Radio – Page 8 – Harry Heuser

17th Aug 20098th Nov 2023

The House That Jack Sat

“Frankly, I’m a little worried,” comedian Jack Paar confided in announcer Hy Averback on this day, 17 August, in 1947. He was, after all, merely a “summer replacement,” a “fellow who broadcasts during the hot weather to give the other actors time to count the money they’ve made all winter.” For the past twelve weeks, Paar had been sitting in for his first-namesake, skinflint Jack Benny, and had held warm that cozy place on the summer sun dial quite nicely at that. Still, while the reception had been far from icy, his “brief summer career” was fast coming to an end as radio was “getting ready for the winter again.”

Unintelligible as they might seem to most of today’s readers, there were tell-tale signs: Edgar Bergen “repainting Charlie McCarthy,” Fibber McGee “waxing Harlow Wilcox,” and Phil Harris switching to “antifreeze, with an olive.”

Resigned as he was to his autumnal fate, the soon-to-be displaced replacement did not go gentle into the night; instead, he took it upon himself to find his “winter replacement” by staging a talent contest.

The first applicants auditioning for Paar are a midget sister act. The sisters do not impress Paar much, even though his assessment suggests that he was not quite at home in the non-visual medium. I mean, having bags under his eyes didn’t send Fred Allen packing; nor did being a trifle wooden hurt Charlie McCarthy’s career.

PAAR. Maybe I was listening wrong. Did you say you do card tricks with mice?

ACT 2. Yes. Here. Pick a mouse.

PAAR. [ . . .] Don’t you do any of the conventional magician’s tricks, like, maybe, sawing a woman in half?

ACT 2. Oh, but monsieur, I shall never saw a woman in half again. I was never so humiliated. I was on the stage of the Orpheum Theater, you see . . .

PAAR. You mean, something went wrong with the trick?

ACT 2. Oh, yes. I don’t know how it happened, but I was sawing this woman in half when, all of a sudden, I heard . . . blup, blup, blup, blip . . .

PAAR. Poor Simone Simon.

The third act is somewhat more promising or, at any rate, more familiar. It is, don’t you know, Jack. Benny, that is, “comedian and violin virtuoso.”

“I was the original Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy,” Benny insists as he lists his spurious radio credentials. “When you were a boy, we didn’t have all of America,” Paar retorts. To prove that, until his season ended some twelve weeks ago, he was “one of the funniest men in radio,” the self-important Benny reads some lines from one of his scripts. So convinced was he of his own genius, that he did not bother to fill in the blanks left by his absentee sidekicks:

Thank you, Don. Well, hello Mary. Phil, you gotta do something about that band. Sing, Dennis. Rochester, answer the door. Yikes. Well, what do you know, it’s Ronnie and Benita. But I think. But I. But. But. But. Bu . . . we’re a little late. So, good night, folks.

Whether boasting Benny looked in on his replacement to give the latter a boost or to let listeners know that the spot was still his, I don’t know; but rarely has a reminder of being replaceable made a comedian on hiatus sound so incomparable.

Meanwhile, just to remind myself that summer ain’t over yet, even though it sure feels like autumn here on the Welsh coast, I booked a trip to visit the old place. Yes, hold your wax, Harlow, beginning next week, I am back in New York. It’s a neat trick, considering that the new place we’ve been doing up still demandss so much of our attention and time. Displacement activity, you say? I should be scratching paint rather than scrape pennies and scram? Aw, go pick (on) a mouse!

Related recording
Jack Paar (17 August 1947)

29th Jul 200928th Jan 2024

“. . . reduced, blended, modernised”: The Wireless Reconstitution of Printed Matter

Nearly two centuries ago, young Rebecca Sharp marked her entrance into the world by hurling a book out of a coach window. That book, reluctantly gifted to her by the proprietress of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, was Johnson’s dictionary, a volume for which Ms. Sharp had little use, given that she was rarely at a loss for words. By the time her story became known, in 1847, words in print had become a rather less precious commodity, especially after the British stamp tax was abolished in 1835, which, in turn, made the emergence of the penny press possible. Publications were becoming more frequent—and decidedly more frivolous.

Gone were the days when a teenager like Mary Jones, whose story I encountered on a trip to the Welsh town of Bala last weekend, walked twenty-five miles, barefooted, for the privilege of owning a Bible. Sure, I enjoy the occasional daytrip to Hay-on-Wye, the renowned “Town of Books” near the English border where, earlier this month, I snatched up a copy of the BBC’s 1952 Year Book (pictured). Still, ever since the time of the great Victorian novelists, the reading public has been walking no further than the local lending library or wherever periodicals were sold to catch up on the latest fictions and follow the exploits of heroines like Becky Sharp in monthly installments.

