Category: Radio Plays

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If It Can Cheer Up Karloff . . .

. . . it ought to be working wonders on a soul decidedly less gloomy than your average Karloffian antihero. A trip to Budapest, that is. It has been eleven months since last we took in the sites of the Hungarian capital. Granted, highlights included visits to awe-inspiring Statue Park and the downright dispiriting Terror House, outings for which my catchings-up with pop-acculturated Hungarians like glamorous Zsa Zsa Gabor and dashing Cornel Wilde or the radio experiments of Val Gielgud in said locale had left me thoroughly unprepared. Unexpected, too, were our encounters with FDR, Scarlett O’Hara, and assorted automata (Kempelen’s famed Turk among them).

William Henry Pratt (or Karloff, to call him by the assumed name that would become a typecasting trap) may not be a widely trusted authority on mirth, merriment or gender orientation; nor is old Hollywood with its backlot scenes and cultural insensitivities necessarily a reliable travel agent. Still, his character’s insistence that “It’s gay there,” which I heard again a few weeks ago in The Black Room (1935), is sure getting me in the mood for another Danubian interlude.

Of all the European city tours I have taken since my relocation from the United States to Wales—Madrid, Istanbul, and Prague among them—our week in Budapest has remained a delight as yet unsurpassed (the well-chosen dark spots on the schedule notwithstanding). Our nights at the opera alone were worth the inconveniences of budget air travel. My recent computer crashes have erased many of my holiday snapshots; so I am all the more eager to retrace my steps. Not that I expect to be walking around town in shorts and shirtsleeves this time around (apparently, a mere four weeks, from mid-March to mid-April, make all the difference). I won’t blame either Buda or Pest if it turns out that, to reverse an adage, you can’t go abroad again.

Not prepared to keep up with the out-of-date while abroad, the ‘castellan shuts up the keep, which will reopen upon his return.

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"You Boig?"

“I don’t have much respect for biographers,” I once told John N. Hall, noted author of Trollope: A Biography and Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life. I was being mischievous, knowing my professor to have a sense of humor that makes him just the man to examine the lives and fictions of the humorists who attract him. Indeed, I have rarely met an academic whose mentality was better suited to his subjects. I was not merely being facetious, though. I was also being honest. I don’t read biographies; not cover to cover, at least. I am too impatient to go through a series of incidents designed to trace the traits and career of a famous so-and-so to great-grandparents who were semi-literate peasants from Eastern Europe, to illustrate what impact the childhood agony of losing a balloon during a rainstorm had on an artist’s psyche, or explain what it really means to be a supposed nobody before becoming an alleged somebody.

You might say that I am not easily impressed by facts and downright doubtful of them; that I am unconvinced a life can be told by means of sundry scraps of evidence culled from contemporary sources or the recollections of contemporaries whose lost marbles are dutifully dredged from the gully of memory lane. It’s all that; but I would like to think that respect has something to do with it as well—respect for a creative mind expressing itself in a work of art by someone who might not be willing or able to open up otherwise. In other words, I take what an artist is willing to give, even if the limited supply of such works are dictated, to some extent, by market demands.

Nor do I believe that being told about traumas and toothaches ought to compel me to regard an artist’s works as the product of such ordeals. Nothing is more tedious than arguing that a character who slips on a banana peel was destined to break his neck because his creator was terrified of the tropical fruit a health-conscious aunt was trying to shove down his three-year-old throat. If I want a story or a picture to be a mirror, the reflection I find therein should be my own.

Autobiographies are a different kettle of fishiness altogether. They are the storied self, the persona an artist has decided to display in a public performance. (Hall, by the way, has since written his own memoir titled Belief [2007].) I accept them as such, which does not mean I am any more patient as I am being subjected to the courtship of an artist’s maternal grandparents, to Ellis Island flashbacks or dim impressions from the cradle. There is some of that in the aforementioned Molly and Me (1961), the autobiography of Gertrude Berg (pictured here in a photograph freely adapted from the March 1943 issue of Tune In).

