Category: Radio Plays

Posted on

The Thin Man Shows Some "Thigh"

There has always been an air of mystery about radio. It has been called the “blind medium,” which, while not quite accurate, suggests that its audiences are left in the dark, drawn in by sound and left out by silence. That is why the airwaves are so well suited to mysteries, the art of holding back and filling you in, deliciously piecemeal—the art of fascinating by frustration. The very word “mystery” is said to have its origins in the Greek verb meaning “to close the eyes,” as well as a noun denoting a faint sound made with one’s mouth shut. Mum, apparently, is the word in this sophisticated game of blind man’s bluff.

Now, this business of withholding information and frustrating those who are itching to know is somewhat less magical when it comes to collecting so-called old-time radio programs. So many transcriptions have disappeared over the years, leaving us clueless as to the nature and quality of a thriller series, aside from a few notes or a list of tantalizing titles. The Thin Man is one of those shows that have almost entirely vanished; only a small number of episodes have been preserved.

On this day, 20 October, in 1944, the Charleses, as impersonated on the air by David Gothard and Claudia Morgan, solved “The Case of the Tattooed Thigh.” That illustrated gam has gone missing; but, an unexpected aid in its recovery presents itself in form of an issue of Life magazine, which turned the script for the upcoming broadcast into a photo novel, shot at Manhattan’s Versailles Restaurant.

However disappointing it might have been for those eager to listen in back then to find not only the thigh but the entire case laid bare by this tell-all spoiler of a picture shoot, the magazine now comes in handy for those who would like to get a load of that elusive limb, or indeed any missing link in the rich history of American radio drama.

Having read the story, which involves an inked kooch dancer who is poisoned by a curare-coated dart while performing her routine with her partner and lover, I wonder how it might have played out on the air. The terse synopsis makes plain how simple radio whodunits were, and needed to be, considering that the twenty-odd minutes allotted to such plays does not allow for a great number of plot twists, suspects, and red herrings. Yet, as I said, there is an air of mystery about the sound-only medium, which can enhance the most prosaic picture and lend charm and intrigue to the dullest text. Sure, I saw the “Thigh,” but I’d much rather wrap my ears around it.

Posted on

Moby-Dick, Squeezed into a Can of Sardines

Well, call me . . . whatever you like, but I am prickly when it comes to the protection of endangered species; those of the literary kind, I mean. Take Moby-Dick, for instance. Go ahead, so many have taken it before you, ripped out its guts and turned it into some cautionary tale warning against blind ambition and nature-defying obsession. Moral lessons are like sardines: readily tinned and easily stored until dispensed; but they become offensive when examined closely and exposed for much longer than it takes to swallow them.

Not far from where I live now, in the Welsh town of Fishguard (pictured), Gregory Peck was once seen impersonating the mad Captain Ahab, who, in the eyes and minds of many non-readers, became the scene-chomping villain in control of Herman Melville’s tough-to-steer vessel of a book. On this day, 19 October, in 1946, Moby-Dick was being chopped to pieces for the airwaves. It had come under the knife of Ernest Kinoy. who did this sort of hack job on a weekly basis; the remains were tossed onto the soundstage of the Columbia Workshop, ready to be delivered to American homes like a quick if none too nutritious meal.

Radio was a regular cannery row back then. Now, the Workshop was a classier establishment than most of radio’s story factories. As I last mentioned here, it was billed as “radio’s foremost laboratory of writing and production technique.” Its producers knew better than to present the entire volume in a twenty-five minute synopsis. A little better, that is. Instead, as if inspired by the hyphen that harpoons the original title, they allotted two installments for its audio-dramatic rend(er)ing of the old mammal. They had done as much in their treatments of Hamlet and Alice in Wonderland (as well as its sequel). They were still a thousand nautical miles away from approaching what E. M. Forster referred to as “the song” of the book.

As Forster remarked, Moby-Dick is “an easy book, as long as we read it as a yarn or an account of whaling interspersed with snatches of poetry. But as soon as we catch the song in it, it grows difficult and immensely important.” The “prophetic song” of Moby-Dick “flows athwart the action and the surface morality like an undercurrent. It lies outside words.” It certainly “lies outside” the domain of sound effects and choric shanties—the readily reproduced impressions of the sea.