In Victorian times, the demand for stories was so great that poorly paid writers were expected to churn them out with ever greater rapidity, which left those associated with the literary trade to ponder new ways of meeting the supply. In Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), a young woman assisting her scholarly papa is startled by an

advertisement in the newspaper, headed “Literary Machine”; had it then been invented at last, some automaton to [. . .] turn out books and articles? Alas! The machine was only one for holding volumes conveniently, that the work of literary manufacture might be physically lightened. But surely before long some Edison would make the true automaton; the problem must be comparatively such a simple one. Only to throw in a given number of old books, and have them reduced, blended, modernised into a single one for today’s consumption.

Barbara Cartland notwithstanding, such a “true automaton” has not yet hit the market; but the recycling of old stories for a modern audience had already become a veritable industry by the beginning of the second quarter of the 20th century, during which “golden age” the wireless served as both home theater and ersatz library for the entertainment and distraction craving multitudes.

A medium of—and only potentially for—modernity, radio has always culled much of its material from the past, “Return with us now” being one of the phrases most associated with aural storytelling. It is a phenomenon that led me to write my doctoral study Etherized Victorians, in which I relate the demise of American radio dramatics to the failure to establish or encourage its own, autochthonous, that is, strictly aural life form.

Sure, the works of Victorian authors are in the public domain; as such, they are cheap, plentiful, and, which is convenient as well, fairly innocuous. And yet, for reasons other than economics, they strike us as radiogenic. Like the train whistle of the horse-drawn carriage, they seem to be the very stuff of radio—a medium that was quaint and antiquated from the onset, when television was announced as being “just around the corner.”

Perhaps, the followers of Becky Sharp should not toss out their books yet; as American radio playwright Robert Lewis Shayon pointed out, the business of adaptation is fraught with “artistic problems and dangers.” He argued that he “would rather be briefed on a novel’s outline, told something about its untransferable qualities, and have one scene accurately and fully done than be given a fast, ragged, frustrating whirl down plot-skeleton alley.”

It was precisely for this circumscribed path, though, that American handbooks like James Whipple’s How to Write for Radio (1938) or Josephina Niggli’s Pointers on Radio Writing (1946) prepared prospective adapters, reminding them that, for the sake of action, they needed to “retain just sufficient characters and situations to present the skeleton plot” and that they could not “afford to waste even thirty seconds on beautiful descriptive passages.”

As I pointed out in Etherized, broadcast writers were advised to “free [themselves] first from the enchantment of the author’s style” and to “outline the action from memory.” Illustrating the technique, Niggli reduced Jane Eyre—one of the most frequently radio-readied narratives—to a number of plot points, “bald statements” designed to “eliminate the non-essential.” Only the dialogue of the original text was to be restored whenever possible, although here, too, paraphrases were generally required to clarify action or to shorten scenes. Indeed, as Waldo Abbot’s Handbook of Broadcasting (1941) recommended, dialogue had to be “invented to take care of essential description.”

To this day, radio dramatics in Britain, where non-visual broadcasting has remained a viable means of telling stories, the BBC relies on 19th-century classics to fill much of its schedule. The detective stories of Conan Doyle aside, BBC Radio 7 has just presented adaptations of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847-48), featuring the aforementioned Ms. Sharp, and currently reruns Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles (1855-67). The skeletons are rather more complete, though, as both novels were radio-dramatized in twenty installments, and, in the case of Trollope’s six-novel series, in hour-long parts.

BBC Radio 4, meanwhile, has recently aired serializations of Trollope’s Orley Farm (1862), Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (1866) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Next week, it is presenting both Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (both 1853), the former in ten fifteen minute chapters, the latter in three hour-long parts.

Radio playwright True Boardman once complained that adaptations for the aural medium bear as close a relation to the original as “powdered milk does to the stuff that comes out of cows.” They are culture reconstituted. “[R]educed, blended, [and] modernised“, they don’t get a chance to curdle . . .

Note: Etherised Victorians was itself ‘reduced and blended,’ and published as Immaterial Culture in 2013.

28th Jun 200913th Nov 2023

The “crazy coon” and the “highvoiced fag”: Jello and the Language of Revolution

Language is to me one of the main pulls of the no longer popular, be it American radio comedy of the 1940s or the serial novels of the Victorian era. That is to say, the absence of the kind of language we refer to as “language” whenever we caution or implore others to mind theirs. Mind you, all manner of “language” escapes me in moments of physical or mental anguish; but, once I hit the keyboard, whatever hit me or made me hit the roof is being subjected to a process of Wordsworthian revision. You know, “emotion recollected in tranquility.”

If the revisions come off, what remains of the anger or hurt that prompted me to write has yet the kind of medium rare severity that renders expressed thought neither raw nor bloodless. No matter how many words have been crossed out, the recollection still gets across whatever made me cross in the first place, and that without my being double-crossed by lexical recklessness.

Writing with restraint is not a matter of adopting certain mannerisms to avoid being plain ill-mannered. Obscurity is hardly preferable to obscenity. The trick is to create worthwhile friction without resorting to diction unworthy of the cause—without using the kind of words that just rub others the wrong way. I was certainly rubbed so when, researching old-time radio, I brushed up on Amiri Baraka’s Jello (1970), no doubt the angriest piece of prose ever to be written about the American comedian Jack Benny (seen here, dressing up as Charley’s Aunt).

