Breaking Walls

BURNING GOTHAM 001: MOVING DAY

May 1st, 1835 — It’s a cold and rainy Moving Day. Every renter in New York is out on the street looking for lodging. Most of the city’s quarter-million live below Houston Street in buildings four stories or smaller, but construction is booming.

New people are pouring onto New York’s dangerously overcrowded streets by the thousands. Rich and poor, many come to earn an honest living. Others for more nefarious reasons. It’s the perfect place to begin.

Aaron Columbus is an illegitimate son, desperate to make his fortune. Together with Aaron’s brother Wyndham Bowen—an African man born in Europe—they involve themselves in backroom deals, Abolitionism, potential war with France, and City politics.

Aaron has struck an illegal import deal with John Jacob Astor, America’s richest man. The import? Two exiled Russian Countesses; Sorina and Raisa Zubov, and their inheritance—eleven pounds of diamonds.

The two women have just arrived in New York.

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Download Episode Transcript

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Written By:

Olga Lysenko & James Scully

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Cast:

Eirik Gislason

Kacie Laforest

Roland Lane

Mary Murphy

Anna Pirogov

Nancy Pop

Matt Roper

James Scully

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Music:

The Hesperus Early Music Ensemble

The Itinerant Band

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Engineer:

Josh Wilcox of Brooklyn Podcasting Studio

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Director & Post-Producer:

James Scully

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Support Burning Gotham on Patreon

In Breaking Walls episode 133 we spend Thanksgiving 1949 with the cast of I Love a Mystery.

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Highlights:

• Thanksgiving Eve, 1949

• Carlton E. Morse—Budget Stretcher

• The First Two I Love a Mystery Runs

• Mutual Broadcasting in 1949—I Love a Mystery Relaunches

• Thanksgiving Day 1949—Thorson and Boles

• Mercedes McCambridge—Oscar Winner

• Tony Randall’s Early Career

• I Love a Mystery is Canceled

• Parley Baer and One Final Pilot

• Wrapping Things Up

• Looking Ahead to Christmas With Jack Benny

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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 used in today’s episode was:

On the Air — By John Dunning

The I Love A Mystery Companion — By Martin Grams Jr.

Network Radio Ratings — By Jim Ramsburg

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On the interview front:

• Parley Baer, Jim Boles, Mercedes McCambridge, Carlton E. Morse, Tony Randall, Russell and Don Wilson, were with Chuck Schaden. Hear their full chats at SpeakingOfRadio.com.

• Parley Baer and Himan Brown were with SPERDVAC. For more info, go to SPERDVAC.com.

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Selected music featured in today’s episode was:

Sligo Creek — By Al Petteway

It All Depends on You — By Frank Sinatra

Shenandoah — By Michael Hanna

The Holly and the Ivy — By George Winston

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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

Ron Baron

Orson Orsen Chandler

Phil Erickson

Eirik Davey-Gislason

Jessica Hanna

Perri Harper

Briana Isaac

Thomas M. Joyce

Ryan Kramer

Gary Mollica

Barry Nadler

Christian Neuhaus

Aimee Pavy

Martin Schwartz

Ray Shaw

John Williams

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WallBreakers Links:

Patreon - patreon.com/thewallbreakers

Social Media - @TheWallBreakers

Well, that brings our look at I Love A Mystery to a close, but there’s no mystery about what people thought of the subject of our next Breaking Walls episode.

Next time on Breaking Walls, we celebrate the holidays by going shopping with the one and only Jack Benny.

Chuck Schaden interviewed Tony Randall on September 16th, 1970 at the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago. Eight days later Randall’s new series The Odd Couple debuted on ABC. Randall played Felix Unger. The show ran for five seasons and became Randall’s most-remembered role. He continued acting until passing away on May 17th, 2004.

After I Love A Mystery went off the air, Carlton E. Morse penned a new serial drama entitled Family Skeleton. He cast Mercedes McCambridge in the lead role. The Program would air weeknights on CBS from June 8th, 1953 through March 5th, 1954. It pulled a rating of 3.3 for Sweetheart Soap.

Mercedes McCambridge had many trials and tribulations. She was nominated for a second Academy Award for her role in Giant in 1956. She also voiced the demon in The Exorcist.

She won a battle with alcoholism and penned an autobiography in 1981 called The Qualities of Mercy.

Six years later her son John—a futures trader—was caught embezzling funds under McCambridge’s name after she’d given him money to invest. Mercedes refused to cooperate with her son and the company he worked for. They wanted to institute a repayment scheme which would have kept the matter from becoming public.

In November of 1987 John wrote a scathing note blaming her for his problems before killing his wife, children, and then himself.

Mercedes appeared in one final TV role in 1988. Her second husband, radio and tv writer/producer/director Fletcher Markle, passed away in 1991. She died on March 2nd, 2004 in La Jolla, California.

Although the serial went off the air in 1952, in May of 1954 a new audition record was produced for CBS in Hollywood. With Russell Thorson back in Los Angeles he carried over the role of Jack, with Ben Wright as Reggie, and Parley Baer as Doc. Parley Baer was most-known for playing Chester Proudfoot on Gunsmoke.