I wonder whether Hemingway was listening in or taking notes that day (and on 26 October, when the Workshop presumed to have done justice to—or simply be done with—the book ). On radio, at least, Moby-Dick sounded like an extended version of The Old Man and the Sea, written a century later. Aside from the famous opening line and the hunt for the titular creature (which takes up the three concluding chapters of Melville’s 135-chapters-spanning tome), little blubber and less bone remains of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, a book known to many and read by few.

To those picking it up for the first time, the humanity and gentle mankindliness of Moby-Dick—especially its tenth chapter—must come as a surprise. What has happened to popular culture in America that it balks at such pre-Wildean sentiment but gorges instead on the book’s supposed machismo appeal? Is it possible, perhaps, to take another look at this Brokeback Mountain of a whale?

“All my books are botches,” Melville declared to Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom the book is inscribed. They most certainly are, once they fall into the hands of adaptors like Mr. Kinoy.

Posted on

“. . . leaking out of Neverland”: Peter Pan in Scarlet

Well, I was all set to go on about Les Miserables.  No, not the musical record-trampler recently certified as the longest-milked cash cow in the history of West End and Broadway.  Nor the original yet-another-page turner, either.  I wanted to commemorate the anniversary of a 1942 radio sketch spoofing Hugo’s epic . . . until I realized that I had already done just that last October.  So, before I end up resorting to bottled thought, I’d better lower myself anew into the tortuous sewers of popular culture.  What I came up with, this time, is the idea for a new column.

Noticing that a recording of Fred Allen’s Les Mischief is being presented tonight by the WRVO Playhouse, it occurred to me that, rather than relying on my own library of plays, it might be refreshing to find out what is “Now on the Air,” to highlight programs currently online, broadcasts or podcasts that caught my ear and might be worth your time.

One such discovery is “Peter Pan in Scarlet,” an adaptation of the recently published sequel to the famous play and novel by J. M. Barrie. True, I’d prefer being treated to another helping of Barrie’s comedy As Every Woman Knows, a superb production of which I caught in Manchester, England, a few months ago. I am generally so little inclined to romanticize the alleged wonders of childhood that I was tickled to find “No Room for Peter Pan,” an odd radio play about growing up starring the most famous Every Woman of them all—Miss Helen Hayes.

Not that I’ve been trying to dodge those Peter Panhandlers altogether. Most recently I took in Paramount’s delightful 1924 version featuring the aforementioned Anna May Wong as Tiger Lily; but, having once suffered through Spielberg’s dismal 1991 update showcasing the belatedly juvenile antics of Man of the Year wannabe Robin Williams, I still approach subsequences like Peter Pan in Scarlet with some misgivings.

Mind you, this is an “official” sequel. In 2005, author Geraldine McCaughrean was commissioned to continue the adventures of Peter and Wendy as sanctioned by the trust to whom Barrie granted the rights to his story. On 14 October 2006, shortly after the publication of the legitimized follow-up, BBC Radio 4 presented its authorized dramatization of McCaughrean’s novel, adapted for the sound-only medium by Nick Warburton. Before being issued as an audio book, a recording of the broadcast has been made available in the BBC’s online archive.

The production is a throwback to old-fashioned radio dramatics, replete with a guiding, at times interacting, narrator and a for British radio unusual attention to sound effects. At ninety minutes, however, it might get on your nerves before it can plays itself out in your mind. As much of American radio drama of the so-called golden age, it tries to cram an entire novel through the comparatively narrow slot of a single broadcast; but unlike the former, this production seems to insist on telescoping it all in a nearly seamless Pan-orama rather than editing and segmenting through slow fades, pauses, and musical bridges, without which much gets lost in breathless confusion, a hyperactive storytelling as unruly as Peter himself.

In a nod to that beloved late-20th century fairytale A Nightmare on Elm Street, “Peter Pan in Scarlet” opens with John Darling shuddering to frightful visions of steel-clawed Captain Hook; and, the horrors being communicable, he is not the only one dreading sleep. “I imagine dreams are leaking out of Neverland. So we must find out why,” Wendy determines in her instant diagnosis of John’s case. The cure she prescribes is to “call the old boys together again” and, overcoming the considerable obstacle that is adulthood, to revisit their apparently endangered pal.

