Amateur Meets an Audience

One of radio's most widely discussed and least heard programs makes its bow this week over a big network. The Author Meets the Critics, after a record-breaking tryout period, will get the full glamor production over NBC. But it will be pretty much the same program that New York audiences have been discussing for six years. Success in the big time is a personal triumph for Author's persevering 32-year-old producer, Martin Stone, who claims: "This thing would have died a long time ago if I hadn't been an amateur."

Stone was just out of Yale Law School in 1940 and working for the Appellate Court in Albany when a friend asked him to help out with a new radio program of book reviews. Amateur Stone thought the idea of "just talking for 15 minutes" over Albany's 250-watt WABY sounded dull. Instead, he suggested that a group of people sit around and discuss books. One day Stone asked visiting Author Jan Struther, then lecturing in Albany, if she would join in the discussion of Mrs. Miniver. She did, the program clicked, and Variety gave it a good review.

Stone was summoned to the NBC throne room in Manhattan and told that the show was "great." But the network, afraid to take on a program that was so pointedly "cultural," advised the young lawyer to move the show over to WGY, Schenectady, and experiment with it for a while longer.

Stone experimented for more than six years. Shortly after Author moved to Manhattan's WHN in 1943, Stone went into the Navy, but he nursed his baby along by remote control.

Friendship's End. Things finally began to look up two years ago. The Book-of-the-Month Club offered to sponsor the show, moved it to Manhattan's WQXR. Mutual aired it for a while, and a few transcriptions were sent out to small stations.

Last month NBC decided that The Author Meets the Critics was now good enough, signed it up on a fine Sunday afternoon spot (4:30 p.m.). This Sunday's subject, for the first airing over a full network: The Story of Mrs. Murphy, by Natalie Anderson Scott.

No dry academic lecture, Author offers a lively, unrehearsed half-hour. In the Schenectady days, authors & critics often rode up as chatty chums, returned to Manhattan in sullen silence. Fannie Hurst once advised the critics of her Lonely Parade to "go crawl back into the wall, where you came from." Whit Burnett left garrulous Ilka Chase speechless when he told her that her In Bed We Cry was "written from the groin." Rockwell Kent and James T. Farrell began a celebrated feud on the show. Dorothy Thompson ripped into Author Henry Morgenthau Jr. (Germany Is Our Problem) with such vigor and at such length that the moderator had to reach over the table and grab her by the arms to make her shut up. She sheepishly admitted: "I guess I am getting old and can't stop talking."

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