Category: Radio

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A (Blind) “Writer at Work” Faces His Audience

The next essay I am going to publish here will mark another anniversary for this journal, it being the 250th entry. Instead of dancing around that less than monumental milestone, I’ll try to explain why I continue to keep writing and how I keep up with whatever I choose to write about—the ostensibly “out-of-date.”

Today, I’ll leave it to another writer to share his experience. That man is Hector Chevigny, historian, magazine writer, and playwright of over one thousand plays, most of them for radio. On this day, 12 October, in 1956, the CBS Radio Workshop invited listeners to eavesdrop on Chevigny in a piece titled “A Writer at Work.”

According to fellow radio playwright-historian Erik Barnouw, Chevigny began writing for radio in 1928. In 1936 and 1937 he was director of the CBS Script Division in Hollywood. His plays were heard on prestigious programs such as The Cavalcade of America and Arch Oboler’s Free World Theater. During the war, Chevigny contributed numerous scripts to propaganda series such as Treasury Salute. In the early 1950s, he took over as head writer for the daytime serial The Second Mrs. Burton (1946-60), an assignment that called for five scripts a week.

Since The Second Mrs. Burton took up much of Chevigny’s time, the Workshop chose to visit the writer at his Gramercy Park home in New York City and capture on tape how he planned and plotted one chapter of the serial (scripts for which can nowadays be found at New York City’s Public Library). On hand to introduce and interview the playwright was the actress then portraying Terry Burton, a fictional character so prominent that she at one time kept her own weekly radio column (as shown below). The equally prominent actress was radio stalwart Jan Miner (previously mentioned here).

However promising the premise, the resulting take-your-listeners-to-work broadcast makes radio’s soap factory sound even more dreary than any of its assembly line productions, considering that it involves listening to a weary and frazzled Chevigny struggling to come up with something “bright and cute” for an upcoming Thanksgiving-themed chapter in his serial.

Apparently, he churned out his scripts well in advance; but work on the Thanksgiving script was off to a slow start. “Oh, darn these Holiday scripts,” we hear Chevigny grumble. In keeping with the expectations of producers and sponsors, the Burton family was scheduled to spend the day on the verge of a tryptophan-induced stupor; and the prospect of having to extract drama from drumsticks and dollops of mash was not a task a playwright could cherish. Among the dictated lines are literary pearls like “And are you ready for more turkey, Terry, dear?” and “Sound Effects: tableware as wanted.”

The tableware was not wanted; and to get the family away from their plates, Chevigny ultimately decides upon a dream sequence in which Mr. Burton finds himself celebrating Thanksgiving anno 1656, a scene played out with cartoonish sound effects and a clash of Colonial and contemporary Englishes.

What listeners do not get to hear, however, is the story behind the noise and spoken words: the story of a writer who lost his eyesight. This would have been on opportunity for the Workshop to explore how becoming sightless, as Chevigny did in 1943, changes a writer’s attitude toward and influenced his approach to working in a non-visual medium. Did this alleged deficiency help Chevigny – the author of an autobiography titled My Eyes Have a Cold Nose (1946) – to develop a keener ear for radio dramatics? “Understandably,” Chevigny wrote in that book, published a decade prior to the Workshop broadcast, “the subject of the perceptions of the blind is one of particular interest to me as a writer specialising in radio.” Chevigny recalled the early days of radio, still being sighted at the time,

when the broadcast play was just coming into being.  I remember well the arguments we used to have as to the best methods of trying to tell a story on the air and how carefully we listened to the pioneer attempts of the British Broadcasting Company and the American networks to achieve a technology.

Little of that experimentation was still being conducted after the end of the Second World War. And the Workshop, despite its title, did little to build on its roots in the mid-1930s, when the series was deserving of the term “workshop.”

Was staying on at a time when most writers of note had abandoned the medium a matter of sticking to what he knew, even though he knew and experienced radio differently back then? Was blindness at the heart of Chevigny’s radio fidelity? After all, The Second Mrs. Burton was the last radio serial to leave the airwaves.

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"The Last Survivor" Reflects on Nuclear Holocaust

Well, just how will North Korea react to the threat of “serious repercussions” uttered by the US? What is the nature and extent of the threat? And what is its validity? The current crisis may very well usher in the New Cold War, now that North Korea is said to have tested its first nuclear bomb, a privilege that the US apparently feels compelled and entitled to reserve for itself. Why should any nation intimidating the US with atomic competition feel obliged to heed such a warning? And why should any one second or third or fourth world power (thus labeled and locked in some position of dependency according to a Western system of classification) abandon its scientific efforts, hostile or otherwise, considering how well stocked American arsenals remain these days?