In order to take flight, the grown-ups have to become children again, a feat achieved by shrinking into the clothes of their offspring. This provides an occasion for cross-dressing and gender-bending in an update divested of the original’s androgyny and adolescent yearnings. The jolly downsizing is nicely realized by the uncredited sound-effects artists. From then on, bright ideas and dark twists chase one another in what amounts to a frantic and noisy quest for a good night’s rest.

Prominent in the cast is Shakespearean actor Roger Allam, who might have faired better than Fred Allen opposite the megalomaniacal Orson Welles in the radio sketch I had on my mind today. After all, Allam played Inspector Javert in the original West End production of Les Miserables and, not averse to hamming it up (as it struck me when I saw him in early 2005 in a crude pantomime at London’s Old Vic), would have refused to be drowned in the sewers without uttering as much as a line of dialogue. As Pan’s nemesis, he never stays down for long, a sequel-symptomatic resilience bespeaking a writer’s determination to keep a newly invigorated franchise afloat.

Posted on

Morlock Guys and Eloi Dolls: The Domestic Battles of the Man Who Envisioned the War of the Worlds

I came across a peculiar piece of schlock science today. An evolutionary theorist has uttered the prediction that, within about 100,000 years from now, the human race may develop into two separate and unequal breeds, a scenario akin to the one H. G. Wells created in his sci-fi thriller The Time Machine over a century ago. Our descendants will either be nasty, brutish and short, or else graceful, fragile and overcultivated, enslaved by technology and a fear of Hobbsian life in the state of nature. In other words, a world of Morlock and Eloi.

Wells’s fictions strike me as rather more urgent and compelling than such a pseudo-scientific hypothesizing about the shape of things to come. As Orson Welles and his collaborators drove home when they brought The War of the Worlds to radio (as discussed here), they invite us to translate the grim visions of the future into a commentary on the none-too-bright world of today. If the time machine had not returned home, the ride would be pretty much wasted.

In some of his smartest if lesser-known novels, Wells dispensed with the creation of seemingly distant worlds as stand-ins for close and contemporary ones. Instead, he documented what was separate and unequal in his own society, examining the clash of classes and the battle of the sexes. One such Wellsian commentaries, which I am currently reading, is Ann Veronica (1909), an incisive comedy about women’s struggle for equality.

I owe this discovery, and quite a few others besides, to my daily excursions into the realm of —another trip not worth taking if you are not prepared to transport something back with you into your here and now. It was a remark made by Lost Horizon author James Hilton on the NBC University Theater that brought Ann Veronica to my attention.

On 3 April 1949, Hilton shared his thoughts on Jane Eyre with the listeners of the NBC University Theater, which presented a dramatization of the novel (as discussed here) with Deborah Kerr in the title role.

Considering how frothy the conclusion of the new four-part BBC television adaptation of Jane Eyre turned out to be last Sunday, Hilton’s lecture may serve as a reminder of the original’s “shocking” and groundbreaking qualities as the “first great novel that emancipated woman emotionally by portraying her not merely as the passive recipient of man’s favor, but as the possessor of rightful and independent passion of which she need not be ashamed.” This “battle” of Jane Eyre and her heirs, so Hilton, continued into the twentieth century, until Wells “fired the last shot” with Ann Veronica.

I just had to find out how that shot was going off, even though I could hardly agree that it was to be the last. I am grateful to Hilton for having brought Ann Veronica to my attention, happy to be following its rebellious heroine in her quest to grow up an equal to the men around her. “She wanted to live,” Wells’s narrator sums it up; but

all the world about her seemed to be—how can one put it?—in wrappers, like a house when people leave it in the summer. The blinds were all drawn, the sunlight kept out, one could not tell what colours these grey swathings hid.

Ann Veronica “wanted to know,” but was little helped by a father who held that women were creatures “either too bad for a modern vocabulary, and then frequently most undesirably desirable, or too pure and good for life.” Anxious to mingle with socialists and suffragettes, she very much resented being cast as an Eloi in a sheltered upper-middle class world apart from if beleaguered by the hoi polloi many of her class regarded as terrifyingly Morlockian.

