Category: Radio Plays

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On This Day in 1944: A Travelogue Introduces Americans to Tel Aviv

Well, it seems that the power lines are beginning to rot. The electric lights went out just after the sun had set, a sun, mind you, that had been hidden for days behind a wind-blown, tattered curtain of clouds. I was rather relieved to find my none-too-successful experimentations in podcasting cut short by this momentary outage, lit a large candle, and began to read a few pages of Mervyn Peake’s epic Gormenghast. In doing so, I was readying myself for a dramatization of this dreadful story—a study in dread—that I am going to attend tomorrow evening.

My reading aloud soon sent my audience (of one) to sleep, just as I have often dozed off listening to recordings of old-time radio programs—a sonically induced somnolence largely responsible for the delay in the completion of my doctoral study. In the image empire of the west, closing one’s eyes is generally associated with rest, rather than heightened attention.

Most of us are too visually trained, weaned on and preoccupied by the ocular, to become fully audile—that is, capable of learning through hearing. It was a challenge that radio producers had to meet when education—or indoctrination—by radio became an essential aspect of mobilizing the masses during the Second World War.

There are a number of radiodramatic techniques that assist listeners in taking in whatever needs to be conveyed; but rather than sharing information—factual specifics or intricate data—radio drama was most successful at creating impressions, stirring sensations, and instilling beliefs. One such belief, slow to take root, was that Americans were not fighting by themselves or for themselves alone, that it was not simply a war against an identifiable enemy, but a struggle for democratic ideals and their realization elsewhere.

In 1943, journalist, poet, and radio dramatist Norman Corwin was asked to create a series that would tell Americans at the home front something about their nation’s gobal allies. Passport for Adams was a sonic travelogue relating the impressions of a small-town newspaper editor assigned to report on the impact of the war on the world’s civilian population; weekly broadcasts transported listeners to Moscow and Marrakesh, to Monrovia and Belem.

As Corwin explains it in his notes on the play “Tel Aviv”—a second production of which was soundstaged by Columbia Presents Corwin on this day, 23 May, in 1944—the “idea was to pull for unity and victory.” The “omission of ugly details was quite beside the point. To have dwelt upon them would have been to play exactly the same tune as Goebbels, who was constantly reminding the world that the British, in their time, were dreadful imperialists.”

To counter the ignorance of his fellow citizens, Corwin created a comic sidekick more naïve than they—a culturally insensitive if good-natured news photographer who greets with wisecracks his colleague’s advice that he prepare for his assignment by “striking up an acquaintance” with Hebrew: “I know plennya Hebrew: aleph, baze, vaze, gimbel, dullard, kibitz, schlemiel, guniff, kosher, gefilte fish, Yehudi Menuhin. . . .”

Poet-journalist Corwin, who, pressed for time, gleaned most of his facts about life in Tel Aviv from a single interview with a former correspondent in Palestine—approached his subject linguistically by making a foreign tongue sound friendly and familiar—a language expressing the ideals known to and embraced by all who fought fascism.

During their tour of the city, Adams and his colleague gather information like pieces of vocabulary, from the shouts of a newsboy (“Davar Iton Erev”) to street signs such as “Rechow Umot Hameuchadot” (Street of the United Nations). Along the way, the ignorant photographer—a man dealing in images rather than words—is set right about the Hora, which he thought of as some “kind of a Jewish jitterbug dance,” while Adams talks to the people of Tel Aviv, among them a construction worker who, once a lawyer in Germany, is proud of having helped laying the bricks of the “Bet-Haam” (House of the People).

The broadcast ends with the word “shalom,” which Adams hopes will gain in a “future not too distant” a “new meaning and a more lasting one than we have ever known.” While “shalom”—or “peace”—is a dream that has yet to be translated into a global reality, radio, as a disseminator of sentiments, kept alive an ideal that kept home front Americans from abandoning the war as a means of achieving it.

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Many Happy Reruns: Joseph Cotten, Radio Actor

Well, I am finally done with Cousin Henry, the novel I was reading, soaking, drying and pressing, however intermittently, these past few weeks. I tend to read in the bathtub, you see, and my books get a fair dousing now and then. Cousin Henry is one of the shorter novels of prolific 19th-century author Anthony Trollope; and even though Trollopeans—those singing a Trollopaean to the less sentimental or melodramatic works of Victorian fiction—generally agree that Trollope’s shorter works are not nearly as satisfying as his enormous three-deckers, I thought Cousin Henry to be an engrossing portrait of a man riddled by guilt—a man too weak to enjoy the fruits of his own wickedness and too wicked to surrender them. Now that I have done with Cousin Henry, I might as well pay tribute to the man who played Uncle Charlie. Joseph Cotten, that is, who was born on this day, 15 May, in 1905.

