Escape: An Appreciation

Why write about a seventy-year-old series from a "dead" medium? The answer is simple. The show known as ESCAPE still entertains, it grips, it keeps a listener fascinated. It can be spellbinding and leave you drained. Some of its stories are pre-sold classics of literature by Conrad, Conan Doyle, John Buchan and Stevenson. Its range is vast, and its production impeccable. As script editor John Dunkel surmised, the show came along in 1947 at just the right time for a group of talents who had mastered the singular craft of radio drama over the preceding decade. As he put it, “The people involved were simply excellent.”

CBS first envisioned ESCAPE as just another show given the green light for summer tryout status, with Fall season potential. What made it one of the most prized shows among radio enthusiasts was its excellence of production in all areas. Like Suspense, Gunsmoke and a select handful of other shows, it still works today because it was made by a group of above average talents committed to a discerning, adult audience.

Once heard, some of the ESCAPE stories were never forgotten. Early radio collector Skip Craig once met an old timer who had heard one of the still-missing shows, One Eighth Apache in its original airing in 1953 and spoke of it admiringly years later.

If nothing else, radio was a medium of wide variety, with its multiple formats of drama, comedy and music, serials, kid adventures, news and games. But there were some series that were a fascinating subset of radio fare that were ever-changing, that dramatized vastly different stories, locales, and with different casts each week.

There were many of these anthologies, including excellent ones like Favorite Story, that captured the attention because they were continuing series of standalone presentations without regular characters and plotlines. These shows remained popular because of the appeal and curiosity factor of anticipating something unique every week. ESCAPE always struck me as the pinnacle of this type of programming.

As an early collector of vintage radio starting in 1972, I developed an appreciation for what seemed the classiest of series. Even at a young age I could tell that certain shows seemed to boast outstanding production values and didn’t insult the intelligence. Suddenly much of TV began assuming a back seat in my growing passion for this medium called old-time radio.

I happily enjoyed a wide range of shows, from B-product like Strange Wills to lower rung detective shows like Barrie Craig, it was ultimately the classic adult radio shows -- Suspense, ESCAPE, Crime Classics, Spade, Marlowe, Gunsmoke, Frontier Gentleman, Dimension X -- that still resonate forty years later. These continue to bring more and more people into the hobby, and that stand the test of time in a vastly changed world.

ESCAPE has remained a favorite for me. It not only hired great actors I already admired from animation, like Bill Conrad, Hans Conried and Paul Frees, but its format was a stroke of genius. “Want to get away from it all?” What a hook. You were instantly grabbed by those teasers: “You are alone in a walled Arab town…”

More than anything ESCAPE reflected the admirably high standards of its first and greatest producer-director, William N. Robson. By the time the show arrived in 1947, Robson was a veteran of the medium. He was fiercely intelligent and in the opinion of several contemporaries, a little arrogant. He owned up to that, confessing “I am not one who suffers fools, and I can’t abide time wasters.” Robson was a born theatrical, possessing an innate sense of dramatic pace and an always surprising mix of melodrama and realism. He admitted that “actors and technicians either hate me, or they respect me. I admit I was tough. But to marshal a group of people to do something of quality you have to be tough.”

He had gained enough confidence to know he was a fine director, and his track record, earning Peabody awards for excellence five times, was unusually impressive.

Understandably, Robson considered radio’s Golden Age as the period between 1938 and 1945. It was in that era that he achieved so much, including his several award-winning documentaries. Robson had honed his talents and developed those high standards because of his years as a director of The Columbia Workshop. And Columbia was the network Robson championed. “There was great esprit de corps then. Bill Paley [CBS President] was relatively young, and he let us fill the many unsold timeslots and do what we wanted. We learned new things almost every day in the late 1930s. Learned as we went.”

The methods and techniques of studio recording, creating sound effects from scratch, developing new echo chambers, musical experiments, blending music with sounds and voices for ultimate dramatic effect: all this was developed to an artform there and gave Robson the intense training ground for his future success. He never enjoyed another show as much as his stunning wartime series The Man Behind The Gun, the culmination of all that his first decade had taught him.

He recognized that much of radio, like much of the movies, was B-grade filler even if it had the sheen of a fully professional production. Of his own work and that of his colleagues from the Workshop days, he aimed as high as possible, offering, “We would rather do a really good show than have a sponsor. I know that sounds sententious, but it’s how we all felt.”

