Lux Radio Theater – Harry Heuser

31st May 20261st Jun 2026

Some Mike It Hot: Tuning in Marilyn Monroe on the Eve of Her One-Hundredth Birthday

A likeness of 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 into 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 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 detracted from her emoting on screen, Monroe’s voice, which also underwent some coaching, never lost the lure of a Lorelei. I mean, the mythological golden-haired seductress referenced by Anita Loos in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (1925), a narrative whose fame was eclipsed by the technicolor and stereophonic treatment it received in 1953, despite the inevitable watering down to which the 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, whose voice is so familiar that we tend to call her to mind by the first of her professional names. After all, watching Monroe’s 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 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 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 begot my study Immaterial Culture. It also led to 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. I produced and narrated a series, short-lived though it was, of recordings featuring the on-air voices of legendary film actors—including silent screen vamps—and exploring the sound-only world of radio drama into which they briefly breathed life at a time when their on-screen visibility was diminishing.

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 of the podcast to reflect on a few instances of Monroe’s disembodiment on the airwaves.

9th Nov 20128th Nov 2023

She Said It in English: Olympe Bradna (1920-2012) on Men, Mikes and Milk

Olympe Bradna is a diplomat of the first rank!” So declared the editors of Cinegram in an issue devoted to Say It in French. In that now largely forgotten romantic comedy, Bradna co-starred as a French student who impersonates a maid to be close to an American lover (played by Welshman Ray Milland) expected to marry a millionaire’s daughter (Irene Hervey) to save his father’s business.

The cover of *Cinegram* No. 60, from my collection

Maybe that sounded better in French, in which the comedy was first staged under the title Soubrette. Never mind. The “petite morsel of feminine allure,” so the Bradna legend goes, had “only been kissed by two men during her whole lifetime”—that lifetime amounting to eighteen years back in 1938.

One year into her brief Hollywood career, Bradna had overcome her “anxiety and embarrassment” and forgotten about her vow that she “would never kiss” at all, “either on the screen or off, until she had a ‘steady’ beau.” Having been teamed with both Milland and Gene Raymond (in Stolen Heaven), the actress was “all in favour” of on-screen romance; but, when asked whose lips she preferred, the teenager refused to kiss and tell. “If I did that, it would be, how do you say? ‘propaganda.’”

In the context of European pre-war clamour and the business of Hollywood glamour, the word choice is peculiar, especially since Cinegram was a promotional effort aimed at British audiences. It is a telling statement, too, as it suggests Bradna’s questioning of the role she was expected to play in the propagation and exploitation of her own image.

Far from naive, the French-born performer knew all about the real world of make-believe, which is why, in her future pursuit of “real romance,” she was determined to “go outside the show business.” In the early 1920s, her parents, Jeanne and Joseph Bradna, had a successful bareback riding act at the Olympia Theater in Paris, after which venue Olympe was named and where she made her stage debut when she was not quite two years old. Hence, I suppose, her expressed need for security: “[A]ctors are fellows with uncertain jobs. They’re generally honest, gay, intelligent and interesting, but they lack that quality of stability that is so important to a girl who wants to establish a home.”

Presumably, she said all this in English, rather than in her native tongue. When she first set her dancing feet on the United States as a member of the Folies Bergère and subsequently performed at New York’s French Casino, she was so dismayed at her “lack of English that she determined to learn to speak the language properly. She succeeded so well,” Cinegram readers were told, “that when it came to making this new picture she had to put in several weeks of hard work under a French tutor to get her French back to standard.” A Hollywood standard, that is. After all, in romantic comedy, a French accent was as desirable as a maid’s uniform.

Bradna’s language skills were put to the ultimate test when, on 14 November 1938, she went behind the microphone for the Lux Radio Theater production of “The Buccaneer,” co-starring Clark Gable as French pirate Jean Lafitte; but her part was suitably Old-World, and all over the map besides, to account for any foreignness in her speech. Bradna assumed the role of Gretchen, which had been played on screen by the Hungarian-born cabaret artist Franciska Gaal. “Oh, I don’t know how I sound, Mr. DeMille,” Bradna said to in the nominal producer of the program during her scripted curtain call, “a Dutch girl with a French accent in an American play.” Supported as she was by Gertrude Michael and Akim Tamiroff, both of whom enriched American English with peculiar accents and inflections, she hardly stood out like a sore tongue.

Not that Bradna, who appeared on the cover of the 27 July 1938 issue of Movie-Radio Guide, was a stranger to the microphone. According to the March 1938 issue of Radio Mirror, Paramount Pictures “put her into five consecutive radio guest-spots for a big build up—but without giving her a nickel.” Perhaps, DeMille would not have given her a nickel, either, for the privilege of making it into a Lux-lathered version of The Buccaneer, one of his own productions, nor given her an opportunity to promote her latest picture, Say It in French, had he known what British Cinegram readers gathered by flicking through their souvenir program for Say It. Bradna, they were told, had “startled experts by announcing that the secret of her facial complexion [was] a daily buttermilk massage.”