Berg was the creator of the radio serial and subsequent television sitcom The Goldbergs, as well as the lesser known House of Glass, about which I got to read in Radio and the Jews by Siegel and Siegel, a volume I picked up at the Jewish Museum in New York during my last visit to my old Upper East Side neighborhood. Molly and Me may be short on the drama of radio, for which I initially picked it up, and lack the to researchers indispensable index, for which omission I immediately put it down again. I need not have been quite so prickly, though. Berg’s memoir, like her writings for the air, is alive with Dickensian characters, a conversational style, and challenges to literary theory that tickle the wayward scholar. Let me give you a for instance:

Well, I saw [New Orleans].  There were hot, wide streets, charming Old World houses—all hot—wonderful hot restaurants, and lovely, well-decorated, hot hotels. In the evening, when the sun goes down, the heat goes down also but the humidity goes up. It’s no wonder that Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner write such good tragedies.  With air conditioning maybe there’ll be a change in our Southern literature.

This passage, my favorite in the entire book, makes me wish Berg had been the ghost writer of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies:

The Lyceum [a New York restaurant her father managed] was a huge place that could take care of fifteen hundred people [. . .].  It was not only big, it was gemütlich, it was where people came to laugh, and it was before publicity men talked about atmosphere.  The ceilings were high and absolutely guaranteed not soundproofed. The whole idea was to have fun and not to be quiet. In those days silence was for funeral parlors, not restaurants.  There were chandeliers that were chandeliers—all cut glass with teardrops and draped strings of little glass balls, not straight pipes with blisters on the end or holes in the ceilings that drop light on you. I’m not saying that those were the good old days.  It’s just that there was something about bigness that was friendly.  Today if it’s big, it’s a bank or Grand Central or a cafeteria where you go in fast and come out fast.  There’s no place to relax any more except at home—and with the foam rubber they put into everything today, who can relax?

“You Boig?” an agent once addressed the writer at the beginning of her career. I can just see him there, facing her. I can hear him, too, thanks to Berg’s writerly gifts and a long exposure to actors like Allen Jenkins. She’s “Boig” all right. I feel that I got to know her as she wanted to be known, a woman who tells her audience not to expect the story of someone who “divorced three husbands, became a drug addict, and finally, after years of searching, found the real meaning of Life in a spoonful of mescalin.”

So what if there’s more Molly than “Me” in this production. I’m not going to tear up the cushions Berg arranged for me in hopes of finding a needle in what is too comfortable to be foam rubber . . .

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Leap Year Special

So it isn’t exactly the 35th of May, the magical anything goes if you dare to imagine kind of day Erich Kästner dreamed up for our delight. Still, it is an extra day, this 29th of February, and ought to be looked upon as extraordinary. Indeed, this rarest 24-hour period in the calendar—the anniversary of Superman’s birth, no less—should really be set aside or simply seized for the carnivalesque. It strikes me as absurd to carry on as usual only to keep our system of charting time from falling apart. Being a man of leisure, confined less by schedules than by the vagaries of the season, I decided to keep out of the rain and find out how this leap year appendage was treated by those in charge of the timing-is-everything, by-the-numbers business-as-usual world of commercial radio, USA.

Rather out of the ordinary, to be sure, was Jack Benny’s 29 February 1948 broadcast. Never one to allow guests a look behind the scenes, Benny had made an exception for his girlfriend, Gladys Zybysko; but those rehearsals, dramatized in flashback, took place on the 28th. I was curious, nonetheless, considering that Sadie Hawkins Day, as it used to be known in the US, is the only day a woman could propose marriage. Would the thoroughly self-sufficient Gladys Zybysko leap at the chance of spending her days with a skinflint like Benny? I didn’t think so. Besides, it never even came to that. Benny was too busy puzzling over a place called “Doo-wah-diddy” (“It ain’t no town and it ain’t no city”), mentioned in “That’s What I Like About the South,” a song to be performed on the broadcast.

On the same night, on another network, The Shadow dealt in his customary fashion with “The Man Who Was Death.” No mention was made of the 29 February. Not that I expect any such reference, considering that those born on this day—like Gilbert and Sullivan’s Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance—remain, numerically speaking, life itself to the very last. So, I kept twisting the dial in search of that twist in our everyday.

Promising “tales of new dimensions in time and space” from “the far horizons of the unknown,” the sci-fi series X Minus One seemed likely to mark the spot. On 29 February 1956 it presented “Hello, Tomorrow,” a fantasy examining a post-apocalyptic society, anno 4195 (alas). However compelling, it is a missed opportunity to match the intercalary with the intergalactic. Say, what calendar do you use in outer space? The problems with such “transcribed” programs is that they were readily recycled and, unlike the live programs broadcast during the 1930s and early-to-mid 1940s, omitted any specific temporal or topical references that would make them appear dated. Besides, “Hello, Tomorrow” would have more aptly been called “Hello Again, Yesterday.” It was a rerun.

