The Fall 1952 start to the Suspense season had a treat: a new performance of Sorry, Wrong Number. This would be the next to last time that Agnes Moorehead would star in the broadcast of the famous script. Next time it would be done was 1957. A 1960 broadcast, after the series moved to New York, would be the 1957 recording with new “wrappers” of the New York-style announcements. This would, however, be the final time that William Spier supervised the production. Elliott Lewis would step aside for the night out of respect for the history of this script, Moorehead, and Spier… and because the taping was a publicity event.
Previous seasons that were sponsored by Auto-Lite usually had an opening episode with a custom-written script with auto-safety theme. It was skipped for this season. The 1953-1954 season, Auto-Lite’s last, had an auto-safety script for its second episode.
The tape for the Sorry, Wrong Number broadcast of 1952-09-12 was recorded on Friday, 1952-09-05. The rehearsal began at 1pm in the afternoon, and the tape recorders started running at 6pm. This was a recording of the drama alone. It was the first time that Sorry, Wrong Number was recorded on tape for later broadcast. The last live performance was 1948-11-18. The music, commercials, and announcements would be performed live on broadcast day.
Sorry, Wrong Number was recorded one time before. It was for the 1947 release of a set of 78rpm records by Decca. It was the largest selling commercial spoken word release. It would be released two more times through the 1950s as the technology shifted to long-playing records. That was a fresh performance of the play, and not drawn from prior Suspense broadcasts.
The press was invited and the TV-Radio editor of the Los Angeles Times, Walter Ames, described the recording session of September 5 in his column of September 15. He noted the command presence of William Spier, and said “the cast probably constituted one of the highest priced supporting groups ever gathered for a mystery show.”
Ames had a comment that was incorrect, but it was insightful. He says, at the end of the column, that “it would have been easier to have replayed one of the old tape recordings.” There were no old tape recordings. The 1948 performance was preserved on transcription discs. Suspense did not start using tape until a year or so later for incidental items. The show would not adopt full recording tape production methods until Fall 1956 when William N. Robson took over the program. Lewis used the tape recorders often, as it was easier to recruit guest stars by having recording sessions outside of their movie set schedules. Ames’ comment is more an indication about quickly recording tape was adopted that “tape” quickly entered the industry vocabulary and came to generically refer to any kind archived recording, at least in his mind, and that of his readers.
An important point about SWN being repeated was that it was a beloved episode, despite the script’s gruesome conclusion. The listening audience was changing. In 1952 there were still many Suspense listeners who had never heard it performed. It was four years since the most recent broadcast of it. The year 1952 was one of a few years of turbulent media change and growth. Listening patterns had been altered by the broadening presence of television. Even though the radio audience was diminishing, when one factors in the amount of time that had passed since the last SWN broadcast, the presence of new listeners among the established fans guaranteed a much different audience. It was easy for Ames, who tracked TV and radio every single day, to momentarily lose that perspective and context. Like the saying about old jokes, it's not a repeat if you never heard it before.
SWN was scheduled as the final broadcast for the 1951-1952 season. That was changed to allow for the performance of Concerto for Killer and Eyewitnesses which starred Lewis. The script was originally intended for actor John Garfield 18 months earlier. Garfield’s blacklist issues made Lewis set the script aside. He hoped the problems would be resolved and Garfield would one day star in the somewhat inventive script. (See https://suspenseproject.blogspot.com/2024/07/1952-06-09-concerto-for-killer-and.html).
Garfield’s death changed that, and Lewis decided to run the script to close out the season. Moorehead was available, as the Broadway run of Don Juan in Hell had concluded. It is likely he convinced Moorehead that she was either too busy or needed time off from the Broadway schedule. Early newspaper clippings announced the upcoming SWN performance, but those were corrected over time as Concerto was announced. They also announced that SWN would be the premiere of the new 1952-1953 season.
Don Juan in Hell would play an important role in the opening broadcasts of the new season. Moorehead, Charles Laughton, Charles Boyer, and Cedric Hardwicke appeared in the Broadway production as “The First Drama Quartette.” The four would appear on stage in formal attire, no props beyond stools, microphones, and a curtain, and perform the play. It was the third act of George Bernard Shaw’s play Man and Superman. The actors had a brief run with the play on Broadway, and it was so well received that a second run was scheduled. It ran from April 6 to May 24, 1952. Laughton was the director. They knew they had something people wanted to see, and took the show on tour.