Jello was penned at a time when many Americans who grew up listening to Benny retreated into nostalgia rather than face, accept, let alone support the radical cultural changes proposed or, some felt, threatened by the civil rights movement. Baraka confronted this longing for the so-called good old days with a farce in which Benny’s much put upon valet Rochester refuses the services the public had long—and largely unquestioningly—come to expect of the well-loved character.

What ensues is a riot—albeit not one of laughs—as Baraka’s “postuncletom” Rochester lashes out at his former master-employer and insists on forcefully taking the money out of which he believes to have been cheated during the past thirty-five years (according to Baraka’s rewriting of broadcasting history). Having found that “loot” in a bag of Jello, Rochester leaves Benny, Mary Livingstone, and Benny regular Dennis Day to their “horrible lives!”—piled up on the floor like the corpses in a Jacobean revenge tragedy.

The plot of Jello is older than its message—the call to rise against the forces that made, made tame or threaten to unmake us; and the only startling aspect of Baraka’s play is the aggressive tone in which that message is delivered, delivered, to be sure, to none but those already alive and receptive to his rallying call.

“No, Mary,” Baraka’s version of Benny insists, “this is not the script. This is reality. Rochester is some kind of crazy nigger now. He’s changed. He wants everything.” The language alone signals that we are well beyond the grasp of the titular sponsor, beyond the code adopted in the summer of 1939 by the National Association of Broadcasters, according to which “no language of doubtful propriety” was to pass the lips of anyone on the air.

As is the case in all attempts at policing language, the underlying thought—the unsaid yet upheld—might be more dubious still; and when Baraka picks up the word “nigger,” he gives expression to a hostility that could not be voiced but was played out in and reinforced by many of the networks’ offerings. Indefensible, however, is his use of equally virulent language like “stupid little queen” and “highvoiced fag” when referring to tenor Dennis Day or “radio-dikey,” as applied to Mary Livingstone. Staging revolution, Baraka is upstaged by revulsion. He has mistaken the virulent for the virile.

In those days and to such a mind, “fag” was just about the most savage term in which to couch one’s rejection of the unproductive and the non-reproductive alike. It was a monstrous word demonstrative of the fear of emasculation. It is that fear—and that word—with which power and dignity was being stripped from those whose struggle for equality was just beginning during the days following the Stonewall Riots of 28 June 1969, from those whose fight was impeded by a fear greater and deeper even than racism.

Now, I’m no slandered tenor; but I have been affronted long enough by such verbiage to be tossing vitriol into the blogosphere, to be venting my anger or frustration in linguistically puerile acts of retaliation. If I pick up those words from the dust under which they are not quite buried, I do so to fling them back at anyone using them, whether mindlessly or with design—but especially at those who inflict suffering in the fight to end their own. Our protests and protestations would be more persuasive by far if only we paid heed to the words we should strike first.

20th Jun 20093rd Apr 2024

His Words, Her Voice: Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and the Resonance of “Enough”

“Oh, I have seen enough and done enough and been places enough and livened my senses enough and dulled my senses enough and probed enough and laughed enough and wept more than most people would suspect.” This line, as long and plodding as a life gone wearisome, was recently uttered by screen legend Olivia de Havilland, now in her 90s. You may well think that, at her age, she had reason enough for saying as much; but Ms. de Havilland was not reminiscing about her own experiences in and beyond Hollywood. She was reciting the words of one of her most virile, dashing, and troubled contemporaries: Errol Flynn, who was born one hundred years ago, on 20 June 1909, and apparently had “enough” of it all before he turned fifty, a milestone he did not live to enjoy.

In her brief talk with BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves host Matthew Sweet, de Havilland talks candidly, yet ever so decorously, about her swash-buckled, devil-may-careworn co-star, about his temperament, his aspirations, his fears. Hers is an aged voice that has a tone of knowing in it. A mellow, benevolent voice that bespeaks understanding. A voice that comforts in its conveyance not of weariness but of awareness, a life well lived and not yet spent.

I could listen for hours to such a voice. I might not care for, learn from or morally improve by hearing what is said—but the timbre gives a meaning to “enough” that the forty-something Flynn never lived to express or have impressed upon him. It is the “enough” of serenity, the “enough” of gratitude, the “enough” of not asking for more and yet not asking less . . . or stop asking at all.

My own life is marked and marred by a certain lack of inquisitiveness, it sometimes strikes me. Being blasé is one of the first masks we don not to let on that we don’t know enough, that we know as much, but don’t know enough simply to ask. I wore such a mask of vainglory when I set out in life, the dullest of lives it seemed to me. My fellow employees had a nickname for me then.

