Radio and television mirror (July-Dec 1948)

My Wife Jane (Continued from page 26) and high school. "A fact largely," Jane would tell you, "unknown to me." Known to her, I hope, but can't be sure, is the fact that we were married in 1928. "Well, Time wounds all heels," Jane Sherwood says. So it does. You just wait and see — all heels really get it. I emphasize this point to show you that one of the good things about Jane's malaprops is that they contain, always, a sturdy stalk of commonsense, a tare of truth growing among the corn. Twelve years as newspaperman and Station KMBC in Kansas City gave me my first radio work which, under the title of The Movie Man, consisted of doing a radio version of my own newspaper column, reading the funnies on the air (something that had never, at the time, been done before) reviewing plays and pictures and etcetera. Everything was for ten dollars. No matter what you did — read the funnies, commentated on the body politic, reviewed play or film, got an idea — ten dollars. FLASHBACK now to an evening in the year 1930. The Movie Man was just finishing his stint when it became apparent that the talent for the next fifteen-minute show wasn't going to show, had canceled out. So I had to talk on for the next fifteen minutes, substituting for the missing talent which was, by the way, the late Heywood Broun. Waiting for me outside the studio on this fateful night was spouse Jane. Jane had never been on the air. Her new marriage to me was to be, we thought, her career. But we'd been doing a lot of kidding around the house and, the night before, had played a game of bridge over which, when I attempted to show Jane how not to trump Ace's aces, she'd snapped "Tell it to the morons!" So I called Jane to the mike and for fifteen minutes we ad libbed. We played a comedy hand of bridge. We bore down rather heavily on the bridge. Jane started to do some malaprops along the "Love at first slight" and "Be it ever so hovel, there's no place like home" line. And after we'd been on the air for fifteen minutes and were signing off, "Why aren't we going on the air?" Jane asked (and, guess what, meant!) "When are we going on the air?" The result of that fifteen minutes of (Mr. Broun's) ad libbed time was a sack full of mail. And Easy Aces was born. The show acquired a sponsor. Jane got the ten dollars. I, because I wrote the show and continued to write it for its lifetime of fourteen years, got thirty. A lapse of time, and very little of that, and I asked for a $50.00 a week raise. The sponsor, balking, showed the whites of his eyes. We quit — for one night. The phone calls were so heavy (we had a lot of relatives in Kansas City!) that a new sponsor coughed up the extra fifty and Easy Aces, feeling on Easy Street (although I, a cautious one, still held on to my column in the Journal Post) resumed. When a Chicago sponsor, happening to hear our show, asked us how we'd like to bring Easy Aces to Chicago, we were dazzled. But not for long. The sponsor would pay expenses for the move but, it developed, "Couldn't guarantee much else." Crossing my fingers and drawing a bead on the moon, I countered the offer of "not much else" by saying we'd go for $500 a week. It was (young men-on-themake, take heed!) a deal. Still not one to dynamite my bridges behind me, I continued to write my column — "au gratin," to borrow from Jane — for free, that means, every day, seven days a week, during the show's first thirteen-week network run. When our first option was picked up, I felt more confident but not exactly reckless, and curtailed my unremunerated newspaper efforts to three a week. Another option snatched up and I was doing one a week — a Sunday column for the home-town sheet. During our second year in radio, I figured Easy Aces was riding easily enough, and high enough, for me to drop column concocting altogether. We would stay in radio, Jane and I agreed between us, only for a short time. "When we get $25,000 under the mattress," I said, "we quit." I wanted to do some good (not radio) writing. My sights were set on Literature. But I was to be the one to say "When we get $50,000, we quit." We didn't. Went on and got "independently wealthy," as Jane puts it, in the fourteen years that, without interruption and with only one disruption, which was our move to New York, Easy Aces was on the air. Following the demise, in its teens, of Easy Aces, my first radio chore was as chief writer for Danny Kaye's CBS show — a popular comedy feature and Kaye being the great kid from Brooklyn that he is, a lot of fun to do. In August, 1946, I was appointed Supervisor of CBS Comedy and Variety programs — a post created (I take pride in this commercial!) especially for me. BUT in January, 1948, I called Jane, who was at home (a small place, our suite in the Ritz-Towers, but we call it home) to the mike again. The urge to return to active broadcasting rather than continue as a "desk" jockey, was upon me. To have Jane with me during working, as well as leisure hours was, I must uxoriously confess, an even stronger urge. I missed my Mrs. Malaprop. The hours without her were a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum. So does Goodman Ace. Result: Jane got a script, took an hour out to study and rehearse it and Mr. Ace and Jane, currently to be heard over CBS, every Friday, 7:00 to 7:30 P.M. (I take pride in this commercial, too!) was on the air. Jane's only reservation about being on the air again is the hour at which we broadcast. "Seven o'clock," she sighs, "spoils the whole evening — too late for cocktails, too early for dinner." So she goes without either and is rewarded by the wolf cries evoked by a figure weighing in at 103 pounds, two and one quarter ounces. As in Easy Aces days, I write, produce and direct the new show and, as in Easy Aces days, I portray the dour husband to whom everything happens, chiefly at the well-meaning or, at least, well-manicured hands of wife Jane, who very much sums up the situation and our relationship when she says, "I have him in the hollow of my head." On the air, the Aces disagree about practically everything. Away from the mike, Jane and I manage to agree more often than we disagree; manage to like <3 *# o i*«BS5 "X* More f^ full ,^s Pound ?J[*>0 Used most by professional beauticians . . . Oceans of foam even in bard water . . . leaves hair soft . . . managable no soap film ■ ci cat cutis mi 1 1 lilt, *£r 77