The March Of Time

Show Information based on John Dunning's book "On The Air"



News documentary and dramatization (1931-1945).



The March of Time was the first radio newsreel: dramatized news events, elaborately staged with sound effects and music, but put together like a newspaper - often on deadline, with impact and accuracy its twin goals. Its roots are found in a series of ten-minute newscasts heard on WLW, Cincinnati, in 1928.



It was conceived in part by Fred Smith, WLW station manager, to help counter radio's lack of news-gathering ability. The wire services then confined their clientele to print outlets, which were uneasy at the prospect of radio entering the news business. Radio stations could only clip the papers, make some cursory attempt to rewrite, and broadcast the news in bulletin form. Smith thought an arrangement with Time might benefit both radio and the magazine. The station would get a news show, which could be offered in script form to other stations around the country. Time would get stronger name identification and perhaps new advertising accounts in areas where the show ran.



Smith approached Roy Larsen, director of circulation for Time, whose offices were in Cleveland. Larsen obtained permission, and on Sept. 3, 1928, Time began syndicating the scripts to other stations. In September 1929, the operation expanded into active syndication, with full shows transcribed and sent to subscribers. Soon more than 100 stations were carrying it. Imitators sprang up, and Smith pushed the idea into a new mode that would, perhaps, make imitation more difficult. He wanted to dramatize the news: as Radioland summarized, "to create for the listener the illusion of being right there on the spot" when news was made. Larsen had qualms about the legality of impersonating living people in a nonsatiric format, in what would undoubtedly be taken by many as a serious news broadcast. Smith countered with this argument: it would be a serious news show; there would be absolutely no fiction, no words taken out of context, no doctoring of the actual statements of the subjects. How could the newsmakers object, unless they objected to what they themselves had said?



A closed-circuit audition program was prepared and, on Feb. 6, 1931, was given a private performance for CBS executives and editors of Time. The show was broadcast directly to Larsen's home, where (according to Raymond Fielding in his book, The March of Time) CBS chief William S. Paley and Time publisher Henry R. Luce were conspicuously present. Few in the assembled party liked the show, but plans continued for its premiere, which took place on a partial CBS hookup a month later. Luce remained uneasy over the show's bellicose nature: it sounded like a midway event, with barkers and hustlers hawking the news. It seemed to fly in the face of journalistic integrity, causing many Time editors to remain skeptical even when it quickly caught on with critics and the public. The March of Time was a success whether Luce liked it or not.



It was nothing if not an attention-grabber. Its sound was like an authentic Movietone newsreel, with shouting mobs, riveting sound effects, and music that conveyed the merciless, relentless pace of time. Through this vivid audio potpourri, listeners would "see" the rise of Hitler, the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the abdication of Edward VIII, the controversy over the New Deal, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, and the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War. Many listeners were convinced that they were hearing the voices of real newsmakers on the scene, and some wondered aloud how it was done.



It was done by a company of New York actors who became known as the cream of the crop. "Nine men and one woman work at a fixed salary of $150 a week," wrote Radio Guide in 1936, as the show opened its sixth season. "They are Time's regular acting staff. But if they sound like actors, they are fired. Time actors must forget themselves completely; must be the persons they impersonate. There is more to perfect mimicry than voice and accent. There must be a feeling of sympathy, even for those people whose lives they abhor." The regular cast, wrote Radio News in 1938, was supplemented by an "available list" of 700 names with specific talents. "Here may be found the voices of Swedes or Abyssinians, gnomes or elves - even the piping, squeaky voice that was once needed to represent a supposedly talking and singing mongoose found on the Isle of Man. To get on The March of Time is the ambition of many a radio voice, for this program has become to radio actors what the old-time Palace Theater was to vaudeville troupers. It is the open sesame to any radio director's sanctum. Out of 1,200 voices auditioned during 1937, only 18 were suitable."



And like any good newspaper, the show had severe critics. It was damned left and right. Real newsmen condemned it for hamming up the news. Communists called it fascistic. William Randolph Hearst labeled it Communist propaganda and forbade mention of it in the pages of his newspapers. It was banned in Germany. It even ran afoul of Roosevelt, who asked and later demanded that it stop impersonating him, because the actors were so good they were diminishing the impact of his Fireside Chats. It was accused of being pompous, pretentious, melodramatic, and bombastic. But it was never dull. In the mid-1930s, Time had Hooper numbers in the 25-point range.



It was produced by Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne, the agency handling the Time account. Arthur Pryor, head of the agency's radio department, ran the show while delegating the director's job to Donald Stouffer and Thomas Harrington. From the beginning it was known that The March of Time would face the stiffest production challenges that radio had yet known. It would be a balancing act between the disciplines of drama and the pressures of news that sometimes continued to break right up to air time. The focal point would be the magazine, which was constantly receiving dispatches from all over the world. When a big story broke at the last minute, a polished ready-to-air show was reorganized: the entire menu was shifted as events demanded. Newspapers are accustomed to this: a top reporter can write a new lead or a new story with only minutes to spare. Drama was developed at a more leisurely pace. But in radio, a new breed of actor had come to the fore, players who could deliver superb performances from scripts they had never seen before going live on the air. Sight reading, they called it: reading always two lines ahead and acting the lines they had already read.



