Ed Wynn (r.) and Graham McNamee. (NBC)
Ed Wynn, the Fire Chief: Dorothy Burnham of Haddon Hall (NBC, 1932).
If you should visit his grave in the Forest Lawn Cemetery of Glendale, California, you will see a very simple inscription that will move one of old-time radio's most valuable historians, Elizabeth McLeod, to as trenchant a single-line summary of a man as anyone might forge.
"Dear God---Thanks," says the inscription on Ed Wynn's grave.
"[O]ne which says much about this sweet, sad man," McLeod will write, in "Tonight The Program's Gonna Be Different," named for the catch phrase that launched Wynn's best-remembered radio series.
It may be the most disingenuous catch phrase of its time. The only difference between Ed Wynn on radio and the Perfect Fool he'd been in vaudeville is that a home listener can't see the costumed mugging and gesturing for which Wynn became noted in the first place.
He brings his costumes and muggings and props to the radio stage---not to mention a studio audience (he is one of the first radio performers to do so), mostly because he has ferocious microphone fright and the trappings of his customary life as a visual clown give him a wrap of security he can't provide himself otherwise.
Perhaps more remarkably, Wynn brings off (for a few years, anyway) the impossible: a visual clown, with no inclination otherwise, going over big through a sound-alone medium. For a few brief but singular seasons, Wynn is the only vaudevillian who can and does bring a radio audience the complete taste and sense of manic vaudeville in its simplest and most immediate terms.
And if his hysterical style will date almost as soon as he's off the air---the vaudevillians who followed him to radio will be more cerebral, character-oriented, and verbal than Wynn by any measure---it is still fair to say that Wynn opened the door through which they'd pass in the first place.
Tonight the show isn't exactly gonna be different, of course: Wynn and his foil Graham McNamee (later to become a titan of early radio sportscasting) zip through a bag of revue jokes involving, among other things, cheese, horses, stock, subways, a baby with a 108-degree fever, and letters from listeners.
But it will be different than Wynn's future in the medium for the odd serenity through which this manic, insecure man will find and hold an audience for those few shining years. The medium will nearly destroy him as profoundly as it formerly elevated him.
His Amalgamated Broadcasting System (a fourth network he hopes will provide high-quality, independent programming) will collapse in its 1933 crib, at the height of his radio popularity, and through little fault of his own and much fault of his snobbish partner, Hungarian violinist Ota Gygi, who seizes the moment while Wynn is filming in Hollywood and makes clear the new network's going for snob appeal alone, achieving nothing but complete alienation of press and prospective sponsors alike.
Amalgamated's death will leave Wynn---who will lose the Fire Chief program a few years later---deep in debt (he'd poured his life savings into what he hoped to be a legacy for his family and vowed to repay every one of his investors), divorced, and plunged into a mental breakdown. It will take his son, Keenan, to prod him, little by little, toward a remarkable entertainment comeback that builds over the final three decades of his life . . . and will have only occasionally to do with his life as a clown.
Music: Don Voorhees Orchestra. Writers: Ed Wynn, Eddie Prebel. (Advisory: Skips midway through recording.)
FURTHER CHANNEL SURFING . . .
The Green Hornet, "What Price Glamour" (ABC, 1945)---On a routine assignment involving beauty products and a proposed state regulation, a comely Daily Sentinel reporter is spooked after seeing a model's disfigured face, spooking Britt Reid (Bob Hall) into getting to the foundation, so to say. Typically effective if slightly hackneyed installment of the long-running crime drama. Axford: Gil Shea. Kato: Rollon Parker. Lenore Case: Lee Allman. Additional cast: Unknown. Director: Charles Livingstone. Writers: Fran Striker, possibly Tom McDougall.
The Harold Peary Show, "Harold's Campaign Speech" (CBS, 1950)---Running reluctantly for mayor against his own boss Peabody (Joseph Kearns), Harold (Peary) rehearses a campaign speech a little edgily . . . then decides he needs a campaign manager. It could be taken as a tongue-in-cheek sendup of a storyline Peary explored a little more famously in a certain other radio show. Could. Gloria: Gloria Mitchell. Evaline: Mary Jane Croft. Additional cast: Parley Baer. Music: Jack Meakin. Director: Norman Macdonnell. Writers: Harold Peary, Bill Danch, Gene Stone, Jack Robinson.
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