I had hoped atomic grandstanding went out with the Reagan administration—and partly as a result of that period of negotiation. Now the heirs of the “Fat Man” are reclaiming the throne in the reign of terror, a reign that, however imaginary or overstated, began some sixty years ago. On this day, 11 October, in 1949, nearly two months after Communist Russia managed to copy the “Fat Man”—stolen from the US by one of my compatriots, German physicist Klaus Fuchs—to become the world’s second nuclear power, American listeners were treated to an apocalyptic vision of life after the final fallout.

“The Last Survivor,” written, produced, and directed by the Mysterious Traveler team of Robert A. Arthur and David Kogan (who, at any rate, got the credit for it), is not one of those science fiction fantasies set in the near or distant future. Instead, the play creates a dystopia set in the here and now—the here and now of the less than peace-assured post Second World War era.

Back in 1947, the chief of an experimental rocket section stationed at an army air base in St. Augustine, New Mexico, is being offered the opportunity to build and man a spaceship running on the kind of power that brought down Japan. Working with one of the scientists who helped to develop the atomic bomb, the narrator and eponymous “Last Survivor” agrees to assist in demonstrating the “peaceful use of atomic energy.”

The rocket reaches Mars and the mission proceeds according to schedule. Upon their return, however, the space travelers are greeted by a horrific site, watched and commented on from above. The world to which they had hoped to return is going up in flames. During their two-year absence, atomic energy had once again been weaponized, this time to wage a war to end not only all wars, but all peaceful co-existence on the planet.

The nuclear blasts very nearly destroy the rocket; only a single scientist remains to tell the tale. His last words, addressed at anyone listening—at no one in particular or no one at all—are more haunting and provocative than any CGI trickery achieved in Hollywood movies:

I am alone now, sitting here staring at the scanning screen; and as I look at that burning, unrecognizable planet once called Earth, the same question keeps running through my mind. What happened? And why? Why did the earth explode in fire? Was there anything that I [. . .] might have done to prevent that all-consuming Holocaust? And I know that as long as I, the last survivor, live, I’ll keep asking myself, why did it happen? Why?

Unlike so many radio thrillers of the late 1940s and early ’50s, “The Last Survivor” does not exploit its premise to advance an anti-Communist agenda. It does not ask, let alone state, how this atomic war started or who started it. Instead, its concluding monologue—the monologue of an isolated speaker in a world beyond dialogue—suggests collective guilt and individual responsibility when it comes to our reliance on or complacency about decisions that affect the future of our planet.

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Why No Matter Matters: D. H. Lawrence, My Mind, and the Radio

Here I am, sorting and sifting through my English Literature anthologies, skipping from one century to another, slipping out of one channel of thought and slithering into the next as if sliding on dried ink liquefied in the muddy corridors of my mind. It is a mind receptive to—and indeed responsible for—all this skipping and slipping. It fancies the catch of whatever catches its fancy without letting such influences harden to the point that they might become a stranglehold. It resists arrest, flinches, and withdraws before any one imported thought can take root so as to seem an extension of some other self.

It is like a stray cat playing with a mouse of whose capture it tires once the flesh stops to quiver under the claws that did it in. That is, my mind seems capable of making anything flitting by seem inviting; but it insists on being in charge, on determining the lifespan of any one idea, and is only too eager to wriggle itself out of the body of thought that might have engaged or enraged it further, that might have irritated or intimidated had it not been done away with, however prematurely.

My mind plays tricks with the matter it takes on; and the tricks, I concede, may be far less bold or grand than the matter it picks on and puts down at will. Just now, I came across these lines from D. H. Lawrence’s essay “Why the Novel Matters.” The word “matters” matters here, as Lawrence talks about thought and flesh, and thought coming to life through flesh alone, that is, when being received or conceived by anyone living. He likens thought to the ether, to radio waves, at which point, of course, I am keenly alive to the matter at hand, the matter it becomes in my own mind, the matter it now becomes as my hands get to play on the keyboard. Here are the words:

