Radio and television mirror (Nov 1939-Apr 1940)

WHAT'S NEW FROM COAST YOU don't hear so much about it on the air any more, but the battle of wits between Jack Benny and Fred Allen is still going strong. Fred's latest contribution to it was his remark that he hadn't laughed at Jack since the time Benny got stuck in a street grating. "Naturally," Fred drawled, "the grating thought Benny was a heel." Wynn Murray, the new singing star on the Allen program, is only eighteen but even at that she's more of a radio veteran than her boss. She started her air career in 1931, one year before Allen did. Her parents were so pleased when she succeeded in getting on the NBC Children's Hour at the age of eleven that they immediately enrolled her in the Scranton Conservatory of Music. They wanted her to be an opera singer — and certainly never expected her to provide musical relief for a reformed juggler! While we're on the subject of that whimsical jester of Town Hall, here's a further bulletin on the efforts of By DAN SENSENEY Portland, his wife, to move him into a real home instead of living in a hotel room. Fred's so used to existing in a trunk he can't get very pleased or excited over his first apartment, but Portland had the time of her life shopping for furniture. She dragged Fred along on one expedition on the plea that she wanted him to test an armchair for comfort. He sat down in the chair, Portland wandered away to look at some bookcases, and when she returned a few minutes later he was fast asleep. She bought the chair, but Fred still grumbled. "Why can't we move in here?" he wanted to know. "More variety around this store than we'll ever get at home." With Arturo Toscanini back in America, conducting his Saturdaynight broadcasts over NBC again, stories and legends about the little gray maestro are cropping up again. One of the best (though I wouldn't vouch for its truth) is that one afternoon at rehearsal Toscanini got so angry at one of his musicians that he Irene Dunne looked like a million at her broadcast with David Niven for Cecil DeMille — but she had to borrow 35 cents to pay for parking her car. threw his $500 platinum watch on the ground and smashed it to pieces. The next day an NBC executive sent him a box of dollar Ingersolls with a note: "These are for rehearsal time." Half a dozen guards are always posted outside NBC's big studio 8-H on the afternoons Toscanini rehearses, because nothing irritates him as much as the intrusion of an outsider. But, despite precautions, he did have a visitor one day. Just before the rehearsal started, one of NBC's engineers was in the studio repairing a Hammond electric organ. He had to crawl into the loudspeaker cabinet, a big box with about enough space inside it for one man, and while he was still in there the rehearsal commenced. The engineer was afraid to come out, because cleverer tricks than getting into a loudspeaker have been used by folks anxious to hear a Toscanini rehearsal, so he closed the panel door and stayed there. More than an hour later he emerged, dripping with perspiration and almost suffocated— but safe from the maestro's wrath. Ben Grauer has one of radio's hardest jobs announcing the NBC Pot o' Gold show, which stars Horace Heidt and his band. This is the program, you know, which gives away $1000 every week to some lucky telephone subscriber, and it's Ben's duty to call the winners long distance and tell them of their good fortune. A pleasant task? Yes, but Ben never can understand what the fellow on the other end of the line is saying, what with his understandable excitement at winning so much money, and the band playing in the background. . . . Incidentally, if you've wondered why they don't fix it so you can hear all of the telephone conversations instead of only Ben's half, it's against the law, which forbids telephone wire-tapping. Do you know where there's one of those huge clocks jewelers often put outside their stores to advertise themselves? It can be with or without a lamp post, but it must tell time or you can't dispose of it to Raymond Scott, the swing musician and composer. Raymond wants one badly, and even went so far as to run an ad in the New York Times asking for it. He wants to set it up in his office at CBS because he and the members of his quintet are always sitting around there and talking and having so much fun they forget the time and are late to appointments — which is very bad for business. He hopes a big clock — one so big they couldn't forget it for a minute, and with a brassy clang to strike the hours — would remedy the situation. * * * Hobbies can be overdone. Even Dave Elman, the Hobby Lobby man himself, admits it. In his office stands a big bookcase, made by a hobbyist, which was the cause of sending its maker to a hospital. It's constructed of millions of tiny pieces of wood, glued together in an intricate mosaic design, and by the time he'd finished it the man's lungs were so full of sawdust he had to go to a hospital. He's all right now, but he's changed his hobby. It's photography now. 50 RADIO AND TELEVISION MIRROR