Category: Radio

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A Letter to Make a Day

Well, he deserved better than being barked at. For once, he had something of interest in his inky, pamphlet-sorting hands. The mailman, I mean. Among the bills and flyers I tossed aside, there was that rare specimen of posted correspondences: a personal letter. A missive that did not include the dismissive “sorry” or “unfortunately,” words frequently uttered by the publishers I approach regarding Etherized, my dissertation on American radio drama. Instead, it contained words like “remarkable” and “wonderful”—both, “remarkable” indeed, referring to just that study, of which this webjournal is an unacademic extension. And none now living is more qualified to make such an assessment (or pronounce such flattery) than the greatest of all American radio playwrights: the Old-time Radio Primer inspiring subject of a 2006 Academy Award winning documentary, Norman Corwin.

Researching about so-called , I never contacted any of the people whose performances are discussed in my work. As I expressed it to Mr. Corwin, I was “desirous to let the words they had intended for publication and broadcasting—words so rarely heard—speak for themselves at last. It was a listener’s respect” for such words, I declared, “not a critic’s arrogance.” I treat radio plays as art, not artifacts. I approach them as such, rather than as occasions to wax nostalgic or opportunities to get at a factual past, however important it is to keep their historical context in mind.

When I write about listening to radio plays, I avoid phrases like “the author believed” or “the writer was trying to…..” I am not a biographer; I don’t presume to know what anyone believes. Instead, I pay attention to an artist’s public utterances to discover what they can make me believe, what they convince me of—to express how their works stimulate my emotional or intellectual responses.

Recently, someone perusing this journal disagreed with my reading of a radio play by modernist poet Archibald MacLeish, arguing that I “misunderstood” the author’s “intent.” I appreciate any alternate interpretation of the works I discuss; indeed, I encourage and long for such dialogue, debates I generally have with myself. I just don’t believe that an author is the ultimate authority, that the creator of any work, once that work has been released to the public, can lay claim to any single, definitive interpretation. The brainchild has been given up for adoption, set free to dwell and flourish in the mind of foster parents the existence of which the one giving birth cannot conceive. Writing about literature and art means to adopt a reading, rather than return the presumably lost child to its cradle.

When a parent like Norman Corwin, curious to find out whatever happened to his child and how it fared in the world, finds traces of it in the adoptee’s home, there can occur a get-together of sorts, a reunion by proxy. I am pleased Mr. Corwin recognized his child and did not find me wanting in my care or amiss in my rearing of it. How elated I am to be commended for having produced, in turn, a response to radio that Mr. Corwin argues to be “leagues ahead of anything ever written on the subject in this country” (meaning, the USA). Perhaps, I ought not to have repeated it here; but, as in any such reunion, there is that moment in which pride, like the hot air in a much-damaged balloon, inflates the ego of the one privileged to have given rise to such a joyful occasion.

It is a moment to celebrate the life of a piece of writing, a life continual as long as there are eyes to read, ears to hear, and minds to create it anew. It is the hope I hear in this opening of “Daybreak,” one of Corwin’s many remarkable performances, which was brought to life again in a CBS production broadcast on this day, 10 July, in 1945:

A day grows older only when you stand and watch it coming at you. Otherwise it is continuous. If you could keep a half degree ahead of sunup on the world’s horizons, you’d see new light always breaking on some slope of ocean or some patch of land. A morning can be paced by trailing night. This we shall do, where we begin we shall return to, circling the earth meanwhile.

My mind has been going in circles today; and, for once, it still feels like morning.

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Old-time Radio Primer: J Stands for Juvenile

It’s pretty much a four-letter word. It is twice as long because it does double duty. It either suggests trouble or triviality, lack of sophistication or abject recklessness. It spells “no good” or bespeaks those who are up to no less than that. The word “juvenile,” I mean. And yet, most of our everyday diversions and the mass-marketing of such—the distinctions between which efforts are less clear now than ever—are being suited to those who supposedly suit the description. To be sure, it is the label “mature audience” or “adult content” that nowadays dangles from what is truly “juvenile” in popular culture: the brash, the unabashed, the verbal or visual provocation that substitutes for stimulating thought—anything, in short, that caters to our desire for instant self-gratification.

Much of what is still being remembered or perpetuated about the aureate days of wireless aurality in America (the 1930s to mid-1950s) is being thought of as “juvenile.” Indeed, it was widely regarded—and frequently denounced—as such even then. “What have you gentlemen done with my child?” protested Lee De Forest, the inventor whose Audion tube brought radio into being. “You have debased this child,” he railed against broadcasters back in those days after the end of the Second World War, when attacks against commercial radio were as common as the entertainment it presented.

