The Mercury Theater On The Air

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

Dramatic anthology (1938 and 1946).

The Mercury Theater, wrote Time in a 1938 cover story, was "bounded north and south by hope, east and west by nerve." It was the culmination of an unlikely partnership between a controversial and noisy "boy wonder" of stage and radio and a former grain merchant who had indulged a passion for theater when the grain market collapsed. One would become world-famous in his youth and would never again capture the magic of those days; the other would toil in obscurity, gaining fame as an actor in his 70s. Their time together was short and ended in acrimony. The peak of it was a scant three years, 1935-38, during which Orson Welles and John Houseman created some of the most startling and talked-about theater New York had seen in decades.

Welles was born May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His mother was a musician, and his father an inventor of sorts, and in childhood Welles was exposed to people from many disciplines in the arts. He knew Shakespeare early: some stories have it that he had read the entire Shakespearean canon by the time he was 10. At 12, he staged a school production of Julius Caesar, playing three important roles himself. He learned magic, which became a lifelong hobby, but could never adequately do figures. By the end of high school, he had set his course to be an actor.

At 16, he traveled through Ireland on a donkey cart. In Dublin, he bluffed his way into an important role in the upcoming Jew Suss at the Gate Theater, gathering high praise. By 1934, he had returned to the United States. A chance meeting with Thornton Wilder resulted in an introduction to Alexander Woollcott, who got him introduced to Katharine Cornell. Welles joined Cornell in road productions of Romeo and Juliet and Candida, and later opened in Romeo in New York. In was in this production, late in 1934, that Welles was first seen by John Houseman.

Houseman, though 13 years his senior, was a late-corner to theater. Born in Bucharest Sept. 22, 1902, he had followed his father as a grain broker until the Depression sent exports into a tailspin. Houseman's first success had come only that year, when he produced Virgil Thomson's opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. He had obtained the rights to an Archibald MacLeish play, Panic, for production in 1935, and he was so impressed by the dramatic timbre of Welles's voice that he offered him the lead. The run was short - three nights - but Houseman soon became director of the newly formed WPA Negro Theater Project and again invited Welles to take part. They decided to stage Macbeth as a jungle melodrama, at the suggestion of Welles's wife, Virginia. It would be set in Haiti, based on the life of Henri Christophe, and would feature voodoo drums and witch doctors instead of Shakespeare's original witches. The play ran for weeks in Harlem; it was followed by Dr. Faustus and, in 1937, by the show that was to prove pivotal in the formation of the Mercury Theater, Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock.

Welles, meanwhile, had made serious inroads on New York radio. He had become a regular on The March of Time and was soon to assume the lead in the Mutual Network melodrama The Shadow. He had taken to radio instinctively, earning about $1,000 a week on the air. His days were full: in addition to his radio shows, Welles was rehearsing The Cradle Will Rock in a time of labor disputes and national strife. There was an uneasiness in doing the Blitzstein play, which had deep anti-capitalist themes. It gave a vivid picture of an industrial tyrant, boss of the fictional "Steeltown," and the fight of Labor against his tyranny. The WPA was already under fire for staging what some people thought were too many labor plays, and there were rumblings in Washington that its funds might be cut. The shoe fell less than three weeks before the June 16, 1937, preview - a sweeping WPA funds cut, followed by a directive prohibiting new openings until the "reorganization" caused by the cuts was implemented.

Welles flew to Washington to argue his case. Failing in that, he threatened to open the play himself. The government's response was severe: as Houseman would recall it in his memoir, on June 15 "a dozen uniformed guards took over the building in force. Project members arriving to sign in found their theater sealed and dark. The Cossacks, as they came to be known, guarded the front of the house and the box office; they hovered in the alley outside the dressing rooms with orders to see that no government property was used or removed."

The company retreated to the safety of the basement ladies' room, where they huddled with telephones for 24 hours, plotting strategy. Obviously, they would have to find a new theater. But then, on the afternoon of the opening, the union decided that its members could not perform on an alternate stage after being paid by the WPA for months of rehearsal. Houseman, addressing the actors, put his own twist on it - the wording "on stage" in the union ruling had, he believed, left them an out: the actors should be free, "as U.S. citizens," to enter "whatever theater we find" with the rest of the audience, rise from their seats on cue, and speak their lines from the aisles. But they still had no theater, and curtain time was less than three hours away.

