5. Nan the Radio Star - Part 2

Battle for Stardom

 

Nan's publicity photo by Maurice Seymour, 1932.

The Great Depression after the stock market crash of 1929 greatly compromised, but did not ultimately harm, the fledgling radio industry. “At the moment when radio was poised to complete its transition from a local to a truly national medium, capital markets dried up, consumption dropped, and unemployment soared,  Cynthia B. Meyers writes. "And yet, radio grew anyway.” [Meyers, Cynthia B., A Word from Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising, and the Golden Age of Radio. Fordham University Press, 2014.]

 

Source

With the Depression underway, however, radio trade magazines reported that some of the networks had trouble collecting bills due from sponsors. [Radio Guide, March 31, 1932.] In addition, a Radio Guide columnist wrote that executives from NBC had decided to do away with 15-minute programs for budgetary reasons. It would be "much cheaper to employ one entertainment unit for half an hour than two for fifteen minutes," Mike Porter observed on April 16, 1932. As a result, some artists and performers were added to the ranks of the unemployed. 

 

This is likely what happened to Nan, for, other than a visit to Columbia's New York City studios in August of 1932, the only reference I have found for her between 1932 and 1936 is in the 1933 city directory for Evanston, Illinois, listing Nan as a cashier in Vera Megowan's Tea Room.

 

Chicago Tribune, November 15, 1931.

 

Competition from Hollywood 

Before she headed back to Chicago to look for work, 21-year-old Nan had faced stiff competition in the radio business. By 1932, Radio Guide reported that "countless thousands of girls" were swarming to radio studios in Chicago and New York in a "battle for stardom." "They come, long lines of them, in their eager faces both hope and fear," the magazine observes in its November 13-19 issue. "When some of the greatest stage stars in the country are washouts in front of the microphone, what chance has the comparatively inexperienced girl to crash the networks and rise to stardom?"

And what chance did Nan Dorland have? She had acting and radio experience, and she was attractive. But a pretty face meant little to broadcasters. "In Hollywood, face and form come first," the magazine states. "In radio, they come last." Producers were always looking for something new, something different.

Radio auditions were tough. "Audition after audition came and went," writes Mary Jane Higby. "I would arrive at those studios rigid with determination, seething with the will to win. And I nearly always did achieve something, but never that glorious first place. After a year of such near misses I was becoming as neurotic as any other of my soap opera characters.” [Mary Jane Higby, Tune in Tomorrow. New York: Cowles Education Corp., 1966.]

Career Revival

Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, May 20, 1943.

Ogden Standard Examiner, Aug. 11, 1927.

With her marriage to radio script writer Richard Morenus in New York City on October 15, 1936, Nan's radio career picked up again. For example, she played a schoolteacher named Harriet Adair in a half-hour weekly NBC series called "Gunsmoke Law" in the late 1930s. Apparently Nan can be heard in the sole surviving episode held at the Library of Congress (which I am attempting to order). The main character, a young cowboy named Dave Serviss, attempts to flirt with Harriet by telling her, "Yore mighty easy to look at." [Source: Radio Rides the Range. Jack French and David S. Siegel, eds., Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Inc., 2014.]

During her nine years of almost continuous radio work in Chicago and New York, Nan also made regular appearances before the microphone on the programs of such well-known radio personalities as Don Ameche, Amos and Andy, Lum and Abner, Walter O’Keefe, Graham McNamee, Bob Hope and others, the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix reported on May 20, 1943. 

Illustration by D. E. Holcomb in Tower Radio magazine, Jan. 1935.

I would love to hear a recording of Nan's voice as apparently it was great for radio. "Miss Dorland is favorably equipped with a pleasant vocal apparatus and an easy flow of vocabulary," Variety magazine enthused on April 26, 1932. Before Nan and Richard moved to northern Ontario, the Star-Phoenix mentioned that she had made a "master recording registration of her voice for a program signature" at the insistence of "an enthusiastic sponsor." Nan's voice was still being heard on the radio long after she left New York.

A 1937 "Behind-the-Scenes" Video of Radio Show Production

 

NEXT: Nan and Richard Get Married - Click HERE

 

PREVIOUS POST: Nan the Radio Star - Part 1 - Click HERE

 

INDEX TO BLOG SERIES:  Click HERE

©Joan Champ, 2021. All rights reserved.