“You have made him a laughingstock to intelligence, surely a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere.” Instead of reaching maturity, radio had been “resolutely kept to the average intelligence of thirteen years,” as though those assuming charge of broadcasting believed that the “majority of listeners” had “only moron minds.” However sweeping and simplistic in his attack, De Forest realized at least that “juvenile” was nothing more—and nothing less—than a construct, an assumed average created for the sake of commerce and mass-marketing; it was not truly representative of American life in any of its stages.

It is no wonder that one of the words most often associated with “juvenile” is “delinquency.” After all, those who attempt to deprive us of our childhood because they believe it pays to have us yearn for adult life are closely allied with those who punish us when we find ourselves unable to buy or refuse to buy into the concept of buying whatever is being pushed our way. I, for one, am highly suspicious of those who wax nostalgic about the imaginary age of innocence—the years during which we are prey to commerce and corruption without yet sensing the state of our vulnerability, the days that are deemed precious by virtue of being irretrievable.

Today, serials like The Lone Ranger and episodic thrillers like The Shadow are being recalled either fondly or disdainfully, but by and large patronizingly. Future generations tend to trivialize the past by cherishing samples of bygone follies that are contrasted with or judged in light of present—and allegedly less primitive—diversions. The realization that we haven’t learned much from history or that we are altogether incapable of learning is perhaps too difficult to endure without the laughter of ridicule, unless such suspicions are being foiled by the benevolent smile of nostalgia.

Very little is gained by such approaches to popular culture, other than putting a performance in what is argued to be its proper place by putting it down as artistically inconsequential, or by elevating it to something incomparable and thereby rendering it historically nil. Such pretensions are of no assistance in our appreciation of history or art; nor do they make for insightful and engaging criticism. To call something “juvenile” means to render it either immune to criticism or unworthy of it.

Granted, I am getting too old to be playing the juvenile in the melodrama of life; but it is not out of a sense of envy or regret that I resent the term. Playing with what was once playing on the radio, I detest being reduced to a statistical average only because much of what was staged in the theater of the mind was conceived with such a construct in mind. I won’t turn a mythical thirteen whenever I take in an old radio program. And if I can’t manage to listen intelligently to such “juvenile” entertainment, I’d much rather be properly childish about it.

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Maureen O’Hara Sounds Matter-of-fact about Murder

I can’t seem to get through this romance. It is tempestuous, steeped in mystery, and features a fierce heroine who bears a vague resemblance to Jane Eyre. Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn, I mean, one of the novels I picked up to set the mood for my trip to Cornwall. That was in April—and I am still not done with Mary’s adventure among the smugglers. I do like Mary, though. She is not the fainting kind, despite the danger she’s in:

A girl of three-and-twenty, in a petticoat and a shawl, with no weapons but her own brain to oppose a fellow twice her age and eight times her strength, who, if he realised she had watched the scene tonight from her window, would encircle her neck with his a hand, and, pressing lightly with finger and thumb, put an end to her questioning.

Now, the woman who portrayed her Hitchcock’s film version of Jamaica Inn, Maureen O’Hara (pictured above, during the production of the 1938 film), was a few weeks from turning twenty-three when she played another character of that mettle. On this day, 6 July, in 1943, she was heard on the US radio series Suspense in a thriller titled “The White Rose Murders.” An adaptation of a story by Cornell Woolrich, it is the sort of yarn Suspense came to be famous for.

“You’ve been reading too many of those romantic stories,” Virginia tells her fiancé, a police officer with so little self-esteem that he thinks he needs a promotion to deserve a well-to-do debutante like the young woman who’s so devoted to him, she sets out to get what he thinks is in the way of their connubial bliss. This woman is serious about marriage. You might say that she’s dying to get hitched. To achieve just that, she sets out to catch the White Rose murderer, a serial killer who strangles young women, apparently incited or inspired by the “Beer Barrel Polka” (also known as “Rosamunde”). As a token of his perverse affection, he leaves behind the bud of a white rose, the symbol, Virginia explains, of “purity, loyality, devotion.”

Virginia carefully dresses to resemble the victims and “tours the low dives,” searching in each “dingy bar” where “Rosamunde” plays, hoping to attract the man the police has been looking for in vain. As it turns out, the tune is practically everyone’s favorite, just as roses prove popular with the men she encounters. She has to smell a lot of red herrings before she meets the one who is eager to offer her that certain rose. It’s the one she least expected, of course, who is out to do her in.

