Category: Radio

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Langston Hughes, Destination Freedom, and the "Funny Things" White Folks Do

A lot was left out of the picture, no matter how vividly it was being painted by the brush of sound on the canvas of the mind. Radio. No other mass medium could create pictures at once so generic and genuine, as invested as they were with the desires and experiences of those tuning in. And yet, in its soundscapes of the nation, in its portraits of the multitude, US broadcasters too often brushed aside or airbrushed what they dared not echo or evoke; too often they resorted to caricature and counterfeit, unless they altogether erased the experiences and memory of millions of citizens on whom broadcasters turned a deaf ear. 

The Southernaires

In the 1930s and ‘40s, when Amos ‘n’ Andy was America’s most popular work of comic serial fiction, commercial radio rarely permitted the minority population mimicked and minstrelized by the program the privilege of a voice, unless to sing gospel music (as delivered by the Southernaires, pictured here) and the hep tunes to which white folks would try to dance. Two notable exceptions to this misrepresentation of, adopting the parlance of the day, the ‘Negro’ experience on American radio were New World A-Coming and Destination Freedom.

On this day, 15 January, in 1950—when Martin Luther King, Jr. celebrated his twenty-first birthday—Destination Freedom presented “Birth of a League,” a dramatization of the exodus of some two million African-Americans from the South to the urban centers of the North—the “greatest internal migration in American history”—as it accelerated in the years just prior to the first World War. As “The Birth of a League” recounts, this led to the formation of the “Urban League” movement. You might say it was the real story behind Amos ‘n’ Andy, the white fiction of two black boys from Georgia who made their way up to Chicago in the late-1920s.

Appended to Richard Durham’s episodic and chronologically somewhat muddled play was an interview with Sidney Williams, the executive secretary of the League’s Chicago branch, with whose co-operation Destination Freedom was presented by station WMAQ, Chicago—the same station that had introduced America to Amos ‘n’ Andy back in 1928.

Williams deplored that “what other Americans expect and get as a matter of right, we Negro workers have to beg and fight for.” The fight, however, was not to be construed as a violent one. The League’s motto—”Not arms, but opportunity”—and the involvement of white businessmen “of good will” in its foundation made this depiction of the segregated South and the struggle for integration in the North more acceptable both to broadcasters and to a larger audience.

The challenge of such broadcasts was to inform and appeal, to protest yet placate. Despite the hope expressed in its title, taken from the book by Roi Ottley), New World A-Coming was at times cynical in its exposure of the injustices suffered by the Negro population. On 16 April 1944, for instance, the series promised the “Story of Negro Humor” as seen through the eyes of Langston Hughes. While it was filled with laughter, the program offered little amusement. Instead, it recalled Hughes’s own experience of Southern inhospitality, which Hughes had previously shared in his article “White Folks Do Some Funny Things.”

Hughes, who at one time was considered for a radio serial project of his own, found little amusement in the treatment the Negro—as character and creator of characters alike—received on American radio (as previously discussed here). In “The Story of Negro Humor,” and its somewhat toned-down reworking a year later (on 8 April 1945) under the article’s original title, Hughes was portrayed by Canada Lee, who acted out various scenes of humiliation personally witnessed or suffered by the American poet and novelist.

The program presented the prejudice and hatred toward black Americans as an American problem, rather than one faced by the minority population alone. Commenting on those who “practice Jim Crow at home and preach democracy abroad,” Hughes expressed himself puzzled at their “lack of humor concerning their own absurdities.” Having “read that Hitler has no sense of humor either,” he concluded that “the greatest killers cannot afford to laugh” and that those “most determined to Jim Crow” were “grimly killing democracy in America.”

Both New World A-Coming and Destination Freedom are rarities in so-called old-time radio. They are programs seldom discussed or traded by those who twist the dial by proxy and distort its history to meet their needs for light or wholesome entertainment. These two programs should not be dug up in defense of the ignorant or indifferent; they should not be aired for the chief purpose of clearing American radio of charges of misrepresentation. Yet, however marginal their role, it would be equally wrong to neglect or dismiss them, and the talent involved in their production, thereby to propagate the image of American radio drama as historically irrelevant and relegate it to the neither-here-nor-there that is nostalgia.

