'TAKE A GIANT STEP'
A Romance in Radio
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
If this were a movie, the music under the titles would give you a feeling for the time and place of the story you were about to view. If it was a play, there would be information in the Playbill giving you some inkling of when and where you were going to be spending the next few hours. Indulge me. Let me tell you a little about the trip on which I'm inviting you to join me. He and she, a boy and a girl. Alice Cromwell and Harold Moore, two simple white bread names for two complicated people. Both from small towns, he from Guilford, Connecticut; she from Goleta, California; both of them second cousins to George Gibbs and Emily Webb, who lived in "Our Town" in a different time, and different too because George and Emily, raised by loving parents, were rooted in that town and never intended to leave. Alice and Harold were nurtured and conditioned by loving parents too, but some niggling gene had somehow found its way into both of them, and when their schooling was done, they hit the road for New York City in pursuit of something, about which all they knew was that it didn't live where they did. So they set out in search of it. It's 1949, mid-century USA. The big war was won, depression was deleted from daily mention, hope was in the air, "Samson and Delilah" were box office champ, Harry Truman was in the White House dealing out the last of FDR's new deal and managing Korea as best he could, but the best he could was a stalemate between North and South until 1953 and by that time General Eisenhower had replaced him. Desi and the rest of America said "I Love Lucy" in October of 1951, and television finally took over from radio as the nation's favorite evening pastime. But in late '49, just weeks after Alice and Harold arrived in Gotham, as it was then called, actors, writers, producers, crews,casting directors were all busy nine to five churning out radio fare day and night. A dozen soap operas on the radio airwaves five days a week, comedies and dramas filling AM dials with "Big Town", "One Man's Family", "Amos 'n Andy", "Our Gal Sunday", "Backstage Wife", "The O'Neals", "Radio City Playhouse" and dozens more. Some, like "Lux Radio Playhouse," came from Hollywood, but New York was home base and if you wanted a career in radio, that's where you belonged. Of course there was the rarified and deified Broadway theatre which was the goal of so many of those who acted only from the neck up, into microphones. But Alice and Harold didn't know about Broadway. They arrived, wide-eyed and hopeful, unprepared, unaware, uninterested in hearing about pitfalls and stumbling blocks. Perhaps it's just as well, perhaps a little learning is indeed a dangerous thing. Come with me back to another time, what's half a century between friends? Alices and Harolds keep coming, they always will. Today they share the same dream, they just describe it in words Alice and Harold would have found foreign. This is their story. It won't change a thing, but you decide if they were better off than George and Emily a hundred years ago, with their own mid-century ways, or better off than the young and the restless today. Did they have a more pungent life than either or both, or were they more miserable and just didn't have a clue about that?
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About the Book
RICHARD SEFF remembers the excitement of his early days in the radio industry, when 85 million radios were blaring away in American homes, while a mere 1.3 million TV sets were moving in. Everyone in the nation turned those AM dials seeking financial advice, weather reports, news of the world, news of the city, mood music, heavy and light drama; they could even have the comic strips read to them by the Mayor of New York. Many actors did their best acting only from the neck up, and some became well paid stars, who never needed to sign an autograph because no one had a clue what they looked like! Richard Seff was there, he was one of them, as Bruce Bigby, a young millionaire on the daytime serial "The Brighter Day" in which his nine month marriage to Althea Dennis ended abruptly when a slight cough developed into an unnamed terminal disease. All this and more is told in a comical voice that pokes fun at the absurdities and the power plays. Though everything in the book could have happened, a clerk in a hardware store may in fact have been an office boy in an under garment showroom, a pretentious understudy may actually have been a woman who had changed her family name to one of her own creation, a raffle ticket may have won its winner a toaster instead of a kayak. Come join Alice and Harold in the Wonderland of Radio.
About the Author
RICHARD SEFF has spent his entire working life in show business as actor, playwright, librettist, agent, investor, memoirist and now novelist. He joined Actor's Equity in 1946 and his last engagement onstage was in 2008. He took a 22 year leave of absence from the stage after a long run on Broadway in the prize winning "Darkness At Noon." During those 22 years he represented artists in the musical theatre, including Chita Rivera, Robert Goulet, Julie Andrews, Ron Field, Linda Lavin, John Kander and Fred Ebb. At the height of his agency career, he left that field to return to the stage. In the decades since, he has appeared in some 25 plays, for one of which ("Angels Fall") he won the Carbonell Award in 1982 for Best Supporting Actor in a play. He's been in 7 feature films and over 50 television series, soap operas, TV films and mini-series. He is the author of "Paris Is Out!" a comedy which brightened Broadway in 1970 for 104 performances. The musical "Shine!" for which he wrote the book, was a triple prize winner in the 2010 NYMF Festival of New Musicals, and has been published by Samuel French and recorded by Original Cast Records. His memoir, "Supporting Player," published in 2004 is still selling as a vivid visit to the Golden Age of Broadway. But in the beginning, in the halcyon days of 1949, he was sustained by the then-flourishing field of radio, so come join him as he conjures up Alice and Harold, a young couple, newly arrived in the Big Apple with high hopes, as they discover each other, and together enter the revolving doors of the mighty United Radio Society (URSo) in search of fulfillment and an honest dollar. Whether or not you recall the pull of those voices emanating from Philcos across the land, you'll have a wild ride, for distance has lent enchantment to this very Disneyish dinosaur called Radio.