Breaking Walls

After eleven orders of thirteen Barrie Craig installments, production of the show moved from New York to Hollywood with the July 6th, 1954 episode. The August 24th episode was called “Blood Money.”

The west coast broadcasts were supported by people like Joan Banks, Olan Soule, Parley Baer, Howard McNear, Herb Vigran, Virgina Gregg, Betty Lou Gerson, and Lawrence Dobkin.

By 1954 ninety-eight percent of homes had a radio set. There were still nineteen million U.S. houses that could only be reached by radio.

Procter & Gamble led the way with over fourteen million dollars spent, and forty companies, including General Foods, Colgate-Palmolive, Liggett & Myers, Campbell’s Soups, S.C. Johnson, and Coca-Cola spent at least one million dollars on radio advertising.

However, the four national networks continued a five-year downward trend in radio ad sales. Network radio gross revenue peaked in 1948 at just under two-hundred million dollars. In 1953, it was down to one-hundred sixty million.

While TV hadn’t fully supplanted radio’s total reach, it had decimated its prime-time audience share. On CBS-TV I Love Lucy led all shows with a rating of 58.8. It was seen in over fifteen million homes.

Radio’s top show, The Lux Radio Theater, was heard in just under three million.

The networks reduced ad sale charges for the sixth consecutive year, hoping to offset TVs broadening market share. It didn’t work. For the first time in sixteen years revenue fell. The only category to see an increase in sales was local advertising, and even that rose less than one percent.

Shows canceled in the first half of 1954 included The Quiz Kids, Dr. Christian, Front Page Farrell, Bulldog Drummond, Rocky Fortune, Ozzie and Harriet, and The Six Shooter.

West-coast actors, like Herb Vigran and Herb Ellis were moving into TV, but television was already going through budgetary changes.

Radio’s top show, People Are Funny had a rating of 8.4. Along with oncoming transistor sets, nearly thirty million cars now had radios, but there was still no system to measure this audience.

The next year it was estimated that out-of-home listening added an additional forty percent to at-home audiences. People Are Funny’s actual rating was closer to twelve.

But these incidentals didn’t matter to the industry’s character actors. Network production habits were changing. More and more documentaries and news were airing from New York, more and more drama was airing from Los Angeles. That summer, NBC shifted the production of Barrie Craig to hollywood.

When Bill Gargan was fired from Martin Kane he planned to star in a Broadway rendition of Doctor Knock. In late September of 1951, Gargan signed a one-million-dollar contract that made him the exclusive property of NBC for the next five years. The deal required him to participate in a minimum of four guest spots on radio and TV each year.

At the same time, Gargan was invited by Frank Folsom of RCA to accompany him to Rome to meet the Pope. Along the way, Gargan went to Paris to appear in the October 7th, 1951 episode of The Big Show.

He participated in a sketch involving a poker game with George Sanders, Fernand Gravey, and Meredith Willson. Two weeks after his Big Show appearance, William Gargan was starring in a new series for NBC.

Launched as part of NBC’s year-long Silver Jubilee, Barrie Crane, Confidential Investigator, first aired over NBC from New York on Wednesday October 3rd, 1951 at 10PM eastern time.

Bill Gargan debuted as the detective opposite Mr. President on ABC, Frank Edwards on Mutual, and boxing on CBS. The show was directed by the just-heard Himan Brown. By 1952 Brown had been involved in radio for decades.

The Barrie was inspired by the nickname of William Gargan’s oldest son, then twenty-two. The title of the show was soon changed to Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator. Episode three was called “The Judge and The Champ.”

In conjunction with NBC’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the network launched a series of both Radio and TV offerings highlighting the growth of NBC's technology, talent, infrastructure and advertising success.

Block-sharing advertising was in full-effect. The network sold commercial time spots, rather than full shows and called it “Operation Tandem.”

Gargan was back on The Big Show the next March 16th, 1952 to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with Tallulah Bankhead and good friend and fellow Catholic, Fred Allen.

Now with transcription wide-spread, Barrie Craig could be heard on different days each week, based on the region. Listeners would also hear different commercials, depending on what local affiliate they were tuning into. These could also be a mix of local and national ad spots.

Blocked-sharing was being used by the other networks. ABC touted theirs as 'The Pyramid Plan,' CBS as The Power Plan, and Mutual called their’s MBS Plus.

In a further refinement of MBS Plus, Mutual introduced an exclusive package of MGM programming for 1952. Both The Adventures of Harry Lime, and The Black Museum aired as part of this deal. For more information, tune into Breaking Walls episode 141.

