Ronald Reagan stars as an unscrupulous young man who has a weakness for a quick buck and attractive women. This is Suspense, so you know those attributes don’t combine well but make a very good story. He’s hired to manage a garage while the owner is on an extended vacation and honeymoon. “While the cat’s away…,” as they say, he converts a couple of back rooms into an illegal casino operation. The owner returns and is understandably quite miffed at what’s happened and demands that the gambling equipment be removed. Not so fast… Reagan’s character threatens to swear to police that he was only following the boss’ orders when he opened the gambling joint. He offers to cut the owner in on the profits, which he refuses, but his new bride is thinks the idea is not so bad. She can't change her husband’s mind, so she makes a play for Reagan’s character and talks him into a plan to murder her husband. (Gosh, that was fast!) She promises that she’ll be with him as they turn the little casino operation into a fortune. The plot to dispose of the husband doesn’t work exactly as planned… and the “payoff for fancy living” that Reagan’s character expected doesn’t work as planned, either.
Spier, Macdonnell, and publicity played around with the spelling of the title a bit, and for a while it was “One and One’s Alonesome” with the combination of the article “a” and the word “lonesome” to coin the word “alonesome.” That would have driven newspaper radio page editors crazy and they would likely “fix” it, making the play on words to have no value.
Writer Nelson Sykes is a Suspense “one hit wonder” writer, with this being the only known radio script he wrote and accepted for prime time broadcast. He was about 25 years old and worked in advertising in Union Carbide’s consumer products division. He left in 1951 to work with the public relations firm that represented Union Carbide, William Esty Company, and he later became a highly influential executive in the advertising industry. He married an opera singer, Martha Moore, and together they managed an opera company and supported the arts through the 1950s and 1960s. She ended up working with ad agency Ogilvy in the 1970s and became a senior VP and general manager of Ogilvy & Mather. After retirement, she became a prominent cultural figure in her native Birmingham, Alabama.
The Suspense TV kinescope of this script’s broadcast of 1950-05-16 has not survived. It starred Robert Emhardt, Nina Foch, Scott McKay, and Meg Mundy. In January, 1950, Mundy starred in Sorry, Wrong Number for an experimental closed circuit color TV broadcast. It was likely seen by less that 500 viewers, all attendees at a broadcasting convention in Washington, DC.
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https://archive.org/details/TSP500323
THE CAST
RONALD REAGAN (George Dellack), Cathy Lewis (Marie), Joe Kearns (Henry Grover / Signature Voice), Larry Dobkin (Jim Brandon), Jack Kruschen (Lt. Williams / Train caller)
COMMERCIAL: Joe DuVal, Harlow Wilcox (Announcer), Sylvia Simms (Operator)
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