Mary Noble, Backstage Wife
The Story That Wouldn't Let You Go
Every weekday for nearly a quarter century, American radio audiences heard the same opening narration: "Now, we present once again, Backstage Wife, the story of Mary Noble, a little Iowa girl who married one of America's most handsome actors, Larry Noble, matinée idol of a million other women — the story of what it means to be the wife of a famous star." That sentence, delivered with the same patient gravity across two networks and three decades, captured the entire engine of the show in one breath. Mary wasn't a star. She was a wife. And that distinction — the woman standing in the wings while Broadway glamour girls circled her husband — generated enough plot to fill well over 4,000 episodes by the time the series signed off on January 2, 1959.
The show originated in 1935 on WGN in Chicago, moved to Mutual on August 5 of that year, then settled into its long home on NBC beginning March 30, 1936. After nearly two decades on NBC, it moved to CBS on July 4, 1955, and ran there until the final broadcast. Fifteen minutes, five days a week, on and on. Episode numbers in surviving recordings reach into the 3,900s — episode 3916 aired May 31, 1950 — which gives some sense of the sheer accumulation. By the standards of mid-century serial drama, this was not a modest undertaking.
What Mary Was Up Against
The central situation never changed, and it wasn't meant to. Mary Noble stood in the wings while a parade of tempestuous, unscrupulous, or calculating women tried to take Larry away from her. The formula was simple, but the execution was relentless. One fan magazine in the late 1930s put it plainly: Mary's marriage "brought her the most complete happiness she had ever known," but she soon had to fight for her husband's love. That fighting never really stopped.
Catherine Monroe was described in the show as the worst adversary Mary ever met. Monroe arrived as a friend, offering to fund Larry's return to the stage after an accident — and the audience knew immediately that the offer came with strings attached. Listeners sent cards hand-addressed to "Mary Noble" warning her to watch out for Monroe, which says something about how completely the audience had accepted the fiction as something adjacent to reality. In desperation, Mary eventually walked out. She turned to Ken Paige, an artist who owned the Greenwich Theater where Larry's new play was to open, and agreed — without telling Larry — to sit for a portrait in exchange for a year's free rent at the theater. When Larry found out, he flew into a jealous rage. The birth of little Larry Jr. calmed things, though only briefly.
Virginia Lansing came later, devious and unscrupulous, working to undercut Larry's self-confidence so she could come to mean more to him than Mary did. Virginia's younger sister Irene — living on Park Avenue with Virginia despite the fact that Virginia had stolen and married Irene's first love — spent considerable effort thwarting her sister's schemes. Tom Bryson, Larry's theatrical manager, took up writing and coaxed Mary into a starring role in his play "Blackout." Mary's emergence as an actress coincided with Larry struggling professionally, producing a sustained crisis-of-confidence plotline that ran through several seasons. By 1951, the show had escalated to a backstage murder: Larry was charged, found innocent, and the real killer — suffering a nervous breakdown — splashed acid in Mary's face, reportedly "possibly disfiguring her forever." Radio critic John Crosby noticed the trend, publishing a column in 1951 titled "Soapland Discovers Homicide Commodity," naming Backstage Wife among the shows that had found murder plots useful.
The Cast Across the Years
Vivian Fridell played Mary Noble through the 1930s and into the early 1940s. Born in 1913, Fridell had built a substantial Chicago radio career — she also starred on Road of Life, Wife vs. Secretary, and The Affairs of Anthony. When the show moved production from Chicago to New York in June 1945, Fridell left the role. She went on to teach drama to teenage students from her home in Glencoe, Illinois, and was interviewed in 1991 by broadcaster Chuck Schaden at the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago. She died August 20, 1998, at 85.
Claire Niesen stepped into the role in 1945 and held it for the remaining 14 years of the run. Born around 1920 in Phoenix, Arizona, she had been valedictorian of her New York high school class and studied at the Feagin School of Dramatic Art. She had vaudeville experience before radio, debuted on radio at 15, and first appeared on a network in Joyce Jordan, M.D. Radio historian Jim Cox, in his Historical Dictionary of American Radio Soap Operas, wrote that Niesen "consistently projected the appealing inflections required by the role: invariably soft-spoken, tenderhearted, and forgiving." Niesen died in California on October 4, 1963, at approximately 43 years old.
