Radio: Aces Up

“I tell them how to do things,” mumbled Goodman Ace (he had a six-inch Dunhill cigar in his mouth), “and they say yes, and don’t do them. They won’t ever learn until some day when all the people will get fed up and turn off all the radios.”

Ace, 47, makes a very good living as CBS’s curator of comedy, but he doesn’t approve of radio. Longtime writer-director-co-star of Easy Aces, he is an expert on the medium he loves to pan: “Now take the rating system. That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of. What do you think would happen if a drama critic said Finian’s Rainbow was a good, solid 10.4?” In the old days, Ace scornfully poohpoohed Easy Aces’ consistently low Hooperating by explaining that “the people who are listening to me are so crazy about the program they won’t even get up to answer the phone.”

The Easy Life. For the past year Ace, who looks and talks a good bit like Jack Benny, has been CBS’s No. 1 doctor for sick comedy and variety programs (“I wanted the office space”). When a sponsor doesn’t like a CBS show, Troubleshooter Ace is called in to patch it up. When CBS wants something new, Ace and a staff of four writers go to work. He is pretty discouraged at the moment over his efforts of the past few months. The Ace-originated CBS Was There (TIME, Aug. 4) was abandoned after seven weeks, and Ace is gloomy about his Robert Q. Lewis Little Show (TIME, June 23): “I gave ’em a good, tight, 15-minute comedy show and what do they do? They expand it to half an hour and throw in an orchestra and an audience. . . . Who the hell said a comedy show had to be half an hour? Marconi? Ida Cantor?”

When Easy Aces, radio’s earliest and sharpest husband & wife program, finally went off the air in 1944, after 14^ years and some 2,400 broadcasts, Goodman and wife Jane decided to watch the ponies and take life easy for awhile. But within six months, Goodie was back in radio, earning just about the top dollar for a writer ($3,000 weekly) as Danny Kaye’s chief scripter. When Kaye left for Hollywood, Ace quit again.

Then one day Jane was cleaning house in their Ritz Tower apartment when she ran across a pile of old Easy Aces transcriptions. With his race-track sense of a good thing, Goodie arranged with Ziv transcription agency (TIME, April 28) to farm out the old records to hundreds of independent stations. The canned Easy Aces is now heard by a bigger audience than ever listened to it as a live show and nets the Aces an easy $75,000 a year.

“Kind of Stupid.” Last week CBS’s Ace was doggedly plugging away at a new script show, a projected variety program, new props for the Little Show. He was also putting the finishing touches on a new show for Jane. ”But she’s pretty fussy,” says Ace. “We offered her a 7 p.m. spot, and she wouldn’t take it because it interfered with her cocktails. Then we suggested a half-hour program, once a week, but she was afraid of the audience. Finally CBS said to give her anything she wanted —so she picked an afternoon spot five days a week, and no audiences. Now that I’ve got the show ready for her, she’s talking about a half hour with a ‘tiny’ audience.”

While Jane is making up her mind, her show, a comic soap opera with slightly satirical overtones, has been mapped out, test transcribed and tentatively scheduled on the CBS log. CBS expects the show to be sponsored and on the air within a month. It will be a new projection of Easy Aces (which is an old projection of the Aces’ private life), with Jane playing her old malapropping role. Goodman will write himself into the script whenever he feels the urge.

On the subject of Jane, Goodie sounds like the husband he plays in Easy Aces: “Well . . . she’s kind of stupid.” Friends hailing him in the Manhattan drugstore where he and his shaggy white terrier, Blackie, have lunch together every day, usually ask how Jane is. “Oh, she’s all right,” is a standard, laconic answer, “if you like Jane.”