Category: Radio

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Blogging Troubles and British Treats

I was all prepared to talk about today’s television and radio offerings in Britain, something I don’t often do. A new cable TV channel is being launched tomorrow: More4. Of chief interest to me, I have to admit, is that it will air Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, albeit yesterdaily. I’ve also been following this, the second season of the X Factor, which is the only British must-see for me this fall. I have commented on this improvement on American Idol (or Pop Idol) before in this journal. The at times tedious auditions are finally over and the contestants are going head to head each Saturday evening in live telecasts. I don’t have a favorite yet, other than judge and promoter Sharon Osborne. Last season, which I only caught midway (after moving here from the US), it was the wonderfully overwrought Rowetta who, it appears, has become somewhat of a queer icon.

What else was on yesterday? Well, there was Margaret Rutherford, again, on BBC 4, in the delightfully wacky high school farce The Happiest Days of Your Life. And then there was that atrocious documentary about Mae West last Friday on BBC 4 radio, part of a new series of talks celebrating Great Lives.

I have never heard a more off-the-mark impression of that glamorous dame, whose comic allure was so effectively evoked by the stage comedy Dirty Blonde.  The discussion about her conducted by the two supposed experts was tiresomely trite. I had hope for some clips from her films, or for a mention at least of Oboler’s “Adam and Eve” sketch, which got West banned from US radio. I mean, if you’re on radio, talk radio already!

I was prepared to expound on any of these viewing and listening experiences until I realized that many of my prior journal entries were littered with symbols and marks that rendered them, if not illegible, so at least highly unprofessional. It seems that my m-dashes—to which I am partial—are metastasizing into something ghastly once they are being left here for a few weeks.

How irksome this is to someone who knows little about html but makes an effort to adhering to the code of the standard English I cannot begin to express (I guess language fails me there, after all). I have made a few corrections, but some of the previous posts are still in shambles, I fear.

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On This Day in 1950: Our Miss Brooks Tackles Climate Change, Global Media, and Communism

Well, I know, today marks the anniversary of Ozzie and Harriet, whose on-the-air adventures were first heard on this day in 1944. Since a transcription of that broadcast is not known to be extant—and since I am not particularly partial to the exploits of the Nelson clan—I paid a visit to Walter and Harriet instead. High school sweethearts Walter Denton and Harriet Conklin, that is, and their peerless teacher, Our Miss Brooks. On this day, 8 October 1950, Miss Brooks got into quite a “tizzy”—”And I don’t tizz easily,” she assures us.

Being temporarily left in charge of Madison High School after its principal, the irascible Mr. Conklin, is delayed at home awaiting a furniture delivery, Miss Brooks finds herself dealing with a potentially serious crisis: a hurricane with winds up to 150 MPH is fast approaching. At least, that is the news according to the weather bulletin she has picked up with the radio receiver Walter built for his Electrical Shop class.

The bad weather has been on everyone’s mind that morning. “Our climatic conditions are undergoing a slow but steady change,” heartthrob biology teacher Mr. Boynton informed her earlier. “It’s something of a meteorological phenomenon, but do you realize that at this very moment the equatorial belt is slipping slowly southward?” “Well, I’ll turn my back. You tighten it up,” she permitted herself to quip. “It’s entirely possible that in the future our area may be engulfed in icy arctic weather,” Mr. Boynton continued his lecture. Of course, that would take about 10,000 years. “Good, I should be finished knitting my mittens by then,” Miss Brooks sighed in relief.

And now the weather report! “Mr. Boynton said our climate was changing, but this is ridiculous.” Or is it? As acting principal, Miss Brooks decides to follow the advisory and closes the school. Together with Walter, Harriet, and Mr. Boynton, she rushes to the principal’s home to make her report. In the fever of excitement, it escaped all who listened that the bulletin came from “downtown Bombay, India.”

A no-nonsense academic, Mr. Conklin is none too pleased about Miss Brooks’s rash actions, dismissing the reports about the advancing storm as “unmitigated jabberwocky.” After all, he reasons, “How could a hurricane possibly get this far into the United States?” “Smugglers?” Miss Brooks dares to suggest. Yet when Walter turns on the receiver he has brought along, the advisory hits home. Listeners are being told to “board up all windows,” preferably by “using bamboo shoots.”