Actors, sound artists, and musicians worked feverishly to accommodate the bulletins from Time's reporters in the field. Managing editor William Geer was Time's man in the slot for the radio show: his was the final word on last-minute changes and cuts, all rewritten to the style of the magazine. If a subject died minutes before air time, a new top was put on the show, and newspapers were scooped, to their disbelief, by a drama.



In 1937, the airship Hindenburg exploded at Lakehurst, N.J., just two hours before The March of Time went on the air. Only bulletins were available at air time, but it was enough: the segment focused on the history of dirigible travel and ended with a news flash on the Lakehurst tragedy. The orchestra and sound effects produced an unprecedented sense of reality, said Radio News: "of storm, explosion, frenzied cries, crackling flames, and crumpling girders." These early effects were created by the pioneer sound artist at CBS, Ora D. Nichols, and her assistants. "The scripts may call for anything from staccato noises of a busy office to a storm at sea," reported Radioland in January 1934. "The two hardest jobs they ever had to reproduce were an oil well burning and the sound of a locomotive being hit by a tornado."



Time saw itself as the show's producer, though the magazine was usually the sponsor as well. Luce was most contented, however, when other products picked up the tab. When Remington-Rand took on sponsorship in October 1933, Time boasted in its pages that this was the first time an advertiser had been persuaded to put on another advertiser's program. The magazine had its hands full with the hectic production schedule, a Sunday-to-Friday grind. Seven or eight sketches, running in length from 90 seconds to four minutes, could be used on the show. More were prepared, giving directors finished scripts in case an unexciting story suddenly "got hot." Scripts were prepared from Sunday to Wednesday. On Wednesday director Pryor met with maestro Howard Barlow and soundwoman Nichols: the music was set and the sound cued in. Casting also began on Wednesday and concluded on Thursday. On Friday it aired, "a clockwork machine," as Radio Guide saw it, "run by the power of human excitement."



It opened to the tramp-tramp-tramp of shuffling feet, indicating "the relentless, impersonal progress of events." The central speaking part was that of the narrator, "the Voice of Time." A second announcer was called "the Voice of Fate," heard on stories of catastrophic proportions or when some notable person died. "As it must to all men, death came today to...," Fate would proclaim, closing the book on another life. [Note how Orson Welles used this in Citizen Kane, ed.] Ted Husing was the first Voice of Time, with Westbrook Van Voorhis as Fate. By the fall of 1931, Harry Von Zell had become Time. He could exude nothing in this role: "I have to sound as impersonal, as imperturbable, as time itself," he said. In October 1933, Westbrook Van Voorhis moved up to the lead role, becoming synonymous with the program. His staccato readings were perfectly accentuated by Barlow's musical stings and bouncy newsreel music. Often he ended the show with the terse announcement "Time.. . MARCHES ON!"



The actors bonded in strange ways to their real-life counterparts. Edwin Jerome impersonated King Alfonso of Spain so realistically that the king's son thought his father was in the studio. Dwight Weist lived the life and death of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Weist studied everything about Hauptmann from his childhood to the bone structure of his head - bone, he told Radio Guide, affects voice. He attended the trial and, while loathing the accused killer of the Lindbergh baby, made himself feel what Hauptmann must be feeling until he could play the role with empathy. When the night came for the reenactment of the execution, Weist felt frightened, sick, as if a part of himself had died in the electric chair. "I can't explain it, but we all have it," he said, "when something happens to the people we impersonate. Ted de Corsia had it too, when Huey Long was murdered. He'd been Huey for a long time."



In 1943, Radio Life highlighted a decade of Time broadcasts. The first story done on the series was the renomination of "Big Bill" Thompson as mayor of Chicago. Adolf Hitler appeared only once in 1931. Most of the action focused on domestic issues, with Americans worried about the Depression. Herbert Hoover, Mahatma Gandhi, King Alfonso of Spain, Huey Long, and Al Capone (in that order) were the people most impersonated. Hoover remained the dominant figure in 1932; Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1937. At the end of the 1930s, people began looking outward, at the rise of Hitler, at Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, at the war in Spain. In 1938, Hitler was the most-mimicked figure on the show; Roosevelt slipped to third, behind Japan's Saburo Karusu and Russia's Josef Stalin, a few years later. Rubber and steel shortages were the top stories at home as the United States entered the war. People wanted to know how other people were coping, and when Jack Benny donated his Maxwell to the scrap drive, he did it on The March of Time.



