Radio: You’ve Got to Believe

Burr Tillstrom’s first solid job was with a WPA-supported puppet show. “It was terrific,” he recalls. “We played everywhere—hospitals, old people’s homes, orphanages.” But the stirring days faded in 1937. Two years later, Tillstrom was working as a salesclerk when RCA put on a television demonstration in his store. “That did it. The moment I saw TV, I knew it was the one medium made expressly for puppets.”

Every weekday evening (7 p.m., NBC-TV), Tillstrom’s Kukla, Fran & Ollie brilliantly proves the rightness of his conviction. But in finding success, 32-year-old Tillstrom has lost his own identity. Like Singer Fran Allison, the only other human regularly on his show, he has been swallowed up by the puppet world he made. The world revolves around Kukla, a pinch-faced, sadly wise, sentimental puppet, and Ollie, a one-toothed dragon whose preenings and posturings might have been conceived by Moliére. It is also peopled by such types as Fletcher Rabbit, whose “mother was a suffragette, and who consequently takes a serious, rather cautious point of view and is a bit of a bore”; Beulah Witch, who was arrested for reckless broomstick driving on Hallowe’en; Cecil Bill, a hysteric in a frightwig; Colonel Cracky (“from the Old South, suh”); Ophelia Ooglepuss and Clara Coo Coo.

Narcotic Pull. The puppets, all powered by Tillstrom’s nimble hands and agile, nine-voiced throat, make their way through rambling shows that somehow seem to crackle with spontaneity. Sketchily rehearsed, scriptless, punctuated with casual pauses, Kukla is likely to strike viewers at first as mildly irritating. But the show has an odd, narcotic pull: by the time Chicago joined the coaxial cable last January, Kukla had built up a Berle sized audience rating of 72%.

Last week, throughout the Midwest and East, moppets watched a series of five special Kukla shows, which ranged from tree-trimming to the opening of Christmas presents. But, large and devoted as is Kukla’s children’s audience, the show’s delicately balanced humor has just as strong an appeal for adults. Before going on the air, the studio crew members talk to the puppets almost as they do with each other. Fran Allison refuses to go backstage because she feels ill at ease whenever she sees Kukla or Ollie hanging lifelessly upside-down from their hooks.

Ephemeral Sadness. This mood has been caught by viewers. Once when Kukla blew his nose on the curtain, 250 handkerchiefs arrived from fans within two days. Unable to answer more than a small fraction of the 8,000-odd letters that pour in each week, Tillstrom mails out a chatty newspaper, the Kuklapolitan Courier, some five times a year (current circulation: 107,000).

Now signed to a five-year contract with RCA Victor (Sealtest is a co-sponsor),Chicago-born Bachelor Tillstrom is no more able than his fans to explain exactly why his show clicks. “I don’t try to be a satirist, because I am not a brilliant wit like Fred Allen,”* he says. “In fact, I think I tend a little to sadness.”

But such sadness as Kukla contains is ephemeral, like everything else about the show. There is no crime, no talk of death nor any serious illness, and no one’s feelings ever get really hurt. Says Tillstrom: “You must believe in the puppets before you can enjoy them. If you don’t do that, the program is just silly.”

*Says Allen: “When you see Kukla, Fran & Ollie come alive on that little screen, you realize you don’t need great big things as we had in radio.”