[NOTE: This is a longer-than-usual blogpost because this was an important broadcast that ended the sponsorship of the series. It was a turning point in the way Suspense would be produced and heard. Details about Auto-Lite’s canceling its sponsorship are explored.]
Peter Lawford returns to the series and stars in another Wilkie Collins story. He plays a wealthy young Englishman who, with a friend, goes slumming in Paris to find an interesting gambling den. He has a fantastic run of luck, breaks the bank, then faces the problem of how to get home safely with his massive winnings. This is a cause for celebration, at which point they get quite drunk with the help of the casino inhabitants, and especially the coffee, which was drugged. An offer is made to shelter the young Englishmen in a rooming house until morning so they can sleep it all off. The men accept gratefully, but begin to doubt the wisdom of their decision when they realize that the door of their room has been locked from the outside. Casinos don’t like when you break their bank, it seems. The intent of the captors was quite clear. They wanted to make sure the money never left their gambling den, and they had a special bed that would trap the “winner” until they suffocated. They would dispose of the bodies later. Uh-oh…
The original 1852 Collins story was adapted by by Morton Fine and David Friedkin and has its own Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Terribly_Strange_Bed The story can be read in full online at Project Gutenberg https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1626
This is one of those stories where you really don’t like anyone. They all have some kind of unsavory nature. But you don’t want anyone to die, and you still want justice to be found.
Lawford performs well enough in his role but stumbles a bit in his narration at the 26:00 mark.
This program had never circulated among classic radio enthusiasts in high quality sound. This particular recording is much better than prior available copies of this broadcast.
The End of an Era: The Loss of Sponsorship
This episode is important to the history of the series because it is the final episode with a sponsor. Auto-Lite decided to end their sponsorship of the radio and TV Suspense. The radio show would convert to a sustaining basis. The future advertisers that are heard on Suspense after this point would have contracts based on buying specific air time, and not underwriting the full budget of a series. Roma and Auto-Lite had nearly full editorial control and determined the acceptability of guest stars. That was occasionally to the detriment of the productions. But it also meant that they wanted to have the highest quality productions, within budget, that would reflect positively on their brands.
Some show publicity stated “Suspense rings down the curtain for the season.” It appears that about a week before the broadcast that the plan was for the season to conclude and Suspense would return in the Fall. Knowing the lead time for publicity mailings and the actual broadcast, it is easy to calculate that Auto-Lite’s decision to withdraw from Suspense must have been finalized just before Memorial Day. After that decision, CBS decided to keep the series going through the summer in hopes of finding a new sponsor. It never did. The show would shift from Monday to Tuesday, as announced at the close of this broadcast. Lewis would produce for six more weeks on a sustaining basis, then leave the series.
Researcher and international voice actor Keith Scott notes that this was the final of the 259 Auto-Lite sponsored shows, and especially the final Suspense broadcast for commercial announcer Harlow Wilcox. He announced 246 of the Auto-Lite series. Frank Martin was the initial announcer in the Auto-Lite run.
Harlow Wilcox was one of radio’s greatest announcing voices and personalities. He knew that this show was yet another marking of the end of the radio era with this very broadcast. This was aired live, and his voice breaks at about 28 min mark as it is his final time to close a Suspense broadcast. (Special thanks to collector John Barker for bringing this to our attention). If the show was taped, they might have done a re-take. But no, this was a special moment allowed to come through. Wilcox was 54 at the time of this broadcast. Unfortunately, he only made it to his 60th birthday. There is a Wikipedia page for him at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlow_Wilcox_(announcer)
Sustaining programs did not have the budgets that sponsored programs had. This meant that Suspense would have fewer Hollywood stars, excepting those who really loved radio drama. The movie studios became more interested in promoting their films on television than radio. The agents of the stars also decided that Suspense was no longer be the place where a somewhat typecast performer could have an opportunity to display other talents or versatility. That would shift to television.
There was another budgetary factor: publicity. Suspense would begin a fall from its higher profile in newspaper TV and radio listings as television received more and more editorial attention. The CBS publicity department’s efforts were shifting, spending less time on radio, especially unsponsored radio. In prior years, the independent actions of sponsor public relations and advertising departments and agencies, movie studio publicity departments and the publicity generated by the agents of the Hollywood stars, occasionally in planned coordination, added to the mix of publicity that would be accessed by newspaper and magazine editors. That previous big Suspense publicity machine was unique among even the biggest radio series. Now it was left to a dwindling CBS radio publicity department to promote the program.
In the end, this is kind of a dividing line where the radio’s top dramatic performers would be heard more often, and take more lead roles. There was still enough radio drama around to keep them very busy, at least until 1960.
Why Did Auto-Lite Leave?
There are so many things swirling around Auto-Lite and the US economy that conspired to lead to the withdrawal of their sponsorship of Suspense. Royce Martin, head of Auto-Lite, died at age 69 in May 1954. Under his leadership, the company had grown to $300 million in annual sales ($3.5 billion in US$2024 terms). He had a heart attack the Thursday before the Kentucky Derby. His horse, Goyamo, finished fourth, under legendary jockey Eddie Arcaro. He died shortly after the race while he was hospitalized. The estate was split between his wife and two daughters.
There was rumbling in the company’s labor relations that would result in a strike at an Ohio plant that lasted three weeks. Many employees of Auto-Lite had been released or furloughed in 1953 because of the economic slowdown. At this time, some were being rehired as the company had some increase in sales, especially the battery division. New management took over after the death of Martin. He may have been the one who insisted on maintaining the high profile the company had with Suspense on radio and TV. The executives who replaced him obviously had different ideas. The company was having financial issues, nothing dire, but there were aspects of their business that demanded attention. When you’re spending lots of money on advertising, sometimes you make decisions to cut that spending or to reallocate it among different media or methods. The company’s stock price had fallen from the prior year, and Wall Street analysts were scrutinizing the company’s finances and outlook as profits per share plummeted from $1.88 a share to 25 cents. The decision to get out of the Suspense commitments seem like an obvious one.
In October 1954, the company received a new loan from Equitable Life Assurance that allowed it to refinance its debt. The financial situation must have deteriorated, because part of the loan agreement was that the company had limits on the amount of additional debt it could take on for the management of its operations. (Yes, Equitable, that Equitable, the This is Your FBI Equitable). Advertising was easy to cut, and those monies could be used to service the new debt as well as to improve operations.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP540607
In light of the Internet Archive DDoS attack and recovery,
this alternative download link is provided
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/r8lazashlxw0b/Suspense_-_Terribly_Strange_Bed
The program can be streamed at YouTube starting at 9am US ET on October 24, 2024
https://youtu.be/yZWYrh9FOyQ
THE CAST
PETER LAWFORD (Henry Calder), Ben Wright (Gerald Tichener), Paula Winslowe (Millie Prudhomme / Woman), Joseph Kearns (Fabian), Vic Perrin (The Croupier), Larry Thor (Narrator)
COMMERCIAL: Tom Holland (Hap), Harlow Wilcox (Announcer), Sylvia Simms (Operator)
* * *
On June 1, 1954, Auto-Lite held the Charity Drawing that it had been promoting for weeks. This is how it was reported by the company to newspapers:
Times were different then: newspapers would commonly publish addresses of persons in the news as part of their reporting. Readers did not mind having it. Few of those mentioned ever complained.
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