I Love the Illusion: The Life and Career of Agnes Moorehead (19 page)

Suspense
made its debut on June 17, 1942 on the CBS radio network.
The show was tightly constructed, lasting only thirty minutes with usually
a commercial by its sponsor about halfway through. Each episode was
introduced by the “Man in Black” (veteran radio actor Joseph Kearns) stating,
“The CBS radio network brings you tales well calculated to keep you in
(dramatic pause)
Suspense!,” followed by its dramatic theme. It was a radio
show which name motion picture stars had little apprehension of doing. In
fact, many did do the show and loved it. Cary Grant said in 1943, “If I ever
do any more radio work, I want to do it on
Suspense,
where I get a good
chance to act.” Indeed it allowed many stars the opportunity to stretch.
Comedians like Jack Benny and Fibber McGee and Molly did dramatic
episodes as did singers like Frank Sinatra and dancers like Gene Kelly.

The man who had the most to do with the success of the show was its
producer William Spier, who, according to
The Encyclopedia of Old Time
Radio,
“personally guided every aspect of the show, molding story, voice,
sound effects, and music into audio masterpieces.” Another major reason
for the success of
Suspense
was its sound effects team headed by Berne
Surrey. Surrey and Spier would go through each script, “as if the two were
plotting it themselves.” Special effects were important on a medium like
radio, where imagination is key. In Martin Grams, Jr.’s book
Suspense:
Thirty Years of Chills,
the role Surrey played is well described: “Sound effects
artist Berne Surrey had many challenges working on
Suspense.
The difficulty
was that over the microphone, many sound effects don’t register to the ear
like they do in real life. If water dripping from a spout in a sink is required
then real water from a real sink wouldn’t do. Surrey used balls of wet sand
being dropped into a huge metal tub to create the desired effect.”

As for Spier, he was the heart and soul of the show. Elliott Reid appeared
a number of times on
Suspense
and other shows helmed by Spier and recalls
him as “a highly intelligent man with a wonderful sense of humor. He was
also an accomplished pianist who could play anything almost at a concert
level. He brought this intelligence to his work — he was wonderful.” Reid
also recalls Spier as a perfectionist who “liked to rewrite, and we would
discuss the script and change the script right up to airtime — but he trusted
his actors and we trusted him.”

Although Agnes became strongly associated with the show she didn’t
make her debut on it until nearly a year after it premiered. She was cast in
the play “The Diary of Sophronia Winters,” which aired on April 27, 1943;
this, too, was written by Lucille Fletcher. Agnes plays a woman who
marries a man she had only met days before on a beach. Her new home is
a deserted hotel in the middle of nowhere and her new husband (played by
Mercury veteran, Ray Collins) locks all the doors leading to the outside.
She discovers she has married a psychopath. There is a good example of
using just the right sound effect in this show. At the conclusion, Agnes
must kill her new husband by using an ax. Spier and Surrey came up with
the idea of using a cabbage as the head and an ice pix as the ax — it made
a convincing and chilling sound. But in the process of performing this
sound effect, Surrey accidentally stabbed himself in the hand. According to
Martin Grams, Jr., Agnes commented after the program that while the
special effect was expertly done, “he didn’t have to add the real blood.”

Fletcher was a regular contributor to the
Suspense
program and indeed
wrote many of the best plays presented on the show. The script she based
on that demanding old woman told the story of a nervous, high-strung,
invalid, Mrs. Elbert Stevenson, no individualized first name is given to her,
alone in her apartment one night while her husband is presumably at his
office working late. She phones her husband and gets a busy signal on the
first two attempts. She finally persuades an operator to dial the number for
her a third time, and is astonished to discover that she has cut into a
conversation between two men making plans to murder a woman. She is
cut off and, appalled, calls the police, who don’t believe her story and end
up hanging up on her. After a while it becomes clear to her, due to the clues
she overhears, that the men are planning to kill her.

