RADIO SALARIES (THE LISTENER'S TONQUE)

Sometime in the 1970s my second wife found a huge stack of a magazines from the 1930s called RADIO STARS and gave them to me on my birthday. The vintage magazines went into storage in 1997. Flash forward to 2010, when I was forced by a house fire to move to this new place I'm in. Damn, that means going through boxes of stuff, sorting through aging material of every type possible, choosing what to keep here and what to send off to join my lifetime stash of eclectic acquisitions.

Doing this, I came upon a Xerox I made of the story below and immediately began to type it, letter by letter. Suddenly I found myself channeling the writer with each tap of the keyboard. I was there--in the ambiance of the times, several years before I was born. New York and Los Angeles were the media centers of the US. And I felt I was there, digging the happenings, trying to imagine what these people were like and wondering what they and their programs sounded like. Below is article is about radio 80 years ago, when it was only ten years old, way back, when "Big Bucks" were humungously huge. So let's go back in time . . .

Maybe you don’t believe radio is the highest paying field in the world.

You will, after reading this.

By Jack Foster, Radio Editor, New York World Telegram

Will Rogers (below) made his last commercial radio appearance on CBS with The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air and an amusing situation developed. To put the moral first: His pride was greater than the $7,600 he would receive for the last two of his contracted broadcasts. And so he resigned, resigned because he was cut off the air at the end of six minutes to chatter on his second program.

You see, Mr. Rogers had been signed for four microphone appearances from Los Angeles at $3,800 each. Well, the sponsor felt that six minutes time would be amusing, but that if he strung on he would destroy the tempo of the half hour. That’s exactly what happened on the first program when Will spoke more wordily than well. And following this initial performance he was asked to submit a manuscript so that he might be clocked. No, he said; this would be impossible. He preferred to speak extemporaneously. Therefore, the sponsor before this second broadcast instructed the California announcer to clip him off on top of a laugh if he exceeded his six minutes., well enough, but it wasn’t until he reached home that his best friends told him what had happened. And was he mad! He was through.

It was a strange situation, wasn’t it, in which the employee wanted to work harder than he was paid for and the employer would have nothing of it. Maybe radio stars don’t know anything about money.

Don’t they? Well, that eminent Scotsman, Sir Harry Lauder ought to. And apparently his celebrated Scotch instincts did not desert him when he went about signing contracts for the air because, he too, received several of those $15,000-for-fifteen-minutes assignments. But here is a fact that never has been printed: One of those $15,000 checks he turned over to a Scottish relief organization of New York without a word, least of all to the press.

Will Rogers and Sir Harry are tops so far as salaries for a single radio broadcast is concerned. George Engles, of the National Broadcasting Co., did hold out for $25,000 for a single broadcast by the eminent Polish pianist, Ignace Paderewski, the only great musician who never has broadcast in America, but he found no buyers.

Another unusual wage arrangement is that under which Graham McNamee (right) works. The original radio idol, Mr. McNamee, you might suppose, would receive a huge weekly pay check. But this is by no means the case. The fact is, his salary, which is little more than a retainer, is said to be about $100 a week. Here is how he makes the money that enables him to live in a luxurious apartment in the upper West Side Manhattan:

For each commercial program that he announces—and he has three at present—he receives $250. This, you see, amounts to $39,000 a year. For making Universal news reels he earns $75,000 a year. Altogether, then, even though lots of listeners believe he has passed the peak of his popularity, this is a greater income than he has receive d at any previous period of his career.

He never, you know, was paid a penny, aside from traveling expenses, for his description of sports and other national events. These he covered solely as a means of increasing his prestige, by keeping his name on the listener’s tongue, and they do say that the listener’s tongue said lots about him following the last Sharkey-Schmeling bout broadcast. (This video is like a reverse-karaoke trip, allowing you to announce along. There are other versions that feature German announcer, but no McNamee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcxYoN6-roA ) And by the way, do you know who pays for a fight broadcast? Well, the National Broadcasting Co, gives the Madison Square Garden Corp. $5,000 for the privilege of radioing an important contest. If it can, the NBC then sells the fight to a sponsor at the usual commercial rates plus the $5,000. This was done to the American Tobacco Co., you will recall, in the Sharkey-Schmeling fisticuffs. If, however, the NBC is unsuccessful in bartering the bout, it goes ahead with the broadcast, bearing all expenses itself.