Convinced by the urgency of the newsflash, Mr. Conklin agrees to take the precautions deemed necessary and the storm watchers are heard cheerfully and noisily chopping up his brand-new garden furniture.

It is only after the damage has been done that the advisories are beginning to sound rather peculiar: “lash down your ox carts,” the radio voice cautions. “Disperse all natives to the hills” and “Be sure to tether your elephants carefully.” The mistake becomes painfully obvious to all. Now it is no longer the hurricane that poses a threat to Our Miss Brooks. It is the frightful wrath of Osgood Conklin. She’d better watch after her priceless porcelain (pictured above)!

I doubt whether such a light-hearted approach to deadly weather phenomena would go over well these days. Now, as I confessed previously, I had a similar experience misreading a radio report about a natural disaster when I came across a fake bulletin on the Jeremy Vine Show. And, as is often the case, the prospect of such horrors heading one’s own way was taken in differently than reports about far-off disasters.

Miss Brooks expressed no concern either for the “natives” in India who hovered in their wind-whipped huts. The weather was really not perceived as that much of a national or global threat back then. In 1950, that threat, Westerners were made to believe, was communism.

Now, Miss Brooks had something to say about communism, or about the dangers faced by those who interpreted their granted freedoms too freely. When subjected to a particularly dull meteorological observation by Mr. Boynton, the hunk oblivious to her charms, she sneers: “You’ll never be investigated for that remark.”

In this one innocuous line, Our Miss Brooks writer Al Lewis communicates the fears of radio artists who found themselves subject to persecution by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Yet as soon as she had hung up her schoolteacher costume, actress Eve Arden was asked to step before the microphone once more to address all those “concerned about the threat of communism.”

As if in fear of being “investigated for that [aforementioned] remark,” she urged listeners to join the “crusade for freedom” headed by General Lucius Clay and to support . . . Radio Free Europe.

What if Walter Denton had picked up Radio Free Europe on his receiver that rainy October morning? What if Mr. Conklin had dared to make his president responsibility for hurricane emergency mismanagement? What if . . . Well, no such controversy on Our Miss Brooks—but don’t call those dated radio sitcoms apolitical. Tune in some time, won’t you, for some unexpected lessons in American history.

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How the Blind Medium Immaterialized Coward’s Blithe Spirit

I guess I am still too wrapped up in US culture to have given British cinema its due. So, last weekend, while on a DVD shopping spree in Manchester, I made an attempt to rectify this cultural lopsidedness. Among my purchases was a copy of David Lean’s Blithe Spirit. Or is it more appropriate to call it Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, even after a noted director has . . . transubstantiated it? Generally, stage plays are treated like the brainchildren of their authors, while motion pictures are attributed to their directors. How many classic films could you trace back to their screenwriter parentage without resorting to the Internet Movie Database?

Anyway, it is an irksome inconsistency I grappled with when I needed to decide how to present and define radio plays for my dissertation (the aforementioned “Etherized Victorians”). Far from being a dead issue, the question arose anew when I followed up my screening of Blithe Spirit (1945) by taking in two radio disincarnations of Coward’s 1941 play.

The first one, soundstaged for Everything for the Boys on 16 May 1944, preceded the world premier of Lean’s feature by a year. Its adaptor was none other than Arch Oboler, probably the biggest name—and not the smallest ego—in US radio drama. Whether daring Americans to turn their Lights Out! or to put on a pair of 3D glasses, Oboler was hardly a subtle craftsman; he certainly was ill-suited to deliver the wit of Noel Coward.

Not surprisingly, Oboler’s rewrite of Blithe Spirit is a humorless affair, a tepid romance rather than a wicked romp. Presented to a live studio audience, the reconstituted comedy elicited only one laugh and a few mild chuckles; nor did it deserve more. The soundman was permitted to break a few dishes—flung by the two ghostly wives of the “hag-ridden” protagonist—but the damage was done largely by eraser, as hardly any of the play’s celebrated witticisms survived the adaptor’s indiscriminate airbrushing.

The challenge seems a formidable one when the play to be radio-readied involves ghosts visible and invisible, audible and inaudible, as well as the flesh and fancy of a decidedly material psychic. A filter microphone and a few hints from The Shadow will not suffice when wit is what is wanting.

