Posts

Posted on

Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Joan Davis, Vallee Girl

I was inclined to put the “wireless women” on hold for today. I have been feeling rather poorly as a result of an exposure to noxious fumes emanating from a fresh coat of paint in our conservatory. My evening with Claudette Colbert, starred in the rarely screened melodrama The Man from Yesterday (1932) was utterly spoiled. I also missed the BAFTAs, the new Marple (controversially, not a mystery in which the old sleuth was placed by her creator), and found little enjoyment in Crack Up (1946), a noirish thriller directed by radio dramatist Irving Reis, which aired on BBC Two early last Saturday. Dizziness, mood swings, fatigue and nausea are my mental and bodily responses to a thankfully small number of chemical solutions including household cleaners, varnishes, and insecticides.

Having spent some time in the crisp winter air this afternoon, I am ready to carry on about those fabulous radio ladies. I was thrilled to hear from a relative of Ms. Minerva Pious, one of the “wireless women” I have been commemorating here over the past few weeks. Her rags-to-riches-to-rags story sure seems worth exploring, particularly by someone who has ready access to personal correspondences and can draw on childhood memories.

The series will come to an end this Friday, when the (to the best of my knowledge) correct answer to the quiz will be disclosed in a tribute to radio playwright Lucille Fletcher. The “microphonic men” will be honored in the fullness of time (meaning, the emptiness of my schedule).

Earlier today, after a few exchanges via email, I was pleased to send off excerpts from my doctoral study to one of those old-time radio greats: none other than poet-journalist Norman Corwin, who will be very much a man of the hour come Oscar night, considering that a documentary about his work is up for an award. Now, on to the current column.

Judging from above picture, I seem to have quite a bit in common with ditzy dame Joan Davis. I am lousy at housework (particularly after taking a whiff of those detergents), tend to break things around the house (even when not intoxicated), and am inclined to sweep many of my mishaps under the proverbial carpet. Of course, Davis merely “enacts a housecleaning drama for Tune In,” a 1940s broadcasting magazine. According to that periodical (an issue of which I picked up years ago at a Chicago memorabilia store), Davis’s career was a “New Example of Rudy [Vallee]’s ability to Pick and Make Stars.”

No “clueless men” here, so far (except for me, of course). Certainly not Vallée, whose oleaginous radio persona I never found particularly prepossessing (give me John D. Hackensacker III anytime). He was a poor reader of lines, and his singing, too, had an air of carelessness about it. I gather he relied rather too much on the superstardom to which he became accustomed and used it to propel others instead of making any further efforts to push himself. Among those who came out of Vallée’s star factory were Carmen Miranda, Milton Berle, Edgar Bergen and Beatrice Lillie, the article claims.

Joan Davis, anno 1943, was hailed as Vallée’s “newest discovery,” notwithstanding the fact that she had already appeared on the screen in comedies like Sally, Irene, and Mary (1938) and Sun Valley Serenade (1941). “To many who have seen her in films,” the article continues, “Miss Davis may not seem a new discovery. But it was Vallee who lifted her out of a medium in which she was but little known, a minor success, and built her into the radio’s outstanding find of the season.”

When Vallee left his show to join the Coast Guard in the summer of 1943, he chose Joan to mind the Store. Here you can tune in to Joan’s remodelled Sealtest Village Store. It becomes clear just who took care of business, even though clueless executives thought for a while they needed to throw in Jack Haley for support. Davis, in fact, slightly improved on Vallee’s Hooper ratings, outscreeching competitors like Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, Eddie Cantor, Fannie Brice, Fred Allen, and Jimmy Durante. Obviously, his time was her time—and America made time for it.

Posted on

Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Benita Hume, Colman’s Mustard

Fair weather convinced me to spend the afternoon in the garden, where I busied myself with saw and secateurs. All that vigorous communing with nature felt like a tonic, especially after last night’s screening of Humoresque, an acrid Joan Crawford melodrama co-starring John Garfield and Oscar Levant, all of whom (but particularly Levant) rather overdid the acerbic one-liners with which the screenplay is riddled. Just about everything is wrong with this overwrought picture, from the drearily predictable and uninvolving plot to Crawford’s atrocious eyewear, the exceptions being J. Carroll Naish as Garfield’s father and the to me intriguing Peg La Centra as an underappreciated nightclub singer.

La Centra was a seasoned radio performer, as, of course, was Levant, whose quips enlivened Information, Please, the celebrity quiz program on which he was a regular. Further wireless connections can be established by pointing out that Tallulah Bankhead (one of the leading ladies featured in the current broadcastellan quiz) took on Crawford’s part in the 19 April 1951 Screen Directors Playhouse production, which offers listeners a somewhat altered ending—and some of Levant’s lines to Bankhead.

Enough of the bilious Humoresque, though. Continuing my “Wireless Women” series, I shall pay tribute instead to one of Crawford’s co-stars in The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1937), an actress generally billed as Mrs. Ronald Colman.

