Tag: Radio City Playhouse

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Hit and Run: Allan Stevenson (1918-2007)

You have probably never heard of Allan Stevenson, the dead man whose voice is now in my ear. I am quite used to hearing the dead speak. Listening to recordings of old radio melodramas is not unlike attending a séance in which the voices of the departed are being made audible by means of a powerful medium. Mr. Stevenson, though, has not long been what is generally thought of as permanently silent. He walked among the living only a few hours ago, an old man, propped up by a cane and blind in one eye. I may have passed him by on one of my many walks downtown to nearby Hunter College or on my way to see a friend who lived in Stevenson’s neighborhood on East 72nd Street. Absorbed in thoughts, I am often dead to those around me, which is why I feel compelled to lend an ear, however belatedly.

According to an indifferently penned article in the New York Daily News, the retired actor who had performed on Broadway in Maxwell Anderson’s long-running Anne of the Thousand Days starring Rex Harrison (1948-49) and the Phil Silvers success Do Re Mi (1960-62), was killed at 2:36 AM by a hit-and-run driver while trying to cross First Avenue in an attempt to get a cup of coffee, a last friendly gesture to a doorman on his block.

Playing in the theater of the mind some six decades earlier, Stevenson was faced with many perilous situations on both sides of the law; and some of his lives were spent before the conclusion of a thirty-minute broadcast. He had supporting roles on programs like Crime Fighters, a dramatic series promising listeners “master manhunters to match master criminals,” and John Steele, Adventurer. In an episode of the latter, Stevenson played a crooked jockey who has his hopes for a life on Easy Street dashed after riding “The Long Shot” (18 April 1950). It is the story of a man “trapped in the bitterness of the past and [put] face to face with the future,” a man who “learned too late that no one can live alone.”

On NBC’s Radio City Playhouse, best known for staging what would later turn into the Academy Awards behemoth All About Eve (as discussed here), Stevenson was cast in the Runyonesque “Betrayal” (30 August 1948) and, more prominently, in the murder mystery “The Wine of Oropalo” (18 December 1949), in which he played the victim of a deadly manipulation.

In Top Secret, a series of World War II espionage thrillers written and directed by Radio City Playhouse producer Harry W. Junkin, Stevenson was twice cast opposite “gorgeous Ilona Massey” (previously mentioned here). In “The Unknown Mission” (30 July 1950), he played a French baron of considerable wealth and charm whom Massey’s glamorous spy is called upon to eliminate.

“I wish we had proof that he is an enemy agent,” she sighs, “It is hard for a woman, without knowing why, to murder.” The hit-noblewoman seems ideally equipped to carry out the assignment. After all, the young Frenchman has “only one weakness,” she is told. “Women.” His grace, however, is well prepared for the attack. He, too, has murder on his mind; until, that is, he permits himself to wonder whether she might care for him. The two assassins find it impossible to follow their respective orders . . . but the duke’s days are numbered all the same.

A week later, Stevenson was again heard on the program in an episode titled “Disaster in London” (6 August 1950), this time portraying a British intelligence agent who is to assist the baroness to thwart enemy plans to poison and kill the entire population of the metropolis. As is made plain to the listener in one of those Shakespearean asides so effective in audio drama, the Englishman is a traitor, himself involved in the chemical warfare plot.

After learning that recordings of his private conversations bespeak his double-agency, this son of a false hero breaks down to disclose his less-than-ideological motives. “There is no dignity left for you but silence,” the traitor’s mother remarks, only to demand an explanation for her son’s actions.

Programs like Top Secret seem an unworthy memorial to an actor who may have hoped for a rather more distinguished career in the theater. And yet, it is the indignity of his death that calls for an outcry, a voice to expose the infamy of his silent killing . . .

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On This Day in 1949: The Radio Tells Americans All About “Eve”

Well, before I make an appointment with The Phantom President, another one of the lesser known motion pictures starring my favorite actress, Ms. Claudette Colbert, I am going to listen again to a radio adaptation of a story that was initially considered as a vehicle for Colbert, but fell into the lap of lucky Bette Davis instead. I am referring of course to “The Wisdom of Eve,” a dramatization of which was broadcast on this day, 24 January, in 1949—thus nearly two years prior to the general US release of the celebrated movie version known as All About Eve.

This is another adventure in recycling, an exploration of radio’s mediating position in the every widening web of multimediacy. Like Eve Harrington, radio was a spider—a yarn-spinning upstart snatching a principal role from its respected elders. Talking itself into the confidence of promoters and audiences alike, radio not only surpassed the theatre and the press in influence and mass appeal, but continued to take advantage of the talent it lured away from those competing media.

“Radio, of itself, has developed almost no writers. It has appropriated almost all of them, at least all of those who could tell a good story.” This assessment of the so-called writer’s medium was made in 1939 by Max Wylie, a former director of script and continuity at US network CBS; he went on to work for the radio department of a major advertising agency and wrote several handbooks for writers or producers of radio drama and edited a number of radio play anthologies.

Wylie knew what he was talking about. Although original plays became more prevalent during the Second World War, when radio served as a major purveyor of propaganda packaged as entertainment, this observation remained essentially an accurate one and does much to explain the gradual decline of radio dramatics in the US during the 1950s, when television assumed this mediating, central position in American culture. Proving the infinite adaptability of popular culture, radio programmed its own redundancy.

“The Wisdom of Eve” first appeared as a short story in the May 1946 issue of Cosmopolitan; before it became All About Eve, author Mary Orr adapted her nearly forgotten piece of magazine fiction for the airwaves. And quite a radiogenic production it turned out to be when it was presented on NBC’s Radio City Playhouse.

“If you were listening to the radio last night,” a female voice addresses the audience, “perhaps you heard what [a certain] radio commentator had to say about Eve Harrington.” On a filter microphone, a device often used to recreate the distortion of voices on the wire or the wireless, the enthusiastic commentator spreads the word about the meteoric rise of one Eve Harrington, “the most-loved, most sought-after, most talented actress Hollywood has seen in a generation.”

Without contradicting or mocking this statement, the narrator takes over again, and her encounter with the “hauntingly lovely” Eve is played out for us in dramatic flashbacks. The speaker is not the bitter and disillusioned Margo, the aging diva, but her friend, Karen Richards, wife of the playwright of Margo’s latest stage success.

What unfolds is the familiar story of Eve’s progress, her seeming innocence, her ambition, and her successful scheming. For the sake of her husband, a man being “made miserable by a temperamental actress,” Karen sides with Eve, too late undeceived about the young woman’s character.

In this play, the radio (the voice of the gossip columnist) is complicit in the world’s deception about Eve. Forever the snake in the make-believe garden west of Eden, it tells us what we want to hear, rather than what we ought to know. Luckily, the listeners of the Radio City Playhouse got just what they wanted that day: a darn good story. What’s more, the motion picture people tuned in as well, and the little piece Orr had trouble selling for years was turned into box-office gold.