Category: Radio Plays

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You’ve Got Mail, Herr Hitler

As of this writing, various episodes of The Shadow have been extracted some four-hundred thousand times from that vast, virtual repository of culture known, no, not as YouTube, but as the Internet Archive. This seems encouraging. At least, the most famous of all radio thrillers is still being remembered or rediscovered today, in part due, no doubt, to the misguided efforts of bringing Lamont Cranston back to the screen that cannot contain or render him. It is rather disheartening, though, that what is being so widely regarded as classic radio, perhaps even representational of American culture, is not the kind of non-matter likely to induce anyone to consider the aural arts as . . . art.

Sure, The Shadow has provided material for quite a few cultural studies, including this journal, and no history of popular entertainment in the United States ought to be called comprehensive, let alone complete, without at least a mention of this conceptually inspired if at times dramatically insipid neo-gothic phenomenon. Still, an injustice is done to a generation that had more on its mind and in its ears than vicarious thrills.

Few who rummage for old-time radio in the Archive appear to have been sufficiently intrigued by an item curiously labeled Dear Adolf. I, for one, was excited to find it there, having read the published scripts and discussed them in my dissertation without having come across those recordings. I argued against reading in lieu of listening; but, in the case of Dear Adolf, it would have been a mistake not to make a compromise and consider what I deem ersatz for ear play.

The series, after all, was written by the aforementioned Stephen Vincent Benét, a once highly regarded American poet who has long fallen out of fashion. While it did not do much damage to the name of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the writing of radio propaganda may have discredited Benét, along with his insistence on telling stories or retelling history, rather than being lyrical, experimental, or elitist.

Dear Adolf is unjustly neglected by those who enjoy such ready access to recordings from radio’s so-called golden age. The six-part program, tossed into the hole left by shows on summer hiatus back in 1942, was commissioned by the Council of Democracy and designed to turn detached listeners into active contributors to the war effort. As the title suggests, Dear Adolf was a proposed as a series of open letters to the enemy, written, we are to imagine with the help of seasoned performers from stage, screen, and radio, by ordinary Americans seizing a rare opportunity to communicate their fears, their hatred, and their defiance to the German dictator.

On this day, 12 July, in 1942, it was Helen Hayes’s task to portray an American “Housewife and Mother.” Well known to millions of listeners, the previously featured Hayes was one of the few theater actresses to embrace radio early on, if mainly, by her own admission, to be able to devote more time to her family and her rose garden.

The war suggested more urgent reasons for stepping behind the microphone, and the airwaves became a passage through which playwrights, poets, and performing artists could exit their ivory retreats and present themselves to the broader public for a cause worth the tempering of high art with an appeal to the lowest common denominator—the need for a clear image of what America stood for and was up against during a war whose objectives, it seems surprising today, were not appreciated or understood by a great many of its citizens. Their support—their money—was needed to provide the funds for a war of uncertain duration and, initially at least, less certain success.

Without becoming an outright fascist tool in a democratic society, radio needed to function as a unifier. In doing so, it had to address and engage a populace rather than assuming it to be homogenous. As I pointed out in my study, “Letter from a Housewife and Mother” is particularly interesting in this respect. Playing the part of a homemaker and part-time First Aid instructor, Hayes is meant to be—and her character insists on being—representative of free women everywhere. Rarely questioned, much less contested, in network radio, her white voice is being countered by that of a black woman, who protests:

Free women? What of me?
What of my millions and my ancient wrong?
What of my people, bowed in darkness still?

Despite her awareness that the enemy would further drive her people back to the “old slavery of whip and chains,” the speaker expresses her disillusionment with American democracy:

And yet, even today, we find no place
Even in war, for much that we could do
And would do for—our country.

However manipulative in its attempt to calm such unrest, the play is remarkable for its acknowledgment of such dissatisfaction with the status quo among those who felt themselves to be disenfranchised. It is a rare moment in American radio drama, far removed from the popular exploits of Amos ‘n’ Andy, which depended for its success on the general acceptance of conditions it refused to problematize.

