Let's Pretend
The Woman Behind the Magic
The story of Let's Pretend is, in most ways, the story of one woman: Nila Mack. Born on October 24, 1891, in Arkansas City, Kansas, Mack had spent years as a stage actress — six of them with the Alla Nazimova troupe, appearing on Broadway in Fair and Warmer and A Doll's House, and in the 1918 play and film War Brides — before she ever sat down at a radio microphone. She arrived at CBS in 1928, appeared in the experimental Radio Guild of the Air, worked on a comedy program called Nit Wits, and scripted and narrated the Night Club Romances series. She told an interviewer simply: "Broadway prepared me for radio."
In August 1930, with a show called The Adventures of Helen and Mary already running Saturday mornings on CBS, the network called Mack back from Kansas — where she had gone to care for her ailing mother and had spent six months as program director of a local radio station — and asked her to take over as director. One of her first productions was an adaptation of "Sinbad the Sailor," with a mixed cast of adults and children. She was dissatisfied with the adult performers and made a decision that would define the next two decades: she would work almost exclusively with children. From that point forward, she built the show around juvenile talent, and the program she eventually renamed Let's Pretend became what it remained through 1954.
Mack's working philosophy was simple but demanding. She believed the best way to tell a children's story was to let children tell it — but that required finding children versatile enough to shift from leads to character parts to the roles of elderly people. She assembled her company through sustained auditions and long rehearsal processes. Radio Guide writer James Street described how children were given small parts first and rewarded specifically for the ability to ad-lib and recover from mistakes. The results spoke for themselves: Miriam Wolfe, at twelve, could vividly portray an eighty-year-old witch, and Estelle Levy — who later took the professional name Gwen Davies — was already "aging" her voice to play a queen mother as early as 1930. Davies later recalled that Mack "was terrified about working with children, because she never had any." The terror didn't show in the work.
How the Show Took Shape
The direct predecessor to Let's Pretend was The Adventures of Helen and Mary, which ran on CBS Saturdays from 1929 to March 17, 1934, written originally by Yolanda Langworthy. That show itself grew out of even earlier efforts at CBS's flagship station WABC in New York — first a program called Aunt Jymmie and Her Tots in Tottyville, which ran 18 broadcasts between October 1928 and February 1929, and then a brief Children's Club Hour in spring 1929. The Saturday morning franchise at CBS had been building toward something for years. After 229 broadcasts of The Adventures of Helen and Mary, with Mack now firmly in charge and her vision of an all-children performing company well established, she changed the title to Let's Pretend on March 24, 1934. Between December 1930 and January 1931 the show had briefly been called Land O' Make Believe before reverting; the 1934 rename was the one that stuck for the remaining twenty years.
Mack favored fairy tales drawn from The Arabian Nights, Andrew Lang, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Brothers Grimm, and she adapted them freely when changes served what she saw as the show's values — honor, service in a good cause, courtesy, and kindness. Favorites like Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Goldilocks were performed many times over the years. Over the full run the series broadcast more than 300 fairy tale adaptations alongside original scripts. The annual Christmas program, Mack's House of the World, returned each year with themes of brotherhood and tolerance. Mack stated in Jerome Lawrence's 1944 volume Off Mike that she did not write for children but "for people of all ages who enjoy fun and fantasy."
Newsweek captured the atmosphere in 1943: kings and queens, talking horses, enchanted forests, witches, dragons, gnomes, and dwarfs. The show made no attempt to compete with cliffhanger serials. The orchestra, led by Maurice Brown for most of the run, provided what Mack described as "carefree" music that was "juvenile in spirit" while establishing the mood and characters of each story — lots of violins, she specified. The Let's Pretend theme became one of the hallmarks of juvenile radio. Sound effects were handled by Arthur Strand, George O'Donnell, Bill Brown, and Jimmy Dwan; announcers George Bryan and later Jackson Wheeler kept the production running on the technical side.
A Company of Children
The roster of performers who passed through Let's Pretend reads like a partial index of mid-century American show business. The show ran from 1934 to 1954 — twenty years — which meant that several waves of child actors came up through it, and many went on to substantial careers elsewhere.
Arthur Anderson joined in 1936 at age thirteen and remained, with time out for military service, until the final broadcast — a span of eighteen years. He played wicked giants, old men, and talking horses. His first Broadway appearances were in Julius Caesar and Shoemakers' Holiday for Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre; he also appeared in three Mercury Theatre on the Air radio productions. Later film credits included Midnight Cowboy, Green Card, and Woody Allen's Zelig. He is best known to later generations as the original voice of Lucky the Leprechaun for General Mills' Lucky Charms cereal, a role he originated in 1963 and held for twenty-nine years. In 2004, Anderson published Let's Pretend and the Golden Age of Radio (BearManor Media), which includes a complete broadcast log compiled by Derek Tague and Martin Grams, Jr., and a foreword by Norman Corwin. Patricia C. Willis, Curator of American Literature at Yale University, described it as "a record of a priceless piece of Americana."
