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Let Sister George Do It; or, Whatever Happened to Radio, Mr. Aldrich?

Well, as I always say, beware of unemployed lesbian radio actresses. Okay, so it isn’t something I say all that often. I mean, who the hell talks about radio actresses these days? Last night, I once again felt myself robbed of an opportunity to say it, and am consequently somewhat cheesed off. I was watching The Killing of Sister George (1968), the first movie to roll out of director Robert Aldrich’s production company. Earlier this week, I allowed myself to ponder Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, having raked in Aldrich’s Autumn Leaves not too long ago. So, I was quite prepared to face yet another aging woman on the verge of a crack-up.

“George,” played by Beryl Reid, sure is that; in danger of losing it all, she is not about to “go gentle” into what, in melodrama, makes for a good nightmare. The “Sister” is about to be written out of a television “soap opera” (however imprecise a term when applied to BBC offerings, considering the absence of commercial sponsors), and the aging “George” who plays her finds both her personal and professional lives under attack. Though not a thriller, Aldrich’s British outing quite easily tops Whatever and its follow-up, Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte, in making mental anguish and secret passions visible. It’s the kind of picture William Castle might have made if he’d been Samuel Naked Kiss Fuller.

Aldrich makes a Killing of nostalgia. That is, his characters attempt to retreat into the make-believe of a longed for long gone (as in the above homage to Laurel and Hardy) only to be dragged right back into the make-believe of his reality, a nasty stand-in for a modern world inhabited by the cruel, deluded, and disillusioned—the kind of people to the labelling of whose fantasies we owe Venus in Furs author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch a word.

The Killing makes a spectacle of homosexual desire, the overt expression and realization of which had been decriminalized in the UK not long before the release of the film, but were still illegal when the play was conceived for the stage. Now, I do not know just how much of Frank Marcus’s play has been reworked for Aldrich’s film version; but the legal recognition and acceptance of the relationship portrayed are certain to have changed the dynamics of this double-life narrative. However slowly the mores adapt to written law, “George” and the eagerly infantile “Childie” (Susannah York) are no longer forced to remain closeted. Opening up the play, the camera, like a Peeping Tomboy, follows them into a nightclub packed with slowdancing lesbians, shooting close-ups of a world once closed off.

As the medium modernizes, it destroys, doing away with what it cannot show. In Marcus’s stage drama, the “Sister” is not a television persona but a radio character, a disembodied voice, a nobody beloved by everyone. “George” enjoys popularity only by becoming invisible and by materializing before her audience—her listeners—as they choose to visualize her in their mind’s eye.

Having made a career of being lovingly constructed by unseen others, “George” very much relies on “Childie” to escape the incorporeal by exerting physical control over the body of a desired other. It is this interplay of the tangibly private and the abstract public, the ample body and the word not quite made flesh, the said and the done that gets undone by Aldrich’s cinematic show-themship, an exhibition in which “Sister George” is being killed all over again for the sake of casting a shadow on the screen . . .

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Things to Come . . . and Go

Well, there are few signs of it here. And sometimes I am not sure how I feel about that. Progress, I mean. Yesterday, I took in the lavish and fabulous Things to Come (1936), one of the cinematic gems the BBC has been dispensing in its current Summer of British Film retrospective. For once, our progress-defying DVD recorder did not refuse its services; so, unlike the previously shown Quatermass Xperiment, which I was unable to preserve for future viewing, Things to Come flickered on our Ikea-blind-turned-movie screen last night without a glitch.

“Progress is good,” “ignorance is bad,” and “war is a waste of energy” are the chief messages conveyed by this collaboration of H. G. Wells and director William Cameron Menzies, posing here with Pearl Argyle in a publicity shot featured, like the image below it, in my frequently raided copy of Film Pictorial Annual 1937, which devotes over a dozen pages to retelling the story in an “easy-to-read narrative.”

The second of these messages, “ignorance is bad,” is being brought across forcefully in the opening scenes, in which the cheer of the folks in Everytown are being contrasted with the warnings of an impending war. I was reminded of Archibald MacLeish’s aforementioned radio drama “Air Raid,” in which warnings about the coming of war are being disregarded by those who subsequently perish in a blitz on their village.