Nor was the 29 February 1944 edition of Your Radio Newspaper a bissextile treat. There was none to be had all round; a sobering end to my search for the exceptional. Well, never mind. I, at least, am adhering to tradition by letting my world go temporarily topsy-turvy. To wit, I have permitted my in so many ways better half to propose . . . tonight’s entertainment. “Anything goes” comes at a price: I am subjecting myself to a screening of La vie en rose. It’s French, it’s Piaf—it’s something I can stomach only once every four years. “Extra,” I concluded after this exercise in futility, is not a synonym for “special.”

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Enter Clemence Dane

Okay, so I got momentarily distracted tonight watching American Idol. It’s the only television show I am following these days; but immediately after the twelve anxious men have sung their way into or out of the finals (we are about two days late here in Britain), I am going to lower the blind to screen Hitchcock’s Murder! The arrival of the Gracie Fields DVD set earlier this week has let to a change in my movie diet, with Hollywood fare being put on ice for the duration. Not that Fields’s Love, Life and Laughter was such a gem; it struck me as a poor, distant cousin of The Smiling Lieutenant (recently released on DVD in the US). Last night, I screened Alfred Hitchcock’s peculiar romance Rich and Strange (1931). So, when I noticed that today marks the anniversary of the birth of Clemence Dane, co-author of Enter Sir John, the novel upon which Hitchcock’s Murder! is based, I knew what we would be watching tonight.

Born in England on this day, 21 February, in 1888, the woman who called herself Clemence Dane was a prolific and highly popular novelist-playwright whose works were adapted for screen and radio. The Campbell Playhouse, for instance, presented a dramatization of Dane’s 1931 novel Broome Stages, starring Helen Hayes. Dane’s best-known work, A Bill of Divorcement (which you may read here), was produced by the Theater Guild (1 December 1946) and adapted for Studio One (29 July 1947).

Dane’s screenplays were reworked for broadcasting as well; the Lux Radio Theater soundstaged both “The Sidewalks of London” (12 February 1940) and ”Vacation from Marriage” (26 May 1947).

What I did not know until today is that, like W. H. Auden (to acknowledge the birthday of another, far more enduring writer), Dane also conceived plays especially designed for listening. Did they “do” radio? is a question invariably on my mind when I consider the cultural contributions of 20th-century writers and actors who made a name for themselves in other branches of the performing arts. The answer, in Dane’s case, came to me from this latest addition to my bookshelves, British Radio Drama, 1922-1956 (1957) by BBC radio drama department head Val Gielgud (last featured here).

According to Gielgud, Dane’s The Saviours, was “without doubt” the “most distinguished contribution to Radio Drama during 1941.” Why these plays are no longer presented by the BBC is a mystery to me. Despite the continued popularity of radio drama in Britain, recordings of classic broadcasts are far more difficult to come by, whereas copies of the published scripts for The Saviours, a series of seven propaganda plays on the theme stated in the title, are readily available in second-hand bookstores online. Published radio plays, of course, are always second hand.

So, I resort to an irreverent account by playwright-actor Emlyn Williams (aforementioned) of his experience being cast by Gielgud in one of Dane’s earlier play, Will Shakespeare: An Invention in Four Acts (1921), broadcast in 1937 on the anniversary of the Bard’s birth (23 April). “In spite of the talkies,” Williams remarks in his autobiography Emlyn, “British radio was still a momentous force.” The thought of going “live” before an unseen audience of three million people was “paralysing.” Worse still was the atmosphere in the soundproof studio, a “dungeon” filled with microphones resembling a “regiment of robots,” each ded eye turnd bright red and stared at its victims.”

Present in the studio was Clemence Dane, whom Williams describes as an

outsize author with a handsome generous face topped by hair as overflowing as her talent.  It had been scooped hastily back into a bun and seemed about to come tumbling down and be sat on.

In a cascade of black to the floor, with a corsage of big happy flowers which accentuated her size, she looked as if, were the world not larger than she was, she would cradle it in her lap.  A photographer advanced to arrange the cast round her chair, just as she was handed a vast bouquet which she embraced with a beautiful smile.  She was a mother at a prize-giving where all her children had ended up First.

