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You’re on the Air
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE CAPTAIN OF THE NINE
AGAINST ODDS
OFF SIDE
Boy Scouts Series
DON STRONG OF THE WOLF PATROL
DON STRONG, PATROL LEADER
DON STRONG, AMERICAN
Lansing Series
BATTER UP
STRAIGHT AHEAD
FAIR PLAY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: “First an actor and now a producer. You should try script
writing, Carlin.”]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
You’re on the Air
By WILLIAM HEYLIGER
Illustrated by
NEIL O’KEEFFE
D. APPLETON-CENTURY COMPANY
Incorporated
New York London
1941
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright, 1941, by
D. APPLETON-CENTURY COMPANY, INC.
All rights reserved. This book, or
parts thereof, must not be reproduced
in any form without permission of the
publisher.
The names of all characters used in this
book are purely fictitious. If the name
of any living person is used, it is
simply a coincidence.
Copyright, 1940, by the Sprague Publications, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ILLUSTRATIONS
“First an actor and now a producer. You should try script
writing, Carlin”
Vic Wylie said, “Don’t let it tear you apart, kid. You can’t
change it. It’s show business”
“Now, now, folks,” Tony Vaux said. “I don’t mean it’s a bad
show”
Lucille’s performance held Joe spellbound. “Brilliant,” Pop said
softly. “I salute her”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
You’re on the Air
CHAPTER 1
Joe Carlin awoke. At once his mind, still partly drugged with sleep,
began to worm restlessly through a hungry channel.
How did you go about getting on the air?
His hand reached for a radio beside the bed. A station came in, swelled,
and filled the room with a crash of music.
Mrs. Carlin protested from the floor below. “Joe! Do you have to blast
down the walls?”
The boy turned down the volume. Wide awake, he sat on the side of the
bed.
How did you become a radio actor?
Then he remembered that this was Saturday. Nothing but orchestras, and
singing and the Woman’s Club program. Yesterday the _City Boy_ program,
with Sonny Baker in the lead, had gone off the air for the summer. He
turned a button and the radio was still.
In envious excitement his thoughts stayed with Sonny. Every Sunday on
the Crunchy Bread show, every Wednesday night on the Perfect-Burning
Coal program, and five times a week, Monday through Friday, with _City
Boy_. Two hundred dollars a week, easily. Last month the _Morning
Journal_ had estimated that two hundred thousand listeners listened to
the _City Boy_ show. Money and fame—there was a combination! And Sonny
Baker was only about eighteen years old.
“My age,” said Joe Carlin, lacing his shoes. How had Sonny broken in?
How did anybody break into radio? How did you climb to the spot where
people watched a clock for your program and you earned two hundred
dollars a week?
The photograph of Fancy Dan Carlin mocked him from the bureau. Fancy Dan
Carlin, actor. There the Fancy one was, rakish silk hat, jaunty cane,
immaculate tails, looking as though he might come dancing gaily right
out of the silver frame.
“I guess I’ve got show business in my blood, Uncle Dan,” Joe said, and
remembered a routine his uncle had taught him last summer. His feet
became sharp castanets against the bedroom floor.
“Joe!”
Joe sighed. He lifted a shirt from a chair and under it found part of
the costume he had worn in last night’s high-school play. He opened the
door.
“Did Dad leave the _Journal_, Mother?”
“It’s here.”
Joe came downstairs. “What kind of press did we get?”
“Fancy Dan Carlin speaking,” Kate Carlin said plaintively. Suddenly she
began to laugh. There was something so rich, so special in her laughter
that, somehow, the boy laughed, too.
“That’s show business talk, Mother. A show gets a good press or a bad
press.”
“You’re not in show business, Joe. Or must I remind you?”
The boy caught himself in time. He had almost blurted that he intended
to go into show business.
A headline in the _Journal_ said:
Joe Carlin Stars in Annual Hi Show
Hunched in the breakfast nook, he read every word of the story: “An
audience of eight hundred that packed the Northend High School last
night—” What was eight hundred when Sonny Baker played to two hundred
thousand? He carried dishes to the sink and asked a tentative question.
“Don’t you think radio’s swell, Mother?”
“Not when I get it for breakfast, dinner, and supper. Sometimes you tune
in for a noisy midnight snack.”
“I mean dramatic sketches,” Joe said hastily. “Aren’t they swell?”
“Some of them.”
This, Joe thought, might represent encouraging progress. Perhaps this
was the moment, while his mother was in the mood to like something about
radio, to drop a hint of his plans.
“Some are pretty bad,” Mrs. Carlin added with conviction.
“Well—some,” Joe said unhappily. Back in his room, after packing the
costume, he tried to give his tie a Fancy Dan Carlin touch—a tweak here,
a pinch there. The effect wouldn’t come. He came downstairs with the
costume in a box. How did you arrange for a radio audition?
