Richard Diamond
The Man Behind the Microphone
Richard Diamond worked because of a paradox. Dick Powell, by the late 1940s, was one of the more interesting second acts in Hollywood — a baby-faced crooner from Warner Brothers musicals who had spent most of the 1930s playing, by his own account, "the same stupid story" over and over. Warner's cast him as "an eternal juvenile," and he finally bought his way out of the contract to escape it. At Paramount he pushed for the lead in Double Indemnity and was turned down. He walked. Eventually he landed at RKO, where he played Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet in 1945, and something clicked. The tough-guy persona fit him. The career changed overnight.
But Powell never entirely left the earlier version of himself behind, and Richard Diamond became the place where both versions coexisted. He played a wisecracking private detective with a sardonic edge and a short fuse, but at the end of every episode he sat down at his girlfriend's piano and sang a Broadway or Hollywood standard — often something from his own earlier career. It was an odd formula. It also worked.
The show premiered on NBC on April 24, 1949, in the 7 p.m. Sunday slot that had previously belonged to Horace Heidt's Original Youth Opportunity Program. NBC had been dogged by rumors it would put a big giveaway show against Jack Benny; instead it announced Richard Diamond, Private Detective. Advance publicity described it as similar to Powell's earlier radio detective vehicle, Rogue's Gallery, where he had played a character named Richard Rogue from 1945 to 1946. He had also played reporter Hildy Johnson on The Front Page in 1948. By 1949 he was practiced at radio drama, and he arrived at Richard Diamond with that background intact.
Blake Edwards Gets His Start
The show was created by Blake Edwards — full name William Blake Crump — who was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on July 26, 1922, attended Beverly Hills High School, and served eighteen months in the Coast Guard during World War II before turning to acting and then writing. Before Richard Diamond, his radio credit was a single show: Hollywood Star Theatre in 1948. He had never worked in radio before being assigned to create a character for Powell.
Edwards originally conceived Richard Diamond as a former OSS agent. By the time the series went to air, Diamond had become an ex-cop — a shift that gave the character a more natural connection to the police procedural mechanics the stories relied on. The relationship Diamond had with Lieutenant Walt Levinson was abrasive on the surface but rooted in something that read as honest affection. Sergeant Otis existed mainly for Diamond to needle. NBC's own publicity described Diamond as "an operative with a keen, sardonic sense of humor" who "tangles frequently with underworld inhabitants." That was accurate enough. During the first season alone, Diamond was cut, drugged, gassed, hit with brass knuckles, hit with crockery, poisoned, strangled, thrown overboard, and nearly blown up. He was never shot in any episode, though he took plenty of blows to the head. The writers also gave him a recurring case of vertigo, a physical vulnerability that grounded a character who otherwise seemed immune to consequences.
Edwards wrote alongside Harvey Easton, Richard Carr, and Jim French over the course of the run. He eventually moved into the director's chair, and Jaime del Valle later took over as producer-director. Don Sharpe produced, William P. Rousseau directed, and the orchestra was led at various points by David Baskerville and Frank Worth. Powell himself served as producer in addition to starring in the series.
How the Episodes Were Built
Each episode followed a recognizable structure. The opening established the case and set up the sarcastic give-and-take with the police. Diamond answered his telephone with invented commercial jingles — genuinely bad ones, delivered with apparent relish. Miss Asher's butler Francis had a recurring role as the man who appeared at the most inopportune moment imaginable and departed stammering. The character was a stock comic device, but the timing of his arrivals was part of the show's running joke.
The closing scenes, at least on NBC, were built around a song. Diamond would end up at the Park Avenue penthouse of his girlfriend Helen Asher — described as a rich redhead — and sing something at her piano. The song might be a Broadway standard, a Hollywood title, or something from Powell's earlier career. It gave the show an unusual texture: a hard-boiled mystery that resolved into a kind of cabaret act. When the series moved to ABC in January 1951, the new sponsor — R.J. Reynolds, promoting Camel cigarettes — issued guidelines calling for "more blood and thunder and no singing." The closing musical segments were dropped. The show continued, but one of its more distinctive habits went with them.
