An Interview with Peggy Webber - Part Four

My 97-year-old next door neighbor.

Kliph Nesteroff: We can look through your window and see Sunset and Vine where you were doing radio shows at the NBC studio way back in 1942.

Peggy Webber: Yes, if you go out on the street here you can really see it.

Kliph Nesteroff: A few blocks east of it was Columbia Pictures. You met Harry Cohn around that time.

Peggy Webber: Oh, he was (laughs)…

Kliph Nesteroff: He was known for being crass.

Peggy Webber: Mel Ferrer was new in Hollywood. He was an established director in radio in New York and he had taken over a group of singers from one of the universities, very famous, and he had done a variety show with them that had won an award. And that attracted Cohn. He thought since he won an award in New York he would put him under contract at Columbia. Harry Cohn was the head honcho and the one-man show. Mel was going to direct a movie - Girl of the Limberlost. But Harry Cohn wasn’t about to listen to Mel Ferrer after he had him under contract. I was playing the lead in the radio version of Girl of the Limberlost so Mel would come across the street from Columbia and sit and watch me do the radio show.

He stopped me one day. He said, “If you would like to take the screen test, I’ll coach you, because I think you should play the lead in my movie.” I was dumbfounded, y’know. I was going to school at USC and he arranged to meet me when I finished my classes at two in the afternoon or something. I started at eight in the morning and had to take street cars all the way to USC. But anyway, I was brought to the studio at two in the afternoon and he would take me down to the juice bar and tell me which juices I should be drinking. Because Ferrer was a fanatic on health. He was like a father to me. My father was ill when I was eight years old, so I never really had a father. I felt like I could depend on Mel. He’d tell me the truth, “You gotta do this,” “You gotta do that,” and I believed him. Anyway, I’m going to write about it sometime and you’ll read it.

Kliph Nesteroff: You worked with John Garfield.

Peggy Webber: Oh, that was the Ken Murray Show. It was a variety show where the audience had to guess whether it was the real person behind a screen or not. So on a couple of those I worked with John Garfield. I played Ida Lupino in one of them and they had to guess whether I was the real person. That helped me become well-known more than any other show. I was playing that old lady… the English lady… I can’t think of her name right now… I did this English lady and it helped make me famous because the audience thought I was her.

Kliph Nesteroff: A list of the voices you were doing at that time… You did impressions of Billie Burke, Maria Ouspenskaya, Marjorie Main, Barbara Stanwyck…

Peggy Webber: Yes.

Kliph Nesteroff: Barbara Stanwyck - now that’s a hard voice to do.

Peggy Webber: Yes, she only had a few mannerisms. Later I had to do her voice on a television show where they were dubbing her voice. I forget who the hostess was on it… a very famous actress herself… she’d swish through the door…

Kliph Nesteroff: Oh, Loretta Young.

Peggy Webber: Yes, Loretta Young. I was playing opposite Dane Clark and he was playing opposite Barbara Stanwyck. So I had to learn to do her voice. I had to watch her movies and watch what little mannerisms she had so I could sound like her.

Kliph Nesteroff: Marjorie Main is an easy one because she was very broad…

Peggy Webber: An easy one, yes.

Kliph Nesteroff: A low voice.

Peggy Webber: Yes, I haven’t done that kind of work for years. I stopped doing that around the time I married Sean McClory on March 17th, 1983. He was from Ireland so he said this way he’d always remember when our anniversary was - St. Patrick’s Day.

Kliph Nesteroff: The Ken Murray Show paid you five hundred dollars for each impersonation?

Peggy Webber: Yes.

Kliph Nesteroff: You were paid for each impersonation rather than for each show?

Peggy Webber: Well, I only did one impersonation per show.

Kliph Nesteroff: Oh, I see. That’s still pretty good money for 1940s radio.

Peggy Webber: It was.

Kliph Nesteroff: And then you did the Harold Lloyd Comedy Theatre.

Peggy Webber: Who?

Kliph Nesteroff: Harold Lloyd.

Peggy Webber: Carol?

Kliph Nesteroff: Harold.

Peggy Webber: Carol who?

Kliph Nesteroff: Harold Lloyd.

Peggy Webber: Harold Lloyd! Oh, yes! I was a regular on the Harold Lloyd show. I played all the bit parts, the comedy stooge parts, on that show.

Kliph Nesteroff: Was he just a host that introduced the show?

Peggy Webber: No, he played some of the stuff. He liked me and I liked him. He was a wonderful man. When I was thirteen Tyrone Power was my favorite movie star. I thought he was so handsome. I just loved him. He starred on an episode of The Harold Lloyd Comedy Theatre and it was the one show I missed. I didn’t have a part on it!

Kliph Nesteroff: It’s an odd idea for a radio show, isn’t it? Most people think of Harold Lloyd as a visual comedian…

Peggy Webber: Well, we had a live audience for the show.