June roses bloomed on a trellis in the next-door yard, and the sky was a
June blue. All at once the courage and faith of young spring were in Joe
Carlin’s blood, and problems and perplexities were miraculously gone.
Why, no station could give you an audition unless it knew you wanted an
audition. It was as simple as that.
The corridors of the high school, brisk and alive during school hours,
were shrouded to-day in Saturday darkness and gloom. Somewhere in the
building a janitor’s mop knocked against a wall and filled the stillness
with hollow echoes. Joe pulled at one of the great doors leading to the
auditorium. Instantly light and clamor burst upon him.
A girl shrieked, “There’s Joe.”
They all had _Journals_. A boy on the stage did some steps and sang
_sotto voce_. He paused with one leg back at an eccentric angle. “I see
you made the headlines, Joe.”
A very dark, very intense girl said rapturously: “Joe, you were perfect.
Absolutely perfect. You ought to be an actor.”
The boy on the stage stopped his dance. “You’d give all the stars
something to worry about, Joe.” He sounded envious.
Joe wondered what they’d say if he told them, casually, that he intended
to be an actor. Soon he’d have to tell his father and his mother. All at
once his throat was dry.
Mr. Sears, teacher of English and faculty dramatic coach, checked his
costume. Mr. Sears was engulfed in costumes.
“Who hasn’t turned in a plumed hat—a red hat? Who—Will you please keep
quiet?”
The very dark, very intense girl rushed across the auditorium and rushed
back with a red plumed hat.
“Joe!” she cried. “You’re not going?”
“Something to do,” said Joe.
“Listen, feller,” called the boy on the stage. “We’re going to have a
jam session.”
“Can’t,” said Joe. They’d had a good time last June, ad-libbing and
turning what had been a good show the night before into a travesty. But
last year he hadn’t been thinking of radio. He pushed open the
auditorium door and went through the darkened corridor.
The boy on the stage snapped his fingers. “Mr. Joe Carlin,” he
announced, “has gone upstage”—which was a way of saying that Joe
Carlin’s head was starting to swell.
Joe caught a bus at the corner. Downtown, the streets, laid out before
the coming of the automobile, were entirely too narrow for modern
traffic. The bus, in spurts of progress, triumphed over one tight,
snarled intersection after another. Stores, stores, stores went past—a
parade of stores. The parade varied. Hotels with potted palms and
canopies, office buildings, Munson’s eight-story department store, the
banks. They crept past a store with a long black and gold sign above the
door and windows: LAW BLANKS—STATIONERY—BOOKS—OFFICE SUPPLIES. A
gold-lettered name on the window read: THOMAS CARLIN.
Joe dropped off at a stagnated corner and walked up Royal Street. The
luncheon-hour crowds jostled him, threw him out of step, got in his way.
His fascinated eyes never left a red neon sign running down the face of
a stone building:
F
K
I
P
The building’s entrance was narrow. A loudspeaker in the hall rasped out
the station’s program of the moment. An elevator disgorged a group of
noisy musicians; a fat man with a cello had trouble worming his way out
through the door. The elevator shot upward, while its own speaker
continued the program.
“Fourth,” said Joe.
He stepped out into a cheerful reception-room done in blue leather. Here
another speaker gave forth FKIP’s gift to the air waves. The blonde,
good-looking girl at the reception-desk smiled. “Back again?”
Joe managed an uncertain grin. People lounged on the blue leather
settees built out from the windows and the walls; people occupied the
scattered blue chairs. Too many people around to ask about auditions.
A man burst into the reception-room out of nowhere, made a sprint across
its length, and disappeared to the right toward the broadcasting
studios. The blonde girl glanced at the wall clock.
“He’d better step,” she said as if this were an everyday occurrence. “He
has twenty-two seconds.”
The radio program signed off. Abruptly a new voice said: “Miss America
and what she’ll wear. Munson’s brings you to-morrow’s styles—” The voice
was somewhat breathless. Joe was sure the announcer was the man who had
raced through the reception-room.
Another elevator stopped, and a woman and three girls stepped out.
Nonchalantly swinging a gold chain, the woman marched off toward the
studios and limbered up her singing voice with complete unconcern. The
three girls stared after her in round-eyed wonder.
The blonde receptionist laughed. The laugh seemed to insinuate that
everything connected with radio was slightly wacky.
Joe said an abashed: “Guess I’ll look around.”
A turn to the right out of the reception-room brought him to a corridor.
Another speaker, set in the corridor wall, continued to tell him what
Miss America would wear. He pushed against a door marked:
Studios—Quiet—No Smoking. The door closed on his heels.