Minds not clouded by crowd-pleasing commercial fare like The Shadow might appreciate Dear Adolf as an experiment in leveling with the marginalized rather than assuming or declaring their differences leveled. While in the business of pleasing everybody, radio did not always reduce difference to the aural stereotypes of regional and ethnic accents.

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. . . under the Sheets: Catching Bill Stern at It

A recent addition to my library is I Hid It under the Sheets (2005), a personal account of New York Times reporter and sportswriter Gerald Eskenazi’s “Growing Up with Radio.” Charming and humorous, it is a rather undisciplined account of broadcasting in the pre-television era, likely to frustrate anyone fishing for facts. However impatient with chatty narratives, I do not number among such readers. I enjoy a good yarn, a point of view, an attitude. There is so little radio writing out there, which makes books like I Hid It a treat. After all, listening to recordings of old broadcasts can seem like a retreat, an act of isolating oneself from the world in the very process of connecting to it, however belatedly. You receive while being shut up, alone in your imaginings; any bookworm knows that feeling—but radioworms are exposing themselves to the spoken word, with voices entering their heads.

So, when you come across a fellow listener, you get anxious to exchange notes, no matter how different they are from yours or how removed the listener is culturally or historically. As a child, Eskenazi was passionate about radio; he went so far as to urinate on some kids who did not share his enthusiasm about certain superheroes or tune in to the same serials. Perhaps, I am safer at some remove.

My main reservation about reminiscences like I Hid It is that, instead of promoting radio drama, they insist on declaring it dead, accessible mainly through the filter of their reflections. Sure, Eskenazi listened to, say, Bill Stern back in the late 1940s; but, rather than having to rely on his or anyone else’s memory and recollections, we now enjoy access to thousands of recordings, most of whom are ignored in favor of such secondhand-me-downs.

It is only in the concluding chapter that Eskenazi acknowledges the existence of certain “sound bites and written dialogue of the old shows” on the Internet. Yet, the decision to “listen again” and to compare those cherished memories with extant recordings he declares to be a “dangerous turn,” one that he took only as he “came to the end of writing this book.”

Still, I let Eskenazi tell me about a past that I made my present. Of his tuning in, say, to Bill Stern and his colorful stories from the world of sports and the great outdoors, all of whom he believed to be truthful. Eskenazi vividly recalls Stern’s sensational account of an Alaskan trapper, a widower whose wife had died in childbirth. In search of milk for the infant, the trapper leaves his cottage, which was guarded by his dog. Returning after a long and arduous journey through the snow . . .

Wait, I thought, this is sounding very familiar. Some years ago, I was told just such a story while visiting a village in Snowdonia, not far to the north of me. And here is how George Borrow, in his 1854 travelogue Wild Wales, retold the legend of that place:

Beth Gelert is situated in a valley surrounded by huge hills [. . .]. The valley is said by some to derive its name of Beddgelert, which signifies the grave of Celert, from being the burial-place of Celert, a British saint of the sixth century [. . .] , but the popular and most universally received tradition is that it has its name from being the resting-place of a faithful dog [. . .]. Though the legend is known to most people, I shall take the liberty of relating it.

Llywelyn during his contests with the English had encamped with a few followers in the valley, and one day departed with his men on an expedition, leaving his infant son in a cradle in his tent, under the care of his hound Gelert [ . . .]. Whilst he was absent a wolf from the neighbouring mountains, in quest of prey, found its way into the tent, and was about to devour the child, when the watchful dog interfered, and after a desperate conflict, in which the tent was torn down, succeeded in destroying the monster. Llywelyn returning at evening found the tent on the ground, and the dog, covered with blood, sitting beside it. Imagining that the blood with which Gelert was besmeared was that of his own son devoured by the animal to whose care he had confided him, Llywelyn in a paroxysm of natural indignation forthwith transfixed the faithful creature with his spear. Scarcely, however, had he done so when his ears were startled by the cry of a child from beneath the fallen tent, and hastily removing the canvas he found the child in its cradle, quite uninjured, and the body of an enormous wolf, frightfully torn and mangled, lying near. His breast was now filled with conflicting emotions, joy for the preservation of his son, and grief for the fate of his dog, to whom he forthwith hastened. The poor animal was not quite dead, but presently expired, in the act of licking his master’s hand. Llywelyn mourned over him as over a brother, buried him with funeral honours in the valley, and erected a tomb over him as over a hero. From that time the valley was called Beth Gelert.

