Radio and the Set of Reality

BOOKS AND MOVIES are all very well, and we'll come back to them before long, but before we do I'd like to talk a little about radio in the mid-fifties. I'll start with myself, and from me, we can hopefully progress to a more profitable general case.

I am of the last quarter of the last generation that remembers radio drama as an active force-a dramatic art form with its own set of reality. This is a true statement as far as it goes, but of course it doesn't go anywhere near far enough. Radio's real golden age ended around 1950, the year at which this book's casual attempt at media history begins, the year I celebrated my third birthday and began my first full year of doing it in the potty. As a child of the media, I have been pleased to have attended the healthy birth of rock and roll, and to have seen it grow up fast and healthy . . . but I was also in attendance, during my younger years, at the deathbed of radio as a strong fictional medium.

Drama is still to be found on the radio, God knows-CBS Mystery Theater is a case in point-and there is even comedy, as every devoted follower of that abysmally inept superhero, Chickenman, knows. But the Mystery Theater seems oddly flat, oddly dead; a curiosity only.

There is none of the heavy emotional zap that used to come out of the radio when Inner Sanctum 's creaking door swung open each week, or during Dimension X, I Love a Mystery , or the early days of Suspense . Although I listen to Mystery Theater when I can (and happen to think that E. G. Marshall does a great job as host), I don't particularly recommend it; it is a fluke like a Studebaker that still runs-poorly-or the last surviving auk. Even more than these, CBS Mystery Theater is like an electrical power cable through which a heavy, almost lethal, current used to run and which now lies inexplicably cold and harmless. The Adventures of Chickenman , a syndicated comedy program, works much better (but comedy, a naturally auditory as well as visual medium, often does), but the intrepid, klutzy Chickenman is still something of an acquired taste, like taking snuff or eating escargots. My own favorite moment in Chickenman's career occurs when he gets on the crosstown bus clad in boots, tights, and cape, only to discover that, since he has no pockets, he doesn't have a dime for the fare box.*

And still, endearing as Chickenman seems as he stumbles gamely from one abysmal situation to another-with his Jewish mother always close behind, bearing advice and chicken soup with matzoh balls-he is never quite in focus for me . . . except maybe for that one priceless moment as he stands slumped before the bus driver, cape between his legs. I smile at Chickenman; I have occasionally even chuckled; but there are never moments as gut-bustingly funny as the moments when Fibber McGee, as unstoppable as Time itself, would approach his closet or when Chester A. Riley would engage in long and uneasy conversations with his next-door neighbor, a mortician named Digger O'Dell ("He sure is swell").

Of the radio programs I remember with the most clarity, the only one which properly belongs in the clause macabre was Suspense , also presented by the CBS Radio Network.

My grandfather (the one who worked for Winslow Homer as a young man) and I really presided at the death rattle of radio together. He was fairly hale and fairly hearty at the age of eighty-two, but incomprehensible because he had a heavy beard and no teeth. He would talk-volubly at times-but only my mother could really understand what he was saying.

"Gizzen-groppen fuzzwah grupp?" he might ask me as we sat listening to his old Philco table model. "That's right, Daddy Guy," I'd say, with not the slightest idea of what I'd agreed to.

Nonetheless, we had the radio to unite us.

At this time-around 1958-my grandmother and grandfather lived together in a combination bed-sitting room that was a converted parlor, the biggest room in a small New England house. He was ambulatory -barely-but my grandmother was blind and bedridden and horribly corpulent, a victim of hypertension. Occasionally her mind would clear; mostly she would go into long, excited rants, telling us that the horse needed to be fed, the fires needed to be banked, that someone had to get her up so she could bake pies for the Elks supper.

Sometimes she talked to Flossie, one of my mother's sisters. Flossie had died of spinal meningitis forty years ago. So the situation in that room was this: my grandfather was lucid but incomprehensible; my grandmother was comprehensible but far gone in senility.

*And for some people, Chickenman doesn't work at all. My good friend Mac McCutcheon once played an album of the Great Fowl's adventures to a group of friends who simply sat and listened with polite, blank expressions on their faces. No one even chuckled. As Steve Martin says in The jerk : "Take those snails off her plate and bring her the toasted cheese sandwich like I told you in the first place!”

Somewhere in between was Daddy Guy's radio.

