A digression in "Soapland"

Welcome to Continuous Wave, the weekly newsletter where we explore the history of broadcasting in the US and its ongoing impact in digital media today. 

I’ve been trying to build to a dramatic plot point in the history of radio, when members of the Radio Writers Guild voted to strike against the entities — networks and agencies — that needed the writers’ talents but didn’t want to offer much money or credit. I promise I’m going to tell this story — but I want to get it right, and I keep encountering one more footnote to track down and one more nuance to consider. Thus we are, just like the characters in the interminable soap operas that once powered radio, on another digression. Fortunately this side quest involves the prose stylist, humorist and artist James Thurber.

Thurber is best known for his short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, about an ordinary man caught up in his own adventure-fantasies while he half-assedly runs errands with his wife. Thurber published it in The New Yorker in 1939, and Hollywood still keeps trying to turn Mitty’s imaginary life into a literally-minded movie, which misses the whole point.

Anyway, in 1948, The New Yorker gave a ton of print real estate to a four-part series by Thurber called Soapland! He enters the radio soap opera universe like a foreign correspondent — considering, each in turn, the writers, the ad agencies and brands, the actors, and the listeners. Thurber introduces readers to soap-production powerhouse couple Frank and Anne Hummert, whom CW readers also met here. The same year the Soapland series ran, Thurber compiled all the pieces, and other miscellaneous work, into a book called The Beast in Me and Other Animals. The book also features many of his iconic cartoons and quirky sketches. 

The thing about Thurber by 1948 is that he was almost completely blind. A horrible childhood accident (getting shot in the face with an arrow by his brother) had destroyed one of his eyes, and it left the remaining one with a worsening condition called sympathetic ophthalmia. Thurber spent a fair amount of time in the hospital, getting operations to save his eyesight. One of his cartoons in the book hints at why daytime radio might have been something he chose to explore. If you can’t get away from it, why not write about it?

Adventures in Ivoryworld

As he embarks into Soapland, Thurber immediately understands the conservative, if not downright retrograde, nature of a broadcast form paid for by manufacturers of household goods. 

Thurber correctly notes that apart from a couple of servant roles, there were no Black people in soap operas (and that segregation generally applied across much of US radio — although by 1948, this garbage practice was finally easing a little in prime-time dramas and some local productions).

In the place of real people and real situations, daytime serials featured lots of outlandish ailments. Thurber’s irony-cylinders are all firing as he goes on a long jag about this. “Amnesia strikes almost as often in Soapland as the common cold in our world. There have been as many as eight or nine amnesia cases on the air at one time.”

By the late 1940s, daytime serials also featured product placements linked to mail-in offers. “Most actors dread the periodical appearance in soap-opera scripts of a singularly syrupy kind of dialogue written by reluctant authors in support of a commercial device known as a premium offer, or giveaway, deal,” Thurber writes, quoting one actress who blurts out mid-rehearsal, “For heaven’s sake, do I have to read this glop?” 

To which the director replies, “I couldn’t cut it out without cutting myself out of a job. Just get hold of yourself and be brave.”

An almost-lost signal language

1948 was close to the end of the ban at CBS and NBC on recorded sound, so most radio soaps were still performed live (see here for a ton more on the sound-ban stricture.) Thurber sits in a network studio as soap opera actors and sound-effects guys gather an hour before airtime to do a couple of read-throughs for timing, and to complain about the day’s bad script. One older actor shuts them up, exclaiming, “What the hell! It’s just radio.” 

Anyway, there’s not much room for philosophizing, because it’s time to go on air and perform for millions of listeners. Thurber notices the show director saunters into the control booth with only five or six seconds to spare. Then, behind glass, the director cannot be heard by the actors but, Thurber writes, he gesticulates “like an orchestra conductor, with a dozen hand signals—cutting his throat with an index finger, stretching an imaginary elastic, and so on.”

These hand signals were an important part of live radio production, because there was no “talk back” system for the director in the control booth to communicate with all the performers during these types of broadcasts. There were too many players, many of them standing around one mic, and some of them potentially moving around the studio. Headphone cables could cause a disaster, and loud-speakers would obviously get picked up by the studio mics. So radio directors had developed a language of hand signals. I found a bunch of these laid out in a two-page appendix in Earle McGill’s excellent book Radio Directing (1940).¹

It wasn’t just hand signals, though. McGill emphasizes that the director’s face is an instrument too.

Earle McGill is a radio dude after my own heart. This picture of him directing a show at CBS is also the frontspiece of his book. I don’t know why he had to get up on the equipment to direct that day, but clearly he had notes to give.

In his book, McGill also includes many diagrams of how to set up the studios for various types of programs. These are weird and sometimes…suggestive artifacts.

Today, most of this stage-sound design is the domain of live concert or theater production. But you do see traces of the the hand-signal language in radio studios where live production still happens — places like NPR. Yes, the on-air talent now wear headphones and can hear direction from the show director in booth. But many directors still use basic hand signals, too — because they work. They tie the precise, mechanical time cues of live broadcasting to the rhythmic wisdom of a human body.

As I go off now to give feedback on a podcast episode mix, I’ll be putting my notes in a Google Doc version of the script, trying to communicate with the sound designer by using time codes and words that might be either helpful or confusing. I feel some envy for the clearer vocabulary of hand gestures, which were a version of these same notes, given in real time. True, this lost sign language was often deployed in the service of bizarre, meandering stories which were themselves written to boost detergent sales. But what the hell. It’s just radio.

1  Thanks as always to Northwestern professor Neil Verma for recommending this vintage gem of a book!