Category: Radio

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Cleaning Up Her Act: Dietrich, Hollywood, and Lola Lola’s Laundry

Her name was Lola Lola. She was a showgirl. Never mind yellow feathers in her hair. Her dive wasn’t exactly the Copa. She was a practical kind of dame who worked up a sweat making those drool who followed her curves as she did her “Head to Toe” number over at the Blue Angel. She wasn’t the “Angel” . . . at least not until Paramount took her under its ample wing and transformed her into a goddess, a Blonde Venus whose heavenly body was beyond the touch of mortals. It was certainly beyond the thought of body odor.

 
Last night, as I watched Der Blaue Engel (1930), the German classic responsible for Marlene Dietrich’s career in Hollywood, I thought of that transformation and thought of it as a fortunate mistake. Fortunate because it gave us this iconic figure—slimmer, trimmer than that of the fleshy Lola—and a face that was all cheekbones and arched, pencilled brows. A mistake because all that glamour inhibited an actress who henceforth was thought of as a star, dazzling and distant.
 
In Hollywood, Dietrich was an exotic figure whose very voice spelled foreign. In Der Blaue Engel, she had an accent as well; but one that told German audiences that she was a girl of the streets and not a creature from Mount Olympus.
 
Right at the beginning of the film, Lola Lola gets a dousing; her image, that is, which is on display in a shop window. She seems in need of it; her life and trade being none too clean. “Mensch, mach Dir bloss keen Fleck,” she snaps at her short-tempered boss (“don’t soil yourself”), just before she sets out to reduce the respectable academic Dr. Rath (“Dr. Council”) to Professor Unrat (“Professor Refuse”). That is where that box of soap powder comes in, with which the showgirl washes her undies (as pictured above).
 
Those are Lux flakes, prominently displayed in the center of the frame. Some six years after the success of The Blue Angel, Dietrich once again became associated with the stuff, without having to come in contact with it. On 1 June 1936, she became the first actress to appear in the overhauled Lux Radio Theater, whose stage had been moved from Broadway to Hollywood. After slipping into the role of Amy Jolly in an adaptation of her first American picture (Morocco), Dietrich had a chance to sing Lola Lola’s signature song “Falling in Love Again,” perhaps as a plea to an audience rather less enthralled by her than poor Dr. Rath. In German, that had been “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt,” lines that translate as follows:

I am from head to toe
Ready for love
Since that is my world
And else nothing.

From head to toe, and every body part in between. Die “fesche Lola” was all flesh; what was returned to us from Paramount Olympus was a shape in shadow and light, a statue made of glamour and enlivened by suggestion. And when audiences were through adoring her, whether irritated by her anaemic vehicles or incensed by the bloodshed in Europe, it was tough for Dietrich to regain the earthiness she had agreed to renounce . . .
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The Great Dictation: Milton, Munkácsy and the Blind Medium

I did not know what to expect when I stepped inside the Hungarian National Gallery, a war-battered royal palace turned into a public museum during the days of Communist rule in Budapest. Somehow, Hungarian culture has remained a closed book—or rather, a neglected volume—to me; and looking at rooms filled with art depicting scenes from Magyar history made me come face to face again with my own ignorance.

How welcome a sight was “The Blind Milton Dictating ‘Paradise Lost’ to His Daughters.” Yes, that face was familiar, as was the composition, even though I had never troubled myself to note, let alone pronounce, the name of its artist: Mihály Munkácsy. I was surprised to reencounter “Blind Milton” there, knowing it to be on permanent display at New York Public Library on 42nd Street (where it is currently the centerpiece of an exhibition celebrating Milton’s life and works). As it turns out, there are two version of Munkácsy’s painting, the one in New York City being the larger of the two.

This year marks the quatercentenary of Milton’s birth, so we are likely to come across “Blind Milton” in the arts and literature sections of our newspapers or the pages of magazines on history and culture. Even in the 19th-century, the image was frequently reproduced on paper. Indeed, we happened upon such a reproduction at a second-hand bookstore in the Hungarian capital not long after our gallery visit, on the very day it was featured in The New York Times arts section online.

The image became so familiar that, by the twentieth century, the

usual conception of John Milton in the imagination of America’s school children has been a misty mezzotint of a blind man sitting in a dark room dictating Paradise Lost to his bored but dutiful daughters.  That Milton was one of the most fearless and most revolutionary thinkers of his century few youngsters have ever been permitted to know.

