The Star and the Story Radio Program

Background

Goodyear Tire and Rubber had been sponsoring Radio programs for over thirteen years by 1944. Some of the programs Goodyear sponsored during the Golden Age of Radio follow:

Two-page 1944 Goodyear Tire and Rubber ad touting their new Goodyear Research Laboratory and promoting Goodyear's The Star and the Story and their Hook 'n' Ladder Follies.

• 1931 The Goodyear Program
• 1936 The Goodyear Farm and Home Hour
• 1939 The Goodyear Farm Radio News
• 1939 Your Farm Reporter
• 1943 Hook 'n' Ladder Follies
• 1943 Salute to Youth
• 1944 Melody Roundup
• 1944 The Roy Rogers Show
• 1944 The Goodyear Theater
• 1944 The Star and the Story
• 1947 The Greatest Story Ever Told
• 1952 Defense Attorney

Needless to say, Goodyear's emphasis in sponsoring Farm News programs was in direct proportion to the numerous farm products that Goodyear Tire and Rubber produced for agribusiness throughout North America. Goodyear's main competitor, Firestone Tire and Rubber, had beaten Goodyear to Radio by three years with their long running The Voice of Firestone (1928-1957). But Firestone had also sponsored their own farm variety program, The Voice of the Farm (1938).

Walter Pidgeon, apart from the fifty silent and sound films he'd appeared in by 1944, had also been heard over Radio since as early as 1931's The Jantzen Radio Program as well as seven appearances over Radio's prestigious Lux Radio Theatre, and several other Film adaptation features over Radio. But prior to 1944, Radio listeners had never heard Walter Pidgeon in his own recurring series. Pulp, Film, and Radio fans of "Nick Carter Master Detective" had already seen Walter Pidgeon as Nick Carter in the 1939 film, Nick Carter, Master Detective, and two sequels, Phantom Raiders (1940) and Sky Murder (1940). And of course, the Nick Carter, Master Detective and Chick Carter, Boy Detective series' had debuted over Radio in 1943.

CBS and Goodyear bring Walter Pidgeon to Radio in his own series

And so it was that Goodyear Tire and Rubber and CBS brought popular Film actor Walter Pidgeon to the air to headline his own Radio feature for the first--and last--time in Radio History. For Walter Pidgeon's avid Film fans the news of Pidgeon's own Radio program was a dream come true. But apart from Pidgeon's own appearances throughout the series, they'd also be treated to guest appearances by twenty-six of the most popular female Film stars of the era. And the list of the female leads or co-stars during this series was unprecedented indeed:

• Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth
• Teresa Wright in Pride Of the Yankees
• Loretta Young in A Man's Castle
• Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday
• Merle Oberon in Wuthering Heights
• Miriam Hopkins in Love Affair
• Ginger Rogers in Vivacious Lady
• Martha Scott in Magnificent Obsession
• Ingrid Bergman in Mayerling
• Kay Francis in Strange Victory
• Barbara Stanwyck in The Straw
• Virginia Bruce in The Moon's Our Home
• Donna Reed in The Outsider
• Lana Turner in Lucky Partners
• Gene Tierney in Heaven Can Wait
• Jennifer Jones in A Star Is Born
• Ida Lupino in A Kiss For Cinderella
• Anne Baxter in Accent On Youth
• Joan Bennett in My Favorite Wife
• Ann Sothern in Tovarich
• Olivia de Haviland in The Admirable Crichton
• Ruth Warrick in Arrowsmith
• Agnes Moorehead in Thief Is An Ugly Word
• Claudette Colbert in No Time For Comedy
• Hedy Lamarr in Romance
• Greer Garson in Private Lives

We're hard pressed to recall another Radio program from its Golden Age that featured virtually every major female Film star of the era during a comparitively short twenty-six episode run.

Walter Pidgeon was married only twice during his lifetime. His first wife, Edna Pickles, tragically died while giving birth to their daughter Edna in 1924. Pidgeon married his second wife, Ruth Walker in 1931 and the two had been married almost 53 years at the time of Walter Pidgeon's death in 1984. Needless to say, Ruth Walker had to have been one of the most self-assured spouses in Hollywood history. In addition to the twenty-six stunning female Film stars who performed with Pidgeon in The Star and the Story, Pidgeon's Mrs. Miniver co-star, Greer Garson, clearly Walter Pidgeon's leading lady of choice, appeared with Pidgeon in a total of eight feature films.

