Episode 3: Golden Boy

Now, how do you get on the radio? What do you do? Here I am. I’ve just about discovered what New York is, Manhattan, and how to get there with the subway. > Come in.

We’re in the world of Golden Age radio, which means that narratives often come serially, building towards an exciting climax. Our story is the life of radio producer Himan Brown. His extraordinary career spanned over 60 years, reflecting a changing America, and a changing industry. In our previous episode, we left our hero on a New York subway, travelling into Manhattan to step into his future. I’m Margot Avery. Stay tuned. > Welcome.

Beginning in the middle ‘20’s, ‘26, ‘27, we were making crystal sets.

Like many early radio enthusiasts, Brown built a crystal radio set at home.

You'd go home and you'd get a little box of some kind. Usually these were little containers in which you bought [oatmeal] , milk, oatmeal, if you please. In Brooklyn, in Brownsville, where I came from, we used to get sour cream in these containers.

That’s Brown in a 1991 interview with Chuck Schaden.

The guy would give you a measure of sour cream. And when mama was through with it, you're supposed to reuse it. I grabbed it and wound the copper wires, and you got a cat's whisker.

So named for the finely tuned navigational device on an actual cat. The copper wire picked up radio signals from the “crystal,” a catchall term for a class of minerals that received sound.

Suddenly you were listening to Pittsburgh. You were suddenly getting something from Cleveland, something from New York City itself. > It gives me great pleasure to launch this, the voice of New York.

And then Brown, already a seasoned performer at the Brooklyn Jewish Center drama club and on the Borscht Belt in productions created by Moss Hart, realized that he could be the little God in the machine himself.

And that was an inspiration for me to say, why can't I be part of that? Why can't my friends at school listen to me?

So just the way he’d crashed Hart’s drama club, pretending to experience he didn’t yet have, Brown developed a new back story.

I brazenly skipped class one day and went up to Madison Avenue in New York where WRNY existed and presented myself as an actor. I was a tall gawky kid who looked a little older, but I tried to impress them with the fact that I was here waiting for a play to begin. And while the play was in process of being rewritten, wouldn't they like to have me read some poetry. And I didn't expect any fee. I didn't want anything. And I thought it would be great publicity for me.

And, he notes prophetically--

I must have been convincing because after that, I could sell almost anything.

Brown is cheerfully irreverent about his beginnings.

I did it for about two or three months. And in the process of doing these readings you read poems about courage and the poems about mother and only God can make a tree and that kind of thing. > I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed. Always poetry. And sometimes they’d play some music behind me and sometimes they didn’t. But it was once a week and it didn’t amount to very much except that I could tell everybody to tune me in!

Brown was already hungry for more chances to perform. These small opportunities, which made him a celebrity in high school, also put him in contact with professional actors; who were themselves beginning to explore the new territory of broadcast radio.

People came up and said, gee, you do that rather well. Or what else do you do? And they explained to me that there were networks that suddenly, stations were getting together. And there was a thing called the National Broadcasting Company, which was an offshoot of really AT&T. They had their studios down on Lower Broadway and they gave auditions to actors.

My mother, Margot Stevenson, helped to create the thrilling world of radio drama in her role as the lovely Margot Lane in The Shadow. Women actors were a growing presence in a growing industry. But Brown was about to discover that there were also powerful women producers, and women executives, behind the scenes. And it was with the help of a few notable women that he got his first lucky break.

These names are implanted in my mind.

At NBC, they included the legendary Bertha Brainard, one of the founding mothers of network broadcasting. A photograph from around 1928 shows a woman with a soft perm in flowered dress with a round collar. She looks a little like Mary Pickford, but was evidently a powerhouse. As was Pickford.

So I called into  a woman called Margaret Cuthbert. Margaret Cuthbert was everything. Casting director, director of drama, whatever. And they gave me an appointment to come in one morning around 11 o'clock on a Saturday, fortunately, so I didn't have to skip class and do my audition. And I checked around.

