Category: Radio

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“Could She Kiss and Kill . . . and Not [Be] Remember[ed]”

Well, it had been a few years since the movie-going public lined up for a helping of The Egg and I (1947), the back-to-the-farm comedy that proved to be Claudette Colbert’s last major screen success. Still in print today, the non-fiction bestseller by Betty MacDonald on which the franchise-hatching hit movie is based has just been selected as BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime (for a 1947 radio drama version starring Ms. Colbert and her co-star, Fred MacMurray, click here). Considerably less enthusiasm was generated by Mel Ferrer’s The Secret Fury (1950), a box office egg that, even upon delivery, was anything but farm fresh.

In 1944, Colbert left Paramount, the studio that had shaped and protected her image—spirited, smart and sophisticated, after initial siren turns in DeMille features. Despite being a shrewd businesswoman, the by then middle-aged actress stumbled from one middling project to another, playing roles emblematic of an identity in a state of crisis and a career in uneasy flux: a crime-solving nun, a terrorist-beset Planter’s Wife, a Texas Lady. Even her outstanding performance in Three Came Home (1950), for the ordeal of filming which she lost her chance at starring in All About Eve, had gone largely unnoticed.

The Secret Fury, the hysterical melodrama she starred in next, was filmed at a time when audiences were being swept away by a new wave of crime stories that were tough, gritty and low on frills. Unconvincing and anachronistic, it is an irritatingly contrived variation on one of those neo-gothic mysteries in which newlywed heroines distrust their brain much rather than those who stand to gain from addling it.

As if to compensate for the mediocre material or to suit her acting to the overwrought plot, the refined and often reserved Colbert was, for once, woefully overacting. Two years earlier, she had played a similar role in Douglas Sirk’s Sleep, My Love (1948)—the thrills-promising poster for which I acquired last fall—and audiences had reason to be less than embracing of mature (if immaturely acting) women who put their lives and careers in peril by marrying into the wrong families or listening to the advice of their Hollywood agents.

When The Secret Fury was sold to theaters in Britain, it was promoted with the help of the Exhibitors’ Campaign Book pictured above. The latest artifact to have made it into my collection of Colbert memorabilia, it affords a fascinating glimpse at the industry’s marketing machinery. Aside from offering cinema displays and providing advertising copy to be fed to the press, it encouraged exhibitors to adopt various strategies of getting a potential audience excited about the motion picture. Suggested activities were contests in which audiences were asked to match Colbert’s eyes, to share their wedding pictures, or accurately to recall recent events in their lives (something Colbert’s character struggles to do in the film).

Another “stunt” to create interest in the film was this “Visualised Brain Test Reaction, followed by the instructions:

Make an enlarged copy of this graph to serve as a teaser display in the theatre foyer, along with an explanatory caption and film credits. Lead off with a display caption: “Did these brain waves reveal the truth of her mysterious week-end?”

Meanwhile, my own head is gradually clearing after a recent fever; no longer content to feast on television sitcoms, I am going to take in one of Colbert’s earlier comedy triumphs . . . the wintersporting romantic triangle I Met Him in Paris (1937). As DeMille pointed out in his introduction to the radio adaptation another Colbert comedy, The Gilded Lily (produced by the Lux Radio Theatre on this day, 11 January, in 1937), the actress had been somewhat of a “starmaker.” Those who were allowed to throw their arms around her became leading men in their own right, as had Charles Boyer and Gilded Lily co-star MacMurray. Back then, Colbert had her pick of roles and other halves, and brains enough to go for the right ones.

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Lemon in My Tea

Well, make that Liz Lemon. I don’t watch a lot of television these days; but 30 Rock sure is my cup of Assam. Not since Seinfeld have I followed a situation comedy with such enthusiasm. Never mind that Fey’s nod to Jerry and his gang turned into just another plug for the stingless Bee Movie. It’s great to see SNL alumni like Tracy Morgan and Chris Parnell in something worth my while (that is, something other than SNL). Rachel Dratch’s Hitchcockian cameos in season one were inspired. And, for once, even the guest appearances (Carrie Fisher!) do not smack of desperation.