To be sure, that feeling of being segregated, set aside or typecast, can hit you at any time in your life; nor are societal conventions oppressive to women only, as Wells demonstrated in another one of his remarkable comedies, The History of Mr. Polly. Like young Ann Veronica, the middle-aged Mr. Polly is eager to escape the strictures of a narrowly defined existence, a life of many divisions and few diversions.

On this day, 17 October, in 1948, the NBC University Theater presented Mr. Polly starring Boris Karloff, an actor whose career in film was similarly circumscribed by the (di)visions of men who profit from such classifications (as I remarked here exactly one year ago). It feels right to return to Wells now, whose gleefully staged domestic battles are often overlooked in favor of his more somber epic ones. I, for one, don’t require the thrills and frills of an elaborate Halloween party to appreciate an attempt to unmask human nature.

Posted on

As Nazis Hang in Nuremberg, a Playwright Points at an "Empty Noose"

Imagine tuning in to one of your favorite mystery programs and being greeted instead by the following message:

“Columbia and its affiliated stations present a special broadcast for Wednesday, October 16, 1946, a day that will long be remembered at Nuremberg and throughout the world.”

It was a reminder that criminals greater than those generally found in detective fiction had been brought to justice; yet the broadcast that followed was far from celebratory.

The play was “The Empty Noose,” heard on the evening of that memorable day on which eleven masterminds of Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity were being executed. The verdict had been announced two weeks prior to the date set for the hanging, giving writer Arnold Perl time to construct with care this provocative memorial, a document in sound that opens with the naming of the sentenced: “Goering, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Sauckel, Jodl, Streicher and Seyss-Inquart.” Of course, only ten were actually hanged that day, leaving the eleventh noose empty.

“You should have seen them die,” the play’s “Eyewitness” addresses the listener,

seen all but one who arranged it by his own schedule [that is, Goering, who committed suicide] walk in the early morning of a gray cold day while most of Europe slept; seen them hanged one by one in the gymnasium under the electric lights. The ghastly ten who were left behind to where the hangman waited. Like those who watched, he knew, there was no payment large enough for what they had done.

Does the violent end of such violent men constitute the end of an era of violence? Or is this hanging little more than a gesture? Is it a time chiefly to rejoice and hope, or to reflect and doubt? These are the questions raised by Perl’s commemorative docudrama whose action unfolds in the eyewitness reports of those who had experienced life under fascist rule and were now attending the trial and executions.

“The Empty Noose,” like Norman Corwin’s “On a Note of Triumph,” refuses to cheer at the apparent victory for democracy, resists uttering or encouraging as much as a sigh of relief. After all, it was not Goering’s noose to which the title of Perl’s piece refers. His “Noose” was reserved for all those fascists who survived, living beyond remorse or reform, those denying the holocaust while harbouring thoughts of genocide, including those active in present-day Germany’s re-emerging Nationalist movement and those, elsewhere, tearing down liberties under cover of democracy.

“What didn’t we do at Nuremberg?” Perl’s play dares to ask, confronting listeners weary of conflict and eager to move on:

Well, that empty noose is still swinging, and it’s still empty. Until it’s used, until it’s choked the life out of Fascism—so far as I’m concerned this is no time, no place—there is no reason—to sit back relieved and calm. Tonight at Nuremberg—and tomorrow—there will still be one round coil of rope ready to be used. It’s going to take a lot of self-examining, a lot of faith in what we believe in, a lot of willingness to fight for it, a lot of speaking out, for all of us, here and everywhere, before that empty noose is filled, and we can stand up and say we have won, we have conquered.

In short—a message the play suggests rather than states plainly lest it promote fatalistic passivity—never.

Non-visual theater is the theater of ideas. While it has rarely been permitted to do so, it can dispense with traditional storytelling, with the Aristotelean dictum that there must be a beginning, middle, and end to any drama. It can raise questions, doubts, and awareness by raising voices and leaving interstices of ambiguous silence. It can resist dramatized exemplars and deal instead with ideological concepts simply by giving them utterance. And it can dangle an empty noose in the mind of its audience, a looming question mark in one’s own head more forceful and than the image of a rope around the neck of another. That image, after all, is a reminder of a time supposedly bygone, a reminder that, once again, someone else was made to stick his neck out to pay for our complacency and complicity.

The living breath of the voices on the air create no such conclusive image; instead, they caution us to be mindful, mindful of a present in which, around and within us, freedom and fascism run neck and neck for our future.