These damned philosophers, they talk as if they suddenly went off in a steam, and were then much more important than they are when they’re in their shirts. It is nonsense. Every man, philosopher included, ends in his own finger-tips. That’s the end of his man alive. As for the words and thoughts and sighs and aspirations that fly from him, they are so many tremulations in the ether, and not alive at all. But if the tremulations reach another man alive, he may receive them into his life, and his life may take on a new colour, like a chameleon creeping from a brown rock on to a green leaf. All very well and good. It still doesn’t alter the fact that the so-called spirit, the message or teaching of the philosopher or the saint, isn’t alive at all, but just a tremulation upon the ether, like a radio message. All this spirit stuff is just tremulations upon the ether. If you, as man alive, quiver from the tremulation of the ether into new life, that is because you are man alive, and you take sustenance and stimulation into your alive man in a myriad ways. But to say that the message, or the spirit which is communicated to you, is more important than your living body is nonsense. You might as well say that the potato at dinner was more important.

It sounds liberating all right; but any such liberties imply responsibility, an obligation toward the message not readily met by the mind. Is it our nervous system alone that makes such tremulations matter? Are not such tremulations alive whether or not we mind them? After all, do not great ideas shrink in small minds; does not the broad spectrum of thought dwindle in narrow ones?

Does radio culture matter less today because our receivers are broken? Is it because we are so concerned with matter—with the concrete we believe to be what we see because seeing, we believe, is believing—that we have quite forgotten how to swim in the ether and to enjoy letting ourselves be tossed in the waves? What use are our finger-tips (or our antennae) if we neglect to touch upon the worlds around us? If we truly ended in our extremities, these worlds would all come to an end. So, instead of admiring our nails, we ought to be peeling potatoes without our awareness of whose potentialities we’d keep eating the same meal.

Unlike dinner forks, the radio signals of old are rarely being picked up these days; and it seems to matter little that they are there to be caught by anyone receptive to them. A culture of listening, which struggled to come alive anew in the 1920s and ’30s, to resurge after having been all but blotted out by dried ink, is once again fading out of earshot. The airwaves matter to me precisely because, for all the commerce it once carried—the commerce that carried it—radio is immaterial; not so much because it does not matter to the many but because it defies matter.

Like the fleeting signals on the air, my mind is flighty; it flits, it flirts with ideas and flings them back into the waves in search of new playthings. Ever since it became alive to those tremulations, it has been continually twisting the dial of that enormous radio. It thrills to the thought that each vibration tells of lives waiting to be revived. It excites in the hunt for the stray signal, even if at times it is too quick to run off and go scratch itself. It is just so tickled by the old cat’s whiskers.

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Rosalind Russell and James Stewart Entertain with Cheap Silverware

The first cut is the deepest.  Less profound words have been said and sung about love and longing. Even so, to call a new line of cutlery “First Love” doesn’t strike me as such a sharp idea. That’s exactly what Rosalind Russell was hawking on the radio, though—and it was purportedly all her idea, too. Some time before she discovered the magic of “Jungle Red,” Ms. Russell was slicing the baloney rather thickly when, on this day, 3 October, in 1937, she stepped behind the microphone to sell cheap silverware. Granted, there was a little more to this knife-throwing act. Ms. Russell was parting the curtain for a new and ambitious series of radio theatricals called The Silver Theater—and a young James Stewart was hand-on-mike to assist her.

Unlike the flatware, the new program was aptly named The Silver Theater, considering that it was sponsored by the International Silver Company, makers of 1847 Rogers Brothers, billed as “America’s finest silver plate.” Undoubtedly inspired by the success of the Lux Radio Theater, the “Silver Company” went for radio advertising in a major way. It sponsored a weekly drama anthology featuring some of Hollywood biggest stars, players like Cary Grant and Clark Gable, Carole Lombard and Bette Davis. The stories were, for want of a better word, original. They were written for radio, that is, regardless of their merit as audio-only plays.

For the premiere of the program, heard on this day in 1937, the sponsors secured the talent of Oscar-nominated screenwriter Grover Jones, who penned an all too familiar story of a girl trying to strike it rich in cutthroat Hollywood. The girl, of course, was Rosalind Russell, and the guy she settles for, James Stewart. Nearly two decades after this outing, Stewart would star in his own radio series, The Six Shooter; but back in 1937, the comedic mumbler was not yet cut out for radio. Russell, on the other hand, was in fine voice. She sure knew how to talk both fast and clearly, a talent that would serve her well in His Girl Friday.

