Category: Radio Plays

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Scotland Backyard

Right now, there are some 17,500 files in my iTunes library, ranging from 2 ½-hour productions of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll to clips of speeches by Himmler and Goebbels.  I was a little concerned about those speeches when last I traveled to the US.  Just days prior to my departure, it was announced that, outrageous as it sounds, the US reserves the right to inspect any laptop and download its content for inspection.  What might those Nazi soundbytes have told some officious, uniformed ignoramus about myself, my politics, and my objectives once on American soil?

Anyway, I don’t even know just what kinds of trash or treasure are stored in my archive of sounds, given the vast number of recordings on my hard drive.  Most of these files I assume to have little or no connection to my everyday life here in Wales.  Much of it is commercial and, commercials aside, rather generic pulp.

Last weekend, though, while going through and editing those titles in my library, I came across a surname of a character in a thriller program that reminded me of a framed drawing on display in our living room.  How strange it seems, pulling the blinds in the morning (if I get up that early) to be looking at the image of an axe murder; but there he is, the notorious Buck Ruxton, right before my eyes whenever I glance to the left of our view of the Welsh hills.  And there he is again, in my virtual library, alongside Our Miss Brooks and The Lone Ranger.

The play in question was produced in the late 1940s or early 1950s as part of the syndicated series The Secrets of Scotland Yard.  It tells of an Indian physician who murdered his wife and chopped her into what the narrator describes as “two hundred all but unidentifiable parts.”  When last I was up in Lancaster, the English town where the not-so-good doctor lived and practiced, I even came across a pub named after him.

Now, we happen to have in our collection two of Eric Fraser’s original ink drawings for the “Case of the Jealous Doctor,” an article about the Ruxton case that was published in the 12 November 1949 issue of Leader Magazine.  The case itself dates back to 1935.  Fraser, as you can see, relished in the sensational character of the murder and the trial, but, unlike the producers of Secrets of Scotland Yard approached his commission with a wry, dark sense of humor.

Listening to the dramatization, I was amazed just how minutely the murder—its background, execution, cover-up and detection—was being reconstructed.  To be sure, it features one of the worst impersonations of an Indian, which is about as sensitive as the Leader article in its claim that, “behind” the Ruxton case “lay the failure of an Oriental to adapt himself to the Western world.”  In other respects, though, the writers and producers of the radio play seem determined to be as painstakingly accurate as possible.

I don’t suppose any American listener to Secrets (produced in Britain, but sold to international markets) would have appreciated this kind of attention to historical, regional detail.  Nor would I, had I not heard about the murder after being subjected to the image.  I would have assumed this radio play to be just another piece of sensational melodrama whose kernel of truth is drowned in a bucket of blood.

Most of all, though, I marvel at the link between the drawing and the recording.  Perhaps, I am still compartmentalizing my worlds too much, keeping apart what is distinct yet kindred.  I strikes me that, whatever subject you pursue, whatever object you admire, remote it may seem from your present surroundings (an apartness, perhaps, that attracted you to the subject to begin with), should not be assumed to have no relation to your everyday.

Sometimes it takes more of an effort to make the connection, and sometimes the efforts seem not worth your making; but every so often (as in this instance, or the time we went in search of a rock in a painting that now hangs in our bedroom or spotted that actress in a Hitchcock movie whose likeness we have on a piece of paper), you—or, I should say, I—get this thrill of being able to relate to an artifact in unexpected, even intimate ways.  It is then that I most appreciate the work of all those nameless or forgotten artists, writers, and researchers engaged in producing what you might dismiss as impersonal or workaday . . .

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Blood, Sweater Girl, and Tears: “A Night with Johnny Stompanato”

I’ve just been tuning in to “A Night with Johnny Stompanato,” an original radio play by British director-playwright Jonathan Holloway, which you may access via BBC’s iPlayer until 18 July 2008. Based on “real events, newspaper reports, and FBI files from the years 1957 and 1958,” this hourlong docudrama recounts a sordid chapter in the life of screen legend Lana Turner, whose teenage daughter, Cheryl, stabbed to death the titular character, the star’s possessive mobster boyfriend. “Real events?” Turner purrs. “Yeah, I guess. Personally, I’ve rarely met a man who could tell the truth when a lie would do.” So, this time around, Lana gets to tell her own story. With us, the radio audience as jury, she is going to court for us—which is to say, she’s going to court us—all over again.

Can Turner give the performance of her life now that her own life is at stake? Let’s be frank, the former Sweater Girl was neither known for her realist acting nor for her vocal talents, as I previously remarked here. Tuning in to Turner is not likely to make you turn on to her. There wasn’t enough “It” in her timbre to make Lana’s figure appear before your mind’s eye as you listen to Suspense thrillers like “Fear Paints a Picture.” In this Imitation of Lana, Laurence Bouvard is ably substituting—and, I found, vocally improving on—the departed screen icon, who never sounded as confident behind the microphone as she looked in front of the camera. You might say that Bouvard sounds more convincing than Turner—even though, to me, “the real Lana” has an oxymoronic ring to it.

Now, my days of thrilling to trash like Hollywood Babylon are long gone, as are my experimentations in hairstyles inspired by Lana’s late 1950’s coiffure. Still, I was looking forward to this racy little number. Unfortunately, it turned out to be rather dull—which is quite a feat, considering the material.

On the face of it, “A Night with Johnny Stompanato” is not unlike one of those femme fatale yarns produced by Suspense, in which tough-talking dames give you the lowdown on a crime they were involved in, until the first-person narration makes way for a dramatization of past events. In short, the past becomes present at pivotal moments in the story. The same formula is used by Holloway, except that the playwright dramatizes the court scenes, which in themselves are retellings, with Turner commenting on the proceedings. In other words, he lets the leading lady attest too much, so that we are told what has happened rather than permitted to overhear it.

One of the most dramatic moments of “A Night with Johnny Stompanato” involves Turner, then shooting Another Time, Another Place in London, attempting to have her increasingly violent lover deported. From her dressing room at the studio, Turner calls Scotland Yard but, “as bad luck had it,” Stompanato was trying to reach her “at the same time.” Sorry, Wrong Number came to mind; but that was my mind, not the playwright’s. Instead of dramatizing this potentially thrilling call, Holloway has Turner recall it for us in retrospect:

The dumb English broad on the switchboard opened the line for him, and he listened in on everything I said to the police. The detective put down the phone, and John’s voice came straight out of the earpiece. I practically dropped dead on the spot.

The dropping dead, though, is acted out for us, with prolonged gurgling and some heavy breathing. Stompanato’s silencing comes as a relief. As impersonated—or caricatured—by John Guerrasio, he sounds about as charming and enigmatic as Allen Jenkins.

“You know,” Turner confides in us at the conclusion of her report,

the most amazing thing about the whole Johnny Stompanato business? That I didn’t learn from it. Just kept right on getting involved with men . . . and having a really bad time getting uninvolved. I never learned from my mistakes, which, I am told, is what makes us different from the animals. Nope. I just kept right on making them.

The same goes for radio playwrights, I suppose; “instead of being dramatic, with action in the now,” aforementioned writing instructor Luther Weaver complained about 1940s radio serials, their narration “offers a post-mortem on what already has happened.” Don’t get me wrong. I am grateful to the BBC for trying to keep radio drama alive (a new adaptation of Cheever’s short story “The Enormous Radio” is being broadcast on Wednesday); but, as “A Night with Johnny Stompanato” demonstrates, dialogue alone does not constitute drama. There’s more tension in one of Lana’s discarded sweaters.

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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!