Despite the names attached to this project—O’Hara, Woolrich, and composer Bernard Herrmann—”The White Rose Murders” is less lurid than it is ludicrous. The situation is suitably creepy—the kind of tale of entrapment and prolonged peril fully deserving of the label Suspense. Even the cheerful “Rosamunde” begins to sound ominous as, in the mind of the listener, it becomes associated with impending horror. Yet instead of relying on a suspenseful mood, the producers of the series insisted on adding an element of surprise—a last minute twist meant to startle the audience. It is a surprise, all right, but one that is psychologically so unconvincing as to reduce the play to mere melodramatic claptrap.

Nor does O’Hara fit her voice to the performance. Perfunctory in her reading of the script, she sounds very much like a sophisticated businesswoman out to get a job done. Perhaps, Virginia’s only adventure was to put an end to all thrills by going through the mill of matrimony. Perhaps, O’Hara had “been reading too many of those romantic stories” not to know which ones were played strictly for the money.

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Ship Surgeon Opens His "Cabin" to Spill Some Blood

There is an air of mystery about the house. The atmosphere is charged with criminal endangerment, and the sounds are clews to the nature of the offence that threatens harm. The rustle of leaves, distant rumblings, the shiver of the umbrella under which I had sought shelter from the sun. I am sentenced to retreat indoors; and before I lose the wireless connection that allows me to communicate with the outside world, I am going to report a murder. Dr. Fabian told me about it. He is a ship surgeon of a luxury liner docked at Southampton. Alone on the ghostly vessel, he has opened his cabin—Cabin B-13—to air his memories of bygone crimes.

Carr’s radio play “Cabin B-13” was published in the May 1944 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Cabin B-13 was the creation of noted mystery writer John Dickson Carr. An anthology of radio thrillers produced by CBS, the series had its premiere on this day, 5 July, in 1948. Carr had been writing plays for the wireless since the beginning of the Second World War, first in England, where he had moved from the US in 1931, and then in America, to which he returned after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Like many storytellers, Carr was called upon to contribute to the war effort by writing propaganda plays for radio; most of the thrillers he wrote or adapted for Suspense in late 1942 and early 1943 tempered escapism with indoctrination.

Cabin B-13 borrows its title from one of the plays heard on Suspense; it might very well have been an extension of the latter series. Like many of Carr’s wartime stories for Suspense, which emphasized the alliance between the two nations, “A Razor in Fleet Street” features a team of American and British characters. An American married to an Englishwoman, Carr frequently explored the relationship of the two cultures—the supposedly old world and the new. The thriller that opened Cabin B-23, was no exception, even though the story is set prior to the war and was produced thereafter. You might say that it stages the revenge of nostalgia.

Bill, an American diplomat, visits London with his British wife, Brenda. He is fascinated by this aged metropolis, which, to him, conjures up memories of Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu, of “Hansom cabs rattling through the fog”—”It’s put a spell on my imagination ever since I was a boy so high.” There is even an old barrel organ under the window of their hotel room, which doesn’t seem to have been refurbished since the 1860s. Brenda is amused by this attitude toward her native country. “[O]f all the Americans I have ever met, you have the most absurd and fantastic ideas about England. You don’t really expect to find Scotland Yard men in bowler hats trailing you every step—now, do you?”

Yet Brenda, too, is looking at her birthplace with the eyes of a romantic. “When you think about it, just remember the barrel organ: safe, stodgy, comfortable—that’s London,” she insists. Such romantic notions soon turn into some very real for the young couple, who become caught up in a murder plot right out of Sweeney Todd, that Victorian thriller about the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Bill is not too keen on facing “one of those bowler hats in real life”—but that is precisely what happens when Scotland Yard informs him that he is the spitting image of a “ripper” (a killer who “uses a razor . . . and likes it”) now on the loose in that “safe, stodgy, comfortable” town.

It is a solid opener for the series, even though, like most of Carr’s work for the aural medium, it is not altogether radiogenic. Generally, Carr was rather too ambitious in his dramatic works for radio, most of which were mysteries that not only asked “whodunit,” but “how was it done.” The results are often confusing or disappointingly simplistic. The ear is not attuned to complex puzzles; unlike the reader, the listener back then could not turn back the pages or close the book to consider the clews at leisure. Nor does the scope of a 20-minute play match that of a mystery novel with its assortment of suspects and red herrings.

