NOTE: This is the first of eight Suspense episodes that Jack Johnstone submitted to the series under the name “Jack Bundy” or “Jonathan Bundy.” (“Bundy” was the name of his wife’s family). All eight were derived from scripts Johnstone wrote for his 1940-1941 Mutual series, Who Knows? Details about that series and the other seven scripts are provided below, and can be found after the cast information for this episode.
Rosemary Rice and Bill Lipton star in a Jack Johnstone script (written under the pseudonym “Jack Bundy”) that was originally used on April 21, 1941 on the series Who Knows?
Rice and Lipton portray Henry and Lucy Fielding, a young couple who are thrilled to find a new place to live. That is, until they try to spend their first night there. Their “dream house” is in the country, far away from the noisy city. Lucy thinks they had help from her guardian angel that led in the home search success, including its affordable price. Harry doesn’t believe any of that, and mostly agrees to the purchase because he is so frustrated with their apartment. There is a concern, however: the real estate agent was a bit elusive when discussing the history of the house and its past owners. Henry and Lucy are so enthused with the idea of this new home for them, that they still decide to proceed.
In their first night in the house, there is a very severe storm. The phone starts ringing with call after call. The calls are unnerving. Henry checks with the phone operator, and she says they have no record of calls being put through. He becomes so upset that he rips the phone from the wall. Lucy gets nervous and has a strange and ominous premonition. She persuades the skeptical Henry that the premonition is real and they should leave the house and stay at a nearby hotel. They can return to the house in the morning and start fresh. As they settle into the hotel room, they are shocked when they hear a radio news report. The house was struck by lightning that demolished part of the home. They realize that by leaving the house they had escaped certain death.
The program was recorded on Tuesday, July 25, 1961. The session began at 10:30am and concluded at 2:30pm.
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https://archive.org/details/TSP610806
THE CAST
Rosemary Rice (Lucy), Bill Lipton (Henry), Lawson Zerbe (Strickler), Toni Darnay (Operators 1 & 2), Larry Robinson (Bellboy / Radio)
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Suspense and the Eight Re-Used Who Knows? Scripts
In 1940 and 1941, Jack Johnstone was the creator, producer and the usual writer for a short-lived 15-minute Mutual radio series, Who Knows? Very few Mutual stations picked it up, but the ones that did were big, such as WOR in New York, WGN in Chicago, and some other big metro markets. The show was sponsored by shoe polish manufacturer Griffin Manufacturing. Newspaper accounts of the series are minimal. In spite of the show having a sponsor to bankroll it, Mutual’s publicity machine was usually the weakest of the radio networks. The lack of the newspaper write-ups limits what we can learn about the series. There are no broadcast recordings of the series in circulation. That means we cannot learn about the series by listening to recordings of them.
Most of the stories had a psychic phenomena angle and were based on the work of popular psychic investigator Herewood Carrington (1880-1958). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereward_Carrington One of his books, True Ghost Stories, was published in 1915, and the text is available at Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44625
Karl Schadow, noted researcher and major contributor to the Suspense Project, noted the connection between that series and the eight Suspense episodes Johnstone scripted. He was able to do research at the Library of Congress once he learned that the scripts for Who Knows? were there. The episodes did not have titles, but he tracked them down by the script character names. This worked because Johnstone did not usually change the character names when he adapted the episodes for Suspense. It took a quite while to go through all those scripts and evaluate them one-by-one. This chart shows the episodes of both series and their original dates of broadcast:
Johnstone had a long-time fascination with ghosts and psychic phenomena from his work on the Mutual series, and likely had interests in the topics before that. His re-use of the scripts implies he remained very familiar with his work of that time 20+ years ago and likely had great fondness for it. The series had some great radio actors in the early stages of their careers. Some would move to Hollywood and become prominent in the programming there. Others would stay in New York. Among the actors in the series were Santos Ortega, Vicki Vola, Luis Van Rooten, Alfred Shirley, Edgar Stehli, House Jameson, Peter Donald, Frank Readick, Ian Martin, Chester Stratton, Elliott Reid, Alan Reed, Jeanette Nolan, and others.
Why would Johnstone and producer Bruno Zirato, Jr. believe that Who Knows? storylines would work on Suspense? There are practical reasons, such as the paucity of new scripts in competition with television’s thirst and attraction for scriptwriters, the austere budget that CBS imposed, and a lack of time to work with new scripts and cultivate new scriptwriting talent. With a resource like Johnstone was available, especially if deadlines were looming, that would be too tempting to turn down. If he had a script he could modify quickly, that could solve a lot of problems.
There’s also the factor of what kinds of stories were popular at the time. Twilight Zone had a big influence on Suspense, especially with writer George Bamber. But these Who Knows? scripts almost seem more like the TV series One Step Beyond. The stories of that series often dealt with similar psychic phenomena. It was popular, broadcast from 1959-1961 and was successful in syndication. They might have believed it was a lucky convergence that the Who Knows? scripts could be popular, like the regular ebbs and flows of dress tie widths or the lengths of dresses. Things fall out of favor and then they come around again.
The monetary and time economy of working with Johnstone and his re-used scripts combined with the popularity of stories in the style of One Step Beyond might have led them to believe that it all made sense from many angles. The stories, however, seem weak in comparison to other Suspense, even in this period.
There are two episodes of the eight that are more important than the others. Devilstone is a key episode in the Suspense series because it was its final episode. Learning that the script was written and broadcast on Johnstone’s earlier series gave a new perspective on the selection of that episode to be the terminal Suspense. There were also changes in dialogue made by Johnstone to mark the end of the radio era.
The discovery of the Who Knows? connection also changes the perception and understanding of the Suspense production of 1962-04-22 Curse of Kamashek. It was originally believed that it was a highly abridged (and very bad) re-use of the Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar five-part serial broadcast from 1956-09-03 to 1956-09-07. That serial is a superb production with an intricate and carefully developed plot and characters. It turns out that the Suspense and the YTJD have the Who Knows? script as a common parent, but they were separately developed. The Suspense version lacks the outstanding attributes of the YTJD production. Suspense is faithful to the original Who Knows? script while YTJD used it as a foundation, expanding and developing it to become an excellent endeavor. That original 1940 script was adapted twice, with each adaptation separate and distinct, and one vastly superior to the other.
Johnstone was prolific as a writer, director, and producer in the late 1930s and early 1940s. His scripts for Who Knows? and other series may have been re-used and re-imagined in later projects. He worked in the early years of Philip Morris Playhouse and the other programs in which he toiled may have ties to Let George Do It and other YTJD episodes.
There are no available recordings of Who Knows? in circulation among collectors at this time. The Library of Congress does have recordings of rehearsals of the episodes. Some background of the series and their holdings is available at https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2021/10/who-knows-radio-and-the-paranormal/ The blogpost notes that LoC does have recordings of rehearsals of broadcasts, but they are not available at this time on a streaming basis. They can be heard by visitors to the Library of Congress by in-person appointment.
Many thanks to Karl Schadow for the background on this important part of Suspense history. His research acumen and work are well known among Library of Congress staff. He was profiled in their blog in 2018 https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2018/05/inquiring-minds-bringing-radios-golden-age-back-to-life/
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