Category: Radio

Posted on

Mind, Reader!

It seems like I am going to be cut off from the internet for a while. High winds wreaked havoc with the local landlines earlier this year, and keeping my date with the out-of-date has turned into an on-and-offline romance during the past three months. Finally, something amounting to more than darning is going to be done about those rotten wires; even the road to our house will be closed off for the duration. It is going to be a week of silent days, without signals and dispatches. Will broadcastellan have returned by the end of it? Can new wires improve the state of broadband? Might there be a future for carrier pigeons? I won’t ask you to tune in tomorrow to find out all about it because I won’t be able either to tell or share. Nor do I mingle with the crystal ball set who look to a psychic or Mind Reader like Warren William for answers.

What is worse, anyway, a phony medium or one beyond reach, a doubtful telepath or unreliable telecommunications?

Posted on

Out of the Bag: The Fiction of Laetitia Prism

She could have run Hollywood. Miss Prism, I mean. You know, the governess in The Importance of Being Earnest who couldn’t tell a book from a baby. Summing up the ends (the conclusion as well as the purpose) of her novel, she explains: “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”  We know where her story ended up, of course; but what end did Miss Prism face, and what ends might she have served after and beyond Wilde?

Where do fictional characters go once their creators are done with them? What do they think, dream, or do between chapters or acts? Where have they been before entering the story their creators had in mind for them? Those are the question tackled by Celluloid Extras, a series of sketches now playing on BBC Radio 4.

What every governess knows: It is impolitic to point.

The practice of picking up familiar characters from the world of literature, disentangling them from the plots that contained them, and getting them back onto a public stage to let them tell us something else about themselves is hardly a novel idea. In January 1937, for instance, the familiar characters of Alice in Wonderland were released from the confines of “Copyright Lane” to mingle with Hamlet and assorted originals from Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and Martin Chuzzlewit in the free-for all of radio’s “Public Domain,” a play produced by the aforementioned Columbia Workshop. It is a tongue-in-cheek approach to pastiche that is both liberating and controlling of the afterlife and private lives of imaginary personages, who, even without those efforts, often do quite well in the minds of those who recall them from their excursions into drama and literature.

Natalia Power’s “Miss Prism, or the Dreadful Secret,” the first of those five Celluloid Extras promises the untold story of the absent-minded governess, whom last we saw being embraced by Dr. Chasuble, much to her delight. Now, I might have picked up some queer vibes, given that the Miss Prism I last experienced on stage was impersonated by a male actor; but Power seems to have gotten a similar impression, however her conclusions were drawn. And yet, Miss Prism seems to have been coerced into speaking up, if indeed the words coming out of her mouth were not put there by another. If it was her mouth.

In “The Decay of Lying,” one of the fictional characters through which Wilde spoke in his dialogued essays, remarked that the “only real people are the people who never existed.” In a postmodern dismissal of boundaries and binaries that would not have done for Wilde, whose stage plays and word plays depend on them, Power suggests that Miss Prism did exist as something other than the prism or lens of our changing mores, that she was, in fact, an acquaintance of the playwright to whom we are indebted for immortalizing her. By telling the fictive truth about imaginary people, “Miss Prism, or the Dreadful Secret” seems to be degrading the art of lying to a practice as indelicate and vile as tabloid journalism.

Giving Miss Prism a dirty secret (aside from the ones already out of the bag when the curtain falls on Wilde’s comedy) and by extracting it in a moment of alcohol-induced carelessness means to imitate life and, according to Wilde’s logic, to take it. Now that is character assassination.

Posted on

A Bell for . . . Talafar?

It is the fuel that keeps the search engines humming. It is fodder for loudmouthed if often unintelligible webjournalists thriving on the divisive. It is the foundation of many a rashly erected platform by means of which the invisible make a display of themselves. The so-called war on terror, I mean, and the time, the shape, and the lives it is taking in Iraq. My position becomes sufficiently clear in those words, as tenuous as it sometimes seems to myself. Experiencing the uncertainty, the turmoil and sorrow that was New York City during the days following the destruction of the World Trade Center, I was anxious to see prevented what then felt like an out and out war against the democratic West; but as a descendant of Nazi sympathizers who is convinced that putting an end to thralldom is a noble cause and conflicted about the use of military force to achieve this end, I could only work myself up to a restrained fervor, which soon gave way to bewilderment, anger, and frustration.

