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A “revoltin’ development” in The Life of Riley

Complaints about the excesses and irresponsibility of broadcasting are nearly as old as the first broken crystal set. During World War II, producers and sponsors of US radio entertainment were obliged to exercise some restraint for the sake of the ostensibly common good by making room for public service announcements and planting overt propagandistic messages into their melodramatic or comic offerings. Not long after VJ Day, though, it was high time for all in the radio game to accelerate profits and squeeze the most out of a medium that was rumored by some to be obsolete within a few years.

Radio was getting shriller, more vulgar, more profligate by the advertising minute, critics lamented in denunciations no less crass than the purportedly noisome programming. In September 1947, NBC made a token gesture in response to such bad press, half-heartedly vowing to ban thrillers from its early evening line-up. That did not stop NBC censors from permitting a gun to end up in an infant’s mouth, as the man living the Life of Riley (starring William Bender in the title role) turned babysitter in arms on this day, 11 October, in 1947.

“Now we’re in for a crime wave,” the father of Riley’s wife Peg declared when hearing the news about young Chester’s plan to become a copper. The story of this doomed undertaking unfolds in retrospect, as Peg tries to set the record straight for the benefit of a dinner guest who thinks about joining the police force after hearing Riley boast about his past exploits. Not only was Riley incapable of preventing a robbery in the store of Peg’s father, but downright criminal in his community disservice.

As ear-witnesses of Riley’s night beat, we follow the eager rookie as he picks up a few suspicious noises. The first is merely the sound of his own flatfeet on the pavement; but when he hears the bawling and choking of an infant, he decides to put his misplaced authority to some use. Entering the home from whence the wailings wafted, Riley finds himself in charge of a neglected baby. “No, now, now. You mustn’t touch my badge. It will stick you. We don’t want you to get hurt,” he gently admonishes the little one. “Oh, you want something to play with? Well, here. You play with this. Riley-Wiley’s nice pretty gun.”

At this point you can hear the women in the studio audience gasp and wriggle uneasily in their seats. Is this a laughing matter? Should Riley—or the producers of this show—get away with such behavior? “Aww, look at the cute little fellow, puttin’ the barrel in his mouth. He thinks it’s a bottle.” It is a disturbing moment that lasts just a little too long to be ignored, let alone tolerated. “Mustn’t pull the trigger,” Riley keeps cooing, “It’s loaded.” Those words, followed by a burglar alarm going off next door, rouse the doting gun-father and put an end to this disquieting episode.

Riley is forced to surrender his badge in the end and continues his bumbling search for a “permanent position”; only his friend Digby O’Dell, the undertaker, can “guarantee” his ultimate success in the matter. “I generally hit the nail on the head,” brags the morbid pal. Riley is tired of having dirt thrown in his face; but O’Dell assures him that it “happens to everyone, sooner or later.” It happens to sitcoms, too, once their short supply of puerile humor gets a bit long in the tooth—and O’Dell seems to have uttered the gallows humor of overworked, underappreciated radio artists faced with a hostile takeover by television.

Well, I think I’ll saunter over to Duffy’s Tavern. The wit is not quite as dim there. Unless you know of a more cheerful watering hole to which I could kilocycle when I am inclined to while away the odd half-hour . . .

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Avian Flu Threats and “The Birds” on the Wireless

“What’s on the wireless?” he said. “About the birds,” she said. “It’s not only here, it’s everywhere. In London, all over the country. Something has happened to the birds.”—Daphne du Maurier, “The Birds” (1952).

Lately I have been eyeing our bird feeder with considerable apprehension. Not because I am anticipating some sort of Tippi Hedren incident while taking care of my feathered charge, but because of the recent news about the deadly avian flu that has been spreading in the east. Some time ago, a UN health official warned that a pandemic “could happen at any time” and might “kill between 5 and 150 million people.” Today, the EU decided to “ban all Turkish live bird and feather imports,” after as many as sixty people had succumbed to the disease in Turkey and Romania. Should I banish the feeder from its prominent spot to some remote corner of the garden? Should I stop treating the local tits and finches to their daily allowance of choice peanuts? Back when Daphne du Maurier conjured up ornithological horrors with her short story “The Birds,” at least, the threat was posed by bills and beaks instead of bacteria.

