Joseph Cotten stars in this disturbing play about a man who decides to murder his twin brother and assume his identity. Suitcases are used to dispose of the dismembered body, but can’t fit the head, so a pasteboard (cardboard) box is used instead. Cotten’s character spends a lot of time trying to get rid of that box... and the head! The bigger challenge in the production is that Cotten plays the twins and has to do so in a way that the listener can distinguish between them… which he does.
“Pasteboard” was, and still is, a type of cardboard. The word is used less often today. It is not the same as corrugated board, but people used “pasteboard” as a generic name for all types of paper boards. The key point is that it was a common box that anyone would use or see during the day, and was not a wooden crate. Most of the listening audience would have realized that this type of box was a poor way to get rid of the horrible evidence of the crime. When this script was used in the Australian series Tension in the mid-1950s, Grace Gibson Productions changed the name to “The Cardboard Box.”
This was Joe Grenzaback’s first and only Suspense script. He also wrote for The First Nighter, Grand Marquee, and likely had many uncredited submissions for those and other series. He received a Purple Heart for an injury during D-Day in Normandy. He was married to actress Jean Sullivan, but they divorced in the early 1950s. She later married comedic actor Tom Poston. Grenzaback also wrote stage plays. A popular one for theater groups was written in 1951, Sing Ho for a Prince!, based on the story of Sleeping Beauty. He also had another popular play in the 1960s for theater groups, Old King Cole. For television, one of his scripts was used on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He wrote many stories for Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine.
There was some confusion as to what script Suspense would use on this date. Joseph Cotten was always going to appear this week, and the original plan was a for “The Mark of the Beast.” The title was changed to “The Name of the Beast” and was broadcast in April 1946 with Vincent Price. It's not certain if the script was not ready for this date or if it decided to hold it for Price. It may have been they delayed “Beast” because “Pasteboard” was something Cotten could do better than others in the upcoming schedule.
There is a strange intersection of news stories and Suspense. Weeks after broadcast, a Radio Life news item speculated that The Pasteboard Box was unfortunate scheduling in light of the discovery of a child's torso in a Chicago murder days before, a murder that is still unsolved to this day. There could have been some suspicion a that time that this script was based with those horrible news events in mind, but the timetable does not work. Grenzaback’s script would have been submitted months before. The Chicago news event was the murder of Suzanne Degnan, and it did get some national coverage. The police had a confession from a serial killer years later, but there were elements to that confession that did not make sense. It is almost 80 years since that awful crime. The timing of Pasteboard Box with the news of this murder is unfortunate and could not be foreseen. The stories are very different. Cotten’s character is caught at the end of the tale, but the story and Degnan facts are not any less gruesome. They’re not related.
Three recordings have survived. The west coast studio recording “(WC)” is the best. The Armed Forces Radio Service recording (#138) is also a fine recording. An aircheck from KQW in San Jose, California has also survived, but it is the least of the three recordings. The AFRS recording is drawn from the missing east coast broadcast. Times are approximate:
WC 16:33 “..it was gone...somehow I got home”
AFRS 13:58 “...it was gone...somehow, somehow I got home”
This story was included in Suspense Magazine #3. A PDF of the story can be downloaded on the same page as the audio files.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP460117
THE CAST
JOSEPH COTTEN (Jack & Walter Parselle), Elliott Lewis (Bank clerk / laughing ferry passenger), Wally Maher (Detective Lieutenant), Jerry Hausner (Ferry passenger), Ian Wolfe (Man in store), Horace Willard (Williams), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Store clerk), unknown (Police sergeant), Tommy Bernard? (First boy), Joel Davis? (Johnny, the second boy), unknown (Helen Winters)
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