It was my moustache that inspired it. Errol Flynn they called me. Little did they know that, even at age 20, I felt that I had “enough” even though I so keenly felt that I had not had much of anything at all. I simply had enough of not even coming close to the glass of which I might one day have had my fill; but, for three long years, I did not have sense enough to leave that dulling life behind. No voice could talk me out of that barren existence but my own.

It was not easy for me to regain a sense of curiosity; it was as if the pores beneath the mask had been clogged after being concealed so long, my skin no longer alive to the breeze and its promises. I had brushed off more than I dared to absorb. One morning, I took a walk around Central Park with one of Errol Flynn’s leading ladies, Viveca Lindfors, and was neither startled nor thrilled; nor did I not seize the opportunity to inquire about her past or permit her to draw me into her presence as she offered me advice and assistance.

Instead, I preserved the sound of her voice on the tape of my answering machine—like a butterfly beyond the magic of flight—her words saying that she had enough of me was dispensing of my humble services as her dog walker. I am left with canned breath, quite beyond the chance of living what might have been a great story.

Enough of my regrets. I can only hope that, when next I feel that I had “enough,” the word will sound as if it were uttered in what I shall henceforth refer to as a de Havilland sense, with dignity, insight and calm—and an acceptance that is not resignation.

19th Jun 200915th Nov 2023

Radio at the Movies: Torch Singer (1933)

“Yoo-hoo, is anybody?” I guess that, from time to time, many of us amateur journalists feel compelled to ask the question so catchily phrased by the matriarch of the Goldbergs. At least Molly Goldberg could hope for a response from her friend and neighbor Mrs. Bloom, to whom her shouts into the dumb waiter shaft were directed. To Mrs. Goldberg, “anybody” was a certain someone. Many who approached the World Wide Web as their means of telecommuning have given up on waiting for a reply to their “Yoo-hoos,” or, instead, have taken the resounding silence for an answer equivalent to “nope.”

According to a 2008 survey conducted by Technorati (which, earlier this month, was referred to in a New York Times article on the blogging phenomenon), 95 percent of all online journals have been essentially abandoned. Tens of millions who saw blogging as an opportunity to cast their thoughts broadly and make their voices heard by the multitudes decided that, once this vast crowd of followers did not, well, immaterialize, their words were wasted on the one or another for whose arrival they would not be dumb enough to wait and to whose apparently exclusive tastes they would not lower themselves to cater.

Like broadcasting before it, the blogosphere lures those creative spirits who might otherwise be dispirited nobodies with that one-in-a-million chance at fame while its ability to connect us to the one-in-a-million willing to connect with us frequently goes unappreciated. As public performers, we won’t settle for “anybody”—but we seem more inclined to aim at the elusive everyone than the dependable someone. One of the most intriguing motion pictures to address our narrow-mindedness about broadcasting is the Depression-era melodrama Torch Singer (1933), one of those startlingly unconventional, non-classic Hollywood pictures referred to as Pre-Code.

Torch Singer stars Claudette Colbert as an unwed mother (that is Pre-Code for you) who, failing to find employment, is forced to give up her infant daughter. After that intimate bond is severed, the motherless child of a childless mother avenges herself on an impersonal, dehumanizing society by tantalizing those who made her suffer, selling the mere appeal of sex to the highest bidder. “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Love,” she warbles, achieving neither. Her body having been robbed of its fruit and the warmth of nestling, she turns her voice into a commodity, first by making a(nother) name for herself a nightclub singer, then by accepting the offer to become a disembodied siren on the radio.

When a newly hired storyteller for a children’s program is struck dumb with mike fright, the reckless Torch Singer takes over as the fictitious “Aunt Jenny,” comforter by proxy, singing lullabies so far removed from any cradle that they are devoid of sincerity, all the while tickled by her own moxie as she promotes the sponsor’s kiddie beverage, long drink in hand.

This perversion of motherhood comes to an end when she realizes that it is possible to subvert the medium instead and seize the microphone to reach the child she gave up for adoption. Rather than performing for everyone and no one, she now sings directly to her daughter, devising a contest that would compel radio listening kids to call in and claim their birthday surprises, thereby revealing their identity to her. Once taken into her own hands, the very medium that seemed to have promised nothing but the belated fame for which she never cared becomes the means through which she can reestablish the intimacy she long believed to be past recapturing.

Its melodramatic shortcomings notwithstanding, Torch Singer serves as a compelling reminder that the media, as extensions or offshoots of telecommunication, have not lost—and should never be divested of—their potential to establish point-to-point connections far more meaningful than the often disappointing stabs at mass exposure in which we are apt to lose sight of one another.

