"A New Kind of Radio Program": Orson Welles (Lady Esther)

By Jeff Wilson

After the demise of the Campbell Playhouse, Welles' following series started broadcasting in September 1941, as The Magnificent Ambersons began production. Promotional material for the show made much of the new format Welles planned to use, and had the show been allowed to continue as Welles wished, it might have developed into something truly interesting. Instead, sponsor pressure (brought about by poor audience test results, much like Ambersons) forced Welles to revert to the standard dramatic format of the time. The series ran just nineteen episodes; fourteen survive today. The first show was broadcast Monday, September 15, 1941, on CBS at 10 p.m. EST. The final show was broadcast February 2, 1942, just before the start of work on It's All True in Brazil.

Orson Welles began Welles' attachment to a concept he would return to throughout the remainder of his radio work, and even in some ways dabble in within his film work later in his career ¹: the almanac. Welles clearly enjoyed the idea of a show that roamed freely from one story or topic to another, presenting as it did a more leisurely, looser feel than the strict "one show, one story" format that was generally the rule in radio drama. Listeners (or at least the listeners the sponsor wanted) felt differently, as testing results would show, leading to clashes between Welles and his sponsor and a dilution and eventual abandoning of Welles' original concept.

An undated CBS promotional brochure, intended to drum up a sponsor for the series, makes clear the aim of the program:

It's a difficult show to pin down in cold type. It would be a program without a formula…just as an evening spent with interesting and well-loved friends has no formula, and the conversation flows naturally from an anecdote to a song to a discussion of a news event, to a joke…There in the pleasure of such an evening, is the essence of the show…a show of many-sided appeal governed only by the dictates of good taste and the basic sincerity and inspiration that should characterize and surround an advertiser's message to the public. ²

Given Welles' natural talents as a raconteur and his ease in off-the-cuff entertaining, this idea must have seemed like an easy hit. What is interesting is that even in this show's proposed format, we find Welles eager to dive into topical events of the time, something he would later get to indulge in fully in his Lear-sponsored Almanac series.

Indeed, an unsigned contract for the series, dated July 24, 1941, makes plain the amorphous nature of the show, describing it as "a complete package radio program consisting of a variety show, a musical show, or a dramatic show, or a combination of any or all of said shows". Welles was to receive a fee of $8,000 per episode (about $98,000 in 2004 currency), with yearly options to continue the show (at escalating fee rates) through the 1946-47 radio season.³

In July 1941, the Lady Esther cosmetics company of Chicago signed on as series sponsor. The company was coming off a sponsorship of Guy Lombardo's music program, and Welles' series was to take its place in the sponsor's Monday evening slot. Though Welles would play the romantic lead in Robert Stevenson's film of Jane Eyre just two years later, he was not renowned for the types of roles or work that would seemingly have appealed to the Lady Esther demographic: middle class, middle-aged women. Given the company's target audience, choosing Welles and his unconventional series seems misguided, and as it turned out, Welles and the sponsor (through Pedlar & Ryan, Lady Esther's ad agency) butted heads early on in the series' run.

The CBS brochure presents a sample script for the would-be program, which includes, as promised, a wide variety of material: music by Jerome Kern (following a trick introduction), an O. Henry drama with Welles and Barbara Stanwyck (as an example of the type of star such a show would seek), musical comedy with Disney's Gadget Band, and Edward Everett Hale's historical drama "Man Without a Country," which gave a sympathetic view of Benedict Arnold. But most odd among these selections was the inclusion of an element presumably meant to make Welles, the artist and "genius" of renown, more accessible to the everyday individual: Jiminy Cricket.

