting for my diction. I always feel that I ought to do so, rather than letting my voice speak volumes for itself and raising the eyebrow of doubt in the process. There I was, in that conference room in Mid-Wales, teaching English imported from America but first gathered at a German high school. However smooth, my spoken English is like a lumpy couch. You can tell where it came from, but there are obvious dents and tears suggesting a few uneasy relocations. Plenty of people have left their impression on it. It has been patched up a few times, but never properly upholstered. No matter how many adjustments have been made to it, for the comfort and convenience of others, it never quite fits into any place. Unfortunately, it is too old now to be traded in for another model.

What I wouldn’t give to sound like Halls of Ivy-leaguer Ronald Colman (last overheard here); or like Milton Cross, perhaps, the famed radio announcer born on this day, 16 April, in 1897. A former tenor, he was originally known to listeners as AJN, such acro-pseudonyms being the convention when he started out in broadcasting back in the early 1920s. By the mid-1920s, though, announcers had made a name for themselves. They were as familiar as the brands they were paid quite handsomely to praise. Cross’s voice, for instance, became associated with prestigious NBC programs like Information, Please (on the air on this day in 1940) and the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts (which, on this day, in 1938, was introducing thousands of listeners to Tristan and Isolde).

The closest I ever got to announcing was being a voice-over recordings reader in New York City; but the texts I read were in German, my native tongue having softened over the years so as to have lost some of its screen villain edge. Apparently, my sought-after melting pot blend was smooth enough not to evoke Stalag 17. Now, I have tried said tongue at podcasting; but it probably would have been unwise for me to pursue a career in network radio during those aureate days of broadcasting in the 1930s and ’40s. Listeners might have thought me a second-rate Baron Munchausen (“Vas you dere, Sharlie?”). Sure, I could have attended Everett Mitchell’s announcer school (above picture of which I found in an issue of Radio Guide for the week ending on this day in 1938). Designed to give students a chance at that $100/week job, the course included lessons in elocution and script reading.

Forget it. There was only one Cross, and I’ve to bear it. I’ll just sit back and listen to the second half of this Recollections broadcast, which features a recording of a speed-reading contest between Cross and fellow announcers Graham McNamee and Ben Grauer, with Rudy Vallee serving as referee. The script: stanzas from the aforementioned “Walrus and the Carpenter.” The tongue workout aside, it is an appropriate choice, given the Walrus’s advice to the men behind the mike called upon to say very little very swiftly, slickly to sell you anything:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.”

Zo, vhen do the picks get zer vings? This is Harry Heuser, signing off on a sunny afternoon half-way up in the Welsh hills.

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Radio at the Movies: Black Legion

Bogart and Moore tuning in

Sure, the radio has got me by the ears. That is old news to anyone who ever glanced at these pages or took a gander at my bookshelves. Truth is, I also make eyes at the old box whenever it catches them. Last night, I was in for an audio-visual treat. While not one of those 1930s productions designed to promote the ancillary medium (vaudeville extravaganzas like The Big Broadcast or its sequels), Archie Mayo’s Black Legion (1937) nonetheless makes great narrative use of the wireless, which plays a central role in telling the story of a workingman’s social decline and deviation. Let me give you a few “for instances.”

When we are introduced to Frank Taylor (Humphrey Bogart) as a family man, we get to see him with his son (Dickie Moore) at the console, sharing the thrills of a juvenile serial. Mother (Erin O’Brien-Moore) stands by, enjoying the spectacle of father and son happily glued to the set, a family ritual fit for a household strapped for cash. As Taylor, frustrated about his position, finds an outlet in blaming his hardship on immigrants who presumably cost him his promotion, he ignores junior and switches the channels, eager to hear an angry voice echoing his sentiments.

Staring at the radio

Rather than being portrayed as a purveyor of innocent entertainment, the radio is also shown to be an insidious force, a noisemaker spreading potentially noisome messages. Making headlines back in 1937, when Black Legion was filmed, was the story of a boy turned killer after listening to crime programs (like Gangbusters, for example). In this case, it is the adult who is susceptible to broadcast rants from invisible demagogues exploiting the inclusive medium of radio for the dissemination of their exclusive missives. Even when they materialize, those hatemongers remain invisible, shrouded in the hoods of the Klan. They are radio creatures, reaching the multitude while remaining impersonal and shielded from attack.

When Taylor joins the legion and turns to a life of hate-crime, the radio is indirectly responsible for his capture. It’s not quite The Tell-tale Heart, but the wireless sure gives the guilty and conscious-stricken man away when, at a diner, he listens to a news broadcast about a crime in which he was involved. Noticing the reactions of their fellow listener, the police officers taking a break immediately spring into action and apprehend the stranger in their midst.

Broadcasters then turn Taylor’s story into a fictionalized newscast, a semi-factual and far from objective dramatization akin to The March of Time, in which the part of the accused is being played by an actor, the judge’s gavel being the baton of the conductor as the music underscores the immensity of the crime. Once able to relax at the console, Taylor has become the next instalment of Gangbusters. Better remain the mute receiver of broadcast entertainment, Black Legion advises, than to become news fodder or the stuff of melodrama.

