Cover of the July 1926 Vanity Fair issue in which Anderson’s “Inquiry” appeared
“Nations are like people,” the US American novelist, short fiction writer and poet Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) remarked in 1926. “It takes a long, long time for one of them to grow up.” That year—that month—the United States was commemorating its one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary, which prompted Anderson to add:
As a nation we are still young. It has only been a hundred and fifty years. What’s that? Well, we may still be wearing short pants, but we are walking down past the clothing stores on Main Street and looking at the spring styles in long pants almost every day now. Such a job we tackled—whew!
Never mind “whew!” How about “whoa”? A “still young” nation? I have heard that one before—back in 2018, at the wedding here in Wales of an international trans student from the United States whose sister told me, probably in response to a reference of mine to the still fresh wound inflicted on democracy by the MAGA king’s first term, that her homeland was bound to make mistakes, and presumably be excused for making them, because the Republic was still so very new.
A portrait of Marilyn Monroe I attempted as a high schooler in the wake of the twentieth anniversary of her death
Like I said in my previous post—and, this being the 871st entry in the broadcastellan journal, I might be excused for repeating myself or at least be expected to do so on occasion—“I readily admit to having a thing about anniversaries, however obscure.” Now, there is nothing obscure about the one-hundredth birthday of one of Hollywood’s most enduring screen icons—Marilyn Monroe, to whose eightieth I devoted a blog entry two decades ago. So much an icon (i.e., a devotional image) is Monroe that the endlessly reproduced sight of her parted lips has overshadowed the sound of the distinctive and, to me, equally enthralling coos and whispers emanating from them.
To this day, Monroe’s infrequent non-musical voice-only performances remain largely unheard or else are dismissed as not worth the bother of unearthing. And yet, regardless of the material Monroe was dealt with for recital, the sound of her voice on the air is itself an event. Broadcast though it was to the multitude, it has the capacity, when experienced with closed eyes and under cover of dark and duvet, to assume the for-your-ears-only confidentiality of a personal call or a confessional eavesdropped on clandestinely.
Monroe’s voice rendered a hot mike redundant. At once torrid and tender, it smolders rather than blazes. Carrying promises of pleasure and warmth, it has the charm of a lullaby sung on what could not be anything but a sleepless night of reverie.
Many such a night I spent as a teenage boy, alone in my room, listening to—and secretly performing—“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” a song whose title would later be echoed by one of English classes I used to teach in the Bronx, an inevitably queerly slanted literature seminar I dubbed “Beyond Dogs and Diamonds: Portraits of American Friendships.”
Whatever the Strasberg “Method” contributed to or however it detracted from her emoting on screen, Monroe’s voice, which also underwent coaching, never lost the lure of a Lorelei. You know, the mythological golden-haired seductress referenced by Anita Loos in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (1925), a narrative whose popularity was eclipsed by the technicolor and stereophonic treatment it received in 1953, despite the inevitable watering down to which the rip-Roaring Twenties flapper chronicle was subjected.
It is no coincidence that Lorelei, the fabled temptress of my native Rhineland, first comes to mind when I think of Marilyn, a face, body and voice so well known that we, being overly familiar, tend to call her by the first of her professional names. After all, watching her movies on German television in my youth, I did not actually get to hear Monroe. The sound reel featured Margot Leonard (1927–2014), a much-in-demand voice-over artist who dubbed not only Marilyn Monroe but also lent her larynx to the likes of Kim Novak and Gracy Kelly.
I have already commented on the havoc German dubbing could wreak, The Prince and the Showgirl being a prime example. By turning Elsie, Monroe’s Deutsch-speaking character French-American, the German version mutes “[w]hatever historical context there was” in the original—”the Balkan crisis leading to World War I”—to “leave nothing but a fairytale.”
Considering that The Prince and the Showgirl is mostly that, anyway, I marvelled at the “pains the German film industry took during the late 1950s to change the background of this innocuous piece of popular culture so as to keep from those who came to see a bombshell any memories of bombs and shell shock.” Muffled though the foreign intrigue became in Der Prinz und die Tänzerin, the loss—of which most viewers without access to the English-language version would have been unaware—was well made up for by Leonard at her most Monroesque.
