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She won an amateur night at Keeney's Theater in Brooklyn, singing When You Know You're Not Forgotten by the Girl You Can't Forget. Her prize was $10, and she gathered $23 in coins from the floor of the stage. She worked for George M. Cohan but was fired when Cohan learned that she couldn't dance. After singing with a road show, she appeared in New York musical revues. A struggling young songwriter, Irving Berlin, gave her a musical piece ca..
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John Dunning |
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and go look and see the book was missing from that back room.
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John Dunning |
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This even became a running gag for nightclub comics: the question "What does Ozzie Nelson do for a living?" was prime trivia. For the record, he was a bandleader; because most of the action of Ozzie and Harriet was set on weekends when the boys were out of school, his occupation was never a factor. But the notion persisted as the times changed--here was a family from Neverland, far away from Real Life. Along with Father Knows Best and Leave..
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John Dunning |
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cc6141e
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Donald Shepherd and Robert F. Slatzer wrote a tough biography, The Hollow Man, which depicted Crosby as a cold, calculating dictator who abandoned his first family to start a new one, who turned his back on his wife Dixie Lee as she lay dying of cancer in 1952, who left a cruel will for his second wife, Kathryn, manipulating his money from the grave. The book was condemned by Crosby's most ardent fans as a hatchet job, but the charges linge..
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John Dunning |
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This was not an isolated incident. Crosby in private was easygoing but distant. He was easy to write for, seldom fussing or making major changes in the script. But if he got his back up, there was little room in his makeup for compromise. "He has no friends," his brother Bob told jazz historian Leonard Feather years later. He was seen by some as cold, even ruthless in business matters. He could pass through town without bothering to call a ..
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John Dunning |
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Wildroot Cream Oil.
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John Dunning |
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Burns and Allen household names--Gracie's search for her "lost brother." Whose idea was it? In The Big Broadcast, Frank Buxton and Bill Owen credit Bob Taplinger, head of publicity at CBS. Carroll thought the idea originated with Burns. In one of his books, Burns said it came out of the agency, whose executives wanted to publicize the show's new 9:30 timeslot. All that mattered was this: it was the most sensational thing of its time. It was..
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John Dunning |
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The Century was a high-speed luxury train, used by the rich and famous traveling between Chicago and New York. Sportscaster Bob Elson set up a microphone in Chicago's LaSalle Street Station and tried to intercept well-knowns for spontaneous interviews. Among the celebrities who appeared were Rita Hayworth and Eleanor Roosevelt, but architect Frank Lloyd Wright brushed briskly past. When Elson said he loved Wright's work, Wright replied, "In..
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John Dunning |
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0cba3d0
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Contestants were selected from the studio audience. By answering an initial question, a contestant won three darts, which he threw at the "Dr. Pepper dartboard." The board was ten feet high and contained circles with values ranging from $2 to $16. Three darts in the $16 circle netted a contestant the top preliminary prize, $48. If a contestant missed his question, he was given the chance to win his darts anyway, through a variety of forfeit..
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John Dunning |
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CAB CALLOWAY, a showman who popularized the ballad Minnie the Moocher and took for his trademark the catchphrase "Heigh-de-ho."
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John Dunning |
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CRIME CLUB, murder-mystery anthology, based on and featuring some of the stories in the Doubleday Crime Club novel imprint.
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John Dunning |
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Sample opening: "Yes, this is the Crime Club... I'm the librarian. Silent Witness? Yes, we have that Crime Club story for you. Come right over." Then the "reader" (listener) would arrive, and the "librarian" would put him in "the easy chair by the window." The book was opened, and the story began. An earlier series, The Eno Crime Club, was also composed in part from Crime Club novels."
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John Dunning |
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A young American was almost hit by a piece of enemy shrapnel, then found his father's name cut into the metal--his father, a mechanic at Boeing Aircraft, had cut his name on the engine of his 1929 automobile but had no idea how the scrap fell into the hands of the "Japs" and nearly killed the son."
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John Dunning |
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It was decaffeinated jazz he sent to WJZ via Western Union lines from the Hotel Pennsylvania. A distant echo of New Orleans, yet it spoke to listeners." The '20s style was lively, rich with saxophone and violin and well-sprinkled with novelty tunes. Lopez was instantly identified by his theme, Nola, given a dexterous workout on the Lopez keyboard. Whiteman had Gershwin: his Rhapsody in Blue concert at Aeolian Hall on Feb. 12, 1924, establis..
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John Dunning |
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For NBC's grand opening on Nov. 15, 1926, the network was able to pull in the bands of George Olsen, Vincent Lopez, Ben Bernie, B. A. Rolfe, and Fred Waring from various locations. All were then nationally known. Bernie had been on the air intermittently in 1923. He was actually a "front man," a showman whose success was rooted more in personal charm than musicianship. His trademarks were the glib tongue, the cigar, and the nonsense phrase,..
