Category: Radio Plays

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Oscar Announcements: One Supposedly Relevant, the Other Simply Levant

I was among those tuning in live today to catch the announcement of the Academy Award nominations. It was a surprising moment of up-to-date enthusiasm, considering that I have only seen one of the films competing in the major categories (and that being the less-than-timely Mrs. Henderson Presents). Not exactly riveted to the spot after Mira Sorvino had stepped to the podium, I promptly consulted the Internet Movie Database (which also posted my latest review today) to find out whether Ms. Sorvino’s career is now reduced to reading a list of now-factor names from a teleprompter.

I stood corrected (if not entirely convinced of her A-list status), then sat down, caught a glimpse of a butterfly in the garden (in January?), and wandered off again into the generally shrugged-off-as-irrelevant realm of old-time radio. Fellow radio scholar Howard Blue, who wrote an informative book on radio propaganda and left a comment on broadcastellan earlier today, will probably not be among those shrugging.

Unlike in the allegedly relevant motion pictures of today, America’s wartime activities featured prominently on radio, whether in serious drama, juvenile adventures, or on comedy programs. On this day, 31 January, in 1943, radio comedian Fred Allen joked about the power of broadcasting in wartime. For instance, the Russian advance slowed down on account of “some mix-up” through which the “Russians army got four days ahead of [radio news commentator] H. V. Kaltenborn.”

The quiz show Truth or Consequences, Allen quipped, could solve the nation’s debt problem. A contestant on that program had just received thousands of pennies in the mail, sent in by empathetic listeners sorry that she answered a question incorrectly. Now, if only Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau could appear on that show and give the wrong answers! Also discussed was a ruling by the OPA (Office of Price Administration) that dining out constituted an “uplift for morale” and was thus exempt from rationing.

And then there was that other Oscar announcement, made by Oscar Levant (pictured above, in one of my humble attempts at illustration). The noted American composer appeared on Allen’s show that day to declare that he was all washed-up. Levant, who was also a panelist on the celebrity quiz program Information, Please!, complained that his reputation was ruined after he had performed at Carnegie Hall alongside Allen’s archrival, the notoriously dreadful violinist Jack Benny.

“We mustn’t go to itsy-bitsy pieces,” Allen tried to calm the discomposed musician. “You sound like an old kindergarten teacher I once I killed in Syracuse.” So, what kind of jobs were available for an over-the-hill composer and ex-radio celebrity? Leafing through the want ads, Allen finds demand for “steamfitters, plumbers, sandhogs, stevedores.” “You’ve got the wrong column,” Levant sneers, “That’s for women!”

Eventually, Allen suggests that Levant turn radio jingles into symphonies and “clean up” with the sponsors. It’s a living. Sure beats having to read a roster of your honored peers—unless you are too deluded to realize that you are no longer among them.

Going to the pictures is fast disappearing on the public lists of favorite pastimes; so, congratulating yourself on your own supposed relevance—rather than honoring potentially enduring cinematic excellence—is a desperate attempt at concealing your impending obsolescence. Forever keeping up with the out-of-date, I, for one, will never have to stoop to such measures.

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On This Day in 1956: Aldous Huxley Opens a Radio Workshop and Talks About Our Brave New World

Rummaging through old photographs and notes, I came across a list of favorite books, a personal and highly incongruous assortment of titles I jotted down when I was twenty-one. Put together before I moved to New York City and went to college, that paper-thin time capsule is filled with thrillers like Maurice Leblanc’s The Double Life of Arsene Lupin and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. There is Truffaut’s wonderful book on Hitchcock, as well as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I eventually got to teach in a college course on friendship in American literature. Also on that chart are the author and work I am featuring today—because they happened to be featured on the previously discussed CBS Radio Workshop.

Architecture for a brave new world: Selfridges, Birmingham

There was little room for the Workshop in my doctoral study, whose subject is the rise and fall of American radio drama between 1929 and 1954—the quarter century during which audio drama (as a form, rather than radio as a medium) made the most significant advances and had its greatest cultural and socio-political influence in the US. This is not to say that there weren’t any notable radio plays either before or after the period defined by me as the form and the medium’s golden age, even though music and talk once again dominated the dial in the mid-50s as they had prior to the 1930s. The CBS Radio Workshop, however belated it may have seemed to a nation obsessed with television, was certainly first-rate.

