Radio: Hackensack’s Shame

‘Brian! Naughty!” scolded Mrs. Ralph Bell, wagging a finger at her 2½-year-old son. She went to .the radio and snapped it off. “How many times must I tell you, you must never listen to your father on the radio!”

The next moment, listeners all over the U.S. heard father’s voice. Father said: “I’m going to let you have it in the belly, see, so you can bleed to death nice and slow.”

Father’s flat, sinister voice is probably the most familiar and vicious in radio’s rogues’ gallery. It seems that scarcely a crime is committed on the air these summer days without Ralph Bell having a trigger finger in it. His ominous accents exude the criminal essence so unfailingly that many directors hate to entrust a “hardened criminal” role to anyone else.

Bell often plays the villain in as many as 16 shows a week; his record is seven in one day. Last week, on “a sort of summer vacation,” he did the dirty work in nine, including one soap opera. All this crime pays Bell about $30,000 a year, but he sweats like a stool pigeon for it—twelve hours a day, six days a week.* Even off the air, Bell sounds and looks like a hood just back from escort duty on a one-way ride. With his sneering voice goes a curling lip (with black, headwaiter mustache to match) and a martini-cold eye. But the yegg is just a softie under his shell.

Bell grew up “a dutiful child” in a respectable middle-class family of Hackensack,N.J. After taking an A.B. at the University of Michigan in 1937, he got a few minor roles on Broadway, then drifted into radio, where he was immediately typed as a criminal.

“The pay’s nice,” says Bell, “if you can stand the disgrace. I am the shame of Hackensack. My poor father can’t go out of the house without being taunted about the three more people his son just murdered.”

Bell can’t figure out where he learned about the criminal mind. He never met a fingerman in his life, never reads mystery stories, spends his few off hours quietly at home with his wife, radio-&-cinemactress Pert Kelton, and their two children. “I figure I just have a talent for murder,” he says. “Whenever I gotta mess a guy. up on the air, I just think of some s.o.b. that insulted me the other day, and then I grind my teeth and do what the script says just as if I was doing it to the guy who insulted me. Afterwards I really feel relieved. Gripes, I’d hate to have a psychoanalyst go over me.”

* A sample day’s work,: 9:30-10.45 a.m., rehearsal and broadcast of The Strange Romance of Evelyn Winters; 10:45-11:30 a.m., breakfast; 11:30 null p.m., rehearsal and broadcast of Big Sister; 1:15-4:15 p.m., rehearsal of FBI in Peace and War; 4:15-4:45 p.m., brushup and repeat broadcast of Evelyn Winters; 4:45-5:30 p.m., dress rehearsal of FBI in Peace and War; 5:30-7:15 p.m., rehearsal and broadcast of Mystery of the Week; 7:15-9 p.m., final rehearsal and broadcast of FBI in Peace and War; 9-11 p.m., dinner; 11:30-11:55 p.m., repeat broadcast of FBI in Peace and War.