Not only that, a record set was released. The 90-minute production was not as successful as the Decca SWN release, but it had excellent sales compared to other releases in the spoken word category. The recording can be accessed at https://archive.org/details/G.B.SHAWDonJuanInHell-NEWTRANSFER
Suspense and Lewis cooperated with the promotion of the traveling stage production and the recording. The first four episodes of the new season had each of the Quartette star in a Suspense episode.
The four shows were rehearsed and recorded in this order:
Tuesday, August 26 (rehearsal only) and Wednesday, August 27 (rehearsal and recording), Vidocq’s Last Case with Charles Boyer
Friday, September 5: Sorry, Wrong Number with Agnes Moorehead
Monday, September 8: Jack Ketch with Charles Laughton
Thursday, September 11: The Diary of Doctor Pritchard with Sir Cedric Hardwicke
The results were not particularly good, unfortunately.
We know about Sorry, Wrong Number and the publicity it could generate, and there’s no reason to assume it was anything less than successful. No recording has become available of this 1952 broadcast, but it is hoped that an Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) recording might be found some day.
Then, a sequence of episodes that might be considered the weakest consecutive installments of the series were broadcast. Charles Laughton garbled his way through Jack Ketch, about the 17th Century incompetent hangman who ended up torturing the prisoners whose capital punishment he was tasked to perform. The story is not set up well, so you’re not all that sure what you’re listening to. The real story of Jack Ketch is absolutely gruesome. Families of the prisoners would bribe Ketch to make sure the process went quickly. He was so grossly incompetent that he would end up beating the prisoners up as they were hanging in excruciating pain. The only suspense to the story is why it was allowed on Suspense. Someone must have liked it as it was used later with the new title The Groom of the Ladder.
The next was Vidocq's Last Case which starred Charles Boyer. He was French, but his portrayal of the famous criminal-turned-criminologist is difficult to understand. Boyer’s French accent seems forced, and at times seems to be an imitation of an American imitating a French accent. The character is a narcissist, and much of the sometimes incomprehensible script that is more about his narcissism gone wild than it is a good story. There's a crime and cover-up in there somewhere. It ends well, but it exhausts the listener.
And then there's The Diary of Doctor Pritchard story with Hardwicke. (The script cover spells out “doctor.”) It plods along. The production can't seem to get engage the listener. The only “hook” is figuring out whom he will poison next. He thinks that he can choose who should die for his own convenience and that of others as he perceives it.
The result is that the 1952-1953 season starts with a thud. A classic Suspense play starts the season, but the Lewis “true story” approach that he seems so preoccupied with fails three times in a row. The season may be the most erratic of the Lewis years. He’s trying to keep the series fresh, differentiate it in some way from the television series, and attract the Hollywood talent the series was known for. He also experiments with two-part productions (Othello in 1953 and The Moonstone in the 1953-1954 season).
The weeks that follow SWN and the Quartette broadcasts thankfully have some better episodes. How Long is the Night is about the aftermath of an atomic bomb test, with the story written by someone who served in the military at a test site. Allan in Wonderland is the first episode in the traditional mold of the series, and is quite good, and was based on the work of a well-known espionage expert. The Frightened City with Frank Lovejoy could be a Night Beat episode if some minor changes were made, and is an excellent production.
There are some missteps along the way. Though it was a good script, Mann Alive was actually a 1949 Sam Spade script, written by William Spier, with only minor changes to characters. It’s likely that Spier and Lewis met about that script and Death and Miss Turner when Spier was in town for SWN. The latter is a good production and doesn’t rely on Moorehead just screaming through her role. But why was Mann Alive necessary? Had the Suspense script backlog of six to eight weeks, and sometimes more, dried up?
The volatility of the Lewis years may have frustrated listeners. It is hard to determine how much of the decline in Suspense ratings was attributable to the ventures away from the traditional Suspense formula that turned listeners off, and how much was the media consumption that was displaced by television. Whatever the case, Auto-Lite pulled the plug on Suspense in June 1954. Lewis may have outsmarted himself in his Suspense vision and strategy along the way. It is undeniable that he was trudging though complicated media transition factors that could not be controlled. The direction of media entertainment to the growth and dominance of television was very clear. It is funny how inevitability can sneak up on you.
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