Bard of the Golden Age

Radio was proving ground for journalism professor Norman Corwin

By LEIF B. STRICKLAND
Staff Writer

On the night of Dec. 15, 1941, a young director named Norman Corwin hurried around a studio in Hollywood, giving his all-star cast final instructions before "We Hold These Truths" went live. The star-studded show, a commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, was the first radio drama to be simultaneously broadcast by every station in the country, and sixty million people would tune in.
It was a historic moment, but not just because of the star power and the size of the audience. Eight days before, as Corwin was finishing the script, Japanese warplanes had descended on Pearl Harbor. Suddenly, the play's patriotic prose took on a new significance.
As the "on-air" sign illuminated in the studio and the stars began their lines, Corwin watched his cast perform. The dress rehearsal had gone almost perfectly, and Corwin was hoping for an encore. But then the mistakes started creeping in: a fumbled line here, an awkwardly long pause there. By the end, as star James Stewart delivered the final line, Corwin was convinced that the play had been a failure.
The control room's telephone, an "unfailing barometer" of public reaction, seemed only to confirm his feeling. Five, 10, even 15 minutes after the broadcast, the phone was silent.
But the next day, Corwin realized just how wrong he had been. Thousands of telegrams flooded the networks; people wrote that the play was a vivid reminder of what was at stake in the war. He had touched the nation.
It would be this ability - the ability to capture the moment, to optimistically commemorate history as it unfolded - that would eventually distinguished him as, to use a New Yorker critic's words, "America's most prominent radio playwright." He became known as a writer and director whose love for literature and whose talent for crafting stories profoundly influenced radio's Golden Age.
And even when the Golden Age faded, Corwin did not. A writer by trade, he continued to author books, screenplays (including the acclaimed Lust for Life), and, occasionally, works for radio.
And for the last 19 years, he has taught journalism classes at USC.

Living life in fast forward

"Norman tended to be a mature artist from a very early age," said A.J. Langguth, journalism professor and Corwin's good friend. "You don't see in his early radio scripts or in his letters a kind of journeyman work that you normally find in a writer, where you can watch a point at which he finds his voice. He just had it."
Throughout his years in Boston schools, he excelled in writing. Teachers soon recognized it was his forte. But he was curious about many things chemistry, geology, history. To get into his top college choice, Harvard, he would have to retake Latin, and he had no intention of sitting in a high school classroom any longer.
He was anxious to see the world, to be in the middle of the action. Corwin decided to forgo college and find a job. He got out the typewriter and starting composing letters to the editors of local papers. By the time he had finished, Corwin had written 80 notes asking for a job.
In the following weeks, 55 responses came back. But only two were willing to consider someone with no experience. And even they weren't willing to take on a 17-year-old. He wanted this job, though, even if it meant growing a mustache and declaring that he was 21.
Suddenly, Corwin was a reporter for a small-town paper in Massachusetts. He covered crime and trials and high school events and even Rotary meetings - the gamut of small-town assignments.
Two years later, having moved to a paper in Springfield, Mass., Corwin got his first taste of radio. The owner of the local station, WBZA, asked him to do an on-air report about one of his quirkier assignments for the paper.
Soon, Corwin was WBZA's news reader. But for a person as imaginative and creative as Corwin, that post wasn't enough. He wanted to have do something different. Along with a friend, Corwin started a show called "Rhymes and Cadences." He would give lively readings of poetry, especially favorites such as Whitman, Keats, Frost and Sandburg and the friend would play the piano during the breaks. Their only competition at the time were shows featuring syrupy poetry read over organ music, which, critics would say, paled in comparison.
In his poetry show, Corwin found a winning format, one which he would repeat several years later at a station in New York (under the name Poetic License) and then at the Columbia network CBS.
"Corwin," novelist and broadcast writer Max Wylie once wrote, "understood radio the first time he tried it."

Plays the next step

By his mid-20s, Corwin had gained a small but loyal following by making the words he loved come alive. But on Christmas 1938, he presented his own words.
"The Plot to Overthrow Christmas" told a tale of the devil's attempt to assassinate Santa Claus. Much to Corwin's amusement, he wrote the lines in verse. It began: Did you hear about the plot to overthrow Christmas? / Well, gather ye now from Maine to the Isthmus / Of Panama, and listen to the story / Of the utter in glory / Of some gory goings-on in Hell.
In writing his own play, Corwin had embarked on the next stage of his career.
"In everything that I write, ranging from a four-network special broadcast across the nation to a letter, I always try to write clearly and with grace," he said.
And by writing his own work, he could showcase the attention to detail.
"He was the bard of radio's Golden Age," Studs Terkel wrote in 13 for Corwin, a book of essays that the School of Journalism compiled for Corwin's 75th birthday. "To read it in print is an exhilarant, but to read it aloud or to hear it is manifoldly so."
Corwin played on the imagination of the reader - zooming from location to location and engaging in fantastical adventures. In plays he wrote his show at CBS, Words Without Music, after "The Plot to Overthrow Christmas," he took the imaginative element of his plays to new heights.
It was this creativity, combined with Corwin's unmatched work ethic, that prompted CBS executives to offer him his own show: 26 by Corwin.
For 26 straight weeks, Corwin was a script-producing factory. He would spend all week writing, drive to New York on Sunday to direct the show and then return to his house to write again. Often he would finish scripts at 4 in the morning and would be so tired that his nose would bleed. He frequently fell ill. But he kept going, creating plays about the radio industry, mythical gods and Biblical stories.
Critics took notice and he soon gained a reputation, Langguth said, as one of the "gems" of the radio world. But it was his wartime works that would attract the most attention. After "We Hold These Truths," he oversaw a short series called "This is War!" Later, he went to England to write and direct "An American in England," a series about the country and its people, and returned in 1944 to produce several American series, including yet another bearing his name, "Columbia Presents Corwin."
But the highlight of these years was his play commemorating the Allied victory in Europe, "On a Note of Triumph."

Dramas gleam with hope

In Philip Roth's 1998 book I Married a Communist, one character, a radio actor, speaks of his admiration for Corwin and "On a Note of Triumph": Corwin combined the rhythms of ordinary speech with a faint literary stiltedness to make for a tone that struck me as the verbal counterpart of a WPA mural. Whitman claimed American for the roughs, Norman Corwin claimed it for the little man."
Critical reception to "On a Note of Triumph" was spectacular, with one writer calling it "the greatest radio drama ever." But none of the praise could save the genre, which, with the rise of television, was getting less and less support from the networks. It was only a matter of time, it seemed, before Corwin's position at CBS would disappear.
Still, after the end of the war, he continued to work on projects for both CBS and UN Radio that, in the spirit of "We Hold These Truths," gleamed with optimism and rooted for the little guy.
Even as recently as Jan. 1, Corwin's words were heard on the radio. In a special for Public Radio International, he inaugurated the new millennium with a hope for the future:
"The new rank of peace is proudest of all early dignities. Perhaps in the new millennium, our sons and daughters can learn to enjoy that pride, and live by it."

Copyright 2000 by the Daily Trojan. All rights reserved.
This article was published in Vol. 139, No. 24 (Tuesday, February 15, 2000), beginning on page 1 and ending on page 14.