Apropos Lemon (still with a capital L): the BBC hit a new low last Saturday with the premiere of The One and Only . . ., a new reality show in which amateur impersonators of iconic performers like Frank Sinatra, Dusty Springfield, and Rod Stewart battle it out for a chance at a contract in Vegas. Nothing terribly wrong with the concept (unless viewers under forty were expected to call in their votes); but the so-called talent appears to have been dragged in straight from a deserted street corner or a low-rent shopping mall . . . in Andorra. It would make for a stellar 30 Rock episode.

Let’s see, Madonna, in her by now long-faded Material Girlishness, has a German accent to which American audiences are sure to thrill. And Lionel Ritchie? He’s a white guy in blackface. That’ll have them dancing on the ceiling over at the NAACP! You’d think the current WGA strike would encourage broadcasters in Britain to fill in the blanks smartly instead of shooting them . . .

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Anything They Can Do . . . to Make You Feel Better

Well, leave it to a couple of old troupers to make me feel a little less sorry for myself. This New Year’s cold is making me feel miserable, cranky, and just about as fresh as a Jackie Mason standup routine. As those subjected to my groanings and whinings will only be too glad to corroborate, I am not one to suffer in silence. Mind you, I groan and whine even without an audience, of which I was deprived this afternoon (save for our terrier, Montague, who showed no signs of interest, let alone compassion). I reckon those noises serve chiefly as a reminder to myself that I am still numbering among the living.

On days like this, when the food tastes stale, I resort to a few extra doses of comfort culture. I seem to derive the greatest pleasure watching or listening to the old. Exposure to youth, in those moments of premature decrepitude, seems rather too cruel to endure.

After a reassuring hour or so with The Golden Girls, I needed to give my burning peepers a rest; so, I quickly went through my old-time radio log and came across this episode of the Big Show, originally aired on this day, 7 January, in 1951. Among Ms. Bankhead’s guests were Fred Allen, joking about his retirement and health problems, Edward G. Robinson, who was heard in a digest of Cornell Woolrich’s After Dinner Story and lamenting years of typecasting, as well as the fabulous Marlene Dietrich, with whose Scarlet Empress I caught up last month at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (a few days ago, I reencountered her in Stage Fright). Now, Dietrich was even older than the hostess of the Big Show—and Bankhead and her team of writers did not let her forget it for a minute.

Marlene, in turn, was permitted to mock Tallulah’s age-imposed invisibility (“I hear so little about you since you have hidden yourself away in radio”) while rubbing it in that she had just been interviewed by the Woman’s Home Companion. “Are they changing the name to Old Woman’s Home Companion?” Bankhead retorted. “Now let’s face it, darling,” she went on to tear at Dietrich’s glamorous persona, “false eyelashes, mascara, powder, rouge, lipstick . . .” “Yes, darling,” Dietrich purred, “but the rest of it is all me.”

“Let’s stop pretending and tell the truth,” Dietrich declared.

There’s no use denying it. I am not quite as young as I used to be. Everybody knows that I am a mother, and now I’m a grandmother. The silly idea women have that they must lie about their age is ridiculous. I don’t care if everybody knows how old I am.

Upon which Dietrich admits to 32 and Bankhead to 31. That cleared up, Dietrich (who performs such “miracles in numbers”) is invited to sing “Falling in Love Again” . . . “just the way [she] sang it 35 years ago,” before she was born.

Culminating in a rendition of “Anything You Can Do,” the Bankhead-Dietrich face-off is another exercise in self-effacement, which quickly became the trademark of The Big Show. Just the kind of kick in the old pants I needed . . .