The makers of Lux Toilet Soap could not have been pleased at Bradna’s insistence, fictive or otherwise, that buttermilk was “all” she needed: “My skin may be ever so parched and dry before the routine, but afterwards it is as fresh and smooth as I could want!

Wally Westmore, Paramount’s make-up chief, reputedly explained that the “secret”—an age-old French recipe for a youthful complexion perhaps not quite so difficult to achieve at the age of eighteen—lay in the rich oil content of buttermilk, which had the same “softening and freshening effect upon the skin as the most elaborate and expensive preparations used by the stars.” That, of course, was just the claim Lever Brothers were making each week on the Lux Radio Theater, which might explain why Ms. Bradna was never again heard on the program, whose stars were handsomely remunerated for their implied or stated endorsement of the titular product. Perhaps, Bradna was not “a diplomat of the first rank” after all . . .

Olympe Bradna died on 5 November 2012 in Lodi, California.

4th Oct 201124th Aug 2024

History Stinks (and Your Granny Didn’t Smell So Good Either)

I’ve long tried—and, you might say, failed and pretty much given up on—filling a gap in the construction of our cultural histories, most of which are entirely too preoccupied with images and their interpretation. Western culture may privilege vision over any other sense—but if you think that the past will unfold before your eyes simply by looking at graphics, photos or printed records, you’ve been led by the ear you aren’t using. It’s no use being so eye-minded as to forget all about lowbrow radio programming, for instance. After all, sound-only broadcasting had a greater influence on most folks living in the middle of the 20th-century than the press or motion pictures—certainly a greater influence than most scholars are prepared to acknowledge. Radio comforted and counseled, intimated and importuned. It brought the world home and played on our minds like no competing medium could.

Crooning, cajoling, and commanding attention, whatever talent stood at the microphone became part of a soundtrack to the everyday of millions of dial-twisters who took in or were taken in by the big bands and banter, by sermons, sportscasts, and soap operas. Radio sold products as well as ideas and ideologies. It excelled in telling stories, be they fictive, factual or false; and, if you let it, it keeps on telling them or telling you about them . . .

While I have long suspected the picture to be incomplete if we insist on looking at the past as a sequence of images, I never seriously considered that, aside from sound, there is a story, too, in the way we smelled. And yet, in my old hometown of Cologne, Germany, alone—the burg that gave us the word for all our attempts at olfactory cover-up—the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once ‘counted two and seventy stenches.’

There would have been no soap—and no soap operas—if we didn’t have trepidations about not being quite fresh, anxieties that were over-ripe for commercial exploitation. In the US, tuners-in of the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s were constantly being alerted to the dangers of B-O, reminded to ‘Lux’ their ‘dainties,’ and told to gargle before putting their kissers to the test. Lest they could endure facing guilt by omission, listeners lathered up with products like White King toilet soap, the box tops of which they collected and sent in to broadcasters as ocular proof of their hygienic diligence, for which cumulative evidence they were duly awarded various prizes (or premiums).

For all the restrictions faced by press and broadcasting, advertising some sixty, seventy years ago, was certainly more in your (presumably unwashed) face than it is now. It sounds as if listeners-in back then were in far greater need of Lysol and Listerine. Could it be that our forebears required more frequent scrubbing because they were more likely to labor manually without having access to as much running water, cold and hot, than our more sedentary selves take for granted today? If so, did they really need to be reminded of their particular emanations?

Advertisers did not rest until the natural acquired the whiff of the common. The airwaves, though they were not permitted to be polluted by sounds suggesting most of the bodily functions to which we give vent in private, certainly were awash with voices alerting us of the social consequences of reeking to high heaven.

However fleeting, sound has not been an instant bygone ever since we succeeded in preserving it some 135 years ago. Granted, such records do not tell us the whole story of how people talked and what they had to say; but whatever we bottle as fragrance is even more likely to throw us off the scent in our quest for the real, something that complicates our efforts whenever we feel inclined to stick our nose into the past.

The irony that I am using a print ad to illustrate my point has not eluded me. It is an ad, no less, from a magazine catering to the radio listeners, consumers who were often told, as they waited for the advent of long-promised television, that only sight could complete the picture. It is a myth in which even radio broadcasters were complicit.

