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Fibber McGee and Molly

My very favorite series from the Golden Age of Radio. For nearly twenty years (starting in 1939), each episode's three segments combined endearing characters with often-dazzling wordplay, and in the breaks offered swing music and close-harmony singing. In other words, for a person of my eclectic tastes, each Fibber McGee and Molly is a very-nearly perfect half-hour of entertainment.

Even if you've never heard an episode of Fibber McGee and Molly, you probably know about its most famous running gag: the impossibly overstuffed hall closet. McGee would (for some unknown reason) momentarily forget the dangers of opening the closet door, wrenching it open just as Molly cried out, "No, McGee, don't open that door!" -- But an instant too late to stop the avalanche of junk which apparently reminded listeners at home of all the useless items they had stowed away in their own closets, attics, and garages.

The right combination

The radio couple Fibber and Molly were played by real-life married couple Jim and Marion Jordan. The obvious chemistry worked as beautifully as that of radio's other famous husband-and-wife teams (George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone.)

The McGee character was familiar to everyone in the show's suburban middle-class target audience. A citizen of mythical-but-familiar Wistful Vista (which was apparently in central Illinois), Fibber McGee was a know-it-all who never let the truth stand in the way of a good story. Mercurial and impulsive, McGee was more like an overgrown child than an irresponsible adult. We forgave his shortcomings, partly because the various projects he ultimately bungled had been well-meaning and intriguing, but also because we never doubted for an instant his absolute adoration of the long-suffering Molly. She was in every way his better half -- possessing all the patience, tolerance, and foresight that McGee lacked -- and while McGee would never admit that he depended on Molly to get him out of trouble, we never doubted for a minute that he knew it perfectly well.

The show's title spelled out two-thirds of the secret to the show's success. The remaining third was a brilliant writer named Don Quinn. Marion and Jim Jordan met Quinn in the course of their early travels up the ladder of radio success, and they very wisely recognized his extraordinary gifts and took him along with them. Quinn wrote virtually every word of Fibber McGee and Molly from its inception until the mid-1940s, when he took on the equally gifted Phil Leslie as a writing partner (ultimately turning the show over to Leslie).

Some people who worked on the show over the years have said that Quinn would keep everyone waiting for each week's script until the last minute, then he would barricade himself in his office with a pot of coffee and a huge plate of sandwiches, and a few hours later would emerge with a fresh, funny, and verbally dazzling script which rarely needed any revision. Since other succeesful radio shows had an entire team of writers working long days all week to complete a script, this sounds like the kind of story McGee himself would tell -- but many eyewitnesses support it. Apparently Quinn was the sort of Mozart-like genius to whom complete and complex works come in a sort of lightning-flash of inspiration.

Typical of the acrobatics Quinn would perform with the English language were the alliterative tongue-twisters that showed off the verbal talents of Jim Jordan -- even in this rare example where the stream of syllables briefly overwhelms him.

Sometimes downright weird

It's tempting to think of McGee as the very model of the square, corny family entertainment typical of its time. And, by and large, that is exactly what it was. But Don Quinn and Phil Leslie's humor often took turns into the surreal or even the macabre.

For example, attentive listeners noticed that every police station, post office, pool hall, and municipal building in Wistful Vista -- not to mention the Bon Ton Department Store -- were always identified as being "at the corner of 14th and Oak." That building must have either been a skyscraper on the scale of the Empire State Building (very odd for a small town) or else a doorway into some alternate universe.

But the classic example of Quinn/Leslie oddness was the running gag of Wallace Wimple being perpetually beaten black-and-blue by his hulking brutish wife (ironically nicknamed "Sweety Face"). Shocking as the spouse abuse may have been, it sometimes paled beside Wallace's plans for retaliation -- such as leaving the gas on in the house while "Sweety Face" slept. McGee would express alarm at this, saying "My gosh, Wimp, that could KILL her!" And Wimple would chuckle and say dreamily, "Yes...." It's a running joke that would never be accepted as family entertainment today.

When the show's humor was at its strangest, it presaged the surreal comedy of TV shows such as Green Acres and The Addams Family. And perhaps this is why Phil Leslie later wrote for both of those programs.

The McGees in Real Life: the Jordans

The McGees were supposed to be a typical middle-class American couple, embodying every positive trait of their class and culture. And in real life, the Jordans were exactly that.

They met as teenagers in their church choir in Peoria, Illinois. Singing together and making people laugh seemed to be a common bond: they hit it off at once and married in 1918.