Neither Stern nor Eskenazi make mention of the Welsh origins of the tale. “Bill Stern had made the whole thing up,” Eskenazi remarked, only to share his disillusionment when, as a youngster, he heard the same story at school, where it was told to him as an “Indian” (is that, American Indian?) legend. Radio provided “avenues for education that were unsurpassed, if suspect,” Eskenazi concluded. Ain’t that a fact! Stern seems to have had no knowledge of Wales. As I overheard in this broadcast, he even refers to Ivor Novello as an “Englishman.”

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"But some people ain’t me!": Arthur Laurents and "The Face" Behind Gypsy

Gypsy again? I guess that is what many theatergoers thought when, only five years after the previous revival, the show opened on Broadway for the fifth time since its debut back in 1959. I have seen three of those revivals and, not inclined to wield my thumb, shan’t ponder publicly whether or not this might be the definitive production. It better not be, since I hardly mind seeing the play interpreted a few other ways, if only to get a chance to catch the old routines with “new orchestrations.” Still, be it stagecraft, performance, or my own very gradual process of maturity, I have not seen the dramatic finale of Gypsy staged any more movingly than in the current production. To be sure, I am opening to Arthur Laurents’s book differently now that I have completed my doctoral study on American radio drama since seeing the 2003 revival starring Bernadette Peters. I am reading between—not into—Laurents’s celebrated lines to find the former radio playwright’s “Face.”

“May we entertain you?” Laurents’s career in radio began in 1939, when the Columbia Workshop produced his first original play, “Now Playing Tomorrow” (30 January 1939), a fantasy concerning the doubtful advantages of gazing into the future. With such a high-profile debut to his credit, the young writer had little difficulties selling scripts to various network programs, including Hollywood Playhouse (1937-40), The Adventures of the Thin Man (1941-50), and This Is Your FBI (1945-53). “Commercial pulp, all of it,” he commented sixty years later; yet unlike fellow playwright Arthur Miller (one of whose wartime radio dramas I discuss here), Laurents was not dismissive of, let alone bitter about, his radio days. He had actively pursued such a career, attending an evening class in radio writing at NYU. Laurents did not feel that he was “faced with the art vs. commerce dilemma”; besides, he was “too flattered” being “wanted, too thrilled at being paid for being happy.”

“Extra! Extra! Hey, look at the headline! / Historical news is being made!” Contributing to the war effort by writing plays for a number of dramatic propaganda series kept the draftee from facing combat overseas and secured him an income of up to $350 per script. The Army arranged for him to work on programs like Armed Service Force Presents (1943-1944), Assignment Home (1944-46), and the Peabody Award-winning documentary drama The Man Behind the Gun (1942-44).

Toward the end of the war, Laurents had found his voice as a radio playwright—a voice strong and convincing enough not to be muffled by spineless industry executives. Drawing on personal experiences, he managed to explore themes similar to those he tackled on Broadway, where he made his entrance with Home of the Brave (1945), a play dealing with anti-Semitism in the Army. While Washington looked closely at his scripts after he had been accused of communist affiliations, Laurents not only managed to get a controversial play about black soldiers on the air, it (“The Knife”) even earned him a citation.

Like Gypsy and West Side Story, Laurents’s radio plays are personal records; their author arrived at a code that made it possible for him to share his own story, the story of an outsider. There is a bit of Louise in many of them. “The Face,” a Writers’ War Board “best script of the month” for April 1945, is no exception. “Do you love a man for his face?” the play asks of us, exploring the experience of a disfigured soldier dreading his reintegration into post-war society, a society, he knows to place great importance on appearances.

“Small world, isn’t it?” Like many of Laurents’s early works for stage and screen, from Home of the Brave to his screenplay for Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), “The Face,” as I put it in Etherized Victorians, is a play of masked figures and figurative unmasking. Dreading the prejudices of post-war America, the disfigured Harold Ingalls and his fellow patients must learn to be strangers “joining forces”:

GOLDSTEIN.  When you get plastered . . . who do you go with?
INGALLS.  There used to be a fellow—but he was discharged last week.
GOLDSTEIN.  Was he—like us?
INGALLS.  Yeah.  So now I go alone.
GOLDSTEIN.  If—if I can get a pass . . . can—I go with you?
INGALLS.  Sure! You know it makes it good, when there are two of you.