.This is how, in 1939, Max Wylie prefaced “The Story of John Milton,” a script from the radio series Adventure in Reading (NBC; 1938-40). The play (by Helen Walpole and Margaret Leaf) tells of blindness, vision, and the specter of persecution as the monumental struggle of the beleaguered poet is being recalled by the voices he called forth in his art.

For twelve years, Milton’s ideas had been in the service of the Commonwealth, until the Restoration threatened to obliterate his words and legacy. Awaiting news from his friend Sir Harry Vane, Milton tries to dictate Paradise Lost to his daughter Mary:

Milton.  You aren’t writing, Mary, you aren’t writing!

Mary.  How can I father? How can I do anything … while we’re waiting for the coming of Sir Harry!

Milton.  Write.  Take down what I say.  “Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous Wolves, / Who all the sacred mysteries of Heav’n / To their own vile advantage shall turn. . . .”

Mary.  I cannot.  I cannot.  Paradise Lost may never be finished.

Milton.  Paradise Lost shall be finished.  I’m not a human being any longer, Mary.  I’m an instrument … a vessel … you don’t understand that … but no matter … I may seem hard to you and your sister … but that’s not important either. . . .

Mary.  I shall try to write.  Dictate it again, father.

Milton.  “Wolves shall succeed for teachers, …”

The war of ideas and the fight for their expression—a challenge as urgent in 1660 and 1939 as it is today—is a fitting subject for the so-called blind medium, a medium capable of conjuring images before the mind’s eye not grown dim from lack of exercise.

Milton is accused of treason. The burning of his books, to be executed by “a common hangman,” have been ordered. “Blind among my enemies…. How can I fight?” the poet cries in near despair, until, roused by his visions, he declares:

If, by my own toil, I have fanned the flame that burned out my eyes … then from that darkness will be born new eyes. All natural objects shut away … I can see clearer into life itself….  My vision will not be blurred or turned aside! And so, O, Highest Wisdom, I submit.  I am John Milton, whose sight was taken away that he might be given new eyes.

It is in the opening lines of the third book of Paradise Lost that Milton comments on his condition:

I sung of chaos and eternal night,
Taught by the heav’nly muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to re-ascend,
Though hard and rare: thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovran vital lamp; but thou
Revisit’st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veiled […].
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of ev’n or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of nature’s works to me expunged and razed,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou celestial light
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.

It seems that, in the scene depicted by Munkácsy, Milton is dictating these very lines, at the moment dramatized for Adventure in Reading. His three dutiful daughters look anything but bored. Entrusted with a solemn responsibility and not altogether ignorant of their father’s perilous position, they are rapt and apprehensive as they listen to the dictation, encoded in which is the speaker’s intimate story, a few telling lines in an epic on the fallibility of humankind.

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If It Can Cheer Up Karloff . . .

. . . it ought to be working wonders on a soul decidedly less gloomy than your average Karloffian antihero. A trip to Budapest, that is. It has been eleven months since last we took in the sites of the Hungarian capital. Granted, highlights included visits to awe-inspiring Statue Park and the downright dispiriting Terror House, outings for which my catchings-up with pop-acculturated Hungarians like glamorous Zsa Zsa Gabor and dashing Cornel Wilde or the radio experiments of Val Gielgud in said locale had left me thoroughly unprepared. Unexpected, too, were our encounters with FDR, Scarlett O’Hara, and assorted automata (Kempelen’s famed Turk among them).

William Henry Pratt (or Karloff, to call him by the assumed name that would become a typecasting trap) may not be a widely trusted authority on mirth, merriment or gender orientation; nor is old Hollywood with its backlot scenes and cultural insensitivities necessarily a reliable travel agent. Still, his character’s insistence that “It’s gay there,” which I heard again a few weeks ago in The Black Room (1935), is sure getting me in the mood for another Danubian interlude.

Of all the European city tours I have taken since my relocation from the United States to Wales—Madrid, Istanbul, and Prague among them—our week in Budapest has remained a delight as yet unsurpassed (the well-chosen dark spots on the schedule notwithstanding). Our nights at the opera alone were worth the inconveniences of budget air travel. My recent computer crashes have erased many of my holiday snapshots; so I am all the more eager to retrace my steps. Not that I expect to be walking around town in shorts and shirtsleeves this time around (apparently, a mere four weeks, from mid-March to mid-April, make all the difference). I won’t blame either Buda or Pest if it turns out that, to reverse an adage, you can’t go abroad again.

