Remembering Days When the Shadow Knew

I suppose if I were Charles Michelson and had listened to recorded radio shows for the past 46 years, I might be a little tired of the Green Hornet too. Doing anything for 46 years, not counting those functions essential to life, could be a drain on one’s enthusiasm. Even in my most erotic fantasies, I never held out much hope for maintaining on any level the kind of consistency Michelson has demonstrated through his fidelity to old radio shows. If he seems to have lost a little of the stirring he once felt when he was hearing the buzz of the Green Hornet for the first time, that’s understandable. Nothing lasts forever.

But I had not heard these shows since I was a kid and still at the age when it was important to me to learn why you had to cock your head to kiss a girl. I was young and had on my mind priorities other than a guy who went around town with a Filipino valet named Cato in a car that buzzed. But then, the memories of innocence assume sweeter tones given the counterpoint of passing years, and when Michelson played some of the old shows for me, I was enthralled.

We sat in his small office overlooking Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills one day, listening to tapes of about a half-dozen of them, which he owns and leases to radio stations around the world. Michelson is a man in his 70s with an expression that seems to simultaneously ask a question and smile knowingly at the predictability of the answer. He has been around the block a few times, as old cops used to say, and I suspect that he is not very surprised at whatever parade might come marching by.

“Listen to this,” he was saying, as familiar with his shows as an old woman with her husband’s snoring. He had already played an episode of “The Green Hornet,” which only mildly intrigued me, though I was sympathetic to the Hornet’s fight against America’s public enemies, and now he was clicking on the tape again. At first there was a kind of dirge-like music and then that chillingly mysterious voice that used to rivet me to a chair when it asked, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. . . .” Followed by the haunting laugh of a hero who came and went like a wind in the willow tree.

“That’s fun,” Michelson said, watching my reaction.

“Fun?” I said. “It’s terrific!” I tend to speak in superlatives when excited. “You’ve got to love those kinds of shows.”

“I like them,” Michelson replied, “but I don’t sleep with them. They make me a clean living. I’m a happy man.”

I never considered the Shadow fun. I considered him, well, important. I believed there actually was a wealthy young playboy named Lamont Cranston who, on a trip to the Orient, discovered the hypnotic power to cloud men’s minds, and could thereby become invisible at will. Only his good friend, the lovely Margot Lane, shared that secret with him.

“I think,” I said, “the Shadow represented the invulnerability of a milder age. You know, when there was always something just out of sight to protect us.”

Michelson looked at me with that amused quizzical expression and shrugged. “I don’t know about social significance,” he replied. “I enjoyed the show then, I enjoy it now.”

“They were clean heroes,” I insisted.

“To the extent that Lamont Cranston never went to bed with Margot Lane, I guess they were.” I frowned and muttered about the imagination that went into it. Michelson, seeing I was taking the whole thing seriously, agreed that the stories were imaginative, perhaps more imaginative than what we see on television today. “‘A good story well told will live forever,” he said, quoting Shakespeare.

The Shadow was more than that. He was the mysterious force that protected small boys walking home alone at night on a quiet and scary street. He was the flash of headlights from a passing car that shone suddenly through a bedroom window and sent the demons in the corners scattering for safety. He was the invisible strength that stood with you on a corner lot when you had to stop and turn at last to face a bully that towered over you. With the Shadow around, you were never alone.

Michelson went on to play tapes of “Dragnet” and “Gangbusters” and some others. And while I remembered them well, they just weren’t the same as “The Shadow.”

Perhaps during the “Gangbusters” era of my life I was simply growing out of the age when I truly believed there would always be someone or something to watch over little boys on dark streets. Perhaps the cop shows just seemed too violent and too real, reflecting the terror of a world at war in the calamity of my youth. We all reach that point where the warm fantasies of our childhood become only cold and scattered memories. New priorities emerge. As Michelson said to me near the end of our talk, “Everything changes. Nothing stays the same.”

Maybe so. But sometimes late at night, just for the hell of it, I play a tape of some of the old radio shows, and when the Shadow laughs, I am taken with the faint and distant feeling that someday, perhaps, everything, may still be all right.