After all, this formidable woman is rumored to be the model for Madame Arcati, the delightfully eccentric psychic in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit (discussed here). Thanks to Williams’s first-hand account, I can picture Clemence Dane in the studio, even if I am not likely ever to hear her plays for radio. To think that the world is dead to the theatrical events of the air, that these offerings are being kept out of earshot. It’s enough to make a body scream bloody Murder!

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Whodunit, Mr. President?

This seems to me just the day to hear about Messrs. Polk and Harding, to listen to the words of Franklin Pierce and Chester Alan Arthur. During the late 1940s and early ‘50s, they were all brought back to life via that great spiritual medium, the wireless. For little less than half an hour at a time, they wafted right into the American home, which, a decade earlier, had been accustomed to so-called Fireside chats from an above determined to come across as being among.

The announcer promised “little known stories of the men who’ve lived in the White House. Dramatic, exciting events in their lives that you and I so rarely hear. True human stories of Mr. President.” The voice channeling those departed leaders belonged to Edward Arnold, whose services were duly acknowledged. Withheld, however, was the name of the titular character he portrayed, so that the public was called upon to guess the identity of each week’s Presidential candidate.

Who, for instance, uttered the promise “If I am elected to this office, which I do not seek, I will not be a party president. I will be a president of all of the people”? Perhaps, it has been uttered rather too often since to make it obvious that the speaker was meant to be Zachary Taylor. “Men will die,” another phantom president exclaimed, “but the fabrics of our free institutions remain unshaken.” Another familiar rallying cry, commonly uttered during times of war or the preparation thereof. It is a line that rings hollow in an age in which war is being waged on terror, at the expense of the freedoms it is ostensibly designed to protect.

Who stated, rather mixed metaphorically, “In the newspapers I can read the handwriting on the wall. I am a complete failure as President of the United States”? Welcome words of contrition and humility we don’t often get to hear from our elected officials, especially those resolute ones who insist on staying the course. And who declared “I am not responsible to the Senate and I am unwilling to submit my actions to them for judgment”?

In concept, at least, Mr. President (1947-53) has all the appeal of a mystery program, even though its producers did not go so far as to call their stories whodunits.

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Stick to what you know?

Are those words to live by? Stick to what you know? In my case, that might very well mean having to stay caught up in a mess of a square you could barely trap a fly with. There is something suspect about this piece of advice, as there is with any adage offered wholesale, which is, of course, just what makes an adage an adage. I have a tendency to stick; but I just as easily become unglued. I am glad to have escaped from much that I knew but knew to be not for me. Some bonds were harder to sever. Throughout, I have attached myself to what I learned to love, rather than know; that is, to what I want to know more about, or to what I understand even without knowledge. One such constant has been the radio—the medium that, before the internet, was the most inconstant if all-pervading source of news and entertainment around.  If I had stuck to what I knew, growing up with television, I might not gotten into this wireless act, suspended in the air they insist on having waves. As a matter of fact, I am still taking to those waves. And even when I am watching movies, I get tossed right back into them. The other night, for instance, I was watching Cary Grant and Myrna Loy in Wings in the Dark (1935), which features the voice of radio announcer Graham McNamee. That’s just as it should be, a disembodied somebody, a few words in your ears.

I am still catching up with myself after the recent crash of my Mac (see previous post). Looking around to find what defines me, besides my life online, I am taking inventory again—inventory in the literary sense that mirrors the metaphoric. Once again, I am compiling a list of the books in my library—all those books on that certain constant, the elusive radio. Once again, I am dusting off a few old volumes I have added to my shelves over the years. One such book is my first edition copy of This Fascinating Radio Business (1946) by Robert J. Landry.

My copy of it (pictured above) was once owned by one John G. Jones, who, I am pleased to say, has taken very good care of it. Landry, in turn, cared for radio and those at work in the to him—and me—“fascinating” business. Now that the writers’ strike in Hollywood has come to an end, just in time to stage the biggest event in motion pictures, I am reminded of Landry’s comments on the plight of radio writers during the 1940s, when radio was second to none in the business of entertaining, educating, or just plain manipulating the masses:

The Federal copyright statutes protect unproduced stage plays but they do not cover radio drama. In general the author and/or owner of a given radio property must rely upon common law.

Does not getting paid for your work, or not getting paid due respect, really cheapen the effort? Landry mocked the supercilious critics who measured radio by standards other than its own:

Radio is vaudeville. It is trivial. It is the market place. It concerns ordinary people and the things they think about. In short radio is educative in a practical and basic sense that disturbs those who prefer to think of education as one PhD dazzling another PhD.