They traveled together with a vaudeville act, one feature of which was a conversation between a grumpy old man and a cute little girl. Jim's grouch was a precursor of Fibber, and Marion's little-girl voice would eventually become Teeny, a perennial character on Fibber McGee & Molly. I have to confess that I'd listened to recordings of the show for years before I realized Teeny was Marion Jordan!

One of the classic confrontations between the short-tempered Fibber and the infuriating Teeny.

"The Johnson's Wax Program"

Johnson's Wax was not the sponsor throughout the entire run -- only for a mere 20 years. One running gag on the show was that their friend Harlow Wilcox, a salesman of wax products, would drop by the McGee home and quickly to steer the conversation -- ANY conversation -- onto the topic of Johnson's Wax and its endless virtues.

And we owe a continuing debt to the S.C. Johnson company, since some forward-looking soul in their corporate office preserved more than 700 of the show's original master recordings so we can enjoy them today.

Hiya, Throcky!

From the earliest days of the show, the distinctive voice and brilliant comic timing of Harold Peary were put to good use in memorable supporting roles. He played store clerks, doctors, waiters -- in other words, he was basically The McGee show's version of Jack Benny's Frank Nelson.

But fan response to Peary's appearances was so great that finally a permanent character was created for him: the McGees' short-tempered next-door-neighbor Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve. McGee called him "Throcky" and the two alternated between being best friends and worst enemies -- often in the span of only a few minutes. Basically birds of a feather, the two overgrown boys could conspire together to play a practical joke on someone, then immediately turn around and play them on each other. The character was such a hit with audiences that he became the central character of his own half-hour comedy program (The Great Gildersleeve) and thus one of mass media's first spinoffs.

Doc Gamble

Apart from the McGees, my favorite character on the show is Doctor Gamble, played by Arthur Q. Bryan.

Bryan's crisp, resonant baritone voice and expressive acting style made him one of the most accomplished and prolific actors of the Golden Age of Radio. He played minor but memorable characters in just about every drama series on the air, and then became a regular light-comedy fixture on Fibber McGee & Molly and The Great Gildersleeve.³ On one end of his impressive scale, he could play tragic and sinister dramatic roles on The Lux Radio Theatre -- and on the other end, he was the original voice (and physical model) of Elmer Fudd.

The "Doc Gamble" character was, like McGee, a loveable curmudgeon -- so the two traded good-natured insults even though they were clearly best friends. Here is a typical exchange of insults between the two, winding up the way it always did.

"Somebody bawl for Beulah?"

Many interesting performers appeared on the show over the years, one of the most intriguing being Marlin Hurt.

This clip from the show speaks for itself.

Did you hear the startled laughter from the studio audience when Beulah first spoke? That was because they had just discovered that the black woman they'd been hearing on the radio was a man! A white man!

Surprising? Yes. Racially insensitive? Well, yes. This was in the 1940s after all ... but Marlin Hurt's "Beulah" was at least a positive character: full of life and fun, generous and kind, and whole lot smarter than her command of the English language might suggest.

Beulah was an instant hit with radio audiences, so much so that the character was "spun off" into her own radio series -- which suffered catastrophe when Marlin Hurt died of a sudden heart attack on March 21, 1946. The McGee show, which usually ended on a big laugh and an up-tempo musical number, ended its March 26 episode with a loving tribute to Marlin and a slower, quieter closing tune.

A year later, the Beulah show was back on the air, now starring Bob Corley (another white man!) as Beulah. But this soon ended in favor a TV series -- and the move to a "visual medium" meant the network would have to finally cast (gasp!) an actual black woman in the role. And that is the strange tale of how Ethel Waters became the first African American to star in a comedy TV series.

And Bill Thompson as Everybody Else

Bill Thompson came to the show as a very young man but immediately proved himself a priceless member of the cast -- in fact, he was several actors rolled into one. In the course of twenty years he played Nick Depopulous, a Greek candy-shop owner; Horatio K. Boomer, a petty thief who sounded suspiciously like W.C. Fields; Wallace Wimple, the timid bird-watcher mentioned above (the one who lives in constant terror of his monstrous wife "Sweety Face"), and The Old Timer⁴, an impossibly old codger with a weird sense of humor.