“Together, wherever we go!” Rather than confronting his biological family, the mother and brother he’ll never quite “get away from,” Ingalls is eager to escape with his double, his secret sharer:

INGALLS.  You’re more of a brother than he is.
GOLDSTEIN.  Now that’s a real compliment.
INGALLS.  Oh you know what I mean.
GOLDSTEIN. Sure.
INGALLS.  Well, I’ll get my mother over with quick and then we’ll beat it into town and really tie one on.  You and me.
GOLDSTEIN.  Right!
INGALLS.  That’s the best way.
(Biz: Fade in MOTHER’s footsteps approaching slowly.)
INGALLS.  You and me.  That’s the— (He cuts as he hears the footsteps.  They are still off but coming closer, closer.)

Those footsteps are the sound of reality encroaching on oblivion and denial, of a past that Ingalls has to reconcile with his present. To move on, Ingalls needs the strength to let go of both by forging new relationships from or in spite of his state of effacement. “If Mama Was Married,” what might have happened to stripper-novelist Gypsy Rose Lee and her sister, June Havoc, who teamed up with a big name in radio? One stuck in infantilizing routines, the other in the rear of a cow costume, each fashioned a career out of a pipe dream of vicarious living.

When Ingalls is discharged, the Army psychiatrist reminds him that “every single day, people get slapped because of ignorance. They get slapped for religion, for color, for how they talk or what they look like.” She encourages him to “stand up to them and tell them they’re wrong!” The play ends with the wish that “this will be the beginning, the beginning of a world where the only thing that does matter is each man himself for what he is himself.”

“But I / At least gotta try [. . .].” While it may never be “Rose’s Turn,” the resilient Arthur Laurents—whose next project will be a revival of West Side Story—has long had a “wonderful dream” worth living, a vision of that “place for us, somewhere,” the voicing and realization of which is well worth the agony of uncovering the not always handsome face behind our masks . . .

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“Jumping Niagara Falls”; or, She’s Pushy, for a Corpse

Among the fifty-eight movies I added to our video library while shopping in New York City is the 1948 film adaptation of Lucille Fletcher’s radio play Sorry, Wrong Number. Fletcher penned the adaptation as well, despite her previous remarks about the merits of her original script. “I wrote ‘Sorry, Wrong Number,’” she was quoted in a 1948 anthology of Plays from Radio, “because I wanted to write a show that was ‘pure medium,’ something that could be performed only on the air.” And yet, “Sorry” has been reworked for stage and television and turned into both film and novel. If the original play is “pure medium,” Anatole Litvak’s melodrama is a Sorry adulteration. Just how much of a narrative muddle it is becomes clear when the screenplay was returned to the airwaves as a presentation by the Lux Radio Theater on 9 January 1950.

The thrill of the original lies in what Matthew Solomon refers to as its “narrative isochrony,” that is, the congruence of elapsed airtime and the clock ticking away the last minutes in the life of the central character. Instead, Sorry is marred by too many flashbacks and too much background story for what is essentially our witnessing of the inevitable death of someone we cannot wait to shut up.

Fletcher invites us to rethink Mrs. Stevenson’s role of a victim and permits us to enjoy tuning in to the well-scheduled execution of a perfect monster. In her screenplay, however, the playwright attempted to elicit feelings for a woman we’d much rather strangle, to make us waver between sympathy and condemnation. Mrs. Stevenson now has a first name and presumably a heart, however weak.

Alfred Hitchcock might have agreed with this revision, considering that the audience experiences suspense more keenly if the character is sympathetic. Fletcher also adds a moment of doubt as to Mrs. Stevenson’s fate by suggesting that her executioner might also become her rescuer.

At the same time, though, the film, unlike the radio play, compromises its point of view, letting the camera glide through Mrs. Stevenson’s room and giving us eyes to see the world beyond instead of keeping us close to the invalid who is being given a pair of wobbly legs just strong enough to make us wonder about her condition and chances of survival. Film insists on showing, even if the most compelling sight is the emotional state as written in the face of a person reduced to being all ears.