Sure, the picture of the past is always incomplete; it is as much a composite as it is a construct. Still, I prefer to keep augmenting my impressions of those yesterdays by lending an ear to the ticking of our clocks. If we keep on looking, and look on only, we might well be missing what is right under our noses …

27th Jun 2011

Better the DeMille You Know

“Take Back UR Power Now,” the letters on the marquee read. I am standing in front of the Music Box Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Whose power? I wonder. Who took it? Who lost it? And just who is telling me—or anyone else reading—to seize it? Take it from me, perhaps? Do I have it? Did I ever have it? Am I supposed to have it? If so, to do what with? Storm the box office? Take to the stage? Tear down the building and plant a tree? A windmill? Hold it. Is this one of those tiresomely postmodern Barbara Krugerisms? As my friend Clifton once put it, “I could look [it] up . . . but it’s more fun to speculate.”

The imperative “Now” intrigues me. It strikes me as incongruous, anachronistic. And, yes, antagonistic. It does not seem to denote the “Now” of 2011, my “Now” on this bright, sunny afternoon spent in one of the most frivolous locales in the western hemisphere. The look of the venue, the somewhat run-down surroundings, the slogan and its lettering transport me back to the early, bleak, violent, recession-shaken 1990s. Why am I thinking race relations? Could this not just as well be some hackneyed Tea Party catchphrase? Or else, a sign of things to come . . .

The time is ripe for warping. I’ve just been to Grauman’s Chinese, placing my palms into the imprints left by stars long gone out. I’ve been taking in all those names on the Walk of Fame, and it felt like treading on gravestones. And I arrived here, at the Music Box, transported by a longing, by the kind of nostalgia I am so wary of.

I did not expect to be reminded of the 1990s, to be taken aback instead of simply being taken back, if that were ever achieved ‘simply.’ Sure, I was prepared to be late. Seventy-five years late, to be exact. If it were in my power, I would be standing here, back in line with hundreds of other enthusiasts, to take a gander at Marlene Dietrich, Myrna Loy, Ruby Keeler, or Claudette Colbert. Not on the screen, mind, but live and in person. The Music Box, after all, was once the venue for the Lux Radio Theater, a Monday afternoon extravaganza hosted by showman-director Cecil B. DeMille. Merle Oberon, Marion Davies, Joan Crawford. Back in the summer of 1936, they were all here. I am in awe.

That is why I have come to this spot—on a Monday afternoon, no less, as I would later realize. I was dreaming. Now I feel tired out, and a little bit stupid, having caught myself chasing after ghosts. It is as if I had been hoping to get hold of the breeze stirred up by some wispy number long since mothballed. The spirit of the place does not “send me,” as swooning teenagers used to call it (the state of swooning, I mean). If anything, it sends me back to where I started this reverie. It takes me back into the ether, the mythical non-space I can fill, at will, with the voices of Marlene Dietrich, Myrna Loy, Ruby Keeler . . . as they were performing for millions of listeners, broadcasting live from the Music Box stage. It takes me back.

Wait. When was it again that I discovered these recordings for myself? The early 1990s. Well, what do you know! I guess, looking at that marquee, I have been forced to catch up with myself, and I find that self wanting, historically lost to the world. Years spent circling in representations of a past not alive to my being. Is it time to take back whatever I squandered? Is there still time? Do I have the energy to matter, the power to mean? I wonder . . .

1st Oct 200910th Jan 2024

They Also Sell Books: W-WOW! at Partners & Crime

Legend has it that, when asked what Cecil B. DeMille was doing for a living, his five-year-old grand-daughter replied: “He sells soap.” Back then, in 1944, the famous Hollywood director-producer was known to million of Americans as host and nominal producer of the Lux Radio Theater, from the squeaky clean boards of which venue he was heard slipping (or forcefully squeezing) many a none-too-subtle reference to the sponsor’s products into the behind-the-scenes addresses and rehearsed chats with Tinseltown’s luminaries, lines scripted for him by unsung writers selling out in the business of making radio sell.

No doubt, the program generated sizeable business for Lever Brothers; otherwise, the theatrical spin cycle conceived to bang the drum for those Lads of the Lather would not have stayed afloat for two decades, much to the delight of the great (and only proverbially) unwashed. For all its entertainment value, commercial radio was designed to hawk, peddle and tout; and although the spiel heard between the acts of wireless theatricals like Lux has long been superseded by the show and sell of television and the Internet, old radio programs still pay off, no matter how freely they are now shared on the web. In a manner of speaking, they still sell, albeit on a far smaller and downright intimate scale.

Take W-WOW! Radio. Now in its fourteenth season, the opening of which I attended last month, the W-WOW! Mystery Hour can be spent—heard and seen—on the first Saturday of every month (July and August excepting) from a glorified store room at the back of one of the few remaining independent and specialty booksellers in Manhattan: Partners & Crime down on Greenwich Avenue in the West Village. The commercials recited by the cast are by now the stuff of nostalgia, hilarity, and contention (“In a coast-to-coast test of hundreds of people who smoked only Camels for thirty days, noted throat specialists noted not one single case of throat irritation due to smoking Camels“); but the readings continue to draw prospective customers like myself.

