Morgan Makes the Big Time

Some people knew the Golden Age of Radio was full of inanity. And a few made fun of it on the air—Fred Allen, Bob and Ray, and Henry Morgan being good examples.

Allen became embittered about a giveaway show which took away his listeners and helped push him off the air. Bob and Ray were shunted from network to network, time-slot to time-slot, trying to find the right fit in a dying industry. And Morgan couldn’t keep a show on the air, despite some great concepts, and finally contenting himself, like Allen, with marking time on a televised panel quiz show.

Morgan had made a bit of a name for himself for being a 15-minute grump, and for ridiculing his sponsor’s sales pitches. One of his complaints was he was capable of fronting a big-time comedy/variety show. So ABC gave him one.

The elements were good. There were put-downs of radio shows and advertising, quirky musical numbers and some social satire. Some of it worked, some of it didn’t. The stuff that didn’t was painful because Morgan got no audience reaction but was forced to finish his routine. ABC finally gave up on Morgan, who was picked up by NBC after a lot of pressure from Fred Allen. But variety shows cost money and with more potential sponsors giving up radio for television, Morgan didn’t have a chance (despite Arnold Stang and two of Jackie Gleason’s future cast-mates, Art Carney and Pert Kelton).

Radio Life profiled Morgan’s career to date in its edition of November 24, 1946. Some of the dialogue described comes from the first two ABC shows. The photos accompanied the article.

Madman Morgan
Madcap Henry Morgan Has Hit the Big Time
Now by Biting the Hand That Feeds Him!
By Joan Buchanan
Wednesday, 9:30 p.m. ABC—KECA, KFMB, KPRO
HE'S A big star now—perhaps destined to be the biggest comedy name in 1947—but the faithful Henry Morgan fans are keeping their fingers crossed. They've followed the incorrigible Morgan's career long enough to know that sometimes the sponsor and the station can't take it. And Morgan just doesn't care!
Here's a glimpse of Morgan's past hilarious history in radio—read it and then join us in crossing fingers. Henry became the youngest announcer in radio at the age of seventeen, became a newscaster and was hired and fired all in the space of five weeks. He just couldn't get to broadcasts on time. He went to a station in Philadelphia and worked for one year, signing off the station at night by announcing the names of everyone who happened to be in the studio including the janitor, elevator operators, window cleaners. He was finally fired for listing station executives whom he seldom met in the missing persons bureau broadcast. Happily Morgan comments, "It was days before they discovered it."

Worked at a station in Boston for two years and was doing fine until he got interested in a law course. He started attending law school at night and was fired for cutting a broadcast to take his examinations. Oh, well, as Morgan says, "Time Marches Sideways!" Our hero finally wound up on station WOR in New York, where he did the remotes from the out-of-town dine and dance spots. Cracks like "Hop in your car and drive to 'Blank's Silver Slipper'. It's only fifteen minutes from New York as the crow flies—that is if the crow happens to be driving a supercharged motorcycle . . ." made officials decide that this wasn't exactly the sort of thing to induce confidence in the remote broadcasts. Instead of firing Morgan, they gave him a weekly spot where he could do his kidding on his own time.
Is "Discovered"
Listeners discovered him and soon he was doing his famous "Here's Morgan" broadcasts three times a week. This was soon expanded to six a week. If the listeners could take it Morgan could! But alas, the poor sponsor! The Adler Elevator Shoe people were perhaps Morgan's most famous and most heckled sponsor. Three times they withdrew sponsorship, but Morgan was in their blood—they always came back. Morgan persisted in referring to his sponsor as "Old Man Adler" and one time after delivering a rhapsody on Adler's Shoes, in an aside, he confided to his listeners, "Frankly, I wouldn't wear them to a dog fight." The sponsor was upset and asked Morgan to retract his statement. Next day on the air, Morgan repeated his set-to with "Old Man Adler". "I said I'd take it back and I will," stated Morgan. "I would wear Adler's Shoes to a dog fight." It was tactics like this that had men of above-average height buying this brand of shoe. Morgan lost the sponsorship of Life Savers when he confided that they were milking the public by putting holes in their candy. He also referred to their six delicious flavors as "cement, asphalt, asbestos . . . "