9th Jun 200931st Jul 2021

“. . . just born to do it”: A Baby Crier’s Audition

“Ziss is mine shtory, ja? Zo, bleeze, vill you be stumm and let me finish,” Tante Ilse burst out in her inimitable take on the English language. When she got that way, she’d assault her adopted tongue like an ill-tempered schnauzer tears at a bunch of newly arrived letters. If you were quick enough, you could just gather the pieces and make out the message intended. Tante Ilse was becoming a little impatient with me. Okay, so I was the impatient one. My finger kept hovering over the red button, and I was anxious to get the tape rolling again. Recording her story was a project that had been going on for several weeks already, ever since I found out that Ilse Hiss, my dear old, bratwurst and sauerkraut-loving great-aunt had a past in show business. Strictly speaking, it was the no-show business. Yes, Tante Ilse had once been a voice on the radio, even though hers wasn’t much of a speaking part. She had been a professional baby crier. A baby crier! Who among those of us not old enough to remember tuning in to the Barbours of One Man’s Family had ever heard of such a bewildering offspring of the dramatic arts!

I just had to ask; and even though I didn’t have to twist her arm to get the whole story, Tante Ilse refused to reminisce about her radio days in any way straightforward or logical; least of all, chronological. I still didn’t quite understand how she had gotten into radio in the first place. “And by crying!” I marveled, “How did you even know there was a market for it?”

“Ach, der market. Dat vas just a little Hungarian delicatessen, a block away. Right over there, where zey built zat, zat shkyshcratcher. Pfui! I did most of my grocery shopping zere. When it vas a market, of course. You would have loffed dat shtore!” As exasperating as such detours could be, attempting to get Tante Ilse back on track by explaining just what I meant by “market” would have been the worst thing to do at that moment. Besides, in a roundabout fashion, Tante Ilse appeared to have gotten to the beginning at last, when, to my great surprise and still greater relief, she added: “And dat’s where it all shtarted.”

It was back in the mid-1940s, shortly after the end of the war. Tante Ilse had long found out that the sidewalks of Manhattan were not paved with precious metal; she had been pounding them long enough. Her brother Heini (my grandfather) had disappeared somewhere, leaving her to fend for herself, sowing, cleaning, taking whatever job she could find. Yorkville was a German enclave then; but Tante Ilse did not want to be reminded of the Heimat and was suspicious of those among her neighbors still proud to be the sprout of a Kraut. Her pride and her principles kept her from borrowing as much as a cup of sugar.

Things might have been worse if it hadn’t been for the housing shortage and the My-Sister-Eileen deal she had going on with a typist who moved into the room vacated by Opa Heini; except that this particular Eileen was no relation and paid handsomely for her share of Tante Ilse’s place. Incidentally, that share eventually became my room when I arrived in New York in the 1980s, when I followed the “Auswanderer,” the expatriates in my family.

Unfortunately, the typist also took work home; and the noise she made on that old Adler of hers often drove Tante Ilse to distraction—and straight out of her quarters. Now, before you say I’m getting to be even worse than my periphrastic relative, let me point out that, on that fateful evening, the noises produced on the old Adler precipitated my great-aunt right to the spot where it all began. The Hungarian market, where Tante Ilse had come to splurge on a bunch of grapes. “Craips. And zour ones, too!” she chuckled. So I pressed the red button and off she went.

She must have been pretty cranky when she got down to Németh’s deli, what with the crowded walk-up, the summer heat, and the noisy typewriter. A bawling tyke was all she needed as she waited in line to pay for her purchase (and to hear whether there was any news about Mrs. Németh’s boy, a Private First Class not yet returned from Europe). Sure enough, there was just such a noisemaker in store for her. It was Mrs. Webber’s youngest, rather too young, some whispered, to make recently discharged Mr. Webber a proud father. Apparently, even the issue was beginning to cry foul.

Matters weren’t helped any when Tante Ilse tried to restore serenity by offering Webber (or not) Junior one of those sour berries. “You never heard zuch bawling,” she insisted, covering her ears as if, nearly half a century on, there still lingered the threat of a reverb in the old neighborhood.

So, what did Tante Ilse do? She leaned over the baby carriage, grinned none too endearingly, and hollered right back. To the surprise of everyone in the store, including her own, she aped the little imp so perfectly that even the mocked one shut up and listened in awe. “Den, der whole shtore was shtill. Nobody could belieff it. Vair vas dat zound coming vrom? Den, dey all looked at me. Vas I a freak or a hero? Dat I don’t know.”

“Move over Baby Snooks,” I added, “The world’s oldest toddler was born.” I had hoped that the radio reference would encourage her to tell me just how that audition led to a career in broadcasting. “I had a talent, alleright; but vat vas I going to do viz it?” I knew my cue and stopped the recording. I had to wait for the next installment; and Tante Ilse, unlike network radio, followed a most erratic schedule . . .

If you visch, I mean, wish, you may listen to my own reading of Tante Ilse’s story here.

6th Jun 200918th Mar 2025

Clash by Day: A D-Day Reminder

It was a crisp, bright afternoon in April when we visited Trebah Garden, one of the most beautiful spots in all of Cornwall. The sun had come out from behind a curtain of threatening clouds and the air was fragrant with a promissory note of summer that even the leafless, wintry trees in the distance were powerless to gainsay. As we walked down the sloping path, past the Rhododendron and Magnolias, beyond the dell of young Gunnera plants that, in time, would grow into a subtropical jungle, we reached a gate that led to a secluded beach. The sea was calm, peaceful the prospect; and even though the name of Trebah had been recorded in the Domesday Book, I felt far removed from the affairs of the world, present and past, as if sheltered in a reserve beyond the reach of history.

