This Day in Broadcast History (Pegeen Fitzgerald, “First Lady of Radio Chatter,” Dies)

January 30, 1989—In the New York City apartment from which she taped so many of the shows she did for more than two generations with husband Ed and, eventually, by herself, Pegeen Fitzgerald—nicknamed “The First Lady of Radio Chatter”—died of breast cancer, at age 78.

Amid the current in-your-face shouting of today’s talk-radio hosts, it’s hard to believe there was a time when the decibel level was lower or when on-air personalities didn’t scream at guests.

It wasn’t that the Fitzgeralds didn’t fight--it was just that it was with each other, done in their own living room, and concerning the little relationship ticks that get under the skin of longtime married couples.

Last month, I visited the Paley Center for Media (successor to the Museum of Television and Radio in Manhattan) to listen to a tape of a Fitzgerald show from 1971, late in their run. On and on they went about a utility incident just down the block from their apartment. I kept waiting for them to switch to something else. I was still waiting as I caught 40 winks!

If I, a middle-aged male, found my attention span sorely tested, then surely those who grew up with video games and MTV would be stunned beyond belief by the couples’ dialogues—with little to break things up but clattering teacups, the meowing of Pegeen’s numerous cats, and, on one memorable occasion, the barking of seals from across the street in the Central Park Zoo.

I doubt if you’ll find more than one or two people under the age of 50—maybe not even under the age of 60—who recall Ed Fitzgerald and his wife today. Yet, if you want a very early template for the kind of chit-chat that Regis and Kelly do in the morning, the place to look is with “The Fitzgeralds: Book Talk, Back Talk and Small Talk,” which pulled in 2 million listeners at the peak of their careers.

You could measure the Fitzgerald’s influence and success in several ways:

* Compensation--$160,000 a year in the 1940s, when radio—and their format—reached its peak.

* Satire—The couple’s on-air sniping led to a parody, “The Bickersons,” starring Don Ameche and Frances Longford.
* Imitators—After their show became a success, Pegeen told People Magazine in an interview two years before her death, Variety “counted 78 couples who were doing shows. Ten years later they found that all of them were divorced or dead.” Well, not quite that soon—though you couldn’t blame the Fitzgeralds for scorning the Johnny-and-Jane-come-latelies who tried to piggyback on their success. The most prominent were Tex and Jinx McCrary and columnist Dorothy Kilgallen and husband Richard Kollmar.

The latter couple, with their la-di-da talk of opening nights at the Thea-tuh and that new restaurant they’d tried, especially brought out the scorn in the Fitzgeralds. Jack Benny and Fred Allen became famous in their radio heyday for their fake “feud,” but the war of words between the Fitzgeralds and the Kollmars was the real thing—so much so that eventually their common corporate parent, WOR, was forced to tell them to knock it off.

As my turn at the console at the Paley Center indicated, I didn’t know what to make of the Fitzgeralds. As it turned out, for years neither did WOR. You’d expect that incomprehension after 30 or 40 years, when the station suits began mumbling ominously about the highly desired “demographics” (i.e., baby boomers), the absence of whom could kill a longrunning TV show as certainly as it did a radio mainstay (as happened with The Beverly Hillbillies, still going strong in the early 1970s when CBS terminated it).

But WOR had also been nonplussed by the Fitzgerald’s concept at the start of it all, in 1940. You could understand the discomfort of the station—after all, this was not only one of the first shows not derived from theater or vaudeville, but also without a producer, without an engineer, without even a script. (Well, almost no script—perversely enough, that was the part of the show that the couple did prepare beforehand.)

The reason why the on-air couple came together at all owed to circumstance. In the late Thirties, both Ed and Pegeen had their own shows for specific audiences—Ed, a book-review spot and an all-night program called “Almanac de Gotham”; Pegeen, a fashion show for women.

Pegeen’s illness one day scared the radio execs. What was happening with their mealticket? If she really felt bad, couldn’t she be persuaded to broadcast from her apartment while she recuperated?