For the premiere of the Silver Theater, Russell agreed to play Girl Friday to the sponsors. That is, she not only committed herself to play, live, in a four part series, to be aired Sunday afternoons from CBS’s West Coast studios; she also became a spokesperson for International Silver. According to the announcer, she happened upon the name of the company’s new line of flatware, “First Love,” which the savvy producers rendered more prominent still by turning it into the title of the opening play. Why, when she saw the cutlery, Ms. Russell professed, she “just fell right in love with it. Any woman would. You see, well, what I mean to say is, if you saw it. . . .” At this point the announcer graciously cuts in, so to speak, relieving Ms. Russell from the well rehearsed task of peddling flatware . . . until next week.

One year later, Russell would return to the Silver Theater, once more playing opposite James Stewart; she was heard again on the program in 1941 and 1943. Her cut was apparently substantial enough to warrant a return engagement. The Silver Theater, while never reaching the fame or popularity of the Lux program, continued to raise its curtain until 1947. In radio dramatic terms, its most distinguished writer was playwright True Boardman, who later referred to the business as a “prison,” the “thickness” of whose walls and the “strength” of whose “bars” would “vary with different sponsors,” but whose “four walls” would always remain.

Hearing your lines come out of the mouth of Rosalind Russell? I guess even prison walls have a silver lining.

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Playing, Dead and Alive: Tennyson, the Internet, and the Radio Racket

Well, the afternoon is about as lively as a cancelled séance whose medium walked out due to death in the family. For the past few days, picking up where I left off a long time ago, I’ve been flicking through two sets of an English literature anthology. Rather than tossing out the old for the new, something I’d be happy to do with a pair of shoes, I’ve been comparing the volumes, pondering the expulsion or demotion of canonical authors whose once prominent works have been removed from subsequent editions. One such author now represented by fewer works is Victorian poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Now, reading Tennyson on a gloomy day does little to brighten the mood; but the following lines, from “In the Valley of Cauteretz” (1864), seem worth reviving, if only to remind me of my present state of mind.

The speaker of the poem, whom we may or may not take to be Tennyson himself, returns to a stream he once visited with a friend, now dead:

Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead,
And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree,
The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.

Tennyson may have been revisited by the memories of his dead friend Arthur Hallam; but to me these lines somehow echo my own noisy yet quiet present, conjuring up my life among the voices of the past, my dwelling and revelling in recorded speech. Why do many of the radio voices I replay each day, transcribed sounds of live broadcasts featuring people now living no longer, sound so much more alive or closer to me than the voices of the present day?

Radio, back in the 1940s, when thousands of men were dying in battle far from home, was complicit in this sense of being visited by those gone or lost, a conjuring act achieved by a mere twist of the dial. Radio often presented itself as a spiritual medium, a modern device capable of annihilating space as well as time. On this day, 2 October, in 1944, for instance, Walter Huston introduced a play about the life of Thomas Paine by remarking that the words of this man called “Common Sense” still speak the

thoughts of many of us even today, in the year of 1944. And because of many other thoughts that this man put into words, we, in these troubled times, reach across the years to shake hands with him, to shake hands with Thomas Paine.

Sure, Thomas Paine sounds an awful lot like Edward G. Robinson, in whose hands lay Robert L. Richards’s script for that broadcast of “The Voice on the Stairs,” produced by the Cavalcade of America. Still, the phonic handshake was neither phoney nor merely symbolic; it was an act symptomatic of radio’s exploitation of our sense of revenance when we hear a voice from the past.

I am reminded of a friend of mine (the one with whom I went to the mystery book store a while back) who threw out her answering machine after playing back the voice of her dead father, still calling for her from the sonic loop of an old tape recording. When we look at pictures of dead people, the subject does not spring to life in the process of beholding; instead, pictures of the past or dead tend to serve as memento mori. They are a representation that does not quite render present, a reminder that is merely an aid to the act of calling to mind, whereas a recorded voice—sound being alive for the duration of its occurrence—streams through the ear canal into the now of our presence before fading into memory. Emanating from the living or the dead, it comes to life anew with each listening.

Dead, alive? The living dead? Or, speaking Tennyson, “Death in Life”? Perhaps I have dwelled among these sonic revenants for too long, becoming in turn, like Widmark’s character in the Inner Sanctum thriller “The Shadow of Death” (also cast on this day, back in 1945), dead to the world. Being engaged in this kind of séance, in the retrieval and re-presentation of past voices, I at times sense being shut out from and slipping out of touch with the living. Just like being caught in the internet, living in a world of sound is, after all, only the exposure to an echo of life—a reverberation produced by the clashing bones of a life stripped of flesh.

