Category: Radio

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Choice Words; or, When a Mac Crashes (Again!)

In written communications, I generally refrain from cursing. I am not sure why so many web journalists feel compelled to express their emotions—even their apparent lack thereof—in terms referring to certain uses of the male sex organ or the issue of our daily excretions. I gather that both spell relief, as does the act of swearing. We all have to get it out of our system once in a while; and I am not one to recommend mealy-mouthing the unsavory by resorting to equivalents of a truculently tossed paper napkin; such disingenuous substitutions have been the curse of radio drama.

Back in 1938, for instance, a production of O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Beyond the Horizon met with a storm of protest when it was broadcast over NBC’s Blue network. As Francis Chase Jr. recalls in his Sound and Fury (1942), the FCC forced an affiliate in Minneapolis to justify such language under the threat of refusing to renew its license after a single listener complaint about exclamations of “Hell,” “Damnation,” and “For God’s Sake.”

To be sure, I am under no obligation to act in the public interest; and somehow I cannot bring myself to avail myself of defused verbal missiles like “darn,” “drat” or “shucks” (the last of which I, as a German, would have trouble pronouncing during moments of distress). That said, I don’t hold with those who believe that mentioning acts of penetration renders the thought expressed more penetrating. If I censor myself here, it is because I am trying to come to grips with whatever has me by the throat as my hands flit across the keyboard, erasing as much as they produce.

I do not have to recreate verbatim what escaped my lips some time ago, as long as I manage to capture the feeling of that moment. Writing it down does not just mean getting it out; to me, it must also mean getting over it. It is a chance to let go of something rather than to let oneself go all over again and make a display of the discharge. Writing is the process of cleaning up, which is not to say that it is the concealment of disorder. Posture and composure become especially important when life seems to be in the very process of . . . decomposing.

What has been breaking down of late is the non-matter of my online existence. Another Mac has crashed—and that a mere three months after the previous wipeout (as lamented here). Never mind that I have learned little since the last incident and that many a souvenir has gone down the virtual sewer. What I noticed is that the crashes occurred while using iRecord, the software with which I copy audio files on the web. As a lover of radio programs, I use it quite a lot. Make that past tense.

To have one’s computer hard disk erased in the attempt to store what is fleeting is beyond “ironic” (another word I dislike). It is a rotten business, being shipwrecking for one’s love of the airwaves. The phrase “blistering barnacles” comes to mind. Indeed, most of Captain Haddock’s celebrated curses will do nicely just now.

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The Women Who Saved My Reputation

Close, but no big star. That’s what I’ve always felt when I come across Hollywood actor George Brent, the kind of actor I happen upon merely because he happens to be in something or opposite someone I care to see. Capable, certainly. Likable, perhaps; but Brent is lacking in the charisma, the je ne sais quoi that turns mere mortals into icons. There he was again, last night, at the close of a particularly quiet day (another one without telephone or internet here at our cottage). His dashing entrance notwithstanding (a rescuer on skis), I cannot say that I watched him. I sort of look past him, usually at the women with whom he had the fortune to be paired.

In My Reputation (1943, but not released until 1946), the woman in question is Barbara Stanwyck. Now, there’s a leading lady that is impossible to overlook; and in My Reputation she is particularly lovely. Perhaps, a little too lovely to be the questionable woman the title suggests her to be. I was reminded of Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?, a novel that tends to make readers go “What’s to forgive?” After all, Stanwyck’s character is a widow, not a bigamist. I suppose the Shakespearean Instruct My Sorrows, the title of the novel on which this romance is based, did not strike Hollywood producers as enticing enough.

What saves My Reputation are those minor players that manage to make a major impression in the few minutes they are allotted on the screen; they are supporting in the truest sense of the word. There’s Eve Arden, for instance, in the kind of role she filled in Mildred Pierce; her confidence and wit are always welcome. She often seems to be on her way to a party of her own and you wish she could have handed you an invitation; instead, she picks up her gift and dashes off. Cecil Cunningham walks on memorably, and Esther Dale is comfortingly efficient as the maid. And then there is Lucile Watson.

What a woman! In her expressions of disdain and her haughty delivery, Canadian-born Watson (1879-1962) bears a strong resemblance to Patricia Routledge, best known to television viewers as Hyacinth Bucket (of Keeping Up Appearances). And yet, as Stanwyck’s mother she remains formidable both in her dignity and her indignity, rather than appearing ludicrous in her pretensions. Just watch how she rebuffs the impertinent Brent, how she makes Stanwyck squirm in the above scene. It isn’t her stare alone that compels you to take notice. Hers is a voice made for lectures on etiquette and the uses of conventions. A voice that insists on being heard and heeded. A voice … for radio.