Posted on

A (Blind) “Writer at Work” Faces His Audience

The next essay I am going to publish here will mark another anniversary for this journal, it being the 250th entry. Instead of dancing around that less than monumental milestone, I’ll try to explain why I continue to keep writing and how I keep up with whatever I choose to write about—the ostensibly “out-of-date.”

Today, I’ll leave it to another writer to share his experience. That man is Hector Chevigny, historian, magazine writer, and playwright of over one thousand plays, most of them for radio. On this day, 12 October, in 1956, the CBS Radio Workshop invited listeners to eavesdrop on Chevigny in a piece titled “A Writer at Work.”

According to fellow radio playwright-historian Erik Barnouw, Chevigny began writing for radio in 1928. In 1936 and 1937 he was director of the CBS Script Division in Hollywood. His plays were heard on prestigious programs such as The Cavalcade of America and Arch Oboler’s Free World Theater. During the war, Chevigny contributed numerous scripts to propaganda series such as Treasury Salute. In the early 1950s, he took over as head writer for the daytime serial The Second Mrs. Burton (1946-60), an assignment that called for five scripts a week.

Since The Second Mrs. Burton took up much of Chevigny’s time, the Workshop chose to visit the writer at his Gramercy Park home in New York City and capture on tape how he planned and plotted one chapter of the serial (scripts for which can nowadays be found at New York City’s Public Library). On hand to introduce and interview the playwright was the actress then portraying Terry Burton, a fictional character so prominent that she at one time kept her own weekly radio column (as shown below). The equally prominent actress was radio stalwart Jan Miner (previously mentioned here).

However promising the premise, the resulting take-your-listeners-to-work broadcast makes radio’s soap factory sound even more dreary than any of its assembly line productions, considering that it involves listening to a weary and frazzled Chevigny struggling to come up with something “bright and cute” for an upcoming Thanksgiving-themed chapter in his serial.

Apparently, he churned out his scripts well in advance; but work on the Thanksgiving script was off to a slow start. “Oh, darn these Holiday scripts,” we hear Chevigny grumble. In keeping with the expectations of producers and sponsors, the Burton family was scheduled to spend the day on the verge of a tryptophan-induced stupor; and the prospect of having to extract drama from drumsticks and dollops of mash was not a task a playwright could cherish. Among the dictated lines are literary pearls like “And are you ready for more turkey, Terry, dear?” and “Sound Effects: tableware as wanted.”

The tableware was not wanted; and to get the family away from their plates, Chevigny ultimately decides upon a dream sequence in which Mr. Burton finds himself celebrating Thanksgiving anno 1656, a scene played out with cartoonish sound effects and a clash of Colonial and contemporary Englishes.

What listeners do not get to hear, however, is the story behind the noise and spoken words: the story of a writer who lost his eyesight. This would have been on opportunity for the Workshop to explore how becoming sightless, as Chevigny did in 1943, changes a writer’s attitude toward and influenced his approach to working in a non-visual medium. Did this alleged deficiency help Chevigny – the author of an autobiography titled My Eyes Have a Cold Nose (1946) – to develop a keener ear for radio dramatics? “Understandably,” Chevigny wrote in that book, published a decade prior to the Workshop broadcast, “the subject of the perceptions of the blind is one of particular interest to me as a writer specialising in radio.” Chevigny recalled the early days of radio, still being sighted at the time,

when the broadcast play was just coming into being.  I remember well the arguments we used to have as to the best methods of trying to tell a story on the air and how carefully we listened to the pioneer attempts of the British Broadcasting Company and the American networks to achieve a technology.

Little of that experimentation was still being conducted after the end of the Second World War. And the Workshop, despite its title, did little to build on its roots in the mid-1930s, when the series was deserving of the term “workshop.”

Was staying on at a time when most writers of note had abandoned the medium a matter of sticking to what he knew, even though he knew and experienced radio differently back then? Was blindness at the heart of Chevigny’s radio fidelity? After all, The Second Mrs. Burton was the last radio serial to leave the airwaves.