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Caught At Last: Some Personal Notes on The Mousetrap

Well, we ended the year in a jam. None too comfortable in a tight squeeze, I nonetheless joined the throng on Waterloo Bridge for the customary year-end countdown and fireworks. We had just gotten out of The Mousetrap, which snapped shut for the 22957th time last night. Opening in 1952, Agatha Christie’s thriller—which started out as a radio play titled “Three Blind Mice” back in 1947—is still packing them in like red herrings in a jar at the St. Martin’s Theatre (pictured below). So, what’s the attraction?

Like most readers, I discovered Christie’s mysteries in my early teens; as a gay male, I did not feel myself represented by the average juvenile fare and was too puzzled and scared to seek out works that might hold a mirror to my androgynous if pimply visage. The impersonal killings perpetrated and neatly solved in the quaint whodunits of the late “Queen of Crime” were just the kind of rest cure my troubled mind seemed to demand.

There was something reassuring in the curlings of Hercule Poirot’s mustachios, the armchair as an intellectual retreat, the assorted young ne’er-do-goods among Christie’s long lists of suspects, as well as the less-than-physically fit busybody of that little old lady who could. It inspired me to try my brains at composing a whodunit, even though, despite numerous attempts, I only managed a revenge comedy whose German title loosely translates as “And All the Worst for the New Year.”

Nowadays, the Christie puzzlers with their lazy prose and perfunctory characterizations do no longer seem quite so satisfying to me; but, as if in gratitude for seeing me through those terrible years, I still catch up with Christie and her works from time to time, whether on television, in the theater, or on my travels. A few years ago, quite by chance, I found myself in the author’s quarters at the Pera Palas Hotel in Istanbul—on the anniversary of her birth, no less.

Back in December 2005, I took in a stage adaptation of And Then There Were None (briefly discussed here). And Then is one of the few works in the Christie canon that is not merely clever but genuinely unnerving.

While well oiled, The Mousetrap is rather less snappy and gripping, despite its opening in the dark to the strains of “Three Blind Mice” and a woman’s piercing scream. The rather superior Gay Lambert (as the troublesome Mrs. Boyle) aside, the current cast of The Mousetrap, which originally starred Sir Richard Attenborough (pictured here on the poster for the play), is as capable as a group of figures in a game of Clue. Little more is expected of Christie’s characters, which fall flat when they are meant to be round.

There is, of course, that queer young fellow named Christopher Wren, just the kind of chap whose welcome presence in the generally impersonal board game tableaux of Agatha Christie, told me, all those years ago, that there was a place for the likes of me in a world filled with hazards, traps, and processed cheese.

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Playing It by Ear; or, "What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?"

Well, luckily we are not in Glasgow in the middle of a storm, a misfortune that befell us last New Year’s Eve. The festivities having been called off due to fierce winds, we ended up back in our hotel room shortly before midnight. This year, we are in London and, without having made any definite plans or arrangements, determined to see a show in the West End, go out for a meal, and watch the fireworks along the Thames. To be sure, this is not the time of year to be playing it by ear; but, even without reservations, there is always plenty to see and do in a big town like London. While I don’t like to come to town without a clue about what is on offer at museums and in the theater, I prefer not to have our days all planned out ahead of time. History tells us that getting lost is a great way to discover something new.

Yesterday, heading out from our hotel near Pudding Lane, where the Great Fire of 1666 got started, we took the wrong bus and ended up at King’s Cross. Being there, we decided to have a look at the recently reopened St. Pancras Station. The old Victorian terminus has been turned into a memorial to poet John Betjeman (1906-84), whose words you will find under foot, where they might be drowned out by a stampede of travelers. How wonderful it was to stand there, not having to rush anywhere, taking in the sights and sounds of the old yet new and ever changing scene.

“Imprisoned in a cage of sound / Even the trivial seems profound.” The words my camera captured ring true today. On New Year’s Eve, those cages (the bells with which Betjeman was fascinated) are going to rattle all over the world. And the trivium of a few seconds passing will assume the utmost significance in the eyes and ears of billions.