Unfortunately, radio adaptations of Hollywood films like My Reputation had no use for supporting actors, most of whom were replaced by repertoire players like Janet Scott, who was heard in Watson’s part in this Lux Radio Theater production from 21 April 1947. Even when, in this Screen Guild production of Watch on the Rhine (10 January 1944), Watson was given a rare chance to share the microphone with the film’s stars, Bette Davis and Paul Lukas, the script was so severely condensed that her supporting role was reduced to a mere cameo.

Far more interesting are Watson’s personal recollections in this tribute to Ethel Barrymore on Biography in Sound; having played opposite and observed Barrymore on the stage, Watson remarked that she “learned an important lesson in acting”:

When thousands came nightly to be thrilled by her magnetic voice, I was watching something else: the way she listened to the speeches of her fellow players.  And I thank her now for any knowledge I have of what is perhaps the highest art of an actor: the art of beautiful listening.

My Reputation makes plain just how well Watson had learned that lesson; at the same time, the supporting actress claims the center of the stage, defying us to ignore her. More than the leading lady herself, Watson, as Mrs. Kimball, makes you understand Stanwyck’s character: a repressed woman struggling to let go; not to let herself go, exactly, but to let go of the past when forced to confront an uncertain future after the death of her husband.

It is Watson’s performance that explains the pressures and strictures this blameless woman has always been up against. After all, Mrs. Kimball does not simply try to save her daughter’s reputation—she defined it.

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Songs, Lies, and Audiotape: Margaret Truman Daniel (1924-2008) on the Air

Having just learned of the passing of Margaret Truman Daniel, the former US President’s only daughter, I am going to conjure up her voice by listening to some of the radio programs on which she was featured. Truman made her broadcasting debut in Detroit, back in 1947; she started out as a pianist, then turned to singing.

Fade to black: Margaret Truman Daniel

To most Americans, of course, she was, first and foremost, the First Daughter. Could she pull off a career on the strength of her vocal chords, people wondered, or was it all a matter of pulled strings? Fully aware of this debate, Truman was often in on the joke, an act that made her a welcome guest on what, in the early 1950s, was the biggest show on radio. Tallulah Bankhead’s Big Show.

On 3 December 1950, Truman faced the acerbic Bankhead for the first time. “I suppose you’re all a-wondering how we were able to get such a prominent personage as Miss Truman to be guest on our program,” quipped the celebrated hostess. “Well, really, all it took was a telephone call. I called a certain party, and that party called another party, who in turn called another party. Uh, naturally, these were all democratic parties.”

On the same broadcast, Truman was also confronted with Fred Allen. Sharing the microphone with the seasoned if semi-retired radio wit proved quite a challenge for the still inexperienced Truman.

Truman. How do you do, Mr. Allen?

Allen. Well, how do you do? It’s certainly a pleasure. But, please, don’t call me Mr. Allen. Call me by my given name.

Truman (imitating Bankhead). All right, Daaahling!

Bankhead. This girl has the makings of a Milton Berle.

Truman. Fred, I’ve been an admirer of your radio program for a long time.

Allen. Well, thank you. But where were you when my option came up back there in 1948?

Truman. In 1948, we were busy with an option problem ourselves.

Allen. Yes, but that option was renewed for another four years. You were lucky you didn’t have a quiz show running against you. And, by the way, Miss Truman, I’m surprised you don’t have a radio program of your own.

Truman. Oh, I can’t do anything well enough to have my own program.

Allen. Oh, on radio that’s no handicap.

When Allen insists that Truman ought to have her own variety program, Bankhead feels threatened:

Allen. Say, uh, this might be an idea, Margaret. Now, how about doing a big variety show, about an hour and a half program, and get the biggest names in show business. Why, you could be the mistress of ceremonies.

Bankhead. Just a moment! That’s my program. I don’t mind standing here without any lines, but I simply refuse to stand here without a program.

Truman. Oh, don’t worry, Tallulah. I wouldn’t dream of doing a program like that.

Bankhead (at her huskiest). And why not, Daaahling?

Truman. Well, I don’t think I’m old enough.

Bankhead. Whaaaaaaat!

Three months later, on 4 March 1951, recent Time magazine cover girl Truman was back on the Big Show. “Aren’t you Charlie’s Aunt,” Allen’s wife and sidekick Portland Hoffa inquired, mistaking Truman for the sister of Britain’s reigning monarch. “Love Is Where You Find It,” Truman trills after a confrontation with Ethel Merman, then learns about the harmonica from Herb Shriner.