At any rate, Mrs. Stevenson died, eventually and unsurprisingly. Or did she? While on our trip upstate, recalled in the current entries into this journal, I was reminded of “Jumping Niagara Falls,” the unlikely sequel to Fletcher’s rather conclusive thriller. In it, Mrs. Stevenson is out for revenge—from the grave as her husband Elbert goes off to the Falls with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. What’s left of Mrs. Stevenson is nothing more than what we get when we first encounter her—a voice, which insists on making itself heard on the telephone, the radio, and (or perhaps solely in) the mind of the man who masterminded her murder.

That voice, in the 1999 sequel (by Brian Smith and George Zarr) is Claire Bloom’s. To me, though, as to anyone loving radio, the voice of Mrs. Stevenson belongs to none other than the aforementioned “First Lady of Suspense.” Equipped with Moorehead’s larynx, Fletcher’s celebrated harridan might have us all over in a barrel.

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Shoes Across the Table

Call it the Case of the Wayward Blogger. I am having a swell time here in sweltering Manhattan; and for once the eyes have it. Today, I vowed to make amends by returning to the aforementioned Partners & Crime bookstore in the West Village, where on the first Saturday of every month (July and August excepting) a capable group of players, musicians and sound effects artists recreate American radio thrillers of the 1940s and 1950s.

On tap this evening were Sam Spade’s muddled “SQP Caper” (originally broadcast on 7 November 1948) and the lively “Taps,” a comedy thriller involving a tap-dancing sister act catching crooks in a rather more sinister act. Outstanding in the cast were David Kester (below, far right and channelling Ned Sparks) and Karla Hendrick (center) who played both Spade’s secretary Effie and Edith “Candy” Kane in “Taps.”

If you count the balloons next to the sound effects table at which DeLisa White (pictured above) worked her earful magic by slamming doors, ringing bells, and keeping shoes a-tapping, you can figure out just how violent (and piercing) the offering for the evening was going to be, each popped rubber sac representing a gun just fired. Yet, to the delight of the audience—and without recourse to the willful misreading known as “camp”—the plays for the evening were light on heavy melodramatics.

Now, this is too hot a night for research and I’m off to enjoy a few ice-cold gin and tonics in a moment; but I am not sure just when “Taps” originally aired. Supposedly, its broadcast date coincided with the date of the reenactment (7 June), even though the program states 2008 as the obviously erroneous year of production. The notes also state that “Taps” was performed as part of the anthology series Suspense; but there is no such play in the program’s twenty-year spanning history.

The Beech-Nut gum commercial so zestfully delivered might be a clue as to the date of the broadcast. I shall have to investigate . . .

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You Are There: Crane Collapse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side

I am not cut out to be a reporter; but since this just happened around the corner, in my old Manhattan neighborhood, where Yorkville meets Harlem, I thought I’d go out to snap this shot. Not that some of the more professional photographers were treated with respect. Two were chased away by an apparently high ranking police officer (one beyond donning a uniform). Ever since I got a ticket and was summoned to court for allegedly sleeping on a New York City park bench (I was struggling to stay awake reading Henry James) and dared to complain about the treatment I received, I am still more wary of the police in the at times insensitively carried out acts of policing our lives. They rarely make me feel protected. Not that the evacuation currently under way is particularly comforting to those living on the block.

Buildings go up at a remarkable speed here in the city; and some constructions sites are as dangerous as they look. You Are There, of course, refers to a radio program that promised to take listeners on location by dramatizing rather more momentous events of the past, from the Last Day of Pompeii to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. I am far more at ease looking backward, at my own pace. Still, as I walk through Manhattan on this latest visit visit of my former home, I shall take my camera along and share my impressions here. As long as there’s a radio connection somewhere . . .

Speaking of Henry James: look what they have done to Washington Square. You’d think the place had inspired Death on the Nile.