Having given up her rather undistinguished film career in the late 1930s, when she became Mrs. Ronald Colman, Benita Hume began to perform alongside her husband on the radio. Together, the Colmans were heard on the Lux Radio Theatre and The Doctor Fights (scripted by playwright Arthur Miller). In the mid-to-late 1940s, the couple made frequent and memorable guest appearances on the Jack Benny Program.

In January 1950, Hume assumed the role of Victoria Hall, exuberant and forgiving spouse of absent-minded college president William Todhunter Hall in The Halls of Ivy (1950-52), an urbane if sentimental situation comedy conceived and co-written by Fibber McGee and Molly creator Don Quinn.

Now, I have been nothing more than a contributing writer of a public access college soap opera, and my only stage play has never been produced; but if ever I were to conceive a situation comedy, I would very much like it to be as charming, witty, and uplifting as Ivy. Not that I believe there is much of a market today for such romance-infused cleverness.

Originally considered and auditioning for the role of Victoria was stage veteran Edna Best, wife of the show’s producer; but, as you will notice when comparing the auditions, Hume brought a warmth and gaiety to the role that was wanting in Best’s reading. The part stands apart from the ditzy or meddling housewife types you’ll encounter in the domestic comedies of Hollywood’s late-Truman/Eisenhower era.

On this day, 17 February, in 1950, the Halls faced a case of racial bias. A brilliant Chinese student, unable to cope with the rejection by her peers, decided to quit college. It is Mrs. Hall who intervenes by reaching out to the young woman and relating the matter to her clueless but quick-to-act husband.

More than a devoted companion, Victoria Hall is a translator and cultural interpreter to her intellectual, world-removed spouse, a man so highbrow he refers to one of radio’s great comedians as “Jack Bunny.” Victoria once was a comedy star on the English stage. Not the classics, mind you. We’re talking musicals like Lulu’s Mad Moment, youthful follies that are not just fond memories to the former actress, but a font of common sense and practical advice.

Whenever Dr. Hall gets lost in reveries, recalling his first encounter with the lovely Vickie and the early days of their romance, his wife yanks him back to the present. She may be British—but she sure is with it.

Whether or not you are opening a can of Schlitz, you might find yourself repeating the sponsor’s catchy slogan, which suits the vintage comedy far better than the beer it was meant to promote: “I was curious. I tasted it. Now I know why. . . .” Much of this is owing to Hume. The Halls of Ivy was her only slightly “mad” Lulu of a moment . . .

Posted on

Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Mary Margaret McBride, Commercial Correspondent

There is a plaque at last on Weymouth House, erstwhile London residence of Edward R. Murrow. I’m not sure how much it is owing to Good Night, and Good Luck. (which I have not yet seen); but this recognition was long overdue. They are all over London, those blue signs, telling passers-by of the notables who once lived, worked and made history behind otherwise nondescript façades. Looking up at them makes me feel that I am walking among those who made a name for themselves—or, if the name fails to ring a bell, plain ignorant. What’s in a name? Well, you could look it up, for starters.

Being that I am in the middle of a series devoted to “Wireless Women,” I shall let that plaque speak for itself and switch from the celebrated Ed “This . . . is London” Murrow to one of his most popular if now less well remembered female colleagues: Mary Margaret McBride (seen above in a picture that appeared in the premier issue of Tune In magazine, March 1943).

Born in Missouri (and her voice will tell you as much), McBride began her broadcasting career at station WOR, New York, in 1934, playing the fictitious “Martha Deane,” dispenser of household hints. A few years later, she signed a contract with CBS and was heard thrice weekly interviewing noted contemporaries, writers, actors, and politicians. While few recordings of McBride’s talks are available online, a tantalizing clip from one of her programs is interspersed in this NPR interview with McBride biographer Susan Ware.

McBride is chatting with brazen Tallulah Bankhead, who manages to break a broadcasting rule while politely inquiring about it:

Bankhead: “I can’t say, uh, ‘hell’ on radio, can I?”
McBride: “No.”
Bankhead: “Well, excuse me.”

Not that interviewer McBride was starchy or self-conscious. Indeed, she succeeded in making acceptable what, to the ears of many, listeners and journalists alike, was radio’s dirtiest kind of talk: commercials. Shrewdly enterprising, she was not above promoting the wares of the sponsors. She even turned her audience into advertisers, reading letters she received from loyal tuners-in who had tried the products she endorsed during her talks.

Apart from reaching millions of Americans with her broadcasts, McBride also exerted influence on the younger generation with proto-feminist novels like Tune In for Elizabeth (1945). Subtitled “Career Story of a Radio Interviewer,” Tune In is McBride’s commentary on—and vindication of—her own profession, packaged as a piece of juvenile fiction.