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"Rest in Peace," He Said: Yvonne De Carlo (1922-2007) on the Air

We web journalists are often, and not altogether unjustly, accused of recycling news rather than generating it. I’ve done my share of reprocessing yesterday by reporting the unearthing of Marlene Dietrich’s lost earring at an amusement park in Blackpool; but, recycling being the process of transforming and putting back to use, I turned this tidbit into a hook from which to dangle a reminder of Ms. Dietrich’s lost or rarely recalled career in radio. So, when I now reflect on the passing of actress Yvonne De Carlo, I am trying to avoid mirroring the tributes that appeared elsewhere.

As pop culture maven Ivan Shreve suggests in his ever instructive Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, the role for which Ms. De Carlo is “best remembered” these days should not overshadow the career she enjoyed prior to getting the Lily Munster makeover. And if you can’t recall anything else, the act of commemoration can be an opportunity to get to know a performer all over again. Like most people who wish to refresh their memories of a certain film or television actor, I turned to the Internet Movie Database, according to which, as of 5 PM EST on this Wednesday, 11 January 2007, Ms. De Carlo (who died on Monday) still numbered among the living. I guess, that is where our personal journals come in, spreading the news a little faster than those slow-firing big shots.

Inspecting her resume, I realized how little I have seen of Ms. De Carlo over the years. In fact, the last time I ran into her, I didn’t even notice her at all. That was in November 2006, when I watched So Proudly We Hail, a 1943 wartime drama starring Claudette Colbert (discussed here). Would I be able to spot her in This Gun for Hire, in which the aforementioned Laird Cregar made such an impression on me? Nor have I ever tried on her Sombrero, in which she had Vittorio Gassman at her feet (as pictured above).

So, instead of flaunting my ignorance, it is probably best to let Ms. De Carlo introduce herself, however belatedly. On 24 February 1947, the young actress, no longer the bit player she had been during the early and mid-1940s, appeared on Tom Breneman’s radio program Breakfast in Hollywood—sporting a feather in her hat—to promote her latest picture, Song of Scheherazade, released earlier that month.

You can tell from the reaction of the studio audience—responsive as trained seals to whatever Breneman and his sponsors tossed at them—that Ms. De Carlo was not yet a star. She was getting there—and she was there to get there. “Who are you, honey?” Breneman prompted the unaffected newcomer, whose response was greeted with no more enthusiasm than the names of the many unknowns whom the host granted exposure to the microphone that day. Apart from confessing some embarrassment about the millinery curiosity on her head, the soft-spoken actress did not get to say very much, the garrulous host being too busy reaping whatever laughs he could from the docile crowd.

He presented her with a bouquet of Camellias, named, in honor of her latest role, Scheherazade. So funereal and grand must the corsage have looked that, when Breneman was permitted to pin it on his charming and good-humored guest, he commented on its startling effect with the ominous words “All she needs there is ‘Rest in Peace.'”

When I listened to this exchange today, it struck me as a bit of gallows humor as dark as Lily Munster’s home. It was Breneman who had wreaths thrown at him not long thereafter (he shut up in 1948 at the age of 46), while the dame with the Camellias, who went on to enjoy another five decades in show business, proved more resilient than Scheherazade.

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Where Does The Lady from Shanghai Come From?

Well, my head’s still spinning from last night’s screening of The Lady from Shanghai. You know, that fascinating, pieced together puzzler for the making of which star and director Orson Welles decided to give his celebrated redhead wife Rita Hayworth the old peroxide treatment and turn her Lana. Now, I got lost somewhere in the cross-and-double-cross scenario; but even before the plot unravelled and ultimately revelled in its fun house mirroring of noirish nightmares, my willingness to go along for the ride got deflected by the film’s opening scenes. Although I had never before watched this picture in what now goes for its entirety, l sensed that I had come across it (or something rather like it) before. Trust me, “Where does The Lady from Shanghai come from?” isn’t meant to be one of those “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb” questions.

Welles is known to have borrowed ideas, narrative devices and storylines, from his radio programs and recycled or reworked them for his motion pictures and stage productions. Examples of these trans-mediations are the 1938 Mercury Theater productions of “A Heart of Darkness” (which Welles had hoped to adapt for the movies) and “Around the World in Eighty Days” (with a musical version of which he belly-flopped on Broadway in the late spring of 1946), as well as the 1939 Campbell Playhouse revisitation of the William Archer’s 1921 melodrama The Green Goddess (with which he toured some six months after its initial radio broadcast). Based on the novel If I Die Before I Wake by one Sherwood King, a book that Welles initially did not bother to read, the troubled Lady might very well might have some roots in radio.