Gross was a popular humorist whose work reflected the newly minted patois of immigrant Jews and their transition into “Americans.” He had a syndicated column in The New York World. Tapes of Himan Brown’s broadcasts have been difficult to trace, but here he is recalling how he pitched the Nize Beby. Himan Brown: N I Z E B E B Y. And mama would tell a fairytale, to the little baby- eat up all the cornflakes, baby, and mama will tell you about Little Red Riding Hook and the Big Bad Wolf.

And she said, okay, let me hear what you can do with it. And I read about 30 seconds and her face lit up. And I read another 30 seconds. And out she comes from the room and she says, you know, this would be tremendous. These fairy tales read with this dialect for New York City, where we have a predominance of a Jewish audience on Saturday mornings. Can you come and do this around 10, 11, 12 o'clock, once a week for 15 minutes? I said, of course I can.

The deal with Gross put Brown on the air at NBC, in 1928, at the network’s new studios at 11 Fifth Avenue. It was his first real gig, and it brought another formidable woman into his life.

So I went on one week and it did pretty good. The second week I'm on, the telephone rings. A page comes in and he says, there's somebody on the phone who wants to talk to you as you’re getting off the air. Margot Avery: Remember, radio was live and in real time. And I go on to the phone and a voice says to me, this is Gertrude Berg and I live in the Bronx on Mount Morris Avenue, and I've been listening to you. Your Jewish dialect is delicious and wonderful.

Gertrude Berg was also a product of the Jewish émigré community. Her father Jacob came from Russia, and her mother Dinah, from England. Like Brown, Berg found her way to performance through the entertainment culture of the Catskills, where her father owned a resort hotel. Berg began to write and perform skits that drew on the characters and speech patterns of the vacationing Jewish housewives and their families. Berg felt she’d found a fellow traveller.

I would like to meet with you. Can you come up to Mount Morris Avenue in the Bronx? I said, the subway runs there. It was only 5 cents.

If there were audio motifs in Brown’s life at this stage, they’d be a ringing phone followed by a subway ride. Broadcast history remembers Berg as a pioneer, one of the first women to create and control her own program.

She was at least 13 to 15 years older than I was.

Where Brown initially saw disparity, what could a mature woman want professionally from a gawky neophyte? Berg saw opportunity.

And she presented me with something called The Rise of Molly Goldberg. And she said, look, there's a father here. There's a mother. I'm the mother. You'll be the father because you seem to be able to deal with your voice. You can become an older man, and you could be my husband and you have a dialect. And we would play together. I will write the scripts and you'll go out and try to sell them. If you got on the air with NBC, you’ll get on the air maybe with something different.

Brown did eventually broker a deal with NBC that launched what was then called The Rise of the Goldbergs. At first, after months of negotiation, the network promised a modest slot- once a week for 15 minutes. The fee was $75. The show, an early version of the situation comedy, debuted on November 20th, 1929. > “Yoo-hoo! Is anybody? / There she is. That’s Molly Goldberg folks. A woman with a place in every heart. And a finger in every pie.” The premise was simple.

There were two children in the story each week. I had to hire the two youngsters who had to play that. And there were always one or two or three other actors. So I was dealing with four or five actors. The announcer came with the time and the music came with the time. They had a string quartet playing some Italian melody that pleased her. And I didn't know what the heck it had to do with the Goldbergs. I think I got about $15 out of it. And she got about $15 dollars out of it.

But then-

It caught on. And after three or four months, the gleam in her eye was all Gertrude Berg. What did she need with this kid from Brooklyn who did all the dirty work and who was a minor? So she said, “Get lost.” I said, but I got a piece of paper. It says here we're partners. She said, “Well, you know what you can do with that piece of paper. You're a minor.”

The passage of fifty years did nothing to dim Brown’s bitterness against Berg.

This betrayal by this sweet loving all bosomy mother who embraced everyone's problems was the most treacherous thing that could have happened to me. I went into a tailspin. She should not have done this to someone who started a career that netted her millions.

The Goldbergs went daily in 1931 and moved to CBS in 1936. But by that time, Brown was out of the picture.

Fortunately, by cutting the umbilical, I was able to get rid of her.