In Things to Come, chemical warfare results in the spreading of a “wandering sickness” crippling all civilization. As the Film Pictorial Annual sums it up in what reads like a bowdlerized version of Byron’s “Darkness,”

Nation after nation was dawn into the gigantic struggle. Infinitely more horrible than the last world war, this new fight carried death by bombs, by gas, by famine and by disease into every city an every town in the civilized world. New hates, new forces were unleashed; until, so obstinate, so wilful is human nature that there was none left to work for peace. The whole world, caught in the struggle, could find no way to end this horror.

Living as remotely as I do, it is quite easy to get lost in the everyday, to lose sight of world events, present or prospective. Right now, I am once again cut off from the internet, this time due to a crossed telephone line. During times like these, I become aware of how I much I depend on telecommunications technology and how keenly I sense its loss. Progress, after all, means positive change only for those who are privileged to benefit from it.

To find out whether things are truly as peaceful as they appeared in the tranquility and seclusion of home—things-hard-to-come-by these days), we drove down to our nearest Everytown. And, succumbing to a “wandering sickness” of the Weltschmerz variety, we took advantage of the technology denied us at home to book a trip out of town. Expect to find references to Prague woven into posts to come once we prove victorious in this latest battle for broadband . . .

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"A-spinning goes our weekly wheel of fortune . . ."

Well, here we go again. As the aforementioned “Major” Bowes used to say, “Around and around and around she goes,” referring to the spinning wheel on the Original Amateur Hour. A few years after Bowes took his final bow, Ted Mack (pictured) took over as host of the show, which, when revived in 1948, was both heard on the radio and seen on television. The concept has been going around and around as well, there being more amateurs than ever on television to root for or laugh at. Another season of The X Factor is currently underway in Britain, with Simon Cowell once again heading the panel of judges, rolling his eyes, and uttering his standard “if I’m being perfectly honest” until the winner is being declared by audience vote just in time for the release of the Christmas single.

Here is how casting director Marie Correll (wife of Amos ‘n’ Andy co-creator Charles Correll) described the auditions for the televised Amateur Hour to the readers of the Radio and Television Mirror back in the summer of 1949:

“The wonderful part is that auditions are open to everyone,” she tells you. “We get hundreds of letters a week and every letter is answered, although it may take from two to three weeks. Our staff sorts the mail geographically. We set dates and enclose application blanks for those close enough to New York to audition here. We tell the others about our out-of-town audition staff and give dates when it will be in their vicinity. But every affiliated station helps as a clearing house for local talent.” 

Application forms are numbered when they go out. Applicants are auditioned in numerical order on the day they appear. No favorites are played. Everybody gets the same chance. Even second and third chances. 

“It’s amazing how much performers can improve even in a matter of months sometimes,” Mrs. Correll says. “We’ve had talent audition, be rejected, write in later for another appointment and make the grade. We never discourage anyone. We try to get a little background on them, find out what they’re aiming for. If they are singers we sometimes make suggestions about numbers that may suit their voices better, though I must say that nine times out of ten they stick to the same numbers. And you’d be surprised how many come to the first audition with only one number prepared, staking everything on a single effort.” 

Space being at a premium even in New York’s huge Radio City, the room where hopefuls wait their turn is really a long corridor, flanked on both sides with chairs that leave only a narrow passageway between. Every chair is filled. Standees lean on their instrument cases, huddled in little groups. 

Youth and hope predominate here, with a sprinkling of the middle-aged and a few elders [. . .]. 

Tonight’s auditions are fairly typical. There are about half a dozen young boys, whose occupations were listed on their applications as shipping clerk, parcel post clerk, plasterer, salesman, and the like—all eager to break away from the routine of their jobs and get into the glamorous show business world. They sing the same numbers in about the same way. 

“It isn’t that they’re bad—they’re just not good enough,” Marie explains. 

There is a harmony team of five Negro boys, a choral group with an earnest leader, and two schoolboys who have written their own material. (Under “type of talent” on their application forms they had put, “Comedy—we hope!”).

Yes, our “weekly wheel of fortune” goes a-spinning, even though talent has long become secondary to hitting the no longer quite so elusive jackpot. Discontented, determined or delusional, they are lining up by the thousands for a chance to enter that allegedly “glamorous” realm of show business, to be enfranchised and marketed, which is why decent plasterers are harder to find these days than celebrities behind bars and disgruntled clerks prepare for their seconds of fame by slipping plastered behind the wheel . . .