At any rate, The Lady brought to mind the 15 October 1939 Campbell Playhouse update of John Galsworthy’s Escape (1926). Both Lady and “Escape” are initially set in Manhattan and tell the story of a man (played by Welles) who finds himself in Central Park after dark and in trouble thereafter. Both men ride around in that most romantic and impractical means of urban transportation, the horse-drawn carriage, and encounter a seductress whom only the most chivalrous nature would take for a damsel in distress. In each case, the hero comes to the aid of the questionable dame, and thereby implicates himself as he, in the Thirty-Nine Steps tradition of botched heroics, is caught and tried for a violent crime. While on the run from the law, both men manage to extract themselves and set things right at last.

So, just where does The Lady from Shanghai come from? Aside from tracing her origins to the melodramatic tradition—and a mind like mine that is steeped in it—I do not presume to have a conclusive answer. In Welles and Mercury Player Everett Sloane, The Lady has several tangible connections to the world of the wireless, another link being Fletcher Markle, a radio playwright who had a hand in reshaping the material. Approaching this sordid portrait of a The Lady while under the influence of countless pieces of fiction, I cannot help but draw such parallels; getting carried away in my own speculations, I am being drawn in and out of the pictures I thus reframe.

My pursuit having taken me to the Internet Movie Database, I discovered that I am not alone one who’s reframing The Lady these days. After receiving more ill-advised nips, tucks and facelifts than Cher and Joan Rivers combined, The Lady from Shanghai is now being readied for a radical makeover. According to the Internet Movie Database, the titular dame will soon assume the likeness of altogether un-Hayworthy Rachel Weizs, whose transformation into a femme fatale would require more than the services of a daring hairstylist. Thus, another iconic film is being shanghaied by the new and far from improved Hollywood.

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The Man Who Went on a Diet and Didn’t Come Back

Laird Cregar in Heaven Can’t Wait

Well, I did not bother to make any.   New Year’s resolutions, I mean. Once again I let slip by the chance of this calendrical construct—a moment in which our attempts to impose the order of the chronologic on the so-called fourth dimension whose measurable expanse is being commorated with renditions of “Auld Lang Syne”—to bring about changes in the race against time that is my life. Perhaps you made up your mind (or had it made up for you) to put an end to something and start something new, an exchange of habits or a switch in attitude intended to improve life or merely to prolong it. I did resolve nothing more than to account for my everyday, aside from continuing with this journal, by counting the movies I take in this year (so far, Night at the Museum, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Gay Falcon, Gentleman’s Agreement, Gilda and The Man in the White Suit), thereby to get a clearer picture of my actual rate of consumption and to ponder, at year’s end, how much these fictions have informed or impeded my journey.

Though far from being a life-as-artist like Walter Pater, I try to think of my existence in all its failures and shortcomings as an unfinished essay, a half-published and oft edited text of which broadcastellan is both a digest and an extension. A man’s success, comedian Fred Allen remarked, “depends on which wears out first—his pencil or his eraser.” That, like most epigrams, sounds smart enough; but the real trick is to avoid getting those two writerly tools confused. Believe me, it’s not that easy to tell them apart. Here’s a for instance and how I arrived at it.

As I was thinking about a subject for another one of my “On This Day” features, I came across “The Death Laugh,” an episode of the radio thriller anthology Inner Sanctum Mysteries broadcast on this day, 8 January, in 1944. Rummaging through my library, I failed to lay my ears on the play I assumed to be there; many of the Inner Sanctum episodes available online have been mislabeled, their dates and titles inaccurately recorded. Rather than putting an eraser to this futile search and moving on to another subject, my mind lingered instead on Hollywood heavy Laird Cregar, the star of said thriller. It was as if the man demanded to be called to mind today, not content to wait even until tomorrow (which marks Cregar’s anniversary in a 1943 broadcast of the Radio Hall of Fame) or the day after that (in which he played Montezuma in Orson Welles’s propaganda series Hello Americans).  

There was no need for him to get pushy. I have always thought Mr. Cregar a fascinating and devilishly handsome fellow—ever since he first made an impression on me in This Gun for Hire (1942); so much so that I quite forgot—or was only too ready to neglect the by no means negligible performances of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Playing Satan, Cregar brought wit to Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait, an otherwise disappointingly well-mannered and overly sentimental portrait of a scoundrel. Why hadn’t I seen more of Cregar over the years, considering my love for classic Hollywood movies?