But the experience taught him some valuable lessons. > ♪ “Nothing's impossible I have found. For when my chin is on the ground, I picked myself up, dust myself up. Start all over again.” ♪ Radio was here to stay, and with ingenuity and pluck, you could get right back in the game. > ♪ “Dust youself off. Start all over again.” ♪

I then went on and figured, well, if I can sell one dialect series, I can do another one.

Brown teamed up with an old friend, Julie Burns, and together they reshaped a Jewish tradition into a program.

We decided between us we were gonna do something called the Bronx Marriage Bureau. Now you can see what that is very quickly. That was the Old Matchmaker theme. [Matchmaker, yes.] Of course. And I would be the matchmaker, Morris Shapiro. She would be my wife. And between us, we settled the fates of dozens and dozens of young marrieds, and older marrieds. It was a good framework for human interest storytelling.

They just had one challenge: how to get it on the air and find sponsors? In this period, advertisers and their agencies were the source of much of the entertainment programming.

So when ad agencies were producing for radio, the program was an ad, the program was like branded content today.

Cynthia Meyers is the author of A Word from Our Sponsor. Brown’s strategy for getting the Bronx Marriage Bureau on the air was fresh and inventive. He approached Goodman’s, a company that made Matzohs for Passover season.

And I convinced the president of the company, a man called Eric Cohen, who was the dearest man and the toughest guy I ever worked for. That he should go on before the Passover holidays three times a week, three 15 minutes a week. I got a deal with WOR for the whole package. He paid me, then I bought the time from them, all of that was permissible. I was a kid, how I all managed that I don’t know. And we did a match each week for 13 weeks. And that lasted for three years.

In case you’re wondering, why 13 weeks? It’s because it represents a quarter of the broadcast year. A packaging model that persisted up until the dawn of podcasting. While dispensing fictitious marital advice, Brown was about to become one of the “marrieds” himself. In 1933 he wed Mildred Geller.

And immediately I had kids. I was a baby, really. But I believed in family and in a home.

There was one family Brown had no interest in:

"Another visit with those good folks, the Goldbergs."

I just didn't want to know about the Goldbergs anymore.

Success led to a kind of reckoning: how many different people could he be at the same time?

Now I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a broadcaster, even though I only was on for 13 weeks. In the meantime, I tried to be an actor and I auditioned for Fred Allen.

"The Fred Allen show with Fred guest Bing Crosby."

Allen was a brilliant comedian often described as “absurdist,” who had a series of syndicated radio shows.

Thank you and good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

Brown’s moxie and versatility appealed to Allen.

He immediately- oh, all these voices, all these trick dialects. But I had to run out. I didn't make rehearsals. So he said, look, kid. Either you're an actor or you're a producer or a director. I still had my father’s business on my back and so on. And so all of this, fit in with a complete picture of never being able to rest really.

Brown was a workaholic, and generally took pride in the number of balls he could keep in the air at the same time. So this sounds like a rare moment of candor. Brown decided to embrace the producer/director model over the actor. And went in search of the next powerful woman who would help shape his career.

There was an advertising agency called Blackett-Sample and Hummert in those days, a very important agency.

The agency was founded in Chicago in 1923 by Frank Hummert. Ann Aschen Hurst, Frank’s wife, was then the head of their radio department. And she was about to introduce Brown to the form that would define his working life.

She was working on a thing called daytime drama. Not soap operas, if you please, but daytime dramas. And I sent a letter to her saying that I was a producer. That I had done the Goldbergs. That I was doing Bronx Marriage Bureau, and that I was ready to serve her as a producer, as a director.

There’s that phone again.

The phone rang and my mother answered, forget it. No great knowledge of English. And couldn't make head or tail of someone called Mrs Aschen Hurst. I came home. There was a telegram. A Western Union. Please be at my office at 230 Park Avenue. I memorized it. Tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock. I would like to interview you. Signed, Ann Ashton Hurst.

If Brown’s recollections of Gertrude Berg are tinged with bitterness, he recalled Ashen Hurst with admiration and fondness.

