This Day in Broadcast History (Fred Allen Airs Last Radio Show)

June 26, 1949—The final episode of Fred Allen’s radio show did more than bring to an end 17 years of the career of one of the broadcast medium’s most popular—and, among his peers, most admired—figures. It also served as an object lesson in how fickle the American public can be when a new technology replaces an old one.

Only 26 months before, Allen had reached the height of his career by landing on the cover of Time Magazine, which celebrated the nasal-voiced comedian’s achievement in producing a remarkably literate entertainment that had captured the allegiance of hundreds of thousands. Only a year later, his show had fallen to only 28th place—and, with television no longer an upstart technology, but an increasingly established one, the possibility loomed that there would be no end to his fall.

Allen’s last show featured the comic who figured in a fake feud that fueled the ratings of both men—Jack Benny. Unlike his good friend, Benny would go on to forge a new career for himself on television that would equal and even surpass what he had achieved on radio.

Last year, I commented briefly on Allen in the context of his quip about Ed Sullivan. I think he warrants far more extended treatment than that, however. In a short space such as this, I still can’t do him justice, so for now I think I’ll just confine myself to aspects of his life and career that appeal to me:

* His first major job growing up was working in a library—the Boston Free Library, as a matter of fact. His father, a bookbinder, had gotten him the position. It served as a launching-pad in his show business career for two reasons: a) he had access to all the books this highly intelligent, studious, and curious mind could want, and b) one of those books, on juggling, enabled him to enter the library’s amateur night show, and start his career in the entertainment industry.

* A talented performer, he was far less staff-dependent than other stars, before or since. True, Allen did hire people like future novelist Herman Wouk to work for him. But they functioned more as sources of raw material than as people who did most of the work. Ninety percent of the show’s writing derived from Allen himself, either writing or rewriting.

* He took on the censors from the beginning. Few performers have fought them week after week with his tenacity. They dogged him virtually from the moment he stepped in front of the microphone, objecting even to innocuous routines such as this: “My sister married an Irishman”—“Oh, really?”—“No, O’Reilly.” In turn, he skewered the advertising and network suits every chance he could.

* He was a truly decent human being, with a kindness to match his intelligence. After his death, Wouk hailed him in this manner: “His generosity to the needy, his extraordinary loyalty to his associates (in a field not noted for long loyalties) showed the warmth of heart that made his satire sound and important.”

* He was devoted to his wife. Like Benny, Allen put his wife, Portland, on the show. When advertisers claimed that their testing of audiences showed that the show would be better off without her, he refused to budge, saying that he would only stay on if she did. It was said that the two things he lived for were the show and her. He never drove, so one of the more common entertainer sightings in Manhattan was of Allen and his wife walking arm-in-arm from their hotel suite. On one of the few times he didn’t do so, on St. Patrick’s Day in 1956, he suffered a heart attack and died. If he’d had the chance to comment on it before he died, I’m sure he would have noted that it served him right. A product of a broken home himself, he made sure that he would break that pattern in his own adulthood.

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.

This Day in Broadcasting History (Walter Winchell Begins Long Radio Run)

January 18, 1929—Armed with a faster-than-the-speed-of-sound delivery, newspaper gossip columnist Walter Winchell made the leap from the printed page to the airwaves with a radio program that would make him a force to be reckoned with by Broadway producers and U.S. Presidents for more than a generation. 

For a man who would become known on the Great White Way for breathtaking arrogance, it’s especially rich to know that Winchell’s show—which went out on a 42-station hookup on its premiere, sponsored by Gimbel’s Department Store—began life as “New York by a New York Representative.”

Far before Howard Stern got there, Winchell was the original “King of All Media.” Well, almost all. 

His newspaper column was the bedrock of his kingdom, the same way that the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority served as the linchpin of New York “Power Broker” Robert Moses’ civic empire. And, like Moses, Winchell seemed for the longest time a law unto himself, an egotist who let nothing stand in his way. 

But there were also realms the two men could not conquer: electoral politics in Moses’ case (he lost the race for New York governor by an embarrassing landslide and never sought office again), TV celebrity journalism and variety shows in the case of Winchell. (His stint as narrator of The Untouchables came when he was already being regarded as a something of a historical relic, lending all that much more seeming authenticity to the crime show.) 

One other thing the two men had in common, besides longevity. Arrogance and an unconquered realm: Neither collapsed in a sudden fall. Instead, their influence slowly ebbed, like the half-life of uranium.

For a long time, it seemed that not just Winchell but the atmosphere of his era was gone for good. 