Posted on

"The Last Survivor" Reflects on Nuclear Holocaust

Well, just how will North Korea react to the threat of “serious repercussions” uttered by the US? What is the nature and extent of the threat? And what is its validity? The current crisis may very well usher in the New Cold War, now that North Korea is said to have tested its first nuclear bomb, a privilege that the US apparently feels compelled and entitled to reserve for itself. Why should any nation intimidating the US with atomic competition feel obliged to heed such a warning? And why should any one second or third or fourth world power (thus labeled and locked in some position of dependency according to a Western system of classification) abandon its scientific efforts, hostile or otherwise, considering how well stocked American arsenals remain these days?

I had hoped atomic grandstanding went out with the Reagan administration—and partly as a result of that period of negotiation. Now the heirs of the “Fat Man” are reclaiming the throne in the reign of terror, a reign that, however imaginary or overstated, began some sixty years ago. On this day, 11 October, in 1949, nearly two months after Communist Russia managed to copy the “Fat Man”—stolen from the US by one of my compatriots, German physicist Klaus Fuchs—to become the world’s second nuclear power, American listeners were treated to an apocalyptic vision of life after the final fallout.

“The Last Survivor,” written, produced, and directed by the Mysterious Traveler team of Robert A. Arthur and David Kogan (who, at any rate, got the credit for it), is not one of those science fiction fantasies set in the near or distant future. Instead, the play creates a dystopia set in the here and now—the here and now of the less than peace-assured post Second World War era.

Back in 1947, the chief of an experimental rocket section stationed at an army air base in St. Augustine, New Mexico, is being offered the opportunity to build and man a spaceship running on the kind of power that brought down Japan. Working with one of the scientists who helped to develop the atomic bomb, the narrator and eponymous “Last Survivor” agrees to assist in demonstrating the “peaceful use of atomic energy.”

The rocket reaches Mars and the mission proceeds according to schedule. Upon their return, however, the space travelers are greeted by a horrific site, watched and commented on from above. The world to which they had hoped to return is going up in flames. During their two-year absence, atomic energy had once again been weaponized, this time to wage a war to end not only all wars, but all peaceful co-existence on the planet.

The nuclear blasts very nearly destroy the rocket; only a single scientist remains to tell the tale. His last words, addressed at anyone listening—at no one in particular or no one at all—are more haunting and provocative than any CGI trickery achieved in Hollywood movies:

I am alone now, sitting here staring at the scanning screen; and as I look at that burning, unrecognizable planet once called Earth, the same question keeps running through my mind. What happened? And why? Why did the earth explode in fire? Was there anything that I [. . .] might have done to prevent that all-consuming Holocaust? And I know that as long as I, the last survivor, live, I’ll keep asking myself, why did it happen? Why?

Unlike so many radio thrillers of the late 1940s and early ’50s, “The Last Survivor” does not exploit its premise to advance an anti-Communist agenda. It does not ask, let alone state, how this atomic war started or who started it. Instead, its concluding monologue—the monologue of an isolated speaker in a world beyond dialogue—suggests collective guilt and individual responsibility when it comes to our reliance on or complacency about decisions that affect the future of our planet.

Posted on

Rosalind Russell and James Stewart Entertain with Cheap Silverware

The first cut is the deepest.  Less profound words have been said and sung about love and longing. Even so, to call a new line of cutlery “First Love” doesn’t strike me as such a sharp idea. That’s exactly what Rosalind Russell was hawking on the radio, though—and it was purportedly all her idea, too. Some time before she discovered the magic of “Jungle Red,” Ms. Russell was slicing the baloney rather thickly when, on this day, 3 October, in 1937, she stepped behind the microphone to sell cheap silverware. Granted, there was a little more to this knife-throwing act. Ms. Russell was parting the curtain for a new and ambitious series of radio theatricals called The Silver Theater—and a young James Stewart was hand-on-mike to assist her.

Unlike the flatware, the new program was aptly named The Silver Theater, considering that it was sponsored by the International Silver Company, makers of 1847 Rogers Brothers, billed as “America’s finest silver plate.” Undoubtedly inspired by the success of the Lux Radio Theater, the “Silver Company” went for radio advertising in a major way. It sponsored a weekly drama anthology featuring some of Hollywood biggest stars, players like Cary Grant and Clark Gable, Carole Lombard and Bette Davis. The stories were, for want of a better word, original. They were written for radio, that is, regardless of their merit as audio-only plays.

