Category: Radio

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Old-time Radio Primer: C Stands for Crooner

Well, I am mad about music this weekend, or something remotely resembling it. After fifteen years of going without while living in the Eurotrash-resisting US, I finally got another hit of it last spring. The Eurovision Song Contest, I mean, the spectacle (or cultural war) in whose battles have fought the likes of Celine Dion, Olivia Newton-John, Abba, Lulu, Cliff Richards, Katrina and the Waves, and whoever it was first to belt out “Volare.” Thursday night’s semi-finals in Athens were predictably vulgar—short on fabric and long on fanfare, feuds and fanaticism.

Gone are the days in which a song could be sold without a dance, in which lyrics could catch the ear while the eye got a rest, on in which a chart-topper could have legs without the exposure of gams (assets that rarely hurt but failed Kate Ryan in her attempt to step up for Belgium).

So, my Norman Corwin-inspired Old-time Radio Primer, a lexical expedition of yesterday’s airwaves that got underway with definitions of “audience” and “broadcastellan“ will pay tribute today to a craze that is as closely associated with radio as the set itself; to the vocal chords that, if Marion Davies’s experience in Going Hollywood is to be believed, ensnared a generation, made youngsters rebel and schoolmarm’s swoon; in short, the crooners and their tunes.

The crooners seized the advantage of the sonic close-up, the proximity to the microphone that can lend force to a whisper, a subtlety and intimacy hard to achieve in a crowded auditorium. They performed for an unprecedented multitude, but, coming home into parlor or boudoir, could always create the illusion of reaching everyone separately, singly, and, if imagined so by the listener, secretly as well.

Having no voice to match the tones of Rudy Vallée or Bing Crosby—whose “Temptation” still sends me—I will salute the much-mocked crooner with some slight but only slightly irreverent verse I penned for the occasion:

Well-oiled enough to wrestle
And steady enough to grind
It finds a niche to nestle
In the ever so obstinate mind.

Well-groomed enough for cocktails
And flashy enough to blind
It sticks when other crock fails
In the ever so obstinate mind. 

Well-heeled enough to dally
Obliging enough to bind:
The crooner and his sally
On the ever so obstinate mind. 

The crooner and his bally-
hoo,
of the
ever so obstinate
no-chance-you-will-forget
cure’s-not-discovered-yet
match-that-your-mind-has met
(more? how about a bet?) kind.

With the notable exception of Mr. Vallée, crooners quickly came to resent the term, insisting, like Crosby, to be billed or labeled otherwise (a simple “baritone” would do). After all, as much as they were adored by the radio listeners of the 1930s, who fantasized about American idols like Vallée, their “Vagabond Lover,” the crooners were widely dismissed or ridiculed by the press, whose writers might have felt threatened by these newly emerging voices, vocal Valentinos whose low, lavender tones seemed to have so much more erotic sway than can be generated by the most aggressive and boisterous Winchellean journalese.

To the chauvinists of the tabloids, radio had opened a Pandora’s voice box, and what poured out into the air to impregnate the imagination of millions was a provokingly and intimidatingly potent seed, strongly suggesting that such sounds could be mightier than the pen.

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What Those Who Remembered Forgot: Cy Feuer (1911-2006) on the Air

Well, the marquee lights of New York City’s playhouses will be dimmed tonight at 8 PM (EST) in commemoration of Tony Award-winning theatrical producer and composer Cy Feuer, who passed away this week at the age of 95. Active for well over half a century on Broadway and in Hollywood, Feuer produced shows like Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, wrote original scores for a great number of popular movies (including the much loved Adventures of Captain Marvel [1941], and served as musical director for numerous other motion picture projects.

I first heard the name Cy Feuer, who published his memoir in 2003, while listening to recordings of a late-1940s series of radio thrillers titled Escape. So, as I have done before in tributes to Shelley Winters and Don Knotts, I will provide a footnote to the obituaries you might find elsewhere.

Escape presented adaptations of adventure yarns, fantastic tales, and horror stories by noted authors like Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Among the stories rendered more exciting or eerie to the ear by Feuer, who composed the music as well as conducted the orchestra, were Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” John Collier’s “Evening Primrose,” and—the stand-out of the series—Carl Stephenson’s “Leiningen Versus the Ants.”

