From the current SPRING 2025 Issue

The remarkable career--and even more remarkable sound--of WILLIAM CONRAD

THE MAN OF A THOUSAND VOICE

By Jordan Elliott

It goes without saying that there were many, many fine actors involved in the Golden Age of Radio. Ask a dozen different radio fans to name their favorite and you’ll likely get a dozen different answers.

Of course, there were actors… and then there were voices. William Conrad was a voice.

If you were listening to radio drama in the post-War years, you heard William Conrad’s voice on thousands upon thousands of shows — at one point, he recalled, he was doing as many as 27 broadcasts a week; in total, his resume added up to almost 7,500 shows. Depending on the role, it could convey the booming tones of authority or a sly edge that was alternatively playful and menacing. In any case, it was unmistakable. (Conrad jokingly called himself “The man of a thousand voice.”) Even in later years, when the Golden Age of radio was over and he became an unlikely television star, there was that voice.

The future William Conrad was born John William Cann in Lexington, KY in September of 1920 — as it happens, mere weeks before Pittsburgh station KDKA signed on for the first time and the Golden Age of radio began in earnest. John’s parents ran a movie house in Lexington, where their young son could absorb the exploits of the biggest stars in Hollywood — and perhaps dream of becoming one himself. It was clear performing was in his blood; according to his son Chris, young John’s first job was singing in a funeral home. “He had a passion for singing.”

Conrad’s dream of Hollywood stardom got a little closer to reality when the family moved to Fullerton, CA in the 1930s. Now that he was living just outside of Los Angeles, the teenager who aspired to a career in the movies found himself drawn to radio and took a job at local station KMPC, where he joined the cast of a locally produced horror series, The Hermit’s Cave. Eventually, he was not only performing on the show, but producing it as well.

Like a lot of young men born in the early 1920s, Conrad’s career was interrupted by World War II. He joined the Air Corps and flew fighter plans before it was discovered that he suffered from night blindness; as luck would have it, his next assignment was the Armed Forces Radio Service.

One of the chief functions of the AFRS was to produce special shows for the men and women in the service, while also recording and editing network radio shows (removing commercials and topical references) to give those overseas a little taste of home. Here, Conrad found himself announcing record shows and working alongside other actors-turned-producers like Elliott Lewis and Howard Duff — who, like Conrad, would become prominent figures in post-War radio.

With the end of the war, Conrad returned to radio with a vengeance. He joined the cast of Destination Tomorrow, a short-lived “docudrama” about human rights, hosted by future television newsman Chet Huntley. He also got to play a variety of roles on Favorite Story, a syndicated series dedicated to dramatizing works of literature. Here, he got to appear in productions of everything from Jane Eyre to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (where he was convincing in both of the title roles).

Eventually, the networks came calling and Conrad found himself playing supporting roles on such prominent series as The Whistler, the nautical drama Voyage of the Scarlet Queen and The Adventures of Sam Spade. (The latter two shows starred — respectively — his former AFRS colleagues Elliott Lewis and Howard Duff.) He also came to the attention of director Norman Macdonnell, who was directing a new adventure anthology called Escape.

Conrad’s voice made him perfect for the stories on Escape, which ran the gamut from John Collier’s “Evening Primrose” to H.G. Wells’ “Country of the Blind” and allowed him to play both heroes and villains. Still, great as he was in those roles, he was even better delivering the invitation that opened the show each week:

Tired of the everyday routine? Ever dream of a life of … romantic adventure? Want to get away from it all?
We offer you … ESCAPE!

Other actors read that opening over the years but none of them made the offer of escape quite as enticing.

Conrad’s emergence on Hollywood’s “Radio Row” coincided with his boyhood dream of making movies. He’d had a small, uncredited role in the 1945 comedy Pillow to Post but the next year he found himself with an important role in an important film — The Killers. This adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story saw Conrad and Charles McGraw playing the hit men tasked with killing a gas station attendant (Burt Lancaster, starring in his first film).

Over the remainder of the decade, Conrad played numerous small yet consequential movie roles. Sometimes he was a gangster or a killer (see Body and Soul, Sorry, Wrong Number and Cry Danger, where his character frames Dick Powell for robbery); other times, he was on the side of law and order (as in Tension and East Side, West Side). In Joan of Arc, he was the prosecutor at the trial of Ingrid Bergman’s title character.

The challenge William Conrad faced where movies were concerned is that he was only 5’-7” tall — hardly your standard leading-man height. What’s more, he was something of a gourmand; he loved preparing elaborate meals for friends and his first wife was — in his words — more a chef than a cook.