And now, for the first time since entering the FKIP Building, the
insistent blast of radio was gone. He stood in a soundless, glass-walled
visitors’ gallery that had broadcasting studios on either side. He knew
this gallery as he knew the hallway of his own home. Studio A, first on
the right, high-ceilinged and vast, for symphony concerts; Studio B, on
the left, for the song-birds of the air. Studio C.... Blue lights in a
square frame said: STUDIO C—REHEARSAL.
He could look into Studio C, through the glass wall, upon a producer and
a cast. Not a sound came out to him. The producer, slouched in a chair
with his chin on his chest, leaped to his feet. His red hair was wild;
his eyes were wilder. He seemed to be playing out a whole scene, and the
cast, pencils out, furiously marked script. The rehearsal began again,
and the producer, back in his chair, held his head and rocked to and
fro. Then the cast must have hit what was wanted. There were smiles,
good humor, and a producer who no longer looked wild.
“I wonder,” Joe asked himself hungrily, “if I’ll ever be doing that?”
Without warning another blue light burned in another frame. STUDIO G—ON
THE AIR.
Curtains had been drawn and Studio G was blacked out. Joe’s heart
hammered. People were dropping their tasks and tuning in. North, south,
west—Boston, Washington, Pittsburgh. Perhaps lonely ships at sea to the
east on the lonely Atlantic. Six feet beyond the drawn curtains lay
mystery, the alluring secrecy of the unknown. Radio!
The blue light burned steadily: STUDIO G—ON THE AIR.
“I’d give my right arm,” Joe said hoarsely. There might not be so many
people in the reception-room now....
The corridor speaker gave out a woman’s voice, hard, clipped, metallic.
Joe, recognizing the voice, knew that the _Years of Danger_ show was
coming out of Studio G, with Lucille Borden in the lead. Lucille Borden
always played tough-girl parts. He’d heard her in lots of shows. She
must be another big money-maker, like Sonny.
The reception-room was almost empty, and excitement stirred him. He
leaned across the reception desk. “I’d like to know—I mean, can you tell
me—”
“You write a letter to the Director of Auditions,” said the blonde girl.
Heat crawled up the boy’s neck.
“I’ve seen so many. I always know. Tell them how old you are, where you
live, what experience you’ve had, what parts you’ve played, your
telephone—”
Joe managed to say: “Only high-school plays. Northend High.”
“Tell them that.” The blonde girl took a sheet of paper from a drawer.
“Write it now. I’ll send it upstairs.”
Joe’s hand felt like two hands, and the pen was hard to hold. _Years of
Danger_ went off the air and was followed at once by an oil company’s
broadcast of a baseball game. An unnoticed base on balls rode down with
him in the elevator; an unimportant three-bagger fell on deaf ears as he
reached the street-level hall. He’d done it! He’d done it! Passers-by
craned their necks to look back at him. Embarrassed, he lost himself in
the Royal Street crowd.
There was a shock of awakening as he came to the store with Thomas
Carlin on the window. Suppose—He stopped on the crowded street and a man
bumped into him from the rear. Suppose his father would not hear of it?
Well—He went on slowly to the store.
Black gleaming show-cases ran up the center of the polished floor;
gleaming show-cases ran parallel with the two long walls. Immaculate
shelves held immaculate stock. Clerks, busy with customers, gave him a
swift, unobtrusive sign of greeting, and he wriggled his fingers in
return. He liked the store—its brisk quiet, its atmosphere of unhurried
alertness. He liked the flashing facets of light that glinted from the
chrome parts of typewriters; he liked the smell, pungent and sweet, of
ink and paper. He liked it all but—but not enough. Not the way he liked
radio. Not the way radio burned him up.
A clerk carried a package toward the wrapping-counter. “How’s the
Thespian?”
Joe grinned and moistened his lips. Suppose his father didn’t
understand.
Tom Carlin was at the telephone in the compact rear office, and the boy
knew a moment of relief. At least he wouldn’t have to tell his father at
once. In the deserted book department, Frank Fairchild, his father’s
right-hand man, quietly checked through some papers. The book department
had always been something of a disappointment.
“Hello, Joe.” The man calmly clipped the papers together. “Been reading
anything lately?”
“No time,” said Joe.
“A remarkably busy world,” Mr. Fairchild commented dryly. “Nobody has
time for reading. And yet here”—a sweep of his hand took in the
department—“here’s everything. Humor and pathos, the stories of great
nations and great men, drama, and poetry and essays. You can take a book
and travel to the end of the world. Romance and adventure. It’s all
here. Have people forgotten the magic land of books?”
“Why not remind them?” Joe asked.
“How?”
A woman entered the department and Mr. Fairchild went forward to meet
her.
Tom Carlin called from the office. “I’m leaving in a half-hour. We can
go home together.”
A half-hour meant a half-hour of respite. The boy’s mind drifted back in
excitement to FKIP, to the audition letter he had written, to the
unknown producer rehearsing in Studio B, to the _Years of Danger_ show.