Now, I am not in the habit of turning to an artist’s biography to assess his or her performances. Instead, I focus on the works that show people and storytellers are in the business of sharing with us. For that reason, the fact that Cregar practically starved himself to death in order to become a leading man was news to me. It seems that neither heaven nor Hollywood could wait for Mr. Cregar.

According to some sources, Cregar was born in 1913; others claim he came into this world in 1914; others still state 1916 as his date of birth. Certain, however, is that he died in 1944 of an uncommonly early heart attack, apparently brought on by a crash diet, the resulting 100 pound weightloss of which was intended to convince Hollywood to give top billing to a man considered too fat to play the dashing lead.

Even on the air, where he could have gone invisible, Cregar played the fat man when he filled in for Sidney Greenstreet in the Lux Radio Theater adaptation of The Maltese Falcon. Mr. Cregar got his wish eventually, yet only posthumously, in Hangover Square (1945)—a belated nod to a man who conformed to an image and was reduced to one in the process.

After I thought about all this, I flicked through the current issue of the Radio Times and noticed that, just as I was fiddling with computer and camera to capture Cregar’s likeness from hell, the British cable channel Film Four had been screening The Black Swan, in which the actor impersonated Henry Morgan, a Welsh pirate born in the windswept parts I now call home.

Yes, Mr. Cregar seemed adamant to turn me into his medium today. Perhaps he was out to warn anyone with the New Year’s wish of shedding pounds this year to take it easy or, better still, to reconsider whether the eraser we take to our lives is chosen by ourselves or handed to us by those who dictate just how our being ought to be shaped.

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January 4, 1942: What’s On?

I am one of those forward-looking folks who peruse the television and radio listings as if they were stock market reports or racing forms. Determined not to miss a winner of a program, I prepare myself by wielding the ever ready text marker as I wend my way through the weekly offerings. Today, though, I am seriously late in my planning. Before me is the US broadcast schedule from 4 January 1942 as it appeared in an issue of the Radio-Movie Mirror.

Having just watched “Static,” a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone—shared with me by a fellow web journalist and consummate teller of fantastic tales—I am in a time-warped frame of mind. It is not for the sake of self-indulgent nostalgia, mind you, that I am revisiting the past, but in order to reconsider the boundaries of escapism. If the present does not turn us on, how can we, in this multimediated world of ours, expect to switch off entirely?

“Static” does not look kindly on television and the getaways it promises; it suggests that there is no escaping the challenges we dare not face as we stare at that small screen on which Westerns, quiz shows, and commercials flicker while life flashes by. Instead, it romances what, by 1961, was nearly a forgotten or at any rate woefully neglected medium in America; it gives two middle-aged people a second chance at realizing their dreams by transporting them, as if on radio waves, to the early 1940s, when first they met. The radio entertainments of that period—Fred Allen, Major Bowes, and the music of Tommy Dorsey—stand ins for what was presumably a time at once rich in possibilities and free from the mindnumbing influences of that set to which Americans had gotten so attached over the years.

All this romancing aside, the early 1940s were hardly an innocent period in modern history; and rather than coming true, many a dream had to be deferred or abandoned altogether. In this moment of uncertainty, at least one business comforted consumers by attempting to keep business running as usual. Worried or bewildered about the war, wondering what changes it would impose on their everyday existence—from blackouts to rationings, from irritating inconveniences to the loss of lives—those sitting at home could still depend on radio for escapist entertainment.

On 4 January 1942, an “Appointment for Murder” was kept by Raymond, host of The Inner Sanctum, Humphrey Bogart and Claire Trevor were heard in Screen Guild reconstitution of High Sierra, and Sherlock Holmes embarked on the virtually spotless “Adventure of the Second Stain,” first related by Conan Doyle some four decades earlier. Meanwhile, Jack Benny was overhead in a flashback episode recounting his botched New Year’s Eve celebrations, a belatedness indicative of the radio industry’s reluctance to catch up with the times.

Beholden to the sponsors who footed the bills, commercial radio was slow to adjust; and none of the programs broadcast during the weeks immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor appear to have any relation to the realities of war. By comparison, even undemanding and apolitical publications like the Movie-Radio Guide, from which the above schedule was ripped, were quick to recontextualize the entertainments they were designed to bring to the attention of prospective listeners.