She might have been a canny businesswoman (she’d been a department-store advertising manager before her showbiz gig), but Pegeen was also in her way old-fashioned and modest. It wouldn’t do, she said, for her regular announcer to see her in her bathrobe. She proposed an alternative male stand-in: her husband.

So there they were that day in 1940, with just the microphone and as little else as possible between them and their listeners. WOR was undoubtedly pleased that the show didn’t turn out to be a disaster, and probably very pleasantly surprised, if not shocked, to see that the experiment was so successful.

As I discovered when I put on the earphones at the Paley Center, the Fitzgeralds’ style was rambling when it wasn’t obsessional. Francis X. Clines, The New York Times’ peerless longtime “About New York” columnist (now a member of the editorial board), summed up the format as well as anyone: “They wool-gather and play off each other. They steep themselves daily in remembrances using the airwaves as their Proustian bed.”

Superficially, at least, Ed would seem my type of guy: a lover of books and theater, sporting the last name of my favorite novelist. Only when I listened to the couple, I found Ed to be a grouchy old cuss. Now Pegeen—she was easier on the nerves, with an easy laugh that suggested she’d learned to tolerate her older mate’s contrary ways over the years and that, with a little bit of eavesdropping on the part of you the listener, you would, too.

Well, most of the time, anyway. They did have their on-air disagreements. One involved a particular penchant of Ed’s, who, from his days as a child actor, had picked up the characteristic of raising his hands when he thought his wife was dropping her voice. One morning, Pegeen decided to return the favor. Her annoyed hubby walked away from the table and left her to complete the show on her own.

Over the years, their listeners became used to the Fitzgeralds broadcasting from homes all over the place in the Northeast, including:

* a 22-room triplex on East End Avenue;
* a Fifth Avenue penthouse with an actual lawn;
* an entire island off the Connecticut shore (put at their disposal by a sponsor)
* the Hotel Pierre, across from the Central Park Zoo
* Kent, Conn., in the foothills of the Berkshires.

We’re so used these days to program directors changing formats at will—sometimes within months. Though their locales might have changed, the Fitzgeralds’ format didn’t over 40 years. By the early 1970s, WOR had gotten restless enough with the show that it tried to kill it. The show’s longtime loyal viewers protested and staved off its execution for nearly another decade.

Not long after Ed’s death from cancer in 1982, the station finally axed the show, but Pegeen managed to find a stint on the local New York public radio station, WNYC-FM. As a faithful listener these last few years to the Leonard Lopate Show, I was surprised to learn before he arrived, the time slot had been known as Senior Edition, with Pegeen Fitzgerald sharing airspace with Marty Wayne and Kate Borger.

Both by herself and with Ed, Pegeen made no bones about her vegetarianism and her passion for animal rights. She became president of the Millennium Guild, a group co-founded by George Bernard Shaw, and maintained over 500 cats in five shelters in Connecticut and New York. (Elderly listeners even left their animals to the Fitzgeralds in their wills.) One of her causes, the Last Post Animal Sanctuary in Connecticut, survives as a result of her deathbed request to her lawyer that this work continue after her death.

Pegeen’s interest in animals showed a particular soft spot she had for the vulnerable. But I like the strong interest she took in human strays, too—the orphans, convicts and former convicts she aided over the years.

The Paley Center in its Manhattan location has only two tapes from the Fitzgeralds’ 40-plus years on the airwaves. One was the 1971 show I mentioned previously; the other, an excerpt from a 1949 show that became compiled as part of a “radio bloopers” episode.

Exposure to the couple, on such a limited basis, is probably not the best way to judge a show or a life. It certainly didn’t give me a sense of the other fascinating aspects of Pegeen’s personality: not just her animals-rights advocacy, but also her hobbies (painting, collecting toy antique fire engines, and racing antique cars), and her parties.

Over nearly half a century, Pegeen Fitzgerald and the man she waggishly styled her “Lord Edward” made viewers feel like invited guests in their homes. Though the early-morning talk show format they pioneered persists, it’s now colored far more strongly with show-business trappings. The Fitzgeralds’ lifestyle and idiosyncratic form of entertainment are now part of a world we have lost.