Not prepared to keep up with the out-of-date while abroad, the ‘castellan shuts up the keep, which will reopen upon his return.

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"You Boig?"

“I don’t have much respect for biographers,” I once told John N. Hall, noted author of Trollope: A Biography and Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life. I was being mischievous, knowing my professor to have a sense of humor that makes him just the man to examine the lives and fictions of the humorists who attract him. Indeed, I have rarely met an academic whose mentality was better suited to his subjects. I was not merely being facetious, though. I was also being honest. I don’t read biographies; not cover to cover, at least. I am too impatient to go through a series of incidents designed to trace the traits and career of a famous so-and-so to great-grandparents who were semi-literate peasants from Eastern Europe, to illustrate what impact the childhood agony of losing a balloon during a rainstorm had on an artist’s psyche, or explain what it really means to be a supposed nobody before becoming an alleged somebody.

You might say that I am not easily impressed by facts and downright doubtful of them; that I am unconvinced a life can be told by means of sundry scraps of evidence culled from contemporary sources or the recollections of contemporaries whose lost marbles are dutifully dredged from the gully of memory lane. It’s all that; but I would like to think that respect has something to do with it as well—respect for a creative mind expressing itself in a work of art by someone who might not be willing or able to open up otherwise. In other words, I take what an artist is willing to give, even if the limited supply of such works are dictated, to some extent, by market demands.

Nor do I believe that being told about traumas and toothaches ought to compel me to regard an artist’s works as the product of such ordeals. Nothing is more tedious than arguing that a character who slips on a banana peel was destined to break his neck because his creator was terrified of the tropical fruit a health-conscious aunt was trying to shove down his three-year-old throat. If I want a story or a picture to be a mirror, the reflection I find therein should be my own.

Autobiographies are a different kettle of fishiness altogether. They are the storied self, the persona an artist has decided to display in a public performance. (Hall, by the way, has since written his own memoir titled Belief [2007].) I accept them as such, which does not mean I am any more patient as I am being subjected to the courtship of an artist’s maternal grandparents, to Ellis Island flashbacks or dim impressions from the cradle. There is some of that in the aforementioned Molly and Me (1961), the autobiography of Gertrude Berg (pictured here in a photograph freely adapted from the March 1943 issue of Tune In).

Berg was the creator of the radio serial and subsequent television sitcom The Goldbergs, as well as the lesser known House of Glass, about which I got to read in Radio and the Jews by Siegel and Siegel, a volume I picked up at the Jewish Museum in New York during my last visit to my old Upper East Side neighborhood. Molly and Me may be short on the drama of radio, for which I initially picked it up, and lack the to researchers indispensable index, for which omission I immediately put it down again. I need not have been quite so prickly, though. Berg’s memoir, like her writings for the air, is alive with Dickensian characters, a conversational style, and challenges to literary theory that tickle the wayward scholar. Let me give you a for instance:

Well, I saw [New Orleans].  There were hot, wide streets, charming Old World houses—all hot—wonderful hot restaurants, and lovely, well-decorated, hot hotels. In the evening, when the sun goes down, the heat goes down also but the humidity goes up. It’s no wonder that Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner write such good tragedies.  With air conditioning maybe there’ll be a change in our Southern literature.

This passage, my favorite in the entire book, makes me wish Berg had been the ghost writer of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies:

The Lyceum [a New York restaurant her father managed] was a huge place that could take care of fifteen hundred people [. . .].  It was not only big, it was gemütlich, it was where people came to laugh, and it was before publicity men talked about atmosphere.  The ceilings were high and absolutely guaranteed not soundproofed. The whole idea was to have fun and not to be quiet. In those days silence was for funeral parlors, not restaurants.  There were chandeliers that were chandeliers—all cut glass with teardrops and draped strings of little glass balls, not straight pipes with blisters on the end or holes in the ceilings that drop light on you. I’m not saying that those were the good old days.  It’s just that there was something about bigness that was friendly.  Today if it’s big, it’s a bank or Grand Central or a cafeteria where you go in fast and come out fast.  There’s no place to relax any more except at home—and with the foam rubber they put into everything today, who can relax?

“You Boig?” an agent once addressed the writer at the beginning of her career. I can just see him there, facing her. I can hear him, too, thanks to Berg’s writerly gifts and a long exposure to actors like Allen Jenkins. She’s “Boig” all right. I feel that I got to know her as she wanted to be known, a woman who tells her audience not to expect the story of someone who “divorced three husbands, became a drug addict, and finally, after years of searching, found the real meaning of Life in a spoonful of mescalin.”

