An Interview with Peggy Webber - Part Three

My 97-year-old neighbor.

Peggy Webber: The way Orson Welles made Macbeth… I had to go downstairs and record the dialogue. And then later I had to act to my own words on a loudspeaker. I had to mouth everything, which upset me. I loved to be spontaneous with things I was doing, but in this case I had to match what was coming out of the speaker. Usually you want to take a pause here and there and do different things. So that worried me very much, but he said it was fine.

He had me work for him for years dubbing everything in Macbeth. Dubbing the children, dubbing the ladies in waiting, and dubbing the witches’ voices. Jeanette Nolan was Lady Macbeth and I was Lady Macduff, but Jeanette had gone back to Montana with her husband so I had to do her screams and dub things for her. I was doubling our voices. He had me working on it for almost three years.

Kliph Nesteroff: Three years is a long time to be working on one film.

Peggy Webber: If he loved you, he loved you and he didn’t bother you. He would say, y’know, make it louder or something, but that was all.

Kliph Nesteroff: You worked with Jack Webb before he created Dragnet. You were on radio shows like Escape and This is Your FBI with him.

Peggy Webber: Oh, yes, for a long time. I’ll tell you how I met him. Julie London. His future wife. Julie and I were the girls on That Brewster Boy. It was a special episode where they introduced the Brewster Boy’s girlfriends. Julie and I were playing the parts together and during the break this young guy with red socks and a sweater came to the platform where we were. He looked like a college boy. Julie said, “Oh, this is my friend” and introduced me. Later they were sitting out in the empty auditorium and they were kissing and making out. They were pretty much in love. Later that night when I got home, my mother had the radio on. And this voice was on the air. It was a program that Jack Webb recorded in San Francisco before he came here.

And I said, “Why, that’s the guy I met today! And he’s doing what I always try to do.” I had learned that people were sick of the phoniness of the actors on radio. They wanted realism. I didn’t know “method” or anything, I was just determined to make everything sound real. And that’s what Jack liked. He noticed that when we worked together on the [This is Your] FBI show. In fact, we worked together two or three times on it. He called me over after one of them and said, “Can you stay until midnight?” I said, “Sure, why?” He said, “I’m recording a test pilot for a show I’m calling Dragnet and I’d like you to do one of the parts.”

He wanted me to sign a contract with him that night. I felt sorry for him. I thought, “I don’t want him to have to pay me money if he can’t get the show sponsored or can’t get it on the air.” I said, “Jack, I’ll work for you any time, we don’t need a contract.” And he got very angry. He didn’t like that. His eyes turned red and he shoved the contract back in his pocket and turned away and left. I thought, “Oh, I really hurt his feelings or something.” Ten days went by and I hadn’t heard from him. I phoned his secretary and said, “Jack told me he wanted to use me and I just wanted to call and tell him that I’m available if he still wants me.” About ten minutes later he phoned back and said, “Of course I want you!” And he told his writers that he wanted me to have a regular part, so they created the character Ma Friday for me.

Kliph Nesteroff: Was he known for having a bad temper?

Peggy Webber: Oh, yes, but nobody paid any attention to it (laughs). He would scream. He had his sound effects crew and they would record everything downtown at the actual municipal buildings. Footsteps going up the stairs at the justice building or whatever. He wanted everything to be perfect. I did too. We’d be preparing the show and he’d be screaming and hollering. One day we were all sitting around the table and everybody was [shielding their face], “Oh, I wish he’d stop!” Virginia Gregg looked over at us and shrugged, “Jewish, y’know.” He wasn’t Jewish (laughs).

Kliph Nesteroff: What about his directorial style? He wanted everybody to speak in that style… maybe not exactly monotone, but without inflections…

Peggy Webber: He said he wanted it to be as if the listener were overhearing a conversation. He didn’t want it to be projected. He wanted it to sound like a conversation that you would eavesdrop on.

Kliph Nesteroff: Would he stop an actor if they emoted too much?

Peggy Webber: Yes.

Kliph Nesteroff: He’d tell them to bring it down a notch.

Peggy Webber: Yeah. And he said he would never use William Conrad. And as soon as I left for Japan he hired him! I’d been working with Bill for years and whenever I mentioned his name Jack would go, “Oh, he’s one of those people who want to hear themselves talk!”

Kliph Nesteroff: William Conrad could do a voice that sort of had that Orson Welles type command…

Peggy Webber: Oh, exactly, he wanted to sound like that. I did his very first radio show with him. It was Jane Eyre where he played [Edward] Rochester and I played Jane. And I thought he was wonderful. He was in his army uniform. He hadn’t been released yet from the army. After that we did a lot of shows together.

Kliph Nesteroff: He was incredible as an announcer and he was great playing heavies.

Peggy Webber: He was very good. Very good. But I recommended him to Jack Webb and Jack said, “He’s listening to himself!” I did that show with Bill Conrad… what was it… the one that was so famous…

Kliph Nesteroff: Escape?

