Lee J. Cobb plays an artist traveling in Trinidad. At an antiques shop, he meets the attractive wife of a very wealthy and very narcissistic owner of a large and stratospherically profitable sugar business. She lures him to their massive home where she treats him with generous hospitality (that will, of course, be revealed to have a sinister motive). It doesn’t take long for the husband to insult Cobb’s character that being an artist is not really work and his efforts produce no true value. The husband suggests that he would find the daily work at a real job to be impossible. The husband bets Cobb’s character that he can’t spend two years in their tropical paradise (where it rains a lot, it seems) working at his laboratory. That lab just happens to be doing research on tropical diseases. All Cobb’s character has to do is maintain administrative lab records for two years. If he does, he will get $50,000, or in US$2023, $840,000.
That’s the set-up: a man infatuated with a rich man’s wife who loves his money but hates him. How convenient the man will be working in a lab where there are tropical disease organisms that could be used to murder that very annoying husband, and inherit the money, all without creating any suspicion. They just have to make sure the husband eats the diseased-infected sauce that the wife adds to the caviar. Which Roma Wine does Elsa Maxwell suggest for poisoned caviar?
The story is by Martin S. Ryerson. He was a freelance writer for many radio series and also for theatrical productions.
CBS promoted the script “Before the Fact” with Cobb for this date; The Bet replaced it. That other script was renamed The Angel of Death and broadcast on 1946-01-03.
There is one surviving network copy of this episode and it is not identified as east or west. The time to network ID is 16 seconds and the recording is identified with “(16s).” An Armed Forces Radio Service recording (#128) has survived. The AFRS version is from the missing network broadcast. Times are approximate:
16s 5:53 there is a verbal stumble on the name Ada
AFRS 5:09 is a clean read
16s 6:20 “So you're an artist, Mr. Turner. (short, hearty laugh) Well, I envy you”
AFRS 5:38 “So you're an artist, Mr. Turner. (no laugh) Well, I envy you”
The network copy is the better sounding recording.
This story was included in Suspense Magazine #1. A PDF of the story is available on the Internet Archive page with the recordings.
This was Lee J. Cobb's first and only appearance on Suspense. He started in theater and did some work in films, but his career was not yet in high gear at the time of this appearance. His reputation as an actor rose significantly when he played Will Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman on Broadway in 1949. He had four nominations for supporting actor in film, two for Oscars, two for Golden Globes. He had three Emmy nominations for actor. He was nominated for a Grammy for the audio version of Death of a Salesman. His career is summarized at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_J._Cobb
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP451108
THE CAST
LEE J. COBB (Scott Turner), Cathy Lewis (Ada Barton), Elliott Lewis (Siam), Wally Maher (Paul Barton), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice)
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