Within the framework of her story, McBride offers advice and encouragement to those who, like everyday heroine Elizabeth Cary, are trying to break into radio without having to churn out serial romances (a career suggested to her by a female colleague): “World War II, it seemed, had cracked completely the walls of the Fourth Estate where women were concerned.”

The title character is one of those aspiring young women who pushed her way through the temporarily loosened patriarchal brickwork at a time when executive doors were still reserved for her male counterparts, too few of whom had gotten, let alone accepted, McBride’s message.

Elizabeth moves from Glendale, Illinois, to New York City in order to pursue a career in journalism. Family connections in the newspaper business notwithstanding, she finds herself drawn to the world of broadcasting; her inspiration is radio interviewer Janet Adams, a fictional stand-in for McBride. Rather than imitating her idol, who started out writing for the papers, Elizabeth is eager to venture straight into radio:

The times—and especially radio—are moving too fast for that. I think a new technique is developing in radio itself. I think that people like Janet Adams are its pioneers

Working for Adams, Elizabeth is impressed how seriously the interviewer is taking her job; she becomes convinced that broadcasting can be an honest business, run with dignity and integrity—despite the commercials that Adams is contractually obligated to read on the air:

[Elizabeth] had thought of commercials as necessary evils, watching the announcer check off the list of products, everything from tea to toffee, as Miss Adams said a few words about each in the course of her broadcast. She had heard from her mother and other sources that housewives all over America trusted Janet Adams, took her advice without hesitation. But she had assumed that the product part of the program was arranged in advance with the sponsors, on the understanding that Miss Adams would feed it into the program as occasion offered. Elizabeth felt a glow of satisfaction. Granted that radio, as it was organized today, could not live without advertising, it was invigorating to learn that one program spoke its mind boldly, even where sponsors were concerned.

In addition to McBride’s justification of her part in radio advertising and the role of commercials in broadcast journalism, the novel emphasizes radio’s respect for the audience. Reading listener mail,

Elizabeth resolved never again to think of people as the public, to be dealt with on the basis of polls and surveys and experts who glibly listed the things ‘They’ liked or told you what they were able to understand. Why, they understood the whole wide world, these men and women from everywhere who tuned you in—or out, as you deserved—and who, if you were wise enough to keep close to them, would guard you from the awful conceit and self-satisfaction that would swiftly wreck both your job and you.

This is how McBride wanted to be perceived by her listeners. Expressing her ideals in uplifting fictions, she improved on—embroidered and enriched—this cherished relationship. In fiction, at least, she could generate fan mail without becoming the mouthpiece of corporations.

Posted on

Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Mary Jane Higby, Radio Raconteuse

Well, I am beginning to think like Miss Marple, the amateur sleuth whose exploits are currently being revived on UK television in a second season of Marple, with the well cast Geraldine McEwan in the title role. Mind you, I am not performing any feats of deduction. What I mean is that, like the old girl, I often draw on my mental store of images when confronted with fresh impressions, thereby discovering the familiar in the new. I encounter a person, in fiction or the flesh, and, all of a sudden, I am reminded of someone else entirely, and then begin to ponder the extent of the perceived likeness.

When I first read Agatha Christie’s Marple novels in my early teens, I found those exercises in trial-by-association rather unconvincing. Growing older, however, I realized that there are only so many faces and stories. Now I frequently draw such parallels myself, especially when I allow my mind to wander, instead of lavishing my attention exclusively on the person, image or text before me.

Last night, for instance, I was watching the Rogers and Hammerstein musical State Fair. I was less than engrossed in the tepid story, enlivened only too infrequently by a memorable tune. So, when redhead Vivian Blaine appeared on the screen, I was reminded of Bree Van De Kamp and her basket of muffins, Desperate Housewives being the only serial drama I follow these days.

Now there’s a classic movie starlet look—streamlined and polished to cartoonish perfection without being expressive enough to achieve thespian greatness. A plastic surgeon’s interpretation of Jessica Rabbit, Marcia Gross might have fared well in production-coded 1940s Hollywood. Even her voice has a certain gloss—just the vocal cords fit for a career in radio. And since I am already in serial mode, I might as well pay tribute to one of the busiest of those daytime serial actresses of American network radio: Ms. Mary Jane Higby (1909–1986).

A bit player in the Hollywood-originating radio theatricals of the early to mid-1930s, Higby got her big break when she moved to New York City, where she successfully replaced the lead actress in the relatively new but already ratings-troubled serial When a Girl Marries. She later recalled her career, and the radio business in general, in her gossipy but insightful autobiography Tune in Tomorrow (1968):

Soap opera may well have been the lowest point ever reached by dramatic art, plumbing down deep beneath Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model and The Perils of Pauline, but make no mistake about it, as advertising it was just plain great. It developed a fanatically loyal audience of many millions; it was habit-forming (the polls showed that 54 percent of the nation’s housewives listened regularly); and it was cheap [. . .].  Dollar for dollar, it may well have been the greatest value the advertiser ever got for his money.