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Theater of the Mime

There is something magical about it. The idea that an old mirror might show us a reflection of our past, with you and me on the other side to make sense of it all. I don’t believe there is such a thing as old news, unless you are averse to or incapable of examining it in the light of your own reflections. I am still flicking through the August 1949 issue of Radio and Television Mirror, as I have been all this week, if only to test my own maxim (which, I admit, sounds rather like the slogan with which NBC once tried to vindicate its reruns).

Earlier this week, an article in the Hollywood Reporter suggested that television is on its way out (except in Australia), that people turn to their computer instead to snatch out of the web whatever they want whenever they want it rather than rely on the old TiVo, let alone simply stay put when something of interest comes on. Back in 1949, television, though practically dating back to the age when radio became the medium of the moment, was still in its commercial infancy, “commercial” being redundant, considering that its growth and maturity were determined by the medium’s viability as a promotional tool.

According to the Mirror, there were just over 1.3 million TV sets in the US that spring, half of them in New York City. Radio was still tops; but those who did not have a TV set were beginning to think of radio as something inferior, as something that would never allow them to keep up with the Joneses.

Few people defended radio those days, in part because programming had gotten worse (instead of more diverse) with the advent of tape recording, used largely for the sake of economy, rather than reportorial or artistic experimentation. Shows were no longer produced live, which gave audiences the impression that they listened to a reproduction rather than a once-in-a-lifetime theatrical event and, as summer reruns became common, the sense that one had heard it all before. Radio was losing its edge, and listeners were only too ready to find that edge and push their old receivers over it. In other words, they were pushovers for television.

So, just what could television do that was not possible on the old wireless? Not much, really, considering the picture quality was still so poor as to give you a headache finding the difference and the production techniques were so inferior as to give rise to the adage that, in radio, the pictures are better. The theater of the mind, it is true, could not recreate the enjoyment of an old-fashioned charade, as demonstrated above by Vincent Price. Pantomime. Now there’s a concept with which to silence the old wireless (even though silent movies could hardly have staged such a comeback against the talkies).

Mr. Price, who appeared on KTTV’s Pantomime Quiz, along with Lon McAllister (also pictured in the foreground), seems to have leaped at the opportunity of saying “boo” to shake up the public on behalf of the television industry. Pity, he was so much more sophisticated as the Saint of the airwaves.

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"Life with[out] Mother": Anna and Eleanor Roosevelt on the Air

Leave it to Will and Grace. That is what I used to say when that show was still on the air. Sarcasm, I mean. The kind of at-someone-else’s-expense humor those most likely to be subject to bias attacks are so quick to dispense. Sometimes, though, even I cannot hold back. While flicking through the August 1949 issue of Radio and Television Mirror, something I decided on doing all this week here at broadcastellan, I came across an essay by Anna Roosevelt, commenting on her life with former First Lady Eleanor.

Back in 1949, the two had a radio program, broadcast Monday through Friday afternoon over ABC stations. Now, imagine soon-if-not-soon-enough-to-be former First Lady Laura Bush and one of her daughters going on the air five days a week to discuss politics and social matters. Who would tune in, let alone without a smirk or the fingers-crossed anticipation of a delicious gaffe?

Now, I do have doubts that the Bush women could handle such an assignment; but that is almost beside my point. Take Hillary and Chelsea, if you must. I mean, would anyone tune in, unless Hillary were having a giant tumor removed or Chelsea defended herself after being caught driving naked under the influence?

We chuckle at the so-called “good old days” with an air of superciliousness or else wax nostalgic. The very thought of sitting still while two of the western hemisphere’s most famous mother and daughter talk without any scandal or sensational element in sight! Preposterous, right? To me, this is neither cause for ridicule nor romance. It is simply a fact that we have become more callous and shallow and than we have ever been in the best and worst of times, even in the face of what might be, according to some scientists, the worst yet to come.

I do go on a bit; but I am not one to attach as of course the adjective “cheap” to the much-abused noun “sentiment.” At any rate, here is Anna Roosevelt talking about her mother and their joint radio venture, recordings of which, I regret, do not appear to have survived for appraisal:

Life with Mother always has been rich with her inspiration. Her aim never was to mold me in her image, but to guide me along lines of intellectual independence, social awareness and understanding. If I am able to bring any of these qualities to our radio program, I recognize how deeply indebted I am to Mother—even when I have the temerity to take issue with her on a subject. 

Neither Mother nor Father ever courted sycophants among their children. And if I have learned to speak up, I can trace my assertiveness to the family hearth. Although the family has arrived at broadly the same general philosophy, it would be an error to suppose that we agreed automatically on every social and economic question of public interest. 