Presented as a success story of the US led invasion of Iraq, the town of Talafar is once again in the news this week, shown in the unfavorable light of exploding bombs and insurgent violence. It has (or ought to have) become obvious that the US and its allies (reluctant or otherwise) are failing in their professed mission against terror and tyranny not because they lack military expertise or international support but because they engaged in this operation with an insufficient awareness and understanding of the different and differing cultures in a region they presumed, hoped, or misrepresented to be a unified (or at any rate unifiable) nation.

I was reminded of all this, if any reminders were required, while watching the wartime parable-turned-Hollywood romance A Bell for Adano (1945), a movie depicting the occupation of an Italian village by American forces toward the close of the Second World War. I generally dislike and avoid war pictures; at least those that reduce history to well-staged action sequences interspersed with scenes of map-pointing generals exchanging remarks about strategies and objectives as if contemplating a game of checkers. A Bell is not that kind of movie.

Based on a 1944 Pulitzer Prize winning bestseller by John Hersey (a Time correspondent and former secretary to Sinclair Lewis), it tells of the struggle for peace, order and community in a battle-scarred town whose lack of pride, hope, and unity is symbolized by the missing bell in the town square, weaponized by Italian’s fascist regime. Realizing the significance of this communal centerpiece, a New York Italian major disregards military orders to find and install an adequate replacement.

On this day, 28 March, in 1944—well over a year before the movie version premiered in US cinemas—NBC radio, in cooperation with the Council on Books in Wartime, presented an adaptation of Hersey’s novel as part of a series titled Words at War. Henry King’s film would attempt to shape parts of Hersey’s narrative into the romance of a lost “Belle” from Adano by casting Gene Tierney as John Hodiak’s Italian love interest, considerably downplaying the ugly Americans his character is up against.

The radio dramatization dispenses with such heartstringings-along to concentrate on the heart of the story: the failings of military strategy and the imperative of cultural sensitivity in the treatment of liberated civilians as exemplified by the response of one Italian-American to the challenges of ideological reorientation, his efforts to understand and assist his ancestral people after the removal of the enemy force that possessed, intimidated and estranged them.

On the radio, A Bell for Adano was announced as a story about “thoughtful Americans, and Americans not so thoughtful.” The very suggestion of America’s humanitarian blunders in an essentially propagandist series like Words at War renders this broadcast “Bell” altogether more compelling than those backlot scenes in which all-American he-fighters show the Axis what what is. The “what” here is “What to do with occupied territory?” once it appears to be under the control of the ostensible victor.

The war in Iraq has yet to deliver a bell ringing loudly enough to convince the world (or me, at any rate) that the freedom, stability, and opportunity it meant to bring about were worth all those local blasts and their global repercussions. Romancing a cracked one just won’t do.

Posted on

Mining Culture: The Welsh in Hollywood

It was too pleasant an afternoon not to be warming to it. The outdoors, I mean. Though all thumbs (and not one of them green), I nonetheless tried my hands at gardening again, transplanting English-grown Californian Lilac into Welsh soil. Unless deterred by the vagaries of what goes for “vernal” here in Wales, I shall probably spend more time tending to the plants than to this journal next week, when the storm-frayed and patched-up telephone lines to our house are scheduled to be cut down and replaced, a spring renewal of telecommunications during which service is likely to be suspended.

No internet, no landline, and no traffic along the already quiet lane leading to this hermitage I call home—it’s “a proper place for a murder.” That is how the setting of Night Must Fall was described when on this day, 27 March, in 1948, the famous and oft revived thriller by Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams was performed on the US radio thriller anthology Suspense.

Along with two members of the original (1935) London cast—Dame May Whitty (as Mrs. Bramson) and Matthew Boulton (as the inspector)—Robert Montgomery was heard in the role of Dan, the lady killer he had played in the 1937 film adaptation. As I realized after seeing it on stage, Night Must Fall is not your common crop of a crime melodrama. It goes beyond the question of whether or not the victim will die by asking us whether she ought to, by making us eager for the “must” of her demise and examine the decline and “fall” of our own civilized morality. As a psychological and ethical puzzler, it translates well into other languages and media.

Now, Night falls in Essex, England, rather than the wild west of Britain; but according to Williams’s stage directions, the character of “Baby-face” Dan “speaks with a rough accent” that, unlike Montgomery’s, is “more Welsh than anything else.” On Broadway as on the London stage, this “sort of Welsh” Dan (as his girlfriend describes him) was voiced by the very Welshman who created him.