I am one of those PhDs who got dazzled by radio; or, who got a PhD and little else for their state of bedazzlement. And I shall keep on recording and commenting on its successes and failures, without condescension or a sense of nostalgia. After all,

professional radiomen resent, and not without some justification, the habit of satire of all things radiogenetic which is typical of the modern intellectual. Certainly the educator and the superior citizen will have little influence in the betterment of radio—and that task goes incessantly forward—until and unless they descend from their platform of amused contempt.

Somewhat belatedly, I am stepping to the podium, addressing an audience long departed. Unlike them, I am going to stick with it. After all, like Mr. Landry, I find this Radio Business fascinating.

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Songs, Lies, and Audiotape: Margaret Truman Daniel (1924-2008) on the Air

Having just learned of the passing of Margaret Truman Daniel, the former US President’s only daughter, I am going to conjure up her voice by listening to some of the radio programs on which she was featured. Truman made her broadcasting debut in Detroit, back in 1947; she started out as a pianist, then turned to singing.

Fade to black: Margaret Truman Daniel

To most Americans, of course, she was, first and foremost, the First Daughter. Could she pull off a career on the strength of her vocal chords, people wondered, or was it all a matter of pulled strings? Fully aware of this debate, Truman was often in on the joke, an act that made her a welcome guest on what, in the early 1950s, was the biggest show on radio. Tallulah Bankhead’s Big Show.

On 3 December 1950, Truman faced the acerbic Bankhead for the first time. “I suppose you’re all a-wondering how we were able to get such a prominent personage as Miss Truman to be guest on our program,” quipped the celebrated hostess. “Well, really, all it took was a telephone call. I called a certain party, and that party called another party, who in turn called another party. Uh, naturally, these were all democratic parties.”

On the same broadcast, Truman was also confronted with Fred Allen. Sharing the microphone with the seasoned if semi-retired radio wit proved quite a challenge for the still inexperienced Truman.

Truman. How do you do, Mr. Allen?

Allen. Well, how do you do? It’s certainly a pleasure. But, please, don’t call me Mr. Allen. Call me by my given name.

Truman (imitating Bankhead). All right, Daaahling!

Bankhead. This girl has the makings of a Milton Berle.

Truman. Fred, I’ve been an admirer of your radio program for a long time.

Allen. Well, thank you. But where were you when my option came up back there in 1948?

Truman. In 1948, we were busy with an option problem ourselves.

Allen. Yes, but that option was renewed for another four years. You were lucky you didn’t have a quiz show running against you. And, by the way, Miss Truman, I’m surprised you don’t have a radio program of your own.

Truman. Oh, I can’t do anything well enough to have my own program.

Allen. Oh, on radio that’s no handicap.

When Allen insists that Truman ought to have her own variety program, Bankhead feels threatened:

Allen. Say, uh, this might be an idea, Margaret. Now, how about doing a big variety show, about an hour and a half program, and get the biggest names in show business. Why, you could be the mistress of ceremonies.

Bankhead. Just a moment! That’s my program. I don’t mind standing here without any lines, but I simply refuse to stand here without a program.

Truman. Oh, don’t worry, Tallulah. I wouldn’t dream of doing a program like that.

Bankhead (at her huskiest). And why not, Daaahling?

Truman. Well, I don’t think I’m old enough.

Bankhead. Whaaaaaaat!

Three months later, on 4 March 1951, recent Time magazine cover girl Truman was back on the Big Show. “Aren’t you Charlie’s Aunt,” Allen’s wife and sidekick Portland Hoffa inquired, mistaking Truman for the sister of Britain’s reigning monarch. “Love Is Where You Find It,” Truman trills after a confrontation with Ethel Merman, then learns about the harmonica from Herb Shriner.

“I’m an actress now,” Truman declared upon her return to the Big Show on 6 May 1951. A week earlier, she had played opposite James Stewart in a Screen Directors Playhouse production of Jackpot (26 April 1951), a satire on the excesses of commercial radio. Bankhead condescended to give Truman the title role in “Advice to the Little Peyton Girl,” a dramatic sketch based on a story by Dorothy Parker. Yet the emphasis was decidedly on the “Advice” and the one proffering it, not on the “Girl”; as the young woman’s “older, wiser, and oh-so-understanding confidante,” Bankhead devoured the scene.