The musical accompaniment for such high melodrama was generally less noticeable or noteworthy than the sound effects, and more often incidental rather than integral; unlike the terrifying animal sounds conceived and created by the Escape sound artists, music was employed mainly to set scenes or enhance atmosphere. It is only when you pay attention to those bridges and screens of sound that you appreciate them as being of some consequence.

Feuer—whose work was also featured on the Ford Theater program, the episodic thriller Case, Crime Photographer, and the short-lived adventure serial Shorty Bell, starring Mickey Rooney—was not given much of a chance to turn musical sounds into characters; like fellow Escape alumni Ivan Ditmars, Leith Stevens, and Wilbur Hatch, he had largely to content himself with producing the odd note to prop up or propel the plot, however odd or ordinary.

In order to fulfill their weekly assignments, radio composers commonly recycled stock music (like the musical crutches handed to The Lone Ranger when he came to television, for the supply of which Feuer is now being credited). Perhaps this is what compelled former radio composer Bernard Herrmann to emerge from the airwaves by making his music speak for and draw attention to itself, refusing to let film scores—such as the intense ones he created for Vertigo and Obsession—go under by pounding them into the viewer’s consciousness so as to let them take center stage in their minds.

On at least one occasion, however, Feuer was involved in something a trifle more ambitious, when, on 25 August 1946, he was called upon to conduct the orchestra assembled for the Columbia Workshop. Billed as “radio’s foremost laboratory of writing and production techniques,” the Workshop produced the experimental play “The Path and the Door” by newcomer Les Crutchfield (previously mentioned here), which boasted a score by modernist composer George Antheil, who had never before worked in or for broadcasting.

To intrigue audiences, radio producers were more likely to invite artists new or altogether alien to the medium, rather than permitting the reliable Girls and Guys Friday of the business to make a name for themselves. Making his escape from the radio (and B-movie thriller) mill, Cy Feuer eventually earned such distinction on the Great White Way, which will appear somewhat less dazzling during tonight’s 60-second salute to a man who managed to “Succeed in Business” these past six decades.

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On This Day in 1938: Americans Are Invited to "Stump the Experts"

Well, it was time to close the sixth broadcastellan poll, if only to devise another in which you are herewith invited to participate. So, what, in my view, has been radio’s chief contribution to American life in the pre-TV era? There is some validity to all of the proposed replies (which I would not have bothered to list otherwise); and even though the statement that the medium “promoted clear diction and elocution” was endorsed by none, it was not meant to be facetious. Depending so much on the spoken word, radio producers certainly had more respect for it than today’s entertainers, artists whose mumblings are the Brad Pitt-falls of visual storytelling. And “Something else”? It might very well be broadcasting’s influence on the nation’s musical tastes, radio having served not only as an “everyman’s theater and public library,” but as a virtual concert hall.

Polls are nearly as fascinating to me as they are frustrating. I, for one, prefer not to give straight answers; I much rather respond or challenge, preferably after some reflection. The kind of question that can be answered decisively—the kind that requires one particular, supposedly right reply—is either unnecessary or suspect.

Nor can I rely upon my memory as a fail-safe system for the ready retrieval of data, pieces of trivia with which I’d rather not clutter up my mind. So, it is with some trepidation that I note a significant anniversary in American broadcasting: the quiz program Information, Please!, which had its radio premiere on this day, 17 May, in 1938 (and not, as the History Channel website will have you know, back in 1930).

Information, Please! was billed as a celebrity quiz program on which everyday citizens asked the questions that experts from the fields of literature, science, motion pictures or politics were called upon to answer. Noted guest panelists to appear on the show during its first two seasons (along with regulars like the aforementioned Oscar Levant) include movie director Alfred Hitchcock, playwright Moss Hart, as well as authors Ben Hecht, Rex Stout, Louis Bromfield, and Christopher Morley.

Here are some of the questions raised during the first program:

“Correct the following line and name its author. And the line is: ‘In the spring a young man’s fancy always turns to thoughts of love.'”

“In what well-known symphony did the composer include a chord in order to awaken a sleeping audience?”

“How is immigration to the United States from the following nations restricted: England, Brazil, China?”

“Kyosti Kallio is a Greek Island, a dictator of Peru, President of Finland, or the name of a Japanese political party?”