“I’m an actress now,” Truman declared upon her return to the Big Show on 6 May 1951. A week earlier, she had played opposite James Stewart in a Screen Directors Playhouse production of Jackpot (26 April 1951), a satire on the excesses of commercial radio. Bankhead condescended to give Truman the title role in “Advice to the Little Peyton Girl,” a dramatic sketch based on a story by Dorothy Parker. Yet the emphasis was decidedly on the “Advice” and the one proffering it, not on the “Girl”; as the young woman’s “older, wiser, and oh-so-understanding confidante,” Bankhead devoured the scene.

Sharing the microphone with experienced performers, Truman was not so much propped up as shown up by them. The following year, for instance, the successful recording artist was called upon to sing opposite Gordon MacRae on the Railroad Hour in the operetta “Sari” (17 March 1952), an adaptation of Noel Coward’s Bitter Sweet. The words “Pretty boys, witty boys, you may sneer” come to mind. Perhaps, Truman, or Bankhead’s script writers, had been right. She did not quite have it in her to be a radio personality. Guesting five times on the Big Show, however, she proved herself a genial team player.

Being shown up by your hostess is bad enough; worse still is when you are the hostess and the guests don’t show up. This misfortune befell Truman on the premiere of her next radio venture. Along with Mike Wallace, the gal from Missouri was to host Weekday, a six-hour, five-day-a-week daytime variety program also starring Martha Scott and Walter Kiernan. Imitating the successful Monitor, Weekday promised drama, music, and chat.

On the opening program, back in 1955, Truman announced Eddie Fisher, her “star companion” for the day. “Hi Eddie!” she opened; but Fisher did not respond. As Slate and Cook recall in It Sounds Impossible (1963), the chats were partially recorded. That is, Truman did not get to talk to her guests, but was expected to simulate her scripted interviews, with the control room feeding her a recorded voice, an experimental technique called “‘stop-start’ taping.” Eddie was not stuck up; he was just a tape getting stuck.

Such difficulties notwithstanding, Truman stuck with the show until 1956, picking up a regular television assignment nearly a decade later. She may not have hit the Jackpot, but she maintained her media presence long after her father and his party had been voted out of office.

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The Baby Crier

“Don’t tell me how to shpeak in dat microphone. For crying out loud, wasn’t I not in de show bisserness?” I had offended her and felt sorry. I could tell that she was offended because her English got a lot worse whenever she just about had it with people. Tante Ilse was right, of course. She had been in show business. And she sure knew how to handle a mike. After all, back in the 1940s and early ‘50s, her line of business had been radio. Radio drama, to be exact. An unlikely business for a woman like Ilse Hiss, who had come to New York in the mid-1930s—from Prussia, with no more than seven words of English and an utter disregard for dental fricatives. Anyway. This is her story; hers and Opa Heini’s.

To get that story, I had placed a small recorder under her nose. As you can see from my portrait of her, it was some schnoz. She didn’t mind the sketch, even though she was quick to point out that there was “something wrong” about that left eyebrow. There was something wrong about it, all right. She didn’t have any. Back in the ‘30s, Tante Ilse shaved, waxed or whisked them off to look more like the leading ladies of the day. You know, Harlow, Lombard, Dietrich. Marlene Dietrich was her brother’s favorite. What am I saying? Favorite! Heini was crazy about the “fesche Lola.” Crazy enough, in fact, that, when the star of the Blue Angel left Germany, Opa Heini packed his suitcase and headed for America. It wasn’t a political statement; he was pining. And although he never got to talk to Dietrich personally (he was too shy, I guess, and too busy making a living besides), his romance with America never ended. Unlike his American-born stepson (my louse of a father), Opa Heini was done with Germany, especially since his older sister had come over to join him. They were the best of friends, those two. And more, I sometimes thought.

Anyway. About that left eyebrow. It never grew back, and Tante Ilse pencilled it in every morning, right before breakfast. After half a century, her hand had become pretty shaky, which is why that arch began to resemble some kind of tribal design, a tattoo of a snake slithering desultorily along after a generous helping of mice. Maybe that’s why I made her nose look a little bigger than it actually was. To distract the eye. I had no intention to caricature or ridicule her. Not Tante Ilse.

So, there was that tape recorder with the built-in microphone under her nose now. It wasn’t the kind she had been used to. Tape recorder, listen to me. Gosh, sometimes I feel as ancient as Tante Ilse. This all took place in the early 1990s, the interviews and what followed. We had met for our weekly Kaffeeklatsch in the stuffy, keepsake brimming living room of her Upper East Side apartment, sipping, what else, coffee (with the “real” condensed milk she wouldn’t do without). In those days, Yorkville was still a very German neighborhood. Tante Ilse (“Tante” is German for aunt, even though she was, strictly speaking, my great aunt) was happy to talk about the past. There seemed to be no sad chapter in her entire life story, aside from the loss of her brother. But that would come a little later. And if you think that this serenity made her a boring person to talk to, you are very much mistaken. Tragedy doesn’t make you interesting; it’s how you manage to dodge it.