In West Germany, Leonard’s voice became so closely associated with Monroe that, in 1982, on the twentieth anniversary of Monroe’s death, Leonard was called upon to resurrect the screen legend in a radio interview. Glued to the receiver that day for soundings of Marilyn, my teenaged self had the finger on the recording button, catching part of the telephone conversation with Leonard, whose name was hardly a household one like Monroe’s. When told by the interviewer that he had never seen her, Leonard sounded rather indignant.
All that second-hand exposure to Monroe on the air and on the small screen no doubt motivated my subsequent search for the real voices of Hollywood actors that eventually yielded my study Immaterial Culture. It also led to a brief foray into podcasting.
When I started blogging in the mid-noughties, still consumed with the subject matter of my 2004 doctoral thesis Etherized Victorians, for which broadcastellan was meant to serve as a sequel of sorts, I was keenly aware that my chosen subject—at that time almost exclusively radiophonic—could be rendered less arcane by recordings of the performances about which I wrote. To that end, I produced and narrated a series, short-lived though it was, of recordings featuring the on-air voices of legendary Hollywood actors—including silent screen vamps—and exploring the sound-only world of radio drama into which they breathed life or to which, at least, they brought a degree of glamor.
Since “The Voice of Marilyn” contained copyrighted sound recordings, it was rejected for publication on my YouTube channel. In a wistfully reminiscent mood brought on by the centenary of Norma Jean’s nativity, I am revisiting the short script for the podcast to reflect on a few instances of Monroe’s disembodiment on the airwaves.
Cover of the May 1926 issue of Vanity Fair in which Aldous Huxley’s essay “The Present Fad of Self Confession” was first published
I readily admit to having a thing about anniversaries, however obscure. They are an invitation to catch up with whatever I missed first time round, especially if I was not around at the time. The century marker in particular offers an opportunity—or a pretext, if ever I needed one—to dwell on bygone media events and the popular culture of yore, traces of which I sample in a twenty-first century context and, more narrowly, from the perspective of my own experience.
For quite some time now I have been browsing vintage US American periodicals ranging from Radio Broadcast to Vanity Fair in search of materials ripe for centenary processing. Seriously dated though my selections inevitably are, I am more intrigued by resonance than I am concerned with variance, let alone obsolescence.
That is to say, even at the risk of presentism, I am drawn to the relatable—and am committed to relating—instead of concentrating on what makes the past so unalike from the present as to appear entirely and solely of its time. Context need not be confinement, just as difference does not have to spell distance.
Declaring something “past” assists in creating an air of critical detachment. It fosters an attitude of authorial but nonetheless assumptive command over a given subject, a superciliousness that, like an eyebrow hovering prominently above the inspecting eye draws—or should draw—attention to the viewpoint of the writer whose imperiousness gainsays any claims to objectivity.
In my own catchings-up with the presumably out-of-date, I resist assuming an authoritative posture or persona. All the while, I am aware of—and aim to foreground—my queer biases and spectatorial limitations as an absent witness or indirect observer.
Far from clinical, the choosing of a subject matter and the manner in which we approach it reveal personality, whether the self at work is acknowledged or not. Whenever we put our name to them, our published words proclaim “I wrote this”—unless, as is increasingly the case in a grim reality inconceivable to those living in 1926—they hush up, however vainly, that “AI wrote this.”
Despite obvious differences, both technological and social, in the ways in which we communicate and consume—how we take in and dole out prose for public consumption—the question of the “I” in journalistic writing, be it as a peek-a-boo tease between the lines or as a treatise writ large, continues to raise itself, to this day, even—or especially—as distinctions between fact and fiction, news and commentary, intelligence and artificiality have become all but erased. Brave New World, indeed, this domain of public discourse.
For that reason alone, Aldous Huxley’s “The Present Fad of Self Confession,” published in Vanity Fair in May 1926—coincidental with the author’s first visit to Hollywood—struck me as worth revisiting one hundred years later, at a moment in time when I question my own willingness to give so freely of myself in projects such as Retroactive Selfies, currently all but shelved on Instagram, and the visual narrative Envelope that I have proposed for display in a local gallery.
I was tickled—or, rather, pricked—by the snide remarks a certain John Wallace made in the April 1926 issue of Radio Broadcast, in which he expounded on “Radio and the Taste of the Nation.” In particular, Wallace took issue with the assertion that the new medium was threatening to turn the United States into the “Land of the Cretin” and the “Home of the Depraved.”