Described in the sample script materials as being "wisely naïve and naively wise," Jiminy Cricket was to have been "someone to whom the world is a new and wonderful experience."⁴. This perhaps indicates that the character was meant to have a more educational use in the show. Despite this initial concept, Jiminy Cricket's role evolved into that of Welles' "conscience," prodding Welles to get on with the show and to refrain from wasting time with overlong speeches, and other similar exhortations. Reproduced below is the opening of the first show, where Jiminy and Welles interacted for the first time. Note the trick introduction:

OW: Stand by!
TECH: We'll be on the air in 15 seconds, Mr Welles.
OW; Yes, I know.
TECH: (fading): Stand by, everybody…
OW: (mumbling) Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, wish I might, get the wish I wish tonight…
JIMINY: Hi, Mr Welles!
OW: Who's that?
JIMINY: Me, Jiminy Cricket!
TECH: What's that, Mr Welles?
OW: I don't know, I guess I was just talking to myself.
JIMINY: Hello, Mr Welles!
OW: Say, who are you, anyway? Where are you?
JIMINY: Well, I'm right here by your side, from now on. I'm your conscience!
OW: Look here, aren't you Jiminy Cricket, from Walt Disney?
JIMINY: That's right!
OW: What are you doing away from Pinocchio?
JIMINY: He doesn't need me anymore, but you do, Mr Welles! Somebody's got to keep you out of trouble. We can't have you scaring the whole country again, for one thing. And for another -
TECH: (Whispering) All right, Mr Welles!
MUSIC COMES IN, BRASSY AND LOUD
JIMINY: (during music): Well, here we go!
OW: (during music) Go away, go away!
(MUSIC ENDS)
OW: Good evening, this is Orson Welles, and this is the first of a new radio series brought to you by the compliments of our sponsor, Lady Esther. Tonight it's our plan -
JIMINY: Now don't do too much talkin'!
OW: We of the Mercury Theater -
JIMINY: Get on with the show!
OW; Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for this interruption… (whispering to staff) Do something about him!
JIMINY: I'm sitting right here on your shoulder! No no, Mr Welles, on the other one! Hey, you're doin' fine, just keep it brief, and get on with it!
OW: All right, all right. Well, let's start off with a short story by Saki, called "Sredni Vashtar."
STORY BEGINS ⁵

In the end, it is not hard to see why the character, at least as written above, would fail. Obnoxious and prone to constant admonitions to keep things moving, Jiminy was bound to wear out his welcome quickly. Also, audiences who tuned in Welles to hear quality, classy radio drama, not to mention the sponsor's target audience, probably failed to find much humor or appeal in the juvenile nature of the character.

With such stated aims as presented in the sample script, one might assume that the character was to be a fairly prominent part of the show; however, Welles and company must have anticipated that the move might backfire. Consequently, Cliff Edwards, the voice of the character, was prudently signed for only the first three episodes (despite the September 10, 1941, Variety reporting that Edwards had been signed for the entire season). The audience surveys for those three episodes showed that listeners did not care for Welles' conscience (Jiminy Cricket was rated the worst part of the first episode, with jazz pianist Meade Lux Lewis following closely), and despite slight audience approval increases over the second and third weeks of the series, Jiminy was abandoned, and Welles, conscience-free, carried on.

The first episode illustrated the problems, Jiminy Cricket among them, that Welles would have with the show, at least in the eyes of Lady Esther. Perhaps Welles intended to tweak Lady Esther's demographic and perhaps not, but choosing "Sredni Vashtar" as the opening story of his new series certainly demonstrated a lack of interest in presenting a pleasant, vanilla show. The story is beautifully performed by Welles (as narrator) and the cast, but the subject matter is on the gruesome side: Conradin is a sickly boy living under a cruel guardian, a woman who seemingly works to make his life miserable. Otherwise friendless, Conradin keeps two animals in a backyard shed: a hen and a ferret. The guardian discovers the hen and sells it to the butcher. Conradin, heartbroken, turns his devotion to the ferret, which he has dubbed Sredni Vashtar. He begins worshipping it as a god. The guardian, outraged that Conradin is keeping something else in the shed, goes to remove it. Repeating over and over a silent prayer of deliverance to his god, Conradin watches, eventually seeing the ferret slink away, bloody evidence of a fresh kill upon its mouth and fur. A shrieking maid then discovers the dead body of the guardian as Conradin sits down to enjoy some toast.