Print reporters and blow-dried journalists, trained in graduate schools of journalism, looked down their noses at the former star-struck city kid whose education ended with the sixth grade. And Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Daniel Bell were heralding “the vital center” and “the end of ideology” at the dawn of the Sixties, a distinct rebuke to a commentator who rode his political hobbyhorses as eagerly as he roared through city streets in a car featuring a radio receiver, a flashing red light and a siren.

Well, that was then. This is now. 

Over the last decade, the atmosphere created by the Internet has come to resemble the go-go years of radio in the 1920s and early 1930s. The similarity lies not merely in the way both became the go-to sources for breaking news in their times, but in a kind of radical egalitarianism that would have sparked the Founding Fathers’ disapproval. 

Winchell, as indicated previously, did not advance far in school. But in his time, lack of education was hardly an insuperable barrier to getting on in the new medium. Everyone wanted to form his or her own radio station, and rather than being told how, for instance, a President’s voice sounded, listeners could decide for themselves. 

Likewise, in the Internet era, everyone can become his or her own editor or publisher. Information is unmediated, with neither an editor nor necessarily even education necessary. 

Matt Drudge, for instance—who, with his hat and the word “developing” at the end of his scoops, styles himself explicitly after Winchell—admitted in his book Drudge Manifesto that he graduated 341st out of his high school class of 355. 

Like Drudge, Winchell could hit or miss with the accuracy of his scoops. But in his time, he was far more a force to be reckoned with than Drudge. He was also a more complicated figure: 

* Though known at the end of his career for allying with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Winchell began as an outspoken supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. Unlike other American Jews such as Walter Lippmann and The New York Times’ Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who were so intent on assimilating into the U.S. that they downplayed the Holocaust while the news reports were circulating about it during the war, Winchell denounced Nazi terror early and often. 

* Though hardly handsome, Winchell’s energy made him attractive to women, enabling him to conduct numerous affairs. 

* His breezy style of reporting led Winchell to coin all kinds of terms that become known as “Winchellisms,” including the now-familiar “scram” and “pushover” and the more unusual “Reno-vating” (for divorcing), “infanticipating,” and “debutramps.” 

* As the inventor of the gossip column at the New York Evening Graphic, he pioneered the practice of exposing the private lives of public figures, inspiring so much resentment that the actress Ethel Barrymore once remarked, “It is a mark against American manhood that Walter Winchell is allowed to live.” Yet he harbored an explosive secret of his own that he carried for more than four decades: the fact that he had never married June Magee, the woman whom he passed off as his second wife. He feared that had he done so, the marriage license would have forced him to reveal the illegitimate birth of their daughter Walda. 

The career of Winchell inspired the classic 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success, with Burt Lancaster’s sinister columnist J.J. Hunsecker resembling him in a number of ways. That film resembled the takedown of another feared press lord, Orson Welles’ thinly veiled expose of William Randolph Hearst, Citizen Kane. Both films: 

* featured scaldingly brilliant scripts that anatomized the will to power of a press lord. 

* were written by men who had bitten the hands that fed them. Welles’ co-screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz, had been a guest at Hearst’s home San Simeon before he came up with the idea for the film. One of the two screenwriters of Sweet Smell, Ernest Lehman, had become familiar with Winchell’s tactics as a press agent before entering the film industry. 

* included scandals that their subjects would prefer be quashed. Hearst’s longtime liaison with silent-film comedienne Marion Davies, hardly a secret in Tinseltown, was held up for savage ridicule by Welles and Mankiewicz. Just as J.J. Hunsecker sought to break up the romance of his younger sister, Winchell shattered an aspiring producer named Billy Cahn, who had secretly dated Walda over her father’s vociferous objections. 

* featured protagonists who, for all their power, ended up alone and psychologically maimed. Charles Foster Kane dies alone in his fabulous but forbidding mansion Xanadu; Hunsecker’s crushing of his sister’s affair leads her to break off all relations with him. Sweet Smell’s forecast of the lonely end of Hunsecker proved to be an accurate foretelling of Winchell’s own fate. 

When his longtime paper, the Daily Mirror, died in 1963, Winchell had lost the longtime mainstay of his career. During the Columbia University demonstrations in 1968, he was astonished to find that he couldn’t persuade a young cop to let him past the barricades: “They don’t know me. They don’t know who I was.” 

Four years later, after his wife had died, a son had committed suicide, and his daughter Walda no longer spoke to him, Walter Winchell died in Los Angeles of prostate cancer. Only one person attended his funeral: Walda, whom he had once institutionalized in a psychiatric facility.