9. Stress in the Radio Biz

 An Ulcer-Making Frenzy

 

"Don't say party to us, say Nan Dorland and Jane Froman, NBC stars who have adopted an early to bed, early to rise, resolution." Quote source: Honolulu Advertiser, Jan. 24, 1932.  Photo source

In the early days ...I knew one man who wrote the commercials for 375 15-minute radio programs per week, wrote and produced an average of 48 transcribed spots a week, wrote a five-a-week daytime serial, and a half-hour dramatic original each week, and did that much for a little over five years," Nan's first husband Richard Morenus wrote in 1949. "I know, and I can show the scars to prove it." [Source: Canadian Broadcaster, January 12, 1949.]

The big clock on the wall of the radio studio ruled the lives of the 75 or so people who worked behind the scenes to produce a show. Ten, nine, eight... three, two - you're on the air!  "That's radio, the fastest business in America and the world today,"writes Carl Prentiss in the August 14, 1937 issue of Radio Guide. "Here, time travels like a rocket. A program may be conceived, written, rehearsed and broadcast in an afternoon. New stars catapult into prominence overnight, plummet into obscurity just as quickly. Whatever you do, do it fast! You'll have to, because - that's radio!"

Radio Guide, March 18, 1938

Many radio performers experienced health problems due to the pace, stress and overwork in the 1930s and 1940s. NBC news commentator Walter Winchell, for example, suffered a nervous collapse due to overwork in April of 1932 and was ordered by his doctor to "take a protracted rest" from writing and broadcasting. (Philadelphia Inquirer, April 24, 1932.)

Fred Allen, a radio comedian from 1932 to 1949, had to take a year off work in 1944-1945 due to dizzy spells brought on by chronic hypertension. He called the process of producing his radio shows a recipe for a nervous breakdown. "For a one-hour show I had to turn out the equivalent of one act of a three-act play every week," Fred Allen said during an interview in January 1945. Allen recalled that, for eight years, he worked 16- to 18-hour days, "pounding out a 50-page script" every week. "People who write for radio wind up with ulcers or go into another business," he observed. [Source: Frederick Woltman, "Behind the Mike," in Pittsburgh Press, January 24, 1945.]

1930s radio performers like Nan had to be versatile. "There was never time to prepare a detailed and searching performance, and for the most part, the hastily written scripts did not warrant it," writes former radio actress Mary Jane Higby. "What was needed was a quick impression, given with broad, sure strokes. It bore the relation to a stage performance that a pencil sketch has to an oil painting." [Source: Mary Jane Higby, Tune in Tomorrow. New York: Cowles Education Corp., 1966.]

Radio's appetite for content was voracious. "My wife and I had been stop-watch slaves in New York for more than ten years," Morenus writes in Maclean's magazine. "I, as writer-director of network programs, [Nan] as one of the more popular actresses who suffer daily in serials before the microphone." The cost of obeying the studio clock "was great in ruined digestions, tired bodies, and nerves as taut as piano wires," Morenus continues. "Something had to snap. It had been Nan." Source

Nan Requires Emergency Surgery

In 1939, Nan, suffering severe abdominal pain, had emergency surgery in New York for a perforated ulcer. A perforated ulcer is a sore in the lining of the stomach or upper intestine that makes a hole through the lining into the belly, causing internal bleeding and damaging other organs such as the liver or pancreas. Surgery was standard treatment in the 1930s. It may not have been the first time, and it was not last time, Nan was hospitalized for abdominal problems.

"It was the intense competition of acting that caused her health to deteriorate," Nan's second husband John Albrecht later told his friend Bob Lee. "After several ulcer operations, the doctors demanded that she change occupations or her life would be in jeopardy." [Source: Bob Lee, The North Called Softly. Prince Albert, Saskatchewan:
Self-published,1977.]

Source

The main causes of ulcers are stress, diet, and excessive smoking and drinking. A study of the personal histories of ulcer patients in Britain found that in 84 percent of the cases, an anxiety-provoking event such as a change in job, the death of a close relative, or unemployment had preceded the illness. Davies and Wilson concluded that "unusual emotional tension" was associated with these emergencies and that patients had been "harassed and worried by their responsibilities and by environmental changes." A 1942 Rockefeller Foundation study of American patients with peptic ulcers found that the ailment correlated with "strong emotions - chiefly fear and anxiety."  Source

Nan had experienced anxiety during her childhood, and had been through some ups and downs during the 1930s. After the short-lived success of her radio show "Keeping Up with Daughter" (1931-32), her career languished. The Depression had caused widespread unemployment in the US, and Nan had gone to work as a cashier at Vera Megowen's Tea Room in Evanston, Illinois in 1933. Once her radio career picked up again in the late 1930s, the competition for work was brutal.

Ad in the Chicago Tribune, October 4, 1931.

Richard’s Account of Nan’s Surgery

“The bench was getting hard. I looked at my watch. Quarter past three. I’d been sitting there in the whispering silences of the hospital corridor since midnight," Richard Morenus writes in his article "From Broadway to Bush" in Maclean's magazine (Sept. 1, 1946). He continues:

How long did it take to perform an emergency operation on a perforated ulcer? I’d obtained the best surgeon-specialist in New York, noted for the brilliance of his quick efficient work. But three hours and 15 minutes! Maybe he’d run into trouble. Maybe he couldn’t save her!

The door of the hospital elevator slid open. Flanked by interns and nurses, still in their operating room caps and gauze masks, a tall rubber-wheeled stretcher cart slowly passed me.

The only color in the moving white was the splash of golden-red hair on the pillow. I had one short glimpse of her face, eyes closed in merciful anaesthetized sleep. But she was alive! My wife was alive. I looked at my watch. Three-thirty.

"She’s all through, Dick." The doctor looked at me steadily. "Yes," he went on, "she’s through with radio. No more stage work, no more making motion pictures, no more metropolitan living. Oh, she’ll be all right, she’ll be perfectly healthy," he added quickly, "but her nerves won’t be able to take any more of that stuff. My advice is that you get her out into the country. You’ve always liked the outdoors, Dick, and it’s Nan’s salvation to live away from the city so you might just as well make up your mind to it.”

Turning Point

During Nan's convalescence, she and Richard made the life-changing decision "to cut loose and carve a year-round existence out of the wilderness" in northern Ontario. Source

Had Nan stayed in the radio business another five years or so, she would likely have found it far less stressful than it had been during the 1930s. After the Second World War, the taping of shows reduced the difficulties of producing a radio show. Mary Jane Higby writes, "Gone is the strain, stress, the ulcer-making frenzy that caused insurance companies to rate the radio actor as a risk only slightly less hazardous than that of a construction worker on a skyscraper." (Tune in Tomorrow, 1966.) 

 

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