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On This Day in 1944: Home Folks Lose Ground to Plot Developers

Well, this will sound like a familiar story. A small house (halfway up in the next block, say) is being torn down after its long-established and well-liked owners cave in to some corporate big shots who want to get their hands on a valuable piece of property that seems just ripe for redevelopment. The transformation achieved proves agreeable enough to all; but to those who remember the neighborhood and used to stop by at the old house, there is something missing in the bright new complex that has taken its place.

No, this is not the plot of Vic and Sade, the popular American radio series that ended its run on this day, 29 September, in 1944. As discussed previously, Vic and Sade had no such socially relevant plots. In fact, it didn’t have any plot at all, which is precisely what distinguished it from the soap operas and situation comedies that came to define American storytelling on radio and television.

You might say (or let me just do it for you) that Vic and Sade was being done in by plot developers—by those who were eager to streamline dramatic storytelling into a solid row of daytime serials and evening sitcoms. In the early 1930s, soaps and comedies had been far from antithetical. Weekday serials like Amos ‘n’ Andy or Lum and Abner told continuing stories whose prevailing mood was cheerful rather than somber.

Eventually, however, savvy producers in search of reliable and lasting formulas determined to strengthen such modes of storytelling by separating the slow tease of the serial from the quick repartees of situation-derived comedy, thereby turning daytime sudsers into murky melodramas that thrived on an atmosphere of present gloom and dark forebodings.

Having no future in washboard weepers, radio vaudevillians, including long-established acts like Burns and Allen, felt compelled to revamp their comic routines to meet the demand for this new kind of zinger and laughter punctuated two-acter.

Vic and Sade, which was not performed before a live audience and which depended neither on one-liners nor on storylines for its lasting appeal, was least likely to adapt successfully to the new situation in comedy. It told stories, all right, but it did not rely on plots. It created characters by letting them go on about something or nothing at all, by reminiscing and gossiping, laughing and lamenting.

Imagine the aforementioned Golden Girls never leaving their kitchen table and forever sharing stories about St. Olaf, the Old South, about Brooklyn and Sicily. That’s pretty much what Vic and Sade Gook, son Rush (later, adopted son Russell) and Uncle Fletcher were doing, day after day, year after year.

What kept listeners coming back to the “Small House” was that writer Paul Rhymer kept on delivering anecdotes about certain colorfully named individuals who were often heard of but never heard, thereby creating the illusion, for faithful listeners, at least, of becoming part of a comfortingly stable family and their large circle of odd friends and acquaintances.

It mattered little that some of those folks Uncle Fletcher delighted in talking about sounded as if they had been brought into being in the very process of animated yarnspinning. They—and good old Uncle Fletcher along with them—came to life for the audience in that manner anyway.

When, in the summer of 1946, Rhymer did adhere to the trend and refashioned Vic and Sade into a weekly, half-hour situation comedy, the charm and wit of the small house talks was lost. Gone was the intimacy of the living room chats or porch meetings as some of those odd friends and neighbors began to step inside, filling the house with needless noise and disturbing our image of them. Equipped with the cartoonish voices of sitcom stock characters, they did not become any more real, but a great deal more irritating.

Not surprisingly, the relocated Gooks disappeared after less than three months. It was a plot that the developers of radio’s new and rigid storytelling had dug for them.

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Past Escape/Inescapable Present: Mr. Moto, the Orient, and the Death of Tokyo Rose

Well, I am not a Houdinist. I mean, a hedonist who escapes artistically. No matter how many supposedly escapist works I see, read, or hear, I can never entirely lose myself in them; instead, I seem to bring to or burden them with my own story and the stories of our time. By the time I am halfway through a yarn like Thank You, Mr. Moto, a 1936 thriller I am currently reading, I have spun such a web of references that I am thoroughly entangled, lost not in the world of the text but in the context of the world I invariably find between the covers, the world that draws my mind’s eye to the not so blank spaces between the lines. It is through my writings that I try to uncover a few intelligible strands in the muddles my mind makes while reading, listening, and watching. Let me give you a “for instance.”

I had considered continuing my recent discussions about the challenges of adaptation by commemorating the anniversary of “Alice in Wonderland,” the first of a two part radio version broadcast in the US on this day, 28 September, in 1937. I took a copy of Lewis Carroll’s fantasy from my bookshelf, but left it unopened. Surely my plans would be undermined somehow, I thought, when I stepped into the floating library that is our bathtub. And so it was. Alice had to wait, and is waiting still. The aforementioned Mr. Moto was not done with me yet.

