NOTE: At the end of this blogpost is important information about the backstory of the Roma sponsorship and the Peabody Award. The week after this broadcast was a very busy one in Suspense history.
The lesson of this Suspense episode is to get some legal advice before you plan a nefarious and deadly act. You might save yourself a lot of trouble... and avoid having a Death Row mailing address.
Kirk Douglas plays a greedy nephew who wants to inherit his sick uncle’s estate. He decides to give his wife the cold shoulder hoping she’ll leave before the uncle dies and leaves him $50,000 ($700,000 in US$2023). He has no desire to be splitting the fortune with her. His bad behavior and insults intimidate his wife into agreeing to divorce. His greedy plan is starting to work.
At a visit to his uncle, Douglas’ character discovers that half of his uncle’s estate will be going to his alma mater, Weymouth College, but the remainder for him is $500,000 (that’s almost $7 million, ten times what he thought!). The uncle dies before he can get his wife to leave and start the divorce process. (There is a Weymouth College in the UK, but it was wholly fictional in this story because it was not founded until 1985.)
He decides to “bump off” his wife to make certain the inheritance can’t be shared. He decides to poison her. The key to the nefarious act in the story may be easy to miss because they are mentioned quickly and later in the story than usual. In many Suspense episodes (and other crime stories) the eventual means of the crime are established early. These are the approximate times of story elements in case you miss them. This list is a spoiler alert.
11:30 The doctor sees Douglas’ character at his uncle’s bedside and gives him the prescription for sedatives to help his wife sleep.
14:40 The husband suddenly remembers the prescription in his pocket, and drops it off at a pharmacy counter before he uses their pay phone to call his lawyer.
15:15 He speaks to his lawyer but cuts him off before the lawyer can provide a key point about community property law that would make murdering his wife wrong (which it is, whether there is a community property law or not) from an estate law perspective (key spoiler alert: inheritance is not part of community property as stated in the story; if this was an episode of The Whistler you can imagine this as the punch line for the “strange ending of tonight’s story”)
16:50 He arrives home to start pretending a reconciliation with his wife and to end their path to divorce; this is his ruse to keep his inheritance by making it easier to win her cooperation in his plan and eliminating any suspicions
20:05 He explains in monologue that he has gradually hidden narcotics away to poison his wife; he will have her overdose by mixing them into her usual bedtime cup of warm milk that usually helps her sleep. Where did they come from? It’s easy to assume he’s been skimming them from her past prescriptions, but it’s stated directly that he got them from another source. It’s not mentioned from where? He’s such an immoral heel that it could have been from anywhere and likely illegal.
22:35 He calls doctor to report her death. The doctor tells him to call the police. What does the know that listeners don't know yet?
24:00 The medical examiner at the scene says her pill bottle was empty.
24:35 The doctor explains he was worried about her dependence on sleeping aids, and that the prescription filled at the pharmacy was for sugar pills! This means the husband poured out the prescription and left the empty bottle on the nightstand. Not realizing it was a placebo, that act further implicates him in the crime.
He should have Googled community property laws before he acted… oh, that’s right… there was no Google until fifty years later. The moral of the story is “don’t hang up on your lawyer… it could cost your life!”
Do pharmacists dispense placebos today? Not directly. They will suggest a homeopathic product or a vitamin as “helping” a patient’s condition but being benign and ineffective. Placebos are used in clinical trials for new medicines, but rarely any other time. There has also been a great effort to give pharmaceuticals in pill format distinctive shapes and colors. At the time of this broadcast, many medicines looked alike, and it was often important for placebos to do so. The wife would have noticed different pills in the container had she looked at them, today, but back then they may have looked similar. Many of the story’s key details are implausible if not impossible today, but might have been more plausible then. The authors would have figured out some other angle. Greed and evil in stories have a way of making alternative plans, and writers always find them.
Earlier than usual in the broadcast is the “mid-show” Roma commercial. It’s just after the 5:00 mark.
The authors of the script were Arthur Julian and Howard Leeds. It was adapted by Robert L. Richards. Julian and Leeds wrote for the radio series Beulah. Julian’s writing career took off with television, eventually writing for such series as F Troop, Hogan’s Heroes, Carol Burnett, Maude, and many others. He was also a producer and an occasional actor. Leeds was a writer for television in the 1950s for Red Skelton and George Gobel. He was also a writer for My Three Sons, Bewitched, Bachelor Father, and others. His career shifted to the producer side, with writing and production credits for The Brady Bunch and production credits for The Facts of Life, and Silver Spoons.
Both the east and west coast broadcasts have survived. The east coast recording includes the tease that listeners should stay tuned for The FBI in Peace and War. The east broadcast has better sound quality.
This is the first appearance of Kirk Douglas on the series, and his performance was excellent. His first movie appearance was a year earlier in the 1946 The Strange Love of Martha Ivers to rave reviews. He was considered to be one of the bright new Hollywood stars at the time of this broadcast. He was not on radio often, but was on Suspense additional times, as well as movie-related radio series. His long, successful, and influential career is summarized at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirk_Douglas
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP470410
THE CAST
KIRK DOUGLAS (George Mason), Cathy Lewis (Lois Mason / Receptionist), Wally Maher (Dr. Alex Thorpe), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Uncle Bert), John McIntire (Bernard), Howard McNear (Officer Farley), Paul Frees (Judson / Druggist), Junius Matthews (John the Medical Examiner)
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A turning point in the series occurs in the week before the next broadcast. Suspense receives a Peabody Award for 1946. The Award was announced on 1947-04-15. The drama award went to Columbia Workshop. Suspense and The Henry Morgan Show were runners up.
The Suspense honorable mention read as follows:
Has the war made Americans blood thirsty for crime and detection? How otherwise can we explain the ever-increasing number of mystery dramas which flood the air? The committee believes that there are too many whodunits for the good of radio; it also believes that in this overworked and melodramatic field there is one program which, for its casting, its music and its suspense, is head and shoulders above the competition. A special citation therefore to Suspense of CBS and to William Spier, its producer and director.
Not everyone was so thrilled. A week later, radio critic Magee Adams, in the 1947-04-24 Cincinnati Enquirer agreed that Suspense had high quality productions and what the Peabody Award judges noted was correct. Adams, however, was concerned about the effect of the program and other crime programs on younger listeners. He believed the judges should have acted to make this very point. He wrote:
Its material usually goes in tor morbid horror and callous brutality, not to mention characters who are psychopathic cases. In these respects it is not the worst on the air. But it receives more than its share of unfavorable attention because of its early hour and the youthful audience. It is unfortunate that this was not taken into consideration by the Peabody Award judges. They had no opportunity to emphasize that, these days, there is something more important than technique in “whodunits.” An award for a more desirable type of mystery show might have served the purpose of constructive criticism.
The Peabody Award and the status of Roma’s sponsorship were intertwined. The 1947-04-16 edition of Variety announced that Roma Wine was cancelling its sponsorship as of 1947-05-22. Because of the lag in time of publishing, it is likely that Variety knew of the Roma situation before the Peabody news was released.
Roma signed up for a summer extension, supposedly 10 minutes before the deadline, in early May. It is possible that the Biow ad agency, which “owned” Suspense, may have had a new sponsor waiting in the wings. Roma was cutting all of its advertising expenditures because of the steep decline in wine industry sales. It is likely some accommodations were made in the renewal. Roma would end its sponsorship in November 1947.
Three Suspense episodes were elements of the Peabody judges decision. Dead Ernest was one of them. There is no research indicating what the other two episodes were at this time.
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