From the current AUTUMN 2024 Issue

Celebrating 50 years of NOSTALGIA DIGEST with this memory from the October-November 1996 issue

THE VOICE BELONGS TO JACKSON BECK

By Steve Darnall

First and foremost, there is the voice. If you’ve ever listened to old radio, you’ve probably heard it. It’s a powerful, commanding voice that presents itself as an ultimate authority. On radio, it was the voice that first told us “Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!” Later, it was the voice that took us “To the age of the conquest of space — with [heavy echo here] Torn Corbett, Space Cadet!” It’s a voice you’ve heard in recent years on commercials for Thompson’s Water Sealer, Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes and most of all, Little Caesar’s Pizza. Even in a casual mode — say, over the telephone early on a Saturday morning — the voice is still a little imposing.

The voice belongs to Jackson Beck, and its tones have kept him working steadily in radio for over sixty years. In the medium’s heyday, he could be heard as a narrator (and performer) on classic kids’ shows like Superman, Mark Trail and Torn Corbett, Space Cadet. In 1948, he landed the title role on Ziv Productions’ syndicated Adventures of Philo Vance. When radio drama dried up, Beck found himself working not only for commercial pitchmen but also for a new generation of comedians who wanted his solid, no-nonsense authoritarian voice.

Given a resume that lengthy, it’s ironic that his father — a New York actor in his own right — was “dead set against” his son entering the business. It’s even more ironic that Beck got his start in radio of all times, during the Depression — and to top it all off, that was the result of answering a bogus advertisement.

“I know this sounds like malarkey, but I answered an ad in the paper: ‘You too can be a radio actor!’” he recalls. “It was romantic, and of course it was a con, but I didn’t know it. Well, maybe I did know it, but I thought, ‘What the hell, I’ve got nothing better to do.’” The men for whom Beck “auditioned,” weren’t really agents, but they did suggest Beck take some radio acting lessons — which, coincidentally, were being taught around the corner at $15 a pop. “Well, at that point I had a dime in my pocket: a nickel for a candy bar for lunch and a nickel to get home on the subway. So I went in and spoke to this guy and said, ‘I don’t have a dime, but if you can open a door here or there, maybe we can do business.’ He said, ‘How would you like to teach here?’”

Beck laughs at the notion of a young man with no radio experience being asked to teach people to act for the radio; apart from an audition with his father (the director of which complained that the two men sounded exactly alike), he’d never even been before a microphone. “[The teacher] said, ‘You’ll catch on. It’s really easy. Just talk to people like you’re talking to me. It’s as simple as that. It’s not like the theatre, where you really project and go into this artificial stage English. You just talk like a human being.’”

Prospects being what they were during the Depression, Beck took the job. “I had a studio set up,” he recalls, “and all these people who were enchanted with the glamour of radio came in and out: housemaids, cooks, bottlewashers, ad guys. I thought, ‘My God, I can’t teach these people. I can’t take their money. They won’t have anything at all.” Beck left the job after a week. What he did instead was to go through the phone book — “and I mean, I went through it line by line” — taking note of any business where the words “radio” or “broadcasting” popped up in the name. When the list was done, the young actor mapped out a route and visited every single can this guy sit down there and pound this stuff out?’ When I went up to his house, he had a wall solid with magazines. There was one on the desk, and a typewriter next to it, and I put two and two together. The guy’s plagiarizing. So what the hell’s the difference? He’s not making any money out of it.”

Beck also put together a “pseudo-comedy” show on a Bronx station and tried to sell it to CBS as a regular feature. CBS passed on the show, but what Beck remembers more vividly was the fellow who passed on it: a young salesman by the name of Ed Murrow. “The thing about it was, he didn’t impress me, because to me he was just another guy in a suit. I didn’t know that he was going on to become the Ed Murrow that he became.”

Beck found something a little more dignified (and lucrative) when he performed in a series of radio trailers for Columbia Pictures. Whenever the studio prepared to release a major film, they would alert the public by producing and syndicating a lengthy radio advertisement, often hiring unknown (and therefore, much less expensive) radio actors to stand-in for the stars. “I was pretty flexible, and I had a good ear, so I played a lot of leads: Frederic March, John Payne, God knows who.” So, now he had experience, and thanks to a day job in the packing department of a button shop, he had some money. Then, when he was cast on an episode of Death Valley Days, he had national experience. “We did those in formal dress in those days, I want you know,” he remarks. “I had to borrow my old man’s tux. Radio was the glamour industry. I mean, my God, if you were on radio, talking to millions of people...which is something that deterred most actors, because they’d think they had an audience of millions and get scared to death. I didn't give a damn. So I did Death Valley Days, and the first time, there's an audience at NBC in one of the big studios — which means about 200 people — all dressed to the nines. You'd have thought they were going to the opera.

"And dead silent," he adds, sounding a little impressed to this day. "When they were told to be quiet and not make any noise, these people didn't make a sound." Now Beck had his first network credit, and his continual visits to agencies and casting directors were paying off dividends. "They got so used to me coming in once or twice a week, that I worked my way into the crowd. So I started to do shows here and there. It's like pulling on a thread, and suddenly you've got the whole spool." He became friendly with George Lowther, a producer/director/writer, and Bob Maxwell, who ran the production firm.

For a couple of years, Lothar and Maxwell had produced a syndicated series featuring the nation's newest comic-book sensation; now, under the sponsorship of Kellogg's Pep, they were preparing to launch The Adventures of Superman as a daily show on the Mutual network, and Lowther — who had been narrating the show, in addition to directing and writing it — needed help.

