Norman Corwin, Pioneer of Radio, Dies at 101

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/arts/norman-corwin-pioneer-of-radio-dies-at-101.html?hpw

October 19, 2011
Norman Corwin, Pioneer of Radio, Dies at 101
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Norman Corwin, one of the last living links to radio’s golden age, a producer and dramatist whose innovative use of sound effects and unusual narrative devices attracted new audiences to serious programming, died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 101.

His death was confirmed by Chris Borjas, his caretaker.

Mr. Corwin was a prolific writer and producer for CBS in the 1930s and ’40s, best known for his dramatizations of American history, vivid human-interest reports from abroad during World War II, adaptations of American literary works and dozens of radio plays.

One of his most celebrated broadcasts came eight days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when four American radio networks simultaneously carried “We Hold These Truths,” a kind of docudrama produced for the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, with performances by Orson Welles, James Stewart, Edward G. Robinson, Lionel Barrymore and Walter Huston.

The program, broadcast live from Hollywood, ended with a live speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House and a performance from New York of the national anthem by Leopold Stokowski and the NBC Symphony Orchestra.

“It needed brilliant craftsmanship to pack such a story into 50 minutes,” John K. Hutchens of The New York Times wrote in a review. “The craftsmanship was there, Mr. Corwin being both artisan and artist. He can take simple, colloquial speech and make it sing. He has a gift also for those devices that hold a script together and give it variety and pace.”

In this case, Mr. Corwin invented a news correspondent, played by Stewart, who traveled back in time to report on the Constitutional Convention and returned to the present to interpret current events.

During World War II Mr. Corwin delivered compelling reports from Britain and the Soviet Union in the series “An American in England,” produced by Edward R. Murrow, and “An American in Russia.”

Life magazine called him “radio’s top dramatic genius.” In 1944 The New York Post wrote, “He has earned the daring reputation of being the first to credit radio audiences with intelligence.”

On V-E Day, May 8, 1945, Mr. Corwin presented what may have been his most famous broadcast, “On a Note of Triumph,” a celebration of the Allied struggle for victory with a score by Bernard Herrmann.

“So they’ve given up,” Martin Gabel, the narrator, intoned. “They’re finally done in, and the rat is dead in an alley back of the Wilhelmstrasse. Take a bow, G.I. Take a bow, little guy. The superman of tomorrow lies at the feet of you common men of this afternoon. This is it, kid! This is the day!”

The broadcast and Mr. Corwin’s career provided the material for the film “A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin,” which won an Academy Award for best documentary short subject in 2006.

“In radio there was never a term equivalent to boob tube or couch potato,” Mr. Corwin told the reference work “World Authors, 1900-1950.” “The eye is so literal, whereas the ear makes a participant of the listener. The listener becomes the set designer, the wardrobe mistress, the casting director. You can listen to ‘Carmen’ on radio. Carmen in person may weigh 350 pounds, but to the listener she’s a beautiful, steamy lady with a rose in her teeth.”

Norman Lewis Corwin was born on May 3, 1910, in Boston and grew up there and in Winthrop, Mass. His father was a printer and engraver who had emigrated from London.

Determined to become a newspaper reporter, he sent out letters to 80 dailies in Massachusetts and, after lying about his age, was hired as a cub reporter at 17 by The Daily Recorder of Greenfield.

Within a month he was the paper’s sports editor, writing features and reviewing films on the side. He moved up to The Springfield Republican, where he became the paper’s lead writer of colorful features. When the paper was approached in 1932 by the radio stations WBZ in Boston and WBZA in Springfield to prepare a nightly 15-minute news report. Mr. Corwin, who spoke in a pleasing baritone, was handed the job.

In 1937 WQXR in New York accepted his proposal for a radio show of poetry readings and dramatizations, “Poetic License,” which ran for 40 weeks. The show came to the attention of executives at CBS, who put him to work producing cultural programs with Gilbert Seldes, including “Americans at Work” and “Living History.”

Soon he had virtual carte blanche at the network. As part of his series “The Pursuit of Happiness,” he presented Paul Robeson singing Earl Robinson’s cantata “Ballad for Americans,” the first performance of Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill’s “Ballad of Magna Carta,” and an adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benet’s poetry performed by Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester.

In 1945 he directed “The Undecided Molecule,” his play about a molecule that wants to determine its own destiny and that argues its case in the Court of Physio-Chemical Relations, presided over by Groucho Marx. Also in the cast were Robert Benchley, Vincent Price, Sylvia Sidney and Keenan Wynn.

“Fortunately for myself, radio was then in a period of relative freedom — freedom to experiment, freedom to speak, freedom from the vulgarity, venality and even cowardice that, in later years, was to blight the medium,” he told “World Authors.”

In 1947 he married Katherine Locke, a Broadway and film actress, who died in 1995. He is survived by their children, Anthony and Diane.

A liberal internationalist, Mr. Corwin grew disillusioned with radio as the chill of McCarthyism gripped the United States. He left CBS in 1949 after an argument over rights to his work and no longer worked in radio after 1955.

His politics made him an object of suspicion in the entertainment industry, which, as he later put it, “graylisted” him.

He wrote screenplays for less than memorable films like “Scandal at Scourie” (1953) with Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, “The Naked Maja” (1958) with Ava Gardner and Tony Franciosa, and “Madison Avenue” (1962) with Dana Andrews and Eleanor Parker.

His greatest Hollywood success came with his adaptation of “Lust for Life,” Irving Stone’s biography of van Gogh, played by Kirk Douglas. His screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award in 1957.

In 1959 his dramatization of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, “The Rivalry,” opened at the Bijou Theater on Broadway with Richard Boone as Lincoln and Martin Gabel as Douglas.

Mr. Corwin taught creative writing at the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts in Idyllwild, Calif., for many years and had been a writer in residence at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California since 1979.

In 1999 he produced a half-hour broadcast distributed by Public Radio International, “Memos to a New Millennium.” Walter Cronkite provided the introduction. The music was by the eminent film composer Elmer Bernstein.

“I’m governed by the potentialities of radio,” he told The New York Post in 1944. “Even in the best shows, they’re only dimly realized. Radio has given us, for the first time, a selective ear, just as the movies gave us a selective eye.”