Aside from a clipped and colorless script, the casting of Madame Arcati—the robust medium with a penchant for sandwiches, physical exercise, and dry Martinis—made matters worse: fluttery and frazzled, she lost much of her comic weight when portrayed by Edna Best. The Theatre Guild on the Air, at least, had access to the original New York cast. It also had the benefit of thirty-five extra minutes, and a script that retained much of the sparkle of Coward’s virtual sex comedy.

On 23 February 1947, nearly two years after Oboler’s inept dabbling in Coward’s froth, the Theater Guild revived Blithe Spirit with considerably greater success. It also broke a few dishes too many (to the audible delight of the studio audience to whom following the job of the soundmen had all the relish of an inside joke); but it kept both the spirit-flesh dynamics and civility-vulgarity dialectics relatively intact.

Sure, Mildred Natwick as Madame Arcati fudges a few good lines, and the attempt to explain the fact that Elvira, the irreverent revenant, is visible only to the tormented male and not to his second wife is almost as clumsy as my prose here. Still, having missed the recent London revival of the play , this was a more than tolerable substitute.

However much it tickled me to watch the redoubtable Margaret Rutherford (captured above in an ethereal fade) as she throws herself into the role of Madame Arcati, the Theater Guild adaptation brought the wit of Coward’s lines home to me like no coating of Technicolor ever could.

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How Cecil B. DeMille Delivered Air Mail for Hawks’s Angels

Without being aware of it at first, I continued my engagement with the movies of 1939—Hollywood’s greatest year—last night, as I followed up a previously mentioned screening of Drums Along the Mohawk by projecting Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings onto my small big screen. Well, I must agree with cinema critic Ted Sennett, who held that the two leads were unfortunate miscasts. The suave Cary Grant (as flying ace Geoff Carter) does indeed cut a “faintly ludicrous figure, and Jean Arthur [as Bonnie Lee] is nobody’s idea of a showgirl.”

Such sensory obstacles and prejudices are immaterial, of course, when listening to a radio adaptation. So, today I improved upon my viewing experience by listening to the mercifully shorter Lux Radio Theatre production of Angels, which aired 29 May 1939. Clipped and satisfyingly swift, the air treatment added a touch of self-reflexivity to Bonnie’s exclamation “Say, things happen awful fast around here.”

Timing itself, by which I mean the date of the broadcast, is significant for two reasons. Unlike most Lux presentations, the airwaved “Angels” took flight shortly after the 15 May 1939 release of the motion picture upon which it was based. Coinciding with—and thus capable of promoting—Hawks’s aviation melodrama, it boasted no fewer than eight members of the original cast, including Grant, Arthur, Thomas Mitchell, silent screen star Richard Barthelmess, and newcomer Rita Hayworth. Even for the lavishly produced Lux program, such screen presence was unusually extravagant. Yet Lux‘s promotional services for Columbia Studios went even further.

As Cecil B. DeMille, host and ostensible producer of the program pointed out during the show’s second intermission, there was a “real-life parallel” between Hawks’s drama of airmail daredevilry in South America and a recent “history-making flight.” Two days prior to the broadcast, Pan Am inaugurated a regular airmail service to Europe. Its pilot, Captain Arthur E. LaPorte was called before the CBS microphone to tell of the “tremendous strides” in aviation: “We have at last conquered the Atlantic.” After all, the clipper crossed the ocean in a mere twenty-five hours.

Picked up by about twenty-five million listeners each week, Lux was capable of delivering its fan letters to the movies with considerably greater speed and efficiency. Its timeliness dramatically underscored and confirmed, Hawks’s film could hardly have received a more prominent stamp of approval. It’s high time I got my hands on one.

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How Jack Benny’s Gagmen Lost Their Typewriter

As I realized anew last night, watching John Ford’s splendid Technicolor epic Drums Along the Mohawk, you don’t need historical footnotes or extensive background information to appreciate old-fashioned melodrama, even if such fictions claim to be based on verifiable facts. As an informed viewer, you’d probably be distracted and irked by careless inaccuracies or wilful distortions, interacting with the film intellectually rather than permitting yourself to become emotionally engaged—unless, of course, you are happily equipped with a remarkable ability to suspend disbelief. Surely I would never stoop to advocating ignorance, but such alleged bliss is no hindrance to the melodramatic experience. How different is the response to humor, especially when a bit of arcane trivia is called upon to serve as the centerpiece of a punch line.