Sure, I can relate most anything or anyone to radio; but in the case of Cotten, there is no need to stretch. Not that it would be difficult to highlight the wireless connections of some of the other notable film and theater personalities born on this day, a list including actress Constance Cummings, who was heard in a radio adaptation of Alice Duer Miller’s narrative poem The White Cliffs on the anthology drama series Romance (22 May 1945); Clifton Fadiman, editor and book critic, best known to American radio 1940s listeners as the moderator of the literary quiz program Information, Please; and playwright-novelist Max Frisch, whose Biedermann und die Brandstifter (Firebugs) was originally written for radio back in 1952.

Joseph Cotten was a radio actor, first if perhaps not foremost. He started out in radio drama in the mid-1930s, acting in a play produced by the American School of the Air, during the production of which he met and befriended Orson Welles, who subsequently gave Cotten his big screen break by casting him in Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. On the air, Cotten was heard on programs like the aforementioned Romance, on the thriller anthology Suspense, the patriotic Cavalcade of America, and the Lux Radio Theater (taking Cary Grant’s part in Penny Serenade, for instance), as well as being featured on Welles’s own showcases, the Mercury Theatre on the Air and its commercial re-establishment, the Campbell Playhouse.

Radio listeners had several opportunities to hear Cotten on his birthday, namely in the 15 May 1949 production of “Breakdown,” as soundstaged by the Prudential Family Hour of Stars and a “Salute to Eugene O’Neill,” broadcast on 15 May 1954. Undoubtedly the least of these occasions was “Halfway to Reno,” a romantic trifle that aired on 15 May 1947 as part of the Radio Reader’s Digest. The play was an adaptation of one of the stories from the pages of Reader’s Digest magazine; it involves a husband and father who falls in love with another woman and seeks a divorce—until he is reminded of the wonders of parenthood, of playing ball with and reading to his son. It is a thoroughly undramatic play, a glossy treatment of marital discord, prefixed by the reminder that, in 1946, one out of three marriages ended in divorce.

Interviewed (that is, reading the script prepared for him) during the introduction to the pay, Cotten assured radio listeners that he was happily married. As I learned today, flicking through an edition of Hollywood Album, he claimed to owe his acting career to one Lenore Kipp, his first wife, who played the piano Cotten was pounding during a local theatre production of “Paris Bound” as far away from Broadway as Florida. When Ms. Kipp said “goodbye” go to New York, Cotten followed and eventually married her.

Most Victorian novels, of course, are concerned with matrimony. Comedies are said to end in marriage, while tragedy begin with it. Trollope, at least, had little interest in the conventional happy ending when he penned his Cousin Henry—a story about a secreted will and its ultimate detection—which concludes refreshingly unsentimental: “As any little interest which this tale may possess has come rather from the heroine’s material interests than from her love,—as it has not been, so to say, a love story,—the reader need not follow the happy pair absolutely to the altar.”

Cotten’s voice had a rough edge, an edge wasted on romances going smoothly. Right now, I am picturing him as the frustrated and disillusioned husband in Niagara, a spouse “Halfway to Reno” making a detour to those deadly falls.

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On This Day in 1942: Marlene Dietrich Receives Some Sound Advice

Well, they aren’t quite done with me yet. Yesterday’s remarks about barbarity and journalism, that is. The problem with expository writing, when approached in the conventional, western sense, is that essays are expected to make ideas fall into place even when the subject is utterly chaotic. This is the very paper logic I was going on about only to get trapped in it. There is something troublesome about getting frustrated by a long-winded “I don’t know” when a purposeful “That’s that” should strike us as so much more suspicious.

Anyway. Ending my day with the customary late-night movie, I was all prepared for a smallscreening of The Bad and the Beautiful, which aired last week on UK channel BBC2. Instead, I never got past the film to which it had been hastily and haphazardly appended: I Cover the Waterfront. So, I quite inadvertently—but rather fittingly—followed up The Front Page (and Are You Listening?) with another sordid tale of big news and small scruples. Like Hildy Johnson, no-name reporter Joe Miller (Ben Lyon) is torn between a girl and a story; but in this case, the girl (Claudette Colbert) is the ticket to that byline-worthy scoop—and the determined newshound manages to get them both, even if it means doing away with his sweetheart’s father. How’s that for a lucky break!