Long before Alfred Hitchcock trained them for his big-screen spectacular, “The Birds” came to US radio in two noteworthy productions by the Lux Radio Theater (20 July 1953) and Escape (10 July 1954). Unlike Hitchcock’s thriller, both radio versions were remarkably faithful to du Maurier’s simple tale of (wo)man versus nature. The 1953 production, starring Herbert Marshall, was probably one of the most imaginatively soundstaged melodramas ever to be presented on the Lux program. The terror generated by an imaginary army of shrieking birds was a veritable tour de fowl in sound effects engineering. Even Marshall had to admit that he was “scarcely the star of the piece when you consider the gulls and the gannets. Villains that they were, they ran the whole show.”

The story of a family under attack in an avian air raid on a remote farmhouse was rendered more intense by the fact that the terrorized characters, like the listener at home, had only the radio to keep them updated to the minute about the world around them. In du Maurier’s “Birds,” tuning in became disquieting, the wireless a source of anxiety to a public dependent on and attuned to the comforting predictability of the precisely timed broadcast schedule:

. . . they’d been giving directions on the wireless.  People would be told what to do.  And now, in the midst of many problems, he realized that it was dance music only coming over the air.  Not Children’s Hour, as it should have been.  He glanced at the dial. Yes, they were on the Home Service all right.  Dance records.  He switched to the Light programme.  He knew the reason.  The usual programmes had been abandoned.  This only happened at exceptional times.  Elections, and such. . . .

At six o’clock the records ceased.  The time signal was given. . . .  Then the announcer spoke.  His voice was solemn, grave. . . .

“This is London,” he said, “A national Emergency was proclaimed at four o’clock this afternoon.  Measures are being taken to safeguard the lives and property of the population, but it must be understood that these are not easy to effect immediately, owing to the unforeseen and unparalleled nature of the present crisis. . . .  The population is asked to remain calm, and not to panic.  Owing to the exceptional nature of the emergency, there will be no further transmission from any broadcasting station until seven a.m. tomorrow.” 

They played the National Anthem.  Nothing more happened. . . .

Here, as in “The War of the Worlds” (the fictional account of a war won by airborne bacteria, no less), the silencing of the relied-upon media is even more alarming than the tumult and the shouting it carries into our homes. . . .

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Blogging Troubles and British Treats

I was all prepared to talk about today’s television and radio offerings in Britain, something I don’t often do. A new cable TV channel is being launched tomorrow: More4. Of chief interest to me, I have to admit, is that it will air Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, albeit yesterdaily. I’ve also been following this, the second season of the X Factor, which is the only British must-see for me this fall. I have commented on this improvement on American Idol (or Pop Idol) before in this journal. The at times tedious auditions are finally over and the contestants are going head to head each Saturday evening in live telecasts. I don’t have a favorite yet, other than judge and promoter Sharon Osborne. Last season, which I only caught midway (after moving here from the US), it was the wonderfully overwrought Rowetta who, it appears, has become somewhat of a queer icon.

What else was on yesterday? Well, there was Margaret Rutherford, again, on BBC 4, in the delightfully wacky high school farce The Happiest Days of Your Life. And then there was that atrocious documentary about Mae West last Friday on BBC 4 radio, part of a new series of talks celebrating Great Lives.

I have never heard a more off-the-mark impression of that glamorous dame, whose comic allure was so effectively evoked by the stage comedy Dirty Blonde.  The discussion about her conducted by the two supposed experts was tiresomely trite. I had hope for some clips from her films, or for a mention at least of Oboler’s “Adam and Eve” sketch, which got West banned from US radio. I mean, if you’re on radio, talk radio already!