The motion pictures adapted for the series represented some of the guest artists' finest performances by 1944. The works of the authors and playwrights J.M. Barrie, Noel Coward, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, Sinclair Lewis, Faith Baldwin, Eugene O'Neil, Samson Raphaelson, Paul Gallico, Jo Swerling, Robert E. Sherwood, and Emily Brontë, among many others, were skillfully adapted to the approximately twenty-five minute format.

The beautiful scoring for the series was provided by Alfred Newman. Over the course of Newman's career he was awarded nine Oscars for his Film scores. At the time Alfred Newman was acting as Music Director for The Star and the Story he had been the Music Director at 20th Century Fox for four years. Goodyear's acquisition of Newman as Music Director for The Star and the Story was clearly an inspired and wholly appropriate choice given the predominately Film adaptations that comprised the series.

As one might well expect with such stellar leading ladies, their performances in at least the four circulating exemplars from the canon are every bit the equal of their corresponding Film work. But it should also be noted that Walter Pidgeon's performances in the same circulating exemplars are equally brilliant. It certainly didn't hurt that Pidgeon was cast opposite the greatest leading ladies of his time. It's equally obvious from the circulating examples that Pidgeon's leading ladies enjoyed the experience at least as much as Pidgeon.

Radio audiences had waited several years for Walter Pidgeon to headline a Radio series. Walter Pidgeon's breadth, depth, and versatility as an actor were never better showcased than in this remarkable pairing of his talent with that of twenty-six of Film's finest actresses--many fresh from some of their most memorable screen performances. Indeed, after the first thirteen productions Goodyear wisely chose to simply rename the series "The Walter Pidgeon Program," in recognition of the series' true drawing card. But given the relatively short duration of the series, the renaming never really took from the 14th to the 26th--and final--production.

Produced, recorded and transribed at the KNX Studios in Hollywood, the series had first been scheduled to premiere on Sunday, January 30, 1944. Last minute contract snags had hinted that the series might not appear until as late as Monday, February 21, 1944. That rumor was throttled back to February 13th. Young & Rubicam, Goodyear, CBS and Walter Pidgeon finally hammered out the contractual loose ends and ultimately rescheduled the remarkable undertaking for February 6, 1944. Running without preemption, the series aired for its fully twenty-six week commitment.

Understandably, the series was not without its scheduling hiccups, given the name talent co-starring in each feature. Recent Oscar winner Jennifer Jones in particular had to reschedule her appearance twice during the course of the series--on the 18th of March and the 2nd of April--ultimately appearing in A Star Is Born on May 21st 1944. She'd originally been scheduled to appear in Vivacious Lady then A Kiss for Cinderella. Ginger Rogers subbed for her in Vivacious Lady and Ida Lupino subbed for her in A Kiss for Cinderella.

The rate that Young & Rubicam negotiated with CBS for The Star and the Story was $6,000 for the half-hour, as reported by The Billboard. The Billboard also indicated that full-hour, sponsored productions in primetime were going for $10,000 over CBS. Given the contributions to Walter Pidgeon, Alfred Newman and Pidgeon's leading ladies alone, we'd imagine that at least $4,500 of that weekly budget represented compensation to the above mentioned principals. The remaining $1,500 of the budget is quite apparent in the wonderful sound engineering and Rupert Lucas' inspired direction of each production. Tobe Reed handled both the announcing for the series and spokerperson for Goodyear.

Each installment of The Star and the Story aired in three acts, punctuated by Goodyear's understandably unrelated commercial messages. The three-act structure for a half-hour program proved problematic to most of the critics and reviewers of the era. More on that, below.

Goodyear wasted no time promoting the series throughout the Print media of the era; all one really needed was a fairly robust magnifying glass to actually read the promotional messages about The Star and the Story and Hook 'n' Ladder Follies. What those spot insertions lacked in readability was more than made up by the literally thousands of promotional insertions of Goodyear products and services including the extremely fine print references to The Star and the Story. Thankfully, CBS and Young & Rubicam managed to keep newspapers of the era supplied with spot photos, articles and program synopses throughout the run of The Star and the Story.

