And There I Stood with My Piccolo

21

21. THE PROGRAM I WENT TO HOLLYwood to do was called The Maxwell House Show Boat from Hollywood, which was rather odd because they had spent the preceding five years trying to convince the radio audience that the Maxwell House Show Boat actually plied the Mississippi River from Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe, wherever the four winds blow. Anyway, the glittering, glamorous New York advertising agency known as Benton and Bowles, who had dreamed up Captain Henry's Show Boat in the first place and who are the Brains behind some of the biggest programs ever to bring thirty thousand dollars' worth of talent every week into your living room free for the tuning, started moving the pawns around on the radio chessboard, which means they had changed their minds about this Hollywood Show Boat and were now looking for a new program for Maxwell House. Mr. Benton and Mr. Bowles had met in college 147 days, incidentally, and decided to go into partnership and make a million dollars each by the time they were thirty-five and retire. Isn't that the silliest thing you ever heard of? What actually happened was that when they got to be thirty-five they had made a million dollars each and retired. Mr. Benton is William Chicago U Benton, and Mr. Bowles is Chester OPA Bowles. So Benton and Bowles was being run by a remarkable man named Atherton W. Hobler, who came to Hollywood to see about replacing Show Boat, and he talked M.G.M. into a marriage with Maxwell House coffee, and the result was the radio program called Good News, and I went along with the deal. It was too bad to see the old Show Boat fold. It had certainly been a milestone in radio entertainment and had discovered Nadine Connor, Lanny Ross, Thomas L. Thomas, Annette Henshaw , and lots of others. And the Hollywood Show Boat, even though it didn't last long, had been no slouch either, with Charlie Winninger, Hattie McDaniel, Jack Haley, Virginia Verrill, and Warren Hull. I'll never forget the opening night of that Hollywood Show Boat. We broadcast from Stage Three on the Warner Brothers lot, as practically no radio studios had been built in Hollywood as yet. If you remember how the old Show Boat used to 148 open, the first thing was a paddle-wheel sound effect with a calliope and then the chorus and the orchestra: "Here comes the show boat, here comes the show boat, puff puff Puff Puff PUFF PUFF PUFFIN' ALONG!" That opening night, the studio clock was a minute and a half slow, so we were actually on the air a minute and a half before anybodyrealized it except the engineer, who frantically signaled from the booth, but nobody saw him except the sound-effects man. So the long-awaited, glamorous Hollywood Show Boat opened up with a minuteand -a-half cadenza for paddle wheel accompanied by a few confusing remarks: "Good luck, Charlie old boy," "Give 'em hell, Hattie," "Well, this is it, kid, all the best." It sure was funny, or at least it is now to look back on. But that was nothing to the first Good News broadcast as produced by a very remarkable man named Bill Bacher. M.G.M. had taken over what is now the Paramount Theatre across the street from the Hollywood Hotel and rebuilt the stage into a replica of the Old Maxwell House in Nashville, complete with a crystal chandelier and forty or fifty thousand dollars' worth of gates and prop butlers serving Maxwell House coffee. We had lots of glamour and had rehearsed for many days with a big orchestra and chorus of seventy people and Jeanette MacDonald and 149 Allan Jones and Robert Young and Ted Healy and Judy Garland and Sophie Tucker and plenty more. There was also a dance routine with Eleanor Powell and George Murphy and a dozen Dave Gould dancing girls that was to work up to a terrific climax in which Buddy Ebsen came whirling into a solo tap dance break—only Mr. Ebsen came to the broadcast wearing sponge-soled golf shoes instead of taps, so on the air the big climax was sixteen measures of silence. Also there was a Broadway Memories routine featuring Trixie Friganza, Irene Franklin, and Frankie Bailey,but when those old-timers came out on...