Sharing the microphone with experienced performers, Truman was not so much propped up as shown up by them. The following year, for instance, the successful recording artist was called upon to sing opposite Gordon MacRae on the Railroad Hour in the operetta “Sari” (17 March 1952), an adaptation of Noel Coward’s Bitter Sweet. The words “Pretty boys, witty boys, you may sneer” come to mind. Perhaps, Truman, or Bankhead’s script writers, had been right. She did not quite have it in her to be a radio personality. Guesting five times on the Big Show, however, she proved herself a genial team player.

Being shown up by your hostess is bad enough; worse still is when you are the hostess and the guests don’t show up. This misfortune befell Truman on the premiere of her next radio venture. Along with Mike Wallace, the gal from Missouri was to host Weekday, a six-hour, five-day-a-week daytime variety program also starring Martha Scott and Walter Kiernan. Imitating the successful Monitor, Weekday promised drama, music, and chat.

On the opening program, back in 1955, Truman announced Eddie Fisher, her “star companion” for the day. “Hi Eddie!” she opened; but Fisher did not respond. As Slate and Cook recall in It Sounds Impossible (1963), the chats were partially recorded. That is, Truman did not get to talk to her guests, but was expected to simulate her scripted interviews, with the control room feeding her a recorded voice, an experimental technique called “‘stop-start’ taping.” Eddie was not stuck up; he was just a tape getting stuck.

Such difficulties notwithstanding, Truman stuck with the show until 1956, picking up a regular television assignment nearly a decade later. She may not have hit the Jackpot, but she maintained her media presence long after her father and his party had been voted out of office.

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Gone Garbo

Well, let’s skip it. The convivial “Well,” I mean, with which I have been wont to begin my posts for over two and a half years now. Things haven’t been well for quite some time, and I hardly feel gregarious enough to have use for such a hokey opening. For once, I am not going to assume the well-worn persona of the casual, nonchalant reporter or produce another impersonal, labored piece of prose commemorating the birth of a celebrity long deceased. That will have to wait.

This journal has been in somewhat of a shambles since my return from New York and London, during which carefree time of easy living I was reminded—if any reminder were needed—that I am truly an urbanite at heart. Matters were not helped when I fell ill soon after coming back to the countryside; nor has facing the first month of the year, bleak and blank as it looms before me, ever felt like a particularly uplifting or inspiring period to me. Renewal? I have yet to sense it.

I feel my isolation keenly at times, and sometimes I appear to be revelling in it as if in a state of martyrdom. Now, by calling this period—and I sincerely hope it is just a phase—Garboesque, I am already in defiance of this journal, Garbo being the only major Hollywood actress not to appear on the radio, the medium to whose stars, stories, and strictures broadcastellan is devoted.

For a moment, feeling either overmastered by the task of keeping up with myself (the recent posts from Gotham and the Big Smoke having been mere placeholders, some of which I have at last begun to fill, as in the case of my getting caught in The Mousetrap), or feeling reluctant to look back, being wary and weary of nostalgia, I contemplated putting an end to broadcastellan. Only, saying “farewell” sounded rather too melodramatic, and, I nearly felt but certainly still hoped, rash and premature.

Its arcane subject matter and frosty euphuisms notwithstanding, this is a personal journal. It has to matter to me before it can matter to anyone. And recently I have been unable to matter much to myself. Not taking myself too seriously has generally been an asset to me; but you can take not taking yourself seriously too far, at which point you drift into a desolate place reverberating with the hollow laughter of self-contempt.

Let us say—or permit me to say it on behalf of myself—that, speaking Garboesquely, I have been in my Two-faced period, a wavering to which those less anxious to find just the right expression or indifferent to the joys of such a challenge refer as crossroads; but I have decided to go on, falteringly and doubtfully, instead of calling it quits without having half the cold heart to disguise such a move as the height of dignity . . .

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“Fortune . . . Danger!”: Weighing In on The Fat Man

Well, he had more than a slim chance of winning over the public when he first stepped on the the scales on this day, 21 January, in 1946, solving the mystery of “The 19th Pearl” (an anniversary also commemorated today by the unfaltering “Easy Ace”). His name, after all, was The Fat Man (also known as Brad Runyon); and he was allegedly fathered by the same guy who gave us The Thin Man. The connection exhausted itself in the contrast expressed in—and unabashedly exploited by—the title. The Fat Man was part of ABC’s “Monday night surprise package,” four programs the network added to its line-up of offerings. According to New York Times radio critic Jack Gould it was a “courageous venture.” Not quite so “courageous,” perhaps, considering that the producers of The Fat Man were banking on the public’s familiarity with the author of The Maltese Falcon, even though said talent had no involvement in the new series other than lending his name to it, for a considerable fee.