I was prepared to expound on any of these viewing and listening experiences until I realized that many of my prior journal entries were littered with symbols and marks that rendered them, if not illegible, so at least highly unprofessional. It seems that my m-dashes—to which I am partial—are metastasizing into something ghastly once they are being left here for a few weeks.

How irksome this is to someone who knows little about html but makes an effort to adhering to the code of the standard English I cannot begin to express (I guess language fails me there, after all). I have made a few corrections, but some of the previous posts are still in shambles, I fear.

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On This Day in 1950: Our Miss Brooks Tackles Climate Change, Global Media, and Communism

Well, I know, today marks the anniversary of Ozzie and Harriet, whose on-the-air adventures were first heard on this day in 1944. Since a transcription of that broadcast is not known to be extant—and since I am not particularly partial to the exploits of the Nelson clan—I paid a visit to Walter and Harriet instead. High school sweethearts Walter Denton and Harriet Conklin, that is, and their peerless teacher, Our Miss Brooks. On this day, 8 October 1950, Miss Brooks got into quite a “tizzy”—”And I don’t tizz easily,” she assures us.

Being temporarily left in charge of Madison High School after its principal, the irascible Mr. Conklin, is delayed at home awaiting a furniture delivery, Miss Brooks finds herself dealing with a potentially serious crisis: a hurricane with winds up to 150 MPH is fast approaching. At least, that is the news according to the weather bulletin she has picked up with the radio receiver Walter built for his Electrical Shop class.

The bad weather has been on everyone’s mind that morning. “Our climatic conditions are undergoing a slow but steady change,” heartthrob biology teacher Mr. Boynton informed her earlier. “It’s something of a meteorological phenomenon, but do you realize that at this very moment the equatorial belt is slipping slowly southward?” “Well, I’ll turn my back. You tighten it up,” she permitted herself to quip. “It’s entirely possible that in the future our area may be engulfed in icy arctic weather,” Mr. Boynton continued his lecture. Of course, that would take about 10,000 years. “Good, I should be finished knitting my mittens by then,” Miss Brooks sighed in relief.

And now the weather report! “Mr. Boynton said our climate was changing, but this is ridiculous.” Or is it? As acting principal, Miss Brooks decides to follow the advisory and closes the school. Together with Walter, Harriet, and Mr. Boynton, she rushes to the principal’s home to make her report. In the fever of excitement, it escaped all who listened that the bulletin came from “downtown Bombay, India.”

A no-nonsense academic, Mr. Conklin is none too pleased about Miss Brooks’s rash actions, dismissing the reports about the advancing storm as “unmitigated jabberwocky.” After all, he reasons, “How could a hurricane possibly get this far into the United States?” “Smugglers?” Miss Brooks dares to suggest. Yet when Walter turns on the receiver he has brought along, the advisory hits home. Listeners are being told to “board up all windows,” preferably by “using bamboo shoots.”

Convinced by the urgency of the newsflash, Mr. Conklin agrees to take the precautions deemed necessary and the storm watchers are heard cheerfully and noisily chopping up his brand-new garden furniture.

It is only after the damage has been done that the advisories are beginning to sound rather peculiar: “lash down your ox carts,” the radio voice cautions. “Disperse all natives to the hills” and “Be sure to tether your elephants carefully.” The mistake becomes painfully obvious to all. Now it is no longer the hurricane that poses a threat to Our Miss Brooks. It is the frightful wrath of Osgood Conklin. She’d better watch after her priceless porcelain (pictured above)!

I doubt whether such a light-hearted approach to deadly weather phenomena would go over well these days. Now, as I confessed previously, I had a similar experience misreading a radio report about a natural disaster when I came across a fake bulletin on the Jeremy Vine Show. And, as is often the case, the prospect of such horrors heading one’s own way was taken in differently than reports about far-off disasters.

Miss Brooks expressed no concern either for the “natives” in India who hovered in their wind-whipped huts. The weather was really not perceived as that much of a national or global threat back then. In 1950, that threat, Westerners were made to believe, was communism.

