Tag: Natalie Masters

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Out of Service: YUkon 2-8209

I hadn’t dialled YUkon 2-8209 in a while. And when I did so today, I realized that the number was about to go out of service. I managed that final call, but the gal on the line, a sassy number named Candy Matson, was hardly herself. The gal from San Francisco was obviously flustered and admitted to being too “confused” to know just what she was saying. At a loss for words? It’s certainly not the Candy that had become so irresistible to thousands of strangers who tuned in each week to hear the dame with the Ann Sothern comfort in her timbre as she talked herself in and out of precarious situations involving assorted felonies. And talk she did. Hers was the kind of tongue that could arrest even my philandering ear.

To radio historian Jack French, who devotes a chapter of his Private Eyelashes to her adventures, Candy Matson, YUkon 2-8209 was “undoubtedly” the “best radio series featuring a lady detective.” Perhaps, she was not quite a lady. “My name is Candy Matson,” the crime-solving siren introduced herself in April 1949 (an audition recording for the series’ 30 June 1949 premiere), and got straight to the point of her enterprise:

I like money. Lots of it. That’s why I became a private eye. And, too, you meet such interesting people. Mostly dead. But, getting back to the cash angle, that’s why I took on the Donna Dunham case. I knew it was full of dynamite. But a girl has to eat now and then, maintain a penthouse on Telegraph Hill, and keep the moths out of a few mink coats. Doesn’t she? Sure. And a shot fired into your room from across the street at three in the morning is just one of those occupational hazards.

Then, how come Candy was so beside and unlike herself on this day, 21 May, back in 1951? The independent spirit had been knocked out of her; and the screwball banter between the high-heeled gumshoe and Police Lieutenant Ray Mallard, who, as French reminds us, was not initially conceived as a love interest for Candy, made way for connubial cooing and the silence that ensues. During her first outing on the air, she had dodged a bullet; but it was an arrow that ultimately did her in.

To French, Candy’s gushing “in the style of a soap opera ingénue over Mallard’s marriage proposal” made for a “tepid climax to an otherwise remarkable series.” Sure, Candy and Ray could have gone on Nick and Nora-ing it for a while; but even the Charleses were eventually encumbered with a thin man of their own.

Besides, Candy was not cut out to be sidekicked around. She enjoyed the rare distinction of having rather than being an assistant, paired as she was with the cultured, at times boozy, and apparently queer photographer Rembrandt “I squirm with intrigue!” Watson, a sort of aging Asta dubbed by an ersatz Karloff. Mallard, meanwhile, rarely got closer to the titular heroine than an imaginary lover like Mr. Boynton . . . until our Miss Matson set out to solve her final case, which opens with her foreshadowing chase after him.

NBC’s ear Candy being stashed away in the keep of matrimony, that 1950s signpost of homebound subordination, of picket-fenced in independence, the lovely voice of Natalie Masters—who was married to the program’s producer—simply dissolved in tears as she accepted the ring and the retirement plan that came with it. That’s what I call giving your devoted followers the third finger, left hand.

A year later, realizing that Candy’s death by marriage might have been premature, producer Monty Masters gave the gal a new if still bell-ringing number (Yukon 3-8309) and tried to start all over again, keeping the police lieutenant and cancellation at bay. “Every time we even get near the subject of matrimony, Mallard ducks,” Ms. Matson sighs as if her marriage had never happened. By that time, however, it was a case of an admiring crowd divorcing the medium. Broadcasters, sponsors, and manufacturers alike began courting a public eager to get a load of the kind of candy that radio had been dangling before their mind’s eye. Boy, did they get the wrong number!

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Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Ann Sothern, Multimediated Minx

Well, this is one of those days when it is best to give the old peepers a rest. The wintry sky is of that dull hue your bleached undies acquire if you’ve been too careless again to sort your laundry. There is little comfort in the fact that the pale face staring at you in the mirror is of a similarly drab shade and that, even though the days are short, it’s too early yet for that warming glass of brandy. You realize that the word of the day over at Waking Ambrose, with whose creator you exchanged a few e-messages earlier, is “tedium,” and that your current mood fits that description so well that you refrain from adding your definition: “The abundance of life wasted on a barren imagination.”

Okay, snap out of it and perk up already. How about a generous helping of lip from someone perennially pert? Someone who’s got verve and nerve enough to be unfazed by whatever it is that daunts you. Whether you’d like to be with her or—what the heck—be her, you know just the dame. You’ve been reminded of her only last night, watching Desperate Housewives and thinking how much that series borrows from A Letter to Three Wives, a voice-over narrated film comedy starring . . . Ann Sothern (pictured here, in another artistic misfire by yours truly). Yes, it’s a little Sothern comfort you crave. So, quit whining, close your bloodshot eyes and let some sass waft your way by listening to The Adventures of Maisie.

As Maisie, Sothern was a siren whose tongue launched a thousand quips—and lashed the hopes of many an ill-suited suitor. Each episode of her syndicated radio show—an aural continuation of MGM B-movies like Maisie, Congo Maisie, Swing Shift Maisie and Undercover Maisie—begins with a wolf call, a “Hi ya, babe, say how about a . . .” from an oversexed admirer, a slap, the “Ouch” of a bruised ego, and the triumphant reply “Does that answer your question, buddy?”

Maisie knows all the answers, right and wrong. She doesn’t even let the announcer have the last word when introducing her adventures: “Yup, I’m Maisie, like the man said. Maisie Revere. I was born in Brooklyn in nineteen hundred and . . . well, I was born in Brooklyn.” That’s enough by way of introduction.

At this point, Maisie goes straight into the retelling of her latest exploits, a dramatized story from the annals of her incident-riddled and peripatetic existence. “I’m in show business. A very fascinating business to be in,” she scoffed, “because you meet so many interesting people who are also out of work.” She always found herself “out of work in the darndest places”; and whether mingling with the hoi polloi or the hoity-toity, whether finding jobs out west or in London salon modelling gowns for “one of them stuffy titled dames,” she was never quite at home but far from lost anywhere.

Long before she became American television viewers’ Private Secretary, the voice of My Mother the Car, or that desperate female who left the Lady in a Cage, wisecracking Sothern was the last word in high-polished brass. With a sultry broadcast voice that only Natalie Masters as Candy Matson could rival, she had you in her dark corner from the start, no matter how many slaps you’d receive from a former title-holder like Ringside Maisie. Give her a listen, won’t you? She just might respond to your introduction with an inviting “Likewise, I’m sure.”