She goes through more attempts to reach her husband and the police,
but gets nowhere. She becomes demanding with a telephone operator, who
responds unsympathetically. She tries to have a nurse come out and stay
with her, without success. Her paranoia and nerves rise with each rejection
and reach its peak when she hears footsteps coming up the stairs making
their way toward her bedroom. She is waiting for the police to call her back
as the killer enters her bedroom — she lets out a terrifyingly piercing
scream just as a train is going by, which muffles the sound as the killer
plunges his knife into her. Then for a moment there is silence, interrupted
by the phone ringing. The killer picks up the receiver. A police officer
identifies himself. The killer responds by saying, “Police Department? . . . Oh,
I’m sorry, you’ve got the wrong number.”

It was a brilliantly executed script with heightened tension exhibited by
Mrs. Stevenson as each moment passes. Lucille Fletcher believed that the
voice of Mrs. Stevenson was vital. It should be shrill and demanding, yet at
the same time make the listener feel the tension and terror that this invalid
is experiencing, to make the listener empathize with this unsympathetic
woman. Fletcher also believed that the story was an “experiment in sound
and not just a murder story with the telephone as the chief protagonist. I
wanted to write something that by its very nature should, for maximum
effectiveness, be heard rather than seen.”

As she was writing the story it became clear to Fletcher that Agnes was
the only actress who could do the script justice and capture the essence of
its heroine. “In the hands of a fine actress like Agnes Moorehead, the script
turned out to be more the character study of a woman than a technical
experiment, and the plot itself, with its O. Henry twist at the end, fell into
the thrilling category . . . it is as I see it, a simple tale of horror.” Fletcher didn’t
have to do much convincing of Spier to send the script to Agnes.

When Agnes read the script, she realized what a tremendous opportunity it
was for an actress. Yet she almost turned it down. She later said, “I couldn’t even
finish reading it because it made me so nervous. I was afraid it was too morbid
and people would turn it off.” If it was too morbid and nerve-wracking for her
as an actress, how could the listeners be able to sit back and enjoy the
program? Only through the intervention of Fletcher did Agnes finally agree
to do the part.

On air day, May 25, 1943, Agnes spent up to six hours working with
Spier and Surrey to make sure that the timing was in tune with the sound
effects. Agnes later spoke on the importance of coordinating her efforts
with the sound man. “The sound man is extremely important. A mood can
be projected expertly, you know, in the mere dialing of a telephone. Also,
the various telephone voices — each must convey just the right tone. For
instance, we had trouble once because a girl playing the telephone operator
couldn’t keep a note of sympathy from her voice while I was pleading with
her for help. I always ‘tune up’ my scream with the sound man’s whistle, to
be sure we’ll hit the same note. I have to get set psychologically each time.”
(Incidentally, Agnes was considered to have one of the best “screams” in the
business. As mentioned, she was used in Welles’ “War of the Worlds”
broadcast as a “screaming woman,” and one week she did an unbilled
appearance on
Suspense,
in an episode which starred little Margaret
O’Brien, titled “The Screaming Woman” as the title character, though only
her scream was heard.)

That night she performed “Sorry, Wrong Number” first for east coast
listeners, giving an emotionally draining performance. Everything was
going well until the very end, when one of the most famous gaffes in radio
history occurred. The actor who played the killer forgot to say his final line,
“. . . Sorry. Musta been a wrong number.” It confused the listeners who were
already on the edge of their seats. It took a lot out of Agnes emotionally to
do that performance. “Moorehead played the invalid Mrs. Elbert Stevenson
with such terrified realism that she sometimes collapsed across the table at
the conclusion,” according to radio historian John Dunning. Two hours
later the show was repeated again live for the West coast. The West coast
audience that night heard the entire show, gaffe-free.