Whenever I am in town, I make a point of making a tour of those stores, even though said tour is getting shorter and more sentimental every year. There are rewards, nonetheless. Two of my latest acquisitions, Susan Ware’s 2005 “radio biography” of the shrewdly if winningly commercial Mary Margaret McBride and John Houseman’s 1972 autobiography Run-through (signed by the author, no less) were sitting on the shelves of Mercer Street Books (pictured) and brought home for about $8 apiece. The latter volume is likely to be of interest to anyone attending the W-WOW! production scheduled for this Saturday, 3 October, when the W-WOW! players are presenting the Mercury Theatre on the Air version of Dracula as adapted by none other than John Houseman.

As Houseman puts it, the Mercury’s “Dracula”—the series’s inaugural broadcast—is “not the corrupt movie version but the original Bram Stoker novel in its full Gothic horror.” Indeed, Houseman’s outstanding adaptation is a challenge worthy of W-WOW!’s voice talent and just the kind of material special effects artist DeLisa White (pictured above, on the right and to the back of those she so ably backs) will sink her teeth into, or whatever sharp and blunt instruments she has at her disposal to make your hair stand on end.

Rather more run-of-the-mill were the scripts chosen for W-WOW!’s September production, which, regrettably, was devoid of vamps. You know, those double-crossing, tough-talking dames that enliven tongue-in-cheek thrillers like The Saint (“Ladies Never Lie . . . Much” or “The Alive Dead Husband,” 7 January 1951) and Richard Diamond (“The Butcher Shop Case,” 7 March 1951 and 9 March 1952), a story penned by Blake “Pink Panther” Edwards and involving a protection racket. The former opened encouragingly, with a wife pretending to have killed a husband who turned out to be yet living, if not for long; but, as it turned out, the dame had less lines than any of the ladies currently in prime time, or any other time for that matter. Sure, crime paid on the air; but sex, or any vague promise of same, sells even better.

That said, I still walked out of Partners & Crime with a book in my hand. As I passed through the store on my way out, an out-of-print copy of A Shot in the Arm caught my eye and refused to let go. Subtitled “Death at the BBC,” John Sherwood’s 1982 mystery novel, set in Broadcasting House anno 1937 and featuring Lord Reith, the dictatorial Baron who ran the place, is just the kind of stuff I am so readily sold on, as I am on browsing in whatever bookstores are still standing offline—if only to give those who are still in the business of vending rare volumes a much-deserved shot in the open and outstretched arm.

9th Sep 20093rd Sep 2024

“Chew that bacon good and slow”: Our Town Like You’ve Never Seen It

Okay, so I’ve been cutting a few corners during my present, month-long stay in New York City; but I wasn’t about to cut Grover’s Corners. Our Town, that is, a new production of which is playing at the Barrow Street Theatre in Greenwich Village. These days, there isn’t much on Broadway to tempt me into letting go of whatever is left in my wallet. I mean, Shrek the Musical? What’s next, Pac-Man of the Opera? A concert version of Saved by the Bell? Secret Squirrel on Ice? I am all for revisiting the familiar—a tendency to which this journal attests—as long as I feel that such recyclings are worth my impecunious (hence increasingly persnickety) while—and theatrical retreads of The Addams Family, 9 to 5 or Spider-Man are not. Come to think of it, I had never seen a performance of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Our Town, which I always thought of as the ideal radio play. Well, let me tell you, David Cromer sure made me see it differently.

Our Town was produced on the air at least three times, even though the Lux Radio Theatre version (6 May 1940) is a reworking of the screenplay, replete with a tacky, tagged-on Hollywood ending and ample space for commercial copy between the acts. Wilder’s 1938 play is decidedly radiogenic in its installation of a narrator (or Stage Manager) and its insistence of doing away with props or scenery. The Barrow Street Theater production seemed to be in keeping with the playwright’s instructions; and I was all prepared to watch it with my eyes closed.

There are two tables on the small stage; and the props do not amount to more than a hill of string beans. The Stage Manager points into the audience, inviting us to envision a small town in New Hampshire, anno 1901:

Along here’s a row of stores. Hitching posts and horse blocks in front of them. First automobile’s going to come along in about five years belonged to Banker Cartwright, our richest citizen . . . lives in the big white house up on the hill.

Here’s the grocery store and here’s Mr. Morgan’s drugstore. Most everybody in town manages to look into those two stores once a day.

Public School’s over yonder. High School’s still farther over. Quarter of nine mornings, noontimes, and three o’clock afternoons, the hull town can hear the yelling and screaming from those schoolyards.