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Oranges Are Just About the Only Fruit

Well, apart from grapes, perhaps. Having left the Big Apple behind us, we started off our trip to London with a roll in the Haymarket. We were not offered any oranges, the vending of which, traditionally, is associated with prostitution; but despite the absence of Cyprians (or Orange-wenches” as referred to in the play), the scene we came upon at the Haymarket was salacious nonetheless. In said 287-year-old Theatre Royal (whose rebuilt venue I captured here in its present condition), The Country Wife was first performed back in 1675. This season, William Wycherley’s bawdy comedy is back, if somewhat condensed (its prologue cropped) and refurbished, with a few visual puns and stagecrafted metaphors added (such as a rendering of the expression “when pigs fly”). The dialogue should best be left unchanged, at least if the revision is as lame as that overheard at the Haymarket that night (something about a doctor being nothing without patience, a pantomime-worthy piece of paronomasia rather more subtle in the original).

Wycherley’s comedy has attracted some of the great actresses of the British theater, including Judy Dench, Helen Mirren, and Maggie Smith. Cast in the role of Lady Fidget (as Edith Evans before her), Patricia Hodge did not quite manage to make the character memorable; but as an ensemble piece, this production succeeded nonetheless as a naughty diversion nowadays referred to as a guilty pleasure.

Mind you, we had consumed a few stomped grapes too many and struggled at first to keep our eyes firmly on the action. Luckily, though, keeping up with this clever Wife is bound to keep anyone up. Take it from an old fruit.

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“Evening Primrose”; or, Attention, Last-Minute Shoppers!

Well, there I was. 2 AM, walking around Macy’s on Herald Square. The department store has been open around the clock for days in what probably amounts to little more than a publicity stunt, and a costly one at that. As I looked around me in the nocturnal crowd, it struck me that folks had dropped in to warm up, avail themselves of the restrooms, or merely to satisfy their curiosity, behavior unlikely to translate into an appreciable increase in sales. Now, I am not a happy consumer at the best of times; I derive little enjoyment from shopping, other than the merchandise I am often too tired, ill-tempered, or tight-fisted to drag to the counter. At that hour, having just imbibed a few gin and tonics at my favorite West Village watering hole, I was certainly not in a position to make any informed choices or last-minute purchases.

Navigating the mercantile maze, I was reminded of John Collier’s short story “Evening Primrose” (1940), as it was adapted for radio’s literary adventure anthology Escape. A distant and sinister forebear of A Night at the Museum, “Primrose” is the eerie account of the after hours goings on in just such a locale (called Bracy’s, no less).

A weary and destitute poet, desirous to break free from the world, has decided to squat, of all places, in the quiet of a closed emporium, where he sets out to make a home for himself behind a pile of carpets. Exploring the premises one night, he discovers that he is not alone.

Those tuning in to Escape on 5 November 1947 were invited to imagine themselves

groping in the midnight dimness of a gigantic department store and suddenly you realize that you’re not alone; that a hundred eyes are glaring at you from the shadows, a hundred hands reaching for your throat, and your most urgent desire is to . . . escape.

They were merely after the contents of our wallets; but I was anxious to escape all the same. The “Evening Primrose” is not in bloom this season. The secret society of non-shopping consumers Collier envisioned would have no chance in the glare of eternal commerce, their struggle for self-preservation crushed by the nightly invaders of a territory reclaimed for a paradisic if parasitic existence.

I was more in my territory strolling around New York City’s outdoor markets. At the holiday fair on Union Square, I caught up with my old pal Kip Cosson (pictured) at the fair on Union Square. My frame being too large for the clothes sporting his jolly, colorful designs, I walked away with a signed copy of his children’s book Ned Visits New York. It tells the story of two pen pals, a South Pole penguin and a New York City mouse, and their sightseeing tour of the town. Department stores, I am pleased to report, did not make the list of attractions. Ned, after all, was feeling “crowded and stressed” and had left his home in “need [of a] rest.”