Before her successful audition for When a Girl Marries, Higby got some sound advice from fellow radio actress Barbara Weeks, who told her to “sound like a nice, nice girl.” The serial heroine must essentially remain sexless, no matter how many times she is being molested, manacled, or rematched at the altar. She is as clean as the soapsuds she is meant to promote can make her.

No wonder those “nice” girls got desperate or became, as James Thurber once observed, “subject to a set of special ills” like “[t]emporary blindness,” “dizzy spells and headaches,” or “amnesia,” whereas male characters were emasculated by way of “paralysis of the legs.” It was the daytime audience’s shared lament and vicarious revenge on the clueless spouses who got to go out into the world each morning, leaving them with the not so nice business of making the house look nice on a limited budget.

Even though Desperate Housewives sanitizes by way of comedy rather than sentimentality, the “nice” formula prevails to this day. Dirty laundry never looked this clean. The advertising machinery behind today’s serials operates differently, of course, since dramatic programs are not directly produced by advertisers to promote a particular sponsor’s wares (for which reason I avoid the term “soap opera” when referring to latter-day serials). We are not always sure just what we are being sold until we find ourselves at the DVD counter or downloading videos from iTunes, coaxed into spending sizeable amounts of money for the privilege of following stories that, in the age before cable boxes and broadband used to air free of charge. Today, you’ve got to pay to watch the commercials or pay more to have them removed.

Unlike the stories in which she was heard on radio, Higby’s inside story is refreshingly unsentimental. She was not in favor of referring to the 1930s, ’40s, and early ’50s as the “Golden Age of Radio,” a label that makes the big and rather vulgar business of hawking goods by telling lurid or lachrymose tales sound altogether too enchanting:

Nobody called it that then.  It is only when a thing is dead that it becomes golden.  If I had allowed myself to brood about what psychologists and sociologists were saying about radio in general and daytime serials in particular, I’d have been tempted to quit my job and go straight.

At least, Higby got a mink coat for all her assorted pains; it was her one great ambition.

Posted on

Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Minerva Pious, Alleyway Dialectician

Well, it is time to light the candles, open that bottle of champagne, and count the ways in which we love . . . Mrs. Living- stone’s husband? Comedian Jack Benny, I mean, who would have turned thirty-nine all over again on this Valentine’s Day. Americans may declare their love for the man by signing the Jack Benny Stamp petition. A licked backside! Now, that is more respect than the pompous miser got on his own show.

So, in keeping with this lack of reverence—and my commemoration of the dames, gals, and ladies of radio—I will give Benny the brush and stroll down Allen’s Alley, the imaginary neighborhood whose denizens were quizzed each week by Benny’s archrival, the partner of Mrs. Portland Hoffa. “Shall we go?” Portland used to ask, cheerfully, to which Fred Allen would reply something like “As the bathtub said to the open faucet: I think I shall run over.”

One of the people you’ll find on Allen’s Alley is Pansy Nussbaum, a Jewish housewife played with great zest by Russian-born actress Minerva Pious (shown above, with Allen, in a picture taken from Mary Jane Higby’s Tune in Tomorrow). Mrs. Nussbaum, whom Pious also impersonated on the big screen (in the 1945 comedy It’s in the Bag), was the “heroine of millions who listen to Fred Allen’s programs,” radio dramatist Norman Corwin remarked. Having cast her as a hard-boiled Brooklyn crime-solver in his comedy-mystery “Murder in Studio One,” Corwin was appreciative of Pious’s vocal versatility, adding that she could also be a “fire-spitting cowgirl, a “swooning Southern belle with six telescoped names,” or a “femme fatale from the Paris salons of Pierre Ginsburgh.”

In other “woids,” Pious was a first-rate dialect comedienne. And even though her heavy-accented caricature of a linguistically challenged, half-assimilated Jew was resented by some proto-politically correct critics, Pious brought so much heart and spirit to her weekly chats with Allen that her verbal stereotyping seemed good-natured, inoffensive, and indeed endearing to those who heard themselves in her laments and grievances.

As old-time radio aficionado Jim Harmon once put it, “Mrs. Nussbaum had less of the schmaltz and charm of Gertrude Berg’s Molly Goldberg” (discussed in the previous entry), and “more of Allen’s own sometimes acid wit.” Mrs. Nussbaum was no “Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog,” mind you; but, well past hearts, flowers, and Valentine’s cards, she did find considerable relief in complaining about whatever she was forced to put up with: wartime food rationings, the post-war housing shortage, or long-time husband, Pierre. Mainly, “mine husband, Pierre.”