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“Elephant” Business; or, Monkeying with a Marx Brothers Script

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I’m sure many of us are exclaiming these days whenever we approach a filling station. As of today, a gallon of unleaded goes for well over $8 here in the UK. Now, I have not driven a car since the Reagan era, but that does not stop me from taking note and commiserating with the one in charge of chauffeuring me about. Back in 1932-33, the Standard Oil Companies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Louisiana, together with the Colonial Beacon Oil Company were spending some of their revenue to send in the clowns to entertain a Depression-stricken public that, for the most part, was going nowhere fast. The clowns were none other than Groucho and Chico Marx, who were heard each week in a radio comedy titled Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel.

On this day, 22 May, in 1933, their vehicle ground to a halt after having sputtered along for six months on the air. Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel did not return for a second season, a cancellation that, as Michael Barson reminds us in his foreword to the published scripts for the series, Groucho Marx attributed to the soaring profits the sponsor enjoyed as a result of the broadcasts, which presumably made Esso feel “guilty” for “taking the money.” It might have been that the puns had all the sophistication of a program geared toward those too young to drive. Contemplating their activities during what was then thought of as a summer break, Chico dreams of going “away on a ranch,” … if only he had the money:

Since the final broadcast is the only one preserved both in print and as a recording, it offers some insights into the changes that were made to a script before it aired. Not that each revision constitutes an improvement.

“Three of your elephants are loose on the boat,” someone alerts Groucho (as attorney at law Waldorf T. Flywheel, at that instant a stowaway mistaken for a famous explorer). “The elephants are loose?” Flywheel replies. “Well, am I responsible for their morals?”

In the sketch that aired on 22 May, Groucho is told instead that “three of [his] monkeys are loose on the boat.” “Monkeys are loose?” Groucho retorts. “Well, get a monkey wrench and tighten them up.”

Sponsors are like elephants. Those straitlaced folks never forget to tighten a “loose” line, no matter how many Esso references you may be able to spin out of a lasso. So, was it the double entendres that proved too much for the oil companies, who subsequently refused to pump in the money for a second season of monkeyshines? To NBC, at least, the show appeared to be far less sustainable than the resources the deserting sponsor was touting as superior.

Given the raw material, penned by Nat Perrin and Arthur Sheekman, the cancellation was not such a loss to those tuning in at home. If you ask me, the Marx Brothers, who depended on visuals for much of their clowning, might as well have monkeywrenched the entire project.

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Out of Service: YUkon 2-8209

I hadn’t dialled YUkon 2-8209 in a while. And when I did so today, I realized that the number was about to go out of service. I managed that final call, but the gal on the line, a sassy number named Candy Matson, was hardly herself. The gal from San Francisco was obviously flustered and admitted to being too “confused” to know just what she was saying. At a loss for words? It’s certainly not the Candy that had become so irresistible to thousands of strangers who tuned in each week to hear the dame with the Ann Sothern comfort in her timbre as she talked herself in and out of precarious situations involving assorted felonies. And talk she did. Hers was the kind of tongue that could arrest even my philandering ear.

To radio historian Jack French, who devotes a chapter of his Private Eyelashes to her adventures, Candy Matson, YUkon 2-8209 was “undoubtedly” the “best radio series featuring a lady detective.” Perhaps, she was not quite a lady. “My name is Candy Matson,” the crime-solving siren introduced herself in April 1949 (an audition recording for the series’ 30 June 1949 premiere), and got straight to the point of her enterprise:

I like money. Lots of it. That’s why I became a private eye. And, too, you meet such interesting people. Mostly dead. But, getting back to the cash angle, that’s why I took on the Donna Dunham case. I knew it was full of dynamite. But a girl has to eat now and then, maintain a penthouse on Telegraph Hill, and keep the moths out of a few mink coats. Doesn’t she? Sure. And a shot fired into your room from across the street at three in the morning is just one of those occupational hazards.

Then, how come Candy was so beside and unlike herself on this day, 21 May, back in 1951? The independent spirit had been knocked out of her; and the screwball banter between the high-heeled gumshoe and Police Lieutenant Ray Mallard, who, as French reminds us, was not initially conceived as a love interest for Candy, made way for connubial cooing and the silence that ensues. During her first outing on the air, she had dodged a bullet; but it was an arrow that ultimately did her in.