While not actual quotations, the phrases “Land of the Cretin” and “Home of the Depraved reflected, according to Wallace, the
utterances of any one of several of God’s private secretaries, expressed editorially in any one of several pastel colored periodicals on the occasion of that sage’s discovery of the existence of radio.
Their “pious pessimism,” so Wallace, was
that the taste of the American nation is lower than that of any other similar body of men on this sphere, and that, among the agents engaged in undermining it, radio promises to be one of the most effective.
“[I]n fact,” Wallace opined, the “custom of unfavorably comparing the kultur of America to that of any other nation,” was not restricted to the realm of broadcasting. Adopted by and cultivated among his countrymen and women, it was an attitude rooted in the notion that “America, in respect to its appreciation of the ‘higher things” was an infant among nations. The belief, according to Wallace, was so “widespread” as to constitute “one of the cardinal planks in the American credo.”
It finds place in our code of national convictions along side of such sacred tenets as “We must avoid all entangling alliances,” “The French do not know how to make coffee,” “Success is always the reward of effort,” “Newspaper men are conscienceless scoundrels,” “Abraham Lincoln was the incarnation of all virtue,” and “The Japs are a dangerous little people.”
As a US-educated ex-Academic mindful of his European perspective, I shall refrain from commenting on the US aversion to “entangling alliances,” other than allowing myself the aside that, one hundred years on, said view has experienced a remarkable resurgence in the age of MAGA and to pose the question, if only by the by, what America First might mean for the future of NATO.
And while I have nothing to say about the coffee culture of France, or about prejudicial views thereof, my musings on so-called “legacy media” such as radio and their reception does encourage me to consider the anti-wireless bias of which Wallace speaks vis-à-vis the effectively re-seeded and carefully nurtured suspicion that “Newspaper men are conscienceless scoundrels.”
After all, never has anti-media bias in the United States been more pronounced than in the second coming of MAGA.
As I browse online century-old periodicals like Radio Broadcast in the year of the 250th anniversary of the US of A, I feel compelled to revisit yesteryear’s attitudes toward radio as a moronizing force in the context of today’s radically transformed media landscape, especially in light of the Trump administration’s weaponization of the FCC.
Is ridding ourselves of traditional mass media making us more discerning consumers of news and entertainment?
Walter Prichard Eaton’s words as printed in Vanity Fair, April 1926
“Who he?” I thought. Or make that “hooey!” The “he” in question is Walter Prichard Eaton (1878–1957), a theater critic and academic of whose voice I first took note while flicking through the digitized pages of Vanity Fair’s April issue. April 1926, mind. The “hooey!” is Eaton’s, or rather, it is my response to his sweeping dismissal of motion pictures in an article titled “The Strangling of Our Theatre,” the first in a series of reports from the cultural battlefield that Vanity Fair billed as a “Symposium” on the “Future of the Theatre in America.”
In a succession of articles, prognostications on the fortunes of the theater in the United States were made by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sydney Howard (May issue), theater mogul Lee Shubert (June), independent theater manager Brock Pemberton (July), Ralph Block, production manager of the Famous Players-Lasky Film Corporation (August), and John Emerson, President of the Actor’s Equity Association (September). Eaton’s response to them in the October 1926 issue of Vanity Fair drew the curtain on the “Symposium.”
Now that “Motion Picture Producers” were beginning to exert “direct control of the drama,” as the editors of Vanity Fair put it, a number of questions, however leading, arose:
Will this result in the production of only such plays as will make good motion pictures, in other words, cheap, obvious and sensational plays?
Will the intelligent minorities who are sponsoring non-commercial playhouses succeed where the commercial houses have failed?
Is our stage to lend itself still more to the standards of Moronia, or will a new theatre of the Intelligent Minority arise, overthrow the theatre of commerce and release the latent dramatic talent of America?
Now, “Symposium” literally means “drinking together.” Perhaps the water cooler was contaminated to begin with, given this set-up, but the intemperance of Eaton’s verbiage has no convivial air about it.
What follows, which may well be “hooey” to you—or “flap-doodle,” to borrow the term used by Eaton that started me off on this tangent—is an attempt at having a word on having words: words as thought, words as theatrics, and words as troll.