When Allen knocked on her door exclaiming “Ahh, Mrs. Nussbaum,” the exasperated wife often had a smart answer revealing her Jewish state of mind: “You’re expecting maybe Weinstein Churchill” or “Turaluralura Bankhead,” or “Cecil B. Schlemil,” or “Mrs. Ronald Goldman?” A former beauty contest winner (“At Rockaway Beach, for 1925, I am Miss Undertow”), she claimed to have had her share of admirers who showered her with presents (“costume jewelry and coldcuts”). For a while, Pansy was torn between two playboys. What a “dilemmel”; but, long story short, after a weekend of deliberation at Lake Rest-a-Bissel she ended up with a “woim” by the name of Pierre.

Eventually, Pierre wormed himself into Pansy’s heart. Her marriage was by no means a loveless affair, even though it all began rather unconventionally, as a fluke. “Thanks to the telephone, today I am Mrs. Pierre Nussbaum,” she gushed during another one of Allen’s visits to the Alley. According to this account of her youth, she had been no catch: “On Halloween I am sitting home alone bobbing for red beets. Suddenly the phone is ringing. I am saying hello.” A “voice is saying, ‘Cookie, I am loving you. Will you marry me?'” And what did she reply? “Foist I am saying, ‘Positively!’ Later, I am blushing.” So, a confused Allen inquires, “why be so grateful to the telephone company?” “They are giving Pierre a wrong number.”

A telecommunications screw-up and a clueless suitor. Now, that’s as close to romance as Pansy Nussbaum—nee Pom Pom Schwartz—was destined to get. So, Valentine’s, Schmellentine’s! Minerva Pious was the one who lamented on behalf of all of us who have a Pierre of our own snoring on the sofa. We were expecting maybe Russell Kraut?

Posted on

Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Gertrude Berg, Everybody’s Mama

Well, I am back from my three-day getaway to Manchester, my makeshift Manhattan. And what a poor substitute it has proven once again. The only bright spot of an otherwise less than scintillating weekend was the production of James M. Barrie’s comedy What Every Woman Knows at the Royal Exchange Theatre. While I prefer the traditional proscenium arch over an arena that to me suggests circus acrobatics or boxing matches rather than verbal sparring, I eventually got past the irritation of being dazzled by confronting stage lights, of having to watch the action through a fireplace or other obstructing props, and of looking into the faces of audience members opposite while the players turned their backs to me.

I was won over, tickled then touched by the excellent performances in this smart and sentimental piece, particularly by Jenny Ogilvie’s knowing portrayal of Maggie, whose “every woman” charm eludes the very man for whom she so devotedly works her magic: her clueless husband, that is. I will have more to say about Barrie’s play—and the hazards of adaptation—in a journal entry coinciding with its 2 March 1947 soundstaging by the Theatre Guild on the Air, on which occasion Helen Hayes was heard as Maggie.

Hayes is one of the leading ladies mentioned in the first broadcastellan quiz; and whether or not she ever had her own radio program is something for you to ponder should you choose to join in before the answer is revealed on 24 February. Until then, I could not possibly let Ms. Hayes or her interpretation of Maggie take center stage. That spot is reserved today for “every woman” Mollie (or Molly) Goldberg and her creator Gertrude Berg, who also portrayed the role for decades on radio, stage, big screen and small.

As vaudevillian-turned radio personality Eddie Cantor once remarked, Berg “captured the charm” of New York’s East Side, and “through her sketches runs the entire gamut of human emotions, from laughter to tears.” It was no charmed life on Pike Street those days, but surely one with whom many radio listeners could readily identify.

Jewish immigrants Mollie, her husband Jake, and her two children, Sam and Rosie, came to NBC radio on 20 November 1929, just a few weeks after Wall Street laid that proverbial egg. Recordings of those first broadcasts are not known to have survived, but the early struggle of the Goldberg family has been preserved in print, in a 1931 novelization of the scripts to accompany the popular series.

Mollie is introduced as a woman whose worries are largely domestic and sometimes imaginary. Anxious because her son, Sammy, is late from school, Mollie speculates that he might have gotten himself “runned over by a cabsitac”; after all, “[d]ey run around so fast like cackroachers.” Mollie, you see, lacked a formal education in American English—unlike her children, who were quick to correct her. “De chicks is loining de rooster!” Mollie exclaimed in exasperation.

Husband Jake, meanwhile, was clueless about Mollie’s desire to improve herself; he was too busy with his struggling business. “Oy, vat beezness!” Mollie sighed, “Saturday, Sonday, holledays. Plain talking all de time! Vy don’t you buy a bed and slip dere and finished! And dat’s beezness? It’s a slavery—jost like in Oncle Tom’s Cabinet!”

Sure, Mollie loved going to the pictures watching movies like “Oy, vot a fool I am,” by “Ruddy Kipland” or “de Four Horsemen in de Apoplexies.” She also marvelled at technological advances such as the newly installed telephone in her home (“Mr. Telephon Company, vhere do you put de nickels?”). Yet, like Barrie’s Maggie, Mollie was eager to learn even that which not every immigrant homemaker was expected to know. For that purpose, she enrolled in a reading and writing course at a neighboring night school. So, as much as listeners were invited to laugh at Mollie’s malapropisms, they were also taught to admire her courage and perseverance:

Ay, ay, Amerike, Amerike! Everybody vhat only vants, can become here a somebody. An education is like in de fairy story, “Open see-saw open.”  Vhen you got an education den everyting; all de doors from de vorld stands open far you.  You could even understand yourself, and vhat’s more important dan dat, ha? You’ll vouldn’t be ashamed from your mama, ha, Rosiely?