After Carr left Suspense in 1943, the series fared very well with plays more deserving of the term; cat-and-mouse thrillers like the aforementioned “Sorry, Wrong Number,” which prolonged their thrills by building tension rather than counting on last-minute surprises.

“A Razor in Fleet Street” improves on those puzzles by casting Bill in the role of the wrong man, an innocent if imprudent adventurer in pursuit of his doppelganger, the criminal he will be accused of murdering. Granted, the idea of the doppelganger is rather wasted on radio; and the case is solved by an onlooker who, unlike the listener, can describe in detail how the crime was committed. How promising, by comparison, is the title of the subsequent thriller: “The Man Who Couldn’t Be Photographed.” That fellow has not be captured on recordings, either; so, like most of the tales told on Cabin B-13, his story remains locked in the memory of Dr. Fabian . . . or some archive yet untapped.

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Lillian Gish Does Not Recall My Name

Mine is not an illustrious one. There are a few others who fared well enough with it; but none among them are my relations. It is uncommon enough to catch my eye or ear whenever it is mentioned, even though my own is frequently misspelled or mispronounced. My surname, I mean. As I shared a while ago in this journal, names hold a special fascination for me. Imagine my surprise when, in search of a broadcast event worth recalling today, I came across the modest proper noun attached to my existence while listening to a recording of an American radio program that aired on this day, 4 July, in 1939.

The program in question is Information, Please!, a quiz show that, as discussed here, invited radio listeners to send in brain teasers and memory testers to “stump” a panel of so-called experts and notable personalities. The guest guesser featured on this day in 1939 was silent screen actress Lillian Gish.

He “wouldn’t be surprised,” host Clifton Fadiman remarked, if Ms. Gish could not answer the first question of the evening, a comment suggesting that the venerable actress was too far removed from the everyday to tune in like regular folk (despite the fact that she had been a panelist on previous occasions).

Whether unable to supply the expected response or unwilling to utter it, Ms. Gish had the smartest reply anyone thus confronted could have given. In keeping with her glorious past and altogether more dignified than the prompted line, her response was silence. You see, the panel was called upon to “give the exact wording” used by announcer Milton Cross in the opening of the program, which, at that time, was sponsored by the makers of Canada Dry. To provide the correct piece of trivia would have meant to parrot a commercial message.

It was a clever game of naming nonetheless. The ostensible poser of said puzzler was awarded a small prize, and the solution, revealed by Fadiman, was rendered even more prominent as a result of it having supposedly managed to elude the experts, much to the amusement of the crowd in the studio.

This introductory bit of product placement was followed by another nominal challenge. The panelists were asked to “name four literary works whose titles consist entirely of initials.” Columnist Franklin P. Adams came up with R.U.R. (short for “Rossum’s Universal Robots”), the science fiction drama by Karel Capek to which we owe the word “robot.” Ms. Gish advanced R.F.D. (for “Rural Free Delivery”), a now obscure volume on farm living in 1930s Ohio by one Charles Allen Smart.

Getting into the spirit of things, Gish then allowed herself to suggest “The Life of the Bee.” She didn’t get away with the pun, but garnered some chuckles, following it up with “Abie’s Irish Rose.” Prepared for such levity with a pun of his own, Fadiman suggested X.L.C.R. as the title of a poem by Longfellow. Controlling herself—and asked not to make another joke—Gish think of R.V.R., a book on Rembrandt by Hendrik Willem van Loon, an essayist whose work (compiled as Air-storming) was regularly heard on US radio back then.

Now, I had to look most of these names up—and quite forgot my own in the process. That name, however, was brought up shortly thereafter on the broadcast, Ms. Gish having been given an opportunity to be anecdotal about silent movies by claiming that she had to smooch a bedpost in Birth of a Nation since no actress was “allowed to kiss the men” in front of camera in those days. The question that followed transported listeners back into the reality of the present day; it concerned names of people in the news. Apparently, one of those names was A. Heuser—H E U S E R.

So, who was this A. Heuser? Ms. Gish left it to fellow panelist John Kiernan, the noted sports columnist who would later host the television version of Information, Please, to answer that question. Turns out, said Herr Heuser was a German prizefighter. Also known as the “Bulldog,” Heuser had been soundly defeated by Max Schmeling two days prior to the broadcast. His first name may have made that defeat sound particularly pleasing to those among the American listeners who kept a watchful eye on Nazi Germany: the initial A. stands for Adolf. That, at least, is an ignominy I do not have to live down.