For the premiere of the program, heard on this day in 1937, the sponsors secured the talent of Oscar-nominated screenwriter Grover Jones, who penned an all too familiar story of a girl trying to strike it rich in cutthroat Hollywood. The girl, of course, was Rosalind Russell, and the guy she settles for, James Stewart. Nearly two decades after this outing, Stewart would star in his own radio series, The Six Shooter; but back in 1937, the comedic mumbler was not yet cut out for radio. Russell, on the other hand, was in fine voice. She sure knew how to talk both fast and clearly, a talent that would serve her well in His Girl Friday.

For the premiere of the Silver Theater, Russell agreed to play Girl Friday to the sponsors. That is, she not only committed herself to play, live, in a four part series, to be aired Sunday afternoons from CBS’s West Coast studios; she also became a spokesperson for International Silver. According to the announcer, she happened upon the name of the company’s new line of flatware, “First Love,” which the savvy producers rendered more prominent still by turning it into the title of the opening play. Why, when she saw the cutlery, Ms. Russell professed, she “just fell right in love with it. Any woman would. You see, well, what I mean to say is, if you saw it. . . .” At this point the announcer graciously cuts in, so to speak, relieving Ms. Russell from the well rehearsed task of peddling flatware . . . until next week.

One year later, Russell would return to the Silver Theater, once more playing opposite James Stewart; she was heard again on the program in 1941 and 1943. Her cut was apparently substantial enough to warrant a return engagement. The Silver Theater, while never reaching the fame or popularity of the Lux program, continued to raise its curtain until 1947. In radio dramatic terms, its most distinguished writer was playwright True Boardman, who later referred to the business as a “prison,” the “thickness” of whose walls and the “strength” of whose “bars” would “vary with different sponsors,” but whose “four walls” would always remain.

Hearing your lines come out of the mouth of Rosalind Russell? I guess even prison walls have a silver lining.

Posted on

Playing, Dead and Alive: Tennyson, the Internet, and the Radio Racket

Well, the afternoon is about as lively as a cancelled séance whose medium walked out due to death in the family. For the past few days, picking up where I left off a long time ago, I’ve been flicking through two sets of an English literature anthology. Rather than tossing out the old for the new, something I’d be happy to do with a pair of shoes, I’ve been comparing the volumes, pondering the expulsion or demotion of canonical authors whose once prominent works have been removed from subsequent editions. One such author now represented by fewer works is Victorian poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Now, reading Tennyson on a gloomy day does little to brighten the mood; but the following lines, from “In the Valley of Cauteretz” (1864), seem worth reviving, if only to remind me of my present state of mind.

The speaker of the poem, whom we may or may not take to be Tennyson himself, returns to a stream he once visited with a friend, now dead:

Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead,
And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree,
The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.

Tennyson may have been revisited by the memories of his dead friend Arthur Hallam; but to me these lines somehow echo my own noisy yet quiet present, conjuring up my life among the voices of the past, my dwelling and revelling in recorded speech. Why do many of the radio voices I replay each day, transcribed sounds of live broadcasts featuring people now living no longer, sound so much more alive or closer to me than the voices of the present day?

Radio, back in the 1940s, when thousands of men were dying in battle far from home, was complicit in this sense of being visited by those gone or lost, a conjuring act achieved by a mere twist of the dial. Radio often presented itself as a spiritual medium, a modern device capable of annihilating space as well as time. On this day, 2 October, in 1944, for instance, Walter Huston introduced a play about the life of Thomas Paine by remarking that the words of this man called “Common Sense” still speak the

thoughts of many of us even today, in the year of 1944. And because of many other thoughts that this man put into words, we, in these troubled times, reach across the years to shake hands with him, to shake hands with Thomas Paine.

Sure, Thomas Paine sounds an awful lot like Edward G. Robinson, in whose hands lay Robert L. Richards’s script for that broadcast of “The Voice on the Stairs,” produced by the Cavalcade of America. Still, the phonic handshake was neither phoney nor merely symbolic; it was an act symptomatic of radio’s exploitation of our sense of revenance when we hear a voice from the past.