Years later, Berg commented on the significant contribution of the serial to American democracy. The “daytime serial,” she said, “can be a very effective force in bringing to the American people a deeper understanding of the democratic way of life” since it was capable of “revealing the meaning of democracy in people’s lives,” and of doing so far more effectively “than any speech.”

During the war, however, Berg agreed to address the radio audience in her own educated, if not nearly as charming, voice, imploring those listening to the Treasury Star Parade to be mindful of the fight for democracy, rather than wasteful of the material benefits deriving from it.

“Women like us fight with the bonds we buy, the rubber we save, the food prepare and the fat we save.” It’s what every woman needed to know back then. And who was more ideally suited to tell them than Gertrude Berg, the mother of radio’s surrogate mom?

Posted on

Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Eve Arden, Class(room) Act

I am up north for a weekend in Manchester, England, which, for the past twelve months or so, has been some kind of ersatz New York City, a Manhattan in miniature.  Not that the three-and-a-half hour journey from here in Mid-Wales is exactly a subway ride downtown. Before spending an evening among strangers, I am going to listen now to another familiar voice as I continue my tribute to female performers in radio drama. It’s a feature coinciding with the first broadcastellan quiz, which you are herewith encouraged to take. Now, the wireless woman I am commemorating today knew all about quizzes—and smart answers. For about a decade she was America’s schoolteacher: Eve Arden, the mistress of the well-timed one-liners.

Before hitting it big in radio and finding the role with which she became so closely identified thereafter, Arden had been a supporting player in a great many Hollywood films. Nominated for an Academy Award (a small but memorable part in Mildred Pierce), she invested even the sparsest and weakest of lines with caustic wit. On Our Miss Brooks (previously discussed here), Arden got ample opportunities to demonstrate her infallible comedy timing.

With Our Miss Brooks, the situation comedy reached maturity, a sophistication only excelled by the smart, sentimental, and at times socially profound Halls of Ivy. Replacing the rather tired and generic he said/she said routines of vaudeville, the sitcom placed a small group of regular and roughly outlined characters (or caricatures) in more or less outrageous scenes designed to test their clearly defined strengths and weaknesses. Now, Connie Brooks had one prominent weakness: Mr. Boynton, the clueless biology teacher.

Much of the humor in Our Miss Brooks derived from the central character’s attempt to balance her responsibilities as an educator with her not so secret passion and her desire to escape the academic hierarchy, to be as giddy and goofy as a teenager. Mingling with her charge rather than ruling over it, Miss Brooks formed a close bond with one of the students at Madison High, the similarly lovelorn Walter Denton.

However ardent a teacher, Miss Brooks was also Eve; and the apple of her eye was always tantalisingly close. According to sitcom logic, however, she never got very far in her pursuit of Boynton, which, much to our amusement, was destined to go pear-shaped.

Perhaps, Arden identified so closely with her role that she was drawn to a man whose first name matched her on-air persona: fellow actor Brooks West. No need to put Eve on the psychiatrists couch, though. I’m just happy to sit in the back of her class, and listen.

Posted on

Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Lurene Tuttle, Disembodied Somebody

Have you taken the broadcastellan quiz yet? I’ve got a few more laudable larynxes lined up to commemorate women in American radio dramatics. There is certainly a renaissance of old-time radio underway, an iPod regeneration infinitely more satisfying than my phrasing here; after all, just how long can a birthing or rebirthing process take? It’s the nurturing that matters now. And while some of those names on my list of leading ladies no longer ring the proverbial bell, they sure spelled “stardom” when radio took center stage in American living rooms. Perhaps, “star” isn’t the word for being it on the radio. Stardom requires visibility, screen close-ups and paparazzi snapshots that define an individual’s status as being removed enough from the crowd to demand admiration and near enough to encourage our approach. A broadcast voice can make an actor; but it is the circulated image that makes a star.

Unlike print and film, radio merely creates a desire to see. Spread long and often enough in magazines or on the screen, the image turns the disembodied speaker, the nobody, into a certified somebody. Quite clearly, the above picture has not remained in wide enough circulation over the past five decades or so to keep alive the memory of the sitter. Her name is Lurene Tuttle; and, however obscure today, she once was the First Lady of American radio drama.

How prominent was Ms. Tuttle in her day? According to the records kept at the RadioGOLDINdex, she was downright ubiquitous. An impressive 722 entries document the broadcasting career of this once highly regarded, stage-trained performer. Her resume includes roles, starring and supporting, on notable drama anthologies like Columbia Workshop, Lux Radio Theatre, and Suspense. She was a regular cast member of comedies like The Great Gildersleeve, Mayor of the Town, and Blondie, as well as episodic melodramas like Dr. Christian.