Unlike the quiz and giveaway programs of late 1940s—which had an even more devastating effect on the production of dramatic entertainment than the reality show format has on today’s television storytelling—Information, Please did not depend for its success on shrewdly engendered greed and promises of instant gratification, whether experienced by the participant or felt by the listener. This does not mean, however, that the instincts worked upon by the comparatively sophisticated Information, Please were any less basic.

“Now, folks,” moderator Clifton Fadiman greeted the audience, “any education that you and I may pick up for the next half hour or so is all to the good; but beyond that we’re out simply to play this as a game and have some fun at it.” And the “fun” of Information, Please! was not so much the thrill of getting it right, but of witnessing others of supposedly “towering intellect” (as Fadiman put it, mockingly) struggle and fail to meet the public’s challenge. To “stump the expert” was the objective, which was nothing less than an exercise in ridiculing the artist and the intellectual in a joyous vindication of mediocrity.

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“Boom Bang a Bang”: Mae West, Eurovision, and the Re-education of Charlie McCarthy

Well, it’s one of those drab and dispiriting whatever-happened-to-summer kind of days on which even morale-boosting Carmen Miranda might have thrown in the technicolored towel. Yesterday, the house was shrouded in mist; and now, as if to mock the recently announced drought warning and water restrictions, the slow-moving clouds across the Welsh hills have assumed a washed-out shade of gray that looks about as cheerful as the fur of a middle-aged rat trying to waddle off with your last piece of cheese. Not that there was any more merriment to be had last night when I lowered the blind to screen the less-than-classic Mae West vehicle The Heat’s On (1943).

Watching West’s caricature of back-alley “come hither” cut the rug with dithering Victor Moore, whose hairpiece had just fallen off while hers remained as conspicuous as a comb-over, had all the gayety of a fancy dress party at a retirement home in a northern suburb of Minsk.

To be sure, West was already past her prime in the mid-1930s, an obsolescence determined not so much by biology than by the enforcement of the Hollywood Production Code, the same code that made similarly cartoonish Betty Boop lower her skirts. Such strictures notwithstanding, West continued to keep censors busy by causing the greatest sex scandal on US radio, when, in 1937, she impersonated the original lady Eve in a Garden of Eden sketch presented on the Chase and Sanborn Hour (as previously mentioned here). West’s delivery was so suggestive that she was subsequently deemed too hot for radio.

Now, the star of the Chase and Sanborn Hour, ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy, got away with considerably more verbal tease and naughtiness than anyone else on the air. Saved by his image—the picture of a wooden chap on Bergen’s knee, that is—Charlie didn’t have to worry much about his reputation. Without such widely circulated likenesses, Charlie would undoubtedly have come across as a rather more adult toy—a stunted youth Peter-Pandering to the randy fantasies of the frustrated heterosexual middle-aged male.

While The Heat’s On made a farce out of censorship in the theaters, Charlie was amusing himself with many a leading lady of the silver screen—and a few misleading ones. On this day, 16 May, in 1943, for instance, Charlie’s heart went a-racing at the sight of Claudette Colbert, who invited the lucky log to spend his summer on her island farm. (At this point, I usually refer readers to my collection of Colbert memorabilia; but one of the finest sets of Claudette images are now on display at the glamour sanctuary known as Trouble in Paradise, a treat not to be missed.)

Charlie was soon disillusioned, however, when it became clear that Ms. Colbert had something other than romance in mind. He was to get busy on the farm, rather than enjoying the fruits without labor. There was a war on, and the Pinocchio among Romeos had to learn to be a little less selfish and irresponsible. As a piece of carved wood, he was certainly expendable—unless his antics could both delight and teach. After all, even old Victor Moore was seen promoting Victory Gardens in The Heat’s On, while Hazel Scott—the only performer to get The Heat up to temperature—tickled the ivories in an attempt to appease disenfranchised African-Americans, racial harmony being essential to the war effort.

On the same evening Charlie learned that flirting with Colbert was futile, Jack Benny’s valet Rochester took center stage singing a number from Cabin in the Sky on his boss’s program; meanwhile, Benny’s rival Fred Allen tried to sell a pan-American ditty to singing sensation Frank Sinatra. Like pleasure-seeking Charlie McCarthy, America’s musical entertainers had all become recruits in the fight against the Axis.