Now, I’m not sure whether it was either a matter of luck or much of a break when, on this day, 10 May, in 1942, radio comedian Fred Allen announced: “[T]onight we have a scoop. One of Hollywood’s greatest stars.” The great one was German-born Marlene Dietrich, a leading lady willing to work hard—but being none-too successful—at remaining a favorite in the public’s eye. Stepping behind the microphone to prove her American patriotism was one of those attempts at salvaging her endangered career.

“You mean you brought me here to do a show just for you?” Dietrich confronted Allen, showing herself offended at his unpatriotic selfishness. “Where are the troops?” Dutifully pointing out that the star had been “touring the country for the Hollywood Victory Committee, giving shows at the various army camps and naval training stations,” Allen showed his appreciation by offering his guest “some fatherly advice about [her] movie career.” It wasn’t an offer the hits-missing actress could afford to ignore.

Dietrich assured Allen that she was perfectly “happy out in Hollywood,” to which the comedian replied: “Oh, but how long can it last, with those rough-and-tumble pictures you’ve been making?” During the shoot of her latest picture, The Lady Is Willing (released two-and-a-half months prior to the broadcast), Dietrich had tripped over some props and injured her leg; but Allen was referring to the star’s online slappings, administered by leading men like James Stewart, Broderick Crawford, George Raft and Edward G. Robinson.

“Give up pictures in Hollywood, Marlene. Come to radio,” Allen suggested, where you “can get beaten up and kicked around [. . .] and not even feel it”—the sound effects man “does everything.” Some noisy demonstrations of the soundman’s business followed. “Radio is wonderful,” Dietrich agreed and was promptly handed a script for a radio serial titled “Brave Betty Birnbaum.”

“Your part starts on page twenty-eight,” Allen informed his guest, who flicked through it in bewilderment: “But the whole script is only thirty pages.” “Well, I know,” Allen explained, “the first twenty-seven pages are a commercial.” At least the soundman was at hand when Dietrich was called upon to kiss her less-than-dashing co-star. “That’s radio, Fred,” she summed up her lesson.

Luckily for Dietrich, the big screen offers did not run out during the 1940s. Only a decade later, when she was getting rather too unsteady on her celebrated gams to keep kicking her screen partners around in scenes of rough-and-tumble glamour, she heeded Allen’s advice at last. It wasn’t exactly an act of desperation, considering that she was in the company of many Hollywood A-listers who found syndicated radio drama to be lucrative and convenient.

Still sultry and seductive in her 50s, Dietrich worked the magic of her vocal chords in the episodic adventure series Café Istanbul and Time for Love, proving that, with a little help from the soundman, it’s never too late for radio romance.

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On This Day in 1948: Radio Listeners Are Offered Free Delivery of "The Front Page"

Well, it sure was fodder for the tabloids. The case of the German cannibal, I mean, which resulted in a retrial and a life-sentence for the remaining party of one decidedly unconventional dinner date. Now, the so-called civilized world deems itself too far above bestiality to grant citizens the right to end their own lives as they see fit or to lose themselves completely in a consensual act of consuming passion. Widely exempt from the consequent criminalization of cruelty—which outlaws the animalistic it can never truly root out—remain the barbarism of capital punishment and the bane of the yellow press.

I don’t often quote journalist-turned-novelist Theodore Dreiser, mainly because his prose is among the most hideous ever to get past an editor; but this line, ripped from his Sister Carrie, is worth considering: “Our civilisation is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.”

It seems a perfectly reasonable attack on civilization; yet it is a line of attack defined by and conforming with the standards of the society it questions: a state of humanity based on the assumption that being human should mean being reasonable, the supposition that society should strive to rid individuals of their impulses and emotions—a project altogether unreasonable.

The paper logic of journalism—those well-formed, epigrammatic answers to monstrously complex questions—is as common and comforting as it is dangerous. Journalism itself is not the product of reason, but caters to the instinctual from which it derives: a curiosity at times so mean and perverse that it must be rationalized away by declaring the imagination-fertilizer being spread to constitute “news” or “information” in the public interest.

The famous American play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, a comedy as poignant today as it was back in 1928, addresses this barbarism of the press, a force so powerful that it has been known to incite wars for the purpose of reporting them.

Adapted for the rival medium of radio by noted American critic, editor, and playwright Gilbert Seldes, “The Front Page” was spread out anew, if somewhat reduced in size, on this day, 9 May, in 1948, when it was reproduced by the Ford Theater, a venue named after its sponsor and not to be confused with Ford’s Theater, the center of cultural refinement that once was the site of a Presidential assassination.