Some eyes followed the pointed finger in my direction, faces in the crowd briefly looking past me in hopes of making out the Methodist and Unitarian churches just behind my back. Now, I’m not saying that the actors were not worth looking at, Jennifer Grace as Emily Webb being particularly charming. Still, at the end of the first act, I could not figure out what Frank Scheck of the New York Post referred to as “revolutionary staging.” Two tables, eight chairs, string beans?

By act three, I understood. David Cromer defies Wilder’s instructions (“No curtain. No scenery”)—and to startling effect. I never thought that the smell of bacon could be so overwhelming, so urgent and direct. Sure, it has often made my mouth water—but my eyes? Whether or not you are a staunch vegetarian, there is reality in the scent, just as there is a revelation behind that curtain. Our Town may be a wonderful piece of pantomime; but Cromer deserves some props.

“Oh, Mama, just look me one minute though you really saw me,” the dead Emily implores the unseeing childhood vision of her mother. “Mama, just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s look at one another.” Seeing this fragrant scene acted out made me realize anew the importance of coming to all of one’s senses, of partaking by taking in, of grabbing hold of the moment (which we Germans call an Augenblick, a glance) by beholding what could be gone at the blink of an eye.

1st Jun 20092nd Mar 2025

Manus Manum . . . Love It: Lever Brothers Get Their Hands on Those Nine Out of Ten

“Ladies and gentlemen. We have grand news for you tonight, for the Lux Radio Theater has moved to Hollywood. And here we are in a theater of our very own. The Lux Radio Theater, Hollywood Boulevard, in the motion picture capital of the world. The curtain rises.”

Going up with great fanfare on this day, 1 June, in 1936, that curtain, made of words and music for the listening multitude in homes across the United States, revealed more than a stage. It showed how an established if stuffy venue for the recycling of Broadway plays could be transformed into a spectacular new showcase for the allied talents at work in motion pictures, network radio, and advertisement.

Marlene Dietrich and Clark Gable at the premiere of the revamped *Lux Radio Theate*r program

“Frankly, I was skeptical when the announcement first reached this office,” Radio Guide’s executive vice-president and general manager Curtis Mitchell declared not long after the Hollywood premiere. The program was “an old production as radio shows go,” Mitchell remarked, one that was “rich with the respect and honors” it had garnered during its first two years on the air. Why meddle with an established formula?

Mitchell’s misgivings were soon allayed. The newly refurbished Lux Radio Theater had not been on the air for more than two weeks; and Radio Guide already rewarded it with a “Medal of Merit”—given, so the magazine argued, “because its sponsors had the courage to make a daring move” that, in turn, had “increased the enjoyment of radio listeners.” There’s nothing like a new wrinkle to shake the impression of starchiness.

“I cannot help but feel,” Mitchell continued, that the “two recent performances emanating from Hollywood have lifted it in a new elevation in public esteem. Personally, listening to these famous actors under the direction of Cecil De Mille, all of them broadcasting almost from their own front yards, gave me a new thrill.”

That DeMille had, in fact, no hand in the production did little to diminish the thrill. An open secret rather than a bald lie, the phony title was part of an elaborate illusion. The veteran producer-director brought prestige to the format, attracted an audience with promises of behind-the-scenes tidbits, and sold a lot of soap flakes throughout his tenure; and even if the act wouldn’t wash, he could always rely on the continuity writers to supply the hogwash.

As DeMille reminded listeners on that inaugural broadcast (and as I mentioned on a previous occasion), Lux had “been a household word in the DeMille family for 870 years,” his family crest bearing the motto “Lux tua vita mea.” Oh, Lever Brother!

Perhaps the motto should have been “Manus manum lavat.” After all, that is what the Lux Radio Theater demonstrated most forcibly. In the Lux Radio Theater, one hand washed the other, with a bar of toilet soap always within reach. As I put it in Etherised Victorians, my doctoral study on the subject of radio plays, it

was in its mediation between the ordinary and the supreme that a middlebrow program like Lux served to promote network programming as a commercially effective and culturally sophisticated hub for consumers, sponsors, and related entertainment industries.

With DeMille as nominal producer and Academy Award-winner Louis Silver as musical director, the new productions came at a considerable cost for the sponsor: some $300 a minute, as reported in another issue of Radio Guide for the week ending 1 August 1937. Of the $17,500 spent on “The Legionnaire and the Lady,” the first Hollywood production, $5000 went to Marlene Dietrich, while co-star Clark Gable received $3,500. Those were tidy sums back the, especially considering that the two leads had not even shown up for rehearsals.