So what if there’s more Molly than “Me” in this production. I’m not going to tear up the cushions Berg arranged for me in hopes of finding a needle in what is too comfortable to be foam rubber . . .

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Leap Year Special

So it isn’t exactly the 35th of May, the magical anything goes if you dare to imagine kind of day Erich Kästner dreamed up for our delight. Still, it is an extra day, this 29th of February, and ought to be looked upon as extraordinary. Indeed, this rarest 24-hour period in the calendar—the anniversary of Superman’s birth, no less—should really be set aside or simply seized for the carnivalesque. It strikes me as absurd to carry on as usual only to keep our system of charting time from falling apart. Being a man of leisure, confined less by schedules than by the vagaries of the season, I decided to keep out of the rain and find out how this leap year appendage was treated by those in charge of the timing-is-everything, by-the-numbers business-as-usual world of commercial radio, USA.

Rather out of the ordinary, to be sure, was Jack Benny’s 29 February 1948 broadcast. Never one to allow guests a look behind the scenes, Benny had made an exception for his girlfriend, Gladys Zybysko; but those rehearsals, dramatized in flashback, took place on the 28th. I was curious, nonetheless, considering that Sadie Hawkins Day, as it used to be known in the US, is the only day a woman could propose marriage. Would the thoroughly self-sufficient Gladys Zybysko leap at the chance of spending her days with a skinflint like Benny? I didn’t think so. Besides, it never even came to that. Benny was too busy puzzling over a place called “Doo-wah-diddy” (“It ain’t no town and it ain’t no city”), mentioned in “That’s What I Like About the South,” a song to be performed on the broadcast.

On the same night, on another network, The Shadow dealt in his customary fashion with “The Man Who Was Death.” No mention was made of the 29 February. Not that I expect any such reference, considering that those born on this day—like Gilbert and Sullivan’s Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance—remain, numerically speaking, life itself to the very last. So, I kept twisting the dial in search of that twist in our everyday.

Promising “tales of new dimensions in time and space” from “the far horizons of the unknown,” the sci-fi series X Minus One seemed likely to mark the spot. On 29 February 1956 it presented “Hello, Tomorrow,” a fantasy examining a post-apocalyptic society, anno 4195 (alas). However compelling, it is a missed opportunity to match the intercalary with the intergalactic. Say, what calendar do you use in outer space? The problems with such “transcribed” programs is that they were readily recycled and, unlike the live programs broadcast during the 1930s and early-to-mid 1940s, omitted any specific temporal or topical references that would make them appear dated. Besides, “Hello, Tomorrow” would have more aptly been called “Hello Again, Yesterday.” It was a rerun.

Nor was the 29 February 1944 edition of Your Radio Newspaper a bissextile treat. There was none to be had all round; a sobering end to my search for the exceptional. Well, never mind. I, at least, am adhering to tradition by letting my world go temporarily topsy-turvy. To wit, I have permitted my in so many ways better half to propose . . . tonight’s entertainment. “Anything goes” comes at a price: I am subjecting myself to a screening of La vie en rose. It’s French, it’s Piaf—it’s something I can stomach only once every four years. “Extra,” I concluded after this exercise in futility, is not a synonym for “special.”

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Angels Over Broadcasts? Ben Hecht on the Air

I’m not sure whether I like the idea. Of me being psychic, I mean. So, I generally come up with some feeble explanation for occurrences not quite so readily explained away. I don’t like the idea of explaining things away either. What’s left to be debated or wondered about once you have gotten to the bottom of the unfathomable? If indeed you truly have. There is room for doubt; and as uncomfortable as I am in that dimly lit chamber, I keep its door unlocked—just in case something peculiar escapes that, without any such doubt, would indubitable have escaped me. This evening, for instance, I answered the question “What’s the movie tonight?”—a question generally posed to me at dinner time—by suggesting Twentieth Century (1934), said to have been George Bernard Shaw’s favorite film. The DVD has been in our library for a while and I have been waiting for just the moment to watch this screwball classic.