Now, Miss Brooks had something to say about communism, or about the dangers faced by those who interpreted their granted freedoms too freely. When subjected to a particularly dull meteorological observation by Mr. Boynton, the hunk oblivious to her charms, she sneers: “You’ll never be investigated for that remark.”

In this one innocuous line, Our Miss Brooks writer Al Lewis communicates the fears of radio artists who found themselves subject to persecution by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Yet as soon as she had hung up her schoolteacher costume, actress Eve Arden was asked to step before the microphone once more to address all those “concerned about the threat of communism.”

As if in fear of being “investigated for that [aforementioned] remark,” she urged listeners to join the “crusade for freedom” headed by General Lucius Clay and to support . . . Radio Free Europe.

What if Walter Denton had picked up Radio Free Europe on his receiver that rainy October morning? What if Mr. Conklin had dared to make his president responsibility for hurricane emergency mismanagement? What if . . . Well, no such controversy on Our Miss Brooks—but don’t call those dated radio sitcoms apolitical. Tune in some time, won’t you, for some unexpected lessons in American history.

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How the Blind Medium Immaterialized Coward’s Blithe Spirit

I guess I am still too wrapped up in US culture to have given British cinema its due. So, last weekend, while on a DVD shopping spree in Manchester, I made an attempt to rectify this cultural lopsidedness. Among my purchases was a copy of David Lean’s Blithe Spirit. Or is it more appropriate to call it Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, even after a noted director has . . . transubstantiated it? Generally, stage plays are treated like the brainchildren of their authors, while motion pictures are attributed to their directors. How many classic films could you trace back to their screenwriter parentage without resorting to the Internet Movie Database?

Anyway, it is an irksome inconsistency I grappled with when I needed to decide how to present and define radio plays for my dissertation (the aforementioned “Etherized Victorians”). Far from being a dead issue, the question arose anew when I followed up my screening of Blithe Spirit (1945) by taking in two radio disincarnations of Coward’s 1941 play.

The first one, soundstaged for Everything for the Boys on 16 May 1944, preceded the world premier of Lean’s feature by a year. Its adaptor was none other than Arch Oboler, probably the biggest name—and not the smallest ego—in US radio drama. Whether daring Americans to turn their Lights Out! or to put on a pair of 3D glasses, Oboler was hardly a subtle craftsman; he certainly was ill-suited to deliver the wit of Noel Coward.

Not surprisingly, Oboler’s rewrite of Blithe Spirit is a humorless affair, a tepid romance rather than a wicked romp. Presented to a live studio audience, the reconstituted comedy elicited only one laugh and a few mild chuckles; nor did it deserve more. The soundman was permitted to break a few dishes—flung by the two ghostly wives of the “hag-ridden” protagonist—but the damage was done largely by eraser, as hardly any of the play’s celebrated witticisms survived the adaptor’s indiscriminate airbrushing.

The challenge seems a formidable one when the play to be radio-readied involves ghosts visible and invisible, audible and inaudible, as well as the flesh and fancy of a decidedly material psychic. A filter microphone and a few hints from The Shadow will not suffice when wit is what is wanting.

Aside from a clipped and colorless script, the casting of Madame Arcati—the robust medium with a penchant for sandwiches, physical exercise, and dry Martinis—made matters worse: fluttery and frazzled, she lost much of her comic weight when portrayed by Edna Best. The Theatre Guild on the Air, at least, had access to the original New York cast. It also had the benefit of thirty-five extra minutes, and a script that retained much of the sparkle of Coward’s virtual sex comedy.

On 23 February 1947, nearly two years after Oboler’s inept dabbling in Coward’s froth, the Theater Guild revived Blithe Spirit with considerably greater success. It also broke a few dishes too many (to the audible delight of the studio audience to whom following the job of the soundmen had all the relish of an inside joke); but it kept both the spirit-flesh dynamics and civility-vulgarity dialectics relatively intact.