Larry Noble had three actors over the run. Kenneth Griffin played the role from 1935 to 1945. James Meighan — born August 22, 1903 in New York City, nephew of silent film star Thomas Meighan — took the part from 1945 to 1951, having already played Kerry Donovan on Just Plain Bill and Michael Waring on The Falcon for Mutual. Guy Sorel played Larry from 1951 through the end of the series in 1959. The supporting cast across the years included Betty Ruth Smith as the tempestuous Catherine Monroe; Helen Claire as the devious Virginia Lansing; Anne Burr as the adventuress Regina Rawlings; Eloise Kummer in multiple roles including the calculating Marcia Mannering; and Ethel Owen as Lady Clara, Larry's mother. Mercedes McCambridge, before her Academy Award for All About Eve, appeared in an unspecified role during her pre-Hollywood years. The show's theme music changed once: "Stay as Sweet as You Are" in the 1930s, "Rose of Tralee" in the 1940s.
The Hummert Factory Behind It
Backstage Wife was produced by Frank and Anne Hummert, the architects of network radio's soap opera industry. Frank Hummert — born Edward Frank Hummert Jr. in St. Louis on June 2, 1884 — had been a Chicago advertising copywriter in the 1920s. He met Anne Ashenhurst, a former newspaperwoman, in 1930; she became his assistant and, in 1935, his wife. Friends and colleagues later described the marriage as "one of the great love matches." Together they built a production empire that, by the 1940s, reportedly controlled 46 percent of the national weekday broadcast schedule and billed an estimated $12 million a year. Jim Cox, in his book Frank and Anne Hummert's Radio Factory (McFarland, 2003), describes their Air Features operation as "the General Motors of radio."
Their company, Air Features, Inc. — which produced Just Plain Bill, The Romance of Helen Trent, Ma Perkins, Our Gal Sunday, Lorenzo Jones, and Stella Dallas, among others — employed as many as two dozen writers and 60 readers and assistants in New York. The writers worked from broad plot sketches provided by Anne Hummert, filling in dialogue at scale rates of $25 per episode. Anne Hummert communicated with the writing staff through detailed memoranda and liaisons; an errant remark to her could mean instant dismissal. Scripts arrived typed in lavender ink, identifiable across a room, according to actress Mary Jane Higby in her memoir Tune In Tomorrow. Higby described Frank Hummert as tall, thin, and solemn-looking; Anne as small, slim, and cheerful, looking "like a well-to-do Quaker lady." As their fortune grew, the Hummerts largely withdrew from public life to their estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, coming to New York only occasionally, where they kept a regular table screened from view by a wall of ferns at a favorite restaurant.
The Hummert method produced characters who were, by design, flat and consistent. Each recurring figure carried an identifying label: "the unscrupulous Rupert Barlow," "the calculating, devious Regina Rawlings." Erik Barnouw, writing about the serial form, noted that each episode began and ended in trouble, with sunny stretches in the middle, and that Friday endings were expected to be especially gripping to hold interest over the weekend. Barnouw also observed that a serial was not conceived in terms of a beginning or an end — it ended when the sponsorship ended. Backstage Wife ended after 24 years when the sponsorship did.
The Parody That Outlasted the Original
The show's formulas were consistent enough that comedians Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding built an entire parallel career on lampooning it. Their parody, "Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife," ran for so long — and found such an audience — that it eventually became better known to many listeners than the show it was mocking. Ray Goulding played Mary Backstayge, playwright Gregg Marlowe, neighbor Calvin L. Hoogevin, and assorted others; Bob Elliott played Harry Backstayge and stage doorman Pop Beloved. A "Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife" LP record was released in 1976, featuring a storyline called "The House of Toast" that had originally broadcast on WOR New York from December 1974 through February 1975. The final episode of the parody aired April 30, 1976. The fact that the parody required very little exaggeration — the show's own conventions were already so settled — said something about how thoroughly the Hummert formula had become its own genre. Backstage Wife even turned up in Hogan's Heroes, in a Season 1 episode where Colonel Hogan and Kinch pick up a radio transmission reporting that the bank is going to foreclose on Mary Noble.
Whatever the critical view of the Hummert method, the audience for Mary Noble, Backstage Wife was real and persistent for nearly a quarter century. The show's fans wrote cards addressed to "Mary Noble" as though she were a neighbor. They tuned in at 4:00 in the afternoon for nineteen straight years on NBC, and kept listening through the CBS years until January 2, 1959. The Nobles' fictional home in the village of Rosehaven, Long Island — a house with a living room, fireplace, a flagstone terrace off French doors, four bedrooms, and a garden full of lilacs, roses, peonies, irises, and petunias — existed in such detail that audiences evidently had no trouble picturing exactly where Mary was standing when the next crisis arrived.