Looking for a broadcasting event to highlight in my “On This Day” feature, I came across an episode of the Jack Benny Program, presented live from New York City on 5 October 1941. Like the Burns and Allen broadcast discussed previously, it is a rather self-conscious piece of comedy in which Jack returns to the air after his summer hiatus and finds himself unable to get back into his groove. Not even the script for that night’s broadcast is finished.

As Jack discovers, his head writers—two guys who spent a night at Roseland dancing together (and winning a cup for it)—have lost their typewriter by betting on .,. Lou Nova. Lou Nova? The name pops up again later in the program, when Benny’s valet Rochester calls in after finding himself in a tight squeeze with his bookie. Turns out, Lou Nova was a celebrated prizefighter with a supposedly “cosmic punch” who lost to heavyweight Joe Lewis a few days before the broadcast—on 29 September 1941. He had been a sure bet until then.

Although there are a few other topical allusions in this broadcast, including references to the Brooklyn Dodgers and the comedy team of Olsen and Johnson (pictured above), Benny’s jokes are generally easier to get than the satirical remarks of rival Fred Allen, whose wit was decidedly more topical. 

Explaining a joke is rarely amusing—but rescuing otherwise useless trivia from obscurity is rewarding nonetheless. Now I won’t feel quite so ignorant if ever I come across another “cosmic punch” line.

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On This Day in 1962: Suspense Ends As US Radio Invests Its Drama Dollar Elsewhere

She’s fiddling with the wrong knobs

Imagine flipping through the latest copy of Entertainment Weekly and reading about a psychological thriller starring Halle Berry and Colin Farrell, to be broadcast live from your favorite radio station. Imagine sitting on a train catching the opening of another season of Desperate Housewives on your iPod . . . with your eyes closed. Imagine what audio entertainment used to be and still could be today had radio not been “abandoned like the bones at a barbecue” (as comedian Fred Allen once put it). Instead of continuing the feast, we are starving our senses, having been given less to nourish our imagination and more to gawk at from afar, even as our television sets are being gradually retired in favor of cyber-age gadgetry.

Well, as anyone passionate about the half forgotten and much neglected culture of US radio drama will be only too keenly aware, today marks the anniversary of what is generally regarded as its official demise. The two last holdouts, the thriller anthology Suspense and the detective series Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar presented their final episodes on this day, September 30, in 1962. In an age when listeners were taking their transistor radios everywhere, radio drama was going nowhere.

Storytelling on US radio had been suffering a decade-long decline, even though, as one of my readers pointed out to me recently, there were still a few fine programs left on the air in the mid-to-late-1950s, including the long-running series mentioned above. There were attempts to revive radio drama in the 1970s and ’80s, as well; but since the old dial had been refitted with a new shorthand for aural art, the potentialities of the medium collapsed into music, talk, and news formats, leaving little space and fewer resources for the theater of the mind.

In the US, the radio play has always been looked upon as a makeshift art, a substitute or remedial form of entertainment for a public that was being told for ages that television was just around the corner. Television was supposedly the real thing, which in reality meant that the landscapes of the imagination were being walled in to fit the tiny screen before our sore eyes.

Getting the picture was a considerable loss; but our ocular preoccupations keep most of us from getting it, from making up for it by making it up all over again.

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On This Day in 1940: Arthur Miller Unleashes a Pussycat

As it turned out, I had been listening to Jeremy Vine’s “Climate Change Special” on BBC Radio 2, in which discussions about global warming and environmental crises were interspersed with a series of fictive news bulletin from the future—the year 2035. After such spurious time-traveling, I retreated into the world of fantasy, a bit of old-time radio whimsy from the pen of none other than the late American playwright Arthur Miller.

Pardon my credulity, but yesterday, listening to the radio, I experienced my own “War of the Worlds” encounter—you know, an act of airwave fakery during which hearing becomes believing. Going about my daily affairs, I picked up a few words of what I assumed to be a news broadcast, it being preceded by the customary jingle of the oft relied upon BBC. “Much of East Anglia remains under water today after the latest North Sea storm surge,” newsreader Adrian Finnegan informed me, and “nearly a million people” had been evacuated from an area large portions of which might never be reclaimed from the sea. Why hadn’t I heard about this before, I wondered, still under the influence of telecasts from hurricane-battered New Orleans.