A decidedly more frivolous war will be waged all over Europe this weekend, when the Eurovision Song Contest, responsible for tunes like “Volare,” “Waterloo” and the abovementioned “Boom Bang a Bang” (also the title of a Eurovision documentary to air on UK television tonight) gets underway for the fifty-first time. Assault weapons include rap from the UK, Country from Germany, and Death Metal from Finland. It’s the showdown of the year on European television; and the US, slow to catch on for once, is planning to copy the concept.

And why not? As Shakespeare might have put it (had he not said otherwise): “If music be the [fuel of war], play on; / Give [us] excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.”

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Many Happy Reruns: Joseph Cotten, Radio Actor

Well, I am finally done with Cousin Henry, the novel I was reading, soaking, drying and pressing, however intermittently, these past few weeks. I tend to read in the bathtub, you see, and my books get a fair dousing now and then. Cousin Henry is one of the shorter novels of prolific 19th-century author Anthony Trollope; and even though Trollopeans—those singing a Trollopaean to the less sentimental or melodramatic works of Victorian fiction—generally agree that Trollope’s shorter works are not nearly as satisfying as his enormous three-deckers, I thought Cousin Henry to be an engrossing portrait of a man riddled by guilt—a man too weak to enjoy the fruits of his own wickedness and too wicked to surrender them. Now that I have done with Cousin Henry, I might as well pay tribute to the man who played Uncle Charlie. Joseph Cotten, that is, who was born on this day, 15 May, in 1905.

Sure, I can relate most anything or anyone to radio; but in the case of Cotten, there is no need to stretch. Not that it would be difficult to highlight the wireless connections of some of the other notable film and theater personalities born on this day, a list including actress Constance Cummings, who was heard in a radio adaptation of Alice Duer Miller’s narrative poem The White Cliffs on the anthology drama series Romance (22 May 1945); Clifton Fadiman, editor and book critic, best known to American radio 1940s listeners as the moderator of the literary quiz program Information, Please; and playwright-novelist Max Frisch, whose Biedermann und die Brandstifter (Firebugs) was originally written for radio back in 1952.

Joseph Cotten was a radio actor, first if perhaps not foremost. He started out in radio drama in the mid-1930s, acting in a play produced by the American School of the Air, during the production of which he met and befriended Orson Welles, who subsequently gave Cotten his big screen break by casting him in Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. On the air, Cotten was heard on programs like the aforementioned Romance, on the thriller anthology Suspense, the patriotic Cavalcade of America, and the Lux Radio Theater (taking Cary Grant’s part in Penny Serenade, for instance), as well as being featured on Welles’s own showcases, the Mercury Theatre on the Air and its commercial re-establishment, the Campbell Playhouse.

Radio listeners had several opportunities to hear Cotten on his birthday, namely in the 15 May 1949 production of “Breakdown,” as soundstaged by the Prudential Family Hour of Stars and a “Salute to Eugene O’Neill,” broadcast on 15 May 1954. Undoubtedly the least of these occasions was “Halfway to Reno,” a romantic trifle that aired on 15 May 1947 as part of the Radio Reader’s Digest. The play was an adaptation of one of the stories from the pages of Reader’s Digest magazine; it involves a husband and father who falls in love with another woman and seeks a divorce—until he is reminded of the wonders of parenthood, of playing ball with and reading to his son. It is a thoroughly undramatic play, a glossy treatment of marital discord, prefixed by the reminder that, in 1946, one out of three marriages ended in divorce.

Interviewed (that is, reading the script prepared for him) during the introduction to the pay, Cotten assured radio listeners that he was happily married. As I learned today, flicking through an edition of Hollywood Album, he claimed to owe his acting career to one Lenore Kipp, his first wife, who played the piano Cotten was pounding during a local theatre production of “Paris Bound” as far away from Broadway as Florida. When Ms. Kipp said “goodbye” go to New York, Cotten followed and eventually married her.

Most Victorian novels, of course, are concerned with matrimony. Comedies are said to end in marriage, while tragedy begin with it. Trollope, at least, had little interest in the conventional happy ending when he penned his Cousin Henry—a story about a secreted will and its ultimate detection—which concludes refreshingly unsentimental: “As any little interest which this tale may possess has come rather from the heroine’s material interests than from her love,—as it has not been, so to say, a love story,—the reader need not follow the happy pair absolutely to the altar.”

Cotten’s voice had a rough edge, an edge wasted on romances going smoothly. Right now, I am picturing him as the frustrated and disillusioned husband in Niagara, a spouse “Halfway to Reno” making a detour to those deadly falls.