Certainly there was nothing to support such a notion at our spirited family gatherings where everyone was free to express opinions, where sometimes even Father would have to shout to get the floor. The dictum that children should be seen and not heard was sharply modified in our household [. . .]. 

Our silence [in front of company] was not mere obeisance to good manners, but a credit to Mother’s good sense. For she took great pains to impress upon us that we should learn by listening to others[. . .]. 

It was second nature for us to hear Mother—from the time I was a child—discuss settlement work in New York, and to hear her connect individual cases to broad social problems affecting hundreds and thousands of others in any large city in the United States [. . .] 

Whether at the White House or elsewhere, life with Mother is unfailingly eventful—and always has been. It was especially eventful recently when Mother—the very epitome of punctuality—did not arrive on time for our first broadcast together at the ABC studios in New York City. 

I couldn’t understand it. Mother had planed in the night before from the United Nations meeting in Paris. We had worked out a few questions I was to ask concerning the Human Rights Committee, and were to meet at 10:30 the following morning at the ABC studios in Radio City. 

I had thought how easy our first program at the same microphone would be. I didn’t become alarmed until I noticed that Mother still was among the missing—and it was just two minutes before air time. 

Suddenly I found myself on the air—and utterly alone. I gazed entreatingly at the door. I was certain Mother would burst in at any moment. But there was no sign of her. I ad libbed for ten and one half minutes, without a page of script or a note to guide me. I filled in two more minutes by playing a recording Mother had made in Paris. I discussed New York traffic. Christmas shopping and anything else that came to mind. 

Then Mother arrived—in time to answer just one question. I knew Mother must have had a good alibi. She did. She had forgotten about the congestion of New York City traffic. She had thought—with incredible naiveté—that she could travel from Washington Square to 50th Street in ten minutes. 

Quite a miscalculation for so adept a world traveller as Mother. It made her realize just how completely engrossing the United Nations sessions had been.

Mrs. Roosevelt, who was taking a break from broadcasting during August, kept turning to the radio for news from Korea. On this day, 22 August, in 1949, she expressed herself concerned about the use of the Atomic bomb to resolve the conflict, hoping that the weapon would never be used (and she does not write “again”) since it would create a deadly chain of retaliation that might prove the end of the civilized world. In light of the current state of broadcasting here and stateside, I have a feeling it takes less than a nuclear weapon to accomplish just about that.

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Taking Them by Storm

Well, how is this for an odd piece of cross-promotion: Linda Darnell selling face powder and a Hurricane picture. Did they really release Slattery’s Hurricane at the height of the season known for the weather phenomenon from which the film takes its title (no, not Slattery, silly)? According to the Internet Movie Database, the movie starring radio actor turned big screen tough guy Richard Widmark was indeed blowing into theaters during the month of August, back in 1949. Perhaps, these days that would be considered bad timing, a move to bring on a storm of protest for its lack of sensitivity. Besides, you try keeping your powder dry during a torrential downpour.

The pictured advertisement, featuring the alluring Ms. Darnell (who had earlier starred in Summer Storm), can be found in the August 1949 issue of Radio and Television Weekly, through the tattered pages of which I am currently leafing. Now, I have not seen the motion picture, which was radio-readied for Lux (rather than Woodbury) on 6 March 1950, with Maureen O’Hara in the Darnell part. Never mind that now. More interesting to me is that Slattery’s Hurricane was written by none other than Herman Wouk, the aforementioned radio writer whose first novel, Aurora Dawn (1946), was a satire of the advertising game and commercial broadcasting in America:

Aurora Dawn! 

[. . .] was the name of a soap; a pink, pleasant-smelling article distributed throughout the land and modestly advertised as the “fastest-selling” soap in America. Whether this meant that sales were transacted more rapidly with Aurora Dawn soap than with any other, the customer snatching it out of the druggist’s hand with impolite haste, flinging down a coin and dashing from the store, or whether the slogan was trying to say that its sales were increasing more quickly than the sales of any other cleansing bar; this is not known. Advertising has restored an Elizabethan elasticity to our drying English prose, often sacrificing explicitness for rich color. 