When I turned back toward the gate, that sense of detachment was shattered in an instant. I was reminded just how connected I was, even here, with the history of the world. I was yanked out of this perceived Eden by no uncertain notice of our fall: a sign telling me that, from it this secluded spot, thousands went into battle to secure the peace that I had enjoyed.

The memorial at Trebah tells of the 175th Combat Team of the 29th US Infantry Division, some 7,500 strong. On the 1st of June in 1944, those men embarked from that very beach to take part in the D-Day landings and, by carrying out their duty, face all but certain death.

“This is the hour,” Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote in her “Poem and Prayer for an Invading Army,” recited by Ronald Colman during a special radio broadcast on D-Day,

this is the appointed time.
The sound of the clock falls awful on our ears,
And the sound of the bells, their metal clang and chime,
Tolling, tolling,
For those about to die.
For we know well they will not all come home, to lie
In summer on the beaches.

And yet weep not, you mothers of young men, their wives,
Their sweethearts, all who love them well—
Fear not the tolling of the solemn bell:
It does not prophesy,
And it cannot foretell;
It only can record;
And it records today the passing of a most uncivil age,
Which had its elegance but lived too well,
And far, o, far too long;
And which, on History’s page,
Will be found guilty of injustice and grave wrong.

At Trebah Garden, where a Military Day is still being held each year, I was found guilty of the “grave wrong” it is to be walking in the splendor of oblivion. I shall not soon forget that sudden admonishment, that unsought clash by day.

5th Jun 200924th Jul 2024

“. . . and it was built to last”: A Message from Buchenwald

I rarely hear from my sister; sometimes, months go by without a word between us. I have not seen her in almost a decade. Like all of my relatives, my sister lives in Germany. I was born there. I am a German citizen; yet I have not been “home” for nearly twenty years. It was back in 1989, a momentous year for what I cannot bring myself to call “my country,” that I decided, without any intention of making a political statement about the promises of a united Deutschland, I would leave and not return in anything other than a coffin. I don’t care where my ashes are scattered; it might as well be on German soil—a posthumous mingling of little matter. This afternoon, my sister sent me one of her infrequent e-missives. I was sitting in the living room and had just been catching up with the conclusion of an old thriller I had fallen asleep over the night before. The message concerned US President Obama’s visit to Buchenwald, the news of which had escaped me.

Just in time, I turned on the television to listen to the President’s speech, and to the words of Buchenwald survivor Elie Wiesel. I was relieved to hear the President talk of the Nazis as “human.” His predecessor would no doubt have resorted to “evil.” How much more meaningful is the word “human”—an acknowledgment of shared responsibility that forces us to relate rather than stand apart from any presumably unmitigated horror, thereby encouraging us to look at ourselves as potentially capable of the acts we are so eager to denounce as “inhuman.”

I was stirred, too, by the seemingly incongruous message of Elie Wiesel, who expressed himself at once doubtful and full of hope, who spoke of the futility of war at the very site of triumph over tyranny. Yet how can one avoid resorting to the violence of the paradox, whether used in the despair of reason or for the purpose of achieving the kind of harmony the metaphysical poets knew as “discordia concors”? How else, if at all, can one account for the life and deaths at Buchenwald, for the monstrously rational, the efficiently profligate, the methodically mad?

One of the first Americans to have witnessed and documented Buchenwald shortly after its liberation was CBS news commentator Edward R. Murrow. On 15 April 1945, three days after first setting eyes on the concentration camp, Murrow confronted his listeners with a report prefaced by the following disclaimer:

Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard had you been with me on Thursday. It will not be pleasant listening. If you’re at lunch, or if you have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio. For I propose to tell you of Buchenwald.

Bringing his eyewitness account to the ears of his fellow Americans, Murrow yokes together the incongruous to evoke the incalculable. Putting his finger on the imbalance of recorded figures and observable facts, he weigh in on the scale of humanity’s failure and thereby succeeds in making the measureless ponderable. Broad statistics are presented alongside minute details. Observations of suffering are contrasted with references to Buchenwald as the “best concentration camp in Germany,” a camp “that was built to last” yet built for annihilation.

Murrow speaks of an orderly pile of bodies, a prominent political figure starved beyond recognition, a warning against pickpockets in a scene of horrendous crime, and a new beginning of Buchenwald’s internees that coincided with the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

At one point, Murrow’s report takes us into a “clean” kitchen that supplies next to no food:

[The German prisoner, a communist, in charge of the kitchen] showed me the daily ration: one piece of brown bread about as thick as your thumb. On top of it a piece of margarine as big as three sticks of chewing gum. That, and a little stew, was what they received every twenty-four hours. He had a chart on the wall. Very complicated it was. There were little red tabs scattered through it. He said that was to indicate each ten men who died. He had to account for the rations, and, he added, “We’re very efficient here.”