It was almost 8 o'clock when they got their house - the Venice Theater, some 20 blocks away. By then much of the audience had gathered outside. The crowd cheered the announcement and began to move across town - audience, actors, and the press. The Cradle Will Rock played in the aisles, with Blitzstein playing his music on a rinky-tink piano that Houseman had secured for the night. No one had to search the theater pages to find their notices the next day. They had made all the front pages, they were famous, and they were out of jobs. Houseman was formally dismissed a month later. A few days after that, he would recall, he and Welles were talking and Welles suddenly said, "Why the hell don't we start a theater of our own?"

Its first year was charmed. The Mercury, wrote Houseman, "was conceived one summer evening after supper; its birth was formally announced ten days later and it opened on Broadway in a playhouse bearing its own name with a program of four productions, a company of 34, and a capital of ten thousand five hundred dollars." They had leased the Comedy Theater, a playhouse at Broadway and 41st Street: Julius Caesar would be its first show. Houseman and Welles divided the work as partners: Houseman ran the business end while Welles did the writing and tended to the plays. Houseman found the fundraising difficult: he probed his contacts on Wall Street but got dribbles, enough, said Time, "to keep the cast stringing along and repair the Mercury toilets." Contributions from Claire Boothe and an advance sale of $8,000 helped, but the production would still open without expensive costumes or sets. Welles turned this to advantage: they would play Julius Caesar as a modern allegory. It emerged on a stark stage, a statement on fascism, with Welles playing Brutus in a blue serge suit.

The press was euphoric. "The brightest moon that has arisen over Broadway in years," swooned Time. "Welles should feel at home in the sky, for the sky is the only limit that his ambitions recognize." Caesar was followed by Shoemaker's Holiday, then by Heartbreak House. The Mercury was solvent, its future apparently bright.

In June 1938, Welles was approached by CBS and offered a timeslot for a Mercury Theater of the air. This was a little frightening to Houseman, whose only exposure to radio had been as a listener to occasional newscasts. He was accustomed to weeks of rehearsal and could hardly believe his ears when he was told that they would go on the air in two weeks, July 11. They had no play to perform, let alone a script: their work in the theater would have to continue without letup, with performances of the current show and rehearsals for the next one consuming their days, and now they had a 60-minute radio show to select, write, cast, rehearse, and perform. Houseman protested, arguing that he knew nothing about radio. Welles said he'd better start learning, and he gave Houseman the job of getting a script together.

They decided on Treasure Island as the opening show. They would do the classics, with emphasis on adventure, under the title First Person Singular. All Houseman had to do, Welles assured him, was sit down with Stevenson's novel and adapt it - mainly a cutting job. Welles would be the director, narrator, and, of course, the star. The First Person Singular title was significant. "The 'I' is more important in radio than in any other medium," Welles told Radio Guide. As narrator, he would lead the audience straight into the story, where they would experience it, almost as participants. He would narrate as the grownup Jim Hawkins and would also play Long John Silver. The plays would be geared "for the listener alone," with no studio audience and no disruptive applause. It was believed to be the first time that radio had offered a regular slot to an entire theatrical group.

Houseman was a week into his task when Welles threw him another curve. They were bumping Treasure Island, putting it back a week, and opening with Bram Stoker's horror classic, Dracula. Welles promised a script, but this consisted of a book with key passages marked for inclusion. With the deadline looming, they retired to Reuben's, a 59th Street eatery that never closed. For 17 hours they sat in the restaurant and worked on the script. "Three days later," Houseman would recall in his memoir, "Dracula went on the air as the opener of what was to become a legendary air series."

The show was sustained, giving CBS high prestige but no income for the Monday night hour. The network assigned Davidson Taylor as supervisor and the tempestuous Bernard Herrmann as musical director. Herrmann and Welles got along as expected: there were "screaming rows," Houseman remembered. Batons were snapped and thrown in the air, and scripts were scattered in the heat of the moment. But each week the show went smoothly on the air, listeners unaware of the frantic improvisation wrought by Welles, usually continuing to the last minute before the opening theme (Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto Number 1 in B-flat Minor) flowed out of their radios.