[The hero’s] purpose was [ . . .] to make the fastest-selling soap sell even faster. [He, one Andrew Reale,] was [. . .] employed [. . .] by the Republic Broadcasting Company, a vast free enterprise rivaled only by the United States Broadcasting System, another private property. These two huge corporations monopolized the radio facilities of the land in a state of healthy competition with each other, and drew their lifeblood from rich advertising fees which assured the public an uninterrupted flow of entertainment by the highest priced comedians, jazz singers, musicians, news analysts, and vaudeville novelties in the land—a gratifying contrast to the dreary round of classical music and educational programs which gave government-owned radio chains such a dowdy reputation in other countries.

Meanwhile, no cross-promotion could save Arctic Manhunt (1949) from obscurity. Announced in the same issue of Radio and Television Mirror, it was meant to convince both the “man-hunting brunette” and the “girl whose man needs—a little encouragement” that lipstick was indispensable to the survival of the species. As yet, no five people of either sex could be found who saw and care to cast their vote for Arctic Manhunt on the Internet Movie Database. Whether or not the advertised product “lasts—and LASTS and L-A-S-T-S,” especially under the conditions endured in the forecast melodrama, I am in no position to say; but memories of those promised “pulse-quickening” scenes certainly faded fast. It takes more than corporate windbags to take them by storm.

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A Week with Radio and Television Mirror (August 1949)

This being the 100th birthday of Lurene Tuttle, former “First Lady of Radio” (previously celebrated here), it behoves me to return to my favorite subject. So, all week I am going to flick through the August 1949 issue of Radio and Television Mirror to dig up what I hope to be noteworthy or just plain curious items.

My copy of the old Mirror is getting a bit tatty, having been cherished more for its content than for its potential trade value. The issue contains a short article about Ms. Tuttle, an Indiana native gone Hollywood: “There’s scarcely a radio program on which Lurene hasn’t been heard,” it says, “but she’s no radio Cinderella. She came to radio as a stage actress seasoned by seven years of trouping in stock.”

Cover of Radio and Television Mirror, August 1949

There is an article by Anna Roosevelt, writing about her mother, another former First Lady, wife of the President who first took such great advantage of the new medium of radio; at the time, Anna and Eleanor were heard Monday through Friday afternoon on ABC. Singer Kate Smith, broadcasting daily at noon over the Mutual network, shares recipes and shows readers around her summer residence, Camp Sunshine.

Louella Parsons, the “First Lady of Hollywood,” describes her experience in broadcasting (as illustrated here). She gossiped each Sunday, 9:15 pm over ABC, but was on her summer vacation that August. Kit Trout describes “tag[ging] along” with her husband, NBC reporter Bob Trout (whose Who Said That? was both heard and seen each Saturday at 9 pm); and Jo Stafford, heard Thursday evenings at 9:30 pm over ABC stations, relates what happened during her first audition.

Mary Jane Higby, in character as Joan Davis (the heroine of daytime serial When a Girl Marries) answers reader mail concerning marital problems, while the aforementioned Terry Burton, heard daily in The Second Mrs. Burton continues her own column in the role of “Family Counselor.”

And then there is Blondie (or, rather, Ann Rutherford), telling readers how she relates to her famous radio and movie character:

Radio’s Blondie on a page from Radio and Television Mirror

The letters we get from people who listen to the show often say that the Bumsteads help them to laugh at their own troubles.  When they laugh at the Bumsteads the laughter carries over to their own lives.  It works for us too. In fact it’s often one of us who furnishes the incident from real life. 

The Bumsteads are not only the couple next door to us on the show, we are the Bumsteads, and yes, Blondie is real to me.

In radio and on television, as in its Mirror, fact and fiction merge, making it difficult to tell one from the other. Reading this monthly is like stepping through the looking glass into a reality show, anno 1949. Sanctioned, streamlined or sanitized, what kind of story is history anyway?

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Hustle Bustle

Generally, I don’t leap at the chance of gawking at gowns worn by Nicole Kidman, Uma Thurman, or Kate Beckinsale, period costumes currently on view at the American Museum in Britain just outside Bath. Still, I was intrigued by the museum’s exhibition Dollar Princesses and, on a trip to the old spa town last Thursday, we trotted up to Claverton Manor (pictured) to have a look.

Dollar Princesses tells the story of what Oscar Wilde referred to as the “American Invasion”—the eastern migration of moneyed American women dead set on a title and deigning to take any destitute Englishman yet attached to it in the bargain. Take Jenny Jerome, for instance, who courted in record speed—a mere three days—to beat the moneyed crowds so as to become Lady Randolph Churchill. Her son Winston, incidentally, made his first political speech at Claverton Manor back in 1897.