Seldes’s edition of The Front Page makes good use of the aural medium by confronting listeners with the sound of the gallows being readied for an execution, a sound overheard in a newsroom whose occupants are paid to cash in on the event.

To those in public office, the timely execution of a cop killer is politically more advantageous than any probings into the mind of the convict. To a journalist like Hildy Johnson—a man torn between the mating instinct and the reasonable goal of making a name for himself—such a hanging not only spells good news, but excitement too great to be traded in for the state of matrimony.

The Front Page is an unflattering portrayal of the newspaper racket; but, unlike Dreiser’s brand of naturalism, it does not simplify what is complex by exposing societal corruptions only to subject them to the either-or morality of didactic fictions that aim at telling us how things are to teach us how they ought to but could not be.

Comedies and melodramas—especially plays that seem aesthetically flawed and morally ambiguous because they are as muddled as our everyday—can be instructive in their willful disorder or bewildering raggedness.

I was reminded of this last night while watching Are You Listening?, a 1932 MGM melodrama in which a young writer gets tangled up in the wireless game, the broadcast medium that offers him employment but that eventually contributes to his being hunted like a social menace and convicted of manslaughter. We, the spectators, are the only witnesses to his supposed crime—but we are sentenced, after promises of romance and gaiety, to follow the fall and disgrace of some latter-day Caleb Williams, an outcast hunted by media hounds interested in something less than justice, driven to the chase by nothing more than a desire to profit from—to feed rather than satisfy—our hunger for the sensational.

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On This Day in 1949: Helen Hayes Broadcasts Mixed Messages to Mothers, Midgets, and Miners

Well, it sure seems a lot smaller these days! The globe, I mean. Picture it, if you will: Wales, a secluded cottage, last Saturday. There they stood, unannounced and unexpected, in the middle of our garden: three strangers from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of these visitors claimed that her great-grandmother used to live in this very house some 150 years ago. Notwithstanding her disappointment at the many changes to the original interior (could we not have done without plumbing for the sake of authenticity?) we all had a nice chat, swapped stories and pictures. Turns out, Wales and Pittsburgh have more in common besides a long history of coal mining.

As is often the case in my daily diggings-up of US radio drama—and my stubborn attempts at relating the out-of-date to our present everyday—I was reminded of this connection as I browsed through my library of radio recordings. I came across a peculiar play called “No Room for Peter Pan.” It aired over CBS in the US on this day, 8 May, in 1949, on the Electric Theater, an anthology drama series starring the celebrated stage actress Helen Hayes. The Electric Theater—named after its sponsor, America’s Electric Light and Power Companies—was staged before the “live studio audience” Hayes had expressed herself to be so glad to do without; but the laughter of the crowd gathered to watch the performers may well have been genuine, given the queer situation in which Hayes, playing an Irish coalminer’s wife in Colliertown, Pennsylvania, found herself.

What to do when your son is determined to become a miner, work you know to be not only dirty but dangerous? You’d rather not have him grow up to go below ground before his time, even if it means that your son won’t grow at all. How lucky is this troubled mother to discover that her son, Danny, is a “midget” or, as the learned physician from Pittsburgh states in his official diagnosis, a “Peter Pan dwarf” (a term better suited for lily and aster varieties). So, to keep the blossoming lad out of the mines and “above the ground, as the Lord intended,” his loving parent vows to turn him into a sideshow attraction: “He’ll be a midget in a circus.”

Danny catches the eye of Mr. Bailey, owner of the Greatest Show on Earth, who is only too glad to take him on. Just then, the protective mother learns that Danny may yet continue to grow, if given the proper medication. To keep him out of the mines, she refuses to let Danny receive the prescribed injections. So, Danny is forced to tour with the circus and learns to like it. He becomes rather disdainful of his poor family home, but is soon cured of his airs when he learns about a mining disaster in which he, as a kid small enough to reach the trapped colliers, may prove his manliness.

The shot of self-esteem is followed by Danny’s first injection. Trouble is, Danny is fearful of the “dirty needle.” His mother is at hand with another sage piece of advice: “You don’t want to stay a midget, do you, lad? You don’t want to give up your growth for the amusement of lazy people. Maybe in the mines you’ll be in danger, but you’ll be living with dignity, like a man.” Seems mom has grown up at last, ready to let her son go and move on—up in height and down in the mines—as he had desired it all along. As if he hadn’t proved his worth already as a life-saving pint-sizer, doing as his mother bade him.