On this day, 27 January, in 1956, the Workshop opened with a provocative piece of 20th-century fiction, introduced and narrated by its author, Aldous Huxley and scored by radio drama alumnus-turned-movie composer Bernard Herrmann. Addressing the audience, Huxley sounded very British indeed, avuncular, educated, opinionated, and somewhat frail; rather like E. M. Forster, who read several of his works for the record and was heard on US radio as a commentator on the NBC University Theater. What Huxley has to say, however, is anything but mellow or dated. It is still shocking today, mainly because his dark vision has already become reality.

As a teenager—I was sixteen or so when I first read Brave New World—I thought of Brave New Work as a work of science fiction. It was altogether more inviting than George Orwell’s dreary Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I was forced to read at school. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, none of the characters or situations were agreeable to me; everything described seemed too nasty and bleak to be endured even by the meek or uninspired.

In Brave New World, I was confronted with a seemingly uncomplicated future, a life not devoid of pleasures and comforts, a world not entirely unrecognizable—if cleaner and less hostile—in which I could imagine myself existing happily as long as I didn’t question myself or the system for whose workings I was being conditioned. Gradually, this rendered the novel all the more disconcerting to me: I realized that I was complaisant and complicit, willing to denounce my freedoms for relief and security.

Introducing William Froug’s two-part dramatization of his story, Huxley insisted on its relevance:

Brave New World is a fantastic parable about the dehumanization of human beings. In the negative utopia described in my story, man has been subordinated to his own inventions. Science, technology, social organization—these things have ceased to serve man; they have become his masters. A quarter of a century has passed since the book was published. In that time, our world has taken so many steps in the wrong direction that if I were writing today, I would date my story not six hundred years in the future, but at the most two hundred. The price of liberty, and even of common humanity, is eternal vigilance.

It seems that sixty years would have been more accurate. Perhaps, Huxley’s dystopia has already become our present. As in the novel, we are being nursed and kept alive to keep business going; we are programmed to consume, hate, be shallow, satisfy those of our desires that are economically advantageous, and to go about our life without questioning how much we really are in control of it.

Established democracies are becoming more fascist in their curtailing of personal choice, freedoms whose realization may be harmful to our bodies and those of others and thus detrimental to long-term consumerism, a world of designer-labelled clothes and legalized designer drugs in which anyone who openly contradicts or loudly confronts is argued to be someone who sides with whose who have designs on our supposed liberties.

I’m still not sure what a tolerable alternative would be to such a Brave New World, one to be braved each day anew without the benefit of Soma.

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On This Day in 1941: The Shadow Turns . . . Ten?

An anniversary is always a convenient occasion to call to mind a certain person or event. It is also a neat way of declaring someone or something significant, simply by virtue of her, his or its longevity. It can also be a cover-up, an excuse for serving stale cake, made to look (or sound) impressive by sticking a considerable number of candles in the cracked icing. Just what kind of confection was being delivered to the listeners of The Shadow on this day, 26 January, in 1941?

‘Today’s broadcast marks The Shadow‘s tenth anniversary on the air,’ the announcer declared. ‘On this festive occasion the Blue Coal dealers of America are proud to present an unusually thrilling adventure of The Shadow.’ The drama to follow, the creakily Victorian murder mystery “The Ghost of Caleb Mackenzie,” was neither thrilling nor unusual. It is the story of an aged grouch who gathers the ‘vultures’ of this family around him once a year so that they might convince themselves of his reasonably good health and continue to crave his fortune. With an evil laugh to rival that of The Shadow, he further torments his next of kin with the announcement that he has written his will.

The alter ego of the mysterious crimefighter, man about town Lamont Cranston, is introduced into the household after his ‘constant companion, the lovely Margot Lane’—who happens to be a friend of the Mackenzies—summons him there in anticipation of something unpleasant. Before she can leave the dreadful get-together, old Caleb is found with a knife in his chest. He leaves behind a riddle, which is to lead his relatives to the hidden will: ‘Attention Vultures! He who will have will to find the will will look inside,’ the envelope reads. Inside, this cryptic note: ‘To find the one who’s passed the test, / Search the place where my soul will rest.’