In an acting career spanning six decades, Williams was a frequent player in (mainly British) film, on stage and television; on US radio, he was heard in one of Norman Corwin’s plays for the United Nations. I recently spotted him in The Citadel (1938), his voice lending authenticity to the depiction of life in a Welsh mining town rendered unconvincing by the casting of Hollywood productions like John Ford’s Academy Award-winning How Green Was My Valley (another cinema classic I caught up with this year) or The Corn Is Green. The latter is based on an autobiographical play by Williams; but with stars like Bette Davis (on screen) and Claudette Colbert (on radio, nearly a decade later) taking on the role of a Welsh schoolteacher, it is the audience who is expected to be green.

Having lived in this country for well over two years now, I am all ears for representations and representatives of Wales in popular culture, whether in British cinema or American radio drama. What remains of this country once its landscape, language, and lore are forced through the filter of the camera or microphone, once it is translated by a popular medium like film and transferred to an international audience? During the next few months, leading up to a Welsh film festival hosted by the National Screen and Sound Archive here in Aberystwyth, I am going to mull over such matters from time to time.

To be sure, the landscape and culture of Wales have changed considerably since A. J. Cronyn’s Citadel and Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley were bestsellers in the US back in 1937-38 and 1940, respectively. Prominently featured in 20th-century popular culture (including the previously discussed “Comedy of Danger,” reputedly the first play written for radio), the mines have been shut down years ago and wind farms have replaced collieries. Today, however, the BBC reported that coal mining is making a comeback here, as the first “deep mine” is set to open in over three decades. Could this mean that Ms. Zeta-Jones is going back to her Welsh roots for a Hollywood returns to the Citadel, the Valley or other recycled Corn?

Posted on

“. . . only a crude little glass baby”: The “Father of Radio” Remembers

Well, I am off this instant on a short and none-too-well planned trip to the south of England, to which quick exit you owe the uncommon brevity and, what is more irregular still, the antemeridian dispatch of this entry in the broadcastellan journal. However inconvenient this last-minute post might be for my traveling companions, I simply could not wait another year to share this anniversary. True, I excite easily when it comes to the old wireless; but in this case the enthusiasm is not altogether unwarranted.

On this day, 23 March, in 1941, Dr. Lee de Forest was called upon to address the American public through a means and medium for the creation of which he was largely responsible.

“Most people believe Guglielmo Marconi invented the radio,” Tom Lewis states in the Prologue of his study Empire of the Air (1991, immediately to make the necessary correction: “he did not.” Among those who did was said Dr. de Forest, once acknowledged to be the “Father of Radio,” due in part to his tireless self-promotion.

To mark the 34th anniversary of the invention of the wireless telephone in 1907 (it is thus the 100 anniversary this year), CBS radio caught up with this daddy of the dial for another edition of Behind the Mike, a CBS program billed as “radio’s own show.”

Based on accounts furnished by his assistant, Frank Butler (present in the broadcasting studio), Behind the Story dramatization of de Forest’s story, his initial struggle, his failure to interest the navy in his invention, the destruction of his New York laboratory by fire, and his indictment for fraud.

After this fictionalized sketch, a cheerful de Forest, by then “almost the sole living survivor of the old guard,” spoke from Los Angeles to his former assistant, to the audience gathered in an East Coast studio, and to the listening public tuning in across the United States:

In 1907, no one could possibly have foreseen what is occurring right now between Los Angeles and New York because then the amplifier, which has since made possible the transcontinental telephone, was only a crude little glass baby lying in swaddling cotton in that little old shoebox in our laboratory.  How well I remember those first audion tubes [. . .].  How difficult they were to construct.  How great our chagrin when one of them burned out.  And what headaches we suffered to keep those first radio telephone transmitters on the air.  Bittersweet are those old memories.

More bitter than sweet, as it turns out. In the 1941 broadcast, de Forest expressed the wish to “live until the 21st century, just to observe the state of radio and television then.” He died in 1961; but not long after he made that unfulfilled wish, so well suited to a radio broadcast designed to celebrate the medium, he all but disowned his invention. In an open letter to the National Association of Broadcasters that appeared in the Chicago Tribune on 28 October 1946 and was reprinted in de Forests 1950 autobiography, Father of Radio, he exclaimed, after years of expressing similar misgivings:

What have you […] done with my child? He was conceived as a potent instrumentality for culture, fine music, the uplifting of America’s mass intelligence.  You have debased this child [to] collect money from all and sundry [..].  You have made of him a laughing stock to the intelligence, surely a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere […].