To French, Candy’s gushing “in the style of a soap opera ingénue over Mallard’s marriage proposal” made for a “tepid climax to an otherwise remarkable series.” Sure, Candy and Ray could have gone on Nick and Nora-ing it for a while; but even the Charleses were eventually encumbered with a thin man of their own.

Besides, Candy was not cut out to be sidekicked around. She enjoyed the rare distinction of having rather than being an assistant, paired as she was with the cultured, at times boozy, and apparently queer photographer Rembrandt “I squirm with intrigue!” Watson, a sort of aging Asta dubbed by an ersatz Karloff. Mallard, meanwhile, rarely got closer to the titular heroine than an imaginary lover like Mr. Boynton . . . until our Miss Matson set out to solve her final case, which opens with her foreshadowing chase after him.

NBC’s ear Candy being stashed away in the keep of matrimony, that 1950s signpost of homebound subordination, of picket-fenced in independence, the lovely voice of Natalie Masters—who was married to the program’s producer—simply dissolved in tears as she accepted the ring and the retirement plan that came with it. That’s what I call giving your devoted followers the third finger, left hand.

A year later, realizing that Candy’s death by marriage might have been premature, producer Monty Masters gave the gal a new if still bell-ringing number (Yukon 3-8309) and tried to start all over again, keeping the police lieutenant and cancellation at bay. “Every time we even get near the subject of matrimony, Mallard ducks,” Ms. Matson sighs as if her marriage had never happened. By that time, however, it was a case of an admiring crowd divorcing the medium. Broadcasters, sponsors, and manufacturers alike began courting a public eager to get a load of the kind of candy that radio had been dangling before their mind’s eye. Boy, did they get the wrong number!

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They [Got] What They Wanted: or, We Postpone This Wedding

Starting next week, I shall once again take in a few shows on and off Broadway. In the meantime, I do what millions of small-townspeople used to do during the 1930s, ‘40s, and early ‘50s—I listen to theater. Since the 1920, such makeshift-believe had been coming straight from the New York stage, whether as on-air promotion or educational features. Aside from installing an announcer in the wings to translate the goings-on and comings-in, it took the producers of broadcast theatricals some time to figure out what could work for an audience unable to follow the action with their own eyes. When that was accomplished, in came the censors to determine what could come to their ears. The censors were in the business of anticipating what could possibly offend a small minority of self-righteous and sententious tuners-in who would wield their mighty pen to complain, causing radio stations to dread having risked their license for the sake of the arts.

Few established playwrights attempted to re-write for radio. One who dared was Kenyon Nicholson, whose Barker, starring Walter Huston and Claudette Colbert delighted Broadway audiences back in 1927 (and radio audiences nearly a decade later). On this day, 19 May, in 1946, the Theatre Guild on the Air presented his version of Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted, with John Garfield as Joe, Leo Carillo as Tony, and June Havoc (pictured) as Amy.

Now, I have never seen a stage production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning They Knew; nor have I read it. Like most tuning in that evening, I would not have known about the tinkering that went on so that the story involving a doomed mail-order May-December romance could be delivered into American living rooms—were it not for Nicholson’s own account of what it entailed to get They Knew past the censors.

Nicholson got to share his experience adapting They Knew, one of his “favorite plays,” in a foreword to his script, which was published in an anthology of plays produced by the Theatre Guild on the Air. According to the inexperienced adapter, his “enthusiasm for the job lessened somewhat” as soon as he began to undertake the revision:

“Radio is understandably squeamish when it comes to matters of illicit love, cuckolded husbands, illegitimate babies, and such; and, as these taboo subjects are the very core of Mr. Howard’s plot, I realized what a ticklish job I had undertaken.”

After all, Messrs. Chase and Landry remind us, as the result of a single listener complaint about this adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, which retained expressions like “hell” and “for god’s sake,” several NBC Blue affiliates were cited by the FCC and ordered to defend their decision to air such an offensive program. Nicholson was nonetheless determined “that there could be no compromise. Distortion of motivation as a concession to Mr. and Mrs. Grundy of the listening public would be a desecration of Mr. Howard’s fine play.”

