ACTORS TUNING INTO A REBIRTH OF RADIO : Old Sound-Effects Man Returns for First Show

When he was 16, Ray Erlenborn earned $20 a week playing one of the page boys in the original West Coast production of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1927 classic spoof of the Hollywood movie studios, “Once in a Lifetime.”

On Sunday, having lost most of the hair on his head but not a whit of his show-business enthusiasm, Erlenborn, 72, will orchestrate the live radio sound effects as 22 modern-day actors, including Ed Asner, John Lithgow, Richard Dreyfuss, Marsha Mason and Amy Irving, revive the Kaufman/Hart classic in a live, old-time radio broadcast over KCRW-FM (89.9).

“We needed a sound-effects man and there aren’t too many of the old radio guys around anymore,” says Judith Auberjonois, the founding director of the newly established actors ensemble, L.A. Classic Theatre Works, which is producing the play to raise money for itself. “When we heard he’d actually worked in a performance with Kaufman and Hart, we thought, ‘What a coincidence!’ It was too divine to be true.”

Erlenborn worked as a sound-effects man in radio and television from the time he was 12 until he retired after 40 years at CBS in 1977. Over the years he has performed with comedians from Buster Keaton to Red Skelton and Carol Burnett. But lately, as a new nostalgia for the “good ol’ days” of radio has blossomed, Erlenborn has been busy helping to re-create the sound and excitement of authentic and seemingly long forgotten radio drama.

“There are so many clubs filled with thousands of old-time radio buffs across the country that it’s almost like a cult,” Erlenborn says. “And over the last couple of years, everyone wants to do the old shows. All the productions we see in film and television might dazzle you with robots and car crashes, but the art of dialogue is lost for the visual effects. And a play like ‘Once in a Lifetime’ has some of the finest dialogue ever written. I think that a lot of people today prefer seeing actors work with their lines.”

Even back when he was 16, Erlenborn remembers that he was a big fan of Kaufman and Hart’s sophisticated comedy. He says that the playwriting duo--who alternated in the part of the playwright in the original production of “Once in a Lifetime”--were looked upon with awe by all the other actors in the cast.

Working on the revival of their play, Erlenborn says, not only gives a new generation of actors and their audience a chance to appreciate the wit and timelessness of this legendary team, but it also provides him with a chance to reminisce about what it was like back when he started in show business as a 9-year-old actor in musical stage reviews and silent films--back when everybody did everything including the sound effects and sweeping up the theater after the show.

Casting calls for young actors back then meant sitting with a bunch of other boys on a long wooden bench outside the casting director’s office. Inevitably, Erlenborn remembers, the casting director would open his door, scan the row of restless faces waiting on the bench and say, ‘I want that freckle-faced boy over there and that little boy over here.’

“So I started painting freckles on my face and I got more parts,” Erlenborn says. “All they had to do was stick me out in front of an audience. I’d get a few laughs or some applause for singing a song and I knew I could do that forever.”

Erlenborn says that, in those days, show people like him did any kind of work in the industry they could get, jumping from one recording studio to another, acting in variety programs and comedies and manning the sound effects in between. In the ‘30s, Erlenborn worked on radio shows at KMPC-AM and, in his spare time, recreated the play-by-play of baseball games, complete with the sound of balls cracking off the bat and the cheers of the crowd, as the scores came in on the wire.

Eventually, radio gave way to television and Erlenborn moved on to the world of matching sounds to pictures. He adored crunching peach baskets to depict the sound of Red Skelton crunching his hand in the door, and then popping a champagne cork as Skelton pulled his hand free. But the style of television--”every decision by committee--director, producer, 15 writers, assistant director, assistant producer, executive producer”--made him miss the fun of live radio, he says.

“At the beginning of television, they left the sound-effects man alone because they didn’t know much about it. But when they started to put in laughs and applause, everyone wanted a part of the action. In radio, on every production, you are a tight little family with one boss and a great deal of creative freedom. Radio was truly the golden era for actors and sound-effects men.”

L.A. Classic Theatre Works chose to revive that golden era in one of its first productions precisely because radio provides a perfect and relatively inexpensive medium for the work of serious theater actors. The company hopes eventually to present a series of monthly radio broadcasts.

“There is a revivalist interest in radio because people spend so much time in their cars or listening to headsets,” says Judith Auberjonios. “The technology of things like the Walkman has led us back to radio. It enables you to plug into media without the encumberances of a movie projector or having to sit still in your living room. It’s mobile, and it’s a very imaginative medium.”

Though “Once in a Lifetime” does not require the most imaginative sound effects, Erlenborn will bring his house store, footstep board, train whistle and little bells to jingle as the women, clad in jewels, walk around the set. But this play, which chronicles the frenzy of 1927 Hollywood as it struggled to deal with the invention of the talking film, does provide a fitting backdrop for the model that has kept Erlenborn working and well fed in the entertainment industry for more than 60 years.

“If it’s show business,” he says, “and this play is certainly show business, I’d do it.”