While lamenting the “bedtime stories” that “ruled the waves” and “rendered children psychopathic,” he nonetheless remained “proud” of his “child,” as “[h]ere and there from every station come each day some brief flashes worth the hearing, some symphony, some intelligent debate, some playlet worth the wattage.”

Not one to throw out the baby with the airwaves, I shall return anon to discuss some “playlet,” to debate whether such “brief flashes” were “worth the wattage” or just curious enough to catch my attention.

Posted on

Acid Tongues in Wilted Cheeks: Hollywood and the "Older" Woman

Well, she’s being teased quite a bit this season about her obsolescence, about being too old for her former job, too old to start dating again after her marriage fell apart, too old for any excitement greater than awaiting the arrival of the latest issue of Cat Fancy. The superannuated one is Gabrielle Solis, one of those supposedly Desperate Housewives. She’s a mere 31, mind you; but that’s just about a quarter to finished on the watch of a supermodel. It’s Hollywood poking fun at its obsession with youth, an obsession I never shared even while I stilled possessed it. It is pointless to shout “Grow up!” these days, since that is exactly what is feared most.

If fifty is the new thirty, does it follow that thirty is the new pre-pubescence? Perhaps that is why Gabrielle is asked to prep hideous little Miss Sunshines for a short career of runway sashaying or paired with an even more hideous Ritchie Rich of a teenager who seriously undermines her chances of landing a man. Gabrielle is not so much robbing the cradle than sinking back into it.

Men like birthday boy William Shatner (born on this day in 1931) never had it quite as tough to stay employed, even though they might experience their own aging anxieties, drowned sorrows untraceable in their bloated or botoxed visages. If Desperate Housewives can be claimed to succeed in making mature women appear desirable it is only by making them look and act less than mature. At least they are spared for a while longer from the fate of being assigned nothing more glamorous or challenging than a low budget sequel to Trog.

Joan Crawford, who did exit with that movie on her resume, made a career out of playing formidable women past forty just until she passed fifty, at which untender moment the formidable was twisted into the berserk. According to Hollywood, the line between fierce and frantic is as thin as a wrinkle behind a layer of gauze; and even in the make-believe of radio, where no gauze is required to assist those incapable of suspending their disbelief at the sight of crow’s feet, Crawford was asked to walk and cross it.

In “Three Lethal Words”, a tongue in less-than-rosy cheek Suspense thriller that aired on this day, 22 March, back in 1951, Crawford is heard as Jane Winters (read: well past spring or about to enter the second childhood of a Jane Withers), a woman who confesses to being, gasp, 43! You know the old gal has a problem (according to Hollywood logic, that is) when she also confesses to having been “ill” and walks into a film studio with a bottle of nitric acid in her pocket.

“It’s amazingly powerful,” she tells her former colleague, now head of the studio’s story department, to whom she is trying to pitch a story of a woman not unlike herself. As it turns out, that is an understatement, considering that the parallels are melodramatically overstated by Ms. Winters choice of character: Sally Summers, a screenwriter who tries to make herself believe that “43 isn’t very old,” but who is constantly reminded of her relative antiquity by her marriage to an actor 19 years her junior, especially when that young man leaves her after being told to send his wife Mother’s Day cards and is teased about not only having seen Sunset Boulevard, but “living it”!

“Three Lethal Words” throws acid into the wrinkle-free face of Hollywood; but the woman who gets to do the throwing is not looking any better for having dreamed up the deed.

Posted on

It Happened Another Night: A Return Trip for Colbert and Gable

Well, you can’t go home again; but that sure doesn’t stop a lot of folks from getting a return ticket or from being taken for a ride in the same rickety vehicle. And with pleasure! Before I head out to the theater for another meeting with Moll Flanders, who’s been around the block plenty, I am going to hop on the old “Night Bus” that took Colbert and Gable places—and all the way to the Academy Awards besides.  On this day, 20 March, in 1939, the Depression era transport was fixed up for a Lux Radio Theater presentation of It Happened One Night. Whereas Orson Welles would try to shove Miriam Hopkins and William Powell into their seats for the Campbell Playhouse adaptation of Robert Riskin’s screenplay, Colbert and Gable (as Peter Warne) were brought back for Lux, reprising their Oscar-winning roles of runaway socialite Ellie Andrews and the reporter on her trail.