She had a giant scrapbook in her commodious lap, filled with clippings from newspapers and magazines, chronicling an age now thought of as golden. Come to think of it, it’s the book that gave me the idea. To interview her, I mean. I was going for my Master’s then, in Theater History. After taking a good and long look at that album, I surprised everyone in the department when I declared that, instead of transgender issues in Elizabethan comedy (or some such topic), I would be writing about the “theater of the mind.” That’s radio drama, in plain English. Back then, few people were talking about it, let alone study it in earnest. Maybe I wasn’t in earnest, either. Not about the degree, at least.

“For crying out loud,” she repeated, this time with a chuckle that made the fleshy folds below her chin resemble those of an agitated turkey. “What is it?” I asked, relieved that she had recovered her good humor. “I vas in the bisserness djust for that: for crying out loud!” How true, I thought. After all, Tante Ilse had been a professional “baby crier.” What kind of job is that, you ask? Believe me, it made me wonder, too.

“You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” I prompted her, teasingly, letting the tape run at last. And, after humming a few bars of the Crosby standard, she began telling it all as if I had never heard it before. Sure, I could have told it myself by then. But Tante Ilse told it best. What a phoney, I thought to myself, without the slightest sense of remorse. This wasn’t about research. This wasn’t about getting a degree. Why not admit it: I had come to be told a story . . .

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Gone Garbo

Well, let’s skip it. The convivial “Well,” I mean, with which I have been wont to begin my posts for over two and a half years now. Things haven’t been well for quite some time, and I hardly feel gregarious enough to have use for such a hokey opening. For once, I am not going to assume the well-worn persona of the casual, nonchalant reporter or produce another impersonal, labored piece of prose commemorating the birth of a celebrity long deceased. That will have to wait.

This journal has been in somewhat of a shambles since my return from New York and London, during which carefree time of easy living I was reminded—if any reminder were needed—that I am truly an urbanite at heart. Matters were not helped when I fell ill soon after coming back to the countryside; nor has facing the first month of the year, bleak and blank as it looms before me, ever felt like a particularly uplifting or inspiring period to me. Renewal? I have yet to sense it.

I feel my isolation keenly at times, and sometimes I appear to be revelling in it as if in a state of martyrdom. Now, by calling this period—and I sincerely hope it is just a phase—Garboesque, I am already in defiance of this journal, Garbo being the only major Hollywood actress not to appear on the radio, the medium to whose stars, stories, and strictures broadcastellan is devoted.

For a moment, feeling either overmastered by the task of keeping up with myself (the recent posts from Gotham and the Big Smoke having been mere placeholders, some of which I have at last begun to fill, as in the case of my getting caught in The Mousetrap), or feeling reluctant to look back, being wary and weary of nostalgia, I contemplated putting an end to broadcastellan. Only, saying “farewell” sounded rather too melodramatic, and, I nearly felt but certainly still hoped, rash and premature.

Its arcane subject matter and frosty euphuisms notwithstanding, this is a personal journal. It has to matter to me before it can matter to anyone. And recently I have been unable to matter much to myself. Not taking myself too seriously has generally been an asset to me; but you can take not taking yourself seriously too far, at which point you drift into a desolate place reverberating with the hollow laughter of self-contempt.

Let us say—or permit me to say it on behalf of myself—that, speaking Garboesquely, I have been in my Two-faced period, a wavering to which those less anxious to find just the right expression or indifferent to the joys of such a challenge refer as crossroads; but I have decided to go on, falteringly and doubtfully, instead of calling it quits without having half the cold heart to disguise such a move as the height of dignity . . .

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Bookshelf Cowboy

Well, howdy. His handsome mug is before me whenever I grab a book from my shelves. Randolph Scott, Series two, Number 385 of Zuban’s “Bunte Filmbilder” (a German line of cigarette cards, issued in 1937). I caught a glimpse of Scott this afternoon when I turned on TV, switching channels for an update on the stock market, the Heath Ledger autopsy, and whatever else made news today. Rage at Dawn (1955) was playing on Channel 4. Checking the Internet Movie Database, I realized that it might have been shown in commemoration of Scott’s birth, on this day, back in 1898.

Now, my frequent encounters with him in my library notwithstanding, I rarely come across his appealing phizog. This is mainly because I don’t care much for the genre in which Scott made his mark. Stagecoach aside, which to me is more of a small-scale Grand Hotel on wheels, I rarely watch Westerns (even though a certain—if unlikely—Texas Lady is prominently displayed in my bedroom). True, Scott co-starred in My Favorite Wife and played opposite Marlene Dietrich on two occasions; but otherwise, there isn’t much on his extensive resume that appeals to me. So, I am once again twisting the dial, the ether being Hollywood’s parallel universe.

