Goodman Ace - Radio Aces

Radio Aces

In 1930, Ace took on a second job reading the Sunday comics on radio station KMBC (anticipating the famous newspaper strike stunt, almost two decades later, by legendary New York mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia) and hosting a Friday night film review and gossip program called Ace Goes to the Movies. Ace was not initially a volunteer for the job. An editor at the Journal-Post had the idea that having an employee read the newspaper's comics on the air for children would increase circulation for the paper. Taking the job meant an extra $10 per week in one's paycheck, but none of the newsroom staff was interested. The editor, reasoning that since Ace's current assignment was covering local theater, insisted he would be the perfect man for the job. Ace suggested a second radio show, this one dealing with films, thus collecting an additional $10 per week.

But one night the recorded fifteen-minute show scheduled to air after Ace's timeslot failed to feed. With an immediate need to fill fifteen minutes' more airtime and his wife having accompanied him to the station that night, Ace slipped into an impromptu chat about a bridge game the couple played the previous weekend and invited Jane to join the chat which soon enough included discussion of a local murder case in which a wife murdered her husband over an argument about bridge. Loaded with Goodman's wry wit and Jane's knack for malaprops ("Would you care to shoot a game of bridge, dear?"), the couple's surprise improvisation provoked a response enthusiastic enough to convince KMBC to hand them a regular fifteen minute slot, creating and performing a "domestic comedy" of their own.

At first, the show that became known as Easy Aces centered around the couple's bridge playing, according to John Dunning in On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): "Ace was not wild about Jane's bridge game, on the air or off, and he kept picking at her until she lost her temper and threatened to quit. The show settled into a new niche, a more universally based domestic comedy revolving around Jane's improbable situations and her impossible turns of phrase."

Written by Goodman Ace, who cast himself as a harried real estate salesman and the exasperated but loving husband of deceptively scatterbrained, malaprop-prone Jane ("You've got to take the bitter with the better"; "Time wounds all heels"), Easy Aces became a long-running serial comedy (1930–1945) and a low-keyed legend of old-time radio for its literate, unobtrusive, conversational style and the malaprops of the female half of the team. The show was never a rating blockbuster, but according to Dunning it "was always a favourite of Radio Row insiders. Like Fred Allen and Henry Morgan, Ace was considered an intelligent man's wit. His show limped along . . . lasted across several formats for more than fifteen years and was one of radio's fondest memories." The radio show was popular enough to get to the big screen; in 1934, the couple signed with Educational Pictures for some two-reel comedies. Dumb Luck was released 18 January 1935, with Goodman and Jane playing their radio characters. While writing Easy Aces, Ace also wrote for other radio shows, earning $3,000 per week in this way. In 1945, Ace signed on as one of the writers of The Danny Kaye Show. Previously he and Jane had been part of a series of celebrity guests who filled in for Kaye while he entertained the armed forces troops who were overseas. When Kaye moved his show from New York to Hollywood, Ace resigned. Whether writing for himself and Jane or for another performer, Ace's rating system of how well a script would do was based on the number of cigars he smoked while writing it. One cigar meant the show would do very well, while four cigars meant this program or episode was most likely hopeless. Ace was sued in 1940 because of the name he selected for a character. He used the first name of one of his staff coupled with the last name of another. Unknown to Ace, this resulted in the name of a real person who was publicly embarrassed by the use of his name on the show. He then began the practice of having those on the program use their own names for their characters.

In 1948, Ace created a new, half-hour version of the show, mr. ace and JANE; this expanded version, perhaps because a live studio audience detracted from its quiet style (a point made especially vivid by its audience-less, quiet audition show, and when new episodes expanded upon some of the old show's vintages), didn't last beyond a single season. And it fared no better on television. In 1956, both Ace and NBC thought seriously enough about another try for the television series to announce Ernie Kovacs and his wife Edie Adams would play the Aces in a pilot for the show; it is unknown whether the pilot took place.

Two decades after its brief, unsuccessful television adaptation, however, someone else was willing to give the Easy Aces idea a fresh television try: a number of the original Easy Aces radio scripts were adapted for the CTV Television Network show The Trouble with Tracy in 1971. The bad news: This version, apparently, was an unqualified disaster, perhaps because burgeoning feminism looked askance at the Jane Ace type of character, and also because of an incredibly low production budget, but most likely because the cast performing the remade scripts just weren't the relaxed Mr. Ace and Jane.

The husband and wife team returned to network radio with the debut of NBC's Monitor; the Aces were announced as "Communicators" just after Dave Garroway's joining the show. They were also part of NBC Radio's Weekday, which was a Monday through Friday network offering aimed at women that premiered not long after Monitor. Ace branched out by writing commercials, featuring himself and Jane. The couple also voiced some commercials used on NBC's Startime, while other actors played the visual roles.