CBS didn’t pick up the series and I Love A Mystery went off the air for good.

Initially running at 7:45PM, Mutual moved I Love a Mystery to 10:15 in 1950. Although geared for teenagers, it was obviously not standard juvenile programming. Many listeners remembered tuning in under blankets with the lights down low.

But, as entertaining as the program was, by 1952, television was taking over in big cities. One Man’s Family began running on TV in 1949. Tony Randall appeared in telecasts.

Mutual ran as a cooperative, rather than a corporation. The network’s top stations — WOR in New York, WGN in Chicago, and Don Lee’s KHJ in Los Angeles — all boasted powerful signals. But, while Mutual had the most affiliated stations of the big four networks, many of these were small stations in rural areas. This limited their advertiser appeal.

As families left cities and farms for the suburbs, the network’s shared programming structure left it at a distinct disadvantage against NBC, CBS, and ABC. Those three networks would use their soaring revenue to move into TV. Although some Mutual affiliates developed television programming, the full network was never able to launch into TV.

With dramatic radio on its way out, the writing was on the wall. The final Mutual I Love A Mystery adventure aired on December 26th, 1952. By then the Red Scare was a major issue in the entertainment industry, as Himan Brown remembered.

Tony Randall was born Aryeh Leonard Rosenberg on February 16th, 1920 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He attended Northwestern University for a year before going to New York City to study under Sanford Meisner and choreographer Martha Graham. Randall worked as an announcer at WTAG in Worcester, Massachusetts.

As Anthony Randall, he starred with Jane Cowl in George Bernard Shaw's Candida and with Ethel Barrymore in Emlyn Williams's The Corn Is Green.

After serving with the U.S. Army Signal Corps in World War II, he came back to New York City. In 1946, Randall was cast in Katharine Cornell's revival of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. The following year in Antony and Cleopatra and in 1949 he appeared in Caesar and Cleopatra.

Simultaneously, Randall found work in radio.

Randall was twenty-nine and in New York when I Love a Mystery was revived. He originally auditioned for the part of Doc, but Carlton Morse felt he was better suited for Reggie York. As much as Randall loved I Love A Mystery, he wasn’t a huge fan of many of the soap operas he appeared on.

Carlotta Mercedes McCambridge was born to farming parents in Joliet, Illinois on March 16th, 1916. She graduated from Mundelein College. McCambridge began her radio career in the 1930s first in Chicago, and then in New York while also performing on Broadway.

In 1949 she made her film debut opposite Broderick Crawford in All the King's Men, for which she won an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and the New Star of the Year.

But no one who knew her was surprised. Orson Welles heralded McCambridge as the greatest living radio actress. Himan Brown almost never failed to cast her. Although she was an Academy Award winner, she was still a proud cast member of I Love A Mystery.

Thursday, November 24th, 1949 was Thanksgiving Day. It was clear and crisp in New York as Macy’s put on its twenty-third annual parade. Floats included The Chef’s Turkey Dinner, the Snowman, and Santa’s Sleigh. Milton Berle guest-starred.

WOR—Mutual aired Cornell vs. Penn at 1PM, Queen for a Day and Luncheon at Sardi’s in the late afternoon, Gabriel Heater at 7:30, and I Love A Mystery at 7:45.

By November of 1949, Russell Thorson was forty-three and Jim Boles thirty-five. They had a wealth of experience in both Chicago and New York radio. With radio in decline, both made their first TV appearances that year. Ford Motors intermittently sponsored roughly two out of every twenty I Love A Mystery episodes, but for the most part, Mutual picked up the financial tab for all three years of the New York run.

In the summer of 1949 NBC-TV approached Carlton Morse with the possibility of coming to New York to put One Man’s Family on TV. Because the entire production would need to be re-cast, Morse had to audition a whole new group of actors.

Mercedes McCambridge, who’d played on I Love A Mystery in Hollywood, was now working in New York and cast, while Russell Thorson was cast as Henry Barbour.

Morse flew back and forth from New York to Los Angeles. On May 25th, 1949, Mutual Broadcasting presented an episode of The Family Theater called “The Man With a Plow.” Morse wrote and directed the episode from Hollywood.

It was then that Morse had the idea of rebooting I Love A Mystery. Episodes would be recorded and transcribed, allowing actors with other commitments to take roles. Morse approached Thorson about starring and McCambridge about doing supporting parts. The cast soon rounded out with Jim Boles as Doc, and Tony Randall as Reggie.

Morse received one-thousand dollars per week from Mutual to write the show, but rather than write new scripts, Morse simply re-recorded the original scripts with minor revisions and title changes. Russell Thorson and his wife helped Morse out with continuity.

I Love A Mystery would re-debut over Mutual Broadcasting on October 3rd, 1949 at 7:45PM eastern time. The cast assembled a couple of times per week to record. Each show was recorded on sixteen-inch discs, airing on weeknights for fifteen minutes.