Radio took a step backward when Morgan went into the army in 1943. Happily, "Here's Morgan" came back to the airways in 1945. And now look! Coast-to-coast on a sponsored show! In deference to the actors and musicians on his present show, Henry is using a script. Formerly he used to work from notes he had made shortly before air time. An expert ad-libber, he could take off from anywhere following his famous opening, "Hello, anybody, here's Morgan." Newspaper items, remarks overheard in an elevator, people talking to themselves on the street, billboard and bus advertisements, signs in store windows, magazine articles and movies are all stored up in Morgan's wonderful memory ready to be used as material for his show. But it's always been the commercial that's the spice of the program. "People don't care about where and how a product is made," says Morgan, "they just want to know if it is good . . . The trouble with the average sponsor is that he's just average. I know more about radio advertising than the guys in the business."
Phone Marathon
Morgan always kept his address and phone number a secret to avoid angry sponsors. If the sponsor was enraged he'd have to call the agency, who called the network, who called the only person who knew Morgan's phone number. She called Morgan, and if the complaint hadn't died down by that time she would recite it to Morgan, who didn't care anyway.
He has never liked studio audiences, and if he tells a joke he thinks isn't funny, he will glare fiercely at anyone in the audience who dares to laugh. He is a versatile dialectician because he worked alone for so long that he had to learn to do his own characters. His Russian, British, French and German dialects are hilarious.
Here are some Morganisms: He invented Broonsday, the eighth day of the week. It's the day that people take old gold and convert it back into sea water—the day we take nylons and make coal out of them. Started a medical school for doctors who don't practice medicine—just pose for ads. "One of my doctors," says Henry, "has invented Gonfalon's Enormous Liver Pills because he discovered that there are various sizes of livers—they're not all little." Morgan is also the discoverer of the town of More. "There are only two housewives in that town," he explains, "so when you see an advertisement that says 'More housewives recommend ... ,' you know it's these two women who live in More, Nebraska." "Do you suffer from acid stomach ?" asks Morgan. "Well, stop drinking acid."

One of Morgan's recent shows started out with the announcer screaming, "And, now, the star of our show, America's number one funny man, Bob Hope!" Morgan came on quietly with, This is Henry Morgan. The reason the announcer said Bob Hope was we figured we'd get twelve million more listeners. If you tune out now, you're a sore loser." And who else would urge you to "try CBS to see if there's anything better on?".
Morgan used to refer to his girl friend as the "ninth most beautiful girl in New York." But said he didn't like women because, "if they're smart, they argue—if they're dumb, you can't stand them!" Unpredictable as always, he recently got married!
A Conformist
On his first half-hour night–time broadcast Morgan told his audience: "The other joke shows aren't on the air yet so I have no one to steal from. Now that I have my own half-hour I'm going to conform. I've shaved my head for a toupee, and I'm going to get a brother-in-law and a mother-in-law and an announcer who giggles and a closet with a lot of stuff in it and start a feud with Toscanini." He also claimed that he'd tried to think of another name for his show—"I was going to call it the 'Jack Benny Show,' but I found out someone else was using it."
"Here's where the commercials would go," he said later, "if I were foolish enough to sell this valuable program." Foolish or not, the program has been sold to the Eversharp Company. Asked how he liked his new sponsor, Morgan replied, "Eversharp has nice, blue eyes." Fans who were fearful that Morgan would be too impressed with his new position to take the same pot shots at the hand that feeds him knew they had nothing to worry about after they heard the first program. Henry was talking about the Schick Injector razor. "I told them the name was too long," he complained. "I told them they ought to call it the 'Morgan' or the 'Snazzy,' but ..."
He ended up his first show in the new series by pleading to the air audience, "Don't hate me. I did the best I could."
Of himself Morgan says, "I'm intelligent but misguided. If I had any real talent I'd go straight."