Sure enough, apart from recreating his roles in Pittsburgh and Belle of the Yukon, Scott can be heard co-starring aforementioned Texas Lady, Claudette Colbert, in an adaptation of Preston Sturges’s ”Palm Beach Story” (15 March 1943), filling the shoes of Joel McCrea. He was to do so again, a few months later, when McCrea did not appear, as scheduled, on the Cavalcade of America program, starring in the propaganda drama ”Vengeance of Torpedo 8” (20 September 1943).

While he did not get much to do or say in the rather dull rehash of Palm Beach Story, Scott was given a chance to prove his comedy skills on a number of occasions. Opposite Gene Tierney, for instance, he was cast in “A Lady Takes a Chance” on the Harold Lloyd hosted Old Gold Comedy Hour (unfortunately no longer available in the Internet Archive). For more laughs, Scott joined Paulette Goddard for a parodic “Saga of the Old West” on Command Performance (21 June 1945). Assigning the parts, Goddard declared: “Randy, you play yourself. A real, two-gun cowboy.”

Turns out that Scott got a chance to play the Ringo Kid, after all. On 4 May 1946, he took on John Wayne’s role in the Academy Award production of Stagecoach. Sharing the microphone with him to reprise the role of Dallas was Claire Trevor, radio’s original Lorelei Kilbourne of Big Town (whom I recently saw in Born to Kill).

To me, the more intriguing performances were Scott’s curtain calls, during which he got to address the audience. Having delivered his lines in the digest of “Palm Beach Story,” the actor was called upon to put his southern charm to work for the war effort, reminding the women on the home front that “it’s men like your own sons and brothers, your husband or sweetheart whom the Red Cross is serving. This year, don’t measure by ordinary standards. Make your contribution to the Red Cross War Fund just as generous as possible.”

“For most of us the war is a distant terror,” he told listeners of the Cavalcade broadcast, “until it is brought forcefully home by those very close to our own lives. Let’s match their effort at the front with ours at home. Back the attack with War Bonds.”

Of course, Scott’s commitment to the war effort went further than those appeals; he was, after all, a veteran of the first World War. And, like many of his fellow actors, he went on tour with the USO (an experience he shared with listeners of Hollywood Star Time).

Meanwhile, the gentleman from Virginia has gone back on the shelf. I shall see him again soon enough, as I reach for another volume on old-time radio. For this spur-of-the-moment tribute to him, Scott made me round up Cavalcade of America and Radio Drama by Martin Grams, as well as John Dunning’s On the Air.

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“. . . some day we’ll have a woman President”; Carole Lombard Predicts

Well, it may not sound outrageous or far-fetched today, but on 22 January, back in 1939, Carole Lombard, whom past generations may have called feisty without being accused of sexism, floored them with views on the role and future of women in the US. To be sure, Lombard was merely reading the script prepared for her; but there was conviction in her voice when she declared: “You can mark my words, Cary Grant. Some day we’ll have a woman President.” Together with Grant and host Ronald Colman, Lombard was featured on the aforementioned variety program The Circle, whose writers gave the punchline to her male co-star: “She’ll never be father of her country.” Upon which Lombard expounded on the “feminine point of view,” accusing Grant of “deliberately trying to belittle the idea and bemuddle the issue. If there’s anything I hate more than a belittler is a bemuddler, and you’re a bemuddler.”

“I didn’t say a woman couldn’t be President,” Grant protested. “I know how you feel about it,” Lombard countered; by this time, hilarity had given way to some serious pamphleteering. “You’re scared. A woman will only get to be President over your dead body, which might be a very good idea.” “Well, now look, Carole. I can’t answer for the rest of the men. But I’d probably vote for this hypothetical woman,” if only to “see what would happen.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what would happen,” Lombard replied, by now stirred enough to flub her lines:

If [. . .] women ran this world it would be a better world, if you really want to know.  It wouldn’t be such a sorry mess of a world.  It wouldn’t be the kind of a world that bombs kids in the street and taxes their [. . .] parents to pay for the bombs.  It [. . .] wouldn’t be a world where people would starve with surplus of stuff to eat around, and it would be a cleaner place, saner place, and a finer place. Because why? Because women are realists.  They wouldn’t permit war because everybody knows nobody can win a war.  They wouldn’t permit slums and filth and disease and poverty because those things cost everybody money.  Do you know what causes war and poverty? All right, all right, I’ll tell you.  Male stupidity, male sentiment and male greed.  Oh, I now women are greedy, too, but they know how to get what they want, you know.  They don’t let stupid sentimental considerations get in their way.  They wouldn’t start a war to get a new trade or raw materials or a swell head when they know darn well they’ll end up headless and bankrupt.  It all comes down to this: men are children and women are realists.  Take it or leave it, gents, take it or leave it.