The Billboard's review of The Star and the Story's premiere production, The Awful Truth, starring Irene Dunne ran hot and cold--very cold. Reviewer Frank Gill (further below) often railed against long--or inappropriate--commercial messages in half-hour drama adaptations. And indeed many of the critics of the era often took issue with often impossible Film adaptations that appeared over Radio. It was hard enough to appropriately adapt a complex 90-minute to two-hour film into a format suitable for Radio--let alone to a twenty-two to twenty-five minute format. We have yet to hear The Awful Truth from The Star and the Story, but the four circulating exemplars from the canon are about as complete as one might expect of a adaptations that necessarily remove as much as four-fifths of the original screenplay in the process. Thief Is An Ugly word in particular starring Agnes Moorehead appears, to our ears in any case, perfectly adapted to the limitations of its approximately 24-minute format. It's perhaps regrettable that The Billboard didn't do a follow-up to that review.

Critics of the era, given the embarassment of dramatic riches offered up over Radio during the 1940s could often become somewhat jaded in their views and expectations of Radio Drama. Though in our experience, Frank Gill's reviews for The Billboard were generally very even handed--apart from his continual irritation with commercial messages. Considering the Film studios, agents, agencies and the leading ladies' other commitments of the era, The Star and the Story stands as an incredibly well-orchestrated undertaking. One can't help but wonder if the unprecedented scheduling of these high-demand Film actresses into a relatively brief, twenty-six episode series wasn't due in part to their interest in working with Walter Pidgeon in the first place. We'd like to think that the chance to work with Walter Pidgeon was the 'super-glue' that held this remarkable undertaking together.

But as a simply practical matter, we're far less inclined to believe that the overwhelming number of listeners among The Star and the Story's radio audiences were tuning in to hear yet another technically succinct dramatic opus. We're far more inclined to believe that the majority of The Star and the Story's listeners tuned in week after week simply to hear Walter Pidgeon paired with twenty-six of the most beautiful, most accomplished leading ladies of Film. Heck, if Walter Pidgeon and these co-stars were simply reading the L.A. Yellow Pages to the beautiful scores by Alfred Newman, we're convinced that those same listeners would have turned in week after week for the duration. We sure would have . . .

Or perhaps we're just hopeless romantics at heart.

Series Derivatives:

Notes on Provenances:

The most helpful provenances were newspaper listings.

OTRisms:

As with a great deal that passes for vintage radio preservation throughout the OTR segment of the hobby, the four circulating exemplars are all adulterated in one form or another. All four have been bi-monaurally stereoized to give them the appearance of being far higher quality encodes than they actually are. Stereo audio didn't enter popular use until 1952, as employed in movie theaters. Stereo FM didn't enter popular use until 1969.

The problem--and outright fraud--wouldn't be so obvious if the people encoding, distributing and perpetuating this inauthentic nonsense were actually engineering the resulting encodes as true stereo, a virtual impossibility given the source recordings. But of course it's far easier--and far less expensive--to simply duplicate the monaural track into two monaural tracks and simply call that deceptive technique stereo. But then what's one more naked lie in addition to the thousands of other such lies and misrepresentations perpetuated by the OTR Community?

The source of most of this garbage of late appears to be the preponderance of podcasting sites and the OTRR. The problem is exacerbated through the thousands of podcasting sites and OTR dumping ground archives such as the OTRR Library, BitTorrent repositories and even archive.org. Needless to say it's a shameful practice that will only stop if demand for this garbage stops. It's patently obvious that telling the OTRR to stop this deceptive and ridiculous adulteration will always fall on deaf ears. This has nothing whatsoever to do with being pedantic--it's about being authentic. Isn't that what preservation is supposed to be about? Authenticity?

And of course, as has become the practice in the OTR World, the three circulating AFRS-denatured exemplars of The Star and the Story are invariably misrepresented as exemplars of the 'as broadcast,' commercial renditions of the canon--but what's one more lie upon the tens of thousands of others.

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[Date, title, and episode column annotations in red refer to either details we have yet to fully provenance or other unverifiable information as of this writing. Red highlights in the text of the 'Notes' columns refer to information upon which we relied in citing dates, date or time changes, or titles.]