Launched with their tandem plan, NBC provided a "pay as you sell" opportunity for local affiliates. Local sponsors could pick from one-hundred-nineteen one-minute spots. The goal was to accommodate sponsors without a long contract.

Craig occupied an office on the third floor of the Mercantile Building on Manhattan's Madison Avenue. Barrie Craig’s writers included Frank Kane, Louis Vittes, John Roeburt, and Ernest Kinoy.

William Gargan was supported by some of the finest east coast voice talents of the era. This included Santos Ortega, Elspeth Eric, Arlene Blackburn, Barbara Weeks, Joan Alexander, Parker Fennelly, Arnold Moss, Luis Van Rooten, and Herb Ellis.

NBC announcers included Don Pardo and Ed King with John Daly as spokesperson for 1952 Pontiac spots and Carl Caruso for Bromo-Seltzer spots.

In 1949 Bill Gargan appeared in Dynamite for Paramount Pictures. It would be his last film until 1956. On March 3rd he appeared on Guest Star.

That year he was in New York City when he phoned acquaintance Frank Folsom of RCA. Folsom invited Gargan for lunch. He went to the fifty-third floor of 30 Rockefeller Center. Inside were executives from BBD&O, The New York Stock Exchange, and others. During lunch Gargan mentioned that he was looking for a job in TV.

Folsom phoned Norm Blackburn, VP of TV and Radio at NBC and a good friend of Gargan’s. Gargan was asked if he’d be interested in playing a pipe-smoking detective, sponsored by the U.S. Tobacco Company. The show became Martin Kane, Private Eye. It would be shot for TV and separately done for radio as well.

Mutual Broadcasting carried the radio series. It debuted on Sunday August 7th, 1949 at 4:30PM eastern time. Meanwhile, the TV version aired on NBC Thursdays at 10PM.

It was live, and the first detective series on network TV with an enormous following. Gargan realized early on that there was only so much you could do with a plot in a half-hour, so he made the series a showcase for himself. He developed a tongue-in-cheek style.

Kane’s 37.8 TV rating for the 1950-51 season was twelfth overall.

Gargan later said “This was TV’s early era, but a few people tried to make the casual intimacy of TV a sexual intimacy. The sight of pretty women, a touch of deep cleavage, a show of thigh became—to these producers—more important than the content of the show. The result was we often had pretty, empty headed girls blowing their lines all over the lot.

“In Desperation, I began to mug for the camera more and the script writers began to write more blatantly. You get into a terrible rut this way. Everybody works harder to undo the damage, and the result is more screeching, overacting, and overwriting. It drives the viewers away, and to get them back you come up with more and more desperate gimmickry.

“What was worse, to me, was the embarrassment. I’m no prude. Probably the best part I ever did on film was that of Joe in The Knew What They Wanted, a wife-stealer. But this was just sleazy.”

The next season the show’s rating fell out of the top thirty. By then, Gargan was friends with New York’s Cardinal Spellman. A friend of Gargan’s mentioned that the Cardinal watched the show. Gargan went to the studio execs and told them to write better scripts or get another star. They got another star — Lloyd Nolan. After eighty-five weeks, Bill Gargan was no longer Martin Kane.

Shortly after, Gargan signed a deal with Sonny Werblin, then of MCA, to do a new private eye show for NBC. The show would eventually be called Barry Craig, Confidential Investigator.

During the War, Bill Gargan led a USO group that featured Paulette Goddard, Keenan Wynn, and accordionist Andy Arcari.

They toured China-Burma-India. He spent four months overseas in some of the poorest and worst conditions of the War, putting on shows and flying in various prop planes despite a lingering ear infection, drinking whatever alcohol he could to help keep sane.

When Bill finally got home his ear was so swollen wife Mary jokingly called him Dumbo. Under contract at MGM, he borrowed an apartment in New York and went on stage. His first night he got word that friend Leslie Howard had been killed in a plane crash.

The War marked a dividing line in Bill’s life.

He went back to Hollywood and made Swing Fever, She Gets Her Man, and finally in 1945, he starred with Bing Crosby, Ingrid Bergman, and Martha Sleeper as Joe Gallagher in The Bells of St. Mary's.

Television sets began to show up in homes as Bill and his agent Ken Dolan conceived a half-hour mystery radio show called Murder Will Out for ABC. It failed to find a long-term sponsor and was canceled.

Gargan next starred in I Deal In Crime, beginning on January 21st, 1946 on ABC. He played private investigator Ross Dolan for the next twenty months.