Thompson's Wallace Wimple voice continued long after the McGee show was over -- as MGM's "Droopy Dog" cartoon character. You can also hear him as Smee, villainous sidekick to Captain Hook in Disney's immortal animated film of Peter Pan -- and while you're enjoying voice talent in Disney films, don't miss The Rescuers -- in which the hilarious Albatross is none other than Jim Jordan (in, alas, his final performance).

Ken Darby and the King's Men

In my opinion, it's musical genius Ken Darby who's the (pardon this pun) unsung hero of the show. He led, sang with, and arranged all the music for the vocal quartet called The King's Men (Darby sang bass with baritone Rad Robinson and tenors Bud Linn and John Dodson). The group sang clever novelty numbers (see below) on the program weekly for decades. Darby created the musical arrangement of "The Night Before Christmas" that was performed on the Christmas episodes of Fibber McGee & Molly for years.

During and after Fibber McGee & Molly, Darby composed and arranged music for dozens of movies, winning Oscars for three: The King and I, Porgy and Bess, and Camelot. He also created the Munchkin voices for The Wizard of Oz -- in fact that's Darby's voice as the Munchkin Mayor. But if you ask me, his greatest cinema work is for How the West Was Won, where he arranged stirring versions of traditional American tunes -- which were then performed by the magnificent voices of his Ken Darby Chorale.

All the rest of the music on the show was provided by the Billy Mills Orchestra, another contribution easily overlooked. I like them the best when they do swing-time versions of familiar non-swing tunes, such as this arrangement of "Scheherazade."

So when you put the King's Men and the Billy Mills Orchestra together -- and with a clever song to perform -- you get some of the best music from radio's Golden Age. Here they are together with a piece written by Billy Mills to celebrate another unsung hero of radio. It's called "I'm in Love with the Sound Effects Man." (WARNING: Once you get this tune in your head you may have trouble getting it out.)

Most obscure McGee trivia ever That ain't the way I heerd it 1There was even an attempt to turn the catch-phrase into a novelty song but it did not catch on. The song written by Billy Mills and called, naturally, "That Ain't The Way I Heerd It," was performed on the April 11, 1939 broadcast. go back That you, Myrt? 2Myrt is an "offstage" character -- but in fact we do hear her voice in the episode aired June 22, 1943. McGee seems as surprised by this as we are. go back The two worlds of Arthur Q. Bryan 3Another testament to Bryan's flexibility: even though the Gildersleeve show was a spinoff of the McGee show, Arthur Q. Bryan played different characters on them. He was Doc Gamble on McGee and the very different Floyd Munson on Gildersleeve. But he wasn't the only actor to do double duty on the two shows: Dick LeGrand, who was sometimes Ole the Janitor on the McGee show was a regular player on the Gildersleeve show as Peavey the Druggist. But perhaps the Gildersleeve show may have taken place in some strange parallel dimension anyway -- on the McGee show Gildersleeve was married (albeit unhappily) but on his own show Gildersleeve was not. Did Gildersleeve's famously foul temper finally get the best of him? go back Mr. Old Timer 4The long-running "Old Timer" character, also played by Cliff Arquette, was often called "Mr. Oldtimer" as if that was his name -- but in the episode aired January 29th, 1946 he admits that his name is "Rupert Blasingame" and that he is, for some odd reason, embarrassed by this. Typical strangeness for this character. go back

Links to other "Fibber & Molly" sites The very best McGee website is Al Girard's amazing tribute The Unofficial Fibber McGee & Molly Home Page ... ...but I also recommend the Wistful Vista site by Eric Wilson, a fan of "The Golden Age of radio" despite having missed it by even more years than I did! Perhaps the shortest -- but most enviable -- Fibber McGee & Molly presence on the web is the show's page on the web site for the Radio Hall of Fame. The Wikipedia article on the show has expanded over the years, and in fact now includes much information gleaned from the page you're reading now! I'm not sure how I feel about that. There's a very nice page about Gildersleeve at (naturally) www.greatgildersleeve.net. As with all other shows from radio's Golden Age, the best place to find episodes of Fibber McGee & Molly is through the amazing Digital Deli, the greatest repository of radio shows in the whole entire world. "Closet gag" BONUS Is it okay that the McGee show may be best remembered for the running joke of the impossibly overstuffed closet? It was, after all, a bit of low comedy in a show that was, by and large, high comedy. You decide. Meanwhile, enjoy this rare occasion on which the avalanche of detritus actually came in handy. While practicing to be an escape artist, McGee ends up bound hand and foot while a burglar searches the house. Here's what happens next: