Breaking Walls: The Podcast on the History of American Network Radio 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.

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.

——————————

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

——————————

The WallBreakers:

http://thewallbreakers.com

Subscribe to Breaking Walls everywhere you get your podcasts.

To support the show:

http://patreon.com/TheWallBreakers

——————————

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

——————————

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

——————————

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.

——————————

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

——————————

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.

On Sunday January 1st, 1956 NBC’s Monitor broadcast New World Today.

1956 was a Presidential election year. At the time of this broadcast, Dwight Eisenhower, who’d had a heart attack in September, was still debating whether he would run for a second term. He’d decide in February, eventually winning re-election.

After the censuring of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, the Red Scare had subsided, overtaken by fear of communism in other parts of the world and general war with Russia.

Meanwhile, In January of 1956 Orson Welles appeared with The New York City Center Theater Company playing King Lear. He was finally home again.

In February he traveled to Las Vegas where he performed a variety act at the Riviera Hotel. Welles was then contracted by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz to create a TV pilot for Desilu Productions.

The short film was written and directed by Orson Welles, based on the short story "Youth from Vienna" by John Collier. Joi Lansing and Rick Jason star as a narcissistic couple faced with an irresistible temptation concocted by a scientist. Welles was the on-screen narrator. It was called The Fountain of Youth and considered a dark comedy.

Desi Arnaz conceived the series, proposing to Welles that he host and narrate. Arnaz later wrote that before signing the deal he clarified the finances with Welles: "I am not RKO. This is my 'Babalu' money." Filming took five days in early May. The total cost was nearly fifty-five thousand dollars.

Arnaz reported that CBS gave the series a slot, with General Foods as a sponsor, but the challenges in getting Welles to commit to a series lasting more than thirty weeks were daunting. The series did not go to air. The pilot was later broadcast on September 16th, 1958, during NBC's Colgate Theatre.

That Spring, the Rock n’ Roll era officially arrived. On April 6th, 1956, Elvis Presely signed a three-film deal with Paramount Pictures. By the end of the month, his single, “Heartbreak Hotel” rose to the top of the charts. It would remain there into June.

Meanwhile, Orson Welles appeared as himself on October 15th, 1956 in a very famous episode of I Love Lucy.

Two days later, he was on the radio for a special one-off program adapting Philip Wylie’s 1954 novel about post-nuclear civilization. It was called Tomorrow and syndicated by ABC and the Federal Civil Defense Administration.

The next month, on November 13th, 1956, his daughter’s first birthday, Welles appeared on NBC Radio’s Biography In Sound for his old mentor Alexander Woollcott, who had passed away in 1943.

On February 13th, 1955 Orson Welles appeared on an episode of NBC’s Anthology in salute to Abraham Lincoln. Directed by John Malcom Brennen, produced by Steve White, and announced by Harry Fleetwood, Anthology offered dramatic readings of famous and lesser-known plays. Its last episode aired on June 12th, 1955, coinciding with the launch of NBC’s Monitor.

On May 8th, 1955 at Caxton Hall in London, Orson and Paola Mori tied the knot. Welles was simultaneously finishing the editing on a film that would be called Confidential Report in Britain and Mr. Arkadin elsewhere. He cast Paola as Raina in the film.

In Mr. Arkadin, American smuggler Guy Van Stratten gets a tip that Russian oligarch Gregory Arkadin, has a dark secret. Wanting to blackmail him, Van Stratten travels to Spain, striking up a friendship with Arkadin’s daughter.

The movie was shot throughout Europe in 1954, with scenes filmed in Spain, London, Munich, Paris, the French Riviera and at the Château de Chillon in Switzerland.

The story was based on several episodes of The Adventures of Harry Lime and was originally released in Spain in October of 1955. Orson and Paola welcomed the birth of their daughter Beatrice Welles on November 13th, 1955. It was Welles’ third daughter.

By then, Welles was planning a return to the U.S.

On March 15th, 1955, Orson Welles premiered as Lord Mountdrago in the British Omnibus horror film, Three Cases of Murder. The film consisted of three stories, Welles appeared in the one titled after his character.

Ten days later he premiered in the french historical epic film Napoléon. He had a small part as Sir Hudson Lowe.

Then on April 2nd, Welles appeared for BBC’s TV network in the first of a six-part series entitled, Orson Welles' Sketch Book.

Written and presented by Welles, the fifteen-minute episodes present his commentaries on a range of subjects. The six episodes were called, “The Early Days,” “Critics,” “The Police,” “People I Miss,” “War of the Worlds,” and “Bullfighting.”

Later that year Welles took part in another series of shorts called Around the World with Orson Welles.

Between June 16th and July 9th, 1955 at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London, Orson Welles staged a two-act version of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

Welles used minimal design. The stage was bare, the props were minimal, and the actors, which included Christopher Lee, Joan Plowright, Kenneth Williams, Patrick McGoohan, and Gordon Jackson, wore street clothes.

Brooms were used for oars, and a stick was used for a telescope. The actors provided the action, and the audience's imagination provided the ocean, costumes, and the whale.

Welles filmed approximately seventy-five minutes of the production, hoping to sell it to Omnibus for a TV film, but he was disappointed in the result.

The next year, old friend John Huston cast Welles as Father Mapple in his 1956 film adaptation of Moby Dick, which starred Gregory Peck.

Welles later cast John Huston as director Jake Hannaford in The Other Side of The Wind. The film wouldn’t be completed and released until 2018, more than thirty-three years after Orson’s death. Welles modeled Jake Hannaford on his good friend Ernest Hemingway.

In 1953 Orson Welles met Italian actress Paola Mori. She was twenty-four, beautiful, and had lived for eight months in a concentration camp during World War II. Her father, a colonel in the Italian army under King Victor Emmanuel III, was a member of the anti-Mussolini resistance. They were soon dating.

In early 1954, Welles played a small part as Benjamin Franklin in the French/Italian historical drama Royal Affairs in Versailles.

Later in the year he was cast by director Herbert Wilcox as the main antagonist in Trouble In the Glen, opposite Margaret Lockwood, Forrest Tucker and Victor McLaglen. It portended things to come, as Harry Alan Towers was still producing a series of Sherlock Holmes radio adventures, starring John Gielgud as Holmes and Ralph Richardson as Watson.

On December 21st, 1954, Orson Welles appeared as Holmes villain Professor Moriarty in the last production of the series. The tale was called “The Final Problem.”

In September of 1952, Orson Welles worked with the BBC for a portrait of early American director Robert Flaherty. Flaherty, who directed the first docu-drama film, Nanook of the North in 1922, had passed away the previous July.

As Welles just mentioned, when he got to Hollywood in the late 1930s, he was fascinated by the early film people, and they were more than happy to share their stories with the then-Boy Wonder.

In April of 1953 the BBC hired Welles to read one hour of poetry from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

The next month the Italian comedy Man, Beast and Virtue debuted, in which Welles co-starred.

From September 7th into October, Welles was involved with Ballet de Paris at the Stoll Theatre in London for a production of The Lady in the Ice. In October the production moved to Paris.

Welles directed, wrote the libretto and was the ballet's costume and set designer.

He later told Peter Bogdonovich, “It was very successful in London, and only moderately so in Paris, where it was very badly lit — as everything always is in Paris. The plot is: a girl's been found, like dinosaurs have been found, in a block of ice. And she's on display in a sort of carnival. A young man falls in love with her, and his love melts the ice. And when she kisses him, he turns to ice. A little parable for our times.” It would be the only ballet Orson Welles’ ever directed.

In late September of 1953 Broadcasting Magazine reported that Harry Alan Towers had sold shows to both ABC and NBC for the fall. ABC would welcome Horatio Hornblower back for a second season, starring Michael Redgrave.

Meanwhile on NBC, a new half-hour anthology program starring Sir Lawrence Olivier called Theatre Royal would take to the air.

The program debuted on October 4th, 1953 with Orson Welles starring in an adaptation of Alexander Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades.” Pushkin wrote “The Queen of Spades” in the fall of 1833. It’s a short story about how human greed can lead to madness.