This play (a script of which may be found in the collection of radio and television composer Wladimir Selinksy, at the New York Public Library) sent out some confusing messages about physical individuality, social conformity, and the nature of life; but, being broadcast on the second Sunday in May, it nevertheless improved on the tired sentiments found on those cards that will give postal workers another backache this weekend.

Meanwhile, unexpected visitors notwithstanding, I’ll be back out in the garden, watching things grow or wilt under my haphazard care, pondering the challenge of arriving at just the right moment to heed advice or ignore it.

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On This Day in 1941: Radio Listeners Get a "Primer" on Their Favorite Pastime

Well, I really ought to have it checked. My memory, I mean. Here I am celebrating the wonders of old-time radio and plum forgot the birthday of the medium’s foremost writer. Poet-journalist Norman Corwin turned 96 yesterday. He had been on my mind, however, since today, 4 May, marks the 65th anniversary of one of his most enjoyable pieces for microphone and antennae: his Radio Primer. Here is how it opens:

Soloist: This is a Radio Primer. 

Quartet: Fa la, fa la, fa la. 

Soloist: The most elementary show you’ve heard 

Quartet: By far, by far, by far. 

Soloist: An alphabetical primer. 

Quartet: A, B C, D; F, E; 

Soloist: Degree by degree, 

From A to Z 

Our Primer will prim 

The radio industry! 

Quartet: The ra-di-o in-dust-ry!

In Corwin’s “Primer,” the letter A stands for “announcers” (the suave voices that cajoled listeners with invitations like “Why not try? Have you ever wondered? Won’t you ask?”). Announcers were the most highly paid men in the business, precisely because radio was business, and the announcer served as a mediator between the sponsor footing the bill for entertainment and the listeners who were expected to express their gratitude by buying the products advertised. The announcer’s spiel linked the commercial, which he read, with the play he introduced or narrated.

Manipulative, you say? Sure, but at least the audience was given a choice to resist such temptations, free of charge, whereas today, in the post-broadcasting age of cable and satellite, we are forced to pay for it all—including the dubious privilege of receiving the commercials.

B, according to Corwin’s “Primer,” stands for “Breakfast food.” What’s that got to do with radio, you ask? Clearly, after 65 years, some footnotes are in order. The radio industry was practically running on soap suds and cereals back then. After their mothers (and quite a few male listeners who may not have had the guts to admit to it) had tuned in for another chapter of their favorite daytime soap operas, the kids returned home from school for their daily bowlful of serial adventure, which, with some justice, might have been called afternoon cereals. Thanks to the sponsor’s spokesmen, Corwin’s “Definer” reminds us, children all across America knew that “Breakfast food is what you have to eat before you can be a hero.”

Another entry in the “Primer” is a gentle mockery of radio’s most notable ham. Yes, “O stands for Orson”: “Who is Orson? What is he, / That all the critics hail him? / Holy terror of the Mercury, / Publicity doth trail him.” And V, of course, stands for the trade paper that was a must for everyone in the industry. I’ve read it myself for years—or tried to decipher it—until I came to the conclusion that, not being in the biz, I really couldn’t justify my weekly fix of nixed polysyllabics like this:

The cinema is Pix.
The hinterland is Stix,
The people there are Hix,
And critics all are Crix.

Fa la, fa la, fa la. I’ve got it in my ears now, that eminently hummable score by Lyn Murray, one of radio’s most versatile composers. Indeed, I am so cheered and inspired by Corwin’s musical perusal of the dictionary that I will inaugurate my own “Old-time Radio Primer” tomorrow. I shall endeavor to go through the alphabet, letter by letter (if not as a daily, so perhaps as a weekly feature of the broadcastellan journal), and looking forward to the lexical challenge. Any suggestions? A and B are already accounted for, but there are a lot of letters left to mull over . . .

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On This Day in 1937: Claudette Colbert Gets Her “Hands” on Lombard’s Part

Well, we’ve all got them, I guess. Those lists of favorite books, or blogs, or breakfast cereals, or some such itemized accounts of our current predilections. They are supposed to tell others something we deem important about ourselves at some point of our lives; but, looked upon in retrospect, they can become a revelation to us, confronting us with time capsules of our likes, longings, and limitations. Here, for instance, are the top three entries on a list of all-time favorite movies as I compiled it back in 1986:

  1. Holiday (George Cukor; 1938)
  2. Hands Across the Table (Mitchell Leisen; 1935)
  3. Fade to Black (Vernon Zimmerman; 1980)

Now, I have not seen Fade to Black since the 1980s. It is a slasher movie for cinemaniacs, which is why I could identify with it back then. For reasons I did not yet fully comprehend, I was drawn, fairly early in my life, to the films and figure of Mitchell Leisen, a tremendously successful designer-director, but not a particularly well-remembered or highly regarded craftsman nowadays.

Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea
on Lux Radio Theatre

Hands Across the Table is a simple you-can-have-your-beefcake-and-eat-it romance starring Carole Lombard as a penniless manicurist, Ralph Bellamy as a rich invalid who’d like to get his hands on her, and Fred MacMurray as a carefree man-about-town with dubious work ethics who eventually sweeps her off her feet. That pretty much sums it up—unless, of course, I’d have to explain the feeling of being torn between having my nails polished by gorgeous Lombard and running my fingers through MacMurray’s hair.

On this day, 3 May, in 1937, Hands Across the Table went on the air in an adaptation produced by that most prestigious and popular of radio theatricals, the Cecil B. DeMille hosted Lux Radio Theatre. It was this series, along with my love for 1930s and early 1940s screwball comedies that got me interested in old-time radio.

Once you have exhausted the classics, you will find a worthwhile substitute in American radio programs like Lux, which give you not only an opportunity to catch a different reading of films so familiar to you that they play before your mind’s eye, but also allow you to re-imagine them with alternate casts.

What, for instance, if Suspicion had starred Olivia de Havilland, rather than her sister, Joan Fontaine? How would Barbara Stanwyck or Ida Lupino fare in Merle Oberon’s role as Cathy in Wuthering Heights [thanks to André Soares for editing]? And what, if anything, could Loretta Young do when called upon to take over for Bette Davis in Jezebel? It all happened on the Lux program.

In Lux‘s audio version of Hands Across the Table, Carole Lombard’s role was performed by Claudette Colbert, who would later be Leisen’s leading lady in Midnight (1939). It was Colbert’s fourth appearance on the show, whose sponsors not only paid handsomely for such brief encounters with the microphone (up to $5000 for top-notchers), but also promoted the stars’ movie careers (by mentioning, in Colbert’s case, the upcoming releases I Met Him in Paris and Tovarich).

Heard in the Fred MacMurray part is Colbert’s Palm Beach Story co-star Joel McCrea (pictured above, with Colbert, reading the “Hands Across” script). Introducing the two leads, showman DeMille credited himself with their discovery:

Greetings from Hollywood.  Tonight’s event, with its glittering stage, its scientific wizardry that carries our voices to all corners of the earth and its audience of millions is a thing that I couldn’t have predicted when I first knew Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea.  The Lux Radio Theater was then as remote from Hollywood as the moon.  But I predicted the eventual triumph of these two young people and was privileged to contribute to it.  I gave Joel McCrea his first motion picture contract.  Claudette was not then the favorite of millions, allowed to choose her stories, directors, and writers. The studio insisted I give her a dialogue test before casting her.  I did—and starred her in The Sign of the Cross and Cleopatra.

For the privilege of putting her hands on Lombard’s part—and the generous remuneration on the table—Colbert was obliged to declare that they had touched nothing but Lux toilet soap ever since her first appearance on the New York stage (in the 1920s). As I put it in Etherized Victorians, my doctoral study on old-time radio, it was all a matter of one hand washing the other.

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On This Day in 1951: A Radio Sitcom Is Cited by the Chamber of Commerce

Well, I can’t say that I have been, lately. Well, I mean. My digestive system is on the fritz, and my mood is verging on the dyspeptic. So, if I am to begin this entry in the broadcastellan journal with “Well”—as I have so often done these past six or seven months—it must be a brusque and slightly contentious one, for once. My jovial, welcoming “Well,” by the way, was inspired by Paul Rhymer’s Vic and Sade, a long-running radio series whose listeners were greeted by an announcer who, as if opening the door to the imaginary home of the Gook family, ushered in each of Rhymer’s dialogues with expositions like this one:

Well, sir, it’s a few minutes or so past eleven o’clock in the morning as our scene opens now, and here in the kitchen of the small house half-way up in the next block we discover Mrs. Victor Gook industriously bending over her ironing-board. Tuesday is the time usually given over to this task, but the holidays have more or less thrown Sade off schedule. And so she irons. But there’s a newcomer approaching apparently . . . because the back door is opening. Listen.

Writing my introductions, I chose to omit the gendered address; but I hope to have retained the friendly, casual tone of the interjection.