As an article in the August 1949 issue of Radio and Television Mirror sums it up, “there’s scarcely a radio program on which Lurene hasn’t been heard.” She was much sought-after by radio drama producers like William Spier for her “ability to play almost any kind of feminine role. Whenever the script call[ed] for a gun moll, a slinky confidence woman, a grandmother, an adventuress, [or] a Main Line debutante,” Tuttle could be relied upon to fit the role.

On this day, 9 February, in 1951, for instance, she was heard as Effie Perrine, Sam Spade’s trusted secretary. While generally not part of the action, she did more than just type Spade’s reports, as listeners are reminded in “The Sure Thing Caper.” Her occasional malapropisms notwithstanding, she fleshes out each story and reinvests them with the language of crooks and thugs—and probably with greater zing or realism than the censors-wary writers of the program ever dared. She also ends up in Spade’s arms and gets to caress his hair, kept so healthy and shiny by the Wildroot Cream Oil people who footed the bill for the Sam Spade series. It sure adds double meaning to Spade’s “Goodnight, Sweetheart,” the words and serenade that ended each show.

Speaking of meaningful doubles, many radio actors had to double as small casts in cost-cutting productions crowded around studio microphones; but Tuttle could make you believe that she was a double without resorting to vocal trickery or voice-altering filters. As radio historian John Dunning points out, Tuttle was once called upon to portray identical twins—with identical voices—who fight over the same man and confront each other in a deadly struggle (in “Death Sees Double,” a Whistler thriller broadcast on 20 November 1944). The evil twin had even her clueless lover fooled as she assumed her sister’s place.

And just how unwell remembered is Ms. Tuttle today, even by those who ought to know (her) better? A book by a noted radio historian, for instance, refers to the actress as one “Earline Tuttle”—further proof that, no matter how often your voice is heard and your name is pronounced on the air, you’re expected to stay in print to make a proper name for yourself. Yet, whatever the state or nature of her fame, Tuttle’s a great gal to come home to . . .

Posted on

Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Mercedes McCambridge, Airwaves Advocate

Last night, I watched The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), a seedy but glamorous rags-to-riches-to-rags melodrama starring Joan Crawford. Crawford was a perfectionist on screen, even though producers like Jerry Wald determined that, by the mid-1940s, her physiognomy was less than ideal and called for that extra layer of gauze in front of the lens to soften her mature looks (because most leading roles in Hollywood are, to this date, a little too young for anyone over forty). No doubt, Crawford’s need for control contributed to what those in the radio business called mike fright.  When Crawford went on the air, starring in dramatic programs like Suspense, she insisted on being recorded for later broadcast rather than going on the air live. Apparently, to someone as protective of her persona as Crawford, any screw-up in radio insinuated something tantamount to crow’s feet on screen. Not to Crawford’s Johnny Guitar (1954) co-star and rival, though, the radio-trained and true Mercedes McCambridge.

Her career in film and on stage notwithstanding, McCambridge was a genuine radio actress; and unlike many aspiring thespians, she would not have objected to the term. Sure, her voice was so distinct that even the hearing impaired could not fail to spot her in any of her many notable radio roles; but, however obvious her vocal disguises, McCambridge, whether performing in night-time thrillers, daytime soap operas, or wartime propaganda plays, rarely did less than throwing herself, larynx and soul, into each and every part she accepted to play.

On this day, 8 February, in 1950, for instance, McCambridge was “Jack Dempsey,” the rambunctious teenage daughter of a prize-fighting crazed rancher. Determined to get married to a man of whom her father does not approve, she convinces a trio of adventurers to defend her rights in what was billed as “The Battle of the Century.” That was just one of the adventures in which McCambridge played a part in 1939—and again a decade later—in a thriller serial called I Love a Mystery. The program, and McCambridge’s role as the maniacal Charity in “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” has been discussed at some length previously in this journal.

She was also heard in many other Chicago-originating drama broadcasts, including episodes of the legendary horror program Lights Out!. My favorite among those is an episode in which McCambridge plays a spoiled teenager on a school trip to Paris. Abducted by a man who claims to know her family, she is dragged into the sewers, where she is forced to make necklaces out of the bones of those killed by her capturer. It’s Grand Guignol, all right—ghastly melodramatics that don’t require images to conjure up unimaginable horrors.

To moviegoers, McCambridge is best known as the demon voice in the The Exorcist, a performance she attributed to a fortuitous bout with childhood bronchitis. McCambridge thought of this role, in which she is never seen, as a radio performance. Until the 1970s, when radio enjoyed a renaissance, she returned to the airwaves with former colleagues, enjoying the freedom that radio afforded the performer, notwithstanding the limitations imposed by producers and sponsors.