The investment paid off; a single Monday night broadcast reportedly attracted as many listeners as flocked to America’s movie theaters on the remaining days of the week. As DeMille put it in his introduction to the first Hollywood broadcast, the audience of the Lux Radio Theater was “greater than any four walls could encompass.” Besides, the auditorium from which the broadcasts emanated was already crowded with luminaries.

“I see a lot of familiar faces,” DeMille was expected to convince those sitting at home: “There’s Joan Blondell, Gary Cooper (he stars in my next picture, The Plainsman), Stuart Erwin and his lovely wife June Collier.”

Also present were Al Jolson, Ruby Keeler, and Franchot Tone. “And I, I think I see Freddie March,” DeMille added in a rather unsuccessful attempt at faking an ad lib. While there is ample room for doubt that any “nine out of ten” of those stars named actually used Lux, as the slogan alleged, they sure made use of the Lux Radio Theater. It was an excellent promotional platform, a soapbox of giant proportions.

A visit to the Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight

As I was reminded on a trip to the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight last year, Lever Brothers had always been adroit at mixing their business with other people’s pleasure. Long before the Leverhulmes went west to hitch their wagon on one Hollywood star or another, they had disproved the Wildean maxim that the greatest art is to conceal art and that art, for art’s sake, must be useless.

It is owing to the advertising agents in charge of the Lever account that even the long frowned upon “commercial” did no longer seem quite such a dirty word.

Related recording

“The Legionnaire and the Lady,” Lux Radio Theater (1 June 1936)

Related blog entries

“Cleaning Up Her Act: Dietrich, Hollywood, and Lola Lola’s Laundry”

Tyrone Power Slips Out to War on a Bar of Soap”

“After Twenty Years of Pushing Stars and Peddling Soap, a Hollywood Institution Closes Down”

22nd Mar 200916th Jul 2024

Floyd and the Flood

Wherever fighting men are in action—wherever disaster shakes the earth—wherever history is in the making—there you’ll find Headline Hunter Gibbons, the machine-gun stylist of words.

His record is 217 words a minute, steady flow for sustained speech. But what a price he has paid for the background that makes his record possible!—His body is crosspatched with bullet wounds and sword cuts. The spot where his left eye should be is covered by a white patch. He’s bivouacked on the feverish sands of Mexico, India and Egypt. His toe joints have been frozen on the arctic waste of Manchuria.

But he’s happy. It is his life and he loves it.

That is how a 1934 article in Radio Guide (for the week ending 17 November) introduced Floyd Gibbons (1887-1939), a news commentator whose life was as thrilling and fast-paced as the one he breathed into the scripts he read—or, rather, performed—on the air.

Delivering his lines, and with such rat-a-tat rapidity, was not easy for the battle-scarred Headline Hunter. According to Robert Eichberg’s Radio Stars of Today (1937), Gibbons was with the American army at Belleau Wood, France, when, on 6 June 1918, the major leading his troop was struck down by German machine gun fire:

Suddenly a bullet struck Floyd in the left shoulder, and another tore through his left arm. Still he crept toward the stricken officer, only to have a third shot pierce his steel helmet, fracturing his skull, and blind him in his left eye.

As one of his colleagues, John B. Kennedy, recalls (in Robert West’s 1941 broadcasting history The Rape of Radio), Floyd “used to have his scripts typed in jumbo type so that he could read easily. ‘With that big type he would come to the studio with forty or fifty pages of stuff, almost four times as many as the rest of us used!’”

Little now survives of Gibbons’s celebrated broadcasts, aside from a couple of reports aired on the Magic Key program. In March 1936, Gibbons returned to the airwaves after nearly seven months, “glad” to be getting away from the crisis in Ethiopia to focus instead on a natural catastrophe much closer to home: the Connecticut River Valley flood. A few years earlier, he had abandoned his coverage of the Sino-Japanese conflict to rush to Hopewell, New Jersey, to get in on the sensational story of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.

In his Magic Key notes from 22 March 1936, which Jim Widner shares in his tribute to the man, Gibbons referred to the overflowing of the Connecticut River as “the worst flood in the history of the last half century.” Seen, as he had it, from above—a view not generally afforded his listeners—the valley looked like a “vast inland sea” on which Gibbons spotted “dismal, un-milked cows” and “bedraggled wet chickens” that were “perched bewildered” upon “isolated elevations like animated weather cocks.”

Gibbons talked of the “withered mushrooms” that were the gas and oil tanks of the refining companies, each containing “hundreds of thousands of explosive fuel which in turn represent fire and disaster should these enormous receptacles be torn loose from their foundations” and “lose their fiery contents.” Those at work to prevent further disaster looked like “Lilliputians” as they tried to “tie down these deadly metallic giants.”