It was only a little later that I discovered that the screening would be a timely one, given that today, 28 February, is the birthday of Ben Hecht, who co-wrote the screenplay with Charles MacArthur. To be precise, the screenplay is based on Hecht and MacArthur’s stage comedy of that title, itself based on Napoleon of Broadway by one Charles Bruce Millholland. Anyway. My ostensible choice having having an air of the ethereal, I felt compelled to commune with the spirits by going in search of Hecht’s voice on the ether.

The writer-producer-director of Angels Over Broadway wasn’t hard to find, either. In their introduction to a reprint of Hecht’s sentimental medical mystery “The Fifteen Murderers” (first published in Collier’s Magazine in January 1943), Messrs. Ellery Queen describe its author thus:

Ben Hecht—child-prodigy[,] violinist, circus acrobat, theater owner, reporter, novelist (remember Eric Dorn?), foreign correspondent, columnist, newspaper publisher, playwright (remember The Front Page?—with co-dramatist Charles MacArthur), scenarist, and motion-picture producer, to mention in rough chronological order some of his vocations and avocations [. . .]

Regretting that Hecht “invaded the Coast of Criminalia only on rare occasions,” the editors drew the reader’s attention to the story “Actor’s Blood,” which they recommended as “sheer melodramatic fireworks.” Before the story was reworked as Actors and Sin (1952), with Hecht providing the voice-over narration, the author had narrated his own radio dramatization of it for a Suspense production starring Fredric March (24 August 1944). For Inner Sanctum Mysteries, Hecht acted as the narrator of his short story “The Specter of the Rose,” dramatized on 19 August 1946, just days prior to the premiere of the motion picture adaptation.

Hecht’s stories, stage and screenplays were often reworked for radio, and perhaps none more often than aforementioned The Front Page and its screwball remake His Girl Friday (in a 30 September 1940 Lux Radio Theater broadcast starring Claudette Colbert). As for the swift and shimmering Twentieth Century. it took off again with Elissa Landi (in a Campbell Playhouse production from 24 March 1939); even Gloria Swanson got on board, performing a scene from the play on the Big Show (31 December 1950), whose hostess, Tallulah Bankhead, had read Hecht and MacArthur’s “What Is America?” on the 29 March 1942 broadcast of Command Performance.

In 1935, Hecht and MacArthur’s musical extravaganza Jumbo, starring Jimmy Durante and featuring songs by Rogers and Hart, was lavishly staged at New York City’s giant Hippodrome, from which venue it was broadcast live in weekly instalments. As biographer William MacAdams points out, Hecht washed his hands of this production after many of his lines were cut as being not easily intelligible in such a large auditorium. He did not, however, turn a deaf ear to the medium. A few years later, he was a panellist on the quiz program Information, Please on 19 July 1938 and 30 August 1938. In the 1950s, he was interviewed for the documentary series Biography in Sound, recalling the lives of Carl Sandburg and Alexander Woollcott.

Considering his resume, it is difficult to not to be exposed to the works of Ben Hecht. That may well be an answer to my psychic experience; but, without question, I appreciate any helping hands and hints from the hereafter, especially if I am being led to a vehicle as bright as Twentieth Century. And now you’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got a reserved seat . . .

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"A two-headed Zulu could do it": Irwin Shaw and the Radio

This being the birthday of novelist Irwin Shaw (1913-1984), I dusted off my copy of The Troubled Air (1951) to pay tribute to a radio writer who successfully channelled his anger and frustration by feeding it to the press, a rival medium that was only too pleased to get the dirt on broadcasting. Like his previously mentioned short story “Main Currents of American Thought,” published in 1939, The Troubled Air is a blistering commentary on the business to which Shaw was introduced by radio writer-producer Himan Brown, for whom he penned the aural comic strip The Gumps. For details on the novelist’s experience in radio, I refer you to Michael Shnayerson’s insightful 1989 biography; here, I am drawing on a few passages of The Troubled Air to document a hack-turned-published author’s urge to let off steam at a time (the McCarthy era) when the old radio mill seemed on the verge of blowing up.

Clement Archer, a former history teacher with hopes of becoming a playwright, enters radio after being persuaded by one of his students that a “ two-headed Zulu could do it. As long as you can type fast enough, you have nothing to worry about.” Archer has his doubts:

“My natural prose style,” he [tells his student], “is something of a cross between Macaulay and the editorial page of the New York Times, and my idea of how people should behave in fiction comes mostly from James Joyce and Proust. And I never had Bright’s disease and I never tried to seduce a twenty-year-old immigrant, and I actually believe that the innocent always suffer and the evil always prosper in real life. So I can’t say I feel boyishly confident about my equipment on a Monday morning when I sit down and know I have to write five fifteen-minute heart-breaking episodes before Friday. I have a lovely idea for next week. Little Catherine (the name of the program was Young Catherine Jorgenson, Visitor from Abroad) is going to California and she’s going to get caught in an earthquake and be arrested for looting when she goes into a burning building to rescue an old miser in a wheelchair. Ought to be good for ten programs, what with the arrest, the examination by the police, the meeting with the cynical newspaper reporter who is reformed by her, and the trial.

