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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