Ever since I saw Peter Lorre’s impersonation of the man a few decades ago, I’ve been meaning to read a Mr. Moto mystery; so, browsing with a friend at the aforementioned Black Orchid Mystery Bookstore in Manhattan last month, I gladly accepted the gift of a 1980s paperback copy of Thank You, Mr. Moto, the film adaptation of which was readied for release at the time when “Alice” was being squeezed through radio’s rabbit hole. Before Moto found himself in quite another ditch after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a hole from which he only sporadically and tentatively reemerged, Pulitzer Prize winning author J. P. Marquand allowed the Japanese agent to speak candidly about American culture and politics.

Indeed, I was rather surprised at some of Mr. Moto’s observations when I read them today; and considering that the Far and Middle-East—contested or world market-contending nations, regions invested with suspicion whose future is being claimed by suspicious investors from the West—are such an Occidental headache these days, Mr. Moto’s remarks about America’s view or conception of the East still ring true today:

“Affairs in the Orient are so complicated to-day. They grow so difficult, if you will pardon my saying so, please, because of the suspicions of your country,” Moto tells the American narrator; “and because of the suspicions of certain European nations regarding the natural aspirations of my own people.” Such “suspicions,” Moto claims, “make the most harmless activities of my country very, very difficult”; but did not the US and Britain “seize” and engage in “colonizing efforts” in the past? he reminds the American.

To the American listener—captured, along with Mr. Moto by a Chinese rebel—Moto’s talk seemed as strange as the “conversation at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.” Apparently, Alice was eager to make herself heard, waiting impatiently outside my bathroom and intruding herself on the story I had chosen instead. But I let Mr. Moto continue as he told apologetically of a “disturbing, radical element” in his country, “somewhat bigoted and fanatical,” which had been “a source of very bad annoyance.” Still, he asked, does not even a “great nation” like America have its “disturbing elements?”

The US, it seems, has two main responses to the world, commercial interests aside: indifference and suspicion, but rarely a sustained interest in or engagement with other cultures, cultures it is prepared to absorb or incorporate, but not to see develop independently.

Reveling in the fantasy of “equality,” it does not deal well with difference, at least not a difference that goes beyond a certain savory and amusing flavoring. Those who refuse or fail to be incorporated, those who remain torn between or by cultures, are labelled suspicious or serve as scapegoats to be impaled on the fence on which they seem to be defiantly perched. Any ambiguous “not for” tends to be read as a clear “against.”

When I stepped out of the tub, already convinced to make Mr. Moto, rather than Alice, the topic of the day, I learned of the death of Iva Toguri, the American who became known as Tokyo Rose and was convicted of treason after broadcasting to Americans from Japan, where she was sent by her mother to attend to an ailing relative during the Second World War.

Even though little could be found that was hostile or harmful in her broadcasts and charges against her appear to have been manufactured, she was stripped of her American citizenship and sentenced to ten years in prison, just about the time it took Mr. Moto to rehabilitate himself in the service of anti-Communist America.

Judged by the either/or dynamics of American thought, those positioned in between are as suspicious as those, like me, who cannot get straight to the point simply because there are so many dots left to connect.

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Spike Jones: The Man Who Found His Hit in Hitler

Well, this is a tough time for heroes. There might still be a need for them, but we stop short of worship. The nominal badge of honor has been applied too freely and deviously to inspire awe, let alone lasting respect. Even Superman is not looking quite so super these days, his box-office appeal being middling at best. And as much as I loathe the cheap brand of sarcasm that passes for wit these days, I am among those who are more likely to raise an eyebrow than an arm in salute.

Compared to the hero, the villain has proven a more durable figure. After all, it takes considerably more effort to forgive than to forget. Besides, we appreciate the convenience of a scapegoat, of a stand-in for our collective guilt; one hideous visage to represent what we dare not find within ourselves.

In government propaganda, the villain serves to remind us against (and, by indirection, for) what we are supposed to fight—a single face to signal what we must face lest we are prepared to face doomsday.

So, who is the next big thing in villainy—fading pop icons excluded? Is there any such person alive today who is as reviled or dreaded as the man who paved the career of one of the most successful US musicians of the 1940s? Adolf Hitler, I mean. That’s the villain. The musician, of course, was bandleader Spike Jones.

