Radio: Barbours to Barber

One of Hollywood’s best character actors, brogueish Barry (Going My Way) Fitzgerald, took to NBC’s air last week on his first program. The new weekly series (His Honor, the Barber, Tues. 7:30-8 p.m., E.S.T.) he appeared in was fashioned of homespun, with an expensive tailor’s touch. The character he plays is sure fire for cornfed philosophizing: a small-town judge who doubles in hair-clipping. The resemblance between this new series and another well-wearing job cut to the same cloth, radio’s 13-year-old One Man’s Family (Sun. 3:30-4 p.m., E.S.T.), was more than coincidental. Both of them are written and directed by paunchy, bald Carlton Errol Morse, 44, one of radio’s masters of the so-human touch.

Like Hollywood’s everlasting Hardy family, One Man’s Family (the Barbours) is an imaginary upper-middle-class family full of common traits, to which all kinds of uncommon things happen. Morse says he got the idea for One Man’s Family from reading Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga. Family is as prettied-up a picture of American life as the neat colonial homes in the ads. A Pocatello, Idaho judge has described the program as “the pillar of the American way of life.” It has been a pillar to Carlton Morse too, bringing him more than 20 radio awards of high & low value, and grossing an estimated $2,000,000 for him.

Tone of a Sigh. Like most script writers, Author Morse is virtually unknown to the mass of radio listeners. Morse might pass for a professor. Spectacles cover his squinty eyes; he walks with a stoop. He is a painfully shy man who habitually secretes himself in out-of-the-way corners in restaurants. He writes—in a dingy little Hollywood cubicle—in rigid seclusion. By 6:30 in the morning Morse is locked in his office, crouched over his typewriter, and hoping for an idea.

He usually gets one. In three hours he can turn out an episode, complete with commercials and the detailed stage directions in which he specializes. He knows exactly how each episode should be acted, down to the tone of a sigh. Morse demands repeated rehearsals until his cast achieves exactly the effect he wants.

No Understudies. He is often so absorbed in his radio characters that he forgets the names of his real-life relatives and friends. This absorption has affected Morse’s attitude toward his cast. There are no understudies for the Barbours and their in-laws. If one of the actors falls ill, Morse simply writes his part out of the script.

Morse’s annual income in good years has been estimated at $260,000. He spent $150,000 on two California homes. When stiffer wartime taxes came along, Morse hired a businessman friend of his to run his financial affairs. The friend now doles him out a modest $30-a-week allowance for lunches, smokes and gin rummy losses.

But Morse remembers less prosperous days. He left the University of California in 1922 without a degree, wandered up & down the Pacific Coast on random newspaper jobs, writing a few $25 radio scripts. In the early ’30s a Coast radio executive assured him that he was “all written out.”

At the latest reckoning, this estimate was inaccurate by at least 12,000,000 words.