Fibber McGee and Molly

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Fibber McGee and Molly

Out of Fibber McGee's famous closet came a 24-year radio run whose success and innovation were matched by few broadcasters in the 1930s and 1940s. The series helped forge the genre later called "situation comedy"; it also invented the concept of the "spin-off," with not one but two popular supporting characters winning their own series in the 1940s. Through it all, Jim and Marian Jordan continued as Fibber and Molly, their program setting both ratings records and a patriotic example during the war years, its stars perhaps more deserving of the title "beloved" than any other performers of network radio's glory days.

The Jordan's early broadcasting careers were inauspicious at best. The couple were already battle-worn vaudevillians when, on a bet, they performed on a Chicago radio station in 1924. But their obvious talent soon won them their own music and patter series. By the early 1930s, Jim and Marian Jordan had hosted or appeared on numerous local music and banter programs; their work gradually evolved into a series that would finally win them a spot on a national NBC hookup.

For Smackout, the Jordans teamed up with Don Quinn, the gifted writer with whom they would collaborate for more than 15 years. In the new series, the couple played multiple roles, among them the proprietors of a depression-era grocery always "smack out" of everything. An existing 1931 recording reveals that Marian perfected her "Teeny" character, the precocious adolescent she would continue to portray when Smackout gave way to Fibber McGee and Molly in 1935.

After years of work, it was undeniably the "big break" for the Jordans and writer Quinn. From Chicago, Fibber McGee and Molly was broadcast nationwide over the NBC network on April 16, 1935 to middling reviews; the premiere show was an uneasy mix of swing music and comedy segments in which Molly was an unadulterated battle-ax who spoke in a thick Irish brogue, and Fibber was a tale-spinning loudmouth who more closely resembled his Smackout character Uncle Luke than the character the nation would come to know as Fibber McGee. Yet the series became a moderate success, at least winning time to develop its style and characters. Within a year, Quinn and the Jordans had shaped the characters into the warmer, funnier personas they would inhabit for the rest of their careers.

The scripts were pure corn, with each episode revolving around the thinnest of plots. Fibber remained a big-talking but inept spinner of yarns; Molly was his long-suffering but big-hearted companion. The couple had no obvious source of income; most of their Tuesday night adventures took place in the McGee home at 79 Wistful Vista, with a company of popular supporting characters parading through the house for brief appearances. Even announcer Harlow Wilcox was made a character, his job being to work in a clever plug for sponsor Johnson's Wax. Many of the supporting characters were played by Bill Thompson, a genuine vocal acrobat who brought life, among others, to "Wally Wimple," a perpetually henpecked husband whose every syllable bespoke his suffering; and the "Old Timer," a talkative curmudgeon whose catchphrase "That ain't the way I hear'd it!" became national slang by 1940.

In the late 1930s, the series weathered a crisis that threatened its very existence. Marian Jordan was forced off the show for health reasons in November, 1937; her hiatus ultimately lasted 18 months. Fans and historians have spent the intervening decades debating the true nature of her absence: press accounts at the time said only Marian had been sent to a "sanitarium" for a "rest," while fans have long whispered she had actually suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1998, radio historian John Dunning, citing an impeccable but anonymous source, revealed that Marian was actually battling alcoholism during her absence. The show limped along without her under the title Fibber McGee and Company. Marian—and Molly—returned on April 18, 1939, her reappearance drawing both press attention and a huge ovation from the studio audience.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, the series' popularity simply exploded. Paired with Bob Hope's new NBC series on Tuesday night, Fibber McGee and Molly suddenly found itself shooting to the very top of the ratings chart—part of a late-1930s spate of new radio hits that included stars such as Hope, Red Skelton, and Edgar Bergen. One of the Jordans' supporting cast proved so popular during this period that he was given his own show: broadcasting's first "spin-off" was The Great Gildersleeve (1941), in which Hal Peary reprised his role of bombastic-but-lovable Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve, who had delighted audiences for several years as Fibber's ever-feuding next-door neighbor.

Fibber's famous closet was opened for the first time on March 5, 1940, in a sound effects extravaganza in which years' worth of piled-up junk came pouring out to the delight of the audience; the oft-repeated gag became one of the best known in broadcast history.

The series was one of the first to go for all-out flag waving upon the outbreak of war on December 7, 1941; two days later, Marian Jordan may have uttered the first broadcast joke of World War Two (Gale Gordon's Mayor LaTrivia tells Molly he's shopping for a globe. "You want a globe with Japan on it?" Molly asks. "Then you better get one quick!"). The series almost weekly featured patriotic themes during the war years; an April, 1943 program in which Fibber buys and then gets sick from black market meat is a perfect exam-ple—forceful without being preachy, and very funny. The McGees even took in a boarder at mid-war, opening their home to war-plant worker Alice. By February, 1943, Fibber McGee was drawing record ratings—quite a feat considering a significant percentage of the population was off fighting the war!

The series suffered a major hit during this period, when actor Bill Thompson joined the service. The slack, however, was taken up in large part by the appearance of the McGee's feisty maid Beulah: a giggly, vivacious—and African-American—bundle of energy whose catchphrases "Somebody bawl fo' Beulah?" and "Love that man!" became two of the most popular slang phrases of the war. The character's popularity only increased when the audience learned the black female Beulah was actually portrayed by a white man—actor Marlin Hurt, who became so famous in the role that he, too, was given his own series. Beulah premiered in 1945; upon Hurt's sudden death the next year, it became the first radio comedy to feature a black actress in a starring role—perhaps making up somewhat for the unapologetic caricature which had first given the series life.

The McGees' ratings suffered only slightly after the war, but the late 1940s proved more troublesome. Bob Hope never recaptured the overwhelming success of his war-years tours of service camps; the entire NBC Tuesday schedule suffered somewhat as Hope's ratings fell. By 1950, the previously obscure CBS sitcom Life with Luigi was besting Hope's ratings. But the biggest threat was television: the new medium's first real sensation—Milton Berle's Texaco Star Theatre —was slotted on Tuesday night, directly opposite Hope and the McGees. Fibber McGee and Molly performed impressively against long odds, but NBC radio's Tuesday night glory days were clearly over.

By then it barely mattered; the series had long ago crossed the line from popular entertainment to American institution. The Jordans stayed with NBC when many of the chain's top comedians bolted to CBS in the 1948-'49 talent raids; writer Quinn departed in 1950. Longtime sponsor Johnson's Wax dropped the series the same year; later sponsors included Reynolds Aluminum (which used its commercial time to introduce a revolutionary new product—Reynolds Wrap!) and Pet Milk. In 1953, with network radio dying, the Jordans gave up their weekly series and embarked on a nightly 15-minute version of Fibber McGee and Molly ; this ran four years. The McGees were still on the air performing short segments on NBC's innovative Monitor series into 1958 and 1959.

By then the "golden age" of radio was long over; the Jordans' refusal to appear in a television version of their creation virtually guaranteed failure upon its premiere in 1958. Marian Jordan died in 1962; Jim lived another quarter century. They had set a decent, honest example for their audience during the era of depression and war; they had also invented and honed many of the formats and techniques broadcast writers and comedians utilize to this day. The phrase "Fibber's Closet" may be a distant memory, but the McGee's legacy is alive and well.

—Chris Chandler