Back to Back-to-Back; or, Serialization of Schemes

A long time (well, okay, make that ‘about four and a half years’) ago I came to the realization that the key to keeping an online journal—and one’s fingers regularly on the keyboard in its service—is serialization: some kind of evolving plot that, like life and Stella Dallas on a diet, keeps thickening and thinning from Monday till Doomsday until the inevitable sundown that not even Guiding Light could outshine.

Despite this realization, though, I have never managed to make a success of stringing together the latest on my follies and failures, mainly because I did not set out to make my person the axis around which this less than celestial body of essays spins. That, in recent months, the revolutions have ground to a near halt and affairs have become all but devolutionary is largely owing to the series of friction that is my one life to live beyond these virtual pages. These days, writing in installments begins and ends in ‘stall,’ which is the least I tend to do best.

Not that the contemplation of the presumably out-of-date lends itself to frequent updates. I mean, what’s the point of being current when your harvest is raisins? For the love of ribbon mikes, how many times can you run away with the A & P Gypsies and still expect anyone to follow the run-down caravan in which you survey the bygone scene? Good for how many yarns are the bewildering progeny of the Happiness Boys, that old “Interwoven Pair,” until any attempt at catching up with the cat’s whiskers and its litter unravels like knitting gone kitty’s corner? Why go on circulating gossip from the Make Believe Ballroom as the world turns the radio off?

Clearly, there is room for a chorus line of doubt when I now announce the beginning of a new chapter in the cancellation dodging saga of broadcastellan. Anyone hoping for a weekly quintuplet of All My Mind’s Children should be advised that this is going to be more a case of One Man’s Family Planning . . .

"2X2L calling CQ. . .": The Night They Made Up Our Minds About Realism

This is just the night for a return—a return to that old, beloved yet woefully neglected hobbyhorse of mine. You know, the Pegasus of hobbyhorses: the radio. After all, it is the anniversary of the Mercury Theatre’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast, a date that lives in infamy for giving those who say that “seeing is believing” an ear-opening poke in the eye. These days, the old Pegasus doesn’t get much of an airing. It may have sprung from the blood of Medusa—but that old Gorgon, television, still has a petrifying grip on our imagination.

What made “The War of the Worlds” so convincing was that it treated fantasy to the trickery of realism, by turning an old sci-fi yarn into what, too many, sounded like a documentary. As the program’s general editor, John Houseman—who gave up the ghost on Halloween in 1988—recalled about the Mercury’s holiday offering, not even the script girl had much faith in the material: “It’s all too silly! We’re going to make fools of ourselves. Absolute idiots.” Instead, the broadcast made fools of thousands by exploiting their pre-war invasion anxieties.

As I put it in Etherized Victorians, broadcast fictions could

tap into what McLuhan argued to be “inherent in the very nature” of radio—the power to turn “psyche and society into a single echo chamber.”

The more urgent concern for broadcasters had always been whether it was proper for radio dramatists to exploit this power at all, especially after the codes of radio’s surface realism had been so forcefully violated by Howard Koch’s dramatization [. . .]. In one of the most disturbing scenes of the play, a speaker identified as a CBS announcer addresses the public to document the end of civilization—“This may be the last broadcast”—until succumbing to the noxious fumes that spread across Manhattan and extinguish all human life below. His body having collapsed at the microphone, a lone voice—rendered distant and faint by a filter—attempts to establish communication.

It is the voice of a radio operator: “2X2L calling CQ. . . . 2X2L calling CQ . . . . 2X2L calling CQ . . . New York. Isn’t there anyone on the air? [Isn’t there anyone on the air?] Isn’t there anyone. . . .” The Mercury Players’ “holiday offering” had not only “destroyed the Columbia Broadcasting System,” as Welles jested at the conclusion of his infamous Halloween prank, but had pronounced the death of its receivers—the listening public. Considering the near panic that ensued, was it advisable to open the realm Esslin called a “region akin to the world of the dream” without clearly demarcating it as fantasy by resorting to the spells of Trilby, Chandu, or The Shadow?

After that night, the aural medium as governed by those in charge of the realties of commerce and convenience seemed destined to perpetuate what Trilling referred to as the “chronic American belief” in the “incompatibility of mind and reality.”