“If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald,” Murrow adds, “I am not in the least sorry.” After all, had he not begun his report with the incongruous invitation to “switch off the radio”?

I knew switching off only too well. As a child and adolescent growing up in West Germany, I felt the incongruousness of being a good German keenly. I was raised in a small village in which a synagogue rotted away unnoticed, history and hope debased as a pigsty. At school, classmates echoed their parents by defending Hitler as the builder of the Autobahn; at home, my paternal grandmother openly spoke of her awareness of what was happening to her Jewish neighbors—and then severed her connections by reducing me to the pink triangle I had pinned on myself by coming out.

I have been weighed down by collective guilt. I have lived under the terror of the extreme left and experienced the lure of the ultra-right as a stance of ultimate defiance. I failed to reconcile my responsibilities of facing history with any chance of personal happiness. So I left.

Perhaps I have been on the run ever since; trying to distance myself from the past I made my present an evasion. My life abroad has been, by and large, an existence in the neither here nor there, its escapism more shameful than my inescapable origins. Yet how else can we expect to make a clean start of it if our feet remain stuck in the soil we are anxious to shake?

It was with some unease that I realized just what I had been watching before my sister returned me to the reality of now: a neat puzzle in which every murder is accounted for and executed according to plan; a “very efficient” murder mystery that reduces horror to a formula borrowed from an old and politically incorrect nursery rhyme; film released, no less, in the year of the death camp liberations. You see, before I listened to the speeches at Buchenwald I had been counting down bodies in And Then They Were None.

1st Jun 20092nd Mar 2025

Manus Manum . . . Love It: Lever Brothers Get Their Hands on Those Nine Out of Ten

“Ladies and gentlemen. We have grand news for you tonight, for the Lux Radio Theater has moved to Hollywood. And here we are in a theater of our very own. The Lux Radio Theater, Hollywood Boulevard, in the motion picture capital of the world. The curtain rises.”

Going up with great fanfare on this day, 1 June, in 1936, that curtain, made of words and music for the listening multitude in homes across the United States, revealed more than a stage. It showed how an established if stuffy venue for the recycling of Broadway plays could be transformed into a spectacular new showcase for the allied talents at work in motion pictures, network radio, and advertisement.

Marlene Dietrich and Clark Gable at the premiere of the revamped *Lux Radio Theate*r program

“Frankly, I was skeptical when the announcement first reached this office,” Radio Guide’s executive vice-president and general manager Curtis Mitchell declared not long after the Hollywood premiere. The program was “an old production as radio shows go,” Mitchell remarked, one that was “rich with the respect and honors” it had garnered during its first two years on the air. Why meddle with an established formula?

Mitchell’s misgivings were soon allayed. The newly refurbished Lux Radio Theater had not been on the air for more than two weeks; and Radio Guide already rewarded it with a “Medal of Merit”—given, so the magazine argued, “because its sponsors had the courage to make a daring move” that, in turn, had “increased the enjoyment of radio listeners.” There’s nothing like a new wrinkle to shake the impression of starchiness.

“I cannot help but feel,” Mitchell continued, that the “two recent performances emanating from Hollywood have lifted it in a new elevation in public esteem. Personally, listening to these famous actors under the direction of Cecil De Mille, all of them broadcasting almost from their own front yards, gave me a new thrill.”

That DeMille had, in fact, no hand in the production did little to diminish the thrill. An open secret rather than a bald lie, the phony title was part of an elaborate illusion. The veteran producer-director brought prestige to the format, attracted an audience with promises of behind-the-scenes tidbits, and sold a lot of soap flakes throughout his tenure; and even if the act wouldn’t wash, he could always rely on the continuity writers to supply the hogwash.

As DeMille reminded listeners on that inaugural broadcast (and as I mentioned on a previous occasion), Lux had “been a household word in the DeMille family for 870 years,” his family crest bearing the motto “Lux tua vita mea.” Oh, Lever Brother!

Perhaps the motto should have been “Manus manum lavat.” After all, that is what the Lux Radio Theater demonstrated most forcibly. In the Lux Radio Theater, one hand washed the other, with a bar of toilet soap always within reach. As I put it in Etherised Victorians, my doctoral study on the subject of radio plays, it

was in its mediation between the ordinary and the supreme that a middlebrow program like Lux served to promote network programming as a commercially effective and culturally sophisticated hub for consumers, sponsors, and related entertainment industries.

With DeMille as nominal producer and Academy Award-winner Louis Silver as musical director, the new productions came at a considerable cost for the sponsor: some $300 a minute, as reported in another issue of Radio Guide for the week ending 1 August 1937. Of the $17,500 spent on “The Legionnaire and the Lady,” the first Hollywood production, $5000 went to Marlene Dietrich, while co-star Clark Gable received $3,500. Those were tidy sums back the, especially considering that the two leads had not even shown up for rehearsals.