“In radio you had to be a tiger or you didn’t last,” McCambridge wrote in her autobiography, The Quality of Mercy, “If you didn’t keep your toes curled under, you would fall of the edge of that marvelous world. For me, nothing in films, or theater, or certainly TV as ever touched the magical kaleidoscope of radio.” Most television and film producers may have been clueless about radio; but you sure got us, tiger! I consider myself mauled.

Posted on

Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Gracie Allen, Presidential Candidate

Well, are you ready to tap your toes to the “The Cabinet Shuffle,” sing “The Tory Blues” or stand up for the “Thatcher Anthem”? That’s right, the Iron Lady is back in business. Show business, that is. Thatcher: The Musical is going on tour. Now, as someone who enjoys representing the past (albeit a past I have never experienced as present until its “now” turned to “then”), I don’t seem to be in a position to throw mossy stones. No, I’m not going to argue, as you well might, that the producers of this show are about two decades too late.

Dwelling in the half-forgotten and digging up the misremembered, I am not among those who opine that there is nothing older than yesterday’s news. A musical review of such faded headlines strikes me as being decidedly more quaint and questionable. The only contemporary touch appears to be the politically correct or overly cautious disclaimer attached to the announcement: the show’s producers aim at being “entertaining and provocative,” yet insist that the “politician’s lasting legacy” is being neither “glorified nor denigrated.” Too recent for revisionism, too tired for satire?

I’d much rather join a chorus of “Vote for Gracie.” Now there was a woman ahead of her time—and her man. As early as 1940, Gracie Allen decided to stop knitting sweaters and run for President instead. To the comic relief of millions of New Deal weary Americans, she ran so fast and so wild that her husband and comedy partner, straight man George Burns, could not possibly keep up with her, let alone keep her down.

“I admit that the election of the first woman would let the country in for a flood of corny jokes,” Gracie remarked (in a slim volume you may read online in its entirety). That does not have to be a deterrent, to be sure. Besides, many of those very jokes were told on the Burns and Allen Program, on which Gracie’s campaign started in February 1940.

The vaudeville routine of Burns and Allen was beginning to sound rather creaky; ratings were crumbling, sponsors grumbled. Soon the husband and wife banter would make way for a novel concept in radio comedy—the sitcom. Before their program was thus reinvented in 1942, Burns and Allen were trying to reinvigorate the old formula by heightening Gracie’s nuttiness, by adding currency and topicality to their gags, and by developing a running joke that would encourage repeat listening. The “Vote for Gracie” campaign was such an attempt to salvage their act.

“You’re, you’re running for President?” an incredulous George Burns burst out when he first learned about his wife’s political ambitions on the 28 February 1940 broadcast. “Gracie, how long has this been going on?” “For a hundred and fifty years,” Gracie retorted, “George Washington started it.” To George the whole idea was “preposterous.” “Not only that,” Gracie added, “it pays good money.”

A clever idea it turned out to be—or a quick fix for the ailing show, at any rate. Soon, Gracie was where she’d always been: all over the place. Spreading her outlandish ideas about democracy, the ditzy candidate got to promote the Burns and Allen act on a number of other high-rated radio programs, including those hosted or headlined by fellow vaudevillians Edgar Bergen, Rudy Vallee, and Jack Benny.

At least Roosevelt’s opponents, candidates like Republican Thomas F. Dewey and Democrat John Nance Garner had “political affiliations,” George cautioned. “Well,” replied Gracie undeterred, “maybe that’s because they weren’t vaccinated.” “Have you got a Republican or Democratic machine in back of you?” George cautioned. “No,” Gracie replied nonchalantly, “that’s a bustle.”

Today’s critics, listeners like Leah Lowe, label Gracie’s antics “transgressive,” which is the academy’s validation of playfulness (and of our engagement with it). “One of the greatest problems today is about the people who would rather be right than be President,” Gracie explained in her startling and disarmingly frank simplicity (as it expresses itself in the aforementioned book outlining her campaign). “I have a solution for that. You can be Left and President: that way you can eat your cake and halve it too. Or you can stay in the middle of the road and get run over.”

“Mr. Roosevelt has been President for eight years,” Gracie went on reasoning in her signature non sequitur and pun-driven unreasonableness,

I’m sure he wouldn’t mind getting up and giving his seat to a lady. That old saying about not changing horses in the middle of the stream is ridiculous, when you remember that people have been changing babies in the middle of the afternoon for years and everybody takes it for granted.

Being oracular, the oratrix declared that

women are getting very tired of running a poor second to the Forgotten Man, and with all the practice we’ve had around the house the time is ripe for a woman to sweep the country. I’ll make a prediction with my eyes open: that a woman can and will be elected if she is qualified and gets enough votes.

It sure worked for a lot of clueless men, even those who, unlike Gracie, didn’t have a “Surprise Party Platform” to stand on.