Not surprisingly, an audience survey by Pedlar & Ryan reported back that only 20.6 percent of the listeners surveyed thought "Vashtar" was excellent, or even good. The only element of the program to score worse in that regard was a tepid sketch about Mexican independence starring Welles' paramour at the time, Dolores del Rio, at 16.4 percent. One thing "Sredni Vashtar" did do was display Welles' interest in the unusual or fantastic, something that did not surface to the same extent in his film work. Stories or poems broadcast on this series with such overtones or material include "Vashtar," "The Black Pearl," "Annabel Lee," "The Hitchhiker," "Wilbur Brown - Habitat Brooklyn," "The Right Side" and "The Happy Prince." These works generally proved unpopular with survey audiences, and in the final few weeks of the program, such material was phased out in favor of more mainstream sensibilities. That said, Welles had numerous other scripts featuring fantastic elements that remained unused , including more Saki stories, Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," John Collier's "Evening Primrose" and "Bottle Party," and Stacy Aumonier's "A Sort of Irritation."⁷

While the survey audience did not like the initial show, "Land," reviewing for Variety, was effusive in his praise, coining perhaps the best description of the show in labelling it "literary vaudeville," and opening his review by noting that "The best thing about this new half-hour is that there is no convenient pigeon-hole in which to classify it," and further: "a hodge-podge then, but in the style of a master showman. There are innumerable touches which vividly illustrate what production can mean when an original mind breezes through it." Land liked the show enough to even pass out praise to Jiminy Cricket and the ads for Lady Esther, ads that had gained a previous reputation for their low quality.7

The second show, broadcast September 22, proved about as popular as the first, with 49.1 percent of surveyees rating the show as excellent or good, compared to 49.3 for the first show.⁸ Of the three stories featured, "Golden Honeymoon," (a story Welles would return to both in radio and film⁹) co-starring Ruth Gordon, received the most favorable response. John Collier's "The Right Side," a story of the Devil tempting a would-be suicide, fared badly. Audience comments focused on the format, complaining about the lack of one story for the entire show, with some complaining that the show was "disjointed, confusing, and lacked unity."¹⁰ Overall, there were only 48 favorable comments, compared to 149 negative.

Welles began the third show with, as he put it, a "grisly thriller" called "The Interlopers," a tale of two landowners whose families have been feuding for generations. The two men are hunting each other in a patch of forest that the two each claim ownership of. When they become trapped together, they initially argue and then decide to make peace. They begin to call for help together, but instead of help, they are met by a pack of wolves. When the story ends and Welles and Jiminy return, Jiminy takes the place of the disapproving audience, asking Welles what the moral of the "nasty old wolf" story was. Welles responds facetiously that "Don't make friends with your enemies or the wolves will get you". Jiminy says "That doesn't sound right, Mr. Welles," to which Welles shoots back "Well have it your way Jiminy, it wasn't wolves those men saw, but a troop of Boy Scouts, with St Bernard dogs."¹¹ Ironically, this story was the best received of Welles' excursions into the strange to date, with 57.4 percent giving it their approval. Still, comments such as "weird" or "morbid" littered the survey responses.¹²

The following weeks saw a gradual upswing in the response to the series, but problems remained. The October 6 show featured "The Black Pearl," a story of love and avarice revolving around the titular item, starring Dorothy Comingore alongside the usual Mercury players. This was the only story of the show, which included some almanac bits and a Welles reading of Poe's "Annabel Lee," which has Welles reading in the high declamatory style, and to rather poor effect, at least to these modern ears. Again, the show proved unpopular, with several comments stating that Welles "tries to frighten the public," and was "scary" and "weird."¹³