He thought of Mr. Fairchild and of books, and the two streams of thought
somehow drew together and mingled. An announcer’s voice, breathless,
echoed in his memory. “Munson’s brings you to-morrow’s styles.” He began
to tingle. Why couldn’t people be told about books, too? Thomas Carlin
presents—
“All set, Joe,” his father said.
The thought stayed with him while they took the car from a parking lot
and moved in crawls and spurts through the downtown traffic.
“What was the talk with Fairchild, Joe?”
“Books. He isn’t satisfied.”
“We could do much better there.”
“I’ve been thinking about that.” Joe was eager. “I have an idea....”
“An idea?” The man was pleased and interested. “We’ll talk it out after
we get home.” He swung to the left and passed a cruising taxi. “So
you’re beginning to think about the business. Fine! I’ve been counting
the days until you’ll come in with me. That name on the window will be
changed some day. Thomas Carlin and Son.”
Joe swallowed. What a spot! He tried to talk.
“I—”
“Yes, Joe.”
The boy couldn’t swallow. He blurted: “I want to be an actor.”
Tom Carlin drove six blocks in silence and stopped at a red light. Then
he drove a mile in silence.
Joe sighed.
The scent of roses mingled with the scent of newly cut grass as they
swung into the driveway. Still silent, the man stepped out of the car,
and Joe followed him to the porch. Mrs. Carlin sat there stirring a
pitcher of lemonade.
“Kate,” Tom Carlin said without preamble, “Joe’s told me he doesn’t care
to come into the store. He wants to be an actor.”
The stirring spoon was motionless. “An actor?” Kate Carlin said faintly.
The man’s voice was bitter. “I suppose Uncle Dan filled you full of show
business last summer. Are you planning to pack up and join him?”
Joe stared. “I don’t want to be a hoofer. I want radio. We have five
stations here in town. Why should I go trouping?”
“Well!” said Kate Carlin, relieved, and poured lemonade.
“Why radio?” the man demanded. “Why an actor at all?”
Joe shook his head. “You get to thinking....” He didn’t finish.
“About thousands tuning you in?” his mother asked.
Joe was grateful. “You see it, Mother, don’t you?”
“I don’t,” Tom Carlin snapped. He put down the lemonade, untouched.
“Joe, I want you to think clearly. Sometimes Uncle Dan doesn’t come here
for two or three years. Why? He’s broke. Fancy Dan Carlin! If he doesn’t
come with fancy money, he doesn’t come at all. That’s show business.
You’re rolling in it to-day, and you’re down to a thin dime to-morrow.
Is that what you want?”
“That’s not radio,” said Joe stoutly. “I’m a nobody. If I got on a
fifteen-minute five-a-week show to-morrow they’d pay me twenty-one
dollars.”
“A week?”
“A day. Six dollars an hour for rehearsal and fifteen dollars for the
show.”
Mr. Carlin was incredulous. “Twenty-one dollars for less than two hours’
work?”
“That’s the radio scale.”
There was no arguing with an amazing twenty-one dollars a day. Tom
Carlin reached for his lemonade and drained the glass. His wife pushed
the pitcher across the porch table. He shook his head and turned the
empty glass around and around in his hands.
“I don’t want you to make a mistake, Joe. Show business has no roots.
Uncle Dan used to earn three hundred dollars a week as a vaudeville
performer; then came moving pictures and after that the talkies. What
became of most of the stars of the silent screen? Where are the band
leaders who were headliners ten years ago? Artie Shaw’s broken up his
band and gone out of business. He found it a health-breaking game. Don’t
you see how it works? Where are you?”
Joe said nothing.
“There’s no glamor in stationery. I don’t get fan mail. But if something
new comes out I’m not thrown into the street. I buy the new merchandise.
A shift in public taste doesn’t lay me away in moth-balls. Don’t you see
it?”
Joe saw it. But—He stared at the rose-trellis next door.
The telephone rang and Mrs. Carlin answered. She did not come out again.
Tom Carlin stood up and walked toward the hall.
Joe thought: “I’m hurting him and I don’t want to.” He felt low and
mean. “Dad.”
Tom Carlin stopped.
“I was telling you about an idea....”
“What idea?”
“About books. Mr. Fairchild calls it the magic land of books. Why can’t
we sell that? Make people think of books that way.”
“Newspaper advertising?”
“N—no. Tell it to them. Put some feeling into it. Make it live.”
“Are you by any chance suggesting radio?”
“Munson does it. He puts on a style show to sell women’s clothing. If we
could put on a sort of book show ... why couldn’t it be done with
books?”
Tom Carlin held up his hand. “Thanks, Joe,” he said with finality, “but
one Carlin in radio is enough.” He went into the house.