Sure, Mildred Natwick as Madame Arcati fudges a few good lines, and the attempt to explain the fact that Elvira, the irreverent revenant, is visible only to the tormented male and not to his second wife is almost as clumsy as my prose here. Still, having missed the recent London revival of the play , this was a more than tolerable substitute.

However much it tickled me to watch the redoubtable Margaret Rutherford (captured above in an ethereal fade) as she throws herself into the role of Madame Arcati, the Theater Guild adaptation brought the wit of Coward’s lines home to me like no coating of Technicolor ever could.

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How Cecil B. DeMille Delivered Air Mail for Hawks’s Angels

Without being aware of it at first, I continued my engagement with the movies of 1939—Hollywood’s greatest year—last night, as I followed up a previously mentioned screening of Drums Along the Mohawk by projecting Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings onto my small big screen. Well, I must agree with cinema critic Ted Sennett, who held that the two leads were unfortunate miscasts. The suave Cary Grant (as flying ace Geoff Carter) does indeed cut a “faintly ludicrous figure, and Jean Arthur [as Bonnie Lee] is nobody’s idea of a showgirl.”

Such sensory obstacles and prejudices are immaterial, of course, when listening to a radio adaptation. So, today I improved upon my viewing experience by listening to the mercifully shorter Lux Radio Theatre production of Angels, which aired 29 May 1939. Clipped and satisfyingly swift, the air treatment added a touch of self-reflexivity to Bonnie’s exclamation “Say, things happen awful fast around here.”

Timing itself, by which I mean the date of the broadcast, is significant for two reasons. Unlike most Lux presentations, the airwaved “Angels” took flight shortly after the 15 May 1939 release of the motion picture upon which it was based. Coinciding with—and thus capable of promoting—Hawks’s aviation melodrama, it boasted no fewer than eight members of the original cast, including Grant, Arthur, Thomas Mitchell, silent screen star Richard Barthelmess, and newcomer Rita Hayworth. Even for the lavishly produced Lux program, such screen presence was unusually extravagant. Yet Lux‘s promotional services for Columbia Studios went even further.

As Cecil B. DeMille, host and ostensible producer of the program pointed out during the show’s second intermission, there was a “real-life parallel” between Hawks’s drama of airmail daredevilry in South America and a recent “history-making flight.” Two days prior to the broadcast, Pan Am inaugurated a regular airmail service to Europe. Its pilot, Captain Arthur E. LaPorte was called before the CBS microphone to tell of the “tremendous strides” in aviation: “We have at last conquered the Atlantic.” After all, the clipper crossed the ocean in a mere twenty-five hours.

Picked up by about twenty-five million listeners each week, Lux was capable of delivering its fan letters to the movies with considerably greater speed and efficiency. Its timeliness dramatically underscored and confirmed, Hawks’s film could hardly have received a more prominent stamp of approval. It’s high time I got my hands on one.

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How Jack Benny’s Gagmen Lost Their Typewriter

As I realized anew last night, watching John Ford’s splendid Technicolor epic Drums Along the Mohawk, you don’t need historical footnotes or extensive background information to appreciate old-fashioned melodrama, even if such fictions claim to be based on verifiable facts. As an informed viewer, you’d probably be distracted and irked by careless inaccuracies or wilful distortions, interacting with the film intellectually rather than permitting yourself to become emotionally engaged—unless, of course, you are happily equipped with a remarkable ability to suspend disbelief. Surely I would never stoop to advocating ignorance, but such alleged bliss is no hindrance to the melodramatic experience. How different is the response to humor, especially when a bit of arcane trivia is called upon to serve as the centerpiece of a punch line.

Looking for a broadcasting event to highlight in my “On This Day” feature, I came across an episode of the Jack Benny Program, presented live from New York City on 5 October 1941. Like the Burns and Allen broadcast discussed previously, it is a rather self-conscious piece of comedy in which Jack returns to the air after his summer hiatus and finds himself unable to get back into his groove. Not even the script for that night’s broadcast is finished.

