by Mike Sacks
How did you first get involved with radio?
In school, I had a classmate who told me that his father just bought the First National Bank Building in Rochester. Located in the same building was a radio station that had the call letters KROC. I perked right up. “Oh, really?” I asked. This was in 1931; I was fourteen. I had wanted to write ever since I was eight years old. I said, “Gee, can I work at the station?” And my friend said, “Sure, ask my dad.”
I went down to the building, all by myself, and I asked my friend’s father, “Can I work at your radio station?” You have to remember that when radio first started, stations were built by the wealthiest merchants in town. These merchants had money, but they didn’t know a damn thing about radio. I said, “You gotta get some sponsors.” And he said, “Well, what’s that? We don’t sell things over here at the network.”
So I said, “I’ll show you. Let’s try the shoe store first.” I knew the owner was a good friend of his. I walked on over to the store and I said to the owner, “Listen. You’re going to sell shoes on the radio. And you’re going to need a slogan.” I said, “I’ll be back tomorrow with a slogan for you.” Overnight, I made one up: “Don’t spend your life two feet away from happiness.” He loved it.
I then went to the fancy grocery store in town—it was called the Vegetable Man. The doctors’ wives bought all their groceries there. I told the manager of the grocery that he needed to advertise on the radio. He loved the idea, and he wanted to be a sponsor, too. But we couldn’t decide what the slogan should be. He said, “You work at the hospital sometimes with your mother, right? Why don’t you introduce celebrities on the air, and we can sponsor the interviews?” I said, “That’s a marvelous idea!” The town was small, but we had a thousand new people a day going through the clinic, and there were oftentimes celebrities. It didn’t bother me to talk to them. I never experienced that awestruck feeling that I think has sort of ruined the country. Celebrities aren’t really celebrities, you know; they’re just people. One of the first interviews I got was with [movie actor] Bill Powell. Do you remember [his 1934 film] The Thin Man? No, you’re too young to remember The Thin Man.
Well, Bill Powell was a patient at the Mayo Clinic, and he was adorable. He was so sweet. Beforehand, I talked to Dr. Charlie, and he said, “Don’t discuss their ailments. You don’t want to get into that. It’s their private thing; don’t do that. Always be nice and make sure a patient has his dignity. His backside is always waving in the breeze, so make sure he has his dignity.”
I disagreed with him. When people are sick, they’ll discuss anything. You see them sitting in the lobby, and you know damn well they don’t know each other, yet they’re talking about each other’s bowel habits. So I told Dr. Charlie that the patients would be willing to talk about anything—and I was right. The interviews for the radio were great.
Another person I interviewed—who was the baseball player who retired before his time? Gary Cooper played him in a movie.
Lou Gehrig?!
Yes, I interviewed Lou Gehrig on the morning he received his results [for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis]. I think he already knew what it was, though.
Do you remember what he said to you?
I don’t. I do remember him being very sweet and nice. Most of the time the patients would want to talk about where they lived and about their family. They were sentimental, you know.
That’s incredible. You perhaps conducted one of the final interviews with Lou Gehrig.
I never even thought about such a thing. I expect I did. But it didn’t mean much at the time. I wasn’t interested in baseball.
There were others. Have you heard of Knute Rockne [the Notre Dame football coach from 1918 to 1930]? Well, my very first interview was him. He was at the clinic, and he was staying at a hotel in town. I can remember ringing the doorbell at his hotel on the seventh floor. And he came to the door and I was terrified. He looked down at me and he said, “Well, look what we have here! You come right in, honey.” And what I remember is not the interview, but the very fact that he lifted me up to him and asked, “What would you like for breakfast, Margaret?” And I said, “Well, sir, I’ve already had breakfast.” And he said, “How about a waffle? Maybe you could eat a waffle?” And I said, “Well, maybe I could.” I spent the morning there. I was just numb, but thrilled that he picked up a telephone and ordered breakfast. I’d never heard of such a thing as ordering breakfast. And then the table came up with food on it! I was more impressed with that than with Knute Rockne and football!
Ernest Hemingway was also there, but I never interviewed him. He was there for erectile dysfunction. I’m just joking.
But it was very, very hard, too, because I worked in the hospital to earn some extra money. I was in tears every night that I worked at the clinic. A writer should never be around sick people, because you only end up getting all of their diseases, as you well know. And I told mother, “I simply can’t stay here, Mother. I’ve got to get out.” I cried all the time. It was so terrible to hear patients say, “I’m going to visit my daughter in New Mexico” and “I’m going to visit my son,” and you knew damn well they were going to be dead before then because you had just seen their tests that read “Inoperable Cancer of the Stomach” or something like that. I just couldn’t take it any longer.
Where did you work after your first radio job at KROC?
I landed a job at KATE, in Albert Lea, Minnesota, about sixty miles southwest of Rochester. This was in 1937, just after I graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in English and acting. I did everything. I wrote commercials. I worked on a thirty-minute woman’s show—it was a daily—and a show about theater that was on once a week for thirty minutes. I’d also write plays and sketches, and I’d give the news, a lot of it about farming. I worked there for a number of years, earning sixty-five dollars a month.