Caleb’s sudden if hardly unexpected death calls for a detective; but The Shadow’s supernatural power to cloud men’s minds—the ventriloquist act by means of which Cranston intimidates suspects and forces confessions—is not particularly effective in this somewhat bungled case. Its two twists notwithstanding, Jerry Devine’s pseudo-gothic hooey is a routine affair. The question, however, is not whether it was worthy of an anniversary broadcast, but whether this broadcast truly marks an anniversary at all.

Now, The Shadow received several makeovers and voiceovers through the years (one of which I discuss here); he may well have suffered both an identity crisis and a loss of memory as a result.

According to some sources, The Shadow was first heard on the Detective Story Hour in 1930. Blue Coal, the sponsor of the ostensible birthday bash, became associated with The Shadow on 6 September 1931, when the Blue Coal Radio Revue reportedly had its premiere. Beginning in October 1931, The Shadow was also featured on the Love Story Drama (or Love Story Hour) program, while The Shadow Magazine was first published in April 1931, contrary to the announcer’s insistence that it, too, was celebrating its tenth birthday that day.

So, just what were the producers of the show commemorating on this day, 26 January, back in 1941? Sorry, answers beginning with ‘The Shadow knows’ simply won’t do this time around.

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On This Day in 1949: The Radio Tells Americans All About “Eve”

Well, before I make an appointment with The Phantom President, another one of the lesser known motion pictures starring my favorite actress, Ms. Claudette Colbert, I am going to listen again to a radio adaptation of a story that was initially considered as a vehicle for Colbert, but fell into the lap of lucky Bette Davis instead. I am referring of course to “The Wisdom of Eve,” a dramatization of which was broadcast on this day, 24 January, in 1949—thus nearly two years prior to the general US release of the celebrated movie version known as All About Eve.

This is another adventure in recycling, an exploration of radio’s mediating position in the every widening web of multimediacy. Like Eve Harrington, radio was a spider—a yarn-spinning upstart snatching a principal role from its respected elders. Talking itself into the confidence of promoters and audiences alike, radio not only surpassed the theatre and the press in influence and mass appeal, but continued to take advantage of the talent it lured away from those competing media.

“Radio, of itself, has developed almost no writers. It has appropriated almost all of them, at least all of those who could tell a good story.” This assessment of the so-called writer’s medium was made in 1939 by Max Wylie, a former director of script and continuity at US network CBS; he went on to work for the radio department of a major advertising agency and wrote several handbooks for writers or producers of radio drama and edited a number of radio play anthologies.

Wylie knew what he was talking about. Although original plays became more prevalent during the Second World War, when radio served as a major purveyor of propaganda packaged as entertainment, this observation remained essentially an accurate one and does much to explain the gradual decline of radio dramatics in the US during the 1950s, when television assumed this mediating, central position in American culture. Proving the infinite adaptability of popular culture, radio programmed its own redundancy.

“The Wisdom of Eve” first appeared as a short story in the May 1946 issue of Cosmopolitan; before it became All About Eve, author Mary Orr adapted her nearly forgotten piece of magazine fiction for the airwaves. And quite a radiogenic production it turned out to be when it was presented on NBC’s Radio City Playhouse.

“If you were listening to the radio last night,” a female voice addresses the audience, “perhaps you heard what [a certain] radio commentator had to say about Eve Harrington.” On a filter microphone, a device often used to recreate the distortion of voices on the wire or the wireless, the enthusiastic commentator spreads the word about the meteoric rise of one Eve Harrington, “the most-loved, most sought-after, most talented actress Hollywood has seen in a generation.”

Without contradicting or mocking this statement, the narrator takes over again, and her encounter with the “hauntingly lovely” Eve is played out for us in dramatic flashbacks. The speaker is not the bitter and disillusioned Margo, the aging diva, but her friend, Karen Richards, wife of the playwright of Margo’s latest stage success.

What unfolds is the familiar story of Eve’s progress, her seeming innocence, her ambition, and her successful scheming. For the sake of her husband, a man being “made miserable by a temperamental actress,” Karen sides with Eve, too late undeceived about the young woman’s character.