As Jack discovers, his head writers—two guys who spent a night at Roseland dancing together (and winning a cup for it)—have lost their typewriter by betting on .,. Lou Nova. Lou Nova? The name pops up again later in the program, when Benny’s valet Rochester calls in after finding himself in a tight squeeze with his bookie. Turns out, Lou Nova was a celebrated prizefighter with a supposedly “cosmic punch” who lost to heavyweight Joe Lewis a few days before the broadcast—on 29 September 1941. He had been a sure bet until then.

Although there are a few other topical allusions in this broadcast, including references to the Brooklyn Dodgers and the comedy team of Olsen and Johnson (pictured above), Benny’s jokes are generally easier to get than the satirical remarks of rival Fred Allen, whose wit was decidedly more topical. 

Explaining a joke is rarely amusing—but rescuing otherwise useless trivia from obscurity is rewarding nonetheless. Now I won’t feel quite so ignorant if ever I come across another “cosmic punch” line.

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The Present Is Shared Pasts

The day recalled in my previous blog entry was of such monumental significance to old-time radio enthusiasts that I thought it appropriate to shroud myself in the silence to which US radio drama was sentenced back in 1962. Actually, I was away for a long weekend up north in Manchester, England—but the timing was fortuitous. Now this past break presents itself as an opportunity to escape the rigidity of my “On This Day” feature, even though I shall continue it before long. In my attempt to avoid waxing nostalgic, I have become too much of an historian by letting past dates dictate my present thoughts. Now it is time for the present to have its day. Well, sort of . . .

Historians seek to make the past present. Those afflicted with nostalgia make their present past. The personal pronoun is significant. Nostalgia is a more self-centered engagement with the long ago. It is openly impressionistic and subjective, which makes it an endeavor at once intellectually dubious and honest. The researcher feels compelled to cover up the subjectivity underlying all our thoughts. As a refugee from the here and now, the nostalgic wanderer is not in need of such subterfuge.

Now, as I wrote when I inaugurated this blog, my approach to the past is neither historic nor nostalgic. Historians make it their business to discourse on the past and its relevance; nostalgic people tend to remove themselves from the everyday, the onslaught of a present they are at a loss to confront. Instead, they surround themselves with like-minded dreamers and reminisce about what they sense to be missing. How can anything we dream or think about be missing? It is there, present in our mind—and, in the act of sharing, it is being represented.

Why such reflections now? Well, having been away for a weekend alone in a big city, I felt detached from those around me. I went out for a few drinks one night and was so tired of standing by myself in the crowd that I went back to the hotel room to catch a late-night TV screening of The Curse of the Cat People. I was not wide-awake enough to follow it, but I had more of a sense of a shared experience watching something broadcast for everyone to see than I had staring at and being stared at in a barroom of unknown anybodies.

I had hoped this journal would make it possible for me find a few somebodies in a vast space of anyones—connected in the spirit of sharing. Thus far, my modest ambitions have not been realized. Anyway, this is the present, and I will get past it.

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On This Day in 1962: Suspense Ends As US Radio Invests Its Drama Dollar Elsewhere

She’s fiddling with the wrong knobs

Imagine flipping through the latest copy of Entertainment Weekly and reading about a psychological thriller starring Halle Berry and Colin Farrell, to be broadcast live from your favorite radio station. Imagine sitting on a train catching the opening of another season of Desperate Housewives on your iPod . . . with your eyes closed. Imagine what audio entertainment used to be and still could be today had radio not been “abandoned like the bones at a barbecue” (as comedian Fred Allen once put it). Instead of continuing the feast, we are starving our senses, having been given less to nourish our imagination and more to gawk at from afar, even as our television sets are being gradually retired in favor of cyber-age gadgetry.

Well, as anyone passionate about the half forgotten and much neglected culture of US radio drama will be only too keenly aware, today marks the anniversary of what is generally regarded as its official demise. The two last holdouts, the thriller anthology Suspense and the detective series Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar presented their final episodes on this day, September 30, in 1962. In an age when listeners were taking their transistor radios everywhere, radio drama was going nowhere.