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Many Happy Reruns: Katharine Hepburn and Leslie Charteris

Well, I prefer doing it slowly, in narrow, dusty aisles, surrounded by strangers. Browsing for second-hand books, I mean. Nowadays, it is so much easier, and often cheaper, to pick up that elusive volume by going online, rather than making a day of it in out-of-the-way bookstores, antique shops, or flea markets. I’m not giving up on that experience, though—on the thrill of the hunt and the triumph of the catch. Hay-on-Wye, where I went yesterday, is the very place for such a literati safari. It is a tiny Welsh village with a population of about 1500; but its narrow streets are lined with about forty bookstores, some of which specialize in Hollywood cinema and crime fiction. That’s where Hepburn and Charteris, both born on this day in 1907, will come in . . . eventually.

Yesterday, I came home with a little something for my Claudette Colbert collection (pictured), with another copy of Norman Corwin’s Thirteen by Corwin (a fine one with dust jacket, previously owned by the BBC research department), and a title from the Directors Guild of America Oral History series, an interview with television pioneer Worthington Miner.

Prior to entering television in the late 1930s (yes, NBC did have a television schedule back then, even though only a few thousand Americans owned a set), Miner had been a theatrical producer in the 1930s; and, in March 1937, his leading lady was none other than Ms. Hepburn, who starred in an adaptation of Jane Eyre (previously discussed here).

According to Miner,

Katie was a wonderful Jane; it was her cup of tea, and she sparkled. But we had a dreadful Rochester and an even worse last act. [. . .] As a result, we decided to book it on the road for a few months and not risk bringing it into New York. For weeks on end it battled the elements, storms and tornados, floods and disasters, without an empty seat in the house. Katie’s name was already a prodigious drawn in the hinterlands. Jane Eyre made a tidy profit, but the kudos was nil for any of us, even Katie herself.

Years, later, Miner was involved in securing the rights Long Day’s Journey Into Night for another producer, with whom Miner strongly disagreed about Hepburn in the role of Mary Tyrone. Miner believed that Hepburn—a “mercurial, unpredictable performer”—was utterly “wrong” for the part. In the “right” role (Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, for instance, which she reprised in several radio productions) she was “incomparable, a class unto herself.” When miscast, however, she could be “aggressively, monstrously bad.” To me, Undercurrent comes to mind; Hepburn was just not cut out to be the victim, even when permitted to fight back.

Someone very much angered by Hollywood casting was Saint creator Leslie Charteris, who shares Hepburn’s birthday. I have mentioned previously (and have been corrected on some muddled facts by Saint expert Burl Barer), that Charteris was not at all pleased when George Sanders took over the role of his Robin Hood of Modern Crime. He much preferred Louis Hayward, who had portrayed Simon Templar in The Saint in New York.

Now, one of the writers involved in adapting Charteris’s novel for the screen was Irwin Shaw, whose play Bury the Dead Miner had produced on Broadway and whose final radio play, “Supply and Demand,” he directed for the Columbia Workshop in the spring of 1937, when Hepburn was touring with Jane Eyre.

Perhaps I am overly fond of such six-degrees-of-separation games; but with some Miner assistance, I could almost send Hepburn and Charteris on a dinner date, discussing a role that might have been swell as a follow-up for Bringing Up Baby: a sophisticated screwball-mystery of The Thin Man variety.

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Old-time Radio Primer: B Stands for broadcastellan

Well, before I was being whisked off for a daytrip in observation of one of those red-letter days on which we are expected to celebrate the gradual approach of our inevitable demise, I subjected myself to a rather probing interview, conducted by the eminent if irascible radio reporter Wally Windchill. Are we ready, Mr. and Mrs. North America, and all the ships at sea?

As the laundry basket said to the ironing board: let’s go to press.

Windchill: You call yourself “broadcastellan.”

broadcastellan: Yes. Only in the blogosphere, mind you.

Windchill: I get it, a surfname; but what does it stand for?

broadcastellan: Well, it all started about a year ago, when, one quiet afternoon . . .

Windchill: Please, we are pressed for time.

broadcastellan: Sorry. The handle is meant to suggest that I am writing about broadcasting and that I consider myself a keeper of records, one who manages a neglected vault of half-forgotten radio treasures. A castellan in the castles on the air.