The investment paid off; a single Monday night broadcast reportedly attracted as many listeners as flocked to America’s movie theaters on the remaining days of the week. As DeMille put it in his introduction to the first Hollywood broadcast, the audience of the Lux Radio Theater was “greater than any four walls could encompass.” Besides, the auditorium from which the broadcasts emanated was already crowded with luminaries.

“I see a lot of familiar faces,” DeMille was expected to convince those sitting at home: “There’s Joan Blondell, Gary Cooper (he stars in my next picture, The Plainsman), Stuart Erwin and his lovely wife June Collier.”

Also present were Al Jolson, Ruby Keeler, and Franchot Tone. “And I, I think I see Freddie March,” DeMille added in a rather unsuccessful attempt at faking an ad lib. While there is ample room for doubt that any “nine out of ten” of those stars named actually used Lux, as the slogan alleged, they sure made use of the Lux Radio Theater. It was an excellent promotional platform, a soapbox of giant proportions.

A visit to the Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight

As I was reminded on a trip to the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight last year, Lever Brothers had always been adroit at mixing their business with other people’s pleasure. Long before the Leverhulmes went west to hitch their wagon on one Hollywood star or another, they had disproved the Wildean maxim that the greatest art is to conceal art and that art, for art’s sake, must be useless.

It is owing to the advertising agents in charge of the Lever account that even the long frowned upon “commercial” did no longer seem quite such a dirty word.

Related recording

“The Legionnaire and the Lady,” Lux Radio Theater (1 June 1936)

Related blog entries

“Cleaning Up Her Act: Dietrich, Hollywood, and Lola Lola’s Laundry”

Tyrone Power Slips Out to War on a Bar of Soap”

“After Twenty Years of Pushing Stars and Peddling Soap, a Hollywood Institution Closes Down”

31st May 200916th Jul 2024

Television and the Individual Talent

“What happens to these ambitious people after their first appearance? Do they go on, succeed, become famous and lead the lives they’d dreamed of living? Or, after a brief glimpse of glory, do they return, disappointed and broken, into the humdrum lives they’d led before?” Those are question many viewers feel compelled to ponder after watching common folk like Susan Boyle perform on amateur competition programs like Britain’s Got Talent. Now, Boyle did not win last night’s finale, and a chance to sing for the Queen; still, her audition turned the unassuming, middle-aged belter-weight into what we are wont to call an overnight sensation. She so captivated an international audience of television viewers and YouTubers that a movie deal and a musical seem pretty much in the bag, even though a career as a recording artist strikes me as somewhat less likely for La Boyle.

The world—or a considerable part of its too readily distracted population—fell in love with a moment, not with a voice. It was an instant in which our media-forged preconceptions about appearances in relation to ability was being checked in a way that was eye-opening without being cause for contrition. Boyle was duly rewarded for dealing with our initial cynicism, with the schadenfreude with which we approached her and to whose temporary check she so greatly contributed. Watching that performance was not so much a guilty pleasure as it was pleasurable guilt.

For anyone who has seen the audition performance (I only caught up with it online, days after the original broadcast), that sudden realization that she was proving us wrong by proving we had wronged her can never be recaptured. From now on, we simply expect a boffo performance worthy of all the ballyhoo. We are accustomed to the face and, having gladly suffered the momentary loss of ours, we keep our jaundiced eyes open for another chance to snicker and sneer. After all, as T. S. Eliot famously remarked in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), “criticism is as inevitable as breathing.”

The thing is, though, that the above questions were not raised by a contemporary reviewer; rather, they were voiced on this day, 31 May, back in 1937, by American news commentator Edwin C. Hill. Hill was referring to the rise of the amateur hour, a programming format he called “[o]ne of the most interesting radio developments in recent years” and commended as a “very human, very appealing movement”—“and a worthy one.”

The comment was made on Your News Parade, ostensibly with one Helen Gleason in mind:

Well, Saturday night on the radio, Helen Gleason answered this question—at least insofar as her particular case was concerned. Winning an Amateur Night Contest was the beginning of a brilliant career for Miss Gleason . . . a career which has carried her around the vaudeville circuits, through the concert halls of Europe, to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera Company . . . and more recently to stardom in operetta.

I say “ostensibly” because that blurb about the “appealing” talent show format was only another occasion to advertise cigarettes, Lucky Strike being the sponsor of Your News Parade. The media may create “overnight” sensations; but in their exploitation of such phenomena, in the milking of the cash cows of human kindness, they foster the very attitude of doubt that they make us question.

Somehow it has only gotten worse with the advent of video. On radio, Boyle might have had a chance to show off the talent she came to display and to be judged by that ability alone. It is television that makes us look like asses by encouraging us not to believe our ears . . .

[This post came to you a day late, on account of the exceptionally fine weather we’ve been enjoying.]