Of that, the press appeared to have been unaware, lest they were complicit in duping the public. Gould, at least, assumed the The Fat Man to be “from the pen of Dashiell Hammett, who except for a changed perspective on human avoirdupois, is still drawing liberally on the pattern set by his eminently successful Thin Man.” Not that he was particularly impressed, arguing that the “script left a good deal to be desired, being pretty wishy-washy in characterization and worse in motivation.” Deemed an “altogether different matter” was the second episode (“The Unfamiliar Face”), a “well-knit thirty minutes” for the fashioning of which Robert Sloane was acknowledged as “adapter and director.”

And yet, Gould argued, it was the performer in the title role who might “determine the program’s long-range fate.” Runyon was played by J. Scott Smart (pictured above, in an image freely adapted from a contemporary Life magazine article photographically recreating one of the Fat Man’s subsequent adventures). Gould called his delivery “casual,” at times assuming a “rather sing-song quality that does not always make for the best of listening.” Like Sydney Greenstreet (as Nero Wolfe), the audibly bulky Smart had a voice well-suited to the role of a criminologist who, the announcer reminds us, “tips the scale at 247 pounds.”

Rather more human than the average hard-boiled investigator, the apple-chewing Runyon is self-conscious about his physical appearances: “The only time you really feel [fat] is when you run into a beautiful woman.” In his first adventure, he does just that. Bidding farewell to his mother at Grand Central Station, he bumps into the proverbial—and as such dubious—damsel in distress to whose charms (enhanced by a slight case of Dietrich) our hero too willingly succumbs. “I don’t think it is wise to kiss strange women in stations, son,” his mother warns him. “Have you still got your watch?” “I’ve got more than my watch, ma. I’ve still got her bag.” And thus, the “Pearl” gets rolling. Not the freshwater kind, mind you, but not such a bad piece of custom jewelry at that.

Less than sparkling was the other thriller series premiering that night: I Deal in Crime, starring William Gargan (whom I last spotted in The Devil’s Party, as well as the Claudette Colbert vehicles The Misleading Lady and Four Frightened People). The prominent lead notwithstanding, Gould showed himself unimpressed:

[. . .] Ted Hediger’s script, most of which is a monologue, creeps along at a snail’s pace and boasts more than the accepted quota of the stock situation for the detective field. The central character of Ross Dolan would make any self-respecting gumshoe cringe, and matters are not helped by a rather lackadaisical performance by Mr. Gargan.

Listening to Gargan’s I Deal debut I am inclined to agree with the critic. As a disillusioned post-warrior returning to his old haunts in Los Angeles, Gargan is emotionally detached to the point of never-mind-the script-as-long-as-there’s-a-paycheck indifference, sounding like a dead cousin of Sam Spade‘s Howard Duff. Being thrown the catchy phrase “So what!” in the opening monologue, listeners are likely to repeat it emphatically, if only to drown out Gargan’s less-than-ideal monotone.

In any case, it is a rare treat to come across such reviews, listen to the program in question, and engage in a debate, equipped with a history of each of these shows. ABC’s The Fat Man remained on the air until 1951 (the year it was readied for the big screen, with Smart in the lead), whereas Gargan’s Crime dealership closed in the late summer of 1948. The other two programs thrown into the mix that night, Paul Whiteman’s rather too confidently titled Forever Tops (a recording of which is available here) and the comedy Jimmy’s Diner, starring Jimmy and Lucille Gleason, fared considerably worse.

To be sure, what killed the Fat one was not a lack of interest in his cases, but the blacklisting of its ostensible creator. Hammett spelled commercial success one day and subversive threat the next, which explains why so few noted writers of the late 1940s and early 1950s would bother to Deal in Crime or self-punishment on the radio.

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” . . . same again? Only a little different?”: Cary Grant and the Radio

Well, this being the anniversary of the birth of the man everyone including Cary Grant wanted to be, I decided to listen to a Lux Radio Theater production of “The Awful Truth,” originally broadcast on the actor’s 51st birthday in 1955. By that time, the program was transcribed (that is, recorded), so that Grant did not have to spend this special evening (previously commemorated here) behind the microphone entertaining a vastly diminished crowd of far-flung radio listeners. Not that the early to mid-1950s had been a particularly busy period in the actor’s career. Aside from its felicitous air date (unacknowledged by the host of the program), the 1955 version constitutes the first reteaming of Grant with his original co-star, Irene Dunne, even though both had shared the Lux soundstage for “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” (10 October 1949), which would serve as the premise for Grant’s own radio sitcom, co-starring wife Betsy Drake (who also wrote some of the scripts for the series).