Meanwhile, in the riverbed,

in which ambitious men had hoped to incarcerate old man river with dikes and dams of stone and steel, the prisoner [ was] lashing, foaming, writhing like a serpent striking back with frightful force and power, an unexpected fury.

Some nine months before his death, Gibbons gave a brief account of his exploits—riding with Pancho Villa in Mexico, sailing on the Laconia when it was torpedoed and sank—to listeners of the Lux Radio Theater (16 January 1939). In it, he remarked that

the best and most truthful report of any happening is that of the personal eye-witness who can honestly say “I saw it. I was there when it happened.” He has to keep in mind the importance of the main event, but must not overlook the apparently unimportant little facts that prove the truth of the story.

In the rush of his reportage, “little facts” at times made way for great effects. According to West, Gibbons’s report of the Ohio River Flood of 1937 referred to “sensational happenings” that had not actually taken place as described. Gibbons was sued for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in damages by a scriptwriter who argued that “his reputation had been marred.”

What Gibbons’s rapid-fire imagery does convey, though, is the fury of the scenes we imagine he beheld. In a rhetorical style long fallen out of favor but so vital to depiction in the absence of visuals, Gibbons personified the threatening force of the raging Connecticut River to capture the truth of the moment in a torrent of pathetic fallacies:

Like a slave, freed from the chains of his presumptuous would-be masters, the river is striking back in wild retaliation. It seems to say: for years, for years I have turned your wheels and lighted your cities and watered your fields and cattle, and heated your homes and transported your commerce; and now, now comes my day of revolt, to show you my strength.

At the conclusion of his report from the Connecticut River Valley, Gibbons paid his respect to those who kept their ears to the flooded ground and saved “thousands of lives” simply through word of mouth: a “newly developed class of men and women,” the “short and long wave amateur operators” who, “[w]hen landlines and other means of high-power communications became disrupted” by the flood, “stuck to their dangerous posts” and “kept going a running fire of information.”

Few understood better than the Headline Hunter how to keep that fire from dying out; and to men like him we must turn to rekindle our imagination in a world awash with images.

3rd Dec 20082nd Aug 2024

Yola (Not Quite Lola); or, The Blonde Who Bombed

Germany. 1932. Another young screen actress is lured from the thriving UFA studios to the motion picture colony in California. Her name was Anna Sten. She was born one hundred years ago (3 December 1908) in what was then Russia. According to Deems Taylor’s Pictorial History of the Movies, Sten was thought of as “another Banky [aforementioned], Garbo, or Dietrich.” Highly, in short. The man who did the thinking was Samuel Goldwyn; and soon after, he must have thought, “What was I thinking!”

European beauties were all the rage in the early 1930s Hollywood. It was a peculiarly anachronistic fad, considering that the talkies called for clear diction, however exotic the looks of the actress from whose mouth the sounds poured into the still imperfect microphones. Beauty, Taylor’s 1948 update of his compendium to motion pictures conceded, Anna Sten “undeniably” possessed; but her “all-too-Russian” accent was better suited to comedy than to tragedy.” Surely, a Russian accent need not be no impediment to melodrama; rather, this non sequitur signals that, by the mid-1940s, Russians were deemed too dangerous or dubious to be romantic leads in Hollywood and were more safely marketable as so many eccentric cousins of Mischa Auer.

When Sten’s first three movies misfired, Goldwyn sensed that the eggs this Kiev chick laid were not golden. By 1935, her leading lady period was effectively over. Still, two years after her last Hollywood flop, the notoriously diction-challenged Sten was given another shot at stardom . . . by stepping behind the microphone of the most popular dramatic show on the air: the Lux Radio Theater. The show’s nominal producer, Cecil B. DeMille, was called upon to remind an audience of millions (most of whom potential moviegoers) why Sten was still a star; no Banky, but bankable:

I first saw Anna Sten in one of the most effective scenes ever filmed. It was in a foreign production with Emil Jannings [Robert Siodmak’s Stürme der Leidenschaft (1932)]. Determined to place her under contract, I started negotiations for the service of this very young girl who had starved with her parents in the Ukraine to become one of Europe’s most glamorous stars. Then, one day, Samuel Goldwyn invited me to his office to ask my opinion of an actress he just signed. The actress was Anna Sten. I was greatly disappointed to lose her, but tonight have the privilege of presenting her in a DeMille production.

The “production” was an unusual one for Lux, a program best known for its microphonic telescoping of Hollywood pictures. Sten was cast in yet another variation on George Barr McCutcheon’s Graustark, that popular, sequel-spawning romance of the early days of the last century. Sten had not appeared in the screen version; indeed, the property was never revisited after the end of the silent era, when last it served as a vehicle for comedienne Marion Davies. By 1937, Graustark was pretty much grave stench. Was Sten being condemned to suffocate in it?