The October 13 show featured a gentle love story, "If In Years To Come," as its centerpiece, which proved popular, but less so were readings of Dorothy Parker poetry (each announced by Welles, performed by Lucille Ball, and lamely punctuated with musical stingers) and a quick throwaway gag involving Joseph Cotten as Noah Webster. Two days later, a Variety headline announced that "Welles Reported Undeferential to Lady Esther Cosmetics Execs And They May Cancel His Show." The article noted that a Pedlar & Ryan exec, Ted Sisson, had left suddenly for the West Coast, giving credence to rumors that Welles was struggling with his sponsor. Variety went on to note that "According to…New York radio circles the account [Lady Esther], which has strong radio ideas, has found Welles tough about accepting 'suggestions' and that has made the account unhappy since it had been able on all its previous programs to convey to the names involved what it considered to be the right concepts of popular entertainment."¹⁴ Or, in other words, Pedlar & Ryan was accustomed to making the talent produce the kind of show they demanded, and Welles would not oblige.

Welles began the show under the assumption that he would be allowed to do as he wished, but with the audience surveys as ammunition, Lady Esther was demanding changes to what was evidently not working. Through November, discussions between Welles and the sponsor focused on how to "fix" the show; a November 4 blurb in Variety reported that "For the first time in his radio career Orson Welles is considering working before a studio audience. Agency and sponsor are said to favor live reaction." ¹⁵ Within two more weeks, a November 19 Variety report stated that

There's nothing wrong with the Orson Welles show that a few little suggestions won't cure, take it from A.E. McElfresh, v.p of Pedlar & Ryan, and Bill Lawrence, Coast manager of the agency, who talked it over with the bearded boy wonder last week. Actuated by a panel taken weekly to determine listener appeal, Welles is swinging into line to fashion his program after the pronounced preference. Show is being moulded toward a one-story framework instead of the vignettes now being utilized. McElfresh said the sponsor is happy with the results so far and that all are hopeful of a set formula which will build to a larger audience.¹⁶

Beyond the fixation with Welles' beard (which he had on arrival in Hollywood two years earlier and had long since shaved), it is interesting to read between the lines here; Welles, whether he was really "swinging into line," appears to have indeed given up the fight for the show he originally conceived around this time. Only one more show in the original format was broadcast, on December 1; in the meantime, the series had broadcast "The Hitchhiker" and "A Farewell to Arms," in its move toward the preferred format. "The Hitchhiker," written by Lucille Fletcher, would prove to be one of the most popular suspense stories in American radio drama history, and Welles himself would perform the story again twice, once for the classic series Suspense, and again for his own Mercury Summer Theater. Unfortunately, the original performance appears lost, so we cannot judge its power versus the later versions. Following the broadcast, a new survey question, simply asking whether listeners liked the show, revealed that 72 percent did indeed like this story, though there were numerous comments of the "Didn't make sense" and "too unreal - too weird - too nerve-wracking" variety. ¹⁷

Perhaps the high point of the series came as a last gasp of its original format, with the December 1 episode. Two comedies of domestic trouble featured, with "Something's Going to Happen to Henry." and "Wilbur Brown, Habitat: Brooklyn." In the first story, we get a gently witty look at relationships, as Janet Gaynor plays a young woman who invents a fictional husband after a misunderstanding in a men's clothing store, and in the process almost spoils a chance at gaining a real suitor, played by Joseph Cotten. While not up to the level of "Wilbur Brown," "Henry" makes a refreshing companion piece to the acidic portrayal of marriage that follows.

"Wilbur Brown" is a funny and sharply acted fantasy, with Glenn Anders (later to appear in Welles' The Lady From Shanghai) as a zoo-dwelling chimpanzee who switches lives with the titular character, a browbeaten, henpecked bank clerk, played by Ray Collins. The interplay of Welles' narration and the actors is handled beautifully, allowing for a fast-paced tempo that helps the story along immensely. Most notably, when Brown goes to see his boss (who doesn't recognize him due to Brown not being behind his teller's cage), the scene goes as follows:

WELLES: …Give you an idea how long people had been associating Wilbur with the cage and the little wire grille; once Wilbur walked into Mr. Johnson's office to see about an overdrawn account. Mr Johnson was the manager of the bank. Wilbur entered and said
WILBUR: Excuse me, Mr Johnson.
WELLES: Mr Johnson looked up and said
JOHNSON: Who are you?
WILBUR: Brown.
WELLES: Answered Wilbur.
JOHNSON: Who?
WELLES: Asked Mr Johnson.
WILBUR: Brown.
WELLES: Repeated Wilbur.
WILBUR: Brown, the teller.