The premiere set the tone. Welles played Dracula with a cutting dialect, and took on the role of Dr. Seward as well. Martin Gabel played Van Helsing; George Coulouris was Jonathan Harker; Ray Collins played the Russian captain; Karl Swenson played the mate; Agnes Moorehead was Mina Harker; Elizabeth Farrell was Lucy Westenra. The press was solid in its praise, and the Mercury pushed ahead with the postponed Treasure Island as its second show July 18. The nine-week run concluded Sept. 5, but CBS extended it into the fall. The show moved to Sundays. Houseman was still adapting all the original novels himself, and Welles kept reaching for new techniques. For The Count of Monte Cristo, the two actors playing the dungeon scenes did so from the floor of the restroom, where Welles had placed two dynamic microphones against the bases of the toilet seat in an effort to obtain realistic subterranean reverberation. Another mike was strung into a toilet bowl with the stopper left open. The constant flushing, Houseman recalled, "gave a faithful rendering of the waves breaking against the walls of the Chateau d'If."

The opening show of the fall season was Julius Caesar. Welles employed newscaster H. V. Kaltenbom as narrator, in an effort to forge modern-day immediacy. These were "the golden years of unsponsored radio," Houseman told Harper's magazine, years later. "We had no advertising agency to harass us, no client to cut our withers. Shows were created week after week under conditions of soul-and health-destroying pressure." Houseman was still the lone writer. He had to boil down to 60 minutes any novel that Welles decided to air, and these were usually fat Victorian monsters that had to be scripted in about three working days. Jane Eyre, Sherlock Holmes, and Oliver Twist followed Caesar. It was at about this time that Howard Koch walked in and asked for a writing job. Houseman hired him at $75 a week and gladly turned over the unrelenting job of scriptwriting. Koch had no way of knowing that he was stepping into radio history - that in one month he would produce the working script for the most famous single radio show ever broadcast.

His first script was Hell on Ice, from the book by Edward Ellsberg. This in itself was a departure. The book had been published only that year, and it would be Mercury's only venture into current documentary drama. Ellsberg had written an intense account of the disastrous attempt by George W. De Long to reach the North Pole in 1879. The story told how De Long's ship, the Jeannette, was trapped in an icepack, and how a handful of survivors endured horrendous hardships for two years. It was compelling radio on Oct. 9, 1938. Booth Tarkington's Seventeen and Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days then brought them to the Halloween season. Welles wanted a spook show, deciding against better judgments to dust off the 40-year-old H. G. Wells fantasy The War of the Worlds and air it Oct. 30. The dissenting voices were afraid that the story would be hopelessly dated, and dull on the air. But Koch had his assignment, and the date was six days away. Welles laid out some general guidelines: he wanted the story told in a series of news bulletins, with cutaways to first-person narrative. As Koch read the original work, a sense of despair set in. H. G. Wells had set his tale in England, and his writing style was long past its prime. This was no simple cutting job: as Koch would recall in his memoir, "I realized I could use very little but the author's idea of a Martian invasion and his descriptions of their appearance and machines. In short, I was being asked to write an almost entirely original play in six days."

Koch visited his family on Monday, his day off. Driving back through New Jersey, he picked up a road map at a gas station. In his New York apartment, he opened the map, closed his eyes, and dropped his pencil point. This was where the Martians would land, a village called Grovers Mill, surrounded by farmland. Koch liked the sound of it: it had "an authentic ring" to it, he would remember, and this play would need all the authenticity he could give it.

On Tuesday, he telephoned Houseman in despair. The show couldn't be done, he said: there was simply no way to make it credible to a modern listener. Houseman considered the alternatives. On short notice, he had only one, Blackmore's Lorna Doone, which he found a dreary prospect. He tried to reach Welles at the theater, but Welles was rehearsing Danton's Death and wouldn't take the call. Houseman then tried to reprimand Koch. Finally he promised to come and help get the script together.