In this play, the radio (the voice of the gossip columnist) is complicit in the world’s deception about Eve. Forever the snake in the make-believe garden west of Eden, it tells us what we want to hear, rather than what we ought to know. Luckily, the listeners of the Radio City Playhouse got just what they wanted that day: a darn good story. What’s more, the motion picture people tuned in as well, and the little piece Orr had trouble selling for years was turned into box-office gold.

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On This Day in 1937: Dickens’s "Signal-Man" Is Interviewed on the Air

Well, my first review for the Internet Movie Database has gone online this weekend. I sincerely hope that no one will be led astray by my remarks about The Misleading Lady (previously discussed here). Unlike the rating, writing the short piece was a joy. As fascinated as I am by numbers (provided I don’t have to add them up), I have never been able to express myself satisfactorily in this supposedly succinct way. I also tend to be rather stingy with my stars or points or other such statistical thumbs, whether I share my opinions on the database or grade a student paper.

Five stars out of ten (as bestowed on aforementioned Lady) is meant to denote mediocrity; but to others it might spell “plain awful.” To me, two means “awful,” which is just what Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen merits, had I cast my vote. That insult to the memory of the famed detective, which aired on LivingTV in the UK this weekend, is so insufferable, however, that I could not sit through it. So, I willingly, gladly surrendered my right to vote, at least according to my own ethics of re-viewing. Luckily, I don’t have to deal with numerical expressions of (dis)approval in my ruminations about American radio drama.

On this day, 23 January, in 1937, the Columbia Workshop presented Charles Tazewell’s dramatization of Charles Dickens’s ghost story “The Signal-Man.” Too many American drama anthologies for radio tackled longer novels, rather than short stories, resulting in cut-rate digests and bloodless storytelling. In early radio drama, the narrator was the first to get the axe; gone with him or her were descriptive passages, character assessments, and an access to a speaker’s inner thoughts.

As I argue in Etherized Victorians, my doctoral study on the subject, the prejudice against narration in radio plays (a more inclusive term I prefer over radio drama), is related to the early failure in presenting stage plays straight from Broadway, a lack of adaptive skill that made it necessary to install a translator in the wings, a voice describing the gestures of the actors and the inaudible goings-on known as “business.” The challenge of proper radio form was to do without this awkward voice, to convey actions and thoughts in dialogue.

Another reason serious radio playwrights objected to—and producers did not encourage—the use of narration was the fact that the single voice on commercial radio was linked to the announcer, the peddler of a sponsor’s wares. The single voice stood out, disrupted the conversation—and thus drew attention to the business at hand: the business of selling things.

Over the years, radio plays and the techniques of broadcast hawkers became considerably more sophisticated; but the narrator was still frowned upon by many playwrights and listeners. Now, Charles Dickens’s “Signal-Man,” as reworked for the Columbia Workshop by actor-writer Charles Tazewell, is a fine example for the use of full dramatization.

In Dickens’s narrative, the plight of the titular character—a lonely railroad employee haunted by a death-foretelling “Thing in the Tunnel” (as the story was also called when adapted for radio)—is expressed by the man who observes him:

His pain of mind was most pitiable to see.  It was the mental torture of a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible responsibility involving life.

Tazewell’s script called for the actor to convey this sense of dread and anxiety through changes in tone of voice as Braxton, the Signal-Man, responds to the questions of Darkin, a journalist interviewing him in hopes of a serviceable human interest story. Reading instructions include “almost hysterical,” “becoming hysterical,” or “with growing hysteria,” as Braxton relates his encounters with a specter warning him of impending disaster.

Generally known as a laboratory of sound effects techniques, the Workshop here relied on dialogue, rather than effects. The result is that the ghost story very nearly becomes a study of insanity; the ambiguities fade as the adaptor decides not to deal in noise. The warning bell, ringing in Braxton’s ears is not heard by the journalist or the play’s audience:

Darkin: It’s your imagination.  The bell is not ringing—and probably, it has never rung at any other time except when some station wishes to communicate with you. 

Braxton: Listen! 

Darkin: I tell you, the bell . . .

Braxton: Not the bell—outside—the ghost’s calling.

Darkin: I hear nothing—save the moan of the wind in the wires.