Storytelling on US radio had been suffering a decade-long decline, even though, as one of my readers pointed out to me recently, there were still a few fine programs left on the air in the mid-to-late-1950s, including the long-running series mentioned above. There were attempts to revive radio drama in the 1970s and ’80s, as well; but since the old dial had been refitted with a new shorthand for aural art, the potentialities of the medium collapsed into music, talk, and news formats, leaving little space and fewer resources for the theater of the mind.

In the US, the radio play has always been looked upon as a makeshift art, a substitute or remedial form of entertainment for a public that was being told for ages that television was just around the corner. Television was supposedly the real thing, which in reality meant that the landscapes of the imagination were being walled in to fit the tiny screen before our sore eyes.

Getting the picture was a considerable loss; but our ocular preoccupations keep most of us from getting it, from making up for it by making it up all over again.

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On This Day in 1940: Arthur Miller Unleashes a Pussycat

As it turned out, I had been listening to Jeremy Vine’s “Climate Change Special” on BBC Radio 2, in which discussions about global warming and environmental crises were interspersed with a series of fictive news bulletin from the future—the year 2035. After such spurious time-traveling, I retreated into the world of fantasy, a bit of old-time radio whimsy from the pen of none other than the late American playwright Arthur Miller.

Pardon my credulity, but yesterday, listening to the radio, I experienced my own “War of the Worlds” encounter—you know, an act of airwave fakery during which hearing becomes believing. Going about my daily affairs, I picked up a few words of what I assumed to be a news broadcast, it being preceded by the customary jingle of the oft relied upon BBC. “Much of East Anglia remains under water today after the latest North Sea storm surge,” newsreader Adrian Finnegan informed me, and “nearly a million people” had been evacuated from an area large portions of which might never be reclaimed from the sea. Why hadn’t I heard about this before, I wondered, still under the influence of telecasts from hurricane-battered New Orleans.

Yes, Miller does have a radio past, even though it is a less than illustrious one. So it is frequently, politely, and foolishly ignored, as if a half-decade of dabbling in the theater of the mind could not possibly have had an influence on the career of a writer whose 1964 drama After the Fall “takes place in the mind, thought, and memory” of its protagonist.

“I despise radio,” Miller told an interviewer in 1947; with a successful play on Broadway and a well-received first novel to his credit, Miller was ready to get out of what he referred to as “a dark closet.” He meant the melodramatic excesses of radio drama, but also complained about the limitations imposed by network executives and the sponsors that fed them. Well, let’s open that closet now to commemorate the broadcast anniversary of Miller’s “The Pussycat and the Expert Plumber Who Was a Man,” a radio fantasy produced by the Columbia Workshop on 29 September 1940.

While not quite the man who had all the luck, Miller was rather fortunate to begin his career in radio, having his plays soundstaged by the sustaining (that is, commercial free) Workshop, a venue far more open to experimentation than the program he chose to recall in Timebends. His playful “Pussycat” is the story of an invisible trickster—a commentary on radio, therefore, and one that forced me to keep in mind the mind-game to which I had just been subjected.

The eponymous tomcat is a megalomaniac intent on going into politics and swaying the masses with his “lovely tenor voice.” Hidden from view behind a microphone, he convinces his audience of potential voters that he “must be a wonderful man,” until he is exposed as a fraud by an average Joe who threatens to drag him out into the open. “[I]f you want to know,” he sums up his tale, “a cat will do anything, the worst things, to fill his stomach, but a man . . . a man will actually prefer to stay poor because of an ideal.”

Clearly, Miller resented radio because he felt that it was making a pussycat of the manly expert he aspired to be. Yet he often overstated the strictures of network radio and eventually got too tired to resist them. Radio plays may not be the cat’s meow to narrow-minded intellectuals, but experts like Norman Corwin proved that they were hardly the litterbox of American culture.