She was a dynamic lady, filled with stories, filled with ideas for this world of the woman at home during the day. And this is how we are going to sell cosmetics and soap and all of the food products that the woman goes out to buy in the shopping marts. There were no supermarkets in those days. She was impressed with all that I had said, all that I had done. All these shows and she asked me, would I produce something which she created. Would I be able to get a writer to do it?

“Of course.” That’s pretty much the Brown formula for life. And if Brown’s account strikes you as topsy turvy, it’s because you're probably thinking in terms of today’s media market, and of the broadcast television you, or your parents, probably grew up on. In that world, quirky creative types, the Aaron Sorkins or Lorne Michaels or Lena Dunhams of the world, shop ideas to networks who then round up advertisers. But this was not how radio dramas originally got to market in the 1930s and 1940s.

A number of agencies, mostly the large ones like Jay Walter Thompson, began to establish radio departments. And these were departments that were staffed with producers, directors, writers, musicians, and copywriters. People who were also supposed to write the kind of advertising words. And they would come up with an idea for a show, convince the client to sponsor it, that is pay for it. Pay for both the program and for the airtime on the broadcasting station.

"And now, back to our show."

And so Marie was the princess of a little Grastakian country, kingdom, who hated her royalty, and hated people bowing and scraping and all the things that she had that the people in her kingdom didn't have. And she ran.

We heard a little about Marie in our previous episode. As Brown notes, it was Anne Ashen Hurst’s concept, to help advertise a lipstick and eventually a cosmetics brand, named for the 19th-century French monarch Louis Phillippe the first. The lipstick was a vivid red, and was used, a vintage magazine tells us, “by many of New York’s actresses and chic young women.”

She wanted to come to America, which was more democratic, and she wanted to be one of the people, so to speak.

But shades of today’s headlines, she can’t get into America without a visa. So she meets and marries Jimmy, a marriage of convenience that of course turns to love. And here, Brown reveals the secret formula of successful

keeping your audience in suspense and your characters in the dark.

And of course, for three years, for three and a half years, Jimmy never knew she was a princess. Everybody else knew she was a princess. Doors were opening and closing. Bombs were going off. Shots were being fired. People were trying to kidnap her.

"With us so far? Can’t wait to tune in next week? Well you can’t."

Because as Brown well knew by that time, all good plot lines come to an end.

There were all kinds of intrigues going on. But poor sappy Jimmy never knew that his dear, dear Marie, was just what she was. At the end of three and a half years, I went to Anne Ashton Hurst and I said, Mrs Ashton Hurst, I've run the gamut. I don't know how we can keep this from him any longer. It's three and a half years, five days a week. How stupid can he be?

But there was plenty more where that came from. Anne Ashen Hurst had become a friend, and Brown wanted to continue to work with her.

“It’s 11:45am Eastern War Time”

Two important shows followed:

“Once again we present David Harum, one of the most beloved stories of American fiction.”

David Harum, a story based on a 19th century novel about an honorable small-town banker. He’s described by one old-time radio scholar, Jim Cox, as “a private eye in banker’s clothing.” Hurst and Frank Hummert, also developed John’s Other Wife, about a department store owner whose wife is jealous of the women who work for him.

“Now for the dramatic story of John’s Other Wife.”

Brown describes it as “an important daytime serial” by which he surely meant that it attracted advertisers.

“Ladies today you can come out of the kitchen by cleaning with grease-dissolving battle-”

Brown was the golden boy and suddenly the field was crowded with sponsors, each wanting their own story line and domain. The brief, heady boom period in podcasting had a similar pattern.

By that time, I think in ‘37 or ‘38, Procter and Gamble was in the picture. Lever Brothers was in the picture. Colgate was in the picture. [And that's how they-] They called it soap operas because that’s why horse operas were called Westerns because of the horses. But here, it was the sponsors that made them soap operas.

But Cynthia Meyers says programming was expanding. Agencies were originally attracted to well-known comedians, like Jack Benny but serials and dramas were gaining strength.