The series started live on NBC and was later transcribed. Powell was comfortable in front of a microphone but prone to fluffed lines. One notable on-air error occurred in an episode where the solution depended on Diamond recognizing by the smell of gunpowder that a weapon had been fired inside the room. Powell said "outside" instead of "inside," and the logic of the mystery unraveled on the air.
The Cast and Crew
Helen Asher was played primarily by Virginia Gregg, who was carrying concurrent radio roles at the time — Brooksie on Let George Do It and Betty Lewis on Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. Frances Robinson also played the part during portions of the run. Ed Begley originated the role of Lieutenant Levinson; Arthur Q. Bryan later took the part, and Ted de Corsia and Alan Reed also played Levinson at various points. Wilms Herbert played both Sergeant Otis and Francis the butler. The supporting cast included Betty Lou Gerson, Betty Moran, and Ted de Corsia, drawn from Hollywood radio's working pool of character actors.
The theme was "Leave It to Love" by Henry Russell, whistled by Powell himself. It became a signature sound for the show — low-key, slightly ironic in the way it fit the genre.
The Network Run
The NBC portion of the run comprised 80 episodes — 51 sustaining (without a sponsor) and 29 sponsored by Rexall, which came aboard beginning April 5, 1950. The early sponsorship negotiations were complicated. In mid-December 1949, NBC approached the Helbros Watch Company with what the trade publication Billboard described as "a highly unusual proposition" involving partial sponsorship of the Sunday slot, in which competition included Mutual's Shadow. An advertising agency, Dorland, Incorporated, later sued NBC in New York Supreme Court for $29,890 over a breach of contract claim connected to a change in sponsors.
The show moved to ABC on January 5, 1951, opening with "The Nathan Beeker Case." Camel Cigarettes sponsored it on Fridays at 8 p.m. until the summer break at the end of June 1951. When the series returned in October 1951, Rexall came back as sponsor. The ABC run ended June 27, 1952. A brief CBS appearance followed in 1953 — Sundays at 7:30, sponsored again by Rexall, using repeat broadcasts as a substitute for Amos 'n' Andy, running from May 31 to September 20, 1953.
The radio series produced approximately 141 original episodes across its NBC and ABC runs. As of 2018, 103 episodes were confirmed as surviving with audio; somewhere between 50 and 60 original episodes are reported as still missing, with scripts but no known audio recordings.
What Came After
The television version of Richard Diamond arrived in 1957, produced by Powell's own Four Star Television — the production company he co-founded with Charles Boyer, Joel McCrea, and Rosalind Russell (McCrea and Russell eventually departed; David Niven joined, and Ida Lupino became the company's lasting fourth partner). Powell declined to reprise the role himself, deciding the character needed a younger actor. He hired David Janssen, then a contract player at Universal, who went on to star as Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive and later in Harry O.
The television series premiered on CBS on July 1, 1957, and ran for 77 half-hour episodes across four seasons. The first two seasons followed the radio characterization most closely, with Diamond still based in New York. The third season moved him to Los Angeles, gave him a 1959 DeSoto Fireflite convertible with a car phone, and replaced the earlier music with a jazz score by Pete Rugolo. It also introduced an answering-service operator named Sam — seen only in fragments of legs and hands, never a full face — who was played for most of Season 3 by Mary Tyler Moore, in her first regular series role. A TV Guide article in May 1959 revealed Moore's identity, and she departed the part shortly after. Season 4 moved the series to NBC.
Blake Edwards, having created the character and helped set its tone, continued in television and film. After Richard Diamond he created Peter Gunn in 1958 — launching his long collaboration with Henry Mancini — and went on to write and direct the Pink Panther film series beginning in 1963. He died on December 15, 2010, in Santa Monica, at 88.
Dick Powell died on January 2, 1963, of lymphoma, at 58. At the following year's Emmy Awards ceremony, the Television Academy presented him a posthumous Trustee Award, accepted on his behalf by Charles Boyer and David Niven.
Richard Diamond as a radio character was built on the premise that a tough detective could also carry a tune, and that the combination didn't have to be a joke. Over four years and three networks, the show made a reasonable case that Powell's two careers, the one he'd escaped and the one he'd built to replace it, could coexist in the same half-hour.