Windchill: So, it’s another one of your awful puns, basically.

broadcastellan: A pun, at any rate.

Windchill: Never mind the rate; it’s cheap. But about radio. As your first and only reviewer on one of those traffic generator sites put it so succinctly in his single-word comment: “Why?”

broadcastellan: Well, I am very much intrigued by aural drama as an alternative to visual entertainment; and, having written a dissertation on the potentialities and shortcomings of these stories in sound, as they played out in the minds of millions during the 1930s and ’40s, I thought I had something to share that . . .

Windchill: You don’t do short sentence, do you?

broadcastellan: Not true! I even “do” incomplete ones. On occasion.

Windchill: Cute. But, about radio. Why the old stuff?

broadcastellan: Radio drama has a fascinating history. It’s a tradition that, in the US at least, has been all but abandoned in favor of television.

Windchill: And that’s bad?

broadcastellan: I think so, yes.

Windchill: But why American radio? You live in England, don’t you?

broadcastellan: Wales, actually.

Windchill: As if anyone outside the UK could tell the difference. Why not British radio, then? I hear it’s still going strong over there.

broadcastellan: I am just not that impressed by what’s being done nowadays. Back in the 1930s and ’40s, radio was it, not fringe culture. The voices, the sound effects, the storytelling—the commercials. It’s the showmanship I admire, the theatricality. And nobody does showmanship better than the Americans. What I love particularly about US radio is its strong connection to old Hollywood; hearing those great stars. Everyone did radio in the 1930s and ’40s—everyone, except Garbo, who very nearly did. They don’t have stars nowadays; just celebrities.

Windchill: I see.

broadcastellan: Besides, I didn’t grow up with those voices. In Germany, where I’m from, movies are dubbed. Radio taught me a lot about the sound of American English, about idiom and jargon.

Windchill: Not that you got it down. Some queer diction you’ve got going on there, Mr. “broadcastellan.” So, you’re going to keep exposing others to your . . . radiology? Not a lot of people out there care, you know.

broadcastellan: I am aware of that, but undaunted by the general indifference. Yes, I’ll keep on blogging. My first anniversary is coming up, on 22 May.

Windchill: I guess we’re going to read all about that in a few days, then.

broadcastellan: Probably. Perhaps we could do another interview.

Windchill: It would have to be a slow newsday.

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On This Day in 1942: Marlene Dietrich Receives Some Sound Advice

Well, they aren’t quite done with me yet. Yesterday’s remarks about barbarity and journalism, that is. The problem with expository writing, when approached in the conventional, western sense, is that essays are expected to make ideas fall into place even when the subject is utterly chaotic. This is the very paper logic I was going on about only to get trapped in it. There is something troublesome about getting frustrated by a long-winded “I don’t know” when a purposeful “That’s that” should strike us as so much more suspicious.

Anyway. Ending my day with the customary late-night movie, I was all prepared for a smallscreening of The Bad and the Beautiful, which aired last week on UK channel BBC2. Instead, I never got past the film to which it had been hastily and haphazardly appended: I Cover the Waterfront. So, I quite inadvertently—but rather fittingly—followed up The Front Page (and Are You Listening?) with another sordid tale of big news and small scruples. Like Hildy Johnson, no-name reporter Joe Miller (Ben Lyon) is torn between a girl and a story; but in this case, the girl (Claudette Colbert) is the ticket to that byline-worthy scoop—and the determined newshound manages to get them both, even if it means doing away with his sweetheart’s father. How’s that for a lucky break!

Now, I’m not sure whether it was either a matter of luck or much of a break when, on this day, 10 May, in 1942, radio comedian Fred Allen announced: “[T]onight we have a scoop. One of Hollywood’s greatest stars.” The great one was German-born Marlene Dietrich, a leading lady willing to work hard—but being none-too successful—at remaining a favorite in the public’s eye. Stepping behind the microphone to prove her American patriotism was one of those attempts at salvaging her endangered career.

“You mean you brought me here to do a show just for you?” Dietrich confronted Allen, showing herself offended at his unpatriotic selfishness. “Where are the troops?” Dutifully pointing out that the star had been “touring the country for the Hollywood Victory Committee, giving shows at the various army camps and naval training stations,” Allen showed his appreciation by offering his guest “some fatherly advice about [her] movie career.” It wasn’t an offer the hits-missing actress could afford to ignore.

