Grief, Memory, Three O'clock in the Morning

On the Air with Mavis Gallant

Radio Schedule, October 11, 1947, Montreal Star

There was a span of time, early to mid-last century, a stretch of more than a few years, when every metropolitan Canadian daily of any size had a radio beat. Full-time reviewers —glancing over their shoulders at the winking incursions of television — kept readers up to date on developments in the industry, listened and assessed to whatever surfed the air waves, and frequently took the pulse of the CBC, finding there cause for wonder, worry, and complaint. Full pages were devoted to the listings of talk, music, and drama programs. It was a Golden Age. Between October 11, 1947 and May 28, 1949, Mavis Gallant (MG) was the radio reviewer for the weekly Montreal Standard. Her column was “On the Air.” She was young, ambitious, and energetic. She would have had to have been all that to have ensured and sustained a really remarkable record of production; she was, at the same time, a staff features writer, in which capacity she turned out lengthy, carefully reported stories on politics, social trends, women’s issues, and the arts. Lord only knows how she found the time and will for the writing of fiction, which occupied her off-time; to say nothing of the partying, which must have been intense. How could it not have been, when you take into account youth, post-war exuberance, Montreal, and newspapers?

With MG scholars Marta Dvorak and Neil Besner, and with the kind support of Mary K. Macleod, MG’s literary executor, I’m working on a book that will be an annotated selection of her newspaper writing which began in 1944 and which she kept up, in a now-and-again way, even after she left Montreal for Europe in Ocotber, 1950. All going according to plan, it will be published in 2024 by Vehicule Press, in Montreal.

MG covered a lot of ground in her weekly survey of both Canadian and American programs; was far-reaching, yet contained. There was no room for expansion in that column, and more than anywhere in that early writing it’s in what she had to say about radio that you see the MG of her future fiction emergent. She’s funny, fair, strong-minded, sometimes acid, speculative, arch. Her one-woman campaign against Al Jolson is a wonder to behold, likewise her pitiless disregard for “All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth.” She keeps close track of Lassie, charts audience response when they detect a difference in the bark and worry that a substitute (and therefore lesser) collie has been stationed at the microphone. On soap operas and on the condescension shown towards women — also children — on the radio (as elsewhere) she is brutal and hilarious.

In the last week or so I’ve been paying attention to this writing about radio; squinting at microfilm photocopies of her columns, which is ruinous for the eyes and the posture, too, but, as we all know, scoliosis is one of art’s noxious, necessary tailings. In the name of annotation, I’ve been digging trenches to nowhere, pausing too long to marvel at the pretty stones and fool’s gold that surfaces along the way. Much of what I’ve found in my scouting about the peripheries will never make its way into the book, of course. Here’s an example.

On December 11, 1948, MG reviewed a WCBS broadcast that had taken place, as she says, “a couple of weeks ago;” a full month had passed, in fact. This is the text of her assessment, in full.

Happily for Canadian audiences, Leacock-lovers all, they didn't have to hear Jack Benny do “My Financial Career” on James Hilton's “Hallmark Playhouse” a couple of weeks ago. Those of you who caught it over CBS have probably never been so surprised in your lives.

Remember that pleasant meandering little story about Leacock’s terror of banks, his interview with the manager about opening his minuscule account, and then his abject withdrawal of the entire amount?

In Benny's gleeful hands it became a series of cracks about Benny himself, and they even managed a respectable number of references during the play to the sponsor, Lucky Strike. Can't remember that Leacock had much to say about LS/MFT, and we don't remember his hero having been entitled Rodney Beamish, employee of the Eagle Clothes Co., zipper department, either.

But, then, it's a long time since we read it, and as one of the New York radio columnists pointed out, Stephen Leacock never had a Hooper rating. Maybe that's one of the reasons we still like him.

In the main, this is self-explanatory.  Anyone contextualizing so pithy a squib would keep the gloss minimal, might want to provide the birth / death dates of Hallmark Playhouse (1948 - 1953, at which point it underwent a name / presenter change and ran through 1955, and the host was Lionel Barrymore); might want to remind readers that James Hilton was best-known as the author of the best-selling Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr. Chips; might want to provide a brief explanation of the Hooper ratings, a radio listener survey on which the future of a program might depend; and perhaps note, for anyone born after, say, 1970, that LS/MFT (Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco) was a gnomic addendum to Lucky Strike packaging and advertising. One’s responsibilities needn’t extend to fact checking the review itself, but when I actually listened to the broadcast (I’ll give you the youtube link at the end) I did have a few quibbles about MG’s very brief, even throw-away, assessment.