During that time, Gargan also guest-starred on Family Theater, hosting the second episode on February 20th, 1947.

Family Theater was created by Patrick Peyton of the Holy Cross Fathers. Mutual Broadcasting donated time under four conditions:

The show had to be a drama of top quality; strictly nonsectarian; feature a film star; and Father Peyton had to pay the production costs.

Peyton met Loretta Young, who advised him on how to approach A-listers. She became the “first lady” of Family Theater. Between 1947 and 1956, there were four-hundred eighty-two dramas broadcast. Few used religion of any kind in the plot.

Bill continued to make guest-appearances on radio, like on the October 13th, 1948 episode of Bing Crosby’s Philco Radio Time on ABC. It would be in 1949 that William Gargan took on his most famous role, and in the process became one of the first television drama detectives in broadcasting.

William Gargan appeared in more than fifty films in the 1930s. In between, he and Mary’s second son, Leslie, was born on June 28th, 1933. The Gargans bought the late Jean Harlow’s house at 512 North Palm Drive for twenty-seven thousand dollars. They’d live there for the next quarter century. Bill’s parents passed away in the middle of the decade.

Gargan soon signed a Warner Bros. two-year contract that paid him one-hundred-thousand dollars, turning down the role of Duke Mantee in Robert Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest on Broadway to sign. The role went to friend Humphrey Bogart. For more info on Bogie, tune into Breaking Walls episode 140.

Bill made his Lux Radio Theater debut on March 6th, 1939 in an adaptation of One Way Passage.

Gargan hated working for Warner Bros. He likened it to sleeping on a bed of nails. The press labeled him “Bill Gargan, King of the B movies.” He later broke his contract.

Perhaps his most famous role was as Joe in the 1940 RKO film, They Knew What They Wanted. Gargan received third billing behind Carole Lombard and Charles Laughton and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

The plot is: while visiting San Francisco, Tony Patucci — played by Laughton — an aging illiterate winegrower from the Napa Valley, sees waitress Amy Peters — played by Lombard — and falls in love. Tony gets his foreman Joe, a womanizer, to write her a letter in Tony's name. Tony's courtship culminates with a proposal. When she requests a picture of him, one of Joe is sent. Amy goes to Napa to be married, only to find that Joe isn’t her husband-to-be. She decides to go through with the marriage. However, while Tony is in bed after an accident, Amy and Joe have an affair. Two months later Amy discovers she’s pregnant. Upon learning of the infidelity, Tony pummels Joe, but forgives Amy, insisting they still be married. Unable to forgive herself, she leaves with the priest.

Meanwhile, Gargan did more radio. He appeared on the January 4th, 1940 episode of The Good News with his former co-star Ann Sothern. Good News aired Thursdays at 9PM eastern time over NBC’s Red Network. Its 16.9 rating was twelfth overall.

Good News was the first major collaboration of a movie studio and a broadcasting system for a commercial sponsor.”

The idea was, simply put, to “dazzle ’em with glitter.” MGM produced. Every star except Garbo was available. There would be songs, stories, comedy, and drama. In short, it promised an intimate glimpse of Hollywood with its hair down. The result cost Maxwell House $25,000 a week.

Gargan was back on the program the following week in a one-act play opposite Lurene Tuttle.

Bill was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar, won by good friend Walter Brennan for The Westerner. He later joked that Brennan spent ninety minutes spitting and Gargan lost to a spittoon. The joking was short-lived. Gargan would soon begin work on another film with the appropriate title, I Wake Up Screaming.

William Dennis Gargan was born to an irish-american Catholic family in Brooklyn, New York on July 17th, 1905. His parents—Bill and Irene—had seven children, but only Bill and his brother Ed survived infancy. Ed was four years older than Bill. The pair were close. Bill’s mother had been a teacher, but his father was a book maker and a gambler, which didn’t sit well with Irene’s parents.

Gargan’s dad made book in the copy room at the New York World and in Room 9 of City Hall. The four-story brownstone they lived in at 427 Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights was won in a poker game. Today P.S. 29 stands on the site. Bill got his first silent movie job at seven for Vitagraph Studios. He was paid Three dollars and eighty-five cents. That’s roughly one-hundred twenty dollars today. It portended things to come. By ten, Bill was hanging out at his father’s bar in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Gargan later said that his mother was more straight-laced, a bit of a prude on the surface, but in reality, she ran with dad all her life and his.” Both parents had good senses of humor.