Did you find your university degrees helpful after you graduated?
Literally, I learned nothing at university. Nothing. I always taught myself. I was a big reader when I was young. I completed War and Peace when I was ten. I can remember a neighbor saying, “Margaret, why are you always going out to the hammock? What do you do there?” Reading was my favorite thing to do. Whenever I could get away with it, I would go out and lie in the hammock with my dog, eating a green apple, and I would read. I still read. I would hate to die for a lot of reasons. But mostly because of all the books I haven’t yet read.
When did you create Ethel and Albert?
I began Ethel and Albert in the late thirties. It started as three- or four-minute filler. Actually, the show was first called He and She. I thought it was something I’d only be doing that week. The show eventually ran every day, for fifteen minutes. And then the station asked for a second show per day, different from the first. Two new shows a day. But I loved it. I was just bored writing copy for the station. It was a great way to sell products, to have a husband and wife in a domestic setting each week. You know, something happens every day to couples that might not seem funny as it’s happening. Later, though, at dinner, it can be hilarious.
The show had a very naturalistic tone to it, in terms of both plot and dialogue. It still sounds very modern.
It’s the little things in life that’ve always interested me. How people in relationships talk to one another. What they say when they really mean something else.
The jokes, too, are much more natural-sounding on Ethel and Albert than on the other radio comedies of the time. On The Abbott and Costello Show, Costello might say, “You have a cold. How can you keep the germs from spreading?” And Abbott would reply: “I’ll make ’em wear a girdle.” Whereas on Ethel and Albert, the joke would be entirely based on a situation: Albert heads off to work while still wearing his old Boy Scout hat that he had put on as a joke and had forgotten about.
When I started, I didn’t write well. I tried too hard to be funny. I was trying too hard to write a Gra
cie Allen type of character [the not-so-bright comedic foil to George Burns]. But it hit me eventually that I don’t have to try to be funny, for God’s sakes. Life is funny!
I never considered what I wrote for Ethel and Albert to be jokes. I didn’t write gag lines. All of the humor was based on everyday situations. The comedy came from character traits that we can all recognize and find funny.
For instance, I remember once eating dinner at a well-known restaurant in New York, and the waiter was too busy with the table of twelve next to ours to bother with us. I went home and immediately wrote a script about that. I called the restaurant’s manager and said, “If you want to know what level of service your restaurant gives, you can listen to Ethel and Albert two weeks from tonight on the radio.” So two weeks came and he had to go sit out in his car, because he didn’t have a radio in his office—I later learned this from someone who knew him. And he called me up after the show aired, and he said, “I apologize. Come back here and have a free meal.” And I thanked him very kindly and said, “I didn’t do it for that. I’m too busy to come around, but thank you very much.” But that’s how I got my ideas. From all over, at any time. Psychologically, it was useful. The show gave me a marvelous sense of freedom.
So, you never felt you wrote “joke” jokes?
No. I think I was certainly capable of doing that. I remember one joke I wrote that went: “How can you put your foot down if you haven’t got a leg to stand on?” But what I tended to write were funny situations tied to character.
I wanted it all to sound real. A few things bothered me about radio. I thought the sound effects were not realistic. The only sound effects I liked were the phone ringing, the doorbell, or just clatter. I hated footsteps. Always footsteps. Didn’t any of the characters on these radio shows ever walk in rooms with rugs in them? The footsteps weren’t realistic, you know? And I’m a very realistic person.
That’s how I ended up playing Ethel. We auditioned a lot of actresses, but they weren’t natural-sounding. They were too slow. They were too dramatic. They sounded too much like they were on the radio. Why couldn’t they just read the way they talked? Why couldn’t they talk like normal people in everyday settings?
Can you see the influence that your show had on subsequent radio and TV sitcoms? I’ve seen Ethel and Albert called the very first sitcom.
I’ve heard from various people over the years that the conversational style in Ethel and Albert is similar to a show I’ve never seen. Siegfield? Zigfeld? Feigold? Something like that?
Seinfeld?
Yeah, well, you know. I don’t have time to watch all these shows. But I think that show, too, was about the little things that happen in our lives. I realized when I first started that there were a lot of ideas all around me. I didn’t have to knock myself out trying to come up with funny situations. They were already there to be discovered.
Yes, but even if a show is based on real life and realistic situations, you still have to write the scripts.
I did, and I had to produce a lot of material over the years. I had to come up with an idea every day. Every single day.
Over the years, how many scripts did you write for Ethel and Albert?
More than twenty thousand.
Twenty thousand?! How is that possible?
Well, listen. I wrote for the show for many years, first for radio and then for TV. This was off and on, but mostly daily. And we’d often broadcast two shows a day. They wouldn’t ever let me repeat an episode. Can you imagine? But it worked out well. I’ve always owned the rights to the show and could take it wherever I wanted. And I was also in charge.
Did the show have any writers besides you?