Kliph Nesteroff: But we don’t think of him as being on the radio. He wasn’t famous for his voice.

Peggy Webber: That was maybe 1949. TV was beginning to come in. Did you know I created Our Miss Brooks? They stole it from me. It was my show. I called it Oh Miss Tubbs and I cast Verna Felton as the teacher. I had John Brown as the principal. Do you know who that is? John Brown, the comedian?

Kliph Nesteroff: I don’t know.

Peggy Webber: Oh, you must! If you wrote a book about comedy you have to know him!

Kliph Nesteroff: Well, tell me.

Peggy Webber: Oh, he was fantastic! He was on the Life of Riley radio show…

Kliph Nesteroff: Oh, okay, yes, he played the mortician Digger O’Dell.

Peggy Webber: Yes! Digger O’Dell.

Kliph Nesteroff: Very funny, monotone delivery, morbid puns.

Peggy Webber: Yes.

Kliph Nesteroff: Very funny.

Peggy Webber: Just great. So he was on my show and Arthur Q. Bryan was on it as the boyfriend.

Kliph Nesteroff: Arthur Q. Bryan, the voice of Elmer Fudd.

Peggy Webber: Yes, he played the janitor and Verna Felton was the teacher. Jane Morgan was the roommate.

Kliph Nesteroff: What channel was that on?

Peggy Webber: W6XAO.

Kliph Nesteroff: So this was before television even existed. W6XAO was an experimental station.

Peggy Webber: Yes, it was the start of television - around 1945.

Kliph Nesteroff: Was it the first television station in the United States?

Peggy Webber: Yes, W6XAO. Don Lee.

Kliph Nesteroff: These were the first TV broadcasts in the history of Hollywood.

Peggy Webber: Yes. And on the day we were to broadcast this television show on W6XAO, Norman Corwin asked me to play the lead on a radio show. This was right after he won some award for making the greatest radio show of all time and here he was offering me the greatest part! And I thought, “What do I do?” They were scheduled for the same time. So I directed a [run-through] of the television show the night before with all of the actors and the stage manager who would be throwing the cues. So it worked out for the cast, but for me, I lost the opportunity to meet all the big wigs who showed up to watch this show.

Kliph Nesteroff: This experimental broadcast was really the first television sitcom ever made.

Peggy Webber: Yeah, so what I did was, I asked someone from Radio Life Magazine, “Can you tell the press I’m co-starring on Norman Corwin’s show and I can’t be here to direct my own show?” He said he would, but instead he gave his name as the writer and director of the show! And that appeared in the magazine!

Kliph Nesteroff: So this show, Oh Miss Tubbs, which you wrote and produced and would have directed… this is what Our Miss Brooks… that’s what it was based on?

Peggy Webber: Well, it was. They sent my scripts to New York and… what was the name of the bigwig at that time? He was very famous.

Kliph Nesteroff: William Paley?

Peggy Webber: Paley! I had submitted the scripts to them, and I think I even told them it was going to be seen on W6XAO. Paley went to a party and the woman who played Brooks… what was her name?

Kliph Nesteroff: Eve Arden.

Peggy Webber: Yes. He said to her, “I just read a script today, a comedy show about a woman who is a school teacher. Would you be interested in playing the lead?” She said she would. They didn’t even contact me or anything, so I got an attorney to contact them. I hired [Roy] Cohn, a very big name attorney, and he said, “Are you working for CBS now?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “If you sue them, you’ll earn ten thousand dollars and you’ll never work for them again.” I said, “Are you sure?” He said, “I know it. I’ve handled cases like this.”

Kliph Nesteroff: Wow.

Peggy Webber: He said, “You don’t have a big enough name to go up against them.” So they went ahead and did the show.

Kliph Nesteroff: Wow. So you obviously never appeared on an episode of Our Miss Brooks.

Peggy Webber: No, although the wife of the man who directed Our Miss Brooks… I toured in a show with her. She and I roomed together. The show was called Detective Story. What was the name of that movie star?

Kliph Nesteroff: Kirk Douglas.

Peggy Webber: Yes, I played opposite Kirk Douglas. He had a girlfriend who was a millionairess and he didn’t want his wife to find out. So he would always book the rooms under my name. It was a ruse. He didn’t want the press to know this woman was staying with him.

Kliph Nesteroff: Did you have to audition for Norman Corwin or did he just hire you automatically?

Peggy Webber: He did the same thing that Orson Welles did. He had me read… He was in this room with a bunch of boxes in an attic. I thought, “What a strange place to put Norman Corwin who is so famous.” He said it was fine with him, he didn’t care where CBS shoved him, he just wanted to get the auditions over with. But he listened to my audition and before I even had two sentences out, he said, “That’s it! That’s it! You’ve got the part!” I couldn’t believe it. After Orson Welles he was my next hero and they both did the exact same thing. I barely said two words and they hired me on the spot. I thought, “How is this happening!?”