Rita Lloyd stars in a Milton Geiger story about a wife who plots to avenge her husband’s unfaithfulness, which turns out to be wrong. She discovers too late that he is innocent, and was planning something that was good for them, together. She believes that she will soon succumb to a heart ailment, despite the assurances of her doctor. Depressed, she decides to poison her husband to punish him for his affair. She goes to a drug store to use a voice recording booth to create a record with her warning and farewell. Part of the process is that the record will be mailed by the business that owns the recording booth concession at the drug store. It is impossible for her to retrieve the record, so she tries to break into booth’s holding box to get it, and fails. After the record was certain to be mailed she learns that her assumption of an affair is groundless. She makes a frustrating fight against time to save her husband from her poisoning scheme, and to prevent him from hearing her message. She gets a message from him instead, and the tragic marital misunderstanding comes to light, and there is no turning back. The ending implies some hope that there may be a reconciliation for them.
The Geiger story is creative and compelling, and Lloyd delivers a fine performance. The episode has not been appreciated in the past because the recordings have been very low quality and difficult to listen to. A cleaner network recording has been found, and a superb Armed Forces Radio Service recording is newly available.
Geiger was a veteran writer whose credits included variety, comedy, and drama for shows like Royal Gelatin Hour, Columbia Workshop, Inner Sanctum, Cavalcade of America, Molle Mystery Theater, The Doctor Fights, Hollywood Star Time, Adventures of Philip Marlowe, Hallmark Playhouse, Screen Director’s Playhouse, The Line-Up, Lux Radio Theatre, Suspense, Eternal Light, and others. He also wrote for many 1950s and 1960s television series.
One of the programs Geiger wrote for was Frederic W. Ziv’s syndicated series I Was a Communist for the FBI. The series was one of radio’s biggest syndication successes. The sequence about the arcade recording booth in Bitter Grapes was adapted from Geiger’s script for episode 38 of that series, Little Boy Blue...Turned Red. Writers often had scenes in their prior work that they had a special liking for because it was interesting or came out exceptionally well. Sometimes referring to previous scripts helped them get through a period of writer’s block. William N. Robson did that for one of his scripts, Mission of the Betta, which used a sequence from Man Behind the Gun. Unfortunately, Betta remains a missing episode.
Where does the episode title come from? The quotations used in the script are from the Song of Songs / Song of Solomon is from chapter 2, verses 14-15. The King James Version is
14 O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.
15 Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.
The “spoiled” grapes are bitter or wild, but the “tender” grapes are nurtured and cared for by the keeper of the vineyard. It is not known which Biblical translation Geiger used, whether Jewish or Christian, but the King James was selected here as it is one of the better known translations in the country. Biblical literacy was broader at that time than it is these decades later. Many listeners would have recognized the Geiger usage, and it would not have been considered obscure. There are references in the Song of Songs to wild grapes, and this verse from Isaiah 5:2 can be translated with that wording:
4 What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it? wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?
Some other translations use “bitter” instead of “wild.” Other translations use “wild berries.”
The point of the title is that the marriage was not cared for, there were secrets, no matter the good intentions, and the wife thought the worst of it, and the husband would not reveal them. It became too late for both of them.
The program was recorded on Tuesday, April 26, 1960. Rehearsal began at 3:00pm and ended at 6:30pm. Recording was done from 6:30pm to 7:00pm.
Two recordings of this episode have survived. The network recording is an aircheck, edited down to only its drama, and has a slightly clipped open. It is in listenable sound quality. This is a far better network recording than that which has been in most hobbyist collections. The Armed Forces Radio Service recording (AFRS#784) has cleaner, richer sound, and is the much preferred one of the two. The AFRS recording is only recently available and allows greater appreciation of the Geiger script.
What is a recording booth? These were very popular at carnival events, amusement parks and arcades, boardwalks, and drugstores. If the proprietor allowed one of the booths in their store, the booth owner would share the sales with the location owner. The recordings were not that good, somewhat like a bad phone connection with narrow audio range. It was a novelty item that many people enjoyed for fun, but not used often. This is a 1946 ad from Billboard that shows how it was sold to amusement arcades and other locations:
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP600501
THE CAST
Phil Meeder (Warren), Rita Lloyd (Lorna), Arthur Kohl (Pharmacist), John Seymour (Quillen), Teri Keane (Nurse), Edwin Wolfe (Devitt), Edgar Stehli (Voice / Taxi Driver)
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