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“Long Distance” Caller Sounds “Sorry”

My students never knew it, but I can be a right pushover when it comes to sentiment. I weep, publicly and almost unabashedly, at the sight of a Landseer painting like “His Only Friend.” I enjoy being manipulated that way and am pleased to find my senses receptive to the melodramatic, the dubious arts some denounce as kitsch and others approach only as camp. Nor do I mind being aware of being taken in—unless the trick doesn’t quite come off and I am left disappointed, unmoved, or get downright cross. Disappointed because I was promised a chance to exercise my passions in the relative safety of the controlled environment that is an aesthetic experience. Cold because the passions could not be provoked, despite appreciable effort; and hostile because my intellect rebukes me for having been put on hold for something clearly not worth the shutting down of reason.

To be sure, there’s much to be done with art even if an emotional engagement is lacking; but I am generally distrustful of critics who deny themselves such personal responses or who, worse still, are entirely incapable of experiencing them; commentators who are eager to speak before having listened to the work they subject to the mental appropriation that is critical study.

A long time ago, I told myself never to write anything I don’t feel; and I don’t enjoy writing about matters that do not matter to me emotionally. Granted, that list of subjects is quite short, since I cannot but feel angry at not feeling anything else. Here, then, is what I feel about “Long Distance,” a radio thriller that premiered on this day, 3 July, in 1948.

To begin with, “Long Distance” sounds an awful lot like “Sorry, Wrong Number” (previously mentioned here) It invited the comparison, considering that it aired on and inaugurated NBC’s Radio City Playhouse within weeks of the film premiere of Sorry, Wrong Number, the vastly inferior adaptation of Lucille Fletcher’s famous radio thriller. Vastly inferior because the film resorted to flashbacks and thus diminished the sensation of experiencing a crime in progress, a crime whose victim will die within the time allotted for the play—the sensation of being alone with this person as she sits by the telephone, fighting for her life.

What makes “Sorry” such a guilty pleasure is that we don’t feel altogether sorry that the number’s up for the ostensibly innocent victim, who reveals herself to be a mean and selfish individual. The distraught woman trying to call “Long Distance” (portrayed by future Palmolive spokesperson Jan Miner) is fighting for survival as well; but it is not her own existence she cares about; it is the survival of her husband. Convicted of murder, he is schedule to be executed within the next twenty minutes. Mrs. Jacks, the desperate woman on the telephone, claims to have found the missing piece of evidence that would prove her husband’s innocence. For the duration of the play, she is heard trying to get hold of the judge who can stay the execution.

Like Mrs. Stevenson, the anti-heroine of “Sorry, Wrong Number,” Mrs. Jacks is frustrated by a maze of wires; the telephone, her only means of taking action, is acting against her. It is only when the clock strikes the hour of death that she finally manages to talk to the only person who can keep her husband alive. She is urged to hang up and await his return call. The deadline passed, dramatic time stands still. A brief musical bridge rips apart the real time unity of the play—perhaps shredding its realism altogether to pieces. Then, the telephone rings once more. Reluctantly, the despairing woman picks up the receiver. She begins to laugh hysterically, shouting her husband’s name.

Unlike the conclusion of “Sorry, Wrong Number,” which leaves no doubt as to the deadly failure of its central character, the epilogue of “Long Distance” permits alternate readings. The voice to which the woman on the phone responds so euphorically is the only one in the play not rendered audible. It is for the audience to determine whether her husband has been saved or whether she lost both him and her mind during the ordeal of this long distance rescue mission.

It is only in this moment of doubt that I can find merit in Harry W. Junkin’s overwrought and derivative melodrama that, were it not for this little breach of trust, leaves me disappointed, cold, and nearly as hostile as Agnes Moorehead must have felt being passed over for Barbara Stanwyck in the film version of the play that had earned Moorehead the title “First Lady of Suspense.”

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Old-time Radio Primer: I Stands for Imagine

This is one of those lazybones, slow coach, watch-your-toe-nails-grow afternoons. A moment of ease and drowsy repose, a moment so slight as to be of no matter, so carefree as to be of no consequence. A now to outweigh any later, to balance any yesterdays on a scale of time perfectly still. It is an instant fit for nothing—which is just what I intend to do. Am I doing nothing? Are not my senses responsive to the rays of the sun, my skin receptive to the cooling breeze, and my ears alive to the slightest of sounds—sounds so soothing as to render highly unlikely the chance of this missive being shared before evening?