"George said to me, 'Listen, I can't do all this at one time anymore. I gotta have somebody in there to narrate it.' We were doing it at WOR, and he had to run in and out of [the control booth]. He said, 'It's getting to me and I still have to go home and write this stuff every night.' So I went in and cut loose and he said, 'You've got it. Start working. Tomorrow you're in here, and you're in here every day of the week, so don't do anything else. This is a job."

lt was a long-term job at that: for the next ten years Beck breathlessly told listeners of the Man of Steel's escapades and predicaments (and, in the tradition of legendary radio actors, would also double as assorted characters on both sides of the law). It’s interesting to note that although Superman was not unknown in the early 1940s, the producers and cast of the radio show take some credit for turning him into one of the most famous characters in American fiction — even beyond granting him daily, national exposure.

The radio show was responsible for the invention of Kryptonite (Superman’s greatest weakness was invented by the show’s writers when actor Clayton “Bud” Collyer had to take a vacation), and a phrase that Beck shouted at the beginning of every episode that has since become legendary: Look! Up in the sky! it’s a· bird! it’s a plane! It’s Superman!

Adding to the character’s mythology was the producers’ desire, in Beck’s words, to “create the feeling that there was a real Superman.” As a result, it was years before most Americans knew that veteran announcer Collyer was the voice of Clark Kent and his Super-alter ego. “I’m sure that I gave him name credit at the end of the show — maybe once a week,” Beck insists, “but they were very, very protective of him. They wouldn’t let him make personal appearances or anything else.

“This is where P.R. came in,” he adds. “They kept him out of the paper, not in it.”

Beck remembers Collyer as “strong, personally.” In the 1950s, Collyer suffered a stroke and was subsequently diagnosed with aphasia. “[Collyer] was the kind of guy that was going to get back and do what he had always been doing,” Beck remembers, “and he finally beat aphasia, to the point where he could come back, and you would never know this man had ever had an illness.” The two worked together again in the 1960s for Filmation Studios’ Superman cartoon series.

As important as the Superman show was for DC Comics’ big star, it was even more important for Beck: by 1950 he was busy with another Kellogg’s-sponsored kids’ show, Mark Trail (when Superman wrapped up its’ run in the 1950s, Kellogg’s put Beck to work announcing another show, the intergalactic Tom Corbett, Space Cadet). “I did Superman, and then I’d go next door and do Mark Trail, but I’d narrate it with a different voice and a different approach, and then I’d play Mark Trail’s right-hand man, who was a French Canuck. I went out and learned a little more French than I learned in high school, and I learned some slang, so I’d throw this stuff in. Those people in Canada who heard this Canuck slang would go crazy. They loved it.” Of course, regional pride was only one reason for the Canadians’ enthusiasm; another was the slang itself. “There were dirty words in there!” Beck laughs. “The Americans didn’t understand what I was saying — I didn’t understand half of it myself — but I worked it into the script, and the people in Canada and northern New York went nuts, because ‘Here’s this guy doing our stuff!’”

Beck was one of those performers who pursued radio acting right up to the end of the Golden Age, appearing on such 1960s offerings as Suspense, Theatre Five and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar (he played a dying gangster on that show’s last episode). When radio drama closed its doors, another, very different door opened up — comedy. In the 60’s, 70s and 80s, Beck found his services in demand by such clients as Saturday Night Live, The National Lampoon Radio Hour and Woody Allen, who hired Beck to narrate his 1967 spoof of “true crime” documentaries, Take The Money and Run.

Twenty years later, when Allen made his nostalgic Radio Days, Beck returned to the microphone and was heard (but not seen) as a newscaster detailing the dramatic rescue attempt of a trapped child. (Unbeknownst to Allen, the Long Island neighborhood featured in the film’s opening shot was an area where Beck had spent many a childhood summer.)

Ironically, for all of Allen’s skill as a comedian, Beck reports the director’s knowledge of radio production was a little lacking. Beck was scheduled to appear in one scene where Allen “had the actors doing a pseudo-mystery, but he has them standing with their backs to the control room. I didn’t have the gall to say, ‘Hey, listen. You got it wrong. Nobody was ever in a position with his back to the control room. They had me turn sideways, but then he can’t see my face. I’m now facing the camera, but the mike’s in my face and you can’t see me.” The scene was eventually cut. “Thank God.”

These days, of course, Beck’s voice still sounds great, and he’s as sought-after as ever — and those clients who find him are usually more than anxious to keep him.

“I’ve gotten calls on New Year’s Eve and Christmas Eve,” he says. “I work for Little Caesar’s every week or ten days, and yesterday they called me at 3:30, 4 o’clock and said, ‘We need you at 5:00.’ If they suddenly decide that they have to do something, they’ve got to do it and it has to be now!”

Like most survivors of the radio era, Beck misses the days of radio drama, but he also understands that in an era where businesses are obsessed with the bottom line, something like radio drama is an obvious casualty. That doesn’t mean he’s happy about it.

“It’s easy to make money out of radio, it really is. I’d love to own a radio station right now. Drama, you can’t do because economically, you’re losing money when you put a drama on. When you put a drama on some of these stations late at night, the audience is tremendous, but it doesn’t catch [on] anymore, because now it’s no longer a habit. It’s not the only source of entertainment or information. You have to fight television and cable, but what can you do [when you’ve] got 75 channels on the set? Not having been exposed to radio as we were as children, [a listener today]’s not in that groove. You can’t go into a store that doesn’t have a radio blaring somewhere. The trouble is, it’s not an integral part of your life anymore as far as entertainment or information is concerned.

These days, Beck says, “I watch a lot of news and, when I can, documentaries. I think we did it better in the old days.”

Tune in to Those Were the Days on October 12 as we celebrate the 50 years of Nostalgia Digest--and hear broadcasts featuring Jackson Beck and the other stars of the Autumn issue!

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