In fact, life in radio’s fiction factory turns out to be “murderously hard work.” After years of it, Archer gets a break at last when he becomes the producer-director of University Town, a series of anthology drama under the sponsorship of a drug company. When his actors and musicians are accused of Communist affiliations by Blueprint, a “belligerent” and “mysteriously” financed magazine “dedicated to exposing radical activities in the radio and movie industries,” the advertising agency in charge of the program gives Archer two weeks to find out from the five people involved—a Jewish immigrant composer, an aging actress, a gorgeous ingénue, a black comedian, as well as Archer’s best friend and former student—whether the accusations are false.

When asked by Archer why drastic measures such as the firing of his composer were deemed necessary, the agency representatives responds by arguing that radio

is not at the moment in a strong position. In fact, it is not putting it too vigorously to say that the medium is fighting for its life. A new form of entertainment, television, is gaining enormous momentum, capturing our clients and our audience; the economic situation of the country is uncertain and advertisers are retrenching everywhere—the old days when we could do anything and get away with every—are gone, perhaps forever.

Being supportive of his creative team, Archer is denounced as a Red sympathizer, even though the communists denounce him equally. His phone is tapped, his career is finished, his marriage in turmoil and a friendship exposed as a fraud.

Shaw was hardly alone in denouncing the industry in which he had worked; but, unlike former gag writer Herman Wouk (from whose satire Aurora Dawn I quoted here), he could not bring himself to make light of the experience.

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Will It Go Her Way?: Some Seriously Belated Oscar Predictions

As usual, I am slow to catch up. A few years ago, the BBC relinquished the rights to televising the Oscars; and since we are not subscribing to the premium channel that does air them, I am relying on the old wireless to transport me to the events. So, here I am listening to … the 17th Academy Awards (as broadcast on 15 Mar. 1945). Considering that Claudette Colbert is nominated for Since You Went Away, I just had to tune in. Also among the nominees, for his supporting role in the same picture, is Monty Woolley, the man to whom my terrier owes his name. This year, the event is broadcast nationally for the first time in its entirety. The host is Bob Hope; it was rival radio comic Jack Benny last time. There will be scenes from the nominated pictures, which are going to be explained to us radio listeners. While the president of the Academy, Walter Wanger, is saying a few words (at sixty minutes, this is a rather overblown affair), I might as well share my predictions with you.

As much as I enjoyed Since You Went Away, my money is on Double Indemnity in the Best Picture category. Gaslight is just a one dark note affair, and I don’t think that Wilson, which I haven’t seen, or Going My Way got much of a chance. Stanwyck should get the trophy for Best Actress; but, as you may know, I am partial to Colbert, who hasn’t won in a decade. Besides, she’s delivered a beautifully restrained performance, rather than going all maudlin or hysterical.

Hush, the ceremony is getting under way. It is broadcast live from Grauman’s Chinese. Hope just quipped that he never knew it was a theater, but thought “that it was where Darryl Zanuck had his laundry done.” He can joke; after all, he is being honored with a lifetime membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his many services to the Academy (“Now I know how Roosevelt feels”).

Could Agnes Moorehead win this time for Mrs. Parkington, her second Best Supporting Actress nomination? I certainly like her radio acting. Did you catch “Sorry, Wrong Number”? Mark my word: if it ever gets adapted for the screen, she’s sure to get the Oscar for that role. She also was terrific in the brief scenes she had in Since You Went Away, in which Joseph Cotten’s character refers to hers as the voice that haunted him across the Atlantic. I don’t think Angela Lansbury has got much of a chance in this category; Hollywood doesn’t quite know what to do with her. Maybe she’ll find her medium one day.

Gosh, can you imagine all those stars in one big auditorium? According to Hope, “it’s informal dress”—“they only had to send Bing Crosby home twice.” Now, the winner for Short Subjects (Cartoon) is announced; the award goes to Fred Quimby’s “Mouse Trouble”—what’s next, rats winning best animated feature?—and Max Steiner just scored for scoring Since You Went Away.