“A little over three weeks ago,” the Editors of the Guide commented, “a third-rate power with autocratic, imperialist ambitions and no scruples, attacked the United States as was to be expected—by hitting below the belt.” The propaganda still wanting on the air was already being provided by publications catering to the radio industry.

Responding to the demand for information, the Movie-Radio Guide promised to keep “pace with the nation’s war effort” and the “needs” of its readers by “inaugurated” an “enlarged short-wave department.” To the reader’s inquiry “What’s on?” the Guide replied in no uncertain terms: A war, that’s what was on.

How much does your entertainment guide of choice remind you of the fact that 2007 is by no means shaping up to be a time of peace?

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Daddy Cool Vs. Father Time: Getting the Better of 2006

Well, this isn’t a travel brochure; hence my taking the liberty of adding a question mark to the following: What better place to ring in the new year than in Scotland, where “Auld Lang Syne” is being sung more passionately and the ringing in goes on longer than anywhere else in the world? Having just returned from Glasgow and Edinburgh, I could think of a few alternatives, considering that Scotland’s chief tourist attractions this time of year—the famed Hogmanay festivities, were pretty much wiped out by fierce gales and lashing rains. The British weather! I have mentioned and deplored it often enough in this journal to claim that I was unprepared for its party-pooping force.

Since practically all of Glasgow takes a prolonged New Year’s holiday—including the city’s retailers and its museums, at one of which, the Kelvingrove, I spotted those heads dangling above on the day of Saddam Hussein’s hanging—there was little else to do than to seek shelter in a multiplex, mercifully kept open, and to take in a few double features. Fairly disappointed by the politics and pretensions of The Perfume, yet charmed by the slight Miss Potter and amused by the to me surprisingly bright Night at the Museum, I was enthralled at last by Guillermo del Toro’s El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), easily the most exciting movie I have seen on the big screen in years, a film unrivalled by any piece of fiction I have come across in 2006.

Not that 2006 was lacking in cultural pearls, many of which I shared and appraised in this journal. I won’t altogether stoop to lining them up, however popular and convenient such an approach to reviewing might be. Indeed, I find it difficult to name the best and worst of the past twelve months; but let me try, anyway.

In a year during which I picked up far too few books to make up a list, my main literary find was H. G. Wells’s aforementioned Ann Veronica, an uneven but compelling portrait of the British suffragette movement. Rewarding as well was Anthony Trollope’s Cousin Henry, a Kafkaesque exploration of doubt and guilt, while Daphne Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn, for all its romantic intensity, struck me as dark-aged (and downright fascist) in its vilification of physical otherness.

At the pictures, the most satisfying film of the year may well have been The Illusionist, which I had the fortune to catch during my trip to Istanbul last September. It quietly triumphed over that other vanishing act, Christopher Nolan’s box-office misfire The Prestige; but, as pleased as I was to find James Bond back in form (after decades of discharging tiresome one-liners to demonstrate his cool) and getting to know The Queen in Helen Mirren’s soon-to-be-Academy Award nominated performance, it took a trip to the aforementioned Labyrinth on New Year’s Day to remind me of the magic of the movies, an emotional sway entirely absent in the hackneyed and uninspiring World Trade Center, the most exasperating of my cinematic encounters.

It was a year that convinced me, an inveterate old-time radio aficionado, to pay more attention to BBC radio, having tuned in to provocative (if not always convincing) plays like “Abrogate” (discussed here) and “True West” (reviewed in this post), adaptations like “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (with Ian McKellen) and documentaries like “Down the Wires.” Still available online this first week of January 2007 are Alan Bennett’s “The History Boys” as well as drama by Pinter and Stoppard.

By comparison, I still look upon television chiefly as a purveyor of old movies, of which I must have taken in over a hundred this year. The BBC’s serialization of Jane Eyre felt less than fresh, the second season of Desperate Housewives irritated me with its heavy-handed bathos, while the third round of British reality show X Factor was short on personalities for which to root. More enjoyable was the Andrew Lloyd Webber judged How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, which generated a new West End personality to star in the current revival of The Sound of Music.

While I have no intention to see that show, I had my share of theatrical treats, foremost among them a revival of Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows and an imaginative staging of Mervyn Peake’s imaginative staging of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. The musical Daddy Cool, which I caught at London’s Shaftesbury Theatre, was not among them. Stringing together the songs of German pop-crafter Frank Farian (the man behind the late-1970s phenomenon Boney M. and the early-1990s lip-synch duo Milli Vanilli) and forcing them into a narrative that borrows from West Side Story, Romeo and Juliet, and Bollywood, Daddy is a Mamma Mia of a musical that will make even those who fondly remember some of the featured tunes go “Oh, brother!” That said, I still came out humming and, having gone backstage to see fictional gunmoll Ma Baker turn into the affable Michelle Collins, I hardly regret the experience.

