The Part That Put The Fizz In Harry Bartell's Career

In the early 1930s Harry Bartell was a student at Rice University in Houston, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa before going on to Harvard Business School. He had met Sylvester Gross, the chief announcer at KPRC radio in that city. Gross included Bartell in a new program that showcased condensed reenactments of MGM movies; the actors were paid with 25-cent tickets to see the actual movie.

"The whole plot hinged on the poison in the scotch and soda. Soda meant siphon: seltzer bottle. We didn't have one and we were about 10 minutes to air time.", recalled Bartell many years later.

He suggested to the panicking Gross that a hole punched in a Coke bottle top would make the necessary fizz if the bottle were shaken. A 20-storey dash to the newsstand on the ground floor produced the Coke, an ice pick made the necessary hole, and the broadcast started right on schedule.

"Sylvester and I were playing on opposite sides of a ribbon mike. He had his script on a music stand so that he could hold the Coke bottle in one hand and the glass in the other. While reading his lines he started vigorously shaking the bottle with his thumb over the hole in the top. When the magic moment arrived…he lifted his thumb…missed the glass, hit the microphone (and) hit me in the eye on the other side of the microphone."

He added: "It becomes a little vague after that. We got off the air. The engineer may have been deafened for life. I had my clothes cleaned. And I was now a radio actor."

Bartell broke into movies in 1943 as a crewman in Destination Tokyo, starring Cary Grant, but he once said: "Radio was the love of my life. It would have been very, very hard to say goodbye to it completely."

"I'm always asked two questions," quipped the actor who worked many times with Vincent Price. "One is the equivalent of 'Did you know Ludwig von Frankenstein?' The other is 'What was it like to work with Humphrey Gable?'"

The list of big-name actors Bartell worked with included Edward G. Robinson, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Tony Curtis, James Mason, Frank Sinatra, Walter Matthau, Peter Graves, Richard Boone to name but a few.

"Some of them were amiable, others were remote, many were scared to death - especially if they were movie stars and couldn't depend on two days of shooting for one page of dialogue. Some had trouble reading, others had their pages pasted to cardboard so they wouldn't rattle.

"Dick Widmark and Mac Carey came out of radio, so they were very relaxed. Ray Milland looked sour about everything, so it was hard to tell. (Actually, he was a lot of fun.) Humphrey Bogart was a terrific chess player. Herbert Marshall was a dear, dear man. A few, and only a few, were quite obnoxious. Warren William, Lee Bowman and Zachary Scott come to mind. But the important thing always was: Was it a good show? Did they do a good job?"

Was there anything that broke him up? "How about this: burping into a live mike I thought I had turned off…or going so blank at the opening of a disc jockey job that I couldn't remember my own name. Finally, I just broke up."

Harry Bartell, born November 13, 1913 in New Orleans, died in Ashland, Oregon, February 26, 2004 aged 90. Just last year he guest starred in an episode of The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and up to the day he died he was communicating with his many fans, usually by e-mail.

He was a fixture in Hollywood for 51 years. Three seasons at the Pasadena Playhouse led to work on 185 radio series and 77 TV series plus about a dozen forgettable movies. He claimed a major accomplishment was surviving with his mind, morale and marriage intact.

He appeared in the first and last episodes of Gunsmoke, and 173 episodes between them and, with fellow actor and close friend Vic Perrin, co-authored two episodes: Chester's Inheritance, and Father and Son. Other TV series performances included roles in Branded, Dragnet, Dragnet 1967, Get Smart, I Love Lucy, Laramie, Perry Mason, Peter Gunn, Police Woman, The Rebel, Richard Diamond Private Detective, The Twilight Zone, The Untouchables, The Veil, The Walter Winchell File, and The Wild, Wild West.

In NBC Radio's The Adventures of Nero Wolfe he was the fifth actor to play Wolfe's sidekick Archie Goodwin, tying the record for the most episodes in that role.

His favorite series was Escape, in which he had 56 appearances. His personal favorite was his leading role in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.

In 1998, Bartell told friend Stewart Wright that the Escape scripts "were wonderful. Many of them were based on classics that stood the test of time. They offered me, as an actor, parts that I never would have gotten on any other program. They were exciting, fun to do and very rewarding from a performance standpoint."

Bartell also worked as an announcer for Silver Theater, Sherlock Holmes and The Casebook of Gregory Hood. "I never considered myself an announcer; I sort of played an announcer as an actor. That was how I got [the Sherlock Holmes] job, a fluke. They had a huge audition and every name announcer in town was over at CBS. I walked into the foyer and I couldn't understand what was going on.

"I asked the secretary. She said: 'Edna Best is conducting an audition for the announcer of Sherlock Holmes.' I said: 'May I go in and say hello?' I had worked with her as an actor. I said: 'Hi, Edna,' and started to leave. She said: 'Aren't you going the read? As long as you're here, pick up the script and read.' That's how I got the job."

It's six months since Harry Bartell died and between now and then I've been amazed how often his name has appeared in the shows I've been listening to. This talented man may no longer be with us, but his talent will live on for decades, maybe even centuries to come, because of the roles he played on radio.

Thanks Harry!

Happy listening my friends,