Now, Vic and Sade was one of those shows that did not successfully transition to the radio format that became such a staple of television entertainment: the situation comedy or sitcom. Rhymer was a raconteur, not a dramatist; he allowed his characters to reveal something about themselves through their words, rather than their actions. If you, like me, enjoy the Golden Girls, imagine Rose, Blanche, Dorothy and Sophia sitting around the kitchen table, telling stories about St. Olaf, the old South, Brooklyn and Sicily—without the dramatized flashbacks. The situation comedy became popular in the mid-1940s; and it did away with the old vaudeville routines, the minstrel shows, and the quietly funny Americana in which Rhymer excelled.

On this day, 2 May, in 1951, one of the finest American radio sitcoms was being honored in Washington, where the cast performed before members of the Chamber of Commerce. The program, which had just received the prestigious Peabody Award, was the aforementioned Halls of Ivy, and the cast was led by Ronald Colman (as William Todhunter Hall, the president of an imaginary American college) and his wife, Benita Hume (as the academic’s refreshingly non-academic spouse, a former stage actress). What made The Halls of Ivy worthy of such accolades was writer-creator Don Quinn’s ability—and the sponsor’s willingness—to tackle a number of social problems, whether topical or universal.

In the spring of 1951, that problem was the Korean War and the resentment with which the draft was greeted by college students who believed to have had their future mapped out for them and now found their careers derailed, their very lives in danger. On Halls of Ivy, the resulting campus unrests were dealt with in a rather tentative and sentimental manner; but Quinn’s sophisticated prose—peppered with smart puns, metaphors, and literary allusions no other radio or television sitcom can hope to rival—make this a worthwhile entry in the annals of Ivy.

Asked to speak before the members of the Chamber of Commerce, Colman had this to say about his radio role (which he later performed on television):

I want to thank you for being such an appreciative audience and for accepting me as a college professor. Come to think of it, I can’t be too bad at that because, I believe, I am probably the only college professor in the country that can take a difficult problem and solve it in exactly half an hour. More that this, I can do it every week.

Highlighting the strength of the program, Colman was also pointing out its weakness. Today, in the post-Seinfeldian era of social irresponsibility in entertainment, the problem sitcom strikes many as simplistic and hypocritical. Of course, most of us fail to express our cynicism and anti-social rants nearly as eloquently as any of the makeshift wisdom shared by The Halls of Ivy.

Realism may lie well beyond the scope of witticisms and sentiments—but the monosyllabic insult and the actions-speak-louder-than-words approach to problem solving contribute even less in the shaping of a better reality for us all.

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"The Island of Death," the Radioactive Sea, and the Legacy of U235

Well, I wasn’t aware of it when I moved here. Not that such knowledge would have prevented me from moving; but it might have made me more doubtful about my seemingly pristine environs—or about picking the catch of the day from the menu of a local restaurant. The Irish Sea, I mean, and the nuclear waste it contains. Research suggests that the Irish Sea, which separates Ireland from my present home of Wales, is the most radioactive body of salt water on this planet.

Growing up in cold-war Germany, I could conceive of nothing more terrifying than atomic power. My earliest nightmare, which continued to plague me in my pre-pubescence, was of a gigantic bomb. An enormous cannon ball of mass destruction, it was surrounded by a shadowy group of scientists whose proximity to this ominous orb had, to my childish mind, already proven them to be beyond trust and reason.

It was a tableau right out of Dr. Mabuse, or some such German spy-fi horror, reconstructed in the feverish imagination of a troubled child. I have never learned to love the bomb—and never doubted that splitting the atom was nothing short of abject, indefensible madness.

There is no need to conceive of scientists as fiendish or sinister to realize the destructive force of nuclear energy. Whatever the nature of their tamperings with nature, the madmen of melodrama, figures like H. G. Wells’s Doctor Moreau help us cope with our anxieties about scientific experimentation by rendering the unfathomable so grotesque as to classify it as something entirely unrealistic and thus safely distant in the realm of futuristic or fantastic fiction.

On this day, 28 April, in 1947, for instance, one of Moreau’s lesser cousins appeared on US radio’s long-running series of Sherlock Holmes adventures, luring a group of sideshow “freaks” on his remote “Island of Terror” to serve as the guinea pigs for his secret experiments, a study designed to show that the “glandular defects” of his subjects “produce psychological alterations.”

As Holmes endeavored to prove in this decidedly unexceptional piece of run-of-the-mill hokum, truth is “stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” Truth is, however, that fanciful ideas may become physical fact, as the inquisitive minds of the few force man-made realities upon the suffering bodies of the many.