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John Dunning |
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There was one endless plot at the core of Backstage Wife: sweet Mary Noble stood in the wings as scores of Broadway glamor girls took dead aim at her sometimes fickle man. With Stella Dallas and Helen Trent, Mary was one of the most tortured creatures of the afternoon. The word "suffer" does no justice to Mary's life with Larry Noble. Mary endured. She faced the most startling array of hussies, jezebels, and schemers ever devised in a subge..
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John Dunning |
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THE BILLIE BURKE SHOW, situation comedy.
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John Dunning |
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Best known as Glinda, the good witch in The Wizard of Oz (and as the wife of Ziegfeld), Billie Burke had a rosy, upbeat series promoting herself as "that bright morning star." She portrayed a woman of uncertain age who would go out of her way to aid a bum in distress or help neighborhood kids get a playground. She constantly mixed metaphors, as in "Let sleeping dogs gather no moss," and was well placed on Saturday mornings."
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John Dunning |
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Each episode began and ended in trouble," wrote Erik Barnouw. "Sunny stretches were in the middle. A Friday ending was expected to be especially gripping, to hold interest over the weekend. A serial was not conceived in terms of beginning or end; such terms had no meaning. It ended when sponsorship ended."
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John Dunning |
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Frank Hummert was a Chicago copywriter in the '20s. In 1930 he met Anne Ashenhurst, a former newspaperwoman who became his assistant and, five years later, his wife. The Hummerts had a formula that was surefire: appeal to the lowest common denominator, make it clear, grab the heartstrings, and reap the rewards. With writer Robert Hardy Andrews they created The Stolen Husband, one of radio's earliest soaps. Hummert went on to do the most not..
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John Dunning |
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A factory it was, rivaling such earlier operations as Beadle & Adams (creators of Victorianera novels by the dozens), the Stratemeyer syndicate (a powerhouse in juvenile thriller books, creators of Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, the Rover Boys, the Hardy Boys, The Bobbsey Twins, and others going strong today), and the system that enabled Alexandre Dumas to turn out more than 250 books in his lifetime.
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John Dunning |
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The Hummerts perfected a soap formula that was best explained by Erik Barnouw. A series of narrative and dramatic hooks was woven into a three- or four-week main storyline. Before the main crisis was resolved, the next one was stirred in as a subplot, which was brought up to a full boil as the old story was resolved and dropped. It was the simplest kind of radio, ripe for satire: comics Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding had little to exaggerate ..
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John Dunning |
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Durham produced his plays as a freelancer; he was never part of the WMAQ staff during his show's run. "I had spent a lot of time studying Dickens," he said in a 1983 interview, a few years before he died. "I had discovered that a Dickens character made you love him or hate him almost at once, and I used that same approach, of setting the characters as quickly as possible, as sharply as possible."
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John Dunning |
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Destination Freedom, though it never appeared on a national network, was one of the most powerful and important shows of its day. It was a striking achievement, a voice whose passion and courage overcame every budgetary shortcoming to become perhaps the strongest plea for Negro rights ever heard on American radio. Its original purpose was to dramatize and reveal little-known lives from black Americana. But even in such early shows as Railwa..
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John Dunning |
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Richard Durham was a black writer whose credits in radio would run a gamut from Irna Phillips serials to prestige plays for such as The CBS Radio Workshop. But in Destination Freedom Durham wrote from the heart. Anger simmers at the foundation of these shows, rising occasionally to a wail of agony and torment. On no other show was the term "Jim Crow" used as an adjective, if at all: nowhere else could be heard the actual voices of black act..
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John Dunning |
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And if the opening wasn't busy enough, there was Johnny, the Philip Morris bellhop, chanting "Callll for Philip Morraiss!" over and over." --
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John Dunning |
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Cloak and Dagger was lost in the summertime NBC schedule, lumped into a mystery block with several other shows of far inferior quality. It never attracted a sponsor and got almost no critical attention, but the recent discovery of the entire run reveals a gripping show with every story an unpredictable departure from formula. It was the story of the wartime activities of the OSS--the Office of Strategic Services--"this country's first all-o..
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John Dunning |
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Radio's Croupier played strongly upon Webster's definition of the word--an attendant who collects and pays money at a gaming table. The host was omniscient, offering wry commentary on the movements of the characters. I am the Croupier.... I spin the wheel of life.... Madame et monsieur, place your bets! The wheel stops, the ball drops, and a long feminine sigh is heard. Thirteen black! ... and the wondrous voice of the male player: I've won..
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John Dunning |
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There were adaptations: The Happy Prince, by Oscar Wilde (Dec. 26, 1936), and The Signalman, by Charles Dickens (Jan. 23, 1937). In
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John Dunning |
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Harry Tugend had abandoned radio to write films; Allen's writers were now Arnold Auerbach and Herman Wouk (later famous as the author of The Caine Mutiny and other bestselling novels). Wouk and Auerbach may have been the most rewritten team in radio, for Allen continued to do the script's final drafts.