And so do we, the wireless audience. In Tazewell’s dramatization, the specter is all but explained away, drowned in the airwaves without as much as a ghost of a chance to rise before us. What haunts me now is the fact that, just after listening to this play, I came across the headlines about the deadly train crash in the Balkans. I’m sure Tazewell’s journalist would term it a coincidence, as dull and comfortless as such reasoning might be.

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On This Day in 1942: Bette Davis Gives Birth to Arch Oboler’s “American”

The retrograde activity of keeping up with the out-of-date seems generally ill-suited to blogging. I doubt whether to keep looking back—and looking forward to doing so as I do—is such a forward-looking thing to do. A blog signifies little to most readers if it cannot bring them up-to-date on its declared subject matter, be it popular culture, politics, or fly-fishing. I have often felt compelled—and more often been compelled by others—to defend my engagement with the outmoded; indeed, the first comment left for me in the Blog Explosion directory was a terse “why?”

The answer, if I felt obliged to dignify such a monosyllabic and misologic remark with a reply, is this: I enjoy the challenge of discovering the relevance of a cultural artefact or an obscure piece of writing not created with me or my present in mind, and debating to what degree my thinking and being might be indebted to the attitudes reflected in such products. Besides, not being able to relate or connect to the supposed bygone is a personal loss, and, given the potential of history repeating itself, often a dangerous one at that.

Now, it would require some degree of mental obduracy or lack of imagination not to be able to relate to “An American Is Born,” a play that aired on US radio on this day, 19 January, in 1942. After all, “An American Is Born” deals with persecution and immigration in wartime, which makes it eminently topical. It is also a deliberate and unabashed work of propaganda, composed at a time when the word did not yet carry quite as negative a connotation as is attached to it these days.

Just how accepting would today’s audiences be of a play like “An American Is Born”? How likely would they find it produced and disseminated by the mass media?

“An American Is Born” was adapted by radio playwright Arch Oboler from a novella by Peter Jefferson Packer and Fanya Lawrence Foss. Written when the US had not yet entered World War II, and first sound-staged in late 1940 with Elisabeth Bergner in the lead, it was again produced a little over a year later for the Cavalcade of America program, with Bette Davis heading the cast. Clearly, this “American” was reborn to be recruited for home front duty.

In the 1942 production, Davis, who was one of Oboler’s favorite leading ladies, played opposite the versatile radio actor Raymond Edward Johnson. Johnson and Davis took on the roles of Czech immigrants Karl Kroft and his pregnant wife Marta. Their US visa having expired, the young couple cross the border to Mexico, where they wait for their quota numbers to come up. “With the left foot first,” Marta insists as they touch Mexican soil. “That means we’ll be back soon.”

Marta, whose father fought for democracy in her native Prague, desires nothing more than for her child to “be an American from his first cry.” In a “world gone mad with the ravings of little men, he should be born in a country that remains sane and firm. A country that believes that man, as an individual, has certain inalienable rights.”

Initially as idealistic and hopeful as the speech Oboler puts in her mouth, Marta is confident that their stay will only last a few days; but she is soon undeceived about the process of immigration. For those waiting, the weeks and months across the border are filled with uncertainties, threatened by corruption, extortion, and political persecution.

When a fellow European offers to assist the young couple, Marta little suspects that he is a member of the Gestapo. She is unaware as well that her openness about her father’s political convictions endangers the lives of her parent and her unborn child.

Another immigrant who is thus intimidated commits suicide, but not before doing away with the enemy in their midst. At the risk of her own life and that of her unborn child, Marta manages to convince Karl to make a run for it. As the title suggests, the two find their way across the border to the US, where their child takes the first breath of freedom as an American citizen.

When was it that such an overtly propagandistic melodrama last reached a large American audience? The 1991 movie adaptation of the Reagan-era bestseller Not Without My Daughter comes to mind, a film in which even a Coca-Cola sign in a Turkish bordertown was greeted as a herald of US American freedom. Seeing it as an international student living in New York City, I thought the film distressingly simplistic, shamelessly manipulative and, in the context of the Gulf War, rather nauseating at the time.

Are narratives like “An American Is Born” rarer now because Americans have less to be proud of as a nation or because today’s purveyors of popular culture, with an international market in mind, doubt that the brand of one-message-suits-all patriotism can still reach a sizeable enough audience to make it pay off.