John Wallace’s column in the March 1926 issue of Radio Broadcasting, which offers an intriguing glimpse at a production of “Danger,” even though the play is not discussed
When it comes to second-hand knowledge, I can get a tad—permit the portmanteau—malcontentious. You know, not just dissatisfied but downright disputatious. It frustrates me not to be able to get straight to the source and having to rely instead on a privileged intermediary.
Owing to that frustration, I tend to quote extensively from the primary sources that I discuss so as to enable my readers, whoever they may be, to enter into a conversation with me on whatever matter I happen to advance for discussion. I am not content to alert others, by way of a footnote, to materials to which they may not have immediate access or which they cannot be bothered to dig up when prompted. Inquisitive as I am, I do not expect anyone to take my word for an elusive “it.”
Mind you, the “it” in question is not, say, the US-Israel war on Iran currently underway—a fact-based rationale for which has yet to be cogently articulated—but the special brand of make-believe known, by some, as Hörspiel—plays for the ear that came into being with the advent of broadcasting in the early 1920s. It is that sort of ephemera to which I have devoted this journal, a blog whose title, broadcastellan, is another portmanteau I invented to cast myself as a keeper of the castles in the air that rose and crumbled in the early to mid-twentieth century, some exceptions notwithstanding.
Unlike silent films, almost none of the broadcasts of those pioneer days of wireless storytelling have survived, either as recordings or as scripts. Hardly any have appeared in print, despite the fact that virtually all of them were scripted. As a result, I am obliged to be told about them in contemporary reviews, which likewise are in short supply.
Fact is, we do not today enjoy the same kind of access to early US radio plays than we do to motion pictures of the 1920s. Too little has been preserved, mainly because, despite the existence of sound recording equipment, sound-only broadcasting was not thought of as anything but ephemeral, accountability, commercially understood, only just coming into being as a rationale for keeping records.
This gap—a lacuna not quite matata—leaves me, if not speechless, so at least without confidence adequately to respond to “Wanted: A Radio Shakespeare,” one such early second-hand account of radio listening. The article was published in the March 1926 issue of Radio Broadcasting as part of a tauntingly titled column “The Listeners’ Point of View,” as represented by John Wallace, a critic whose remarks on the first radio play published in the United States I previously mentioned here.
Having referenced the article in Immaterial Culture, I did not return to it until now—”now” being the one-hundredth anniversary of Wallace’s remarks on, and recommendations for, the advancement of the radio play in the United States.
“Wanted: A Radio Shakespeare” is worthwhile picking up anew, considering that the attitudes toward the sound-only medium voiced by Wallace would remain valid for at least another decade, by which time, in the summer of 1936, the Columbia Workshop signaled that experimentation was, at last, however tentatively, being given a modicum of attention in US broadcasting.
“What is the basic force that makes the human mind function?” The question was posed not at a symposium attended by noted philosophers and physicians, but to the readers of the 27 February 1926 issue of Radio Digest, who were subsequently asked:
What is telepathy? Is it not fundamentally Radio activity, a form of Radio transmission[?] Can the energy that starts a mass of brain cells into motion, that formulates thought and speech[,] be propelled as the voice is propelled from the vibration of the fragile filament in a vacuum tube? Does this energy ever die? Can it be attuned, converted into controlled ether wave movement, refined to audible sensitiveness?
Whoa! One question at a time, if you please—and, thinking as a public speaker—if you expect a question to sink in and elicit a response. Other than “Whoa!” that is. A bit of context would be helpful.
The above is not a passage from Upton Sinclair’s Mental Radio, a treatise written in the late 1920s, published in 1931, and endorsed by Albert Einstein. As the notion that telepathy was “fundamentally” a form of wireless transmission suggests—apart from the fact that it was published in Radio Digest—the context in which the question was posed was wireless transmission—and radio “drama” in particular.
Offering listeners “an opportunity to win fame, honor and bags of gold” for the solution of a mystery about to commence, the editors of Radio Digest got more specific, explaining:
These are questions to be considered in the strange case of Peleg Turner in the first two chapters of A Step on the Stairs, appearing in this issue of Radio Digest. Was it the voice of the dead Peleg that manifested itself, as he had predicted, through the Radio horn for the benefit of his heirs?
The WRC cast of A Step on the Stairs featuring Ted Husing (Radio Digest, 10 April 1926)
Call it ballyhoo or baloney, with those words, one of the earliest radio serials was launched in February 1926.