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Lines of Business: Roxy, the Rockettes, and the Radio

You pretty much have to line up for anything in a busy town like New York City. It is hard to believe that when I first visited the city I did not know how to queue. Not that this kind of orderliness is entirely unknown to the Germans, who call it “Schlange stehen” (literally, standing snake). We used to do it for bread, but we don’t do it for the circus or for the busses and trains that get us there. Perhaps, that kind of discipline is too closely associated with days of famine and fascism, in which more than an evening’s entertainment was on the line.

Anyway. I didn’t mind lining up in front of the Radio City Music Hall to see those gals whose line of business is . . . standing in line. The Rockettes, whose fancy legwork is the highlight of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, now celebrating its 75th season. Of course, my disorderly mind went wandering. I was thinking about “Roxy” Rothafel, the man to whom we owe this spectacle.

Back in 1925, when entertainment by radio was still in its pre-network infancy, Roxy, then Director of the Capitol Theater in New York City, experimented in on-air theatricals, marvelling (in Broadcasting: Its New Day) that radio was the

great spiritual anodyne of the time. None but the hungry hearts that need it most can appreciate, even dimly, what it means. It is a new sunshine, a new hope in life, bringing with it immeasurable joy. It is all hopelessly beyond the understanding of the blasé who are bored by even the most sensational amusements that modern life has to offer.

According to Roxy and his co-author Raymond Francis Yates (who had already penned the Complete Radio Book),

[t]here is a deeply human side to broadcasting that cannot help but reach far down into the conscience of an impresario fortunate enough to win public acclaim. The searching nature of radio makes this so; radio is a magic fluid that finds its way into every crevice of human life. At the same instant it is seeking out the little family group in the cabin of a snow-covered sand-barge wintering in the dreary North River at Hoboken as well as those who are lounging in the luxury of a Fifth Avenue mansion. The lonely souls in an ice-covered, wind-lashed lighthouse on the North Atlantic coast are fellow-listeners with the humble folk in the murky tenants of New York’s lower East Side. The little farmhouse nestled in the snow-clad hills of Maine, the lonely trapper of the silent Yukon, the patient sufferers on hospital cots, the meek inmates of almshouses, all are reached by radio. To some, radio is but a small part of racy life of varied sensations, but to hundreds of thousands it is a great part of a life of spirit-crushing monotony.

Surprisingly, the enterprising Roxy argued that “advertising by radio does not offer a solution to the problem of making broadcasting self-supporting on the scale that is necessary for national success.” Ruling out “voluntary contributions from the public,” they envisioned “equipment that will confine reception from certain studios to those who pay a monthly or yearly fee.”

He was off there. Meanwhile, I am off again, standing in line for some classic cinema treats (and a bit of art) at the MoMA . . .

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Christmas Shopping in New York . . . with a Certain Tightwad from Waukegan

Well, it “hardly seems possible, but it’s true. Only twelve more shopping days till Christmas.” The timely if rather superfluous reminder, along with a suggestion to stock up on a certain gelatin dessert, was proffered by Don Wilson, the rotund and jovial announcer for the Jell-O Program starring Jack Benny, a former vaudevillian who had put money in his purse by leaving the defunct circuit for the lively, money-spinning kilocycles. On this day, 11 December, back in 1938 the show, incongruously opening with “Hooray for Hollywood,” was broadcast from New York City. Since I shall be bargain hunting in said Metropolis later this week, I am tuning in, however belatedly, in hopes of some free money-saving advice from the old skinflint.

There was trouble in the air when bandleader Phil Harris told Benny that tenor Kenny Baker was not hand-on-mike to provide the customary musical interlude. Baker had borrowed a few bucks, allegedly to see the World’s Fair, which would not open until the following April. Benny offered to fill the dead air pocket with one of his dreaded violin solos, upon which the orchestra threatened to desert (until Phil digs in with “A Pocketful of Dreams”). The oft-belittled fiddler was thwarted, for once; but he did get to play with Jascha Heifetz a few years later (as pictured above).