All of this was done in rapid-fire fashion, to excellent effect. The story then looks at Wilbur and the chimp's switching of places, and Welles describes to the audience how no one noticed the plain absurdity of a chimp working in a bank and a man in a zoo cage. He telles the audience that the very absurdity of the situation is what caused people to not mention it to anyone else. As Welles states, "What shall the people believe, their reason, or cold, hard fact?" For Welles, having gone through the "War of the Worlds" saga, this must have been an amusing speech to deliver. The story is filled with sly humor: take the following exchange between the chimp, distressed by his new life, and Wilbur, happy in the chimp's cage:

CHIMP: I don't like your wife!
WILBUR: So what? Neither do I.¹⁸

Despite the quality of this show, listeners again remained unimpressed, and the show was the last of the series as Welles originally intended it. Overly literal-minded audience members refused to accept the stories, particularly "Wilbur Brown," on their merits, and one satire-challenged teacher even wrote a letter to Welles criticizing the ridiculousness of the idea of a man and chimp swapping places. One survey respondent commented that it was "typical of Orson Welles," which one can take in a quite different way from how it was intended. ¹⁹

Following this final hurrah in the old format, the show settled in to one story per show, with occasional added bits such as poetry readings thrown in. Ring Lardner's "Symptoms of Being 35" played December 8, along with readings from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The Whitman readings appear to have been included as a response to the Pearl Harbor bombings of the previous day. Welles told audiences "Ladies and gentlemen - as we all know, our country has answered a vicious and unprovoked attack by declaring war on Japan. This is a time for energetic and unashamed patriotism on the part of all of us. I know that we all agree to that because I know that none of us will be satisfied with anything but complete victory." ²⁰

After a war coverage pre-emption on December 15, Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince" played as the Christmas show. Welles would perform this story again with Bing Crosby in a performance that would be released on vinyl.

The show of December 29 saw Welles work for the first time with future wife Rita Hayworth, in Richard Connell's rambunctious comedy "There Are Frenchmen and Frenchmen." Welles plays Frenchman Achille La Bucelle, sent to Oklahoma to teach French at a private girl's school as part of a teacher exchange program. There he meets Oona Birdsong (Hayworth), the physical education teacher and dean, and they begin a somewhat outlandish courtship that ends with La Bucelle entering a wrestling match to defend Birdsong's honor, after which she finally accepts him. Comical "Indian" music abounds, and Joseph Cotten appears at the break (he also plays a policeman turned wrestler in the show) to ask such mock-dramatic questions as "Will Professor La Bucelle get to first base with Oona Birdsong? Does he know what first base is?" It is a strange show, and perhaps "typical of Orson Welles."²¹

The final five shows of the series did not attempt anything as unusual, however, as they were a mix of Mercury Theater on the Air recyclings and material Welles used again later. The recyclings were "Garden of Allah" (January 5, 1942) and "My Little Boy" (January 19, 1942), broadcast on The Campbell Playhouse and Mercury Theater on the Air, respectively. "The Apple Tree" (January 12) was rebroadcast on Mercury Summer Theater in 1946. "The Happy Hypocrite," (January 26), based on Max Beerbohm's Dorian Gray-eque parody, debuted after delays due to script issues, and the series ended with a second performance of Norman Corwin's "Between Americans," which Welles had performed on the Gulf Screen Guild Theater on December 7, 1941. And that was almost that.

Somewhat surprisingly, that was not quite the end of the story. Despite his troubles with creative control and the prospect of an enormous amount of work ahead in South America on It's All True (not to mention his expectatations of wrapping up editing on The Magnificent Ambersons), Welles tried to get an agreement to continue the show from South America. In a January 19, 1942, letter to Lawrence Shenfield of Pedlar & Ryan, Welles' lawyer Jack Moss provided an in-depth argument as to why extending the show's run would be a good idea, and why doing it from South America would be worthwhile as well.

