Radio: Another Wonder Boy

With a blare of trumpets, CBS publicists this week introduced radio’s latest Boy Wonder. Pale, thinly handsome Fletcher Markle, 26, is writer-producer-director of Studio One, a bright, new, hour-long dramatic series on one of radio’s choicest spots (Tuesdays, 9:30-10:30 p.m. EDT).

Behind Fledgling Fletcher are seven years of variegated experience, and—more significantly—two of radio’s most influential ex-Boy Wonders: Orson Welles and Norman Corwin. At 18, Markle left school and began acting, directing, and writing stories he’d much rather forget today (the kind of “terribly sophisticated stuff you do when you’re 20, when you know everything that goes on in hotel bedrooms”). At 19, he settled on radio, wrote 250 dramas for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., ! became a smash hit with Dominion listeners.

He served in the R.C.A.F. during the war, writing Air Force radio scripts in Toronto and a documentary film, Vi, in England.

The helping hands of Corwin and Welles were not proffered without a little arm-twisting from Markle. He peppered Corwin with mail, and when Corwin was in Toronto, played recorded shows for him. Corwin, enthusiastic and polite, got CBS interested in Markle, who was given a chance to flex his muscles on three Columbia Workshop dramas last summer. Then, with Corwin’s backing, he joined the network.

Welles.put up more resistance. He first ignored, then rudely rebuffed the young man. After a month of persistent trying, however, Markle finally broke down the Welles defenses, persuaded his target to listen to a recorded parody of Welles in action. Impressed, Orson let the youngster repeat the parody on his Mercury Sum mer Theater program and invited Markle to Hollywood to do a screen version of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. The production fell through, but Markle is disgusted with movies, anyway, and with “that terrible place” (Hollywood). If movies could be made in “civilized” New York, he thinks he might have another go at them.

Meanwhile, he’s happy at CBS. His first broadcast was an adaptation of Mal colm Lowry’s currently fashionable novel about an alcoholic Briton in Mexico, Under the Volcano (TIME, Feb. 24). Up coming: Topaze, a telescoped Winesburg, Ohio and an updated An Enemy of the People.