Radio romances (July-Dec 1945)

99 46 RADIO is the world's most fascinating business. I have been in the thick of it since I was eighteen, and I love it. But there was a time — back in 1938, when I was keeping moderately busy acting, announcing, producing and writing for only a couple of dozen shows a week — when I wished fervently to be transformed into a shoe salesman. That was the time I had the girl, I had the ring, I had the license — but I didn't have time to get married. And if Elizabeth Dawson — she was the girl — hadn't inherited a sense of humor from her father (my nomination for the century's finest father-in-law) the money spent in the other two items would have had to be written off as bad investments. .Elizabeth could see the fun in a honeymoon which began at eleven o'clock at night and ended at noon the next day. But I am getting ahead of my story. We met in St. Louis — not, as in the picture of the same name, at the Fair, but backstage at the St. Louis Little Theater. The theater was a hangout for both of us. Elizabeth, who was rapidly developing a talent for illustration and design, had designed the settings for several productions and I had acted a part or two when my dawn to dark schedule at Radio Station KMOX permitted. But on the night we met we both were playing the role of Stage Door Johnny — even the more inglorious because we were being kept waiting at the gate. Elizabeth was waiting for her date of the evening, Kent Adams, the leading man in "Celestial Holiday," the play currently in rehearsal. I was waiting for my date, Julie Stevens, the leading lady. Elizabeth and I, total strangers, cooled our heels in the wings while Kent and Elizabeth rehearsed torrid love scenes on stage. Kent tore off stage, when Elizabeth 'arrived, long enough to apologize for keeping her waiting, and to introduce her to me. "Look after my girl, Marvin,'' he said, — but in order to get married, discovered Marvin Miller, you have to get the ring and the license and the girl you love all together in the same place at the same time By MARVIN MILLER adding cagily, "but just make talk." She wouldn't even talk, at first. I found out later she had been an usherette during a run of a play in which I played the lead and she was convinced that I was the most conceited person she had ever seen. She shuddered at Kent's suggestion that she sit and talk with me. She was sure, she told me afterward, that I would have one subject of conversation: me. She was right. I did talk about me. But she listened. And the next time we saw Kent, Elizabeth was my girl. "We had a lot to talk about," I told him, and ducked. It was a year and a half after our meeting before we went shopping for wedding rings, but our courtship was conducted under the most difficult conditions. My job on the staff at KMOX was a man-killer. I had a title: Assistant Chief Announcer. But I had no privileges. I began working at eight o'clock every morning with a Rise and Shine program, and signed off my last show at eleven at night. My dates with Elizabeth, of necessity, began at eleventhirty and ended whenever her father's heavy shoe hit the floor above the livingroom in a sort of gentlemanly hint. We never went to the movies. It was even too late when I got off work to go anywhere for a soda. So we developed our own peculiar dating technique: we played quiz games and Guggenheim (I, having appeared on a thousand radio quizzes, always won — wh^ch kept me happy) . And it dawned on us slowly that you have to be in love to enjoy a spirited game of Guggenheim at three o'clock in the morning. So I proposed. Elizabeth, convinced, I am sure, that if she married me she might be let off Guggenheim, agreed— but she suggested that I broach the subject to her father. I didn't know Mr. Dawson well then. He was a successful business man, but I knew him better, as an actor. He hung around the little theater as faithfully as Elizabeth and I did, and occasionally played a character part. One night he had scared me half to death when he walked into the livingroom with a shotgun under his arm. It was late, and the lights were low — and how was I to know the gun was only a prop for his current role in the theater? When I arrived at the Dawson house to make my plea for Elizabeth's hand I was unnerved at the sight of her parents waiting for me in the extremely tidy parlor. I blurted out my piece, and there was no response. Finally, in the grim silence, Mrs. Dawson remarked, "John, dear, I forgot to dust the piano." "It's all right, (Continued on page 97)