And so, by the time he was assigned ESCAPE and another CBS series, The Doorway Of Life, Robson was a past master of the audio medium. In later years he could reflect on himself. “I used to disparage Orson Welles. I always thought he was overrated. [Looking back] I confess I was jealous of Welles. I was jealous of Corwin.”

While his other shows were easily categorized – Hawk Larabee was simply a cowboy drama, an early stab at the adult western, while Doorway was specifically about child psychology - ESCAPE was where Robson could truly have fun with all that he had learned. As he said, “By then we had all the skills.”

Robson occasionally dismissed ESCAPE as “just another Suspense, that’s what the network was after.” One big reason for the success of Suspense was its anthology nature. Again, no regular characters and always the promise of something fresh and top drawer with each tune in.

Robson was a firm believer in the medium’s unique ability to feed the imagination. He revealed “One thing I always tried for was what I called ‘cinematic narration’…where the narrator becomes [the equivalent] of the camera.” That is what Robson achieved week after week in his colorful ESCAPE shows, many of which had listeners riveted with apprehension and, in a show like the famous Three Skeleton Key, experiencing a palpable feeling of dread.

The selection and acquisition of material for ESCAPE’s stories was handled by, firstly, John Meston and then John Dunkel. Robson noted, “Their contributions were superb, and never did I disagree with them.” Robson signed off on the story then hired a tiny band of gifted writers, including Dunkel, to adapt the literary properties. Les Crutchfield (discovered near the end of the Columbia Workshop run), had a marvellous gift for word pictures and contributed an amazingly consistent run of quality scripts, like the great A Shipment of Mute Fate. The fine West Coast radio actors, names not known to the public, had top material with which to develop their vocal characterizations and they did not disappoint.

Robson then went to work with detailed rehearsals. “A director has to mold the show. I wanted realism.” His rehearsals were the direct opposite of Spier’s on Suspense . Robson said, “I believed in lots of rehearsal. It was an offshoot of the insecurity of youth.” It was only in the three years he hosted Suspense from 1956-59 did he feel he was able to take things much easier and rely on his long experience.

The ESCAPE actors he hired were a mix of names from Robson’s New York period, like Frank Lovejoy and Luis Van Rooten, and those Pacific Coast artists with whom he felt comfortable. Elliott Lewis and Barton Yarborough were from his Hawk Larabee series, and Bill Johnstone was a regular on The Doorway To Life. In the first nine months of ESCAPE, Robson was able to give the best anonymous actors in town challenging roles that were an actor’s dream…a cut above the B-style melodrama of the lesser shows that were their daily bread and butter.

Robson was able to boost a few talents up a notch in prestige: Paul Frees and Bill Conrad benefited in a big way from ESCAPE exposure, and their turns as the insistent Signature voice (“Fed up with shovelling snow?” or “Tired of the everyday grind?”) gave them great recognition factor. Robson noted, “I wanted talent and ability. And the actors I got were a small group of superb people who delivered.” One thing he sought were actors of endless flexibility, who could assume any dialect a story of foreign intrigue required.

Cy Feuer was the first musician contracted, and his scores were unforgettable. For Papa Benjamin he arranged an authentic sounding voodoo chant that was a mini masterpiece of jazz rhythms. He also originated the theme music that stayed with the series long after his departure, recognizable by its subtle borrowing of the menacing cue from Moussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.

When Feuer left, CBS staff musician Wilbur Hatch took over. He was another inventively versatile composer. The score he did for Drums Of The Fore And Aft is as evocative in its brief thirty minutes as any composed for a two-hour movie blockbuster. The ending where it becomes a wistful underscore as Erik Rolf delivers Kipling’s sad close, and then swells to a glorious and proud military finis is catch in the throat stuff. Hard to believe that productions of this quality were thought of as just another half hour of radio to be forgotten once heard.

The sound department at CBS was populated by dedicated artists who spent years plussing the network’s many radio dramas with subtle and ingenious sounds that added to the verisimilitude. Such people as Cliff Thorsness, Ross Murray and Ray Kemper created hundreds of realistic sounds, from cattle, submarines, destroyers, train journeys, gun battles, flying saucers, waterfronts, big city ambience and hundreds of starving ship’s rats.

As the show progressed the weekly high standard was impressive. Robson felt there were occasional duds, but he remained true to his code: “I always felt if it was worth doing, it was worth doing well.”