I am reminded of a friend of mine (the one with whom I went to the mystery book store a while back) who threw out her answering machine after playing back the voice of her dead father, still calling for her from the sonic loop of an old tape recording. When we look at pictures of dead people, the subject does not spring to life in the process of beholding; instead, pictures of the past or dead tend to serve as memento mori. They are a representation that does not quite render present, a reminder that is merely an aid to the act of calling to mind, whereas a recorded voice—sound being alive for the duration of its occurrence—streams through the ear canal into the now of our presence before fading into memory. Emanating from the living or the dead, it comes to life anew with each listening.

Dead, alive? The living dead? Or, speaking Tennyson, “Death in Life”? Perhaps I have dwelled among these sonic revenants for too long, becoming in turn, like Widmark’s character in the Inner Sanctum thriller “The Shadow of Death” (also cast on this day, back in 1945), dead to the world. Being engaged in this kind of séance, in the retrieval and re-presentation of past voices, I at times sense being shut out from and slipping out of touch with the living. Just like being caught in the internet, living in a world of sound is, after all, only the exposure to an echo of life—a reverberation produced by the clashing bones of a life stripped of flesh.

Posted on

On This Day in 1944: Home Folks Lose Ground to Plot Developers

Well, this will sound like a familiar story. A small house (halfway up in the next block, say) is being torn down after its long-established and well-liked owners cave in to some corporate big shots who want to get their hands on a valuable piece of property that seems just ripe for redevelopment. The transformation achieved proves agreeable enough to all; but to those who remember the neighborhood and used to stop by at the old house, there is something missing in the bright new complex that has taken its place.

No, this is not the plot of Vic and Sade, the popular American radio series that ended its run on this day, 29 September, in 1944. As discussed previously, Vic and Sade had no such socially relevant plots. In fact, it didn’t have any plot at all, which is precisely what distinguished it from the soap operas and situation comedies that came to define American storytelling on radio and television.

You might say (or let me just do it for you) that Vic and Sade was being done in by plot developers—by those who were eager to streamline dramatic storytelling into a solid row of daytime serials and evening sitcoms. In the early 1930s, soaps and comedies had been far from antithetical. Weekday serials like Amos ‘n’ Andy or Lum and Abner told continuing stories whose prevailing mood was cheerful rather than somber.

Eventually, however, savvy producers in search of reliable and lasting formulas determined to strengthen such modes of storytelling by separating the slow tease of the serial from the quick repartees of situation-derived comedy, thereby turning daytime sudsers into murky melodramas that thrived on an atmosphere of present gloom and dark forebodings.

Having no future in washboard weepers, radio vaudevillians, including long-established acts like Burns and Allen, felt compelled to revamp their comic routines to meet the demand for this new kind of zinger and laughter punctuated two-acter.

Vic and Sade, which was not performed before a live audience and which depended neither on one-liners nor on storylines for its lasting appeal, was least likely to adapt successfully to the new situation in comedy. It told stories, all right, but it did not rely on plots. It created characters by letting them go on about something or nothing at all, by reminiscing and gossiping, laughing and lamenting.

Imagine the aforementioned Golden Girls never leaving their kitchen table and forever sharing stories about St. Olaf, the Old South, about Brooklyn and Sicily. That’s pretty much what Vic and Sade Gook, son Rush (later, adopted son Russell) and Uncle Fletcher were doing, day after day, year after year.

What kept listeners coming back to the “Small House” was that writer Paul Rhymer kept on delivering anecdotes about certain colorfully named individuals who were often heard of but never heard, thereby creating the illusion, for faithful listeners, at least, of becoming part of a comfortingly stable family and their large circle of odd friends and acquaintances.

It mattered little that some of those folks Uncle Fletcher delighted in talking about sounded as if they had been brought into being in the very process of animated yarnspinning. They—and good old Uncle Fletcher along with them—came to life for the audience in that manner anyway.

When, in the summer of 1946, Rhymer did adhere to the trend and refashioned Vic and Sade into a weekly, half-hour situation comedy, the charm and wit of the small house talks was lost. Gone was the intimacy of the living room chats or porch meetings as some of those odd friends and neighbors began to step inside, filling the house with needless noise and disturbing our image of them. Equipped with the cartoonish voices of sitcom stock characters, they did not become any more real, but a great deal more irritating.

Not surprisingly, the relocated Gooks disappeared after less than three months. It was a plot that the developers of radio’s new and rigid storytelling had dug for them.