Taming That New Upstart

They also had voices then.

The Golden Age of Hollywood wasn’t just played on movie sound stages: as documented in Leonard Maltin’s new book, “The Great American Broadcast,” film stars from Bogart to Gable to Crawford created their magic at radio microphones, in programs that sometimes added a new dimension to their screen personas.

Maltin’s history offers new or previously unpublished interviews with Orson Welles, Norman Corwin, George Burns and dozens more, illuminating everything from the involvement of radio sponsors to the role studio audiences played in bringing a broadcast to life.

But it’s Maltin’s chapter on “The Hollywood Connection” that will fascinate movie buffs the most.

“Hollywood initially feared radio as competition--the enemy,” observes Maltin. “But as it did with television a generation later, it made its peace with radio, in stages.”

By the 1930s, studios realized that radio could be a promotional tool--or even a source of profit. But Maltin says it was the ruthless, powerful columnist Louella Parsons who started the Hollywood connection to radio with her weekly broadcast, “Hollywood Hotel.”

“She virtually blackmailed stars to appear, from the evidence I could get. An invitation from her was tantamount to a command performance. She didn’t pay the stars to appear; she convinced studios this was good promotion for their films,” Maltin says.

“Within a few years, ‘Lux Radio Theater’ moved to Los Angeles from New York, and that started the wave to Hollywood.”

During the more-than-20-year run of “Lux Radio Theater,” listeners were led to think no less a personage than Cecil B. DeMille directed the broadcasts that he hosted each week.

Not so, says Maltin.

“The American public was bamboozled. He was the host, nothing more. He arrived at the last possible moment and read the script. It was a role he played with great gusto.”

Meanwhile, MGM practiced its own form of deception with its variety series “Good News of 1938,” designed to promote MGM films and featuring the full roster of Metro’s stars.

“They claimed it came right from MGM studios,” Maltin recalls. “In fact, it was done in downtown Hollywood, in a theater.” They also “phonied it up in the best MGM tradition” by hiring actors to play off-screen studio luminaries, like songwriter Harold Arlen and art director Cedric Gibbons (“Oh, a new Cedric Gibbons!” sneered Wallace Beery, before interviewing “Gibbons” on a live broadcast).

But the stars at least were real. Some, like Jimmy Stewart, loved working in live radio; some, like Clark Gable, performed under duress; and others, like Joan Crawford, were simply terrified.

“[Actor] Sidney Miller told me that he once led Crawford back from the microphone to her seat when her scene was finished. He saw that she had dug her fingernails into her palm so ferociously that she’d drawn blood. That’s how petrified she was.”

Sometimes it was the star who brought the terror to a broadcast. Veteran character actor Frank Morgan (“The Wizard of Oz”) was a notorious boozer, whose inebriation added an element of risk to his many radio appearances. For “Academy Award Theater,” Morgan had the key role of narrator in a broadcast of “The Shop Around the Corner,” co-starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. A week of rehearsal was booked; Morgan skipped it all.

The night of the live show, “Morgan showed up just before broadcast completely sloshed. So they forced coffee down his throat and tried to get him into shape. He went out, and to the director’s absolute astonishment, Morgan gave a wonderful performance, and the audience never knew.”

On some occasions, a hit broadcast could inspire a feature film. “Barbara Stanwyck told me that she had the idea of doing ‘Dark Victory’ on radio [before the movie was made],” Maltin says. “It had been a successful Broadway play. She called the people at ‘Lux Radio Theater’ and said, ‘I’d love to play this part.’

“They said, ‘We only do movies that have been produced’ . . . but they looked into it, and did the show with Stanwyck. As she understood it, Edmund Goulding--the director-writer-producer--heard the show while driving in his car. He was so impressed, he went to Jack Warner the next day and said, ‘You have to buy this property, this is great movie material.’

“Warner took his advice, bought it, then cast Bette Davis in the movie. Stanwyck never forgave anyone involved . . . especially Bette Davis!”

Radio also allowed adventurous stars to break out of their stereotyped images. The long-running CBS series “Suspense” invited comics like Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Danny Kaye and Ozzie and Harriet Nelson to play dramatic or villainous roles--”and they were often quite good,” Maltin notes. “They seemed to relish the opportunity to do something like that.”

Another master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, tried his hand at radio in the mid-1940s, a decade before his success in television. The pilot he created was “a pretty good murder mystery,” Maltin observes, “but what they missed was the idea of adding black humor to [Hitch’s] personality, and that of course was what made him such a hit on television in the ‘50s and ‘60s.”

Four decades after television usurped radio as America’s top home entertainment, Maltin says discerning listeners can still find solid new radio drama--featuring stars, to boot.

“ ‘L.A. Theaterworks’ [on KCRW-FM (89.9)] gets stars like Kelsey Grammer, John Goodman, Ed Begley Jr., David Warner and Samantha Eggar to do new plays on radio . . . radio veterans like Jeanette Nolan and William Windom still perform.”

For vintage broadcasts like the ones described in Maltin’s book, fans can turn to KNX’s nightly “Drama Hour” at 9 p.m., as well as Sunday broadcasts of classic shows on public radio stations KPCC-FM (89.3) and KCSN-FM (88.5).

The broadcasts recall a time when stars firmly established in one medium took their chances in another--with often surprising results.

Notes Maltin: “I assumed it would be the stage-trained actors turned movie stars who’d fare best in radio, and the purely invented stars who would not . . . but that was not always the case. Some of them got it and some of them didn’t.

“But if you stop to think about it, what makes a movie star? Their looks and screen presence, as well as their acting ability. Take away two of those three ingredients, and force them to project that star quality just with their voice, and that’s a tall order.”