Three years later, very nearly to the day, the star of To Be or Not to Be would give her life in the effort to rally support and funds for the war (as I mentioned here). Was Lombard, a regular in a Circle of male stars including Groucho and Chico Marx called upon to reaffirm the nurturing role men assign to the supposedly fairer sex, however vehemently the position was stated? Was she a mouthpiece for isolationists, her speech a product of “[m]ale stupidity, male sentiment and male greed”?

Parody or propaganda, the words Lombard hurled into NBC’s unevenly drawn—and quickly withdrawn—Circle make for one of the most intriguing moments in the history of US American network radio entertainment. As to the accuracy of her White House prediction, at least, we may be close to getting an answer.

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“Fortune . . . Danger!”: Weighing In on The Fat Man

Well, he had more than a slim chance of winning over the public when he first stepped on the the scales on this day, 21 January, in 1946, solving the mystery of “The 19th Pearl” (an anniversary also commemorated today by the unfaltering “Easy Ace”). His name, after all, was The Fat Man (also known as Brad Runyon); and he was allegedly fathered by the same guy who gave us The Thin Man. The connection exhausted itself in the contrast expressed in—and unabashedly exploited by—the title. The Fat Man was part of ABC’s “Monday night surprise package,” four programs the network added to its line-up of offerings. According to New York Times radio critic Jack Gould it was a “courageous venture.” Not quite so “courageous,” perhaps, considering that the producers of The Fat Man were banking on the public’s familiarity with the author of The Maltese Falcon, even though said talent had no involvement in the new series other than lending his name to it, for a considerable fee.

Of that, the press appeared to have been unaware, lest they were complicit in duping the public. Gould, at least, assumed the The Fat Man to be “from the pen of Dashiell Hammett, who except for a changed perspective on human avoirdupois, is still drawing liberally on the pattern set by his eminently successful Thin Man.” Not that he was particularly impressed, arguing that the “script left a good deal to be desired, being pretty wishy-washy in characterization and worse in motivation.” Deemed an “altogether different matter” was the second episode (“The Unfamiliar Face”), a “well-knit thirty minutes” for the fashioning of which Robert Sloane was acknowledged as “adapter and director.”

And yet, Gould argued, it was the performer in the title role who might “determine the program’s long-range fate.” Runyon was played by J. Scott Smart (pictured above, in an image freely adapted from a contemporary Life magazine article photographically recreating one of the Fat Man’s subsequent adventures). Gould called his delivery “casual,” at times assuming a “rather sing-song quality that does not always make for the best of listening.” Like Sydney Greenstreet (as Nero Wolfe), the audibly bulky Smart had a voice well-suited to the role of a criminologist who, the announcer reminds us, “tips the scale at 247 pounds.”

Rather more human than the average hard-boiled investigator, the apple-chewing Runyon is self-conscious about his physical appearances: “The only time you really feel [fat] is when you run into a beautiful woman.” In his first adventure, he does just that. Bidding farewell to his mother at Grand Central Station, he bumps into the proverbial—and as such dubious—damsel in distress to whose charms (enhanced by a slight case of Dietrich) our hero too willingly succumbs. “I don’t think it is wise to kiss strange women in stations, son,” his mother warns him. “Have you still got your watch?” “I’ve got more than my watch, ma. I’ve still got her bag.” And thus, the “Pearl” gets rolling. Not the freshwater kind, mind you, but not such a bad piece of custom jewelry at that.

Less than sparkling was the other thriller series premiering that night: I Deal in Crime, starring William Gargan (whom I last spotted in The Devil’s Party, as well as the Claudette Colbert vehicles The Misleading Lady and Four Frightened People). The prominent lead notwithstanding, Gould showed himself unimpressed:

[. . .] Ted Hediger’s script, most of which is a monologue, creeps along at a snail’s pace and boasts more than the accepted quota of the stock situation for the detective field. The central character of Ross Dolan would make any self-respecting gumshoe cringe, and matters are not helped by a rather lackadaisical performance by Mr. Gargan.

Listening to Gargan’s I Deal debut I am inclined to agree with the critic. As a disillusioned post-warrior returning to his old haunts in Los Angeles, Gargan is emotionally detached to the point of never-mind-the script-as-long-as-there’s-a-paycheck indifference, sounding like a dead cousin of Sam Spade‘s Howard Duff. Being thrown the catchy phrase “So what!” in the opening monologue, listeners are likely to repeat it emphatically, if only to drown out Gargan’s less-than-ideal monotone.