The emphasis shifted. In 1942, Time became more a straight news show, with only one or two events dramatized each week. Time reporters were rushed onto the air from distant locations with live shortwaved reports. Amid the clatter of teletypes, the show was compiled from London, Singapore, and China. Among the many newsmen who contributed were Harry Zinder from Cairo, Robert Sherrod and George Strock from Australia, William Fisher and Theodore White from New Delhi, and Walter Graebner from Moscow.





CAST:

Ted Husing, Westbrook Van Voorhis, and Harry Von Zell, variously, as narrators known as "the Voice of Time" or "the Voice of Fate."

Also, many skilled imitators of world newsmakers.

[Note the many actors who became members of The Mercury Theater on the Air, ed.]

Bill Adams as Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Bill Johnstone, Staats Cotsworth, and Art Carney also as Roosevelt.

Bill Johnstone also as King Edward VIII and as New Dealer Cordell Hull.

Frank Readick as Cordell Hull, as former New York mayor Jimmy Walker, as Charles Lindbergh, and as Joseph Zangara, killer of Chicago mayor Anton "Tony" Cermak.

Jack Smart as Louisiana Sen. Huey Long.

Ted de Corsia as Huey Long, and as Herbert Hoover, Benito Mussolini, Gen. Hugh Johnson, Pierre Laval, and in many gangster roles.

John Battle, specializing in southerners, as Huey Long and as Vice President John Nance Garner.

Marion Hopkinson as Frances Perkins, first female cabinet member, and as Eleanor Roosevelt.

Agnes Moorehead, Nancy Kelly, and Jeanette Nolan as Eleanor Roosevelt, and in other roles.

Dwight Weist as Bruno Richard Hauptmann for almost two years.

Dwight Weist also as Adolf Hitler, as Joseph Goebbels, John L. Lewis, William Randolph Hearst, George Arliss, Father Charles Coughlin, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, George Bernard Shaw, and as Fred Allen. Dwight Weist also (according to Radio Guide) as "all three Barrymores, including Ethel."

Edwin Jerome as Josef Stalin, Haile Selassie, and King Alfonso of Spain.

Maurice Tarplin as Winston Churchill.

Peter Donald as Neville Chamberlain.

Also: Ted Jewett, Everett Sloane, Orson Welles, Paul Stewart, Juano Hernandez, Arlene Francis, John Mclntire, Harry Browne, Charles Slattery, Herschel Mayall, Arnold Moss, Pedro de Cordoba, Ray Collins, Gary Merrill, Porter Hall, Kenny Delmar, Georgia Backus, Claire Niesen, Lotte Staviski, Myron McCormick, Karl Swenson, Elliott Reid, Martin Gabel, Adelaide Klein, etc.



ORCHESTRA: Howard Barlow (CBS); Don Voorhees (NBC).

PRODUCER-DIRECTOR: Arthur Pryor Jr., of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne.

Also: Donald Stouffer, Thomas Harrington.

SUBSEQUENT DIRECTORS: William Spier and Homer Fickett, alternating weeks in the mid-1930s; Lester Vail

WRITERS: Fred Smith, Dwight Cook, Ann Barley, Bob Tallman, Jimmy Shute, John Martin, Bob Richards, Ruth Barth, Paul Milton, Richard Dana, Carl Carmer, Garrett Porter and Brice Disque.

SOUND EFFECTS: Initially Ora D. Nichols and her assistants at CBS, George O'Donnell and Henry Gauthier; also, Al Van Brackels, Walter Pierson, James Rinaldi, Roland Fitzgerald and Edward Fenton (CBS); Keene Crockett (NBC); also, Bob Prescott, Edwin K. Cohan, etc.



BROADCAST HISTORY:

March 6, 1931-April 26, 1935, CBS.

30m, Fridays at 10:30 through June 1931; at 8:30, 1931-33; at 8, 1933-34; at 9, 1934-35.

Time magazine; also, Remington-Rand, beginning Oct. 13, 1933.



Aug. 26, 1935-Sept. 25, 1936, CBS.

15m, weeknights at 10:30. Remington-Rand until March 30, then Wrigley's Gum.



Oct. 15, 1936-Oct. 7, 1937, CBS. 30m, Thursdays at 10:30. Electrolux Refrigerators.



Oct. 14, 1937-April 28, 1939, Blue Network. 30m, Thursdays at 8:30 until Jan. 1938;

at 8 until July 1938; then Fridays at 9:30. Electrolux Refrigerators, 1937-38; Time magazine.



Oct. 9, 1941-June 5, 1942, Blue Network. 30m, Thursdays at 8 until Feb. 1942,

then Fridays at 9:30, later at 9. Time.



July 9, 1942-Oct. 26, 1944, NBC. 30m, Thursdays at 10:30. Time.



Nov. 2, 1944-July 26, 1945, ABC. 30m, Thursdays at 10:30. Time.