Yes, Miller does have a radio past, even though it is a less than illustrious one. So it is frequently, politely, and foolishly ignored, as if a half-decade of dabbling in the theater of the mind could not possibly have had an influence on the career of a writer whose 1964 drama After the Fall “takes place in the mind, thought, and memory” of its protagonist.

“I despise radio,” Miller told an interviewer in 1947; with a successful play on Broadway and a well-received first novel to his credit, Miller was ready to get out of what he referred to as “a dark closet.” He meant the melodramatic excesses of radio drama, but also complained about the limitations imposed by network executives and the sponsors that fed them. Well, let’s open that closet now to commemorate the broadcast anniversary of Miller’s “The Pussycat and the Expert Plumber Who Was a Man,” a radio fantasy produced by the Columbia Workshop on 29 September 1940.

While not quite the man who had all the luck, Miller was rather fortunate to begin his career in radio, having his plays soundstaged by the sustaining (that is, commercial free) Workshop, a venue far more open to experimentation than the program he chose to recall in Timebends. His playful “Pussycat” is the story of an invisible trickster—a commentary on radio, therefore, and one that forced me to keep in mind the mind-game to which I had just been subjected.

The eponymous tomcat is a megalomaniac intent on going into politics and swaying the masses with his “lovely tenor voice.” Hidden from view behind a microphone, he convinces his audience of potential voters that he “must be a wonderful man,” until he is exposed as a fraud by an average Joe who threatens to drag him out into the open. “[I]f you want to know,” he sums up his tale, “a cat will do anything, the worst things, to fill his stomach, but a man . . . a man will actually prefer to stay poor because of an ideal.”

Clearly, Miller resented radio because he felt that it was making a pussycat of the manly expert he aspired to be. Yet he often overstated the strictures of network radio and eventually got too tired to resist them. Radio plays may not be the cat’s meow to narrow-minded intellectuals, but experts like Norman Corwin proved that they were hardly the litterbox of American culture.

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On This Day in 1066 and 1939: Two Conquerors Take Language to War

Not being revisited by the nuisances of power failures and coughing fits I suffered recently, I find myself willing to rise to something amounting to a challenge. Tackling the ambiguities of Archibald MacLeish’s verse drama “The Fall of the City,” for instance. Originally broadcast on 11 April 1937, “The Fall” was again presented by the Columbia Workshop on this day, 28 September, in 1939. The world changed considerably during the time elapsed between those two productions, adding urgency to a play about . . . well, about what, really?

I’ve grappled at length with “The Fall” in my dissertation, describing the confusion and frustration of critics who sensed the play to be significant but could neither make sense of it nor find much consensus among each other. Some argued that it wasn’t even a play at all. Apparently anticipating this reception, MacLeish prefaced the published script with the following disclaimer:

“Any introduction is a confession of weakness. This one is no exception. It is written because I am anxious to persuade American poets to experiment with verse plays for radio and because I am quite certain the radio verse play I have written will not persuade them of itself.”

US poets were not too keen on having their precious wares compete with soap commercials. Others believed that their words were best spread among the few rather than being freely disseminated through channels of less-than-pure air. The horrors of WWII shook up a number of ivory towers, drawing out poets like Stephen Vincent Benét and Edna St. Vincent Millay in fighting form. In propagandist poetry, the ultimate test of language was not whether it could move listeners, but whether it could get them moving, whether it could motivate them to fight battles, buy bonds, or save kitchen fat.

While American broadcasters were training announcers (like the proud vocal-talent pictured above) to hawk the products of their corporate sponsors, Fascist Germany had been exploiting the power of the spoken word to turn open-minded individuals into a league of like-minded or mindless lemmings. “The Fall of the City” opened a debate about mass persuasion, about the media’s role in molding opinions and fabricating war. Its ambiguity is rooted in a distrust of the very medium it employed.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the play begins, “This broadcast comes to you from the city,” a town whose downfall is first announced, then actualized. It is talked into being as the figure of a radio announcer stands by to document the unfolding event. MacLeish’s announcer takes listeners to the “central plaza” of this unspecified city to become ear-witnesses to the resurrection of a recently buried woman who, for three consecutive days, appeared before a crowd of spectators, and who now utters a baffling prophesy:

The city of masterless men
Will take a master
There will be shouting then:
Blood after!