He arrived around 2 A.M. to find Koch in better spirits. Koch was beginning to have fun "laying waste to the state of New Jersey." Koch was especially enjoying the destruction of CBS, where the last gasping announcer would be heard mournfully calling for survivors at the 40-minute break. Houseman and Koch worked through the night and all of the following day, finishing at dusk Wednesday. There was a rehearsal on Thursday, handled in Welles's continued absence by associate producer Paul Stewart. A transcription was cut of the reading, and the crew listened to it with a creeping sense of failure. Koch had been right: it was a dull, unbelievable show. Houseman felt that another rewrite was essential, that "its only chance of coming off lay in emphasizing its newscast style and eyewitness quality." They plunged in again.

"We sat up all night, spicing it with circumstantial allusions and authentic detail," Houseman recalled. Koch would remember it as "a nightmare of scenes written and rewritten" for taskmasters "who considered sleep a luxury." It ended when they ran out of time. The script was then in the hands of Welles, the gods, and the CBS censor, who received his copy on Friday.

Whatever the censor saw in the script, true fear was not part of it. The writers had gone a little too far in their attempt to be authentic, and a few real locations were replaced with fiction. The Hotel Biltmore became "the Meridian Room of the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York." References to CBS were changed to "Broadcasting Building." The script went up to mimeo. As far as Houseman and Koch were concerned, it was ready for the air: they called it a very long day and went to bed.

On Sunday morning, Welles - who would receive on-air credit for almost every aspect of the broadcast - had still not seen the script or attended any of the rehearsals. He made his first appearance Sunday afternoon, taking over the final rehearsals from Paul Stewart and beginning the mysterious process of making it an Orson Welles show. "A strange fever seemed to invade the studio," Houseman said in Harper's from a ten-year perspective. This was "part childish mischief, part professional zeal. The first to feel it were the actors." Frank Readick, who would play the soon-to-be incinerated newsman, Carl Phillips, got out transcriptions of Herb Morrison's already classic description of the Hindenburg disaster. Morrison had been assigned to cover the airship's landing with recording equipment: the subsequent explosion was thus preserved in a never-to-be-forgotten moment of news broadcasting as Morrison wept in his telling of it. Readick listened to these records continuously, trying to capture the essence of distress in Morrison's voice.

Welles, meanwhile, was making last-minute changes. He stretched out the early scenes that Houseman and Koch had trimmed earlier. Back into the script went the same ingredients. that Houseman feared would be so tedious - the long cutaways of dance music, the weather bulletins and astronomical observations. Welles thought that the tedium of the first minutes would add credence to the next half-hour, when events too incredible to believe would pile one on top of the others at an impossible pace. Within 40 minutes, Houseman would write, "men traveled long distances, large bodies of troops were mobilized, cabinet meetings were held, savage battles were fought on land and in the air." This would be done in the "here and now," with no fictional framework to prop it up and help the listener attain the suspension of disbelief so vital to even the possibility of success. Among the most effective of these techniques came at the first blast of the Martian heat ray, when the "field transmission" went dead and the station was forced to fill the time with a "piano interlude" - an ominous playing of Clair de Lune.

At 8 o'clock, Welles mounted the podium, assuming the stance of both director and star, and the play began. Dan Seymour clearly announced that The Mercury Theater on the Air was presenting the Orson Welles production of The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells. Welles gave a short prologue, setting the tale in the near future. Then the news bulletins began. There was a weather report, then a shift to the Park Plaza Hotel for a band remote. Herrmann's musicians gave a good account of themselves as "Ramon Raquello and his orchestra," with a popular-sounding rendition of La Cumparsita. This was interrupted by a news bulletin, announcing "explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals, on the planet Mars." La Cumparsita ended and Star Dust began, with applause. Another news bulletin: reporter Carl Phillips was being sent to the Princeton Observatory to interview "the noted astronomer" Professor Richard Pierson. As Pierson, Welles gave several lines of astronomical mumbo-jumbo; then it was announced that he and Phillips were racing to Grovers Mill, New Jersey, where a shock "of almost earthquake intensity" had just been recorded. It took them less than two minutes to travel the 11 miles. More news bulletins were read, and when Phillips returned to the air he continued the telescoping of time. Now the pace was heightened even more. A huge cylinder had fallen in the field of Farmer Wilmuth, who was quite happy to talk about it. There was more speculation by Pierson as to the extraterrestrial nature of the metal casing. Suddenly the top began to "flake off. . . rotate like a screw." A dull metallic clank, obviously the door of a space vehicle hitting the earth, was followed by what many listeners would remember as the most terrifying lines they would ever hear from a radio.