The other graduates scattered across stage, screen, and the rest of radio. The Mauch twins, Billy and Bobby, went to Hollywood and appeared in The Prince and the Pauper in 1937 and several films based on Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories; Nancy Kelly became a film star; Patricia Peardon took the title role in Broadway's Junior Miss; Roslyn Silber graduated into the long-running role of Rosalie on Gertrude Berg's The Goldbergs. Walter Tetley played Leroy Forrester on The Great Gildersleeve and Julius Abbruzzio on The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, and eventually voiced Sherman in the Mr. Peabody segments on Rocky and His Friends. Billy Halop became the lead of the Dead End Kids. Jack Grimes voiced Jimmy Olsen on The New Adventures of Superman and The Adventures of Batman. Sidney Lumet directed 12 Angry Men in 1957 and received an honorary Academy Award in 2005. Dick Van Patten — who, like Lumet, attended the Professional Children's School in New York — starred decades later as Tom Bradford on Eight Is Enough. Skip Homeier reached Broadway at twelve in Tomorrow, the World! The list runs further still: Anne Francis, Lamont Johnson, Joan Tetzel, Jimmy Lydon, Donald Buka, Albert Aley, Daisy Aldan, Bobby Readick.
Mack's Current Biography stated that she "trained and directed two generations of child actors." In a 1965 radio interview, Sybil Trent — who joined the company in 1935 at nine years old, discovered by Mack at a community sing — recalled: "We grew up together like a family."
The Cream of Wheat Years
For most of its run, Let's Pretend was a sustaining program — broadcast without commercial sponsorship, with child performers earning $3.50 per show in the early years, later rising to $5 per appearance. That changed on September 25, 1943, when Cream of Wheat assumed sponsorship through its advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, anchoring the show at 11:05 a.m. Eastern on Saturdays. With the new sponsor came two immediate changes: veteran radio actor and announcer Bill Adams, then fifty-six, became the host as "Uncle Bill," and cast pay jumped to $47.30 per broadcast.
Adams opened each session with "Hel-looo, Pretenders!" — and the studio audience, seated in CBS's Radio Playhouse 3 in New York, would respond "Helloooo, Uncle Bill!" Adams would then ask "How do we travel to Let's Pretend?" A child would suggest a mode of transport, sound effects would take over, and the fairy-tale story would begin. The performers also adapted the Let's Pretend theme with new words for the sponsor, producing a jingle that began "Cream of Wheat is so good to eat." The 1944 production budget ran to $2,000 per week — less than the $3,000 per week paid for rival CBS Saturday dramas Grand Central Station and Armstrong Theater.
By May 1952, Radio Mirror reported that the show had won thirty-six awards. Over the full run the total reached nearly sixty, from radio magazines, women's clubs, and school and college associations — including two George Foster Peabody Awards, a Women's National Radio Committee Award, and five Radio Daily Awards. The accumulation prompted CBS to introduce the program every week as "Nila Mack's Let's Pretend." The best Hooperating the show achieved was a 6.5 in the 1946–47 season, which was widely understood to undercount the actual audience: the show aired at 11:05 a.m. Eastern on Saturdays, before Hooper's telephone polling of listeners began on the West Coast, where it aired at 8:05 a.m. A single on-air announcement in August 1938, offering a ten-dollar prize for the best response to "Why I listen to Let's Pretend," drew more than 5,300 entries. A thousand fan letters per week was normal at the show's peak.
How It Ended
Cream of Wheat cancelled its sponsorship on December 6, 1952, as television cut into the Saturday morning audience. The show reverted to sustaining status, with cast pay dropping back to $43 per broadcast. CBS moved the program out of its established timeslot and shifted it to Saturday afternoons at 2:30 p.m., but only when it did not conflict with sports broadcasts. The 11:05 a.m. slot went to Grand Central Station.
Five weeks after the sponsorship ended, on January 20, 1953, Nila Mack was found dead in her Manhattan apartment. She had suffered a heart attack. Theater figures Howard Lindsay and his wife Dorothy Stickney were her closest friends. She was buried beside her parents in Riverview Cemetery in Arkansas City, Kansas. After her death, she was described in tributes as "the fairy godmother of radio." Time magazine, in a 1940 profile, had noted that by her tenth anniversary in radio Mack had had a hand in 1,304 shows. Newsweek in 1943 characterized her as "large, plump, hard-boiled and shrewd"; Arthur Anderson, who knew her across eighteen years of rehearsals, described her as "a lone woman in a man's world" for whom those traits were assets, noting that her office on the fourteenth floor of CBS sat just down the hall from Edward R. Murrow's.
The show continued for nearly two more years under director Jean Hight and writer Johanna Johnston, with Warren Sweeney as the new announcer. The company instituted the Nila Mack Award for the players who gave the best performances in each broadcast. Let's Pretend aired its final episode on October 23, 1954. The show had run, in its various forms tracing back to Aunt Jymmie and Her Tots in Tottyville, for more than twenty-five years on CBS.