A lot of great writers submitted, but not a single person had a script that would’ve fit. [Novelist] John Cheever once submitted a script. He was a good writer, but it just didn’t fit. People never seemed to believe it was about anything. They all thought I wrote about nothing. No, it was always just me doing the writing. And I’ve always typed with two fingers, if you can believe it.
I wrote constantly. Every single day, nonstop. One night—and this was when I was living in New York in the fifties—my doorbell rang at three-thirty in the morning. I was up writing. I was always up writing. I said, “Who is it?” And I heard a man say, “Don’t open the door, please God, don’t open the door!” And I asked, “What do you mean don’t open the door?” And he said, “Don’t open the door! I don’t have any clothes on!” And I said, “So you’re naked?” And he said, “Yes. And you know me, I’m from downstairs.” And I said, “You don’t sound like you’re from downstairs. What is it you need?” And he said, “Could you get me a coat?” And I answered, “What, am I crazy? Opening the door at three-thirty in Gramercy Park? Well, just a minute.” And I opened the door a crack and handed a coat to him. I made him walk down to the end of the hall before I opened the door again. He had changed and was walking back to my apartment.
And I recognized him. I had screamed at him six months earlier because he was having a musical jam session in his apartment while I was trying to write. It was so noisy! I couldn’t get anything done. So I recognized him, and he began to tell me that he worked for The New Yorker as a cartoonist.
He was a New Yorker cartoonist? What was his name?
I’m not going to tell you. He later became a big seller in The New Yorker, but I’m not going to say things like that. And we sat there in my bay window overlooking Gramercy Park—I lived at 12 Gramercy Park—waiting for the police to arrive with a locksmith. I didn’t have a key to the guy’s apartment. He told me that he had been taking a shower and had locked himself out of his apartment by mistake. He’s sitting there in a raincoat and I’m in a bathrobe, and I said, “Do you like working at The New Yorker?” And he said “Yeah, but if I can’t get back in the apartment, I can’t work on my cartoons for tomorrow.”
I said, “Tomorrow, I have to produce a show, and I haven’t even written the script yet. So, thirty-seven million people will eventually be turning on their TV sets to watch and hear what I’m saying, and I haven’t even got an idea. And here you are, complaining to me because you can’t get into your apartment!”
He laughed and said, “Do you know Jim [James] Thurber? He listens to your show when he works, and so do a lot of the other cartoonists.” A few months later a group of New Yorker cartoonists sent me fan letters. So I’ve got a scrapbook full of those.
[Playwright and humorist] George S. Kaufman once said a nice thing about me. He saw a TV episode I had written, and he told a mutual friend that he liked it.
What was the episode about?
I had written a script where Albert returned home just as Ethel was getting herself ready for a Halloween party. There was a pumpkin on the front porch that she had scooped out and put a candle in. And Albert thought it’d be funny if he took out the candle and then put the pumpkin on top of his head and pulled a sheet around himself. He ran in—the silly way that people do to be funny—in order to scare Ethel. And he screamed, “Oooooh!” And she said, “For heaven sakes. Go upstairs and get that thing off! The guests are going to be here at eight o’clock.” But he couldn’t get the pumpkin off. [Laughs] He couldn’t get the thing off his head, and Ethel then had to drive him to the hospital to have a doctor try to surgically remove it. It was very realistic.
I heard from a friend that George Kaufman told her, “I saw the funniest damn television show. This writer guy had an idea that comes once in lifetime.” He said, “God, he did it so well. I don’t know who wrote it.” I ended up meeting Kaufman later, and I told him, “I was the one who wrote it. And that writer guy is a writer dame.”
When you created the television version of Ethel and Albert for NBC in 1953, you remained the show’s sole writer. Did you find any difference between writing for radio and writing for TV?
Not a bit. Not a bit.
A lot of radio writers had a tough time transitioning from a
descriptive medium to an entirely visual medium. Many radio writers would tend to overwrite for television.
When we started our show on radio in 1944, there were about one hundred television sets in all of New York City. Think of it. One hundred. The medium was all radio. But that changed a little by 1950. But it was still so new. I once attended a taping of George Kelly’s [1924 play] The Show-Off, down in the RCA building, at one of the studios. It was horrible. The lights were so strong. It was incredibly hot. The men had great sweat stains under their armpits. The temperature was 115.
So, when it came time to shoot our show, I knew we had to shoot it in an air-cooled studio, which we did up in Schenectady [New York]. We nearly froze to death, but it worked. It was all so new and everyone was so nervous. The cameraman twisted up in the coils and fell off his feet. Two people in the control room got up to see what was going on and, in their frenzy, they bumped heads, and one knocked the other one out. And then the one who wasn’t knocked out came out of the control room and tripped over the cable. It was total shambles.
I have to say, though, that I was fine. I can’t talk for other writers, but the reason I didn’t have any trouble with the transition from radio to TV is because I always envisioned exactly where we were going and what we were doing. It was an easy transition. It was nothing.
But it frightened a lot of people. A lot of stage actors couldn’t make the transition. It terrified them. Performing live in front of millions, as well as a live crowd. It could ruin their timing.