Dietrich assured Allen that she was perfectly “happy out in Hollywood,” to which the comedian replied: “Oh, but how long can it last, with those rough-and-tumble pictures you’ve been making?” During the shoot of her latest picture, The Lady Is Willing (released two-and-a-half months prior to the broadcast), Dietrich had tripped over some props and injured her leg; but Allen was referring to the star’s online slappings, administered by leading men like James Stewart, Broderick Crawford, George Raft and Edward G. Robinson.

“Give up pictures in Hollywood, Marlene. Come to radio,” Allen suggested, where you “can get beaten up and kicked around [. . .] and not even feel it”—the sound effects man “does everything.” Some noisy demonstrations of the soundman’s business followed. “Radio is wonderful,” Dietrich agreed and was promptly handed a script for a radio serial titled “Brave Betty Birnbaum.”

“Your part starts on page twenty-eight,” Allen informed his guest, who flicked through it in bewilderment: “But the whole script is only thirty pages.” “Well, I know,” Allen explained, “the first twenty-seven pages are a commercial.” At least the soundman was at hand when Dietrich was called upon to kiss her less-than-dashing co-star. “That’s radio, Fred,” she summed up her lesson.

Luckily for Dietrich, the big screen offers did not run out during the 1940s. Only a decade later, when she was getting rather too unsteady on her celebrated gams to keep kicking her screen partners around in scenes of rough-and-tumble glamour, she heeded Allen’s advice at last. It wasn’t exactly an act of desperation, considering that she was in the company of many Hollywood A-listers who found syndicated radio drama to be lucrative and convenient.

Still sultry and seductive in her 50s, Dietrich worked the magic of her vocal chords in the episodic adventure series Café Istanbul and Time for Love, proving that, with a little help from the soundman, it’s never too late for radio romance.

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On This Day in 1948: Radio Listeners Are Offered Free Delivery of "The Front Page"

Well, it sure was fodder for the tabloids. The case of the German cannibal, I mean, which resulted in a retrial and a life-sentence for the remaining party of one decidedly unconventional dinner date. Now, the so-called civilized world deems itself too far above bestiality to grant citizens the right to end their own lives as they see fit or to lose themselves completely in a consensual act of consuming passion. Widely exempt from the consequent criminalization of cruelty—which outlaws the animalistic it can never truly root out—remain the barbarism of capital punishment and the bane of the yellow press.

I don’t often quote journalist-turned-novelist Theodore Dreiser, mainly because his prose is among the most hideous ever to get past an editor; but this line, ripped from his Sister Carrie, is worth considering: “Our civilisation is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.”

It seems a perfectly reasonable attack on civilization; yet it is a line of attack defined by and conforming with the standards of the society it questions: a state of humanity based on the assumption that being human should mean being reasonable, the supposition that society should strive to rid individuals of their impulses and emotions—a project altogether unreasonable.

The paper logic of journalism—those well-formed, epigrammatic answers to monstrously complex questions—is as common and comforting as it is dangerous. Journalism itself is not the product of reason, but caters to the instinctual from which it derives: a curiosity at times so mean and perverse that it must be rationalized away by declaring the imagination-fertilizer being spread to constitute “news” or “information” in the public interest.

The famous American play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, a comedy as poignant today as it was back in 1928, addresses this barbarism of the press, a force so powerful that it has been known to incite wars for the purpose of reporting them.

Adapted for the rival medium of radio by noted American critic, editor, and playwright Gilbert Seldes, “The Front Page” was spread out anew, if somewhat reduced in size, on this day, 9 May, in 1948, when it was reproduced by the Ford Theater, a venue named after its sponsor and not to be confused with Ford’s Theater, the center of cultural refinement that once was the site of a Presidential assassination.

Seldes’s edition of The Front Page makes good use of the aural medium by confronting listeners with the sound of the gallows being readied for an execution, a sound overheard in a newsroom whose occupants are paid to cash in on the event.

To those in public office, the timely execution of a cop killer is politically more advantageous than any probings into the mind of the convict. To a journalist like Hildy Johnson—a man torn between the mating instinct and the reasonable goal of making a name for himself—such a hanging not only spells good news, but excitement too great to be traded in for the state of matrimony.

The Front Page is an unflattering portrayal of the newspaper racket; but, unlike Dreiser’s brand of naturalism, it does not simplify what is complex by exposing societal corruptions only to subject them to the either-or morality of didactic fictions that aim at telling us how things are to teach us how they ought to but could not be.