Movies like this remind me how ubiquitous and influential radio used to be in American culture, not merely as a source of entertainment, but as a former of public opinions and a forger of personal destinies.

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Good News: Seeing Judy Garland at El Capitan

Compared to seeing, listening is a solitary experience. What is going on in your head while you take in sounds is between you and your ears—a private world removed from the public place where noise, music, and talk are produced. True, you may be overhearing what those around you are saying while a performance is in progress; yet, unlike that frown you may want to bestow on those who won’t shut up, you cannot make ear-contact.

The sense of isolation—the remoteness against which producers of radio programs fought by placing live audiences in the studio to create an approximation of a shared experience for those tuning in at home—is especially pronounced when you put on your earphones to take in a recording of an old radio program, seventy years after those watching it have vacated the studio. So, it is good news when you, feeling quite apart, hear the voice of someone who has been there, a fellow in the audience whose response you are invited to share. Good News is the name of the show; and so is having an expert in the business of radio entertainment right there with you, eager to report.

On this day, 14 April, the Maxwell House Coffee-sponsored Good News of 1938 featured Judy Garland, who had yet to star in The Wizard of Oz, child actor Freddie Bartholomew, as well as veteran comedians Frank Morgan and Fannie Brice (whom you may hear in this recording of the program, retrieved from the indispensable Old Time Radio Catalog).

The word “show” a rather unsatisfying when applied to performances designed to be heard, not seen; but in this case I imagined BBC radio drama department head Val Gielgud watching the broadcast spectacle. As Gielgud noted in his diary (excerpted in his Years of the Locust, aforementioned), Gielgud went to the “El Capitan to see the Maxwell Coffee Hour broadcast with the Metro stars.” Comparing it to British radio entertainment, he called the program a “slicker, more gilt-edged version of our shows from St. George’s Hall.”

Not surprisingly, the “advertising inserts” seemed “silly beyond belief” to the visitor from Britain when, particularly when “read out by an announcer in front of a vast audience.” He was not immune, though, to Robert Taylor, who “comperèd with much charm,” and pointed out that “young Bartholomew stood up well to an interview with some aged editor [Bernarr McFadden] who was presenting him with a gold medal [for his performance in Captain Courageous, and fluffing horribly on his script.”

Gielgud marvelled how “all these stars” remained so

surprisingly amiable in their attitude to perfect strangers, who must as a rule bore them no end. It may be part of “the act,” but they seem quite without pretentiousness, while their manners are quiet and charming: Fannie Brice . . . Florence Rice . . . Judy Garland . . . and that amiable actor Frank Morgan.

Completing his radio day, Gielgud went to the Cocoanut Grove to see broadcast favorites Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy (“in terrific form”). So, Gielgud barely took note of Garland, who sings the duet “Why? Because” with Baby Snooks. Nor did he mention designer Adrian, who was interviewed on the program. Most surprisingly, perhaps, no mention was made of the play heard on he broadcast—“The Hebrides” by noted radio dramatist turned Hollywood director Irving Reis, with whom Gielgud would soon work on a production of the Columbia Workshop.

To be sure Gielgud was on somewhat of a whirlwind tour of Hollywood, and rather impressed by a certain leading lady. Once again in the company of Anna May Wong, Gielgud may very well have forgotten the birthday of his famous brother, John Gielgud, who was born on this day in 1904. At least, he was too distracted to make any mention of it.

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See Attached: The Memo That Ran Away With the Memorial

This glimpse into the workings of my mind is brought to you by the makers of forgetfulness, short attention span, and obsession. . . . This afternoon, I was determined to pay tribute to Thomas Jefferson, born on this day, 13 April, in 1743—preferably by listening to an old radio play. As I remembered, and correctly at that, I had just the book in my library: the first of two volumes of plays written for the Cavalcade of America. It includes “Thomas Jefferson: Pioneer in Education,” a playlet by Edward Longstreth and Kenneth Webb (a recording of which you may find here). Yes, I remembered correctly. What I had quite forgotten was that, two years ago, I had already commented on this play and its politics in some detail. I might not have been able to concentrate on such a tribute anyhow. What fell out of the first Cavalcade volume was the memo pictured above. Dated 28 October 1940, it reads:

Miss Bickford:

Mr. McKay thought Mr. Little would be interested in reading some of the shows Mr. Longstreth has written.

A. Canning

Somehow, I could not stop my mind from spinning yarns. Who were these people? And why was this memo still left in the book, as if Miss Bickford had just put it aside, indifferent to the recommendation? The only familiar name was Mr. Longstreth’s, author of the Jefferson play. Hugh McKay, I gather, was an advertising executive (surmises backed up by this essay on television actor Gardner McKay), and A. Canning the playwright’s agent. Anyway, I did not get much further than that; but, boy, did I keep looking.