Picture source: Radio Guide (19 November 1938)

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Related writings
“‘War of the Worlds’: A Report from the Sensorial Battlefield”
“‘War of the Worlds’: The Election Edition”
“Thousands Panic When Nelson Eddy Begins to Sing”

“Anyone we know?”: An Absentminded Review of The Royal Family

What a tramp my mind has turned into lately. I would like to think that I still got one of my own, to have and to hold on to, for richer or poorer, and all that; but every now and again, and rather too frequently at that, the willful one takes off without the slightest concern for my state of it. It used to be that I could gather my thoughts like keepsakes to store a mind with; these days, I wonder just who’s minding the store. And just when I feel that I’ve lost it completely, there it comes ambling in, disheveled, unruly, and well out of its designated head. With a little luck, the suitcase of mementoes with which it absconded turns up again, similarly disorganized, rarely complete if at times strangely augmented. Perhaps, minds resent being crossed once too often. That has crossed mine, to be sure.

Anyway, where was I going with this? Ah, yes. Straight back to New York City. The Biltmore Theatre. Make that the Samuel J. Friedman, as it is now called. Built in 1925 and steeped in comedy theater tradition, the former Biltmore is just the venue for the current revival of The Royal Family, of which production, scheduled to open 8 October 2009, I had the good fortune to catch the second preview a few weeks ago. Classic crowd-pleasers like Poppa (1929), Brother Rat (1936-38), My Sister Eileen (1940-42), and the long-running Barefoot in the Park (1963-67) were staged here, where Mae West caused a sensation in October 1928 with Pleasure Man, a play they let go on for all of two performances.

While Ethel Barrymore might have wished a similarly compact run for The Royal Family, the play amused rather than scandalized theatergoers who appreciated it as a wildly flamboyant yet precisely cut gem of wit set firmly in a mount of genuine sentiment—which is just what you’d expect from a collaboration of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. Histrionics, theatrical disguises, a bit of swashbuckling—this screwball of a jewel still generates plenty of sparks, even if the preview I attended needed a little polish to show it off it to its full advantage.

Informed that her son may have killed a man, the matriarch of the family inquires: “Anyone we know?” Among the somebodies we know to have slain them with lines like these in the past are Broadway and Hollywood royals like Otto Kruger, Ruth Hussey, Eva Le Gallienne, Fredric March, Rosemary Harris, and . . . Rosemary Harris. As is entirely in keeping with the play’s premise—three generations of a theatrical family congregating and emoting under one roof—Ms. Harris is now playing the mother of the character she portrayed back in 1975. Regrettably, unlike Estelle Winwood in the cleverly truncated Theatre Guild on the Air production broadcast on 16 December 1945, Ms. Harris as Fanny Cavendish was not quite eccentric or electric enough, although she certainly possesses the curtains-foreshadowing vulnerability her character refuses to acknowledge.

Decidedly more energetic and Barrymore or less ideally cast were the other members of the present production, which includes Jan Maxwell as Julie, Reg Rogers as Tony, Tony Roberts as Oscar, John Glover as Herbert Dean and Saturday Night Live alumna Ana Gasteyer as Kitty. Whenever the pace slackened and the madcap was beginning to resemble a nightcap or some such old hat, I could generally rely on Ms. Gasteyer’s gestures and facial expressions to keep me amused.

There was a moment, though, when my attention span was being put to the test—and promptly failed. I looked at the fresh though not especially fascinating face of Kelli Barrett (as Gwen) and found myself transported to the 1920s, those early days of the Biltmore. I started to think of or hope for a youthful, vivacious Claudette Colbert performing on Broadway at that time, a few years before she left the stage to pursue a career in motion pictures. Why, I wondered, was my mind walking off with her?

Well, eventually it all came home to me—my mind sauntering back in with a duffle bag of stuff I didn’t remember possessing—when I perused the playbill to learn about the history of the Biltmore. Colbert, I learned, had performed on that very stage back in 1927, the year in which The Royal Family was written, enjoying her first major success in The Barker. Decades later, she returned there for The Kingfishers (1978) and A Talent for Murder (1981). So, there was something of a presence of Ms. Colbert on that stage, even though she never played young Gwen.

Today, researching a little to justify what still seemed like a mere digression in a half-hearted review of the play, I discovered (consulting the index of Bernard F. Dick’s recent biography of Colbert) that the actress did get hold of a minor branch of the Royal Family tree when she seized the opportunity to portray Gwen’s mother in a 1954 television adaptation of the play. That version, the opener for CBS’s The Best of Broadway series, was broadcast live on 16 September—which happens to be the day I stepped inside the Biltmore to catch up with The Royal Family.