On radio nights, I would bring in a chair and place it in my grandfather's corner of the room, and he would fire up one of his huge cigars. The gong would sound for Suspense , or Johnny Dollar would begin to spin that week's tale through the unique (so far as I know) device of itemizing his expense account, or the voice of Bill Conrad as Matt Dillon would come on, deep and somehow unutterably weary: "It makes a man watchful . . . and a little lonely." For me, the smell of strong cigar smoke in a small room brings up its own set of ghost referents: Sunday night radio with my grandfather. The creak of batwing doors, the jingle of spurs . . . or the scream at the end of that classic Suspense episode, "You Died Last Night.” They died, all right, one by one, that last handful of radio programs. Johnny Dollar went first; he totted up his last expense account and drifted away into whatever limbo waits for retired insurance investigators. Gunsmoke went a year or two later. TV audiences had associated the face of Matt Dillon, only imagined for the previous ten years or so, with that of James Arness, Kitty's with Amanda Blake, Doc's with Milburn Stone, and Chester's, of course, with the face of Dennis Weaver. Their faces and their voices eclipsed the voices which came from the radio, and even now, twenty years later, it is the eager, slightly whining voice of Weaver that I associate with Chester Good as he comes hurrying up the Dodge City boardwalk with gimpy enthusiasm, calling, "Mr. Dillon! Mr. Dillon! There's trouble down t'the Longbranch!” It was Suspense , the last of the grisly old horrors, that held out the longest, but by then TV had demonstrated its ability to produce its own horrors; like Gunsmoke, Inner Sanctum had made the jump from radio to video, the swinging door finally visible. And visible, it certainly was horrible enough-slightly askew, festooned with cobwebs-but it was something of a relief, just the same. Nothing could have looked as horrible as that door sounded . I'm going to avoid any long dissertation on just why radio died, or in what ways it was superior to television in terms of the imaginational requirements it imposed on the listener (although we will touch briefly on some of this when we talk about the great Arch Oboler), because radio drama has been rather overanalyzed and certainly overeulogized. A little nostalgia is good for the soul, and I think I have already indulged in mine.

But I do want to say something about imagination purely as a tool in the art and science of scaring the crap out of people. The idea isn't original with me; I heard it expressed by William F. Nolan at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention. Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door, Nolan said. You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching at it. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a tenfoot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. "A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible," the audience thinks, "but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall.” Consider, if you will, the most frightening sequence in The Changeling . The heroine (Trish Van Devere) has rushed off to the haunted house her new friend (George C. Scott) has rented, thinking he may need help. Scott is not there at all, but a series of small, stealthy sounds leads her to believe that he is. The audience watches, mesmerized, as Trish climbs to the second floor; the third floor; and finally she negotiates the narrow, cobwebby steps leading to the attic room where a young boy has been murdered in particularly nasty fashion some eighty years before. When she reaches the room, the dead boy's wheelchair suddenly whirls around and pursues her, chasing her screaming down all three flights of stairs, racing along after her as she runs down the hall, to finally overturn near the front door. The audience screams as the empty wheelchair chases the lady, but the real scare has already happened; it comes as the camera dwells on those long, shadowy staircases, as we try to imagine walking up those stairs toward some as-yet-unseen horror waiting to happen.

Bill Nolan was speaking as a screenwriter when he offered the example of the big b,-g behind the door, but the point applies to all media. What's behind the door or lurking at the top of the stairs is never as frightening as the door or the staircase itself. And because of this, comes the paradox: the artistic work of horror is almost always a disappointment. It is the classic no-win situation. You can scare people with the unknown for a long, long time (the classic example, as Bill Nolan also pointed out, is the Jacques Tourneur film with Dana Andrews, Curse of the Demon ), but sooner or later, as in poker, you have to turn your down cards up. You have to open the door and show the audience what's behind it. And if what happens to be behind it is a bug, not ten but a hundred feet tall, the audience heaves a sigh of relief (or utters a scream of relief) and thinks, "A bug a hundred feet tall is pretty horrible, but I can deal with that. I was afraid it might be a thousand feet tall." The thing is-and a pretty good thing for the human race, too, with such neato-keeno things to deal with as Dachau, Hiroshima, the Children's Crusade, mass starvation in Cambodia, and what happened in Jonestown, Guyana-the human consciousness can deal with almost anything . . which leaves the writer or director of the horror tale with a problem which is the psychological equivalent of inventing a faster-than-light space drive in the face of E=MC^2.