Theatre Royal was developed to capitalize on Lawrence Olivier’s name. At the time the program launched, Olivier and then-wife Vivian Leigh were getting set to appear in Terence Rattigan's comedy, The Sleeping Prince in the West End. The play would run for eight months. It made Olivier temporarily unable to star in his own program.

Many fine actors of the British stage and screen were involved in individual episodes of Theatre Royal, like Robert Morley, Harry Andrews, Muriel Forbes, and Daphne Maddox. The music was credited to Sidney Torch.

Once Sir Lawrence Olivier could no longer appear, Sir Ralph Richardson took over as host of Theatre Royal.

Selected episodes were repeated, with a different series opening and closing on ABC Mystery Time in the late 1950s. The show remained in active syndication in the U.S. into the 1970s.

Welles briefly returned to America to make his first appearance on TV, starring in the Omnibus presentation of King Lear, broadcast live on CBS on October 18th, 1953. It was directed by Peter Brook, and co-starred Natasha Parry, Beatrice Straight and Arnold Moss.

One of the first projects Orson Welles undertook after moving to Europe was a film version of Othello. Despite Macbeth’s criticism, he was still confident he could produce a successful Shakespearean film.

However, filming was erratic. Its original Italian producer announced on one of the first days of shooting that he was bankrupt. Instead of abandoning filming altogether, Welles as director began pouring his own money into the project.

He took acting jobs to ensure continued production. He also raised money by going on the stage. In the summer of 1950 Welles appeared in Paris in his own play called The Blessed and The Damned, which consisted of a short film, called The Miracle of St. Anne, and two one-act plays. It received positive reviews.

In August he traveled to Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Munich, where he starred in An Evening With Orson Welles.

Filming of Othello stopped for months at a time to raise money. It took more than two years to complete and was shot in Morocco, Venice, Tuscany and Rome.

Before the film’s release, Welles played the Shakespearean drama on stage to audiences in Newcastle and London.

A dubbed version of Othello premiered in Rome In November of 1951. Welles' original English-language version premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May of 1952. It won the Grand Prix and was released in Europe thereafter.

When David O’Selznick got word that Harry Alan Towers had distributed The Adventures of Harry Lime to MGM, he refused to air it, so Towers took the series elsewhere. He quickly found out that MGM was now contractually obligated to provide a series with Welles to the Mutual Broadcasting System.

So, in 1951 Towers went to Welles with another radio series. He’d already produced a series called The Secrets of Scotland Yard with Clive Brook.

The new series would be called The Black Museum. It was based on real-life cases from the files of Scotland Yard. Walking through the museum, Welles would pause at one of the exhibits, describing an artifact that led into a dramatized tale of a brutal murder or a vicious crime.

Towers visited Australia in the late 1940s and set up production facilities in Sydney. The Black Museum was produced there by Creswick Jenkinson. Ira Marion was scriptwriter and music for the series was composed and conducted by Sidney Torch.

Orson Welles's introductions were recorded on tape in London, then flown to Australia to be added to the locally recorded performances. This was the first series to be produced in Australia in this way.

The program was transcribed in 1951. In the U.S. Mutual Broadcasting carried the series, with more than five-hundred stations airing it. In New York it began airing Tuesdays at 8PM on New Year’s Day, 1952. Episode twenty-seven was called “The Notes” or “Kilroy Was Here.”

“Kilroy Was Here” is a graffiti scrawl or meme of debated origin that became popular during World War II. It was associated with GIs stationed in Europe, depicting a bald-headed man with prominent nose clutching at and peeking over a wall. Next to him was the phrase.

Robert Rietti played leads and Keith Pyott was often in the cast. Beginning In May of 1953, The Black Museum was also broadcast over Radio Luxembourg, a commercial radio station, and was not broadcast by the BBC until 1991.

The Black Museum aired for the calendar year of 1952 over Mutual. It was rebroadcast on KABC, Los Angeles, in 1963 and 1964, and on KUAC—FM in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1967.

In 2002, Harry Alan Towers produced The Black Museum for TV, hiring Gregory Mackenzie to be director and showrunner. The anthology series used Welles’ original narration.

The adaptation was shot on location in London in a film noir style and the pilot starred Michael York as Scotland Yard Inspector Russell.