First of all, they were based on already existing genres. So serial dramas, we already had serial movies. We already had serial stories in magazines and newspapers. So having serial dramas was not a new idea. What was new was turning it into an audio experience.

And soon, Brown was presented with yet another opportunity.

Mrs Hummert at that time was advertising a product called Jad’s Salts. You took these every morning and you lost a pound a day. They were nothing more than high class laxatives. They drained your body of fluids and all sorts of things.

And they were eventually targeted by the FDA. But Jad Salts led indirectly to one of Brown’s greatest successes. In support of the product Brown was producing a show called Jack Dempsey’s Gymnasium three nights a week. Dempsey was a boxing great who went on to become a figure on the New York social scene.

At that time, the big big thing was the Schmelling- Baer fights. And Jack Dempsey, who was in a kind of semi-retirement set a drama up in which we were privy to the development of fighting and the development of the lives of the fighters. I made a story out of a documentary.

But the sponsors also imagined that this same audience could be drawn to fiction.

These guys that were selling Jads Salts said, what would you be able to do for some kind of an adult audience that would be cops and robbers? That was the way I termed it. I said, what would happen if I went to Chicago and tried to get the rights from the Chicago Tribune and Daily News syndicate for Dick Tracy? Oh, that would be wonderful. We could test it. And so I came to Chicago. It was the first time I had taken the 20th Century Limited.

It seems only right that Brown should travel to a significant destination in his life by way of a legendary train. And it’s a reflection of his demanding life, pulling him in many directions, that his first child was born just around the time he boarded the train.

I remember going up, Chicago Tribune building. I met a man called Arthur Crawford. A wonderful wonderful sweet guy.

The trip resulted in another coup for Brown.

I bought the rights from Chester Gould. Announcer: “Calling all cars. Calling all cars. Dick Tracy is on the air. / Yes it’s Dick Tracy. Protector of law and order!”

Dick Tracy first aired in 1934 with an NBC affiliate, then moved to CBS and evolved from 15-minute episodes to half hour prime-time by the end of the 1930s.

The interesting strange thing was that although we went on to sell Jad Salts, the kids picked this show up. I never really did a children's program for children. I did an adult program for children.

“Calling all adventure fans. Calling all Dick Tracy fans. Stand by for another exciting adventure Monday at this same time. That is all!”

The “Boy Wonder” was next offered an opportunity to acquire The Gumps. [You have to love the onomatopoetic on·o·mat·o·poe·ic title]. Like Dick Tracy, The Gumps had their origins in a comic strip that ran in the Chicago Tribune for over 40 years. The program offered up the tribulations of a middle-class family with a trying patriarch and a tetchy wife. In this, the show had something in common with one of the Golden Age’s other classic comedies, Fibber McGee & Mollie.

I don't like auditions. I talk to actors and my insights tell me whether or not they will work.

Brown’s “insights” started the career of one of radio’s great dramatic actors. Wait for our episode 4 for the story of Moorehead’s role in one of early radio’s masterpieces, Sorry Wrong Number. The Gumps also brought writer Irwin Shaw into Brown’s life.

I didn't know who could write comedy for me. Each one had to be a vignette. It was way ahead of its time. It's the kind of thing that Woody Allen and a lot of the comics today do. And I said to this chum of mine who sat next to me in the English class, maybe you can do all of this. You could write these little vignettes. You're very good at short stories. You’re doing very well.

Like Brown, Shaw was the child of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, though he was born in the South Bronx rather than Brooklyn. He went on to a celebrated literary career as the author of such novels as The Young Lions and Rich Man, Poor Man. But during the 1930s he eked out a living as a radio script writer, paid by the word.

Brown got what he wanted when he stepped off that subway from Brooklyn all those years ago. By the end of the 1930s he was the man of the moment; in demand, happily overemployed, and churning out ideas. And he was keeping company with other remarkable talents who helped make the Golden Age golden. In our next episode, we’ll revisit some classics of the era, and meet the geniuses behind them. This is Audio Maverick. Next up, “Golden Age.” I’m Margot Avery. Stay tuned.