US network radio did much to hold a nation together, both during the Depression and the Second World War. I suspect, especially on the subject of immigration, this is no longer a role the media are ready, willing, or even able to play.

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On This Day in 1942: Death Upsets the Pudding Trade

Only a few days ago I commemorated my 100th entry into the broadcastellan journal by going in search of fellow old-time radio bloggers. Not a week later, the subject has become considerably more prominent among bloggers with an entire classroom of neophytes posting their thoughts on radio’s “imagined community” and reviewing individual programs selected by their instructor. It remains to be seen whether the thought-sharing extends beyond the virtual college annex, or just how long the on-air engagement with “yesterday’s internet” (as Gerald Nachman called the radio) will last. “Tired of the everyday routine? Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure? Want to get away from it all?” Just hop over to technorati and type in “Three Skeleton Key,” the title of the first radio play on the group’s listening list.

Speaking of “everyday routine,” it was hardly business as usual on Jack Benny’s Jell-O program on this day, 18 January, in 1942. “Jack Benny will not be with us tonight,” announcer Don Wilson informed those tuning in for some fun and laughter. Instead, the half-hour was filled with song and band music, with the reassurance that Jack would be back on the following Sunday to entertain America. Was the beloved comedian out sick, as he would be for five weeks in 1943, when George Burns and Orson Welles guest-hosted the show?

No, it was the violent death of glamorous, 33-year old motion picture actress Carole Lombard, Benny’s co-star in the Lubitsch comedy To Be or Not to Be, then in post-production. Lombard’s death on 16 January—and Benny’s cancellation of his scheduled performance two days later—were solemn reminders how the war, into which the US had just entered in December, would alter the everyday lives of all Americans, service(wo)men, celebrities, and civilians alike. The Academy Award-nominated actress had been returning from a War Bond Drive in Indianapolis when her plane crashed and killed all passengers on board. For her contribution to the war effort, Lombard was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

To be sure, there were no references to Lombard’s death during the 18 January broadcast, news unlikely to have a favorable impact on the sale of gelatine puddings, the manufacturers of which sponsored the popular program. On the following Sunday, Benny’s writers even found humor in dealing with the comedian’s fictive car crash.

For one night, though, Benny’s conspicuous absence spoke volumes louder than this speech in Hamlet, the play from which Lombard’s last movie borrowed its title and which presented the miser from Waukegan in a preposterous impersonation of the miserable prince (pictured above). Asked to explain just what “seems” to be the matter with him, Hamlet replies:

‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, [. . .],
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, not the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shows of grief
That can denote me truly. These indeed “seem,”
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passeth show—
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

Comedy can do only so much to combat grief, solemn speeches so little to capture it. Beyond the domain of the airwaves, the rest is silence.

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On This Day in 1948: James M. Cain Authenticates a “Lovely Counterfeit”

Well, I’ve done my darndest here to spread the word about old-time radio. Before it became “old-time,” radio did this rather more effectively, of course; spreading the word, about itself that is. It had professional announcers who could make you buy, or at least desire, most anything, from a can of soup to a slice of soap opera. Sure, not everyone fell for the hyperboles of the air, especially when they fell on the deaf ears of journalists who made a living trashing the American pastime of listening to romantic serials, aural funnies, and gory thrillers; if they did not ignore radio drama altogether, as they do nowadays, the peddlers of the printed word tended to denounce and deride as gleefully and excessively as radio announced and applauded itself.

Unlike the feud between radio comedians Fred Allen and Jack Benny, this was an all too real confrontation. If listening to the radio continued to be a pleasure, it was increasingly thought of as a guilty one, much to the displeasure of the sponsors.

One way of countering the attacks of the press, of assuring listeners that radio drama was perfectly respectable, middle-class fare, was to drag noted authors before the microphone, especially when their works were being adapted for the broadcast medium. When Howard Koch’s dramatization of Rebecca opened the Campbell Playhouse on 9 December 1938—thus predating the premiere of Hitchcock’s film adaptation by well over a year—the legitimacy of the production was underscored by producer-host Orson Welles’s transatlantic telephone conversation with Daphne du Maurier.