He grew up going to Sea Gate in the summer and fighting for the Irish kids from Bay Ridge against the Italian kids in empty lots. He played baseball and basketball for St. Francis Xavier grade school and St. James High. He ditched school in the spring to scale the Ebbets Field wall to watch the Dodgers and their stars of the 1910s.

When he was fourteen and working as an ice brusher at the Prospect Park skating rink, Gargan met a girl named Mary Elizabeth Kenny. He was so taken that he used his broom to knock her down! Gargan recalled that “She got up, her eyes spitting fire and her mouth not doing badly either. I knew I was in love.”

Gargan loved the theater. By high school he was playing in school productions of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet. However, a teacher who’d been out to get Bill for his comedic behavior made life so miserable during Bill’s senior year that he dropped out.

Gargan became a message runner for a Broad Street brokerage firm, then a cop for a clothing store, then one for a Wall Street agency until he was fired for losing a tail. He sold Wesson Oil to grocers, sneaking away to watch plays. One day the lights went up and Gargan noticed his boss was sitting next to him. “Good show,” Gargan said, “you’re fired,” said his boss.

Bill’s brother Ed was an actor. While having lunch with Ed one day at the Lamb’s Club a man named Le Roy Clemens mentioned to Bill that a play he’d written was having tryouts. Bill read a line and was hired, beginning his career in Aloma of the South Seas. They opened in Baltimore in 1924. Gargan was a quick study, learning everyone’s parts as well as the stage manager’s. Within a year he was directing the Philadelphia production of the play. Aloma of the South Seas ran for forty weeks.

Gargan spent the next years playing all over the country with people like George Jessel and Richard Bennett. Jessel would be godfather to Bill’s first son Bill Jr, affectionately known as Barrie. Barrie was born on February 25th, 1929.

After the stock market crashed, Bill got a short-term job on stage in New York where he met William Bendix. Soon a casting director at Paramount called and after that Leslie Howard cast Bill in a play. Bill later said that Leslie helped make him a star.

That same year, on January 12, 1932 Gargan opened at the Broadhurst theater in New York with Leslie Howard in Philip Barry’s The Animal Kingdom. It was a smash hit. His success led MGM to call. They offered him the part of Sergeant O’Hara in the 1932 feature Rain, starring Joan Crawford and Walter Huston. He’d be paid fifteen-hundred dollars per week. That’s over thirty-three grand today. Bill bought out his contract with The Animal Kingdom, playing on May 2nd for the last time.

The next morning, Bill, Mary, and young Barrie left for Hollywood. Rain was shot on Catalina Island.

Hey everybody James Scully here, the host, producer, and director of Breaking Walls. If you've been enjoying Breaking Walls please consider giving the show a rating or review on whatever platform you listen. The most listened-to platforms are iTunes, Spotify, and Youtube.

For those who don't know, the series is available on Youtube. And for those who didn't know, the series is also available anywhere you could get a podcast (and at https://www.thewallbreakers.com/breaking-walls) if you've been watching on Youtube.

If you like the show, consider donating $1 per month at https://www.patreon.com/TheWallBreakers

Breaking Walls Episode 142 will be on William Gargan and Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator. This will be out in full on August 1st, 2023 at the Patreon and in parts throughout the month of August in the main show feed.

After that, we'll begin a mini series on radio and world news in September and October of 1957.

So, once again, if you appreciate the show, these are monthly four-hour documentaries that I produce in my own time. I'd very much love if you would subscribe on Patreon for $1 (or more) a month.

Or, if you really like the show and can't, the next best thing I could ask for besides a review is to please tell people. Word of mouth is the best way this show can grow effectively. A lot of podcast marketing isn't nearly as good as you, the listener who enjoys this, telling someone you know, "hey check this out."

If you have any questions, please reach me at my email — [email protected].

Thanks! I'll catch you on the flip side.

In Breaking Walls episode 141, we finish a three part series on the radio career of Orson Welles by picking up as he left The United States for Europe in the late 1940s.

For full appreciation, tune into episodes 79 and 104 before hearing this.

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Highlights:

• Macbeth, HUAC and Leaving the U.S

• Harry Alan Towers, and Harry Lime

• Othello and The Black Museum

• Song of Myself and Theatre Royal

• Moriarity

• The BBC Sketchbook and Moby Dick

• Mr Lincoln and Mr Arkadin

• Returning to the U.S.

• Tomorrow and Yesterday

• Looking Ahead to Barrie Craig

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The WallBreakers:

http://thewallbreakers.com

Subscribe to Breaking Walls everywhere you get your podcasts.