As I looked at the artifacts and read the literate panels, I was reminded of the impression made by American heiress Isabel Boncassen on Lord Silverbridge, characters of The Duke’s Children (1879-80) by the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope:

Thrice within the next three weeks did Lord Silverbridge go forth to ask Mabel to be his wife, but thrice in vain [. . .]. It was no doubt true that he, during the last three weeks, had often been in Miss Boncassen’s company [. . .]. But Mabel had certainly no right to complain. Had he not thrice during the same period come there to lay the coronet at her feet;—and [. . .] was it not her fault that he was not going through the ceremony?

“I suppose,” she said, laughing, “that it is all settled.”

“What is all settled?”

“About you and the American beauty.” 

“I am not aware that anything in particular has been settled.”

“Then it ought to be,—oughtn’t it? For her sake, I mean.”

“That is so like an English woman,” said Lord Silverbridge. “Because you cannot understand a manner of life a little different from your own you will impute evil.”

“I have imputed no evil, Lord Silverbridge, and you have no right to say so.”

“If you mean to assert,” said Miss Cass, “that the manners of American young ladies are freer than those of English young ladies, it is you that are taking away their characters.”

“I don’t say it would be at all bad,” continued Lady Mabel. “She is a beautiful girl, and very clever, and would make a charming Duchess. And then it would be such a delicious change to have an American Duchess.” 

“She wouldn’t be a Duchess.” 

“Well, Countess, with Duchessship before her in the remote future. Wouldn’t it be a change, Miss Cass?”

“Oh decidedly!” said Miss Cass.

“And very much for the better. Quite a case of new blood, you know. Pray don’t suppose that I mean to object. Everybody who talks about it approves. I haven’t heard a single dissentient voice. Only as it has gone so far, and English people are too stupid you know to understand all these new ways,—don’t you think perhaps—?”

“No, I don’t think. I don’t think anything except that you are very ill-natured.” Then he got up and, after making formal adieux to both the ladies, left the house.

As soon as he was gone Lady Mabel began to laugh, but the least apprehensive ears would have perceived that the laughter was affected. Miss Cassewary did not laugh at all, but sat bolt upright and looked very serious. “Upon my honour,” said the younger lady, “he is the most beautifully simple-minded human being I ever knew in my life.”

“Then I wouldn’t laugh at him.”

“How can one help it? But of course I do it with a purpose.”

“What purpose?”

“I think he is making a fool of himself. If somebody does not interfere he will go so far that he will not be able to draw back without misbehaving.”

“I thought,” said Miss Cassewary, in a very low voice, almost whispering. “I thought that he was looking for a wife elsewhere.”

“You need not think of it again,” said Lady Mab, jumping up from her seat. “I had thought of it too. But as I told you before, I spared him. He did not really mean it with me;—nor does he mean it with this American girl. Such young men seldom mean. They drift into matrimony. But she will not spare him. It would be a national triumph. All the States would sing a paean of glory. Fancy a New York belle having compassed a Duke!”

“I don’t think it possible. It would be too horrid.”

These days, titles are still a big draw in the United Kingdom; as the recently concluded “Cash for Honours” investigation drove home, they are as desirable as ever among those with a few thousand pounds to spare. The latter-day “Dollar Princess,” on the other hand, is not so eager to spend her precious ducats on a Duke. That kind of hustling went out with the bustle. Lords, after all, are a dime a dozen around here.

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The King of Clubs

Well, I wonder now. About that golf ball, I mean. Earlier this week, I went on a tour of St. Donats, the Welsh castle that, during the 1920s and ’30s, was being transformed into a getaway for media mogul William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, silent screen and talkies star Marion Davies. A decade after Hearst’s death in 1951, his trustees finally managed to sell this fourteenth-century if thoroughly remodeled castle, something that Hearst had been trying to do since his empire began to crumble in the late 1930s. In 1962, St. Donats became the site of the international Atlantic College and as such no tourist attraction; but, as I mentioned previously, every August and early September, when most of its students are away, it is open to visitors.

Our tour was conducted by one of the students, a girl from New Mexico, who, however charming, smart, and fortunate to land a scholarship to attend this prestigious school, had little to do with or say about the castle and its history, other than sharing a few anecdotes about a ghost, a pirate, and a deadly duel, all part of St. Donats fascinating lore.