Also on board that night were Walter Connelly as Ellie’s father and, “believe you me,” Roscoe Karns as the fellow traveler Ellie can stand even less than the arrogant newshound—”Yessir. Shapeley’s the name, and that’s the way I like ’em.”

Of course, if you like ’em like Shapeley, George Wells’s rewrite of the Production-Coded tease that is It Happened One Night will be a disappointment. For starters, you won’t get to admire Colbert’s traffic-stopping gams or Gable’s retailer-headache of a bare chest. Capra’s down-to-earth comedy suffers badly from becoming airborne—if, indeed, it ever does.

On the airwaves, you won’t get to hear Ellie’s liberating plunge into the ocean; her story picks up at the bus terminal, with Peter getting fired while the “Extra, Extra” of a newsboy alerts him to the scoop that could revive his career. Before we quite get why Ellie is out of her element, Peter is already in his, as the elements of screwball are beaten to the pulp of romance.

The old bus sputters along as if someone had slashed its tires. Gone, too, are many of Riskin’s censors-defying innuendos. Still, if you got a mischievous mind, you can tear down the Walls of Jericho or any barrier that might keep you from imagining what is really happening between Ellie and Peter. “You haven’t got a trumpet by any chance, have you?” Luckily, I always carry a spare.

Posted on

Lance Sieveking, “The Man with the Flower in His Mouth”

Let me be the first to admit my ignorance. The world being largely ignorant of me, I simply cannot depend on anyone else to do so. That said, I might as well turn the keeping of this journal (complicated as it was today by internet-disrupting hailstorms) into occasions to pick up a little something rather than disperse whatever scraps of knowledge I may already lay claim to after years of study (or intellectual loafing).

One such occasion might be the birthday of British radio and television pioneer Lancelot Sieveking, born, as the Internet Movie Database informed me, on this day, 19 March, back in 1896. Sure, I had come across his name during my research for Etherized Victorians; but, concentrating my efforts on American radio dramatics, I had conveniently overlooked Sieveking’s accomplishments. Even the folks over at the Database have yet to catch up with this man of all media; at least, his death (back in 1972) has thus far escaped them.

It is no overstatement to say that the author of The Stuff of Radio (1934) is a neglected figure today; his name has most recently been dropped in connection to Disney’s first entry in the Chronicles of Narnia series. Narnia author C. S. Lewis had approved of Sieveking’s radio dramatization but dismissed the idea of a film adaptation. During the first season of BBC2 television’s Oxford English Dictionary challenge Balderdash and Piffle, there was some debate about the origin of the phrase “back to square one,” which was argued to lie in an eight-squared drawing meant to assist BBC radio’s football commentators back in 1927. That design, as it turns out, was Sieveking’s.

Fellow BBC radio drama producer Val Gielgud had this to say about the “not altogether fortunate” Sieveking: “He was perhaps over much influenced during his most impressionable years by G. K. Chesterton, and by the theory of that master of paradox that because some things were better looked at inside out or upside down such a viewpoint should invariably be adopted. Talented and imaginative beyond the ordinary, his eyes gazing towards distant horizons, he was liable to neglect what lay immediately before his feet.”

In other words, Sieveking was an audio-visionary, a trier of radiogenic techniques at whom actors and colleagues would “gaze with a certain dumb bewilderment” as he “exhorted them to play ‘in a deep-green mood,’ or spoke with fluent enthusiasm of ‘playing the dramatic-control panel, as one plays an organ.'” There was not much use for such an one in radio. As Gielgud put it, even British radio broadcasting, “provided him with no laboratory in which experiments could be carried out.”

In 1930, when radio drama was still in its protracted infancy (despite earlier trials-by-air like the aforementioned “Comedy of Danger”), Sieveking found a “laboratory” in the still newer medium of television. He collaborated with Gielgud in bringing to British television “The Man with the Flower in His Mouth.” An adaptation of Luigi Pirandello’s short play L’uomo dal fiore in bocca (1923), it aired on 14 July 1930.

Little remains today of Sieveking’s work in sound and images, aside from its blueprints—long-out-of-print scripts and theories. Now, I live in a town with a five-million-volume copyright library (which celebrated its 100th anniversary today); but for a snippet of sound, you might as well saunter over to tvdawn, where you may hear Sieveking’s spoken introduction to “The Man.”

