The Adventures of Maisie
The Character Who Wouldn't Stay Put
Maisie Revere wasn't the kind of woman radio heroines were usually cut from. She was a Brooklyn beauty, an underemployed entertainer and stage actress, perpetually broke, perpetually on the move, and perpetually slapping the hands of men who got ideas. The show's opening set the tone immediately: you heard Maisie walking down a sidewalk and hauling off on some fellow who made a pass at her. No setup, no explanation. That was all you needed to know about where she stood. At the close of each episode, she'd dust herself off and mutter "Come on, feet," and head off toward whatever trouble was waiting in the next town. The formula was simple and it held together across seven years, two network runs, and a syndication package that MGM produced until 1953.
The character herself had been around since 1939. MGM had originally acquired the source property — Wilson Collison's novel Dark Dame — as a vehicle for Jean Harlow. Harlow died in June 1937 before a final script was completed, and the property sat on the shelf until Ann Sothern caught the attention of studio executives in the 1938 film Trade Winds. According to former TCM host Robert Osborne, in a 2015 film introduction, they signed her immediately. The result was a B-picture series that ran to ten films between 1939 and 1947, eight of them written by screenwriter Mary C. McCall Jr., and eventually the radio series that gave Maisie her longest continuous run anywhere.
From Film to Radio
The ten Maisie films have never been mistaken for prestige pictures, but they were profitable enough that their box office proceeds helped finance MGM's more costly productions. The series took Maisie through a mining camp, a boxing arena, a wartime factory floor, and a Reno divorce mill, among other settings. Congo Maisie (1940) was essentially a reworking of the Jean Harlow vehicle Red Dust, with John Carroll stepping into the role Clark Gable had played. Ringside Maisie (1941) turned out to be personally significant for Sothern — it was the production on which she met her future husband, actor Robert Sterling. Time magazine, reviewing Swing Shift Maisie in 1943, called Sothern "one of the smartest comediennes in the business."
Fan mail for the films was frequently addressed to Maisie herself rather than to Ann Sothern, which unsettled the actress. She told the San Bernardino Sun in 1942, "Maisie is a real person to me now... A friend and companion. She's fun to do." But there was a real fear behind the warmth: Sothern worried about being permanently typecast. The character was undeniably popular, and the radio series, when it arrived in 1945, only deepened her identification with the role.
The radio program premiered on CBS on July 5, 1945, sponsored by Eversharp. The CBS version ran for 30-minute episodes and shifted time slots more than once — Thursdays at 8:30 through mid-August 1945, then Wednesdays at 9:30 for the 1945–46 season, and finally Fridays at 10:30 during 1946–47. That CBS run wrapped on March 28, 1947. Producer John L. Greene oversaw the CBS episodes, with Tony Sanford directing and Samuel Taylor among the writers. The CBS orchestra was led by Albert Sack. In this version, Maisie was cast somewhat differently than in the films — she worked as a secretary to an unsuccessful attorney, which traded some of the character's rootless energy for a more settled domestic comedy setup. The supporting cast included Hans Conried, Arthur Q. Bryan, Virginia Gregg, Peter Leeds, and Hy Averback, with John "Bud" Hiestand and John Easton sharing announcing duties at different points.
The Syndicated Version and a Changed Maisie
After the CBS run ended, MGM produced a transcribed syndication version beginning in late 1949, offered for distribution on November 24 of that year. This version also fed the Mutual network, which carried the show Fridays at 8 from January 11, 1952 through December 26, 1952. Sothern returned for both, and the character shifted back closer to the footloose original — Maisie was once again an underemployed entertainer drifting from job to job, usually winding up broke in some out-of-the-way place. Her catchphrase, "Likewise, I'm sure," was billed as her answer to everything.
Arthur Phillips wrote the syndicated scripts, and Harry Zimmerman provided the music. Jack McCoy announced. The supporting cast for this run was substantial and included some of the best character performers working in radio at the time: Hans Conried, Sheldon Leonard, Lurene Tuttle, Bea Benaderet, Ben Wright, Marvin Miller, Joan Banks, and Frank Nelson, among others. Benaderet and Elvia Allman both took turns playing the recurring character Mrs. Kennedy. Pat McGeehan played Eddie Jordan. Sandra Gould and Jeffrey Silver rounded out the ensemble. The surviving episode titles give a sense of how much variety the writers packed into the format — "Maisie Ravier, Private Detective," "Lord Deveridge & Lady Ravier," and "Jerome Schmerzterbreugen vs The Bebopster" sit alongside more straightforward story premises, all of them built around the same character dynamic: Maisie lands somewhere new, someone underestimates her, she handles it, and moves on.
Maisie's romantic structure followed the same rule in radio that it had in the films: she fell in love often, but she always gave up the hero and went her own way at the end of each story. That pattern was the engine of the series. It kept the show moving and kept Maisie free, which was the point.
Ann Sothern and What the Radio Years Meant
By the time the syndicated series was running, Sothern's personal circumstances had changed considerably. After the critical and commercial success of A Letter to Three Wives in 1949, she had reason to expect the next phase of her film career to be stronger. Instead, she contracted infectious hepatitis after receiving an impure serum shot while in England for a stage performance. She was confined to bed for an extended period, and MGM eventually canceled her contract. The syndicated radio series was more than a creative project during those years — it was her primary source of income while she recovered. She continued recording Maisie episodes through her illness.
Her radio experience with the character had actually begun well before the 1945 premiere. Sothern had been working in radio since at least 1935, appearing on Rudy Vallee's The Fleischmann Hour and Bing Crosby's Kraft Music Hall, and in dramatic parts on Lux Radio Theatre and Screen Guild Theatre. On November 24, 1941, she appeared in the Lux Radio Theater adaptation of Maisie Was a Lady, which built audience appetite for a dedicated series. By 1945, she wasn't coming to radio cold; she knew how the medium worked.
After the Mutual run ended in December 1952, Sothern transitioned to television with the CBS sitcom Private Secretary, which premiered in 1953. She played Susie MacNamara, secretary to New York talent agent Peter Sands, portrayed by Don Porter. The series ran for 104 episodes, alternating with The Jack Benny Program, and Sothern owned it through her production company Vincent Productions, Inc. She received Emmy Award nominations for her work on the show, though she never won. The Ann Sothern Show, which followed on CBS from 1958 to 1961 and was produced by Desilu Productions, won the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series — Musical or Comedy in 1959. Sothern received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
Her final film appearance came in Lindsay Anderson's The Whales of August (1987), alongside Bette Davis and Lillian Gish, and it earned her the only Academy Award nomination of her career, for Best Supporting Actress. A 1960 television pilot simply titled Maisie attempted to revive the character with Janis Paige in the title role, directed by Edward Ludwig, but it never sold.
What Survived
A substantial portion of the syndicated run has been preserved on tape, with the earliest surviving episode dated November 24, 1949 — the same day MGM began offering the package for distribution. The CBS episodes from 1945 to 1947 are less thoroughly represented in what remains, which is the more common pattern for network shows of that era: the transcribed syndication discs were built for repeated use, while the CBS broadcasts depended on whoever happened to be recording off the air.
The series as a whole occupies a specific place in what radio Comedy could do with a recurring character. Maisie was self-reliant by design, not as a novelty. She solved her own problems, didn't wait to be rescued, and the show never framed that as anything unusual. The formula wasn't complicated, and the show didn't pretend otherwise — Sothern herself acknowledged the character's appeal was rooted in genuine affection rather than artistic ambition. What held it together, across CBS and syndication and Mutual, was the consistency of the voice, and the fact that Sothern never stopped sounding like she meant it.