Even his faithful valet Rochester (of whose hardship and penury I spoke here) was a no-show. He was up in Harlem “enjoying a little Southern hospitality.” No doubt, the gang dreaded having to go shopping with or receiving gifts from Benny, the horrors of which experiences, like the parading endured at Easter (and discussed here) were being documented annually on radio and television, to the amusement of the American public.

“An electric razor for Don, a necktie for Kenny, a chorus girl for Phil,” Benny checks his list. At a department store perfume counter. Benny and Mary Livingstone get a whiff of Springtime in the Bronx. “Oh, yeah, it’s lovely that time of year,” Benny quips, “with the bagels all in bloom.” When Benny is taken aback by the very thought of having to pay $10 for an ounce (or $4000 for a gallon) of something more “oulala,” the impatient saleswoman suggests that he run “some violets through a wringer and make it [him]self.”

It is only the first in a series of humiliations, which also involve a less-than-nimble-fingered pickpocket and a mishandled fitting. “Go back to California and squeeze an Orange,” an ill-tempered floorwalker suggests when Benny and Livingstone exhibit the nerve to ask for the necktie counter.

Best peeled by the thick-skinned, the Big Apple is a tough town, all right. Maybe “Hooray for Hollywood” (for which Benny and company were soon to depart) was not so incongruous an opener after all. Just how pitiless a town it was Benny would learn a few weeks later. In January 1939, the high-salaried comedian who squeezed laughter out of a pinched penny was indicted on three counts of illegally importing over $2000 worth of jewelry into the US. According to Gaver and Stanley’s There’s Laughter in the Air (1945), previously consulted here, Benny initially pleaded not guilty; he changed his mind around Easter and received a 10,000 fine, as well as a suspended sentence of a year and a day.

I, for one, shall be traveling to New York with an empty suitcase. Should it get quiet here in the meantime, as it has on previous occasions, it is because I am being too cheap again to pay for wireless access I insist on being complementary, without my having to order an overpriced cup of coffee.

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Sound Construction

Well, it has been particularly blustery of late; and, according to the BBC, Welsh coastal dwellers are to brace themselves for the fierce storms announcing themselves so boisterously. I am used to such noisy tidings by now. They are part of the seasonal soundscape of the Welsh coast, the otherwise quiet place to which I, romantically propelled, betook myself from the din of the metropolis.

Yes, I can take it now, the sound of the gales pushing against our cottage, the telling rattle of the letterbox long after the postal workers have made their rounds, the creaking of the beams and the lashing of rain against the glass drum of our conservatory, orchestrally augmented by the high-pitched screeching of the twisted willow branches scraping against the panes. Then there is that dictionary-challenging, onomatopoeia-defying shhhshing of the wind, as if nature were insisting on airtime, determined to shut me up, shut in as I am, surrounded by those ominous and still strange sounds.

Before heading out into that storm tonight, for company and a few drinks, I wrapped myself up in a sound cape of my own choosing, a blanket at once muffling and eloquent. BBC Radio 4 offered just that: “The Castle: A Portrait in Sound” (available here until 13 December). A portrait not unlike those produced by the Columbia Workshop in the 1930s and the CBS Radio Workshop in the ’50s (as discussed here), “The Castle” recalls the past of a Scottish stronghold rendered in spoken words, its present, the after-liveliness of its ruins, being captured by natural sounds.

When its palette is not muted by the welcome commentary that gives names to its noisemakers, the sonic portrait of “The Castle” reverberates with the spray of the sea, now stormy, now calm, with the buzz of insects and the chatter of swallows, of skylarks and kittiwakes, and the rather obscene squawks of the shags. The fabled invasion of Daphne du Maurier’s avian agitators (last heard here and currently being readied for another big screen attack) was brought vividly to mind.

If only the wind and rain were not messing with the wires again, making it difficult for me to sustain a wireless reception sound enough to get this “Castle” on the air . . .