Someone was crawling out of the hollow top… someone or something. Two luminous discs were visible…might be eyes, might be a face. Now something wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake… tentacles…another one and another one…and the thing's body, large as a bear, and it glistened like wet leather. And the face: the eyes black, gleaming like a serpent's, with a V-shaped mouth dripping saliva from rimless lips...

And with Phillips giving a full account, the monster rigged its fighting machine and brought up its heat ray. Soldiers burst into flames. The fires spread everywhere. Suddenly Phillips was cut off the air. Dead time heightened the effect.

More bulletins. Red Cross emergency workers dispatched to the scene. Bridges hopelessly clogged with frantic human traffic. Automobiles were to use Route 7…

At last came the blunt announcement that defined the show. Everything else was window dressing to this bald lie. Ladies and gentlemen, as incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our own eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars. Soon came Kenny Delmar, as a very official and gloomy "Secretary of the Interior." More news bulletins. Martian cylinders were failing all over the country, and in New York the enemy could be seen, rising high above the Palisades. Ray Collins, the last announcer, described the machines wading the Hudson, "like a man wading through a brook." The smoke crossed Fifth Avenue, came closer, and again there was a long and terrible silence. The last pathetic voice was that of a shortwave operator, breaking through from some outpost. 2X2L calling CQ, New York…isn't there anyone on the air?… isn't there anyone on the air…isn't there anyone…?

At about this time, Davidson Taylor was called away from the studio. The telephone began ringing. When Taylor returned, Houseman recalled, his face was ashen.

The panic had begun in New Jersey and spread north and west. Men staggered into bars babbling about the end of the world. Bartenders tuned in just in time to hear Kenny Delmar - playing the "Secretary of the Interior" but sounding enough like Roosevelt to chill their marrow - putting faith in God and the armed forces in this national catastrophe. In Newark, traffic ran wild through the streets. People wrapped their faces in wet towels and roared past puzzled traffic cops in their haste to get out of town. One Newark hospital treated 20 people for shock. A woman in Pittsburgh was reportedly saved by her husband as she tried to swallow poison. A power shortage in a small midwestern town at the peak of the show sent people screaming into the streets. At a college campus in North Carolina, students fought over the few available telephones. In Boston, families gathered on rooftops and imagined they could see a red glow against the night sky, as New York burned.

Inside Studio One at CBS, the drama rolled to its conclusion. Taylor had heard frightening reports of affiliate reactions to the show. Casualties were mounting across the nation, he had been told: there were deaths by suicide and mob tramplings, with more coming in every minute. He returned to the booth with orders to interrupt immediately and announce that the play was fiction. But Welles had reached the 40-minute break; Dan Seymour stepped to the microphone and said, "You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and The Mercury Theater on the Air in an original dramatization of The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells."

This was followed by 20 minutes of straight drama, with Welles as Professor Richard Pierson describing the aftermath of the war. In the punchline, the Martians were killed off by simple earth bacteria. All was right with the world again. Welles closed with assurances that The War of the Worlds had "no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be - The Mercury Theater's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying boo." In his New York apartment, Howard Koch turned off his radio and went to bed, satisfied that he had done his best, unaware of the havoc his play was causing across the nation.

The most frightening part of the evening, for Houseman and Welles, was just beginning. Even as the closing Tchaikovsky theme flooded the studio, police swarmed in, confiscating scripts and segregating the players. They were kept for a time in a back office, then were thrown to the press. The questions were hard and terrifying. How many deaths had they heard of?…implying, as Houseman later told it, "that they knew of thousands." Had they heard of the fatal stampede in the Jersey hall? Were they aware of the traffic deaths and suicides? The ditches must be choked with corpses, Houseman thought. Then they were released, taken out a back exit. Houseman found it "surprising to see life going on as usual in the midnight streets."