The scope of the show equalled that of the whole sweep of movies: spy sagas, occasional classics of literature, science fiction, westerns, horror, psychological drama. The latter was a Robson specialty, and he loved shows where he could crawl inside a person’s head to follow the troubled subconscious. A splendid example was the unsettling Confession by Algernon Blackwood, with the fears of a demobbed soldier suffering shellshock. The atmospheric feel of a post-war fogbound London was eerily achieved aided by a great Cy Feuer score. And it was one of the young William Conrad’s best performances.

Blackwood proved fine source material for ESCAPE. His great story of lycanthropy set in an off-kilter Welsh village, Ancient Sorceries, was another tale redolent of dread. A great piece of acting by another young player, Paul Frees, gave the show a touch of class. It was unsettling to have such evocative sound images of Wales or London planted in your head and then realize that this was in fact a group of actors standing around a couple of mikes in an L.A. studio.

A later example of the psychological was Present Tense written by James Poe, a friend of its star Vincent Price. This tale got into the mind of a murderer in a kind of time warp.

The ultimate example of this type of story was Robson’s own adaptation of the Civil War classic An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. In the brief time it takes to lynch a man, the victim’s mind flashes back, and we hear two alternating narrators elucidating his jumble of thoughts. The half hour snaps back to the opening as we realize it has been the memories of a man who is now dead.

This internal approach was later picked up by Antony Ellis for disturbing dramas like I Saw Myself Running, which deals with recurring nightmares, or A Study In Wax which has a brilliant performance by Stacy Harris as a man slowly losing his mind.

As the show continued, Robson left for Europe where in late 1949 he did a season of THIS IS PARIS from France. His assistant Norman Macdonnell, promoted to full director status in March 1948 and working closely with John Dunkel, contributed some superb shows. Macdonnell was another man meant for radio, and his productions were as strong in their own way as his mentor’s had been.

The format was set from the start and was as unique as the other great radio anthologies with unforgettable signatures, like long-time favorites The Whistler and The Mysterious Traveler…Escape’s hook, about getting away from the mundane routine, was one of the most effective and it varied only slightly in its seven years on the air.

A common complaint with latter-day fans is that the show was shifted by CBS willy nilly, cancelled, started up again and again, and forever resembled a show on standby. A show that almost never had a sponsor, possibly because the corporate mindset always felt more comfortable with repetition and recurring characters. But CBS must surely have regarded ESCAPE as a solid property that was always there in a pinch, sometimes as summer replacement material, sometimes an uninterrupted year’s programming.

By the end of the run, as the industry was slowly moving to tape operations, the show was still a quality production, even as the budget had incrementally shrunk over time. In the last years, the music by top composer Leith Stevens was now obviously recorded in advance and the shows were being assembled. Some of the final episodes have a somewhat canned sound, lacking the verve of those early live shows. As Paul Frees explained, there was always that pride in carrying off a live show, a healthy studio tension during the performance that kept everyone fully alert. As Frees put it, “You were under the gun, and you really had to deliver. We actors were like an insurance policy…if the director wanted B flat, you instantly gave him B flat.”

And yet even at the end when the prolific writing team of Fine & Friedkin had assumed the directing and production duties, ESCAPE could sound as fresh as ever with a delightful fantasy like Two and Two Make Four. This tale about a secret tunnel under the English Channel was as engaging as any in the show’s salad days.

Enjoy the series if you haven’t sought it out already. Many of the shows were lovingly restored in the early 1980s by Ken Greenwald and they sound as though you’re there in the control room. For almost fifty years, ESCAPE has been a show like Suspense, Gunsmoke and a few other classics: shows that have remained constantly popular examples of radio as the artform that died too soon.

For collectors who fall under the show’s spell, this log is intended as a listening guide. My hope is that it will instil a sense of appreciation for the talents of all who brought the series to life: its gifted actors (finally identified in this log by the roles they played), the musicians, sound effects specialists and, above all, its writers and directors.

KS
June 2020

REFERENCES

Escape: Classics by Elizabeth McLeod (Radio Spirits, 2012)

Escape: Essentials by Karl Schadow (Radio Spirits, 2015)

ESCAPE, The Story of Radio’s VAGABOND Phoenix by Stewart Wright (SPERDVAC Radiogram, pages 9-14, July 2013)

Interviews with William N. Robson: An Evening with William N. Robson by John Hickman (WAMU-FM, 1974); The Story of GUNSMOKE by John Hickman (WAMU-FM, 1976); The Golden Days of Radio, with Dick Bertel & Ed Corcoran (WTIC Hartford, 1976); unpublished interview by John Scheinfeld