In any case, it is a rare treat to come across such reviews, listen to the program in question, and engage in a debate, equipped with a history of each of these shows. ABC’s The Fat Man remained on the air until 1951 (the year it was readied for the big screen, with Smart in the lead), whereas Gargan’s Crime dealership closed in the late summer of 1948. The other two programs thrown into the mix that night, Paul Whiteman’s rather too confidently titled Forever Tops (a recording of which is available here) and the comedy Jimmy’s Diner, starring Jimmy and Lucille Gleason, fared considerably worse.

To be sure, what killed the Fat one was not a lack of interest in his cases, but the blacklisting of its ostensible creator. Hammett spelled commercial success one day and subversive threat the next, which explains why so few noted writers of the late 1940s and early 1950s would bother to Deal in Crime or self-punishment on the radio.

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” . . . same again? Only a little different?”: Cary Grant and the Radio

Well, this being the anniversary of the birth of the man everyone including Cary Grant wanted to be, I decided to listen to a Lux Radio Theater production of “The Awful Truth,” originally broadcast on the actor’s 51st birthday in 1955. By that time, the program was transcribed (that is, recorded), so that Grant did not have to spend this special evening (previously commemorated here) behind the microphone entertaining a vastly diminished crowd of far-flung radio listeners. Not that the early to mid-1950s had been a particularly busy period in the actor’s career. Aside from its felicitous air date (unacknowledged by the host of the program), the 1955 version constitutes the first reteaming of Grant with his original co-star, Irene Dunne, even though both had shared the Lux soundstage for “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” (10 October 1949), which would serve as the premise for Grant’s own radio sitcom, co-starring wife Betsy Drake (who also wrote some of the scripts for the series).

Prior to their Awful reunion, Grant and Dunne reprised their roles in the mascara hazard Penny Serenade (16 November 1941) for the Screen Guild Theater, appeared together in a Screen Directors Playhouse production of My Favorite Wife (7 December 1950), as well as the Screen Guild’s original radio play “Alone in Paris” (30 April 1939).

Nearly two decades of Grant’s life in picture are echoed on the air, in radio dramatizations ranging from Lux’s 8 March 1937 broadcast of ”Madame Butterfly” (adapted from the 1932 film) and the comparatively obscure (if recent DVD release) Wings in the Dark (1935), reworked for the aforementioned Silver Theater to classics like His Girl Friday (1940) and Suspicion (1941). Radio also invites speculations as to what a difference Grant might had made in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt and I Confess.

Equally at home in melodrama and comedy, Grant guested on a comedy-variety programs like Pepsodent Show, starring Bob Hope (much to the delight of hundreds of screaming WAVES and nurses in the all-female studio audience), and the drama anthology Suspense (in which he was cast in a number of memorable thrillers, including two plays—“The Black Curtain” and “The Black Path of Fear”— based on stories by Cornell Woolrich). On the big screen, in turn, Grant was given the opportunity to star in an adaptation one of the best comedies written for radio, Norman Corwin’s “My Client Curley” (previously discussed here), even though the sentimental film, titled Once Upon a Time (1944), does not manage to capture the magic and wit of the original.

Listening to the actor’s radio performances through the years, it was interesting to hear the changes in Grant’s voice—a voice as distinctive as the cleft in his chin—divorced as it is on the air from the features that became rather more distinguished with age. Truth is that Grant, never known for passionate emoting, sounded awful staid in the 1955 rematch with Dunne, his next to last performance in radio drama. He had been heard once before in a Lux presentation of Leo McCarey’s raucous romance; but his sparring mate that night—the opener of the program’s fifth season on 11 September 1939—was Claudette Colbert, whose character in Without Reservations would write a role assigned to Grant (for the 10 March 1941 Lux broadcast, the role of Jerry Warriner was tailored to Bob Hope, with second fiddle Ralph Bellamy as the only original cast member in that production).

Back in 1939, there was zap and brio in his voice, which, in the sound-only medium, had to make up for the loss of some wonderful slapstick. Nearly sixteen years later, in a reading of the same if somewhat condensed script, what had once come across as carefree and devil-may-care sounded an awful lot like “who cares.” The by then all but defunct genre of screwball with its unsentimental take on love as war (from courting to court case) demanded more energy than either Dunne or Grant were willing (or able) to bring to their connubial tussles. Indeed, the loudest laughs in the studio audience are generated by the less than convincing barks of Mr. Smith, the couple’s pooch (granted, somewhat of a scene-stealer in the film as well).

After experiencing episodes of puerile madcap in Howard Hawks’s Monkey Business (1952), which did little to rejuvenate his career, Grant was finally slowing down. Unfortunately, he appeared to be rehearsing for An Affair to Remember with material not designed to make us forget that his days of cheeky indiscretion lay in a livelier past. Perhaps it is just as well that adaptor George Wells cut Jerry’s final speech in The Awful Truth. It might have sounded too much like an aging actor’s apology, his plea to an audience expecting lively antics: “So, as long as I’m different, don’t you think things could be the same again? Only a little different?”