Still another unusual salary arrangements, stranger than Graham McNamee’s, is that under which Arthur Tracy, the Street Singer, functions. Mr. Tracy has been going the rounds of the local New York stations without any great luck until he met up with Ed Wolfe, as booking agent and former manager of Vincent Lopez. Well, Mr. Wolfe saw the possibilities in the Jewish troubadour, signed him under a five-year contract with the guarantee that he would earn $150 a week at the end of a year and he would be entitled to a third of his salary. At the end of six months the Street Singer actually was averaging $52,000 a year and an attempt was made, though unsuccessfully, to break away from Mr. Wolfe.

On the same Columbia network sings Bing Crosby, (below) and his exact monetary status is only known to those in intimate radio circles. When Mr. Crosby came to New York several years ago he tried to induce the National Broadcasting Co. to pay him $150 a week, but they would have none of his type of singing. So he returned to California, sang in the Cocoanut Grove, a Los Angeles night club, earned considerable of a reputation for his boop-boop-a-dooping and returned a year and a half ago to Manhattan to try radio again.

This being a period when so-called trick and personality singers were the vogue, the Columbia Broadcasting System was eager to sign him. The salary figure given to the press was $1,500. But, the fact is, Columbia guaranteed him only $350 a week. However, he was soon hired by a commercial sponsor at $2,500 a week and shortly won a vaudeville contract at a salary something above this.

Now that Bing has made good he has returned to Los Angeles. It paid him to come to New York and will pay him to return to the home town. For they are counting heavily on him becoming a moving picture star. And, if what a film executive tells me is on the up and up, he has signed a most amazing contract. He will receive, they say, $300,000 for three movies to be made within a period of five years, the first of which will be The Big Broadcast. His theme song was not poorly chosen—“The gold of the day.”

Then there’s the story of Virginia Rea, whom you probably know best as Olive Palmer. Miss Rhea was receiving about $1,500 a week for the two or three songs she offered on the Wednesday night Palmolive Hour. But when time came for the renewal of contracts last fall she demanded $1,750, and Frank Munn, Paul Oliver to you, was after an increase, too. Well, the sponsor wasn’t sure he wanted to continue the series, anyhow, and when Miss Rea’s request came before the board of directors—of course, it may have been only a coincidence—but a decision was made there and then to drop these broadcasting activities. And Miss Rea’s dainty soprano was entirely off the air until July, when she signed for one series with Paul Whiteman and another with a commercial program.

But I have rambled on abominably long in telling you these stories, and I’ve amplified only a few of the notes on my desk. I haven’t told you about the Boswell Sisters (right), who receive $1,800 a week on the air and $4,000 to $5,000 a week on the stage; about Guy Lombardo, $1,500 on the air and $5,000 in vaudeville; about Eddie Cantor, $3,500, who wants the ante raised when he returns from picture making; about Morton Downey, $3,000 a week when he is on the air; about Harry Richman. $3,000; about Lawrence Tibbett, $4,000; or about Mme. Frances Alda, $4,000 for each of six broadcasts.

Yes, I must have a word about Mme. Alda. She had been signed, the studio legend goes, for $3,000 on each of those happily remembered Puccini Opera programs. But on the day before her first broadcast she announced that, if you asked her, her salary ought to be $1,000 higher. Well, there was nothing to do to meet here request. He picture had been published widely in the press, and the program could not go on without her. The series would cost $225,000 anyhow, and so, I suppose, an extra thousand here and there didn’t make a difference.

$1.00 in 1932 had about the same buying power as $14.79 in 2010. Which means that every thousand bucks back then, in the days before income tax, was worth $14,790. The 25 grand mentioned above was worth $369,750 today. My favorite example are those 15 big ones for a quarter-hour. That’s a 15-minute gig that paid $221,400 ... or, $885,600 an hour. Minus the infernal lights, wardrobe, makeup and Hi-Def to put up with, Seacrest and you'all AFTRA brothers and sisters.