As a result, despite being something of a sportsman (in addition to being a fisherman, Conrad skied “as swiftly as a bullet” according to radio producer Norman Macdonnell), he often struggled with his weight. This factors in combination might have been effective for bad-guy supporting roles, but they prevented him from becoming a bona fide screen star — at least for now…

Thankfully, radio loved an actor who had a great voice, and Conrad found himself working steadily on countless shows, from Suspense to the Lux Radio Theatre to the spiritually inclined drama of Family Theatre. As the 1940s became the 1950s, Conrad and Norman Macdonnell both found their services in greater demand than ever and their paths often crossed.

One particular fateful instance occurred in 1951, when Macdonnell was producing and directing an anthology series for CBS called Romance. Compared to Escape and Suspense (two shows Macdonnell had helmed in the past), Romance focused on adventure stories that put love front and center.

The show’s idea of romance could cover a lot of territory, past and present. One such example was a story by John Meston, a frequent contributor to Romance who had also written for Escape. The story, “Pagosa,” saw Conrad playing Jeff Spain, who reluctantly becomes the sheriff of a lawless Western town. The story featured actress Georgia Ellis as Jeff Spain’s love interest. It was a sign of things to come…

As it happened, Conrad’s turn on “Pagosa” coincided with CBS’ plans to launch a new Western drama that would aim for a more mature audience than juvenile adventure shows like The Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy. The show was to be called Gunsmoke and there had already been two unsuccessful auditions with Rye Billsbury and Howard Culver playing the lead role of Dodge City Marshal Mark (later Matt) Dillon. It’s been suggested that someone — maybe Macdonnell, maybe a CBS executive — hesitated to call on Conrad for fear of overexposure.

Conrad had his own theory, which he explained some years later. “I think when they started casting for it, somebody said, ‘Good Christ, let’s not get Bill Conrad; we’re up to you-know-where with Bill Conrad.’ So they auditioned everybody and as a last resort they called me.” Out came that voice; a day later, Conrad was offered the role.

Today, Gunsmoke is remembered as the gold standard of radio drama. That has a lot to do with Meston’s scripts, which never shied away from the fact that Dodge City in the 1870s could be a brutal and violent place. (The writer Lucius Beebe described it as a “suburb of hell.”) If the “good guys” usually prevailed, it was clear that it came at a cost. The penchant for realism extended to sound effects as well; sound effects men Tom Hanley, Ray Kemper and Bill James were as interested as Meston and his fellow writers in setting the scene accurately.

And of course, there was an outstanding cast, led by Parley Baer (as Deputy Chester Proudfoot), Howard McNear (as town physician Doc Adams), Georgia Ellis (as dance-hall-girl-turned saloon-owner Kitty Russell)… and of course, Conrad as Matt Dillon, who is charged with keeping the peace in a world that rarely appreciates his efforts. As Dillon said at the start of many episodes, “It’s a chancy job, and it makes a man watchful — and a little lonely.”

Within a year, it was clear that Gunsmoke was unlike any show on the air, not only for its penchant for realism but because it seemed as though everyone got involved in every level of the show’s production. Cast members with an interest in the American West would let the writers know if a detail in the script was incorrect, and some of them (including Conrad) even contributed scripts of their own. At one point, the sound effects team recorded actual gunshots in Conrad’s back yard.

If the above suggests Gunsmoke was all work and no play, the truth is quite the opposite; the cast would often devote rehearsals to trying to make each other laugh. Even the technicians and musicians could get in on the fun; during rehearsals for a Gunsmoke episode in which a new hotel burnt down, the orchestra finished the first act by playing “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” which sent the actors into hysterics.

Gunsmoke’s popularity on radio made it inevitable that the show would find its way to television. Although one suspects Conrad would have liked to carry the role over to the new medium (he even dieted in advance of his screen test), it was evident that he came across as more portly than heroic on the small screen. Even Conrad downplayed the idea years later. “I don’t look like Matt Dillon,” he admitted to writer Leonard Maltin. “I was delighted not to have done it.”

Thankfully, Gunsmoke lasted on radio until June 1961; when it left the airwaves, it was Hollywood’s last remaining Golden Age radio drama. (It was replaced the following week by Suspense, which was produced in New York.) Like a lot of actors, Conrad later admitted to missing both the steady work and the camaraderie he’d enjoyed working in radio.