However much remains of the old place, its more recent past is now obscured, a fleeting Hollywood romance yielding both to antiquity and utility. Since the castle is now a campus, little is left of its imposed splendor designed to impose, architectural features imported from all over Britain and Europe by Hearst, who had done as much on an even grander scale at San Simeon in California. Assembled from various secular and profane properties, the (pictured) banqueting hall with its English church roof and its fireplace from France, was commissioned by Hearst to accommodate his illustrious guests, however rarely he ultimately got to entertain at St. Donats.

Waiting for our tour to commence, we found a golf ball in a little herb garden on the grounds. I thought little of it at the time; but when I browsed through Enfys McMurry’s slyly titled Hearst’s Other Castle (1999) to satisfy my newly roused curiosity about St. Donats, I came across a reference to . . . Big Broadcast star, USO morale booster, and golf enthusiast Bob Hope.

As those who know me come to dread, I can ride the hobbyhorse of old-time radio to death; but I didn’t expect to drag it back from its pasture quite that quickly in this case, notwithstanding Hearst’s media empire and Davies’s appearances on the Lux Radio Theater. As it turns out, the quintessential radio comedian of the medium’s so-called golden age was indeed staying at St. Donats shortly before Hearst’s death in 1951. Hearst had not been at St. Donats in over a decade; and Hope, of Welsh descent on his mother’s side, was the last major Tinseltownie to occupy this ancient castle. He was in need of a place to flop while attending a golf tournament in the Welsh town of Porthcawl during the spring of that year.

Now, I don’t suppose Bob “Thanks for the Memory” Hope could have planted that ball there among the lavender and fennel, the herb garden being a recent addition; but those moats and towers sure inspire yarns . . .

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What Makes Me Stay and Sammy Run?

Well, what a difference a day makes—at least if you are spending it installing a new router. The wireless woes of recent weeks having passed, I can continue to issue my journal without further “adieu,” this week’s return visit to the Welsh getaway of media mogul William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies excepting. As much as I enjoy being out and about, I relish staying put to share whatever crosses my mind, free to linger in the presence of kindred spirits or chat online with friends overseas to learn about their struggles and successes in show business and music publishing. I am somewhat short on ambition, I guess, safe for writing my own radio column, come hell or high definition. And, unless I allow myself to stray from the subject or find myself thwarted by technology—I am doing just that right here.

A radio column. That was what got Sammy started. You know, Sammy Glick, the title character of What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), the novelistic debut of Budd Schulberg (whose voice you may hear at the close of this mid-1950s radio documentary about his friend and colleague F. Scott Fitzgerald). Now, Sammy was just a twelve-bucks-a-week nobody running copy for a drama editor at a New York City newspaper when, one day, he announced that he “felt himself ready to conduct the paper’s radio column. Of course,” sneered the narrator (said editor), “the fact that the paper had never had a radio column didn’t seem to discourage him in the least.”

I first read this exchange when I was researching my doctoral study on so-called old-time radio, examining it in relation to other and older media in the 1930s and ’40s. What Makes Sammy Run? provided a vivid example, albeit fictional, of the doubt, dread, and disdain with which the American press eyed, tried to suppress, and pretended to ignore the commercial might of the broadcasting industry. “[W]hy should we plug a setup that’s cutting our advertising?” the editor tells Sammy, the overeager upstart who aims to please with the aim of pleasing himself:

“And just what makes you think you’re prepared to be an expert on matters Marconi?”
“What made you think you were an expert on the theater?”

To this blunt challenge, the irked authority feebly replies:

“I always liked the theater. I’ve seen lots of plays.”
“Well, I’ve listened to the radio plenty, too,” Sammy said.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “Everybody listens to the radio.”
“That’s why there oughta be a radio column,” Sammy said.

Guess what, little Sammy gets his column, and then some. He’s got plenty of nerve and few scruples. Unencumbered by the weight of a conscience and lifted instead by an inflated ego, the boy is getting far, and fast. He even passes off as his own a radio comedy by an inexperienced if gifted nobody who came to ask him for advice, barely giving credit to its original author when he sells the piece as a screen project.

What makes the Sammys of the world outrun us? What makes them run us over and run our lives as we stay put and gaze at them through the cloud of dust those windbags leave behind as they make a dash for whatever it is that is it for them? That is what I ask myself while I remain seated, long after the handfuls of dust have settled, to see the world from my virtual porch . . .