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John Dunning |
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And the closings were also done to formula. There was always a senorita, and Cisco always collected his kiss. Said Radio Life: "For each dark-eyed conquest he has a string of pearls ('they belonged to my sainted mother') and a kiss before he rides off with Pancho into a blazing desert sunset." Up came the dreamy organ music: the senorita would breathe, "Ooooooh, Cisco!" and Cisco would answer "Ooooooh, senorita!" The action would cut to the..
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John Dunning |
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The camaraderie of the trail was a constant. To Cisco, Pancho was "Chico," and their allegiances were first and foremost to each other. Though Cisco would often scold his partner for stupidity, no other man was allowed to denigrate his friend. Cisco was a fighter, a formidable foe with fists or guns. The fights, especially in the Jack Mather syndications, were wildly verbal, with Cisco and Pancho jabbering away even in the thick of fisticuf..
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John Dunning |
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The show would bring together "the elect of the entertainment world" to discuss in a heavily scripted but spontaneous-sounding hour "anything under the radio sun: poetry, music, drama, death, taxes, fur coats"--all the topics that might be expected to "come up" naturally at a social gathering of such luminaries. Colman and Grant were obviously cerebral talents; Lombard and the Marx Brothers, though popularly known as madcaps, were keenly re..
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John Dunning |
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Each star was given carte blanche approval over his or her segment or appearance. "It might have worked if actors weren't all children," Carroll wrote. But "each week they'd all phone each other and ask, 'Are you going to be on next Sunday? Oh no? Well, then, I don't think I will either.'" Thus was the concept defeated. "They all appeared together almost all the time, and the money ran out fast, fast, fast! There was either a feast or a fam..
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John Dunning |
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Jackson Beck as the Cisco Kid, "O. Henry's beloved badman who rides the romantic trail that leads sometimes to adventure, often to danger, but always to beautiful senoritas." Louis Sorin as Pancho, his fat comedic sidekick."
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John Dunning |
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This series grew out of a deep interest in psychology on the part of producer Wilson. It explored the moment when a character stood at the brink of a crime, stepped over the brink, and was brought to account.
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John Dunning |
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The appearance of Destination Moon in movie houses helped make 1950 the year of S-F on radio. Dimension X rose to the task, proving that radio and science fiction were ideally compatible. The series demonstrated (though it would take the perfection of television to prove it) that adding a picture to a story of vision, illusion, or myth does not automatically enhance things. The tube is too small, the props too artificial (no matter how inge..
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John Dunning |
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Joseph Kearns as the Crazy Quilt Dragon. Hanley Stafford as Snapper Snitch the Crocodile. Howard McNear as Samuel the Seal and as Slim Pickins the Cowboy. Elvia Allman as Penelope the Pelican. Elliott Lewis as Mr. Presto the Magician. Lou Merrill as Santa Claus. Frank Nelson as Captain Tin Top. Cy Kendall as Captain Taffy the Pirate and as the Indian Chief. Gale Gordon as Weary Willie the Stork and as the Ostrich. Ted Osborne as Professor W..
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John Dunning |
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An advocacy group, the Cinnamon Bear Brigade, operates in Portland, Ore., and claims 400 members nationwide. The outstanding cast was identified by Frank Nelson, with additional names supplied by SPERDVAC, the oldtime radio society of Southern California. But the actor who played the male lead, Jimmy Barton, eludes them all. Not even the most ardent Cinnamon Bear advocates have been able to supply his name.
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John Dunning |
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The Cinnamon Bear was
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John Dunning |
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In the initial NBC series, Greenwood played a neophyte reporter on a small newspaper, who aspired to Hollywood stardom. In the regular season, she lived in "the little town of Lake-view," where she took over the raising of the three Barton children (little Robert and teenagers Jack and Barbara) and tried to keep the Barton estate solvent. The estate consisted of a heavily mortgaged house, "a lunchroom near the high school that barely pays f..
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John Dunning |
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Crime Classics grew out of a long-standing and deep interest of actor-director Elliott Lewis in history's great murder cases. Lewis had compiled an extensive library of true crime cases, often primary source material dating from the 17th century. He decided to re-create not only the facts of the crimes but also the times in which they had occurred. This would encompass the sounds of an Edinburgh street in the 1830s as well as the dialects, ..
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John Dunning |
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Orson Welles, 21 years old and unknown, offered Shakespeare: Hamlet (Sept. 19 and Nov. 14, 1936) and Macbeth (Feb. 28, 1937).
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John Dunning |
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In fact, the humor was extraordinary. The narrator, Thomas Hyland, was played absolutely deadpan by Lou Merrill. Over the sound of rainfall came his droll voice. "That's the way it sounded when it rained, because the room was just below gutter level, and the rainwater rushed by the room's only window, and many lodgers caught cold in this room. They were lucky. Many other lodgers wound up on dissecting tables. They were murdered, by Mr. Burk..
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John Dunning |