The late 1950s saw Conrad take small parts in films ranging from the heist drama 5 Against the House to Dick Powell’s misguided The Conqueror, which saw John Wayne painfully miscast as Genghis Khan. He even co-starred with Anthony Quinn in 1957’s The Ride Back, playing a sheriff who tries to extradite a gunfighter from Mexico.

There were also voice-over opportunities for movies and series that needed a narrator. He was perfect for The Fugitive, a crime drama that starred David Janssen as a man who spent four seasons trying to clear himself of a murder charge. Then there was Rocky and His Friends, the 1959 series also known as The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.

Cartoonist Jay Ward had hired Conrad to narrate the absurd animated adventures of a plucky flying squirrel (voiced by June Foray) and his dimwitted moose friend (voiced by series producer Bill Scott). According to Foray, Ward and Scott knew they wanted Conrad for the job. As for what they wanted from him…

“Bill came in with… these stentorian tones with a great diapason,” Foray recalled in 1994, “and Jay said ‘Oh, you gotta go faster.’” The upshot was that “every time he talked a little faster, his voice would get a little higher. Finally, Jay said, ‘You gotta go faster, Bill! You gotta keep up with the actors!’

“Bill said, ‘But I sound hysterical!’ Jay said, ‘That’s exactly it!’”

Conrad’s high-pitched, breathless narration was perfectly suited for the delightfully ridiculous adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and their enemies, Boris Badenov (voiced by Paul Frees) and Natasha Fatale (Foray again). The show ran for five seasons, and while attempts to revive the characters haven’t been quite as successful, one thing these efforts share is a narrator, each doing their best to sound like a hysterical William Conrad.

By the 1960s, Conrad was in his forties and while he wasn’t old by any means, the fact was that on-camera roles were becoming few and far between. So it was that Conrad turned once more to the roles of producer and director, first on television shows (including This Man Dawson and 77 Sunset Strip) and later for movies (including the mystery Two on a Guillotine and the 1965 thriller My Blood Runs Cold). And, as it turned out, he wasn’t done with acting yet...

By 1971, Quinn Martin (who worked with Conrad on The Fugitive) had produced a number of long-running television series. So it was that in his quest for new ideas, he called upon Conrad to star in Cannon. Frank Cannon was a policeman-turned-detective who could solve crimes by using his wits — and when necessary, his fists.

Frank Cannon’s weight made him unusual among television detectives and various characters often referred to it for derogatory or comedic effect. (In an episode that saw Cannon traveling by plane, a stewardess admonishes him to fasten his seat belt. He politely explains that it is fastened, although it might be hard for anyone to tell.)

Given the ridiculously high standards that Hollywood sets for glamour and beauty, it’s hard to imagine a less likely television star than William Conrad. When he landed the role of Frank Cannon, he was fifty, balding and, in his own words, looked “like a walrus.” (His weight during this time fluctuated between 230-260 lbs.) Still, as Conrad’s son Chris later explained, “He was an everyman... he was not particularly graceful, and America related.”

Thankfully, he still had a remarkable presence (and that voice) and that — supplemented by a roster of guest stars ranging from Anne Baxter to Micky Dolenz — made the show a success. Cannon’s ratings placed it among the Top 20 shows for its first three seasons and the show ran until 1976.

Now that he was officially a television star, the medium welcomed Conrad back with open arms. He made guest appearances on numerous comedy and variety shows (ranging from Laugh-In to The Carol Burnett Show) and came back in 1981 for a short-lived series based on Rex Stout’s corpulent detective Nero Wolfe.

Conrad had more success with the 1987 series Jake and the Fatman, where he played a former policeman-turned-Los Angeles district attorney. The series ran for five seasons; during that time, Conrad was able to parlay his celebrity status to serve as a commercial spokesman for First Alert home smoke detectors.

William Conrad died of heart failure on February 11, 1994. He was laid to rest at the Forest Lawn cemetery in Hollywood Hills. He is remembered as one of the most ubiquitous and important voices in radio history — and if his voice was, in his own words, like “a black drape,” Conrad the man was anything but.

“People would say ‘Gee, he’s nasty and mean’ and so forth,” Foray recalled, ‘because he had that exterior, but he really wasn’t. He was a softie inside.”

Christopher Conrad agrees. “My father said it was the most important thing to him that he be remembered as a kind man, a nice man. And he was. He was an amazing man.”

Which seems only fitting for such an amazing voice.

To hear William Conrad on radio, tune in to Those Were the Days on April 5 and to Radio’s Golden Age on May 18.

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