Some of the most enjoyable experiences writing broadcastellan are adventures in research, something I didn’t quite set out to do, something unexpected and newly learned. In this case, I learned more about my personality. I did make an effort though, and read a few lines from Jefferson’s letters. This one, a letter to John Adams dated 5 July 1814, caught my eye:

I am just returned from one of my long absences, having been at my other home for five weeks past. Having more leisure there than here for reading, I amused myself with reading seriously Plato’s Republic. I am wrong, however, in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to go through a whole dialogue. While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself, how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this [. . .] With the moderns, I think, it is rather a matter of fashion and authority. Education is chiefly in the hands of persons who, from their profession, have an interest in the reputation and the dreams of Plato. They give the tone while at school, and few in their after years have occasion to revise their college opinions. But fashion and authority apart, and bringing Plato to the test of reason, take from him, his sophisms, futilities, and incomprehensibilities, and what remains? In truth, he is one of the race of genuine sophists, who has escaped the oblivion of his brethren, first, by the elegance of his diction, but chiefly by the adoption and incorporation of his whimsies into the body of artificial Christianity. His foggy mind is forever presenting the semblances of objects which, half seen through a mist, can be defined neither in form nor dimension. Yet this, which should have consigned him to early oblivion, really procured him immortality of fame and reverence [. . .].

While my ignorance in this case is not quite of the Socratic kind, I have long learned to live with this “foggy mind” of mine, this cerebral mine reverberating with its own limitations, the cave as theater—at play with the shadows it insists on turning into puppets set up to make a fool of myself. Never mind Miss Bickford. And while I would like to discover whether the sly Mr. Longstreth, who managed to turn a history lesson into a word for the sponsor, landed another assignment as the result of Mr. Canning’s epistolary appeal to Mr. Little, I make the most of ignorance by attaching myself to what I cannot quite make out. I let my imagination run away with whatever scraps it is dealt . . .

The preceding was brought to you by the makers of forgetfulness, short attention span, and obsession, who had a lot of say in the matter . . .

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Pointless to Return?: Journey Into Space, Fifty-five Years Later

As you may have gathered from my inordinately prolonged silence, I am currently forced to carry on beyond the limits of cyberspace; the aforementioned power cable refused at last to charge the old Mac (apparently outmoded at age 3 ½), preventing me not only from filing my reports but from getting at whatever files I have not yet gotten around or taken the care to transfer. While I have experienced my share of computer mishaps and malfunctions over the past few years, familiarity with such high-tech lows does little to alleviate frustration.

Perhaps it is just as well that I am returning now, albeit without my customary prolixity, by taking a return trip into space, where, as the old movie slogan goes, “no one can hear you scream.” Well, never mind the outbursts. Besides, I spent the afternoon away from the web by dipping my brush into the watercolors (as evidenced above) to mark another special occasion.

BBC Radio 4, where radio drama is still alive and, some claim, well, was being original today by offering . . . a sequel. Now, considering that entertainment these days is synonymous with recycling, that hardly seems anything to get excited about (even though, I, too, am looking forward to keeping up with the Indiana Joneses next month); but this sequel is certainly a departure—rather like the first return to Tara or the reopening of Bates Motel.

Nearly 55 years after its premiere on 21 September 1953, the science fiction serial Journey Into Space is being revisited, with author Charles Chilton, now in his 90s, picking up the threads of a yarn left dangling in suspended animation decades ago. “Journey Into Space: Frozen in Time” (available here until 18 April 2008) reintroduces listeners to Captain Jet Morgan, now aged 72, lost in space after over forty years en route to Earth (the first adventure, “Operation Luna,” was set in a futuristic 1965). Morgan is played by David Jacobs, the announcer for the 1953 series and the only surviving cast member of that production.

According to this week’s issue of the Radio Times, the original Journey “marked the last time radio drama ever got higher ratings than television.” A shame, really, considering that imaged sci-fi dates so poorly and is often mind-numbingly dull. The nostalgic charm of Doctor Who, currently back for another season on BBC TV 1, eludes me entirely.

Then again, I always thrill to the chance of letting my mind’s eye set the scene; and if the Journey is unlikely to attract quite the crowd lured to the tube by that overrated quack, it may yet succeed in getting the next generation of science fiction aficionados attuned to the non-imaged that has to be imagined, to the thrill of listening, of experiencing adventures in time and space as they were once offered by series like Dimension X and X Minus One.

It sure has been a while since that first outing into space. Back then, the merry crew dared to challenge their oxygen supply by enjoying an extra-terrestrial cigarette break. None of that nowadays, when staying alive for its own sake (or the sake of the ailing health care system) is deemed more important than those small pleasures of everyday living. Who needs aliens, forced as we are to distance ourselves from the past to become strangers to our former selves. . . .

Unfortunately, the BBC only gets it half right. Who, after all, remembers that first Journey Into Space? Whereas BBC TV 3 recently broadcast all three previous Indiana Jones adventures, the radio audience is not given a chance to catch up, being left in the dark as to the voyage thus far. A potentially thrilling reunion is rendered well nigh pointless, and certainly far less poignant. Luckily, recordings of the 1953 series are still extant—and you do not have to wait for the BBC to open its vaults. So, if you decide to get defrosted, you are better off to go back in time and start where it all began, during that troubled ”Operation Luna.”