Chapter I: Front Matter

APPLAUSE MAIL

By Oney Fred Sweet

Betty Parsons advised all persons craving a tryout on WMQZ that Henri Salzman, the program director, would be in the office after three o’clock in the afternoon. She could impart this brief information, say nothing more, and fulfill her duty, but just now there was something most attractive about the inquiring and aspiring young man on the other side of the railing that ran along in front of Betty’s desk.

The young man had an instrument case under his arm, yet he was hardly the musician type, Miss Parsons thought. Surely, in his background there had been plenty of outdoors and athletics. If looks could be broadcast, she figured he would be a microphone wow.

“Do you play?” she asked.

“And sing,” he nodded.

They were alone in the office.

“I’ve seen a lot of ’em come and a lot of ’em go,” Miss Parsons informed him out of her wisdom of six months at the office of the broadcasting station. “Whether you make good or not ’ll depend on the applause mail. Take a seat on the bench there and wait for Henri. He’s almost due.”

The young man hadn’t said anything about a partner in his act. That would probably come later.

Not wholly absorbed in the task of sorting applause mail, Miss Parsons had a chance to study a profile that came as near to being her ideal as had come her way since gaining contact with the business world.

Take the applause mail that Betty sorted at her information desk near the entrance to the office. There were listeners-in who raved about the melodious voice of Bert Hall, the announcer. Betty knew he was married and getting bald.

There were fans that were wild about the Joy Boys and the Canoedlers, and Betty, seeing who they were and what they were “in person,” had nothing particular against them, but never had they inspired in her any emotion.

A candy bar had been named after the famous “comic strip team,” but here again, so far as Betty was concerned, familiarity had taken the edge off illusion.

“You must find the work interesting,” commented the caller.

Well, it was. But, after all, a job was just a job. It wasn’t having somebody care enough about you to want you to share with them “a little white house on a little green hill.” All afternoon the office had seemed unusually stuffy.

“Henri’s the man you’ll see,” Betty returned. “Henri and his orchestra furnish the luncheon and dinner concert music down in the Belmore Gold Room.”

She lowered her voice and leaned forward.

“I won’t introduce you right away. It’s best to wait until he gets settled. He hates to deal with tryouts that ’ve got more persistence and pull than anything else. He was the first in the business to figure out radio technique for an orchestra. You’ve heard Henri Salzman’s regular Wednesday night feature—‘_Musical Tours to Other Lands._’”

“Always tune in on it,” the young man enthused.

He had hair that stayed in place, and he showed just the right kind of teeth when he smiled.

“Well, Henri added reed instruments and got that effect,” Betty explained. “And his other complex is applause mail. Claims it’s the only way a station can tell whether a thing’s ‘hot’ or not. Every day I and the other girls hand him the mail count. Sssh! Here he comes now!”

Henri Salzman, as he entered, was hardly the music master of tradition. True, he wielded a wicked bow, but mixed with his talent was an economic urge.

He had a habit of blinking. Within him was the struggle between art, as he knew it, and trying to visualize an audience that couldn’t be seen.

It was the vagueness of the thing that gave so many of the old-timers stage fright when they got before the microphone. And no one knew better than Henri the list of “flops” that had followed the attempts of stars in other methods of expression to reach the countless numbers seated critically at their radio sets.

“Henri.”

“Yes, Betty.”

“There’s a young fellow here—”

“In a minute, when I go over these scores,” Henri blinkingly suggested.

“Suppose you turn on the loud speaker down here now,” Betty urged. “It’s just about time for the finish of the home management period.”

She glanced at the clock.

“I’ll take him upstairs to the studio. It’s something we ought to grab.”

But Henri had sighted something on his desk. It was the scenario to be used that night for compositions by MacDowell. Ed Barton, who had written the “hooey,” had left space for a number that went with a description of rippling water.

It was Ed’s idea to leave nothing to the imagination of the listener. And no scenario was quite complete, to Ed’s way of thinking, unless the customer was given a word picture of water in the process of rippling.

“I’m going to take him upstairs,” Betty interrupted. “See that the horn’s working right, won’t you? See that he gets the right kind of a ‘break.’ You know how it was when that woman from Muskegon sang for you the other day. The way the horn was working, Schumann-Heink herself would have made you throw up your hands and ask to have it shut off.”

Betty went first to the mirror at the rear of the room. The equipment there for freshening up natural beauty was complete. She was glad she had just got a swirl bob.

“Poor kid,” she said to herself. “Plenty of the others who have come up here have had their press agents and managers.”

She manipulated the clasp to the little railing gate and walked around to where the youth waited on the bench. He sprang eagerly to his feet and she told him to follow.

“Thing to do is just be natural,” she coached in an undertone. “Don’t get too close to the microphone, and remember the boys in the amplifying room ’ll make it louder or softer. And tell all your friends to write into the station telling how ‘hot’ you were. Write a few letters to yourself. Henri says the only way he can tell about a feature is by the mail it pulls. What’s your name?”

“Huntley—Robert Huntley.”

“‘Huntley’s Half Hour of Harmony,’ we’ll call it. Gotta have a catchy title, and that’s as good as Al Somers could’ve thought of. Without the right kind of ‘hooey’ in this game you’re sunk.”

“Hooey?”

“You’ll know what I mean if you stick around,” Betty sighed.

For some reason she was half out of breath. The elevator was slow in coming.

“Wish I could let the folks know so they could listen in,” he remarked.

“Where are they?”

“Down in the southern part of the State.”

“’Fraid you won’t have time now.”

But it was a relief to have him say “the folks” instead of the name of some sweetie.

