How Radio’s Sound Men Made Millions See a Horse That Was Two Coconut Shells
A house is burning. You can hear it — the low roar building behind the actors’ voices, the individual crackles as the fire finds something new to eat, the collapse of a beam. A family in a darkened living room in 1938 leans toward the wooden cabinet in the corner and watches the fire spread, each of them seeing their own version of the flames, the smoke, the room going bright.
There is no fire. There is a man standing a few feet from a microphone in a studio in New York or Chicago, slowly crushing a sheet of cellophane in his fist. That is the roar and the crackle: candy-wrapper film, worked close to the mic while an actor shouts about the heat. When the story needs a horse to gallop up, the same man cups two halves of a hollowed coconut and clops them against a slab in a rhythm — trot, then canter, then the full four-beat gallop — and tens of millions of people hear hooves. A sheet of thin metal, gripped at one corner and shaken, is thunder. A box of cornstarch, squeezed in both hands, is boots crunching through snow.
Almost none of it was recorded in advance. The hand-made effects happened live, once, in real time, in the same room as the actors, and could not be done again.
The set in the corner
By the mid-1930s the radio had become the center of gravity in the American home. In 1930, roughly four in ten households owned one; by 1940 it was more than eight in ten — some twenty-eight million homes, up from twelve million a decade before. Through the Depression, families who fell behind on the washing machine and the car kept up the payments on the radio, because it was the one piece of furniture that talked back to the whole country at once.
The set itself was often a substantial thing, a polished console the size of a small dresser, and the family arranged the evening around it. A show came on at a fixed hour, and you were there or you missed it. There was nothing to look at. The cabinet held a lit dial and a speaker cloth, and everything else — the burning house, the galloping horse, the ship’s deck in a storm — assembled itself somewhere behind the listener’s eyes.
That was the trick of the whole medium, and its practitioners knew exactly what they were doing. Radio drama built its worlds out of a single sense and asked the listener’s imagination to supply the rest, which it did, vividly, and for free. A picture would have fixed the horse as one particular horse. The sound let every listener keep his own.
Why it had to be live
The reason a grown man was crushing cellophane in front of a microphone, rather than playing a recording of an actual fire, was partly technology and partly rule.
The recording equipment of the early 1930s was not good enough to trust on the air; a disc of a real fire, played back, sounded like static and mud. And the networks made it a matter of policy. NBC, for years, flatly prohibited the broadcast of recordings — everything that went out had to be happening as you heard it. So the sound of a program was assembled the way the acting was: live, on cue, in one continuous take, with no chance to fix a miss. If the gunshot came a beat late, the whole country heard it come a beat late.
This turned sound effects into a genuine profession, and a demanding one. A network sound man read the script, marked his cues, laid out his props in order along a table, and performed them in sequence with both hands while the actors performed the lines, all of it threaded through a director’s signals. A single scene might call for a door, footsteps crossing a room, a telephone, and a thunderclap outside, each hit on its exact word. Robert L. Mott, who came up on the effects tables of live radio and live television in the 1950s and later wrote the standard reference on the craft, gave one of his books the title that says the whole thing: Radio Live! Television Live! Those Golden Days When Horses Were Coconuts.
The room
The studio that makes the fire is a carpeted, soundproofed room high in a network building, and the burning house is being built by perhaps a dozen people, all of them standing, none of them visible to anyone.
Along one wall is a plate-glass window, and behind it sits the control room: an engineer at a console, riding the levels, easing the voices up and the effects down and the music under; and the director, in headphones, who once the red light comes on cannot say a word aloud. He runs the whole broadcast in pantomime through the glass — a finger stabbed at a performer for go, a hand sawed across his own throat for cut, a slow pull of the hands for stretch it, you’re running short.
The actors work in a loose half-circle around a single upright microphone, the RCA 44 ribbon, scripts held up in their hands because nothing is memorized. There are only a few of them for a whole town of characters; a good radio actor carried three or four voices, so the sheriff and the drunk and the boy at the door might all be two people leaning in and out of the same mic. The 44 had two live faces and two dead ones, and the cast used its geometry like a stage. Step in close and your voice fills the listener’s ear. Step back and you are across the room. Turn your head to the microphone’s dead side, keep talking, and you walk out the door without moving your feet.