Perhaps it is just as well that I give in and let my mind go blithely astray. For all the exasperation of momentary lapses, of missed punch lines, plot lines or points my thoughts are beside of, the returns are welcome and oddly reassuring. Besides, the old tramp wouldn’t have it any other way . . .

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Related writings
“Not Every Tome, Dick, and Harry; or, How to Approach Claudette Colbert”
"‘. . . it’s been a good day’: A Cake for Mr. B”
“ Is That a Barrymore Behind the Mike?”

Related recording
“The Royal Family,” Theater Guild on the Air (16 December 1945)

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.

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Related writings
"Shoes Across the Table"
"Murder in the Backroom; or, No Place for a Lady"
"Mary Margaret McBride, Commercial Correspondent"
"Orson and the Count: The Man Cast as The Shadow as the Man Who Cast None"

Related recordings
"Ladies Never Lie . . . Much," The Saint (7 January 1951)
"The Butcher Case," Richard Diamond (7 January 1950)
"The Butcher Case," Richard Diamond (9 March 1951)

Gone South . . . and Very Pacific: Broadway on an Off Day

I suppose I am back in my element (earth, mingled with dust), being that I can reminisce at last about my recent trip to New York City from the comfort of my own patch of terra firma across the pond. Okay, so I never managed to turn writing into a living; but I sure can turn life into writing—provided I can go on about past experiences once I am good and ready, once that which has been going on and gone through my mind is bona fide bygone. Not one to multitask, I somehow cannot both be living and writing simultaneously, which is why Twitter is not for me. I am not cut out to be an on-the-spot correspondent. You won’t catch me with my finger on the pulse of anything yet living other than in my thoughts where, quickened by imagination, anything presumably dead and gone is readily revived.

Perhaps, going live is not the same as being in the moment; at least, performances need not be, by virtue of being live, worth a moment of my time. For the record (and this is a new record to me, for I am about to change my tune): canned performances are not necessarily inferior to live ones. At least I thought so a few weeks ago while watching a recorded broadcast of a dazzling Metropolitan Opera production of Madama Butterfly, screened on the plaza in front of the building housing that venerable institution. There I was (leaning against a trash can, no less), joined by hundreds of strangers, to take in, free of charge, the musical equivalent of cured meat, a pickled delicacy shared out to lure those partaking into the venue to shell out serious money for the supposedly real thing. Maybe I’ll think differently tomorrow at the local cinema, where I will be catching a high definition broadcast of the current National Theatre production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, live from London; but I sure realized that live is not to be confused with lively when I went to see South Pacific at New York’s Lincoln Center Theater, just a few feet from the screen where Madame Butterfly had flickered before my teary eyes.

South Pacific left my peepers dry, even though I was on the brink of welling up when I reminded myself that I had let go of more than $90 for a discount ticket to for the dubious privilege of beholding said spectacle. What I witnessed was Broadway on an off night, some less than “Enchanted Evening” during which the cast went through the motions like Zombies on sabbatical. I knew as much when I opened my playbill to discover one of those white slips that, on the Great White Way, are equivalent to a pink one: Paulo Szot, the celebrated lead, had been replaced for the evening (and several weeks to come) by one William Michals.

Turns out, Mr. Michals had all the charm and thespian animation of a Bela Lugosi. Not that Laura Osnes (as Nellie Forbush) was out-Mitziying Ms. Gaynor. She did not as much try to wash that man right outa her hair as dispose of him with a purple rinse. As I remarked to my fellow onlooker, the pair had less going on between them as might be generated by a preschooler’s chemistry set.

Almost everything about this potentially engrossing play seemed to have been rehashed on a desperately reduced flame. I, for one, was boiling; it wasn’t “Happy Talk” you’d have overheard had you been eavesdropping on us as we left the theater. Sure, the production had been running for a year and a half and wasn’t exactly “Younger Than Springtime”; but the Pacific, never more deserving of the name, has rarely felt quite this tepid. A rousing rendition of “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame” and the still-spirited performance of Danny Burstein (as Billis) aside, the promise of Bali Ha’i never left anyone feeling quite this low . . .

Yoo-hoo! Isn't anybody anymore?

