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Johnny Dollar

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Jack Johnstone

Everyone has a favorite radio series. Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar is the one that got me into OTR collecting and was the original reason I joined The Radio Historical Association of Colorado. I probably have more episodes of this show in my collection than any other single series.

For over 12 years (1949 – 1962, including a one-year hiatus in 1954-55), the series recounted the cases of JOHNNY DOLLAR, “the insurance investigator with the action-packed expense account.” Johnny was an accomplished padder of his expense account. The name of the show derives from the fact he closed each show by totaling up his expense account and signing it “End of report…Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.”

Terry Salomonson in his authoritative A Radio Broadcast Log of The Drama Program notes that the original working title of the show was “Yours Truly, Lloyd London.” Salomonson writes,

“Lloyd London was scratched out of the body of the (Dick Powell audition) script and Johnny Dollar was written in. Thus the show was re-titled on this script and the main character was renamed. Why this was done was unclear, possibly to prevent a legal run-in with Lloyd’s of London Insurance Company.” Although based in Hartford, Connecticut, the insurance capital of the world, freelancer Johnny managed to get around quite a bit, his adventures taking him all over the world.”

There were some unusual devices used in the show that helped set it apart from other shows. Johnny had no partner, assistant or secretary. Another atypical aspect gave the show additional credibility: frequently, characters on the show would mention that they had heard about Johnny’s cases on the radio. Johnny often used his time when filling out his expense account to give the audience necessary background information or to express his thoughts about the current case, which often involved exotic locales, continental officials, intriguing villains and tense confrontations.

No fewer than eight actors played Johnny Dollar. Dick Powell (Rogue’s Gallery) cut the original audition tape but chose to do Richard Diamond, Private Detective instead. Gerald (The Adventures of Philip Marlowe) Mohr auditioned in 1955 prior to Bob Bailey getting the title role.

Through the first three Johnny Dollars’ — Charles Russell, Edmond O’Brien, and John Lund, there was little to distinguish the series from many other radio detective series. Dollar was just another hard-boiled detective, in a medium that was overloaded with them. Charles Russell, the first to play the role, would throw silver dollar tips to bell boys and waiters. Luckily, this trite gimmick did not survive long .

On October 3rd, 1955, after a hiatus of over a year, the show came back with a vengeance. A new production team (including director-writer Jack Johnstone), a new star, Bob Bailey (Let George Do It), and a new format would set the series apart from its competitors. Johnny’s cases were now a continuing serial, five-days a week for 15 minutes each evening. With 75 minutes of air time (minus commercials), there was sufficient time to develop good story lines and interesting characters.

During this time, the show attracted some of the best writers in Hollywood including Jack Johnstone (aka John Dawson), Robert Ryf, and Les Crutchfield. Even Bob Bailey wrote a script. He used the pen name Robert Bainter (Bainter was his middle name) as the script writer for “The Carmen Kringle Matter” that was aired on Saturday, 12/21/1957 on the West Coast and the following day for the rest of the country.

Bailey, generally thought of as the most popular of the Johnny Dollars, brought a new interpretation to the character. Tough, but not hard-boiled; street-wise, but not overly cynical, Bailey’s Dollar was smart and gritty when he had to be, but also human. His character would get emotionally involved in some of his cases. He had a streak of impatience and would occasionally not fully listen to a witness and rush off on a tangent before realizing his mistake.

The weekday serialized episodes are generally acknowledged as some of the finest radio detective shows ever produced. (There were 55 multi-part shows in all: 53 five-part, 1 seven-part, and 1 nine-part.) The serialized episodes continued until November 2, 1956, when the series reverted to a once-a-week, 30 minute format. Bob Bailey continued in the lead until the “Empty Threat Matter” on November 27, 1960 when the Hollywood run ended.

In December, 1960 , the show moved New York. Robert Readick started the New York run as Dollar, but lasted only a short while. Jack Johnstone continued to write for the show and submitted scripts from California. (Johnstone wrote about 350 Johnny Dollar scripts under his own name and his pen names John Dawson and John Bundy. As Dawson, he also wrote or adapted scripts for such shows as Romance and Have Gun, Will Travel.)

The guest stars and supporting casts were always first-rate, attracting the best radio actors in both Los Angeles and New York. Particularly noteworthy was the work of Virginia Gregg who played many roles, including Johnny’s girlfriend, Betty Lewis. Harry Bartell was also a frequent guest who did many of the Spanish dialect roles when Johnny went to a Latin American country. Vincent Price co-starred as himself in “The Price of Fame Matter” and went to Europe with Johnny on the case. The character closest to a continuing role was that of Pat McCracken, of the Universal Adjustment Bureau, who assigned Johnny many of his cases. McCracken was played by many actors.

And so an era passed. Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar was the last continuing detective series of the Golden Age of Radio. Mandel Kramer was the last Johnny Dollar (and a close second in popularity to Bailey) when the final episode, “The Tip-Off Matter,” aired on September 30, 1962.

Plans for a television series, written and directed by Blake Edwards, fell through. A pilot was made and possibly aired in 1962, but television executives felt that Bob Bailey just didn’t “look the part” (Bailey stood 5-foot-9 and weighed 150-pounds) and thought that the public wouldn’t accept another actor in the role.

But great characters never really die. In January 2002, Moonstone Books, publishers of some pretty classy graphic novels, announced their plans to develop Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar as a quarterly book in their Noir Fiction line. Although the proposed series doesn’t seem to have worked out, a graphic novel did eventually see light of day, and was one of Moonstone’s more faithful and entertaining adaptations of a classic character. Bringing the radio fave to the printed page were the creative team of David Gallaher, a former Marvel.Com writer/editor and Montreal’s own Eric Theriault, the creator of such cult faves as Veena and Flirt. David and Eric did their homework — and it showed.

In 2019, Moonstone also relased a prose collection of original Johnny Dollar stories by

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Respectfully submitted by Stewart Wright, August 1999, with a teeny bit of stuff from Kevin Burton Smith (Thanks, Jenni).
Bob Bailey photo, courtesy of Scott and Jan Macgillivray, is actually taken from Bailey’s first film, “Jitterbugs” (1943).

 

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