Whatever I see, read, or hear this year I shall take in with glee, cheered by the thought of having in broadcastellan a journal in which to document nothing more plainly than the extent of my own folly.

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A Moody Christmas: There’s Life Yet in the Old Scrooge

Eighty-what? Bah, humbug! Age does not deter film, stage, and television actor Ron Moody from going on tour in yet another dramatization of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the Wales Theatre Company production of which I caught at the Aberystwyth Arts Center. In fact, Moody adapted the story as well, in collaboration with director Michael Bogdanov (whose productions of Fiddler on the Roof and Amazing Grace I have reviewed on previous occasions).

What’s more, Moody not only took on the play’s largest role but enlarged it still by taking over as Dickens’s narrator as well.  He resurrected the old miser with wit, humor, and feeling, even though his voice came across rather faintly and his lines were at times mumbled or muddled to an extent that the character’s age and grumpiness could not entire disguise or explain. When Scrooge reminds one of his ghostly guides of being “mortal” and “liable to fall,” Moody’s frame made the line utterly convincing; yet he stepped surprisingly lively after his reformation, cheerfully urging the audience to rise for a standing ovation.

The production was a busy one, meticulously recreating the story’s memorable scenes and characters with numerous set changes performed by stagehands shifting the makeshift props, activities that distracted from the endearing fairytale simplicity of the narrative and very nearly defeated the object of creating a sense of proscenium arch realism. It was all too much for poor Mrs. Fezziwig, who slipped upon entering the scene in which she was introduced to Scrooge by the Ghost of Christmas Past.

All this stagecraft brought to mind the superiority of non-visual storytelling on radio and in public readings. It is in the spoken word, aided at most by music and sound effects, that a ghost story like A Christmas Carol is most likely to thrill and enchant, as it certainly did in many of the productions heard during the 1930s and ‘40s on US radio, including this Campbell Playhouse adaptation broadcast on Christmas Eve, 1939.

There is no use trying to keep the eyes dry; their services are not required for the enjoyment of plays by radio. If tears happen to blur your vision, let them run freely.  They are testimony to the vision and insight of your mind’s eye.

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Being Here: Living Reconciled to Virtuality

Well, it has been two weeks since my last entry in the broadcastellan journal. I have been on trips to England’s two largest cities, London and Birmingham (pictured, in my rather futuristic snapshot), spending time with friends, taking in culture high and low. I rarely stay away that long from this virtual nook I call home. Whenever there is living to be done, I tend to fall behind with the chronicling of same; and when I finally catch up with myself in writing, the reporting seems pointless, the moment past. Perhaps it is this inability to reconcile actuality to virtuality that convinced me to keep a journal devoted to the presumably out-of-date.

Instead of summing up the fortnight that was, I am looking ahead, announcing the pieces I am going to share in the days to come. For what remains of the year (and of my time online), I shall file a few belated reports from the theaters, virtual and otherwise.

For the most part, it has been “otherwise” rather than otherwise. After my short trip to Birmingham, where I was introduced to Patrick Hughes’s mind-teasing “Superduperspective” (on view, free of charge, at the Waterhall until 17 February 2007), I went to see the aged Ron Moody as Scrooge in a touring production of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. While in London, I took in A Moon for the Misbegotten starring Kevin Spacey (whose career I have been following ever since I was introduced to his work by a mutual friend); an irreverent adaptation of Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, performed by a cast of four; and the musical Daddy Cool, based on the once hugely popular songs of Frank Farian (of Milli Vanilli infamy), many of which provided a soundtrack for my childhood in Germany. I am going to devote one essay each to these diverse stage entertainments, and am likely to toss in the occasional reference to American radio dramatics, the formerly free theater for the multitude.

There isn’t much “free” theater to be had these days; and, judging from the American accents I picked up only infrequently while in the UK capital, London is rather too expensive to attract many Western travelers, particularly at this time of year, when many forgo culture for commerce in their search of bargains. Although I moved from the US to Britain quite some time ago, I still think in dollars and convert pounds into US currency to assess costs. It is a habit that made the ticket prices at London’s movie theaters seem all the more outrageous. I guess we laughed more at our folly than at the penguin antics when we found ourselves paying $25 per person to see Happy Feet. Somewhat less pricey were screenings of Casino Royale (an antemeridian matinee at London’s premier movie house, the Odeon Leicester Square) and Stranger Than Fiction, playing at a much smaller venue.