In the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, little was known as yet about the long-term effects of radiation, of the cancers and mutations to threaten future generations. Radio dramatist Norman Corwin was among the first to address the tremendous legacy of the Enola Gay and its deadly mission. “Do not smile, do not smile as though knowing better,” he admonished the nonchalant in “Set Your Clock at U235,” a monologue read on 29 October 1945 by Paul Robeson (pictured above, on the cover for a recording of another radio performance).

Corwin asked Americans the uncomfortable question of what was to become of their “dear-bought, blood-begotten, towering, and grave victory”:

The secrets of the earth have been peeled back, one by one, until the core is bare:

The latest recipe is private, in a guarded book, but the stink of death is public on the wind from Nagasaki:

The nations have heard of the fission of the atom and have seen the photographs: skies aboil with interlocking fury, mushrooms of uranium smoke ascending to where angels patrol uneasily.

Perhaps, Corwin had rather too much trust in mythological figures, in those “angels” on “patrol.” He believed—or at least suggested—that the “chemicking that could destroy us, together with our pots and pans and allies, can also do as bidden by us: outperform whole teams of genii: be servile to the meek: reform our wayward systems peacefully.”

The nuclear disasters of the 1970s and ‘80s should have convinced us that the genii do not feel in any way obliged to “do as bidden by us.” Here, science must be content for once to play itself out on paper. To keep those determined to doctor with or deal in that most lethal of Promethean sparks enchained on the rocks of common sense is our debt to future generations. It’s “elementary.”

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Totalitarian Vistas, Orwellian Dystopias, and the Myopics of Chernobyl

Well, are you ready for United 93, the movie dramatizing the experience aboard one of the planes hijacked on 11 September 2001? New Yorkers were the first to view the film, which premiered last night at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it is being screened alongside sequels and remakes like Mission: Impossible III and Poseidon. Are the popcorn-littered, digital surround-sound blasting multiplexes the most appropriate places to remember the past and commemorate the dead?

Having lived in Manhattan during the terror and aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks—days of fear, frustration, anger and uncertainty—I am doubtful that any traditional film narrative, whether somber of sensational, could deepen our understanding of terrorism, let alone supersede the horrific images that continue to replay in our minds.

Our desire to see for ourselves is sometimes best left unsatisfied, unless the act of seeing—and of not finding—drives home that we must probe not elsewhere, but differently. However impressive, suggestive or manipulative, pictures cannot show us our thoughts that, at best, they can merely provoke. More often, they become too overwhelming or altogether numbing, leaving us in a state of stupefaction in which complex ideas become dim and indistinct, a state quite advantageous to propagandist efforts. I am reminded of the description of the movie theater experience in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a devastating portrait of an insensate mind:

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise [. . .]. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman [ . . .] sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself [. . .]. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause. [. . .]

Orwell’s dystopian fiction proved highly useful during the Eisenhower years, when it was appropriated for the purpose of demonizing communist ideals and socialist ideas that, in the depression-stricken period of the FDR administration, had been widely embraced, sanctioned, and partially implemented. A radio adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four that aired on this day, 26 April, in 1953, underscored the timeliness of Orwell’s “prophetic reporting of the future,” by casting newscaster Kenneth Banghart in the role of the narrator.

“Perhaps you’re wondering why a newsman is appearing in a Theatre Guild on the Air dramatization,” Banghart introduced himself and the play.

It’s because George Orwell’s great novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, deals with the most terrifying subject in the news today: the threat to all free men of communism or totalitarian domination in any form. In fiction, Orwell creates for us a picture of what life might be, should the totalitarian forces succeed with their plan to become the earth’s masters.

It was a masterplan that—according to the disposable logic of America’s emerging consumer culture—was the due course of communism itself.

Thirty-three years after this broadcast—on 26 April, in 1986—the iron curtain was still firmly in place, keeping much from view and leaving more to the imagination of cold-war stirred westerners. It did not keep the radioactive cloud from moving westward, however well guarded the secret of the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl—or of its extent, at any rate—might have been. The boundaries we create in our minds, those we mind, and those we mindlessly accept, are no hindrances to the invisible force of destruction unleashed by hubris, ignorance, and greed.

Being pointed to it by someone who is generally a purveyor of visual treats, I took a virtual tour of the wasteland that is the area around Chernobyl today: a ghost world that will remain uninhabitable for generations to come. Not surprisingly, what renders these images—and the video clip above—most profound is what we do not get to see, what becomes tangible only to our receptive minds: the hazards of the half-life, the sorrow of lives lost, and the misery of life’s blind ambitions.