Five months later (5 May 1939), when the Campbell Playhouse presented Wickford Point, author J. P. Marquand was also on hand to add prestige to the production. And when Edna Ferber was heard in the 31 March 1939 broadcast of Show Boat, she not only appeared for a curtain call, but joined the stock company of the Campbell Playhouse to play the role of Parthy in a non-musical adaptation of her 1926 bestseller.

Of course, such cross-promotions, which were likely to benefit authors and publishers even more than broadcasters, were no guarantors of excellence or authenticity. Agatha Christie’s previously discussed sanctioning of The Adventures of Hercule Poirot (22 February 1945) could hardly have deceived anyone about the spurious parentage of this anonymously penned and not surprisingly short-lived series. Christie spoke with dignity and authority, but could lend none to the production.

Quite the reverse can be said about the Suspense production of Love’s Lovely Counterfeit and its endorsement by author James M. Cain, heard over the US network CBS on this day, 17 January, in 1948. The play, headed by James Cagney and introduced by Robert Montgomery (who also read an excerpt from the novel, was the real thing: not mere dramatic snipped, but an hourlong presentation that could do justice to Cain’s short novel.

Its author, however, was little of help when asked to address the public: “briefly, I thought it was excellent.” In a rather unusual move, bespeaking the prestige of the Suspense program, Cain also congratulated the two men responsible for the adaptation. Missing his cue twice during his short scripted small talk with Cagney and Montgomery, he rendered his authentication disingenuous in the process.

Perhaps, a bit of fakery, such as Cagney’s enthusiasm about the “particular element that makes Cain the most powerful writer of true suspense fiction in America”—the “inevitable climax, an explosion of the energy” generated by “two people in love”—might have been more convincing. Most listeners would not have noticed if their favorite author had been impersonated by a professional actor, reading lines prepared for the occasion by the author; but so eager were producers to demonstrate that radio was no cheap substitute, that they felt compelled to sell the authentic at the cost of sounding phony.

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Martin Luther Kingfish? Langston Hughes, Booker T. Washington, and the Problem of Representation

It was time to close the fourth broadcastellan poll, for which I had put together a list of radio plays by notable American poets, playwrights, and novelists including Archibald MacLeish, Arthur Miller, and Pearl S. Buck, as well as works by writers more closely associated with the medium (namely Arch Oboler, Morton Wishengrad, and Norman Corwin). I was not surprised that the play receiving the most votes was Lucille Fletcher’s “Sorry, Wrong Number.”

Less surprising still was that just as many voters turned out to declare that they had not heard or read a single one of the works mentioned. My intention was to highlight this anticipated lack of awareness, to suggest, particularly to those already interested in old-time radio, that to tune in to aural drama of the 1930s and ’40s does not mean to sever all connections with thoroughly respectable literature or so-called legitimate drama. Sure, Life Can Be Beautiful—but old-time radio drama can also be thought-provoking, historically relevant, and artistically engaging.

I needed to make this claim when I set out to turn my love for the traditional American Hörspiel (German for audio play) into the subject of a doctoral study in English literature. Long neglected and too infrequently discussed, aural dramatics are far easier to sell, package, and deliver as an historical subject than as an aesthetic one. Anything that may tell us about a people, its past and its paths, is generally deemed worthwhile a prolonged investigation of what is otherwise thought of as artistically negligible or intellectually dubious.

While eager to move discussions about radio drama into the academic circles in which I assumed myself to be spinning for years to come, I was anxious not to distort the subject by paying too much attention to a few isolated literary productions at the expense of the episodic thrillers, comedy-variety shows and dramatic anthologies that made up the bulk of the US networks’ night-time schedules throughout the 1940s. In other words, I did not want to represent the exclusive by excluding the representative.

As it turns out, recovering what was largely absent told me much about the everyday of American broadcasting as commercial construct and historical reality, as well as the democracy of memory.

None of those voting in my poll knew the radio play “Booker T. Washington in Atlanta” by noted African-American poet Langston Hughes; no wonder, since recordings of it have apparently not been preserved and its script has not been published in decades. It aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System to commemorate the Booker T. Washington stamp that was issued on 7 April 1940. Hughes called his play “a special occasion script, as are most scripts dealing with Negro life—since we are not normally a part of radio drama, except as comedy relief.”