Comedies and melodramas—especially plays that seem aesthetically flawed and morally ambiguous because they are as muddled as our everyday—can be instructive in their willful disorder or bewildering raggedness.

I was reminded of this last night while watching Are You Listening?, a 1932 MGM melodrama in which a young writer gets tangled up in the wireless game, the broadcast medium that offers him employment but that eventually contributes to his being hunted like a social menace and convicted of manslaughter. We, the spectators, are the only witnesses to his supposed crime—but we are sentenced, after promises of romance and gaiety, to follow the fall and disgrace of some latter-day Caleb Williams, an outcast hunted by media hounds interested in something less than justice, driven to the chase by nothing more than a desire to profit from—to feed rather than satisfy—our hunger for the sensational.

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On This Day in 1949: Helen Hayes Broadcasts Mixed Messages to Mothers, Midgets, and Miners

Well, it sure seems a lot smaller these days! The globe, I mean. Picture it, if you will: Wales, a secluded cottage, last Saturday. There they stood, unannounced and unexpected, in the middle of our garden: three strangers from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of these visitors claimed that her great-grandmother used to live in this very house some 150 years ago. Notwithstanding her disappointment at the many changes to the original interior (could we not have done without plumbing for the sake of authenticity?) we all had a nice chat, swapped stories and pictures. Turns out, Wales and Pittsburgh have more in common besides a long history of coal mining.

As is often the case in my daily diggings-up of US radio drama—and my stubborn attempts at relating the out-of-date to our present everyday—I was reminded of this connection as I browsed through my library of radio recordings. I came across a peculiar play called “No Room for Peter Pan.” It aired over CBS in the US on this day, 8 May, in 1949, on the Electric Theater, an anthology drama series starring the celebrated stage actress Helen Hayes. The Electric Theater—named after its sponsor, America’s Electric Light and Power Companies—was staged before the “live studio audience” Hayes had expressed herself to be so glad to do without; but the laughter of the crowd gathered to watch the performers may well have been genuine, given the queer situation in which Hayes, playing an Irish coalminer’s wife in Colliertown, Pennsylvania, found herself.

What to do when your son is determined to become a miner, work you know to be not only dirty but dangerous? You’d rather not have him grow up to go below ground before his time, even if it means that your son won’t grow at all. How lucky is this troubled mother to discover that her son, Danny, is a “midget” or, as the learned physician from Pittsburgh states in his official diagnosis, a “Peter Pan dwarf” (a term better suited for lily and aster varieties). So, to keep the blossoming lad out of the mines and “above the ground, as the Lord intended,” his loving parent vows to turn him into a sideshow attraction: “He’ll be a midget in a circus.”

Danny catches the eye of Mr. Bailey, owner of the Greatest Show on Earth, who is only too glad to take him on. Just then, the protective mother learns that Danny may yet continue to grow, if given the proper medication. To keep him out of the mines, she refuses to let Danny receive the prescribed injections. So, Danny is forced to tour with the circus and learns to like it. He becomes rather disdainful of his poor family home, but is soon cured of his airs when he learns about a mining disaster in which he, as a kid small enough to reach the trapped colliers, may prove his manliness.

The shot of self-esteem is followed by Danny’s first injection. Trouble is, Danny is fearful of the “dirty needle.” His mother is at hand with another sage piece of advice: “You don’t want to stay a midget, do you, lad? You don’t want to give up your growth for the amusement of lazy people. Maybe in the mines you’ll be in danger, but you’ll be living with dignity, like a man.” Seems mom has grown up at last, ready to let her son go and move on—up in height and down in the mines—as he had desired it all along. As if he hadn’t proved his worth already as a life-saving pint-sizer, doing as his mother bade him.

This play (a script of which may be found in the collection of radio and television composer Wladimir Selinksy, at the New York Public Library) sent out some confusing messages about physical individuality, social conformity, and the nature of life; but, being broadcast on the second Sunday in May, it nevertheless improved on the tired sentiments found on those cards that will give postal workers another backache this weekend.

Meanwhile, unexpected visitors notwithstanding, I’ll be back out in the garden, watching things grow or wilt under my haphazard care, pondering the challenge of arriving at just the right moment to heed advice or ignore it.