Category: Radio

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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 . . .

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“. . . 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.

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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 . . .

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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 is wrong with this picture? That is what I thought last night when I screened the Vincent Sherman-directed melodrama The Hard Way (1943). In the title credits, vaguely reminiscent of the extravagant remake of Imitation of Life (1959) in its display of girl’s best friends, the moral of the film seems clearly foreshadowed, especially for audience’s watching The Hard Way upon its initial release, in the relative austerity and climate of restraint during wartime.

Just what does it take to get such sparklers? Apparently, it takes a woman hard as rocks, who insists on having it her way but, rocks and all, is bound to fall rock-bottom hard. That is where we meet Ida Lupino’s character, who is fished out of the water after an attempted suicide.

As it turns out, the opening credits are misleading, even if the narrative eventually falls into a predictable groove, coming full circle. While it tells a rags-to-riches story, The Hard Way is not about material enrichment. It is about ambition, the desire to escape a life of hardship. Or is it about sibling rivalry? Or selflessness put to the test?

The Hard Way somehow seems too soft, like Lupino’s dreamy eyes. I mean, Baby Face (1933) it ain’t. Then again, this is coded Hollywood. The Hard Way plays like a draft for Mildred Pierce (1945): a woman struggling and scheming behind the scenes so that a younger relative may have that new dress, the big break, her name in lights—all, that is, except the same man. The scenario calls Joan Crawford and Ann Blyth to mind; and, indeed, those two would have fared better in this show-biz vehicle than the rather too sensitive Ida Lupino and the altogether too plain Joan Leslie.

The problem is that rooting for Lupino’s Helen Chernen is easy, and it gets in the way of the misogynistic rationalizing that a woman without a man does not live a life worth living. I kept hoping that, instead of pushing her sister onto the boards, Helen 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 that way.

The only player that is 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 affecting scene). George brought to the show the brand of pathos that an old-fashioned backstage backstabbing melodrama requires, and watching Lupino push her where she wants her makes you wish there had been more of this sort of intrigue along the way.

As I thought of an alternative cast 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 arrangment of Hollywood 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, no doubt, by many Lux listeners from her 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 more sophisticated and emotionally complex interpretation of the character by Lupino denies us: a single-minded ruthlessness.

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 days as a leading lady were pretty much over.

Hopkins would not make another movie for half a decade and instead would take either supporting roles or appear in B-pictures 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).

To be sure, Lupino comes from an old theatrical family; but in The Hard Way, her performance seems too understated for the kind of histrionics fit for that toothsome stew of the sensational and the sentimental, the kind of potboiler that, for all its misogyny, was once known as a woman’s picture.

Not that the Lux production is pitch perfect. Its main fault lies in its use of an omniscient narrator to string together the episodes of Helen’s life.  No longer is it she who, from her deathbed, recalls the past after having so desperately attempted to drown it; instead, the teller of tales is DeMille, who sets the scene for the leads to inhabit—until the next commercial break, that is.  Anyone hoping to abandon the formula of a program designed to sell soap would, like the washed-up Helen Chernen, fail the hard way. 

Ultimately, The Hard Way lacks the energy that makes films camp.  It is as if Lupino did not quite know what motivates Helen or else did not believe in and accept the motivation she was dealt with.  It is as if she herself asked, as I did, “Now, what is wrong with this picture?”

[I watched The Hard Way again on 31 Jan./1 Feb. 2026, after which viewing this blog entry was edited.]

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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.