I might not get anything done at present; but, as hard as it has been for me to put to sleep the guilt a Calvinism cut down to a strict work ethics and a suspicion of non-manual labor taught me to suffer, doing naught and doing not as some think one ought is a naughtiness that can produce a host of something—a host ready to accommodate a multitude of guests in the open inn of my imagination.

“Imagine”! It’s another word for my old-time radio primer (begun here)—and certainly one made for the airwaves, the medium that minds beyond matter. What does it mean, to imagine? According to Aristotle, it is the mental reproduction of sensory impressions. Does it follow that the imagined is inferior to the real, a mere copy of an original? Not a fruitful train of thought, perhaps, this levelling of mental streams with the concrete of matter-of-factness. Besides, you won’t get far with the concept of originality in , which borrowed so freely that I might as well have let “I” stand for “influence.”

The notion that imagination is reproduction has caused artists of centuries past to prefer the word “fancy” as denoting invention, rather than imitation. Listening to the radio, however, imagination seems the more appropriate term, as much as 1930s theorist Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007) insisted on freeing sound from the business of substituting for the other senses not engaged during the act of lending an ear.

Listeners of radio plays do not so much invent worlds as image them forth with the sonic inventory ordered by the writer and supplied by the producer. The furnished rooms, unlike those shown in pictures, on screens large and small, may differ greatly, according to the vocabulary, experience, and preferences of the audience.

Of course, associations can be more profound than the image of door being produced by oil-starved hinges. That sound may also produce thoughts of approaching danger, of impending entrapment, of what’s behind and what might lie ahead.

On this day, 1 July, in 1954, for instance, Escape invited listeners to conceive of a “Dark Wall” and a closed door behind which was concealed a “beautiful woman whom you must find before she meets her death.” The rooms, after all, are not just set up to be furnished in accordance with a more or less clearly defined blueprint, to be inhabited by a set of characters. Within these dark walls, there also flourished doubts and wonderment, sorrow and fear.

To get behind that dark wall and sneak through the door takes about as much effort as closing ones eyelids, which makes listening to a play for radio the ideal activity for an idle moment like this—as long as the mind’s eye is ready to adjust to the luminescence of the imagined. Pardon me, while I wander off . . .

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The Home Folks Are Moving In

Well, sir, it’s a few minutes or so past six o’clock in the evening as our scene opens now, and here in the garden of the small house halfway up in the Welsh hills we discover Dr. Harry Heuser setting the table for a barbecue dinner. Sorting the flatware, he still keeps an eye on Montague, his Jack Russell terrier. Meanwhile, the side dishes are being prepared in the kitchen and the telephone is ringing. Listen.

That is how my evening dinner preparations might have sounded if they had been fictionalized by Paul Rhymer, creator of radio’s Vic and Sade, a series of sketches (previously mentioned here) that had its debut on this day, 29 June, in 1932. Some sixty years before Seinfeld renovated the television sitcom, Rhymer constructed a fictive world whose four main characters could truly go on about nothing like nobody else—without as much as a situation. Like this, for instance:

UNCLE FLETCHER. [. . .] Don’t s’pose you ever knew Arnie Gupples, Vic? 

VIC. Name’s not familiar. 

UNCLE FLETCHER. Sadie? 

SADE. Uh-uh. 

UNCLE FLETCHER. Arnie Gupples worked in a shoe store there in Belvidere years ago. I’ve bought shoes off’n Arnie. Far as that goes, I could name you off a dozen parties that bought shoes off’n Arnie. Hey, Sadie, your cousin Albert Feeber bought shoes off’n Arnie Gupples. 

SADE. Really? 

UNCLE FLETCHER. (Stoutly) Your cousin Albert Feeber bought shoes off’n Arnie Gupples. 

SADE. Um.

Don’t expect the other shoe to drop any time soon. This is as much a rumination about birthday presents as it is an occasion for one of Uncle Fletcher’s stories, yarns that became tangled as soon as he set out to spin them. For all their lazy folksiness, Rhymer’s wireless tappings of the small house have been likened to the Theater of the Absurd. In the estimation of noted storyteller Ray Bradbury, these “conversations” are “more brilliant in their pointlessness, circling around nothing, than anything written since by Pinter or Beckett.” Radio raconteur Jean Shepherd followed up this assessment by calling Rhymer’s series an “authentic picture of American life” while arguing them to be “far closer to Ionesco in spirit than [. . .] to Thornton Wilder.”