Prior to their Awful reunion, Grant and Dunne reprised their roles in the mascara hazard Penny Serenade (16 November 1941) for the Screen Guild Theater, appeared together in a Screen Directors Playhouse production of My Favorite Wife (7 December 1950), as well as the Screen Guild’s original radio play “Alone in Paris” (30 April 1939).

Nearly two decades of Grant’s life in picture are echoed on the air, in radio dramatizations ranging from Lux’s 8 March 1937 broadcast of ”Madame Butterfly” (adapted from the 1932 film) and the comparatively obscure (if recent DVD release) Wings in the Dark (1935), reworked for the aforementioned Silver Theater to classics like His Girl Friday (1940) and Suspicion (1941). Radio also invites speculations as to what a difference Grant might had made in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt and I Confess.

Equally at home in melodrama and comedy, Grant guested on a comedy-variety programs like Pepsodent Show, starring Bob Hope (much to the delight of hundreds of screaming WAVES and nurses in the all-female studio audience), and the drama anthology Suspense (in which he was cast in a number of memorable thrillers, including two plays—“The Black Curtain” and “The Black Path of Fear”— based on stories by Cornell Woolrich). On the big screen, in turn, Grant was given the opportunity to star in an adaptation one of the best comedies written for radio, Norman Corwin’s “My Client Curley” (previously discussed here), even though the sentimental film, titled Once Upon a Time (1944), does not manage to capture the magic and wit of the original.

Listening to the actor’s radio performances through the years, it was interesting to hear the changes in Grant’s voice—a voice as distinctive as the cleft in his chin—divorced as it is on the air from the features that became rather more distinguished with age. Truth is that Grant, never known for passionate emoting, sounded awful staid in the 1955 rematch with Dunne, his next to last performance in radio drama. He had been heard once before in a Lux presentation of Leo McCarey’s raucous romance; but his sparring mate that night—the opener of the program’s fifth season on 11 September 1939—was Claudette Colbert, whose character in Without Reservations would write a role assigned to Grant (for the 10 March 1941 Lux broadcast, the role of Jerry Warriner was tailored to Bob Hope, with second fiddle Ralph Bellamy as the only original cast member in that production).

Back in 1939, there was zap and brio in his voice, which, in the sound-only medium, had to make up for the loss of some wonderful slapstick. Nearly sixteen years later, in a reading of the same if somewhat condensed script, what had once come across as carefree and devil-may-care sounded an awful lot like “who cares.” The by then all but defunct genre of screwball with its unsentimental take on love as war (from courting to court case) demanded more energy than either Dunne or Grant were willing (or able) to bring to their connubial tussles. Indeed, the loudest laughs in the studio audience are generated by the less than convincing barks of Mr. Smith, the couple’s pooch (granted, somewhat of a scene-stealer in the film as well).

After experiencing episodes of puerile madcap in Howard Hawks’s Monkey Business (1952), which did little to rejuvenate his career, Grant was finally slowing down. Unfortunately, he appeared to be rehearsing for An Affair to Remember with material not designed to make us forget that his days of cheeky indiscretion lay in a livelier past. Perhaps it is just as well that adaptor George Wells cut Jerry’s final speech in The Awful Truth. It might have sounded too much like an aging actor’s apology, his plea to an audience expecting lively antics: “So, as long as I’m different, don’t you think things could be the same again? Only a little different?”

In the 1930s and ’40s, Grant’s vocal chords were as elastic as his vaudeville-tested sinews. A few day’s after his 35th birthday (on 22 January 1939, to be exact), the lad from Bristol surprised those tuning in to the Ronald Colman hosted Circle with a spirited rendition of “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.” What’s more, the tune is followed later in the program by Grant’s tuneful delivery of . . . the FCC’s regulations regarding station identification. Something different, all right.

“No cackling,” Grant told Colman a few years later on the Command Performance (22 July 1944); but he could be persuaded, nonetheless, to sing a few notes. With the exception of his performance of Cole Porter in the disingenuous Night and Day (1946), there was nary a false one in Grant’s long and varied career on screen and radio.