A California native born in 1911, Jones had his breakout hit in the early 1940s with the song “The Führer’s Face,” a merry war mobilizer of a tune that went something like this:

When Der Führer says, “We ist der master race”
We Heil! Heil! Right in Der Führer’s face,
Not to love Der Führer is a great disgrace,
So we Heil! Heil! Right in Der Führer’s face. 

When Herr Goebbels says, “We own der world und space.”
We Heil! Heil! Right in Herr Göring’s face.
When Herr Göring says they’ll never bomb this place,
We Heil! Heil! Right in Herr Göring’s face. 

Are we not the supermen?
Aryan pure supermen?
Ja we ist der supermen,
Super-duper supermen. 

Ist this Nutzi land not good?
Would you leave it if you could?
Ja this Nutzi land is good!
Vee would leave it if we could. 

We bring the world to order.
Heil Hitler’s world New Order.
Everyone of foreign race will love Der Führer’s face
When we bring to der world disorder. 

When Der Führer says, “We ist der master race”
We Heil! Heil! Right in Der Führer’s face,
When Der Führer says, “We ist der master race”
We Heil! Heil! Right in Der Führer’s face.

Are we still singing chart-topping songs like this about any one of our present-day (mis)leader? Should we? Is to laugh at them enough? Might the laughter perhaps be cheap and the joke on us? I don’t presume to have any answers. Listen to Spike Jones and his famous song on BBC Radio 4 this week, a song initially banned by the BBC. Don’t starting hitting your grandma with a shovel, even if yours, as mine, was working for one of Germany’s biggest names in fascism.

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Mr. Benny Gets the Key to Baldpate

Well, I feel rather less prickly than yesterday. My cold seems to be on its way out and, having spent some time out of doors in the warmth of the autumn sun, I feel somewhat more serene and benevolent. Speaking of doors (a transition more creaky than the farce I am writing about today): Having complained previously (and elsewhere) about the conventional and therefore superfluous adaptation of Jane Eyre now flickering in weekly installments on British television, I am going to mark the anniversary of a decidedly more inspired variation on what was once a similarly familiar work of fiction, Seven Keys to Baldpate, a crowd-pleaser that was revived for radio on this day, 26 September, in 1938.

Granted, it is easier to rework a piece that does not warrant the reverence befitting a literary classic such as Jane Eyre, a respect that can be artistically stifling when it comes to revisiting or revising what seems to demand fidelity rather than felicitous tinkering. A mystery novel conceived by Earl Derr Biggers, the creator of Charlie Chan, Seven Keys opened many more doors after going through the smithy of theater legend George M. Cohan. Unlike Biggers, Mr. Cohan did not play it straight, but turned the thriller into what he then sold as a “Mysterious Melodramatic Farce”—starring himself.

In Cohan’s farce, the thriller writer Bill Magee accepts the $5000 challenge of a friend who dares him to pen a novel within twenty-four hours. To achieve this, the author is being given what he believes to be peace and quiet—the only key to a remote resort shut down for the winter.

During his night at Baldpate Inn, the supposedly single guest is disturbed by an assortment of singular strangers, lunatics and villains, until his friend shows up to confess that the bizarre goings-on were a practical joke designed to illustrate the ridiculousness of the author’s improbable plots. The epilogue of Seven Keys discloses, however, that the action of the play was a dramatization of the novel Magee actually managed to complete that night. He won the wager by fictionalizing the challenge.

Opening on 22 September in 1913, the play became an immediate and oft-restaged favorite with American theatregoers. It was subsequently adapted for screen and radio. When, some twenty-five years after its premiere, the producers of the Cecil B. DeMille hosted Lux Radio Theatre got their hands on this potboiler, they slyly revamped it as a commercial property fit for the latest medium of dramatic expression.

In his introductory remarks, DeMille promises the listener a “special treatment” of the play—and that, for once, was no overstatement. As I have discussed at length in Etherized Victorians, my study on old-time radio, the broadcast revision is not so much a rehash as it is an media-savvy update of the original.

Whereas Cohan’s version celebrates the victory of popular entertainment, of readily digested pulp fictions churned out for a quick buck, Lux writer-adaptor George Wells transforms Seven Keys into a radio story—a story about radio that parodies the anxiety of former vaudevillians-turned-broadcast artists to achieve lasting success, to be remembered long after the shows in which they starred week after week had gone off the air—to become cultural icons despite their invisibility. And those keys to uncertainty were handed to the man who had been through it all and stayed on top by knocking himself down, fall guy comedian Jack Benny.

