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THE CREAM OF CROSBY
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and could communicate to us earth creatures by means of small horn-like objects on its head. (Head? That's a head?)
Well, naturally, an assignment like that would tax the ingenuity of a Maurice Evans or maybe even of a Humphrey Bogart. So I dispatched my operative over to see just how well Glenn did. (I'd have gone myself, but seven-year-old boys terrify me even without small horn-like objects on their heads.)
Operative X-l walked right into a big union problem. What was Glenn Walkin exactly — a prop, a costume, a piece of scenery, an actor? Glenn's thirteen-year-old brother held that he was an actor and added vehemently: "Oh, you always get the good parts!" The union eventually strung along and Glenn was paid scale rates with a bonus. The bonus: the sphere which he activated. He was enchanted with it and is even now frightening the wits out of all the little boys in his neighborhood.
The Brooks Brothers people — the costumers of show people, not of Madison Avenue executives — ran up the sphere which was a canvas bag about the size of a beach ball. It had a foam rubber exterior rough as the moon and it was painted a mottled green. The original idea was to zip little Glenn inside and have him roll around as living spheres from other planets are likely to do. This proved impractical on a number of counts. For one thing, it didn't ring true. For another, it gave little Glenn a very limited emotional range in which to act. For still another — and most importantly — it was hard on little Glenn who never knew which side was up.
So they unzipped little Glenn and pulled out his legs. Instead of rolling around, he walked around — a concession to practicability which would have horrified Jules Verne. The general idea of this script (called "The Quiet Lady") was that these green spheres were frightening us earth folks into fits and there was a nasty rumor running around that they were spreading a disease. Well, Una O'Connor, who was, so to speak, tuned into their antenna, got to hashing things over with one of the spheres (little Glenn) and found out that they weren't trying to spread the disease at all; they were trying
to teach us stupid earthlings how to cure it.
During rehearsals little Glenn Walkin grew so fond of his sphere that he'd crawl inside it and sit there between scenes. When Operative X-l arrived, he was sitting inside it — just his head showing — drinking homogenized milk through a straw. The day before he'd crawled inside, zipped himself up and fallen asleep.
In little Glenn's big scene, John Conte walks into a room and opens a closet door. Out waddles the green sphere. It just stands there, pulsating, then staggers back into the closet. "Pretty scary sight," reported Operative X-l. Conte slams the door and yells for another actor and asks him to shoot the thing. But just then Una O'Connor gets a message from him and shrieks, "No, he's trying to tell me something."
They ran through it three or four times. When it was over, Glenn had quite a lot of trouble getting out of the sphere. He rolled over a couple of times, kicking and flailing his arms. Finally he crawled out, grinning and soaked with perspiration.
A cameraman turned to the director and shook his head. "Mort," he said, "this isnt a bit believable."
The 100th Concert
RADIO IS still winning handily in one department, that of music. On Jan. 11, one of radio's greatest programs — the New York Philharmonic symphony — was broadcast for the 700th time, which is a lot of times. The Philharmonic has become that rare thing, a radio classic. That is, it has acquired such enormous prestige than any changes in its structure are greeted with a roar of protests as if the network were proposing to monkey with the United States Constitution.
In the 1950-51 season, for example, the symphony was recorded and broadcast at 1 p.m. (EST) Sundays in place of the normal time at 2:30. Recording, of course, has become such a high art that even sound engineers can hardly tell the difference. Still, listeners from Boston to Houston were outraged at the very thought that their beloved concert was coming to them out of a can rather than out of a