Radio stars (Oct 1938)

RADIO STARS Ex-Lax is good for every member of the family— the youngsters as well as the grownups. At all drug stores in KX1 and 25tf sizes. EXLAX THE ORIGINAL CHOCOLATED LAXATIVE DON'T DELAY/ SOFT, TENDER, BLEEDING GUMS ME AN S OS SEE your dentist first sign of soft, ten der, bleeding gums He can give you ex pert care. But h needs your help, too. Forhan's Does Both Jobs CLEANS TEETH • AIDS GUMS Dentists advise daily gum massage to help prevent gum trouble and to help keep teeth brilliant. Use Forhan's Toothpaste and massage twice every day. Forhan's is different. It contains a special ingredient for the gums. Hour, an actor was rehearsing tlie part of an aged sea captain. The script was about a shipwreck on a northern island. Just for lughs, the actor started barking like a ack of seals in the background. Imitating nimal noises was something of a hobby to lis man. "Leave the seals in !" the direc>r shouted, and when the show went on le air the "seals" were a bigger hit than the sea captain. Within a week there were over twelve calls to the studio for animal imitations by the man who had done those masterful seals — and Bradley Barker, actor, writer, director and producer, was willynilly committed to a career of impersonating animals. Unusual among many fine animal noise imitators because it was not his main profession, Barker is today one of the foremost among them. In show business practically all his life, Barker trouped in the theatre for years as an actor, playing in such famous old plays as Arizona and The Virginian with Dustin Farnum. Then, for six years, he did nicely in the advertising business, but the lure of the lights was too strong. He returned, but this time to the Kliegs. He worked at Universal as leading man in thrillers, also as a gag man and director, but it was in the early days of sound that his gift for animal imitations was first called into play. In Submarine the technicians couldn't reproduce the sound of a frying egg. Barker stepped up and from his lips came exactly the right noise. They called him "Fried Egg" Barker after that. He joined NBC, not as an imitator, but as a regular actor. After his successful, impromptu seal imitation and the ensuing calls for more, he gave up and devoted himself to perfecting his noises. He spent a season with the circus, learning the various grunts, growls, whines and roars of the animals so accurately that he not only does a lion's roar, for example, but the different types of roars and differentiates between a female lion's roar and a male's. He always visits the circus to brush up on effects ; scorns the zoo because the animals are too lethargic. He used to get his dog all excited by staging an imitation dog fight in the next room. But the dog finally got too blase. BERNARD HERRMANN: Perhaps you listened to the CBS production of Mr. Sycamore, in which flute and harp, in a brief musical interlude, conveyed the impression of a man turning into a tree! Or in Cosmos or The Meeting of the Meteors you heard the unearthly musical background conveying the sensation of outer space. Certainly, in various dramatic programs you have been faintly aware of the short, thirty-second musical bits that "set" atmosphere ; bits which would be hard to trace to any known composition. Well, they're especially written by Columbia's Bernard Herrmann. This youthful conductor-composer's main job, besides working as staff conductor for CBS, is in composing brief bits of cue music, or background, atmosphere, mood or incidental music as it is variously known. Unlike a full-length composition, Herrmann's effects must be made in a few bars, and must be gained inobtrusively, to blend with the mood of the drama. "When the audience says, 'The orchestra is playing,' the music director of a program has failed his purpose," Herrmann says. "Attention is distracted from the drama and the whole aim of the cue music is defeated." Herrmann is only twenty-six, a New Yorker, and started writing an opera when he was thirteen. He won a $100 prize for a symphony composition while in high school. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School, New York University and Juilliard Graduate School. At the age of twenty he made his professional debut conducting his own ballet in the Shuberts' Americana Revue. Besides his regular work, he is occupied with a cantata, based upon the story of Moby Dick, which he has been working on for two years. It will be produced in September by the Columbia Workshop, and will run forty-five minutes. ORSON WELLES: Another of the remarkable young people in radio is the Mercury Theatre's actordirector, Orson Welles. At twenty-three, Welles has behind him a successful production of Julius Caesar on the Broadway stage, which he directed and played in, and is now writing, directing and acting in the Columbia series known as First Person Singular. In his "spare" time he continues with the Mercury Theatre. Welles, while playing in Julius Caesar, also appeared on the air playing, among other things, the totally different type role of The Shadow in the popular mystery series. He has also appeared in many of the Columbia Workshop's productions and the March oj Time. As a boy he ran away from his Wisconsin home to paint in Ireland. When he got there the urge for the theatre dominated him, and he lied his way into star roles at the Gate Theatre in Dublin by describing himself as a Theatre Guild actor. Later he performed at the famous Abbey Theatre and at the Peacock and returned to New York when the Labor Ministry refused to allow him to work in London. In America he played opposite Katharine Cornell as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet and in MacLeish's Panic. He became one of the moving spirits in the Mercury Theatre, one of the most active and virile of the new theatre movements. Some of its successes include The Cradle Will Rock, Julius Caesar, Shoemaker's Holiday and Shaw's Heartbreak House. Also, Welles directed the all-Negro production of Macbeth and Dr. Faustus for the W.P.A. FRANCIS X. BUSHMAN: Another unusual actor on the air is the veteran star who "came back" from oblivion, Francis X. Bushman. The matinee idol of a previous generation, biggest male name in pictures in his day and the actor who appeared in more pictures than any other individual, having starred in 418 productions, Francis X. Bushman made his last picture in London in 1933. Many stars have come and gone since 1911, when Bushman began in pictures with the old Essanay Company in Chicago. Few, however, reached the tremendous salary and personal adulation of the virile, muscular Bushman, who, as idol of the silent screen, made and spent six million dollars during his career. His own life was stranger than any of the serials he 54