Easy Aces - Accident of Circumstance

Accident of Circumstance

Goodman Ace (b. Goodman Aiskowitz, 1899–1982) was a film critic for the Journal Post in his native Kansas City. On radio station KMBC, he read comic strips to children on Sunday mornings and reviewed films on Friday evenings. One night in 1930, the cast of the 15-minute show that followed his slot failed to show up, and Ace found himself having to fill in the time. His wife, Jane (b. Jane Epstein, 1897–1974), had accompanied him to the studio that night, and the two engaged in an impromptu chat about their weekend bridge game. This brought such a favorable response that the station invited Ace to create a domestic comedy---even though neither of the couple had ever really acted before.

At first, according to radio historian John Dunning (in On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio), the show oriented entirely around the couple's bridge playing, and nearly died the same way, when Jane Ace was said to have lost her temper over her husband's constant needling of her style of play, and threatened to quit the show entirely. Ace revamped the show into "a more universally based domestic comedy revolving around Jane's improbable situations and impossible turns of phrase." The result was one of radio's most respected comedies, going on to a fifteen-year air life despite its never being a ratings blockbuster. It was the first KMBC program to go on to become a network radio show.

Easy Aces moved to WBBM Chicago in 1930 on a trial basis; the Aces themselves launched a write-in appeal to test the size of their audience and thousands of letters convinced original sponsor Lavoris to renew the deal for 1932-33. (A typical Ace maneuver, according to Dunning, was to buy trade publication ad space poking fun at the show's modest rating: after all, a typical Ace ad would say, the ratings were polled by telephone and the Easy Aces audience never answered the phone while the show was on.) The program began airing on the CBS network in March 1932. That summer, the Aces sought New York backing and found it in the Blackett, Sample and Hummert agency headed by Frank Hummert, soon to become radio's top soap opera producer with his wife Anne but then producing various other programs.

Hummert liked the Aces' style and the show's low overhead and put them on CBS as often as four times weekly, as an afternoon offering, before Anacin (marketed at that time by American Home Products' Whitehall Pharmaceutical division) moved them to 7 p.m. in 1935---right up against Amos 'n' Andy. They couldn't possibly out-rate that hit, but they could and did build a loyal audience of their own. The show moved to the NBC Blue Network and a 7:30 p.m. time slot Mondays and Wednesdays, beginning in 1935, before returning to CBS in 1942, holding the same time slot on Wednesdays and Fridays. The show became a half-hour entry one night a week from 1943 through January 1945. It ended only when Goodman Ace and Anacin had a disagreement over a musical bridge in one of the episodes; he, in turn, criticized their use of cardboard packaging instead of tin for their headache tablets, calling it a "gyp").

In 1934 the couple was signed by Educational Pictures to do Easy Aces two reel comedies. Dumb Luck was released 18 January 1935, with the Aces reprising their radio roles.

Easy Aces storylines often ran several episodes, though there were many single-episode stories, and the show was performed live on the air but in an isolated studio, without an audience, which made perfect sense considering its conversational style. Goodman Ace wrote the show's scripts and played the exasperated but loving husband of Jane Ace as his deceptively scatterbrained, language-molesting, more than periodically meddlesome wife. (Like many radio couples of the day, the Aces used their real names on the air, though no one ever addressed Ace by his first name---it was always Ace---and Jane chose the maiden name of Sherwood for her on-air character.)

There were no sound effects beyond the almost ambient-like playing of normal life sounds, and the Aces' inexperience as actors probably worked in their favour: they simply played as though they were allowing listeners to eavesdrop on their own real-life conversations, allowing Easy Aces listeners more than those of many shows to believe the Aces really could have been their own unusual neighbours. The couple worked from a card table with a microphone sunk in its center, feeling it was easier to talk to each other in this manner rather than standing at a microphone. In addition, as Arthur Frank Wertheim noted in his book Radio Comedy, Ace shunned belly laughs in favour of consistent character humour. "A lot of times, on the air," Wertheim quoted Ace as saying, "I noticed comics in a sketch do a joke that destroys the character because it gets a big laugh."

The cast included Mary Hunter as best friend and boarder Marge; Paul Stewart as ne'er-do-well brother-in-law Johnny; Martin Gabel as Neil Williams, a newspaper reporter and Marge's love interest; Helene Dumas as Southern maid Laura; Ken Roberts as Cokie, an orphaned young adult "adopted" by the Aces; Ann Thomas as Ace's secretary; Ethel Blume as the Aces' niece, Betty; Alfred Ryder (remembered best as Sammy on another old-time radio mainstay, The Goldbergs) as Betty's husband, Carl Neff; Peggy Allenby as Mrs. Benton, a nosy, gossipy neighbour who turned up now and then to leave openings for Jane to fret and gnash over imagined slights or indiscretions; and, Truman Bradley and Ford Bond as their announcers. When Easy Aces relocated from Chicago to New York, the actor who played Marge's husband did not move along with the rest of the cast; Ace wrote him out of the script with a divorce for the couple and a new boyfriend for Marge. He then received a letter from an extremely loyal fan who said that since he did not believe in divorce, he would stop listening to the show unless Marge's ex-husband was written out of the story as dead.

They made it seem as natural as tying their shoes: Ace himself prodded his network to build set tables with microphones embedded beneath them, not in front of or above them, the better to ease the prospect of mike fright among their co-performers and allow them to sound like themselves and not actors. Further along that line, Ace refused to rehearse an episode more than once, the better to avoid destroying the spontaneity that made the show work as it did.