For example, there is an allusion to Lucky Strike within the context of the play; but, as drums go, it was not over-beat, as she suggests. Hallmark, however, was lovingly, lavishly and lengthily licked, as one might expect, given that the card company was the name sponsor.

Leacock’s story, first published in Life Magazine, April 11, 1895, is a classic for a reason; a good part of its charm is in its leanness, its economy. That was thrown under the Hallmark bus, and the drama — such as it was — took its treacly trajectory from whimsical speculation about how “Rodney Beamish” came to be so nervous around questions of finance. Past traumas were explored through a series of flashbacks laced with jokes about Freudian analysis. (This must have piqued MG’s interest because she wrote A LOT about psychiatry, and Freud in particular, in her features.)

I felt a bit aggrieved on Jack Benny’s behalf. Hallmark always had marquee names dropping by as special guests, and Benny was a logical, even an ideal, choice for the part, owing to how his entire schtick, the whole length of his long career, traded on his legendary stinginess. For the Leacock adaption he bore little responsibility and just as little blame. He was in the studio as a working stiff doing a job, and if culpability for what is, it’s true, an ersatz rendering was to be assigned it should have been laid at the feet of the writers, Howard Snyder and Hugh Wedlock, Jr. They were boyhood friends from Brooklyn, gag writers for hire, willing provisioners of schlock to the highest bidder. They wrote Abbot and Costello movies, cranked out jokes for Red Skelton, for Eddie Cantor, all that crowd. Benny was one of their principal mainstays; with Jack, they had a thirty-year association.

Wedlock, Jr. was 85 when he died in 1993; I’m not sure how long he remained active, but he’d been one of the Laugh-In writers for Rowan and Martin in the early days of the show. By that time — 1967 — he was a solo act. Snyder died at 53, in the early hours of April 13, 1963, when his 1958 two-door sedan crashed into a concrete retaining wall at the dead end of the 900 block of Hilldale Avenue, in West Hollywood. He was one of 13 fatalities that weekend, a death toll so alarming that it sparked a call at the state level for the tightening of traffic regulations. (Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, April 13, 1963). At the time of his death, he was one of the writers for My Three Sons.

Snyder lived at 1422 N. Sweetzer Ave, in West Hollywood. What would never, ever make its way into the footnotes of a book such as the one that now preoccupies me is the story of 1422 N. Sweetzer. And that’s a pity, really.

The Sunset Lanai Apartments

At 1422 N. Sweetzer, West Hollywood, is the Sunset Lanai Apartments. When the first tenants moved in in 1953, it was touted as a stately pleasure dome, and the embodiment of swank. The architect was Edward H. Fickett — an extremely prolific craftsman whose schooling was paid for by the actress Irene Dunne, and whom Better Homes and Gardens called “the Frank Lloyd Wright of the Fifties” and whose many private homes are sought after by post-and-beam aficionados; the developer was George Alexander. On April 23, 1954, near the site of the Sunset Lanai, Mr. Alexander was involved in a dramatic car-out-of-control episode at the corner of Laurel Canyon and Sunset Blvds. As reported by the Los Angeles Evening City News, a brake failure caused his “expensive auto” to “run wild through a service station at the start of Sunset Strip, [knock] down two gasoline pumps which blazed briefly and spectacularly, and ended up against a tree with nobody injured and none of the nearby cars having been hit.”

This is the first of several stories with unsettling car connections connected to the building. A rented Cadillac, from Hertz, emerges from the Sunset Lanai a few years later: 1422 N. Sweetzer was the address of a pair of young felons whose adventures were detailed on August 1, 1957, when the Los Angeles Times reported that a “young man about Hollywood and a 19-year old Turkish beauty, Tanju Dilet, were jailed in New York City yesterday as they allegedly prepared to fly to Instanbul with a treasure in merchandise stolen from Los Angeles merchants.” The young man was identified as Donald Heller, age 22. Via charge accounts assigned to a fake company they’d set up, and a long string of bad cheques they adeptly passed, they managed to purloin 25,000 worth of minks, silverware and “other luxury items,” which they stored in the back of the Hetz Caddy. They’d booked passage to Istanbul on the Constitution, changed their minds, canceled, and reserved a flight. The travel agent alerted the authorities and the bunko squad was waiting for them when they went to pick up their tickets. The court reporting pursuant to an appeal filed by Donald Heller (also known as Arthur Donald Heller, also known as Donald Keller) from the State prison where was eventually confined make for merry reading.