I know this makes me sound like a nance, but I’d be terribly upset if Art Direction (Color), did not go to the team behind Mitchell Leisen’s Lady in the Dark; the film faces tougher competition in the Cinematography (Color) category, though, where it is up against Kismet and Meet Me in St. Louis. For Black and White, Joseph LaShelle for Laura should come out on top. I was rooting for Leisen’s No Time for Love and its clever dream sequence to win the Oscar for Art Direction (Black and White), which just lost to Gaslight.

Hang on, there is some mix-up about the trophies. Sure sounds unscripted. In fact, Hope, the old pro at the microphone, seems to have forgotten the audience outside the theater, folks like me who don’t get to see what’s going on. At least we are being treated to a few notes from the twelve nominated songs and the voices of Judy Garland, Rita Hayworth, Dinah Shore, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.

Meanwhile, I am testing out my second sight. Best Director is going to be either Wilder or Hitchcock, who faced such tough competition a few years back when Rebecca lost, rightly, to The Grapes of Wrath. A shame, really, that Tallulah wasn’t even nominated for Life Boat, for the Original Motion Picture Story of which John Steinbeck is likely to get awarded. Original Screenplay, of course, will go to Preston Sturges, who, after all is nominated twice (for Hail the Conquering Hero and Miracle of Morgan’s Creek). And if the Screenplay Oscar doesn’t go to Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder, then I don’t know what what is . . .

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“And then is heard no more”: Radio between Covers

As much as I dislike mathematics and however arithmetically challenged I am without a calculator, I very much enjoy compiling lists and studying figures such as box office statistics. I am less interested in watching contemporary film than in finding out how many others have. It gives me an idea of what is popular without having to subject myself to yet another sequel of an indifferently constructed CGI clones. My kind of picture is, on average, at least half a century old. Today, I considered the list of films I have screened of late and rated them, on a scale from one to ten, at the Internet Movie Database. It is not an easy task, this kind of opining by the numbers, as I remarked here previously; but I enjoy cast my votes all the same. You may follow my voting history here. This being the night on which western cinema is being celebrated—I also added a few titles to our own movie database containing the DVDs in our video library.

Not that I am entirely visual-minded on this my day of reckoning. Once again, I am cataloguing my library of books on broadcasting, a collection that has grown considerably since last I attempted to inventory it. While I am at it, I am scanning some of the covers, so aptly referred to as dust jackets and put them on display where they are more likely to tickle someone’s fancy rather than irritate throat and eye. Pictured are first editions of Francis Chase’s Sound and Fury: An Informal History of Broadcasting (1942), Charles Siepmann’s Radio’s Second Chance (1946), and fred allen’s letters, edited by Joe McCarthy (1965).

There is “no glory in radio,” Allen remarked in a letter to Abe Burrows (heard here) upon the future Pulitzer Prize winner’s retirement as a radio writer:

in pictures, or in the theatre, you can work less, make as much money and acquire a reputation that will mean something. A radio writer can only hope for ulcers or a heart attack in his early forties. With few exceptions radio is a bog of mediocrity where little men with carbon minds wallow in sluice of their own making. for writers with talent and ideas, after it has served its purpose as a training ground, radio is a waste of creative time.

Chase’s title, borrowed, like my response above, from Shakespeare, echoes the attitude of those who ignored radio’s offerings as trivial. Not that they would have thought of the average soap opera as a “tale told by an idiot.” Rather, the tale was being delivered by calculating businessmen and women on behalf of those who sold the product that gave such fare its name. To them, radio signified nothing but what is measured in dollars and cents.

Unlike Siepmann, however, Chase did not reject the system of commercial sponsorship that begot the trifles beloved by millions. To Siepmann, the “question” was whether those” salesmen of soap and food, drugs and tobacco, the most reliable interpreters of the kind of information and ideas on which a free, democratic people will thrive.”

In the service of commerce, radio writers often lacked self-respect or pride in their work. Even a gifted satirist like Allen denied the quality of his material, something he would not have done had it appeared in print, the medium to which he aspired without finding the time or strength to fulfil his ambition. In a wistful missive to novelist Herman Wouk, one of his team of writers who (as related here), quit the broadcasting racket to make a name for themselves in drama and literature, Allen concluded that

a radio program is not unlike a man. it is conceived. it is born. it lives through the experiences that fate allots to it. finally, the program dies and like man, is forgotten except for a few people who depended on it for sustenance or others whose lives had been made brighter because the program had existed.

