WESTSIDER HIMAN BROWN
Creator of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater
5-10-80
During the 1930s, a comedy called The Rise of the Goldbergs was second only to Amos & Andy as the most popular radio show in America. Its success was due largely to the efforts of a young man from Brooklyn named Himan Brown, who co-produced the series, sold it to NBC and did the voice of Mr. Goldberg. He had started in radio drama while in his teens, and soon after graduating from Brooklyn Law School as valedictorian, decided to make radio, not law, his career.
During the next three decades, as producer of Inner Sanctum Mysteries, The Thin Man, Grand Central Station, Nero Wolfe and other series, Brown became the Norman Lear of radio. But by 1959, it was all over: the last network radio drama was forced off the air by the onslaught of television. Brown, however, kept up a personal crusade for radio, pounding on the desks of every broadcast executive he could reach. Fourteen years later, in January 1974, his dream was realized, and radio drama was reborn with the CBS Radio Mystery Theater.
The 52-minute show, it turned out, was long overdue. Within weeks, CBS received 200,000 fan letters from listeners. Currently the Radio Mystery Theater can be heard in New York on Monday through Friday at 7:07 p.m. on station WMCA (570 AM). It is heard seven nights a week on approximately 250 other stations across the country. Brown, the producer/director, oversees every phase of the operation, from hiring the writers and actors to directing and recording sessions from a control booth at the CBS studios.
"I have never stopped believing," he says, "that the spoken word and the imagination of the listener are infinitely stronger and more dramatic than anything television can offer." He is a silvery-haired, distinguished looking gentleman with a mischievous twinkle in hie eye and an endless capacity for humor. Ruddy-complexioned and vigorous, dressed in a gray pinstripe suit and a crimson tie, he approaches his work with an infectious enthusiasm.
On a typical weekday, Brown arrives at the sound studio at 9 a.m. with a batch of scripts under his arm, which he hands out to a group of actors assembled around a table. Many are stars of the stage or screen — Tammy Grimes, Julie Harris, Tony Roberts, Fred Gwynn, Bobby Morse, Roberta Maxwell, Joan Hackett. "I get the best actors in the world, right here in New York," he notes with pride. "They work for me in the daytime and on Broadway at night."
As the cast members go through a cold reading. Brown interjects his comments: "Do a little more with that. … Don't swallow your words there. … Cross out that line." The actors laugh and joke their way through the session; Brown is the biggest jokester of all. Finally everyone takes a break before doing the actual taping. Brown calls his 91-year-old mother on the telephone and speaks to her in Yiddish for some time. Then he answers a questions about his discoveries in sound effects.
"In the 1930s I was doing Dick Tracy, a very popular show. For sound effects we had several doors. One of them screaked, no matter what we did to it. I like to think that door was talking to us, saying, 'Make me a star,'" he says with a smile.
The creaking door later became the signature for Inner Sanctum Mysteries, and is now employed as the introductory note for the Radio Mystery Theater, along with host E.G. Marshall's compelling greeting: "Come in." Himan Brown also created the sound of London's foghorns and Big Ben for Bulldog Drummond, the laugh of the fat Nero Wolfe, and the never-to-be-forgotten train that roared under Park Avenue into Grand Central Station.
When the recording session get underway, Brown observes the performers through the thick glass of the control booth as they stand around a microphone, reading their line with animation. From time to time he stops the action and repeats parts of a scene. "It's all spliced together afterwards," he explains.
In the late 1940s, Brown began to produce television dramas, such as Lights Out and the Chevy Mystery Show. He built a large TV studio on West 26th Street for that purpose, which for many years he has leased to CBS for filming the soap opera The Guiding Light.
For most of his career, Brown has been a resident of the Upper West Side. The father of two, he is married to Shirley Goodman, executive vice president of the Fashion Institute of Technology. He has long been involved in community affairs and charitable organizations, including the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, the National Urban League and the National Conference of Social Work. Brown is constantly in demand as a public speaker, a fund-raiser, and a creator of multimedia presentations.
His plans for 1980 include reviving the Adventure Theater, a children's radio with that he last did in 1977. "The best thing about radio drama," he joyfully concludes, "is that we can take you anywhere, unhampered by sets, production costs, locations, makeup, costumes, or memorizing lines, and make you believe everything we put on the air. … The screen in your head is much bigger than the biggest giant screen ever made. It gives you an experience no other form of theatre can duplicate. It's the theatre of the mind."