Amid the bewildered throng (some 500 people participated in creating the sound of the crowd), reporters and politicians are heard trying to interpret the oracle and to fix upon a plan of action. Is the message to be ignored? Is the prophesied attack to be countered or endured? One orator, holds that “[r]eason and truth” are the weapon of choice:

Let this conqueror come!
Show him no hindrance!
Suffer his flag and his drum!
Words . . . win!

His words are powerful enough to have people dancing in the streets—until another speaker convinces them to go into battle. While this exchange of words and changing of minds is going on, the talked-of invader—a hollow suit of armor—takes over and the masses surrender. Unlike William the Conqueror—who, on this day in 1066, made Anglo-Saxon words bow to French langue—he does not have to utter a single syllable to make a message-mangled city fall, its “masterless men” happy to have “found a master.”

Summing up this war of words, the announcer remarks that the “people invent their oppressors: they wish to believe in them.” Are these words to be taken for the author’s? If oppressors are inventions—a notion not going over well with some of MacLeish’s contemporaries—then who is to be entrusted with the power to use or control the media capable of creating such alleged fictions?

It seems that MacLeish was apprehensive about the uniformity of thought produced by broadcast speech. It made his own attempt to invade the medium a troubling undertaking: how to convince your listeners not to take your word for it?

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On This Day in 1950: Ronald Colman Lectures on Bigotry and Schlitz Vows to Ship 600,000 Cans of Beer to Korea

I started writing this during a power outage; so, in commemoration of this event, I’ll try [and promptly failed] not to be quite so long-winded this time. I didn’t relish the experience of sitting alone in the dark without the comfort and convenience of electricity, especially since darkness is the very stuff of radio drama, the sound pictures that are stored on my computer or waiting to be snatched out of the world wide web.

For a while I tried to fill the void with my own voice, reading out loud by candlelight, enacting the parts in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the book at hand. The flicker illuminating the pages began to irritate me; and when I caught a glimpse of the shiny surface of my laptop, I couldn’t resist to drain its precious battery power by popping in a CD and listening to one of my favorite situation comedies of old-time radio, Don Quinn’s witty and endearing Halls of Ivy. Besides, I had already decided to write about the 27 September 1950 broadcast of that show—an episode OTR enthusiast Jerry Haendiges argues to be “probably the best of the series.”

Among the smartest comedies of its day, the series had long escaped my notice, since “its day” was the early 1950s, a time when radio was already experiencing a decline in talent, audiences, and sponsorship. When setting up the research boundaries for my dissertation, I initially dismissed such late-comers, sound unheard, assuming them to be lacking in literary merit and production values, deficiencies owing to conservative—that is, money-starved—programming as a result of dwindling advertising accounts. The Peabody Award winning Halls of Ivy (1950-52) sure proved me wrong.

The program was greeted as a sign of radio’s maturity, not its senility and obsolescence. In the May 1952 issue of Theatre Arts critic Harriet Van Horne, who had previously lamented radio’s adolescent fare, recommended Halls of Ivy as a “literate” treat, arguing its writing to be “often much better than the dialogue you encounter in some Broadway shows.” Set in a liberal college, the series delicately addressed and eloquently expressed a number of social concerns, the fictional campus being a playground on which to act out matters of race, class, and gender. Sentimental without being saccharine, it was edifying without getting snooty about it. I mean, come on, the show was sponsored by the makers of Schlitz—the “beer that made Milwaukee famous.”

On this day in 1950, Halls of Ivy presented a study in prejudice. Penned by Don Quinn and Cameron Blake, the story for the evening involved a high-toned mother of a dead soldier who vows to make a $500,000 donation to Ivy College after finding a picture of her son in a newspaper announcing the award given to the student who painted his portrait. When college president Dr. Hall (Ronald Colman) hears about this proposed endowment, a “girdle” to bring the institution back into shape, he fears that “this girdle is the old-fashioned kind. You know, the kind with strings.” Sure enough, the benefactress stipulates that the money “must absolutely not be used to provide scholarships for . . . well, for certain races and creeds.”

The donation is refused. Adding to the irritation of the narrow-minded society lady who offered it, the Halls receive a visit from the student artist who captured the likeness of the son from whom she had been estranged. As it turns out, the painter is of a “certain race” himself. After this exposure—a confrontation with and a laying bare of her bigotry—the strings are removed and the money can change hands, a moral lesson delivered with such skill and grace that even the contrived ending does not come across as awkward or trite. Summing up the dramatized lecture, Dr. Hall remarks that “life itself is a little like a college. You don’t learn much by attending only one class.”