Few radio plays captured the black experience, whereas the “stereotype of the dialect-speaking, amiably moronic Negro servant” was the “chief representative of [his] racial group on the air.” Erik Barnouw, who included the play in his anthology Radio Drama in Action (1945), added that “[t]his kind of script” was acceptable in American broadcasting since it “can emphasize Negro accomplishments instead of our society’s failure toward him.”

US radio entertainment was not all Amos ‘n’ Andy—an Anglo-Saxon distortion of the diversity of an ever-evolving culture; nor should it be mistaken for an accurate representation of 1940s America. The average radio audience was largely a construct created by an industry that provided the funding for programming designed to increase its profits and improve its image. Yet however warped, it was nonetheless a composite picture in which millions of individual listeners tried to find themselves.

It is this problem of representation that Hughes addresses in his play: “You’ve spoke in front of northern white folks, and southern colored folks, and us farmers around here too,” a farmer tells Booker T. Washington:

But in Atlanta tomorrow you gonna have city folks and country folks, Yankees and Southerners—and colored folks added to that.  Now, how you gonna please all them different kind o’ folks, Washington? I figger you got yourself in a kinder tight place.

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On This Day in 1950 and 1953: Suspense Pops Some Corn for the Holidays

After yesterday’s intriguing ghost story on Suspense, I went in search for a few more seasonal treats from the same series. Unfortunately, listening to the sentimental offerings that aired on this day, 21 December, in 1950 and 1953, respectively, is about as thrilling as finding yet another pair of socks under the tree.

In 1953, when most stars had already abandoned US radio, along with a television and Cinemascope crazy public, Greer Garson stepped up to the microphone for “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.” No doubt, she had been pushed behind it by the producers of her upcoming picture, which was duly plugged. Never mind that the Academy Award-winning actress never appeared in the announced film, Knights of the Round Table.

Considering that “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” was written by Morton Fine and David Friedkin, experts in radio thrillers, and that it featured a stellar cast including radio stalwarts Howard McNear, Herb Butterfield, Irene Tedrow, Joseph Kearns, and Harry Bartell, the episode bears less resemblance to old-fashioned blood-and-thunder worthy of Suspense than to the melodramatic stardust sprinkled onto the airwaves by light-drama anthologies like The First Nighter or Grand Central Station.

“‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” tells the story of a little girl (Anne Whitfield) who is faced with the possibility that her mother and father might not come home for the holidays—that they might never come home again. Her nanny (Garson) receives news that the child’s parents might have died in a plane crash. Only the most naïve listener—or those with faith enough to believe that a Christmas thriller might end unhappily—would assume for one moment that the parents are truly dead. And, sure enough, after much crying and praying, the two return home.

The only highlight of this murky mess of failed heartstrings manipulation is Ms. Garson’s passionate reading of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” the poem by Clement Clarke Moore from whose famous first line the play borrows its title. The reading, designed to console the child, is cut short by the arrival of her parents, just when Santa’s slay is ready to “dash away.” After a perfunctory reunion, the nanny is urged to continue her reading. What a pity Garson ever got interrupted, only to carry on with this dreadful piece of sentimental pulp.

Only slightly better is “A Christmas for Carol,” starring crooner-comedian Dennis Day. Day plays the husband of the eponymous Carol, who is about to give birth—but not without complications. Being a lowly bank clerk and unable to pay for a nurse, the desperate man decides to resort to crime.

After stealing the life savings of an elderly man, he becomes remorseful and quite incapable of escaping with the loot. His struggles are closely followed by one Mr. . . . wait for it . . . Wiseman, a police officer who, having stood by and observed the young man being put to the test of his own conscience, finds his faith in the anxious father-to-be entirely justfied. Virtue is duly rewarded; a twist of fate relieves the impecunious family from hardship and harm, as mother and child are well enough not to require any expensive care after all.

Now, I don’t think any of this is worse than the appalling “Wizard of Oz” pantomime I just glimpsed at (for as long as I could stand it) on ITV 1’s Paul O’Grady Show. Still, the allegedly “outstanding theater of thrills” (as Suspense was announced each week) certainly tossed audiences some awfully stale fruitcakes for the 1950 and 1953 holidays. Say, what is your favorite Yuletide yarn?