Shortly after July 20, 1957, appellant and Tanju left in the Cadillac obtained from Hertz U-Drive for New York. Appellant used Tanju's Diner's Club card wherever he could at restaurants and hotels across the country. In New York they immediately made arrangements to go to Turkey by boat, but later, upon being informed police were looking for him, appellant tried to arrange to go by plane, but before arrangements were made they were arrested in New York on July 31, 1957, with 13 suitcases carrying 212 articles weighing 387 pounds, including the mink stole and silver. The police also found in appellant's possession the Cadillac belonging to Hertz U-Drive.

Their post-arrest story is gothic and sad and sketchy. Tanju — who  was said to come from a well-to-do Istanbul family — was pregnant. There was some question as to the validity of their marriage as Keller had been previously entwined — there was a child from that union, too — and seemed not to have been very thorough about getting a divorce. He was sentenced, she was given a suspended sentence and ordered deported after the child was born; but she must have found a way to stay in the US or, at least, return to the country. Tanju Keller — there surely can’t have been more than one — crops up from time to time in the public record, including as the President of an association for parents of “handicapped” children, in California. What her connection to Arthur Donald Keller might have been, post 1957, I can’t say, but he seems to have concluded they were divorced (see above), because in 1977 he’s reported as being engaged to Judy Cecchini. Perhaps Tanju returned to Turkey, because it’s via the Turkish courts that a notice appears in the Austin-American Statesmen, July 27, 2016, advising Arthur Donald Keller, resident of Austin, but seemingly untraceable, of the proceedings against him.

Then, a veil is drawn.

Mr. Keller

Mrs. Keller

No car was implicated when, on May 10, 1958, Mrs. Ruth Wander of 1422 N. Sweetzer kept a beauty appointment between the hours of 3.30 and 7.15 PM. She came home to find the front door ajar, and $31,175 in jewels, furs, clothing, and perfume gone with the wind. However, the four-wheel connection soon resurfaces with the singer Buddy Greco, who did some time at the Sunset Lanai. In 1960, the LA Mirror reported (October 25) that his late model auto had been stolen from the underground garage; in it were eight mohair suits, four sweaters, eight dress suits, cufflinks, two cameras, several gasoline credit cards and sheet music valued at $2,5000.

Other celebrities came and went from the Sunset Lanai: Bill Macy (of Maude fame) was there for a while, so were James Coco, Christopher Hewett, Vinent Gardenia, Jeffrey Tambor, Al Pacino. All must have had their respective rides. On Feb 26, 1964, the LA Evening Citizen reported that actor Vic Morrow (here we set aside cars for that eventual helicopter, very sad ) of 1422 N. Sweetzer was ordered to pay $1,400 a month to his estranged wife, the actor and screenwriter Barbara Morrow. She declined his wish for a reconciliation, saying that he’d threatened to “maim her.” Restraining orders were placed on both parties, and the divorce was enacted that year.

No doubt much transpired at the Sunset Lanai over the years twixt then and now, but not much that made it into the papers. In 2012, an exotic dancer at a West Hollywood club quarreled with a fellow performer and torched her apartment in the Sunset Lanai. There was a lot of damage, and the owners of the property made a move to have it condemned and razed. Heritage advocates protested. The widow of architect Edward Fickett, Joycie Steinberg Fickett, hauled herself from her sick bed and made a presentation to whatever body was deciding the fate of the Sunset Lanai. It’s still there, as I gather, so she must have been persuasive.

As noted, none of this will find its way into a book about the early journalism of our gal, MG. It’s irrelevant, it’s already on the cutting room floor. Digressions are us, but we know when to set them aside and move on. That time is now. Joycie Fickett said that Edward — he was considerably older — sang her a love song every morning before he went to work. This is me, crooning to you, while the grindstone spins. Back to it. Thanks for reading.

Classified ad, 1953