“Darn old elevators,” she complained, nervously. “All of ’em going the wrong way. Thought you weren’t just off vaudeville. So many of ’em who come up for a tryout are. They hand out the line about being tired of traveling around, and tell Henri if he’ll just put ’em on the air once, the public ’ll be so crazy about ’em they’ll want to tear down the station if they ain’t kept on steady.”

“And what happens?” asked Mr. Huntley.

“Station’s never been torn down yet. There’s so many stations and so many programs. What ever gave you the idea of wanting to go on the air?”

“What made you want to work in a station?” he parried.

“Answered an ad.”

“It’s been my ambition to broadcast,” he declared wistfully, “ever since I got a radio. Musically inclined, I guess that’s what they call it. And if I could make a living at broadcasting—”

“We all have dreams,” Betty confided. “But you’re up against something. We’ll have to frame up a letter that you can read over the air. You know—some lonely sheep herder on a ranch. I could type one off. ‘Dear Mr. Huntley: I want to let you know how much your music means to me ’way out here forty miles from the railroad.’ That always goes strong, and it’s a good puller for regular letters from folks who want to hear their names mentioned on the air. Here’s the elevator!”

Station WMQZ was located on the fashionable Hotel Belmore’s roof. And with frequent mention of the hotel in the announcements, the Belmore got a wonderful “break,” even if all the radio artists did have to pass in and out of the marble lobby.

Betty led the way up a final flight of stairs beyond the elevator and young Mr. Huntley, an expression on his clean-cut face of mingled awe and fear, followed with his instrument case gripped tightly under his arm.

The two studios at WMQZ were separated by the glassed-in quarters occupied by the mechanics. Plush curtains had been done away with, the plain walls being of a patent composition that took proper care of the acoustics.

A Mrs. Eleanor Jarvis was just leaving the microphone with her notes, her period devoted to tips on how to make the home more “homy” having come to a close. She bowed, patronizingly, to Betty as she passed. Ben Morris, the assistant announcer, asked “What’s the big idea?” and Max, the lone mechanic on the job at that time of day, frowned.

“It’s O. K.,” Betty told them defiantly. “Henri ordered a special tryout.”

Sullenly Max retired to his glass booth.

“When the red light comes on,” Betty schooled her companion, “that means everything you say from then on goes on the air. When the red light switches off, you’re off. See! Wait for the red light in the little bulb there on the wall and then strut your stuff.”

He turned toward her a face that was tense and pale.

“Don’t get mike shy,” Betty cautioned him. “There’s your microphone—number three. It’s all connected up. Go ahead and knock ’em cold.”

Betty understood. There was something ogreish about the cold, metallic little disk.

With what sort of a world did it connect up? What sort of people, here and there and out yonder, were listening? And in what mood? And what was it they cared for? And what would be their comment concerning one’s effort? If one only knew. Or was one lucky not to know?

A red glow came into the tiny bulb on the side of the wall.

One song that the nervous young man sang as he twanged his uke was called “You May Not Mean Much to the Multitude, But You Make a Hit With Me.” There had been a swarm of what might be called sentimental songs suitable to the day and age.

If Betty had any criticism to offer, it was that the youth presented the number in rather stilted fashion, but she loved the theme of the ballad. As to the voice or the accompaniment—these were matters for musicians, who really knew, to decide about.

Announcer Bert Hall came to the microphone between numbers to say in his most velvetlike tone:

“You are listening to Huntley’s Half Hour of Harmony.”

As Bert turned away, with the performer’s back to him, he held his nose, and Betty could have slapped him for it. But Betty knew Bert. There was but one word for all his verdicts on amateur efforts—“terrible!”

The hands of the clock on the studio wall told that it was time for the program’s end. The light went out of the little red bulb. The ordeal was over.

Mr. Huntley rose limply from his chair.

“How was it?” he asked, trying to smile.

“Hot,” assured Betty. “Don’t worry but what it clicked.”

“It was different than I thought it was going to be,” he quavered. “One of my strings was a little off. Think that’ll make any difference? Thought it would sound worse if I stopped to tune.”

“Never correct yourself on the air,” Betty advised. “I get that motto from Bert Hall. He’s got a tongue that’s oiled and he flits right on. Same way with an instrument, I should think.”

“Wish I knew just how my voice sounded out where it went to,” he regretted.

“Nobody ever knows,” she solaced him. “I’ll say there’s a lot of baloney about all this talk of being able to judge a person by his voice. There’s a lot of people who should be heard and not seen, but that don’t mean you. It’s a profession, being able to register honey in your voice.”

“Maybe a million people were listening in.” His eyes glowed.

“Maybe.”

“If I’ve made good,” he ventured, “and get a lot of—what was it you called it?—applause mail, I’ll owe a lot to you.”

She flushed and lowered her eyes. Finally she said:

“There aren’t many wow musicians who come from down the State. Most of ’em who come to the rail there by my desk are foreign, and look foreign.

“It’s like the song you sang. They make good with the million, maybe, but they don’t mean much to me. As a rule, folks you like from down State are all right for listening in, but for the broadcasting end, ‘not so good.’ I—it’s the first time I ever tried to push anybody onto the station.”

He paused for a moment in fumbling with the snaps on his ukelele case.

“How soon,” he asked, “do they put a fellow on regular?”

“Oh, soon as the public shows how it stands,” she informed. “Take Moore and Mott—they’re not only on the pay roll, but they’ve had six weeks of vaudeville—you know, fans who want to see them in person—a rake-off from their candy bars, and club dates galore.”

“That ’d be great,” he enthused. “Dad wanted me to stick with him in the store.”

They rode down together on the elevator.

“You’ll be dropping around,” she called after him as she reached her own floor. “It takes a day or two before the applause mail starts coming in.”