In the days following the broadcast CBS was bombarded with thousands
of letters and phone calls from listeners questioning what had become of
Mrs. Stevenson! During the following week’s broadcast Spier had Joseph
Kearns, in his guise as the “Man in Black,” address the situation. “The
producer of
Suspense
felt it was incumbent to reply herewith to the many
inquiries to the solution of last week’s story of the woman on the telephone
titled, ‘Sorry, Wrong Number,’” explained Kearns. “Due to a momentary
confusion in the studio, an important line cue was delivered at the wrong
time and some of our faithful listeners were uncertain to the outcome of the
story. For them, they knew that the woman, so remarkably played by Miss
Agnes Moorehead, was murdered by a man whom her husband had hired
to do the job. We would also like to announce that, in response to the many
hundreds of requests, this
Suspense
play will be repeated within a few
weeks.” The show was repeated again on August 21, 1943 — only three
months after the first airing — an almost unprecedented act in radio
at the time.

“Sorry, Wrong Number” became an instant classic. It also terrified
people who listened to the broadcast, not unlike the famous Martian scare
that Orson Welles sprung in 1938, but this audience knew they were
listening to a dramatic program — yet the realism of Agnes’ performance
was chilling. Greer Garson and her mother listened to the show one night.
They were alone and after the conclusion of the broadcast they spent
considerable time going through their home locking windows and doubly
bolting doors. Agnes even got a chill herself shortly after performing in
“Sorry.” One night her husband, Jack Lee, was gone and Agnes was alone
when she picked up the phone and got “crossed-wires” and heard two men
discussing “the end of the world.” Her experience performing the play was
still fresh and it terrified her. One funny story which might have had a tragic
outcome, but didn’t, concerned a man who was driving along Sunset
Boulevard in Hollywood listening to “Sorry, Wrong Number” on his car
radio. He got so caught up in it that he crashed his car into a telephone
pole. Agnes and Spiers heard about this and took up a collection to pay for
the $20 in repairs his car required. Perhaps what makes it so terrifying to so
many people is that unlike most
Suspense
episodes the killer(s) get away
with it. The show ends with the murderers seemingly prevailing.

In the program’s first three years, Agnes made nine appearances on
Suspense.
Of those nine appearances, four were performances of “Sorry,
Wrong Number.” So popular was this play that for the first few years after
its initial airing it was presented annually on
Suspense.
But Agnes also
performed it on other shows as well, for instance in 1946 she did a
condensed version on
Radio Hall of Fame
. Agnes became identified with the
role of Mrs. Elbert Stevenson and “Sorry, Wrong Number.” In 1952 Agnes
released a disc version, which became the third highest selling record that
year for Decca records.

Many stories have been told of Agnes’ emotionally draining performance
in “Sorry, Wrong Number.” One such story involves how, when performing,
Agnes would get so nervous and emotional that without knowing it she
would have her hair pulled down over her eyes, her blouse would be pulled
out and she would remove her shoes and jewelry. Conrad Binyon, her
Mayor of the Town
co-star, recalls viewing her through a window during a
Suspense
broadcast, and discounts this particular story. “I never saw Agnes
during any performance on radio that she didn’t maintain an immaculate
decorum.”

While she was always in demand to perform “Sorry, Wrong Number” on
radio, and hers is considered the definitive performance, she was not
considered for the part of Mrs. Stevenson when producer Hal Wallis
bought the rights for a motion picture to be produced by Paramount in
1948. Agnes went to Wallis and asked to be considered, but Wallis told her
no. He didn’t feel Agnes was a big enough name at the box office, but he
did offer her a supporting role in the film, which she wisely declined.
Barbara Stanwyck got the part and did a good job, but padding out a
24-minute play to an 80-minute motion picture took much of the dramatic
tension out of the story. Agnes later said she wasn’t “bitter,” but “of course,
I wanted to play it. I did all I could do to get the part. But they had Barbara
Stanwyck and I hear she gives an Academy Award performance. It’s a fine
part and a fine script. When you add a fine actress like Barbara Stanwyck,
it should be a great performance. Well, those things happen and it’s useless
to grow resentful. I did the broadcast eight times, after all, and the records.
Wasn’t I foolish not to tie it up then, when it had been written for me?”