Going to the pictures has gotten pricey; and that applies not only to those in motion: the current exhibition of paintings by Velasques at the National Gallery requires the forking over of an eyepopping £12. As price tags raise expectations, the paintings seemed to lose some of their lustre when considered in the light losing itself in empty pockets. No wonder I keep turning to the comparatively cheap thrills of old-time radio drama for my day-to-day amusement.

Though no longer free, there was much on offer at home, if only I had been listening to the radio. Still to be enjoyed are Sir Ian McKellen in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and a production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, both aired on BBC radio The BBC makes programming available online for a week, and I am now trying to catch up with some of the outstanding or noteworthy dramas presented in recent days—from the gay wedding at The Archers to the five-part adaptation of A Room to Let, a story collaboratively conceived by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Elisabeth Gaskell—broadcasts I missed while wirelessly away in England.

Mind you, I could have enjoyed wireless access at our hotel—for the price of £15 a week; but, more than the cost itself, I resented being prompted to provide personal data in order to be granted a privilege that ought to be free like the air itself. Paying for air charged with the particles of commerce? Being charged yet again for exposing myself to a deluge of online advertising while depriving myself of an opportunity to recharge? Progress? Bah, humbug!

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"We will interrupt all programs": Radio Drops a Bombshell

It certainly threw a wrench into the well-oiled works of radio as a commercial enterprise. The attack on Pearl Harbor, that is. On this day, December 7, in 1941, American broadcasters had to find ways of accommodating the “word from our sponsor” to the considerably more “important message” that would alter—or end—the lives of people the world over. Comedians Edgar Bergen and Jack Benny were both on the air as scheduled that Sunday, entertaining the multitude with their commercially sponsored programs.

Both broadcasts were prefaced by the following announcements: “Ladies and gentlemen. We will interrupt all programs to give you latest news bulletins. Stay tuned to this station.”

The bombing of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declaration of war on Japan and its allies marked an uneasy transition of American radio as a source of advertising to one of propaganda, of information and indoctrination. As US President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared in his public radio address on 9 December 1941, “free and rapid communication” needed to be restricted in wartime.

It was “not possible to receive full and speedy and accurate reports” from all theaters of war, since even in those “days of the marvels of the radio” it was “often impossible for the Commanders of various units to report their activities by radio at all, for the very simple reason that this information would become available to the enemy and would disclose their position and their plan of defense or attack.”

Still, the medium that had long fallen into the hands of corporations, had an obligation toward the American public it ostensibly served, a duty to operate in the “public interest” that it might have neglected over the years, notwithstanding the President’s occasional and popular Fireside Chats.

Necessary delays in reporting aside, Roosevelt vowed “not hide facts from the country” if such were known and the enemy would “not be aided by their disclosure.” He reminded “all newspapers and radio stations, “all those who reach the eyes and ears of the American people,” that they had a “most grave responsibility to the nation now and for the duration of this war.”

While “sudden” the “criminal attacks” were but the “climax of a decade of international immorality,” Roosevelt argued. From Japan’s invasion of Manchukuo, Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, Hitler’s occupation of Austria and his invasion of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Russia; Italy’s attack on France and Greece, the Axis domination of the Balkans, and the Japanese attacks on Malaya and Thailand, to the bombing of Pearl Harbor—each occurring “without warning”—the events were “all of one pattern.”

America had “used” their awareness of that pattern “to great advantage. Knowing that the attack might reach us in all too short a time,” the US “immediately began greatly to increase” its “capacity to meet the demands of modern warfare.” The war, Roosevelt cautioned, would not only be “long” but “hard,” warning of shortages and a general cutting down on consumerism. He expressed himself confident that businesses and individuals alike would “cheerfully give up those material things that they are asked to give up,” and that they would “retain all those great spiritual things without which we cannot win through.”

Those who recall the attack on and fall of the World Trade Center towers might recall the sudden change in significance of a medium that could be relied upon for its mindless and commercials-riddled entertainment one day and then, suspending all advertising and most regular programs, engaged in an image blitz on a stunned audience that, having had so little introduction to the events leading up to them, regarded them as unprovoked, inexplicable, and without any historical connection to the dramatically altered present.