Instead of a successful novelist, the artist now up for a crazy night at Baldpate is Jack Benny, as “himself,” a frustrated thespian who accepts the challenge of developing a suitable dramatic vehicle for himself after having been turned down for serious dramatic parts time and again. Benny’s challenger is no other than Mr. DeMille, who, in a rare stunt, not only introduces and narrates the play, but acts in it, and that without having to drop his director-producer persona. Throw in a few Lux Flakes and it comes out a clever bit of promotion all round.

The unpretentious yet self-conscious reworking of a play as old hat as Baldpate into a comment on the recycling business of radio entertainment—and a demonstration of how to lather, rinse, and repeat successfully—is one of Lux‘s most ingenious and engaging productions.

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Eyrebrushing: The BBC’s Dull New Copy of Charlotte Brontë’s Bold Portrait

Well, I could blame it on the medication. Or it might be this holiday souvenir of a cold that is dulling my senses. I sure haven’t been able to savor my meals lately. So why should I thrill to yet another warmed over helping of Jane Eyre, a story I have read, written about, and taught, that I have heard and seen more often than any other work of English fiction? Why should anyone get excited about such a much chewed on and oft-reconstituted chestnut? Save college students, perhaps, who may take the BBC’s new television production as an occasion to keep their assigned editions unopened and to watch the plot unravel in four readily digested hour-long installments. If I sound cantankerous, it is neither bronchitis nor Ms. Brontë, I assure you: it is Sandy Welch’s bland rehash of one of the most daring and delicious growing-up stories ever concocted.

So, what’s wrong with this version, apart from production values and camera work reminiscent of 1970s television, apart from plain Jane’s sculptured eyebrows (brought to the job by Rossetti-lipped Ruth Wilson) and swarthy Rochester’s Darcyish looks (courtesy of Toby Stephens), apart from its skimming of some ten chapters (or eight years) and the half-hearted rendering of the novel’s relished if easily overcooked gothic mystery? Perhaps I had expected something rather more dynamic and radical after last year’s sensational adaptation of Bleak House.

Jane Eyre, to be sure, is not a Dickensian novel. It does not depend on bathos and caricature to elicit our responses; it relies instead—and succeeds in relying—on the intimacy of its portrait, the self-portrait of an inexperienced, self-conscious young woman who is given a voice to tell her tale.

That was radical in 1847—and it is still remarkable today, despite millions of blogs reveling in or bogged down by the mundane. Indeed, readers of Brontë’s pseudonymously published tale wondered whether this was fiction at all, or whether it was, perhaps, a thinly veiled if highly romanticized version of a real governess (in the employ of Mr. Thackeray, perhaps?). They wondered, too, whether this story was penned by a woman, considering its frank account of a socially unequal and as such questionable relationship.

Adaptations of Jane Eyre—any reworking worth our while—should make an effort to recreate this sense of realism, which is not found in the novel’s gothic situations, in the screaming but otherwise voiceless character of the presumably mad, Sargasso Sea-swept Bertha, in the fire that consumes Thornfield Hall and temporarily blinds its owner, or in the telepathic connection that reunites a mature Jane with her now helpless and emasculated master. The realism lies in the first-person narration, in the observations of a woman who has the nerve to tell her story, a story of teenage angst filled with humiliation, unease, and doubt. In short, a real story.

Voice-over narration, so closely associated with film noir, assists viewers to reach where the novel invites us to go: under the surface of conventions, beyond appearances, and as straight as Victorians could possibly permit themselves to pry into the heart and mind of a woman whose story is taken from her once she is not permitted to tell it herself.

Even radio, the medium best suited for the exploration of Jane’s mind, often resorted to an omniscient narrator such as this one by Walter Hackett, as performed in the US by the Yankee Players and broadcast in the early 1950s over the Yankee-Mutual Network:

The courtyard of the King George at Millcote is deserted with but the exception of the young girl standing at the entrance. She shivers as the rawness of the late November afternoon strikes through her thin cloak. Suddenly the door of the inn opens and a large-boned, powerfully-built, sullen-featured woman walks across the cobblestones toward the young girl.

It is time to return the story to that “young girl”—or leave it with Charlotte Brontë, who tells it so well. So, would-be dramatists of radio, film and television, take heed: let Jane Eyre speak up, or shut up!