A step away stands the sound man, or two of them, or on a heavy night three, at a table of arranged junk and a rack of turntables loaded with effect discs — the motors and crowds and storms that no object in the room could make. He has his own microphone. He has read the same script and penciled his cues into it, and he performs them into the half-second they belong in, watching the conductor so his marching feet fall on the beat of the music. Off to the side is the music itself: a lone organist for a small show, a full orchestra for a large one, laying down the bridge that carries one scene into the next and the low sour note that tells you something is wrong before the actor does.
Nobody is watching. Many mysteries and thrillers played to an empty studio — the big-star anthologies like Lux Radio Theatre played to a full house, but plenty of straight drama ran with only the “ON AIR” sign lit and the second hand sweeping the clock, because the show had to end on its exact minute — and if it aired at eight in New York, the whole company would gather and perform every cue again, live, a few hours later for the West. The house burns down twice in one night, cleanly, to the second, and is never seen either time.
The catalogue
The tools were mostly junk, and the ingenuity was in knowing which piece of junk stood in for what. Almost none of it was the obvious object.
Fire was cellophane. Thunder was a suspended sheet of metal, shaken. Footsteps in snow were a box of cornstarch, kneaded so the granules ground against each other into a squeaky crunch. Rain was dried peas rattled in a wooden box. A creaking door was a small real door and its hinge, cut down and mounted on a portable frame the sound man could open on cue. Breaking glass was a handful of small metal scraps dropped on a board; a crash box — a container of crockery, scrap metal, and gravel — tumbled out the larger wrecks, the collisions and collapses. A stabbing was a knife driven into a head of cabbage. To open a bottle of champagne, a man pulled a wet cork with one hand and, with the other, popped a pricked balloon.
The famous galloping horse — the coconut shell — was general convention, but it was not the only way. At WXYZ in Detroit, where The Lone Ranger first rode out of the studio in late January 1933, the sound crew got their hoofbeats by pounding toilet plungers into a box of dirt, which gave the gallop a duller, earthier thud than shells on stone. The point was never fidelity to the real object. It was fidelity to the sound the ear expected, delivered on the exact beat of the line.
Fibber McGee’s closet
The single most famous sound effect in American radio was a pile of falling junk.
On Fibber McGee and Molly, an NBC comedy built around the married team of Jim and Marian Jordan, the running gag was a hall closet stuffed past capacity. Someone would open the door, and the entire contents would come down in a long, tumbling, clattering avalanche — cans, tools, cookware, a bowling pin, something that sounded suspiciously like a mandolin — that ran on far longer than seemed possible, cascade after cascade, until at last, when the audience thought it had finally stopped, a single small handbell went ting to signal the very bottom of the pile. Then McGee would sigh that he really had to get that closet cleaned out one of these days.
The avalanche was the work of NBC’s Hollywood sound men — Ed Ludes and Virgil Rhymer are among the names usually attached to it — who built it by hand each time from a fixed inventory of noisemakers spilled in sequence. One such build, recorded in a tribute to the show’s sound-effects man Manny Segal, ran to ten empty oil cans, a pair of skates, a snow shoe, a barrel of broken crockery, a bowling pin, boxes of kitchenware, a rake, an egg-beater, three cowbells, and a mandolin — set on a portable stand and sent tumbling on cue. The gag first fell open in March of 1940 and became such a fixture that over the show’s run the closet was opened well over a hundred times. It landed hard enough that “Fibber McGee’s closet” entered the language as a phrase for any space crammed with junk, which it still is, decades after the last person heard the actual sound.
What the ear could see
When the pictures came, they came fast, and the sound men followed the work to television. The film world had a kindred craft — later named Foley, after Jack Foley at Universal, who had been footstepping and rustling to picture since the late 1920s — and when sound arrived the studios recruited people with radio experience to build it. But something specific went out of the world with live radio drama.
The cellophane fire worked because the listener did the largest part of the labor. The sound man supplied a crackle and a roar; the listener supplied the flames, the heat, the fear, the height of the burning house, none of which any camera had to build because none of it existed anywhere but in tens of millions of separate imaginations, all lit at once by a man crushing a candy wrapper. A screen shows you a fire and you watch it. A radio hands you a crackle and you build the fire yourself, and a thing you build yourself is harder to forget.