To me, the “glory” of radio is that there was none in it. Going on the air was, quite literally, the business of self-effacement. The medium’s ephemera, albeit preserved to this day, are symbolic of our own inconsequentiality, our struggle to be heard before being silenced for good, better or worse.

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Enter Clemence Dane

Okay, so I got momentarily distracted tonight watching American Idol. It’s the only television show I am following these days; but immediately after the twelve anxious men have sung their way into or out of the finals (we are about two days late here in Britain), I am going to lower the blind to screen Hitchcock’s Murder! The arrival of the Gracie Fields DVD set earlier this week has let to a change in my movie diet, with Hollywood fare being put on ice for the duration. Not that Fields’s Love, Life and Laughter was such a gem; it struck me as a poor, distant cousin of The Smiling Lieutenant (recently released on DVD in the US). Last night, I screened Alfred Hitchcock’s peculiar romance Rich and Strange (1931). So, when I noticed that today marks the anniversary of the birth of Clemence Dane, co-author of Enter Sir John, the novel upon which Hitchcock’s Murder! is based, I knew what we would be watching tonight.

Born in England on this day, 21 February, in 1888, the woman who called herself Clemence Dane was a prolific and highly popular novelist-playwright whose works were adapted for screen and radio. The Campbell Playhouse, for instance, presented a dramatization of Dane’s 1931 novel Broome Stages, starring Helen Hayes. Dane’s best-known work, A Bill of Divorcement (which you may read here), was produced by the Theater Guild (1 December 1946) and adapted for Studio One (29 July 1947).

Dane’s screenplays were reworked for broadcasting as well; the Lux Radio Theater soundstaged both “The Sidewalks of London” (12 February 1940) and ”Vacation from Marriage” (26 May 1947).

What I did not know until today is that, like W. H. Auden (to acknowledge the birthday of another, far more enduring writer), Dane also conceived plays especially designed for listening. Did they “do” radio? is a question invariably on my mind when I consider the cultural contributions of 20th-century writers and actors who made a name for themselves in other branches of the performing arts. The answer, in Dane’s case, came to me from this latest addition to my bookshelves, British Radio Drama, 1922-1956 (1957) by BBC radio drama department head Val Gielgud (last featured here).

According to Gielgud, Dane’s The Saviours, was “without doubt” the “most distinguished contribution to Radio Drama during 1941.” Why these plays are no longer presented by the BBC is a mystery to me. Despite the continued popularity of radio drama in Britain, recordings of classic broadcasts are far more difficult to come by, whereas copies of the published scripts for The Saviours, a series of seven propaganda plays on the theme stated in the title, are readily available in second-hand bookstores online. Published radio plays, of course, are always second hand.

So, I resort to an irreverent account by playwright-actor Emlyn Williams (aforementioned) of his experience being cast by Gielgud in one of Dane’s earlier play, Will Shakespeare: An Invention in Four Acts (1921), broadcast in 1937 on the anniversary of the Bard’s birth (23 April). “In spite of the talkies,” Williams remarks in his autobiography Emlyn, “British radio was still a momentous force.” The thought of going “live” before an unseen audience of three million people was “paralysing.” Worse still was the atmosphere in the soundproof studio, a “dungeon” filled with microphones resembling a “regiment of robots,” each ded eye turnd bright red and stared at its victims.”

Present in the studio was Clemence Dane, whom Williams describes as an

outsize author with a handsome generous face topped by hair as overflowing as her talent.  It had been scooped hastily back into a bun and seemed about to come tumbling down and be sat on.

In a cascade of black to the floor, with a corsage of big happy flowers which accentuated her size, she looked as if, were the world not larger than she was, she would cradle it in her lap.  A photographer advanced to arrange the cast round her chair, just as she was handed a vast bouquet which she embraced with a beautiful smile.  She was a mother at a prize-giving where all her children had ended up First.

After all, this formidable woman is rumored to be the model for Madame Arcati, the delightfully eccentric psychic in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit (discussed here). Thanks to Williams’s first-hand account, I can picture Clemence Dane in the studio, even if I am not likely ever to hear her plays for radio. To think that the world is dead to the theatrical events of the air, that these offerings are being kept out of earshot. It’s enough to make a body scream bloody Murder!