In fact, there were no deaths. There were some bumps and scrapes, a broken bone or two, and a flurry of lawsuits against CBS. Princeton commissioned a study, published in 1940 by Hadley Cantril under the title The Invasion from Mars. Cantril found that six million people had heard the show: 1.7 million believed it to be authentic news; 1.2 million were genuinely frightened. Contributing factors were the Munich crisis, which had set people on edge and accustomed them to the interruptions of real newsmen with breaking stories, and the Edgar Bergen broadcast on NBC. Bergen then had the top-rated show in the nation. He had just finished his opening Charlie McCarthy routine as "Carl Phillips" and "Professor Pierson" arrived at Grovers Mill on CBS. Bergen introduced a Nelson Eddy song, and a sizable portion of his formidable audience gave the dial a quick-flip…and never turned back.

For the record, Welles was contrite. Forty years later - removed from the threat of mob assault - he confessed only to amusement, and amazement that people could be so gullible. For three full days the fate of The Mercury Theater on the Air hung in the balance. No one at CBS could decide, as Houseman told it, whether they were heroes or scoundrels. Dorothy Thompson seemed to speak for the majority: after pronouncing the broadcast unbelievable from start to finish, she lauded Welles for demonstrating how vulnerable the country was in such a panic. As for Welles, he was an overnight star on the world stage. Campbell Soups stepped up with an offer to sponsor, and in December the show moved up to first-class status.

The new Campbell Playhouse would emphasize big-money guests, who overshadowed the rep company that the Mercury had brought to radio. Current bestsellers would be mixed with the classics. There was a different sound to it, a texture flavored by money. The Martian broadcast was also a turning point in the Houseman-Welles partnership. Welles was suddenly the boy genius, for the time at least untouchable. The balance of power that had always existed between the partners shifted, leaving Houseman feeling more like a Welles employee. Houseman moved on, to other work in the theater. Welles hit his peak in 1941, with the release of Citizen Kane. His later Hollywood projects were star-crossed and economically troubled. He came into middle age still trading on the reputation of his youth. Houseman, meanwhile, attained his own stardom in 1973, at age 71, in an Oscar-winning film performance in The Paper Chase. He reprised his character - Charles W. Kingsfield, professor of law - in an acclaimed television series of the same name.

Welles died Oct. 10, 1985; Houseman Oct. 31,1988. In a tribute to both, Howard Koch termed Houseman "the pedestal on which the statue of Orson was erected."

Most of the Mercury run can be had on tape, though the quality at times leaves much to desire. The War of the Worlds is of course the great attraction, though it is far from the most effective show to a modern listener. Much more interesting, dramatically, is Dracula. Wonderful then and now was the trilogy of August 8, containing My Little Boy (an eloquent attack on intolerance), I'm a Fool, and The Open Window. Far and away, in this writer's view, was Hell on Ice the best of the series. This gripping true story could hardly have been more effectively told: its power is still in full evidence, overcoming even its rough preservation on a dozen or more 78 rpm sides, with commensurate surface noise. On a happier note, the entire 1946 Mercury Summer Theater is available in mostly good sound. Highlights were The Hitchhiker, The Moat Farm Murder, The Apple Tree, and, again, Hell on Ice. Here Welles was reunited with old Mercury players Alice Frost, Agnes Moorehead, Elliott Reid, and Edgar Barrier, and received additional support from such as Lurene Tuttle, Mary Lansing, Norman Field, and John Brown. The announcer was Ken Roberts; the composer-conductor, again, was Bernard Hermann.

CAST:

Orson Welles, with his celebrated repertory company from Broadway;

Martin Gabel, Ray Collins, Kenny Delmar, George Coulouris, Edgar Barrier, Paul Stewart, Everett Sloane, Joseph Cotten, Hiram Sherman, Erskine Sanford, Frank Readick, Agnes Moorehead, Alice Frost,

Karl Swenson, William Alland, etc.

ANNOUNCER: Dan Seymour.

ORCHESTRA: Bernard Herrmann.

PRODUCER: John Houseman.

DIRECTOR: Orson Welles.

WRITERS: John Houseman, Howard Koch.

ENGINEER: John Dietz.

SOUND EFFECTS: James Rogan, Ray Kremer, Ora Nichols.

BROADCAST HISTORY:

July 11-Dec. 4, 1938, CBS. 60m, Mondays at 9 until Sept. 11, then Sundays at 8.

Became The Campbell Playhouse (covered under that title) as of Dec. 9, 1938.

June 7-Sept. 13, 1946, CBS. 30m, Fridays at 10. Pabst Beer.