To support the show:

http://patreon.com/TheWallBreakers

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The reading material for today’s episode was:

• A Book by Desi Arnaz

• Citizen Welles by Frank Brady

• This is Orson Welles by Welles and Peter Bogdanovich

• On the Air — By John Dunning

• Discovering Orson Welles by Jonathan Rosenbaum

• Orson Welles on the Air, at OrsonWelles.Indiana.edu

• Wellesnet.com.

As well as articles from:

• Broadcasting Magazine

• Life Magazine

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On the interview front:

• Orson Welles was with BBC’s Monitor, Peter Bogdonavich, Dick Cavett, Michael Parkinson, and Dinah Shore.

• Harry Alan Towers spoke with Sheridan Morley and the BBC.

• Joseph Cotton was with Chuck Schaden. Hear the full chat at SpeakingofRadio.com.

• Jeanette Nolan was with SPERDVAC, the Society to Preserve and Encourage Radio Drama, Variety, and Comedy. For more information, please go to SPERDVAC.com

• Lurene Tuttle spoke with Same Time, Same Station in 1972.

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Selected music featured in today’s episode was:

• Wilderness Trail — By Walter Scharf for National Geographic

• Irish & Celtic Waltz — By The Irish & Celtic Folk Wanderers

• The Colorado Trail, Op. 28 Fantaisie for Harp — By Elizabeth Hainen

• Seance on a Wet Afternoon — By John Barry

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A special thank you to Ted Davenport, Jerry Haendiges, and Gordon Skene.

For Ted go to RadioMemories.com, for Jerry, visit OTRSite.com, and for Gordon, please go to PastDaily.com.

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Thank you to:

Tony Adams

Steven Allmon

Orson Orsen Chandler

Phil Erickson

Jessica Hanna

Perri Harper

Thomas M. Joyce

Ryan Kramer

Earl Millard

Gary Mollica

Barry Nadler

Christian Neuhaus

Ray Shaw

Filipe A Silva

John Williams

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WallBreakers Links:

Patreon - patreon.com/thewallbreakers

Social Media - @TheWallBreakers

It seems fitting that the way in which Orson Welles described Alexander Woollcott is the same way many who knew Welles would have described him.

That’s going to bring our look at Orson Welles’ radio career to a close. We’ve now covered Mr. Welles in long form three times — in episodes 79, 104, and now 141. We also covered his time as The Shadow in depth in episode 131.

Is this the last time we focus on Orson Welles? That remains to be seen, but next month on Breaking Walls we’ll move to NBC where we’ll focus on one of the more underrated detective shows of the mid-1950s.

That show? Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator.

The reading material used in today’s episode was:

• A Book by Desi Arnaz

• Citizen Welles by Frank Brady

• This is Orson Welles by Welles and Peter Bogdanovich

• On the Air — By John Dunning

• Discovering Orson Welles by Jonathan Rosenbaum

• Orson Welles on the Air, at OrsonWelles.Indiana.edu

• Wellesnet.com.

As well as articles from:

• Broadcasting Magazine

•Life Magazine

On the interview front:

•Orson Welles was with BBC’s Monitor, Peter Bogdonavich, Dick Cavett, Michael Parkinson, and Dinah Shore.

• Harry Alan Towers spoke with Sheridan Morley and the BBC.

• Joseph Cotton was with Chuck Schaden. Hear the full chat at SpeakingofRadio.com.

• Jeanette Nolan was with SPERDVAC, the Society to Preserve and Encourage Radio Drama, Variety, and Comedy. For more information, please go to SPERDVAC.com

•Lurene Tuttle spoke with Same Time, Same Station in 1972.

Selected music featured in today’s episode was:

• Wilderness Trail — By Walter Scharf for National Geographic

• Irish & Celtic Waltz — By The Irish & Celtic Folk Wanderers

• The Colorado Trail, Op. 28 Fantaisie for Harp — By Elizabeth Hainen

• Seance on a Wet Afternoon — By John Barry

Breaking Walls Episode 142 will spotlight William Gargan and Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator. This episode will be available beginning August 1st, 2023 everywhere you get your podcasts, and at TheWallBreakers.com.

In the meantime, give Breaking Walls a quick rating on whatever platform you listen, especially itunes.

You can also join The Breaking Walls Facebook group at Facebook.com/Groups/TheWallBreakers.

And support this show for as little as a buck a month at Patreon.com/TheWallBreakers.