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| Dorothy Lamour at the radio mike. |
Ghost voices, technical difficulties
and an overenthusiastic opening night crowd bedeviled a radio broadcast
featuring Dorothy Lamour as the “femcee” at the premiere opening of oilman
Glenn McCarthy’s Shamrock Hotel in Houston, Texas. On the evening of March 17,
1949, Glenhall Taylor, producer of The Sealtest Variety Theater, agreed
to allow the program to originate from the Herald Room of the new Shamrock
Hotel. The usual format of the program involved two guest spots each week: one
performed a comedy sketch, the other a dramatic sketch in which Lamour herself
usually took part with the guest star. Music was provided by Henry Russell and
his Orchestra with vocals by the Crew Chiefs Male Quartet. For the evening of
March 17, Hollywood screen actor Van Heflin and comedian Ed Gardner were in
attendance to appear on the broadcast. What followed was a scrambled program
which faded several times and was off the air completely at others, now
considered one of the biggest disasters for NBC in the calendar year of 1947.
Thankfully for Glenn McCarthy, Dorothy Lamour’s nation-wide radio broadcast was
the only “casualty” of the glittering formal opening of his twenty million
dollar Shamrock Hotel. While Lamour told the press the whole thing was “unavoidable,”
her name was briefly tarnished in newspapers across the country that week.
Between 2,000 and 3,000 people
jammed into the 18-story hotel’s dining rooms for a $42-per-plate dinner
marking the formal opening. The confusion was too much for Lamour’s radio
broadcast which was scheduled at 9:30 p.m. Eastern. As the radio show began,
many guests were still hunting for their seats and the hubub was so great that
Lamour and her guest stars, Heflin and Gardner, had to shout over the
microphone to be heard. “The crowd was still entering the room at the start of
the program and we had trouble getting started,” Lamour explained. “Later the
public address system failed and we departed somewhat from our script.”
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| NBC Publicity photo |
The program suffered numerous line
breaks and was of low quality with the actors’ conversation repeated when they
obviously thought they were off the air. The continuity of the program suffered
most with ad-libbing in an attempt to keep the show moving. At approximately
9:32:42, a telephone conversation going on at the source of the program came
over the air and, although muffled, was intelligible. Radio listeners might
have wondered if they had bad frequency on their own radios. Because the
attendees arrived late, instructions were never given to prevent the high
background noise that was picked up by the microphones. Lamour herself made
several attempts to get the cast back on the script but to little avail.
Gardner ad-libbed freely after an attempt to tell his “Two-Top Gruskin” routine
failed. Instead, Gardner announced the names of prominent guests in the
ballroom for the benefit of the radio listeners. The dramatic spot between Van
Heflin and Dorothy Lamour suffered most with little of the actual script
broadcast.
At Chicago, NBC officials said line
failure, “probably at the Shamrock Hotel,” forced piano standby music to be
used during most of the first 12 minutes of the show. The direct cause of the
error was never reported publicly, to avoid pointing full blame toward the
correct source. In Hollywood, it was an NBC spokesman who blamed the whole
thing on an “over-enthusiastic opening night crowd,” adding that, “at one
point, two diners seized the microphone and shouted into it.”
In New York, another spokesman said
network executives were conducting an investigation to determine whether any
profanity went out over the air. Dorothy Lamour insisted no profanity was
involved.
The network at Chicago, the
controlling point of the broadcast, stayed with the show for the first five
minutes, during line breaks and low quality, in the hope that difficulties
would clear momentarily. NBC delivered multiple “One Moment, Please”
announcements, then cut to the piano music as filler until 9:43:15 when NBC
brought the chaos back to the air.
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| Dorothy Lamour press photo from NBC. |
Under contract with the sponsor and the radio network, the advertising agency made sure a recording of every broadcast be transcribed. It is for this reason that every episode of The Sealtest Variety Theater exists in recorded form... including this episode. Fans of old-time radio and vintage Hollywood have sought out this recording to listen to. Yeah, there were complications during the broadcast. Without knowing the history behind the recording, fans of vintage radio broadcasts would question what they were listening to. Larry and John Gassman provided a superb 45 minute presentation about this broadcast, with audio samples, at the recent REPS convention in Seattle, Washington. Attendees first hand were able to learn about this program and laughed as they heard the excerpts, with full understanding of what was going on behind the scenes.
As for Ed Gardner, who flew to Houston
early that morning to participate in the broadcast... He flew back to New York
City the morning after and, a week later, took his entire family on a probably
much-needed vacation (Honolulu or Miami, depending on varied sources).
Ironically, this was not the first time the Sealtest radio program suffered
technical difficulties. For the broadcast of October 3, 1946, similar technical
difficulties occurred on the same program. AT&T trouble between Denver and
Omaha prevented the first two and a half minutes from being broadcast
nationwide. Meanwhile, due to Chicago operating error, an announcer apologized
to the listening audience and music filled the remaining minute and a half. The
WEAF program portion failed to go through for the same reasons, resulting in a
standby announcer apologizing and introducing a transcribed orchestra which
failed to go out due to engineering trouble. WEAF also had dead air for the
first minute and a half.