That Rhymer inspires such name dropping is due in part to his radiogenic use of the unseen and non-speaking character—the “phantom” of Mrs. Harris. In Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, Mrs. Gamp appeared to be in “constant communication” with a woman whose existence remained a “fearful mystery” and stirred “conflicting rumours,” since none had “ever seen her.”

Giving voices to only four of his creations, Rhymer managed to introduce hundreds of such talked-about “phantoms” into the small house—an imaginary dwelling fit for anyone dwelling on and dwelling in imaginings. Its architecture never changed, despite undergoing countless extensions. Like our memories, it became cluttered and crowded, familiar and bewildering, age-worn yet ever new. Here, conjured up again for our amusement, is the aforementioned Arnie Gupples.

UNCLE FLETCHER. Arnie Gupples give Gwendolyn Yowtch this fancy shoe scraper for her birthday. They were engaged to be married at the time. Well, sir, first shot outa the box Gwendolyn went to scrape some mud off her shoes with that shoe scraper, twisted her ankle, had to have the doctor, got mad, an’ give Arnie the mitten. Two months afterwards she married Art Hungle an’ moved to North Dakota. Arnie felt so bad he quit is job at the shoe store. I heard afterwards he finally married a rich woman that made him learn to play on the cornet. 

VIC, SADE, and RUSH. Uh. 

UNCLE FLETCHER (thoughtfully) Way the world goes, I guess. 

VIC, SADE, and RUSH. Um.

Which concludes another missive from the small house halfway up in the Welsh hills.

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Amelia Earhart Is Late

I could tell things wouldn’t go my way today. The evidence was right there on the carpet, and next to it, with a wet cloth, was I, trying to ameliorate the situation. Jack Russell terrier Montague, who has been our companion for a week now, has finally made his mark. I guess I should be thankful that it was only exhibit number one, not number two. Then was the computer giving me grief by making it impossible for me to access my own homepage. Now, I am no fastidious Phileas Fogg; but such vagaries are the antithesis of an orderly, well-structured existence.

In old-time radio, there was little tolerance for anything amounting to chaos, be it disorder or nothingness. The broadcast schedule was tight, and any deviance from it meant to alienate both the listening public and the corporate sponsors who footed the bills. On this day, 28 June, in 1937, millions of Americans expected to meet on the air the leading lady in it. The famed aviatrix (pictured above, right, next to screen stars Ruth Chatterton and Kay Francis) was scheduled to appear on the Lux Radio Theatre; not as an actress in a play, but as an added attraction, a latter-day Phileas Fogg whose life in flight was the very stuff of melodrama.

Announcer Melville Ruick was forced to offer tuners-in the following apology: “We had hoped at this time to bring you Ms. Amelia Earhart. However, she has not yet completed her sensational around-the-world flight; so, will be heard instead next Monday evening from the Lux Radio Theatre, will she have arrived by that time.”

Ms. Earhart, who was on her way to New Guinea, would not appear in the following broadcast. In fact, a few days after her delay was announced, she would disappear altogether when her plane was lost somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, more than 6000 miles from her destination. During the subsequent Lux broadcast, the last of the season, host Cecil B. DeMille read the following statement:

Somewhere in a distant corner of the South Pacific is Ms. Amelia Earhart, who had planned at this moment to be on the stage of the Lux Radio Theatre. I know everyone hearing me now joins in our hope that the rescuers of Ms. Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, will reach them swiftly and find them safe. I’ve just spoken with George Palmer Putnam, husband of Ms. Earhart at Oakland. Considerably more encouraged than he was yesterday, Mr. Putnam says that after a careful check of all reports, he believes the fliers are on land believes. He adds that they have adequate supplies, which will last Ms. Earhart and Captain Noonan until the arrival of rescue ships or planes.

You might say that Ms. Earhart was done in by radio; radio navigation, that is, which let her down in the clouds. To find her turned out to be the most costly mission yet undertaken by the US government. It was an effort to no avail. Her body vanished into the thin air that had failed to carry her, the air that did not transport her into millions of homes as publicized. The rest, speculation about her reappearance or her being killed by the Japanese, is legend. Within days after her final scheduled appearance on the radio, such speculations would be all over the front pages of the world’s newspapers.