Not quite. The Lux version (8 February 1937) made no attempt at fidelity to the original. Like many romances written or rewritten in the wake It Happened one Night, Graustark was given a screwball spin. Clearly, this radio production was designed to test how Sten’s comic appeal. For this, the air waves were an economically safer testing ground than the sound stage. Besides, it forced the foreigner to prove her command of the English language, albeit in a role demanding an eastern European accent. Sten is delightful (and altogether intelligible) in the role of Princess Yetive; but the broadcast did nothing for her career.

Commemorating Sten’s 100th birthday (she died in 1993), I am turning to her final pre-Hollywood effort, the musical comedy Bomben auf Monte Carlo (1931), from which all the images here are taken. As the bored Princess Yola, a not-so-distant cousin of Yetive, Sten plays opposite German screen idol Hans Albers, the sea captain whom she employs and pursues, using the manual How to Seduce Men as a guide. It is the kind of screwball material that would have served her well overseas. Also in the cast are Heinz Rühmann (last seen here) and Peter Lorre, whose voice remained an asset in Hollywood, and the lively tunes of the Comedian Harmonists (who also appear on screen). This one bombed in name only, however monstrous the title in light of German air attacks on Spain in 1937 . . . shortly after Sten’s first and final Lux broadcast.

It was not so much Sten’s diction that caused her fall as it was the rise of a stentorian dictator. The Old World that Sten had been called upon to represent was fast disappearing; and whatever was distant and foreign soon ceased to be exotic, glamorous, or desirable.

30th Aug 20082nd Aug 2024

Radio at the Movies: Manslaughter (1922)

Radio was little more than a craze back in 1922; but the radio and the microphone were already prominently featured in Cecil B. DeMille’s Manslaughter, released in September 1922, some ten months after US Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover declared the medium to be useless for point-to-point communication, thereby paving the way for broadcasting while leaving hobbyists in the dust of centralized, scheduled entertainment and the big business it was meant to promote. That same year, comedian Ed Wynn made his first foray into radio, the first drama presentation went on the air, and the first commercial went out to anyone equipped with headphones and crystal sets.

The reception was often poor; and critics were not enthusiastic either. One commentator, having just witnessed one of those early broadcast, remarked:

[W]e prefer to stumble downstairs and out again into the silent lanes to meditate on the civilization of 1930, when there will be only one orchestra left on earth, giving nightly world-wide concerts; when all the universities will be combined into one super-institution conducting courses by radio for students in Zanzibar, Kamchatka and Oskaloosa; when instead of newspapers, trained orators will dictate the news of the world day and night, and the bed-time story will be told every evening from Paris to the sleepy children of a weary world; when every person will be instantly accessible day or night to all the bores he knows, and will know them all; when the last vestiges of privacy, solitude and contemplation will have vanished into limbo.

It took a few decades longer for wireless technology to achieve what the reviewer predicted to happen by 1930; but it would not have surprised me if broadcasting had received a similarly unfavorable treatment in one of DeMille’s epics, in which the vices of modern society were frequently likened to the debaucheries of Rome in its fall. Not so.

Manslaughter, as told by DeMille, is a story of redemption in which both Lydia Thorne, the “speed-mad” socialite justly accused of the titular crime and Daniel O’Bannon, the principled District Attorney who sees to it that she pays for same are suffering the consequences of their actions. Rather inexplicably, O’Bannon has fallen in love with the selfish woman he is sending to jail, presumably because he can see her potential for good even though he accepts the duty of showing everyone how bad she really is.

Ultimately, the two are brought back together through the melodramatic expediency of fate and, having confessed everything else, confess their love. She has paid her dues to society and is thoroughly reformed; he has overcome self-destruction and despair. After all, this is a C. B. DeMille picture.

Before the lovers can run off together, the romance is delayed once more by an important announcement. This is where the radio comes in. O’Bannon has decided to run for governor; but one of his rivals for the hand of Lydia Thorne reminds him that she is a convicted criminal and won’t do as the wife of an elected official. Instead of being denounced and exposed by radio, in place to keep the public abreast of election results, O’Bannon grabs the microphone to broadcast a very personal decision.

It seems that DeMille was courting the new medium to prepare for his role as host and ostensible producer of the Lux Radio Theater, for which the story was adapted in 1938, with Fredric March reprising the role of O’Bannon he had played opposite Claudette Colbert, DeMille’s favorite leading lady, in the remake shot in the year so dreaded by the reviewer of that early broadcast back in 1922. Herbert Hoover’s comments notwithstanding, in DeMille’s Manslaughter, the radio is still very much a communication device. O’Bannon broadcasts unannounced and unrehearsed, just as he makes up his mind about Lydia Thorne. Unlike motorcars and their freewheeling owners, radio was fast without being loose.