The Wit & Widsom of Johnny Dollar

One of the great things about radio drama among all the forms of mass-media entertainment is the emphasis it gives to the human voice as the driver of the story. Though imaginative sound design often helps set the scene, it's rarely used to paper over narrative shortcomings the way visual effects are in TV and movies. This is especially true for detective dramas, which like their literary counterparts are often told in the first person. For many fans of radio drama, the long-running series Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar was a pinnacle of the genre.

With each case presented in flashback as the title character adds up the expenses incurred in the course of investigating that week's insurance matter, even the most minute items could be a big part of the story with the telling key to "seeing" how they all fit together. Very often the finest moment of any story would come at the end when Johnny finishes his report and offers his remarks on the case. In many ways, particularly during Bob Bailey's tenure in the lead role, it was a microcosm of what made the show so great.

Even in a genre whose success often hinged on the quality of the main character's narration, Bailey's delivery of the various writers' sardonic dialogue under Jack Johnstone's direction typically added up to something special. Two particular examples have stuck with me as I've been revisiting these programs as research for my documentary about the program (whateverbecameofjohnnydollar.blogspot.com), each by one of old-time radio's best writers. One is from The Cui Bono Matter (by Les Crutchfield) and the other from The Markham Matter (by E. Jack Neuman writing as John Dawson). Both are noteworthy not just for how they speak to the plot but also the way they display Johnny's character.

The Markham Matter: "In the end it was his attempt to run away, and it didn't work. It never works. Even if you get away, you find something new to run from."

The Cui Bono Matter: "When you gave me this assignment, Don, you asked a question, a phrase in Latin: cui bono? Who benefits? So, here is your answer: nobody."

If you've never heard these stories before, and even if you have, they're both well worth a listen.

Rethinking a Golden Age

Like many fans of old-time radio, I always tended to think of the golden age of radio as a single era. As I've been researching a film project about the end of that period, an intriguing book by radio historian Jim Cox entitled Say Goodnight Gracie: The Last Years of Network Radio has made me realize how important seeing radio's heyday as a series of eras within the larger era is to understanding the development of old-time radio. More specifically, it helped me appreciate how various external factors impacted the development of some of its best loved programs, especially in the 1950s.

Though radio was still the dominant medium at the start of the decade,  television was starting to erode the mass audience for whom radio had been the primary form of entertainment. As the 1950s went on, many long-running radio shows ended, including icons like The Shadow. Some programs found second lives on television. Some programs, like the soap opera The Guiding Light, co-existed in both TV and radio for a time. The majority of shows simply vanished. Much of this was driven by the sponsors, who once supported the lion's share of radio programming, deciding that television was where they wanted to put their resources. And though many classic shows suffered as a result, there was also a curious, and in some ways beneficial, flip-side to that shift.

Though both audience sizes and sponsor support for radio programming were declining, there was still a substantial audience for the networks to serve. More to the point, there was airtime that these networks needed to fill and, as much as possible, fill cheaply. Those factors turned out to be a genuine boon for radio drama. Unlike the star-driven music and variety programs which required large (i.e. expensive) casts and orchestras, dramas could be made for a fraction of the cost. Cox cites the average weekly production cost of a variety program as $40,000, whereas a detective series might only cost $4000-$7000. In contrast to the reality/competition driven network line-ups of today, the economics of broadcasting in the 1950s actually favored scripted drama.

It wasn't just economics, though, that benefited radio drama. By the middle of the decade, the audience that was still loyal to radio drama was also a more discerning audience that desired more substantive story-telling of the kind offered by writer-driven programs like Gunsmoke and X Minus One. This was the environment into which actor Bob Bailey and writer/director/producer Jack Johnstone stepped in 1955 when the mystery series Yours Truly Johnny Dollar began its year-long run of character-driven long-form narratives that ultimately led to it becoming the very last continuing drama of radio's golden age. That the same factors that ultimately doomed radio-drama in America were also a factor in some of its greatest shows is the sort of irony that would have been very much appreciated by Matt Dillon, Johnny Dollar and the other well-drawn characters that made old-time radio's final decade in many ways its finest decade.