Posted on

That Box in the Corner: Are You Still Watching?

Well, there it stands gathering dust in the corner. Our television set, I mean. It’s not one of those svelte (or puny) supermodels, mind you, but the burly variety that reminds you of all the weight you put on sitting in front of it. An elephant in the room, you might say, taking up space instead of demanding—let alone warranting—much of my time. During the last few weeks, while our phone line was down and I had no access to the internet, I came to rely on it again, for company and up-to-date news; but it only confirmed what I already knew: television as I grew up with and was raised by it (posing, as I am here in front of my old black-and-white set) is dead.

Sure, Wednesday is Desperate Housewives day here in the United Kingdom (the only television serial I follow regularly and with pleasure); but I rarely sit through an episode while it actually airs. Since it is canned entertainment anyway, there is no need to be subjected to the commercials that once sustained broadcasting but now seem largely responsible for the demise of the medium. These days, you might as well wait and pay handsomely for the DVD box set, consumer reasoning that Channel Four now attempts to counter by selling online the expensive programs they purchased overseas.

Live (or almost live) entertainment still attracts millions of viewers. Shows like American Idol (which is shown here on Fridays, in an edited, spin-throughable omnibus version hosted by the pretty if pretty superfluous Cat Deeley) are undoubtedly popular with advertisers since their find-out-after-the-break cliffhanger design very nearly succeeds in gluing you to the tube. To be given a chance to watch even the inconsequential happen as it unfolds is a shrewd exploitation of our longing for immediacy, for being in the (k)now. To some, like me, a yearning for community might be an even greater pull; but I suspect that the on-demand culture and its manufacturing of exclusivity has done much to kill the democratic urge of communal watching.

While cut off from the web, I even resorted to watching Fox news—the ambassadorial embarrassment responsible for giving Europe wrong ideas about an imperialist, see-if-I-care America—just to get that old feeling of being right there (however much to the right there) with the rest of the Western world or some sizeable portion thereof. It is the sense of belonging I just don’t experience fishing for clips on YouTube. As much as I, in the connective failure that is broadcastellan, go on about the wonders of old-time radio (the kind of live entertainment that was compromised by the advent of tape-recording), I do miss the old tube . . .

Posted on

What Those Who Remembered Forgot: Betty Hutton (1921-2007) on the Air

Well, I guess that, too, “Comes Natur’lly.” I just learned of the passing of singer-comedienne Betty Hutton. The star of Hollywood cinema classics like Preston Sturges’s wartime romp Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), the screen adaptation of Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1950) and Cecil B. DeMille’s Academy Award-winning Greatest Show on Earth (1952) died yesterday at the age of 86.

Like her sister Marion, with whom she performed before embarking on a film career with The Fleet’s In (1942) (for which this is a radio trailer featuring Hutton’s “Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry”), was often heard on radio variety programs, including the morale-boosting wartime shows Mail Call and Command Performance, belting out trademark numbers like “Murder, He Says.”

Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, the gal who couldn’t quite conquer television was also heard on most of US radio’s top-notch film and theater programs, including Theater Guild, the Lux Radio Theater and the Philip Morris Playhouse, performing in light comedies like “Page Miss Glory” (an old Marion Davies vehicle) or in adaptations of her own films, such as the Screen Guild‘s version of Stork Club or the Screen Directors Playhouse presentation of Incendiary Blonde.

Unfortunately, most of Hutton’s dramatic performances on radio have not been preserved. What can be appreciated online is the solidification of the Hutton image. She’s “like a dynamo . . . with a short circuit,” quipped ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy when, on 28 September 1947, Hutton was a guest on Edgar Bergen’s comedy program, singing “Poppa Don’t Preach to Me” from her latest movie, The Perils of Pauline. Rather than tampering with her successful tomboy persona, as attempted in Mitchell Leisen’s misguided box-office dud Dream Girl (1948), Hutton was given the opportunity to ridicule such efforts to make a lady out of her by agreeing and failing to act like someone “knee-deep” in culture (one of the “Boston” Huttons, a family “so old, it’s been condemned”). “Why,” she insisted, “I can be so refined, you wouldn’t even know it’s me.”

“She’s much too wild for you,” Bergen had warned his wayward puppet, complaining that there was “room for improvement” in Hutton’s conduct. “After all, girls are not boys.” Betty Hutton was the kind of “Incendiary Blonde” that could give a mischievous dummy like Charlie ideas without making a log fire of his wooden heart.