Remembering Gertrude Berg, that is. Having been to Fleischmanns last year (without spotting her tombstone there), I was thrilled to be catching Aviva Kempner’s much reviewed if ultimately unsatisfying documentary Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan last week. After all, it is not a film you are likely to see in Europe (or, for that matter, in any US multiplex); and I doubt whether it will ever be released in Wales, my present home. Who, after all, remembers (or ever had the opportunity of) tuning in to The Goldbergs, or The Rise of the Goldbergs, as Berg’s program was initially called in the days before television?

Kempner’s filmic memorial to Berg and her creation—heard on radio and seen on stage, television and the movies—aims at countering the oblivion to which the writer-producer-actress and her signature character have long been consigned; but, judging from the elderly, Jewish audience among which I found myself, aside from my good friend, Brian, Mrs. Goldberg is not likely to find new admirers through Kempner’s polite and downright reverent re-introduction, however deserving she may be of praise.

“Why, for all her popularity and apparent influence, is Gertrude Berg so little remembered today?” Paul Farhi of the Washington Post asked back in July 2009. It is a question Kempner does not trouble herself to answer, other than with a resounding “Why indeed?” Predating but overshadowed by I Love Lucy, The Goldbergs come across as little more than a noteworthy, ethnic curiosity, a historical footnote, the stuff of nostalgia. At least, Kempner’s documentary, which New York Post critic V. A. Musetto called “fawning and formulaic,” did little to convince me otherwise—and I don’t need convincing.

“Ulleright, ulleright!” For all its shortcomings, Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg is still a welcome and overdue tribute to of a long overlooked icon of American popular culture—and an enterprising, emancipated woman at that; but it is also a rather perfunctory and historically questionable piece of bio-cinematography, replete with a poorly reenacted scene from Berg’s earliest radio script.

Except for a few tantalizing clips of Edward R. Murrow's interview with Berg on Person to Person and those seemingly random excerpts from The Goldbergs kinescopes, the documentary, like most pieces of ocular proof, is at a loss to fill the screen, resorting to images only remotely related to the subject; or, else, to talking heads like Ed Asner’s and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who recalls being addressed as Mrs. Goldberg). Meanwhile, the snippets from Berg’s radio and television broadcasts are often unintelligible, if it weren’t for the subtitles. The result is about as funny as a translated joke—and certainly not remotely as amusing or charming as Berg’s glossy autobiography Molly and Me (1961).

Here, for instance, is how autobiographer Berg made the connection between her parentage and her wireless offspring. Those watching Kempner’s documentary never get to hear about it. To them, Molly is a kindly woman leaning out of a window, chatting to her neighbors—and an audience long since dispersed—or praising the miracle of Sanka Coffee, instead of yelling “Yoo-hoo, is anybody?” into a telephonic darkness just beyond her Bronx apartment:

My father was a special fan of the dumbwaiter and when radio was invented, he gave up the shaftway only because of the better coverage. But until that time it was through the dumbwaiter that he got to know everybody, not by their names, but by their locations. He predicted divorce for Mr. and Mrs. 5-D because of their nightly arguments; he knew that Mrs. 3-A’s son was going to leave home before even Mrs. 3-A. It didn’t take second sight; all it took was a good ear and a comfortable chair near the dumbwaiter door.

Kempner’s film is so reverent and nostalgic, it sentimentalizes the already saccharine confection of Mother Goldberg, whose Jewish Amos ‘n’ Andyisms enliven the early scripts for her radio serial, extant only in print, before the series-turned-daytime serial settled for at times “soap-operaish” melodrama.

“[E]verything about The Goldbergs changed but the theme song, ‘Toselli’s Serenade,’” Berg explains in Molly and Me. Those encountering Molly in Kempner’s documentary are unlikely to see Molly as an early Lucy, or, come to think of it, as a prototype for linguistically challenged immigrant Ricky Ricardo.

“So come down a liddle after,” Mrs. Goldberg once yoo-hooed to her neighbor, Mrs. Bloom, “maybe ve’ll go to a mofie—is playing de Four Horsemen in de Apoplexies.” Well, you almost got it, Molly. Apoplexies are the kind of movie theaters that leave you angry at your lack of choices. Too bad that even the exceedingly rare art house simplexes are not likely to rescue you from the fate of being trampled to death by the pale horse of apathy.

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Related writings
The House of [Broken] Glass
Wireless Women, Clueless Men (Part Five): Gertrude Berg, Everybody's Mama
On This Day in 1941: Molly Goldberg Nearly Chickens Out