Not to be outdone my the fictional donation, Schlitz announced at the close of the program that, having been given the okay from the Eisenhower administration, it would ship 600,000 cans of beer to the American soldiers then fighting in Korea. It’s a rather tacky coda—but sponsors aren’t exactly classy when it comes to touting their wares.

Once the power was restored in my abode, I set out for another trip to Ivy College—because “you don’t learn much by attending only one class”—and watched a 1955 episode of the TV adaptation of Halls of Ivy, also starring Colman and his wife, Benita Hume (along with the wonderful Mary Wickes as their maid). Well, sometimes it is nice to let someone else do the picturing for you, particularly after having been forced to spend two hours in near darkness.

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On This Day in 1937: The Shadow Gets a Voice-over

I remember the first time I heard the menacing voice of The Shadow—and it was not over the radio. I was a college student in New York City and was cleaning the Upper East Side apartment of a fading southern belle. Well, I needed the cash and she was too much of a spoiled socialite to do more around her place than pet her Shih Tzu and point out the offending dust particles. She told me about some prank phone calls she had been receiving from a rather peculiar and not-so-secret admirer in her neighborhood. I think she had filed a restraining order, but that did not stop this cookie character from entering her sphere telephonically. The eerie message he left on her answering machine, which she did not hesitate to play back for me, was as ominous as a line from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. It was not ‘Fire walk with me,’ though, but “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” followed by a declarative but less than clarifying ‘The Shadow knows!’ Sinister laughter concluded this bizarre tele-communication. Let’s just say I was glad to put down the feather duster that afternoon and make off with my meagre earnings.

Several months later I came across those very words once more—and I could not get out to escape them, as I was already home.  I had just discovered the thrills of old-time radio and now realized that the unnerving telephone message etched in my mind was nothing but an imitation—albeit a brilliant one—of the most memorable signature in American radio drama. Yes, those lines sure tolled a bell, even though the knell was delivered in a different voice and accompanied by the somber and to me as yet unfamiliar strain of Saint-Saens’s Le Rouet d’Omphale.

The alter ego of Lamont Cranston—’wealthy young man about town’ who used his mysterious ‘power to cloud men’s minds’ to aid the forces of law and order—The Shadow was a man of many voices. Since he always had to have the last laugh, his strained vocal chords seemed to require a number of replacements.  On this day, 26 September, in 1937, when The Shadow returned to the airwaves after a thirty-month-long hiatus, Cranston received another one of those vocal makeovers, this time courtesy of Orson Welles.

Welles has gotten rather too much credit for his portrayal of The Shadow; after all, he was neither the first actor to play the role nor the one who stuck with it the longest. He spoke condescendingly of the popular program—an attitude common among actors and writers who used radio as a career springboard or a temporary cash cow—and asserted that he read his part without rehearsals (an unlikely story, given the fastidiousness of the sponsors and Welles’s youthful inexperience). To be sure, Welles’s first disappearing act as The Shadow—in an episode titled “Death House Rescue”—was neither a dramatic nor a thespian marvel.

In a story about Cranston’s efforts to save the life of an alleged cop killer on death row, Welles comes across as pompous and disdainful; since he always sounded like none other than Orson Welles, overgrown ‘boy wonder,’ it is difficult to determine whether he was sneering in character or at his character—a ham hampered by an attitude of I’m-way-above-such-baloney.  Agnes Moorehead, who played opposite Welles, managed a less self-conscious performance as Cranston’s companion, the “lovely Margot Lane,” whatever trifle of a line she was being tossed. Unlike Welles, Moorehead inhabited her role rather than interrogating it, which made her a most valuable and much admired player in commercial radio drama.

Still, his pretensions notwithstanding, Welles’s subsequent fame served The Shadow quite well. It encouraged scholars to dig up transcriptions of the long-running series and contributed to their preservation, although surveys of Welles’s distinguished theatrical and cinematic repertoire generally devote little more than a few footnotes to these broadcast performances. Some scripts from the final months of the series (not preserved on tape) even resurfaced in print—as a 1970s high school textbook (pictured above).

As may have become apparent, I could never quite warm to Welles or wring chills from his impersonation of The Shadow. Then again, I always thought of The Shadow as the voice of a creep on the answering machine of a dislocated Scarlett O’Hara gone twilight. What an introduction!