It was with “fear and trembling” that Nicholson submitted his script. Recalling its reception, he expressed himself “surprised to find the only alteration suggested by the Censor was that Joe seduce Amy before her marriage to old Tony.”

The “only alteration”? Is not the “before” in the remark of the pregnant Amy—”I must have been crazy, that night before the wedding”—precisely the kind of “compromise” and “[d]istortion” the playwright determined not to accept? Nicholson dismisses this change altogether too nonchalantly as a “brave effort to whitewash the guilty pair!” Rather, it is the playwright’s whitewashing of his own guilt in this half-hearted confession about his none too “brave” deed.

The censors sure knew what they did not want those to hear who never knew what they did not get.

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Notes on a “Note”: Milton Allen Kaplan’s Radio and Poetry

“If radio literature is worth study and analysis, it must be filed, classified, and catalogued accurately. The variety of programs would necessitate an intricate library system in order to permit a student to find such categories as poetry, music, historical drama, documentaries, readings, adaptations, and discussions.” Thus remarked Milton Allen Kaplan in his 1949 study Radio and Poetry, one of the most recent additions to my library of books on American broadcasting. To this day, such catalogues remain inaccurate and incomplete, at best, even at the Library of Congress or the broadcasting museums in New York and Chicago. Radio verse plays, in particular, are an immaterial thing—a nothing—of the past; they are almost entirely forgotten or ignored, especially in the teaching of literature and drama.

Literary critics seem to assume that, since radio was chiefly an advertising tool, the spoken yet scripted words that aired had only the most tentative connection to the arts. The study of what presumably were mornings with Stella Dallas, afternoons with The Lone Ranger and evenings with Jack Benny should be left to cultural historians whose trade it is to dig into the trash heap of Western civilization.

When Radio and Poetry was published, network radio was pretty much dead as a medium for verse. Even the most distinguished practitioners, Norman Corwin and Archibald MacLeish, found the networks less than accommodating. Corwin, of course, had come under suspicion by the House un-American Activities Committee and, in 1949, left CBS to write and produce plays for UN Radio instead. Only a few short years earlier, his works had been heard by tens of millions and were deemed vital to the war effort.

As Kaplan points out, Corwin was “the first poet brought up with radio,” as opposed to being among the “notable poets who turned to radio.” While not recruited, he was often importuned to write occasional verse, to speak to and for the nation, to erect aural monuments in commemoration of the momentous.

On this day, 13 May, in 1945, Corwin’s “On a Note of Triumph” was once again produced; the aforementioned play had originally been heard on V-E Day (8 May), which it was expected to celebrate. “Coming as it did at a climactic moment in our history,” Kaplan remarks, the play “won nationwide attention, and was rebroadcast, published, and transcribed.”

Corwin did not altogether embrace his role as a national chorus in the theater of war; and the “Note” he struck was hardly a positive one. Instead, it is cautiously optimistic, daring to consider the future rather than seeing victory as a happy ending to a drama staged with a cast of millions. The “Note” was also one of Corwin’s last major plays; the “triumph” of peace gave way to the whispers of anti-Communist hysteria and further war cries in Korea, the conflict that would not trigger any poetic responses on US radio. “So they’ve given up,” the play opens. “. . . on radio,” Corwin might as well have added after V-J Day.

Norman Corwin, who recently turned 98 (and whose 97th I commemorated here), is hardly unheard of today. His V-E Day broadcast was subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin (2005). Still, his name is not frequently uttered among those whom Kaplan sought to engage, the literary scholar and educators whom he encouraged to consider radio plays as aural art.

Indeed, Kaplan’s study, long out of print, is just about as triumphant as the medium upon whose life it depended. Radio verse being a dying art back then, Radio and Poetry was doomed to be buried alongside it. The author’s enthusiasm seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

“Today,” he concluded in a passage sounding very yesterday,

we have many aspects of poetry on the air—the advertising jingle, the popular song, the cadenced prose of the announcer, the verse play, the radio opera.  Tomorrow, as our audiences comes to demand more and more of the medium and as that medium changes, what new aspects will be revealed, what new alliances effected, what new forms developed?

Heard any new “radio opera” or “verse play” lately? Apparently, those jingles and popular songs are the notes triumphant . . .