Moss began by enumerating the reasons that the movie project made for such a good idea, claiming that "it is clear that the effectiveness of the project would be greatly strengthened by a radio program originating from South America. Such a program…would be in English, and expressly directed commercially, to…the United States."²² Welles and Moss wanted to make the programs available through electrical transcription discs, which would be sent back to the United States for broadcast. This would, Moss stated, allow for similar broadcasts in South American nations where Hollywood pictures had created a taste for English language entertainment.

Moss went on to play the patriotism and money cards in suggesting that by continuing with the series, Lady Esther could benefit by being perceived as contributing to the war effort. Also, he went on, "It is certain that the wide publicity given to Mr. Welles' picture and radio activity…would be very valuable, commercially inasmuch as the direct connection between Lady Esther and Welles would be clearly established in all such publicity."²³

As to the content of the show, Welles proposed to create shows that "would take on the rich color of Latin America which listeners in the United States would find doubly interesting." Considering the general lack of interest in Welles' two Mexican-themed stories on the show, this seems highly unlikely. Still, this new direction is essentially what Hello Americans would sound like when it hit the airwaves in November 1942. Which should tell us that if nothing else, the idea of the series did interest Welles in a creative, as well as monetary, sense.²⁴

Despite Welles and Moss's proposal, the sponsors, so far as know, since no return response exists within Welles' files, had no real interest in carrying on the series in this format. In any event, Welles would have Hello Americans to make up for what he missed out on with this opportunity. Not only would he have the new series, but he would have it with more creative control, given that series' lack of corporate sponsor. Orson Welles remains of interest today through its risk-taking, choice of material, and the lost opportunity it presented for something slightly different in the often fairly vanilla world of radio drama. It is worth contrasting Welles' second effort in an almanac styled show, his 1944 Orson Welles Almanac, with this one, given the general failure of the later show, and the relative successes of the first.

ON TO DETAILED SHOW LOG

Footnotes:

1 Welles would return to the "almanac" (if we can loosely term it such) format in his Orson Welles Almanac show for Mobil, his commentary show for Lear Radio, and in film projects like It's All True, Orson's Bag, and The Magic Show, among others.
2 Welles mss, Lilly Library, Box 8, folder 19 pp 2-3. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.
3 Welles mss, Lilly Library; Box 27, folder 1
4 Welles mss, Lilly Library, Box 8, folder 19 p 4
5 Quoted from broadcast of 9/15/41.
6 Welles mss, Lilly Library, Box 9, folder 29-31, survey results for Lady Esther series
7 Variety, 9/17/41.
8 Welles would re-broadcast the story in his Mercury Summer Theater series, and attempt a film version during the 1970s.
9 Welles mss, Lilly Library, Box 9, folder 29-31, survey results for Lady Esther series
10 Welles mss, Lilly Library, Box 9, folder 29-31, survey results for Lady Esther series
11 Quoted from broadcast of 9/29/42.
12 Welles mss, Lilly Library, Box 9, folder 29-31, survey results for Lady Esther series
13 ibid.
14 Variety, 10/15/41, p 3.
15 Variety, 11/5/41, p 29
16 Variety, 11/19/41, p 36
17 Welles mss, Lilly Library, Box 9, folder 29-31, survey results for Lady Esther series
18 Quoted from broadcast of 12/1/41.
19 Welles mss, Lilly Library, Box 9, folder 29-31, survey results for Lady Esther series
20 Quoted from broadcast of 12/8/41.
21 Quoted from broadcast of 12/29/41.
22 Welles mss, Lilly Library, Box 9, folder 19. p 2; Moss-Shenfield wire, 1/15/42.
23 Welles mss, Lilly Library, Box 9, folder 19. p 4; Moss-Shenfield wire, 1/15/42.
24 ibid.

Copyright © 2005 Jeff Wilson
Posted 7 March 2005