Peggy Webber: Escape. I did a lot of Escapes. There were about three different shows produced by CBS that Bill and I did.

Kliph Nesteroff: Did you do Escape live?

Peggy Webber: Yeah.

Kliph Nesteroff: Did you have to do it twice? One broadcast for the east coast and one for the west coast?

Peggy Webber: Yes, sometimes. I often did that, but I think they timed it so the broadcast would just air at the correct time in New York.

Kliph Nesteroff: It would just air at 5pm here and 8pm there or something.

Peggy Webber: I think so. New York was more important. Out here nobody cared.

Kliph Nesteroff: Eventually they stopped that practice when tape came in, right? Seems like a lot of work to have to do the same broadcast twice in the same night.

Peggy Webber: The first time that I ever did that [two broadcasts of the same show in one night] it was This is Your FBI. And later soap operas I would do it two times. Once in a while on a CBS show, but not too often. NBC we had to do that all the time - two shows.

Kliph Nesteroff: So it was more common at NBC to do two broadcasts, one for each coast, than at CBS…

Peggy Webber: [This is Your] FBI, for instance, was ABC, but they were using the NBC building. It was an ABC program. [This is Your] FBI was directed by Jerry Devine who became my close friend. He hired Sean McClory because of me. He didn’t know Sean and he hired him to work on his shows. I was [later] married to Sean McClory.

Kliph Nesteroff: So, ABC was using the NBC studio… Was that because of the consent decree? NBC had to sell off the NBC Blue Network and it became ABC.

Peggy Webber: It was just after war time.

Kliph Nesteroff: Did they not have their own studio yet? They eventually had a studio right around the corner on Vine Street.

Peggy Webber: They didn’t have one yet. It was NBC totally. Huge building.

Kliph Nesteroff: Did ABC ever have their own radio studio in Hollywood?

Peggy Webber: I think they worked out of KHJ for a while. I did Sherlock Holmes for them and then again later when it came to NBC.

Kliph Nesteroff: Wasn’t it on Mutual? I love Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. I loved the chemistry that they had as Sherlock Holmes and Watson.

Peggy Webber: Yes, yes. They’d tease each other. When they weren’t on the air, they’d be having arguments. You know who else did that? Barrymore. Lionel Barrymore and Lew Ayres. I worked that show.

Kliph Nesteroff: Dr. Kildare.

Peggy Webber: They did the same thing. They kept teasing each other, joking about, and insulting each other (laughs).

Kliph Nesteroff: Well, with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce… Here they are basically doing a drama, but they were like a comedy team.

Peggy Webber: They were. They were. They loved each other and they had a good time and that relaxed the cast. It was good.

Kliph Nesteroff: The radio show and the many movies they made. I just love their chemistry.

Peggy Webber: Well, Edna Best [producer of the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes] kept her word and put me on that show. I had to work hard to get good parts because the first things she had me do were extraneous voices. That came out of my very first audition in Hollywood and then she began to trust me. She divorced Herbert Marshall and when she married Nat Wolff, he began using me all the time. I worked a great deal at the time for him.

Kliph Nesteroff: Nat Wolff passed away in 1959. It’s incredible you remember all these details. Here we are in 2023 talking about things that occurred over eighty years ago. I want to ask you more about what this neighborhood was like back then. You first arrived in Hollywood in 1942. When you first arrived, you got a job at Sears in the shoe department?

Peggy Webber: Oh, I hated it!

Kliph Nesteroff: Where was Sears?

Peggy Webber: It was down on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Kliph Nesteroff: Oh, it’s still there. That big building by Western Avenue that’s all boarded up?

Peggy Webber: Yes, it looks horrible (laughs).

Kliph Nesteroff: And you also worked at a Thrifty Drugstore on Hollywood Boulevard?

Peggy Webber: Yes, that was my first job when I arrived here. My mother and I had no money. My father had died in the hospital after a long illness so there was no money. I sold our old car and got, I think, ninety-nine dollars for it and that was all our money when we came to Hollywood. I got us an apartment above Sunset Boulevard for twenty-seven dollars a month or something. I got the job at Thrifty’s so we could pay the rent. This was right before I landed my audition at CBS.

Kliph Nesteroff: Hollywood Boulevard has a lot of despair these days, but you have mentioned that drug addicts used to wander the Boulevard and come into the drugstore, acting sketchy, all the way back in 1942.

Peggy Webber: Oh yeah, it was awful. I was only 16, you know, and I had never seen people like this. The women were all horrid looking with wounds in their legs and everything. I would have to wait on them and they were all crazy and couldn’t talk right. It was so scary. But at least it helped us pay the rent.

Kliph Nesteroff: When people think about drug addicts, they think of it as a modern problem. They never think of that as having existed on Hollywood Boulevard in the 1940s…

Peggy Webber: Oh, but it did. It did. It was war time and people were crazy.