In the 1930s and ’40s, Grant’s vocal chords were as elastic as his vaudeville-tested sinews. A few day’s after his 35th birthday (on 22 January 1939, to be exact), the lad from Bristol surprised those tuning in to the Ronald Colman hosted Circle with a spirited rendition of “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.” What’s more, the tune is followed later in the program by Grant’s tuneful delivery of . . . the FCC’s regulations regarding station identification. Something different, all right.

“No cackling,” Grant told Colman a few years later on the Command Performance (22 July 1944); but he could be persuaded, nonetheless, to sing a few notes. With the exception of his performance of Cole Porter in the disingenuous Night and Day (1946), there was nary a false one in Grant’s long and varied career on screen and radio.

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Magnetic Realism: Norman Corwin’s One World Flight

Well, it kept Bing Crosby on the air; but it also made that air feel a lot staler. Magnetic tape. Its introduction back in 1946 was a recorded death sentence to the miracle and the madness of live radio. Dreaded by producers of minutely timed dramas and comedy programs, going live had been the life or radio. Intimate and immediate, each half-hour behind the microphone had the urgency of a once-in-a-lifetime event. Actors and musicians gathered for a special moment and remained in the presence of the listener for the express purpose of being there for them and with them, however far away. They made time for an audience that, in turn, was making time for them. In a world of commerce in which democratic principles were reduced to the ready access to cheap reproductions, the quality of being inimitable and original was fast becoming a rare commodity indeed. The time for the magic of the time-bound art, the theater of the fourth dimension, was fast running out.

And yet, in the right hands, this new technology also meant innovation. It held the promise of unprecedented access to an unscripted and unrehearsed reality, the kind that live broadcasting scarcely approximated but often faked. One such groundbreaking program was Norman Corwin’s fourteen-part documentary One World Flight, which premiered on this day, 14 January, in 1947.

As I discuss it at length in Etherized Victorians, my doctoral study on so-called old-time radio, Corwin had played with the idea of taking listeners around the world in flights of fancy like “Daybreak”; he had created the illusion of on-the-spot reportage in dramatic series like Passport for Adams. Journalistically speaking, One World Flight was the real thing.

As a recipient of the first annual One World Award commemorating Wendell Willkie’s diplomatic tour in 1942, Corwin spent four months circling the globe, gathering one hundred hours of interviews, indigenous sounds, and ethnic music. “Here is real documentary radio,” playwright Jerome Lawrence declared in his introduction to a published transcript of the first program; “[r]adio from a shiny chrome studio at Sunset and Vine or at 485 Madison [was] kindergarten stuff in comparison.”

One World Flight presented a post-war world in turmoil, at once a strange new world of opportunity and a breeding ground for hatred and conflict. Corwin’s editorial scissors did not snip away what his tape had managed to capture, even though the voices of hope were given a prominent spot. The future prime minister of India is heard calmly expressing the belief that “freedom for one world” lies in the acceptance of the fact that people and nations “are not alike,” that “everybody is not the same,” and that otherness does not imply inferiority.

One World Flight provides aural proof in support of this sentiment, “moments out of interviews with people high and low; optimists, pessimists; liberals, fascists, communists; stevedores, prime ministers.” According to Corwin who also narrated, the “profoundest things” were not always said by “presidents and premiers,” but by “ordinary” and “humble people.”

Among the “actually recorded” speakers are an Italian woman despairing over the loss of her family during the bombardment of her village; a Filipino girl dismayed that Truman did not drop the atomic bomb on Russia; a Russian newspaper editor who warns that fascist conflagrations begin with a spark; and an Australian accountant cautioning against the advancement of the “colored races,” a “Frankenstein monster” that would “turn on” and “devour us, like the Japanese.” Replacing his idealized—and idealizing—microphone with a magnetic wire recorder, Corwin picked up ideological dissonance where he had hoped for “testaments of agreement.”

To Lawrence, these recordings, though not always “Magnavox-clear,” were of an “authenticity” that was “startlingly refreshing to a fiction-tired radio listener.” He defied his readers to “sit down at a typewriter and compose such simple, straightforward literary dynamite” as was set off on One World Flight.

“Without the tape recorder one wonders if radio would be the exciting instrument it is today,” remarked one radio critic, citing as exemplary The People Act (1952), a short-lived series of community documentaries that relied entirely on taped interviews and speeches. Such uses of magnetic tape remained the exception, however; the increasing reliance on recorded material resulted instead in the prefabrication of formerly live programming and the institution of summer reruns, a new efficiency in network broadcasting that spelled artistic impoverishment rather than renewal.