The image bombardment and the relative blackout of comprehensive world news by a largely irresponsible commercial medium did much to get Americans in the mood for the war that is still being waged and lost to this day. By comparison, the broadcasting day following the attack on Pearl Harbor proceeded pretty much according to schedule; it was only gradually that commercials made way for—or merged with—public announcements, that comedians told topical jokes and soap operas dealt with the realities of war. Before one can fully understand what it means never to forget, one has a lot of catching up to do with the world.

Having spread this “important message” about the imperative of keeping up with and following up on the allegedly out-of-date and the seemingly unrelated or tiresomely repetitive news of the world, the broadcastellan journal will go on a brief hiatus and won’t resume regular day-to-day postings until the beginning of 2007, aside from a few scattered reports of cultural events and reviews of seasonal radio and television offerings. If you have glanced at, read, perhaps even enjoyed, a few of the roughly two hundred essays shared here throughout the year, I encourage you to drop me a line.

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“These Three”: Gay Lovers Straightened through Air-conditioning

The history of taboos sure is shocking. I mean, it is shocking to realize what, over the years, has been hidden from view and banned from our discourse. Interracial marriages. Same sex unions. Gender reassignments. While denial can be as harmful as our tendency to designate, you would have to have been living under that proverbial mineral formation or petrified by the religious fundamentalism that passes for faith these days to regard such realities as unmentionable. They may not be widely understood or tolerated, let alone embraced, but as the facts of life in all its complexities they are too much in the public eye to be ignored.

Simeon Solomon, The Sleepers and the One who Watcheth (1870; detail)

Often argued to be responsible for foisting a liberal education on the masses, Hollywood has, in fact, played an important role in keeping quiet about many aspects of our everyday lives. Beginning in the mid-1930s, and for several decades thereafter, the Production Code curtailed what could be shown or talked about in motion pictures.

It was on this day, 6 December, in 1933, that James Joyce’s Ulysses was ruled to be “not obscene,” lifting the ban on its sale in the US; but that, aside from its narrative structure, hardly made Ulysses ( 1922; previously serialised 1918-20) a hot property in Tinseltown. Writers who wanted a share of the profits to be made by selling stories or streamlining them for the silver screen had to deal with the strictures of the code and learn to rework their material accordingly.

One playwright who accepted this challenge was Lillian Hellman, whose 1934 stage success The Children’s Hour was brought to the ears of American radio listeners on this day in 1937.

The Children’s Hour tells the story of two women whose teaching careers and personal lives are wrecked when one of their pupils alleges that they are having an intimate relationship.  Like Hellman’s 1936 screen version of The Children’s Hour, titled These Three, George Wells’s radio adaptation for the Lux Radio Theatre drowns out the unspeakable by suggesting instead a triangulated relationship with a virile heterosexual male at its center.  Wedged between Stanwyck and Mary Astor that night was the presumably irresistible Errol Flynn.

Hollywood had long thrived on love triangles, although they were rarely as ambiguous as in the above painting by the aforementioned queer artist Simeon Solomon.  Indeed, the three-cornered plot is key to the first new genre of production-coded cinema—the screwball comedy, in which heterosexual marriage is challenged by old flames or new rivals until it is ultimately reaffirmed. Although—or perhaps because—These Three is more concerned with libel than with forbidden love, with allegations rather than physical acts, the revision eliminates the unmentionable to make room for a rumor that can be talked about.

As if determined to remove any doubts as to the straightness of the radio adaptation and all those associated with the production, Lux host Cecil B. DeMille opens the program by letting listeners in on a “secret,” a story that had “completely escaped the headlines.” The unheard-of item amounted to little more than the announcement of a recent marriage. According to DeMille’s anecdote, the unconventional Ms. Stanwyck had just attended the wedding of her stableboy, danced with the hired hands, and “made them all forget” that she was the “groom’s boss.” The Lux program presented itself as clean entertainment without wanting to appear stuffy.

What is more stuffy—and objectionable—than the codes governing radio and motion pictures is the subsequent silencing of the history of such hush-ups. A description of the Lux broadcast in a 1995 reference text, for instance, keeps mum about the pedigree of the adaptation by alluding vaguely to “[c]ertain aspects of the stage production’s plot” that “made a straight film version out of the question.” Phobic histories like these not only contribute to our ignorance of past inequalities. They keep us from moving beyond them.