The Front Page—that was the name of the play heard on the Lux Radio Theatre on the night she was originally slated to speak. At hand to lend realism to the role of unscrupulous newshound Hildy Johnson was one of America’s most celebrated and controversial news columnists, Walter Winchell. He was meant to have met his match not only in Hildy but in the living news story invited to relate her own tale. While he performed admirably in the Hecht/MacArthur comedy-drama staple (previously discussed here), the real scoop was beyond his reach.

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Somebody, Please, Stop the Music!; or, There’s a Fly in My Diegesis

Well, I am feeling rather languid. I rarely take naps in the afternoon—but today I’m as supine as Montague, our terrier, who arose this morning with a pronounced limp. A limp, that is, pronouncing his exhaustion. Sunday’s outing on Cardigan Bay has taken its belated toll. Monty has been with us for less than a week now and I am not sure just how much exercise he can handle (or would that be pawdle?). Apparently, rock climbing and sea diving are new disciplines for the less than limber chap. Perhaps, I should not grumble at his temporary torpor. It has been a while since last I worked on my little play. My play for radio, I mean.

Watching the video clips of Montague frolicking on those rocks (clips I am editing for a potential webjournal of Missives from Montague) made me ask a question I had not considered before: the question of music. Pardon my synesthesia, but some of those images sounded as if they had been scored by Bernard Herrmann, the radio composer who went on to make it big in pictures. There was an abandon in the seascape, a pathos in the scene of small dog staring into the foamy waters from the doubtful perch of a slippery rock as a decidedly more daring dog plunged into the surf to leap for a small rubber ball as if his life depended upon it. From Montague’s point of view (or from my perspective imposed upon his), it was exhilaration tempered with anguish, a longing and lingering in a tempest of impulses.

No doubt, I will hear these pictures differently if I look at them again; perhaps they will be altogether soundless. Right now, this muteness would spell indifference. If I don’t hear anything while looking at them I fear that I might have lost the sense of replaying a personal memory, however excessive my indulging in sentiment may seem at presence. Is music theatrical—or, as the name implies, melo-dramatic—while natural sound and stillness are matter of fact? Are silent images any more objective than musically underscored ones? Am I not being manipulated by the picture, an image that seems to supply its own score?

I have been wondering about the soundscape of my play. Supposedly, there is something called extradiegetic sound. That is, music superimposed on a diegesis, the story as experienced by its characters. Now, if my play included a scene in which the old lady (one of the two main characters) played a musical instrument, that strain would be considered diegetic. Everything else—music not heard by the characters, but by the audience only—is understood to be beyond their senses. Sounds clear. But might not the distinction be rather too neat and exclusive?

Now, the old lady won’t be playing any instrument; she might know how to play the organ—and she would most certainly enjoy the harp. Old enough, she might even remember the Merry Macs (pictured above), tune trillers featured on Fred Allen’s radio program. Right now—that is, for the duration of the play as soundstaged—she is too busy playing with that young man, the stranger she has lured into her dark house or, rather, the darkness of her mind. How about the music playing in that mind, unsound but not necessarily unsounded? Might she be scoring the melodrama in which she has cast that strange man? Might the young man, gradually turning suspicious, begin to hear John Carpenter’s theme from Halloween (or some such Psycho score with which he is familiar), just as I mentally soundtracked my pictures of Montague?

Should I play around with such potentialities? Or should I tell myself to stop the music, despite the fact that its effective use has enriched scores of radiogenic performances, including the “glitter” of harps and strings heard on Norman Corwin’s “Odyssey of Runyon Jones”—a fantasy in which a harp, playing a harpy, “holds a conversation” with a boy in search of his late dog?

“Stop the Music”? That, of course, was the name of a popular quiz program often being blamed, and not unjustly, for the slow but certain death of radio playfulness. “Radio is the Marshall Plan with music,” quipped the aforementioned Allen, who, on this day, 27 June, in 1948, tried to stand up against the giveaway shows that prompted millions of his listeners to twist the dial in hopes of getting rewarded for waiting by the telephone: “The slogan of the quiz program is, ‘If you can’t entertain people, give them something.'”

To Allen, and anyone with a keen, uncommon sense for the aural medium, this was a dead giveaway that radio artistry was being slaughtered for commerce, that those in charge of broadcasting were ready to renounce the sounds of the imagination for the common sense of the “ka-ching.”

Considering today’s economy of radio dramatics, which advises against what is conveniently dismissed as old-fashioned or corny in storytelling, I will rely on the music playing in the mind’s ear of the audience. Perhaps, characters and setting will succeed in suggesting the soundtrack I had in mind—theirs and mine.