Episode 1
Amazing Grace
WHEN Grace Isabel Gibson was born on 17 June 1905 in El Paso, Texas, the daughter of rancher and taxi driver Calvin Newton Gibson, a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan, there were no such things as radio stations. By the time she finished school, the new medium was already in its infancy. By late 1922, 560 American stations were on the air.
Grace was the third of four children. Bertha and Dora were the elder sisters. Calvin was her younger brother. Sometimes they lived on a farm. Other times they moved back into town.
El Paso was on the Mexican border, and, like her hometown, Grace was the product of two cultures on her mother's side. From Margaret Escobara, born in Mexico City, Grace could claim Mexican ancestry, as her heavy-lidded brown eyes and frequently impassive expression attested. Certainly, her penchant for spicy Mexican cuisine travelled with her all her life. Her mother also endowed her daughter with German blood from the Schultz family-a fact that "explained her Brunnhilde stature and untroubled air of taking business in her stride", as a Sydney reporter would later observe of Grace.
JUST weeks before Grace's seventh birthday, her destiny was shaped by an event that unfolded on 14 April on the other side of America. David Sarnoff, a young telegraph operator at the Marconi station in New York, picked up a message from the North Atlantic: "RMS Titanic ran into iceberg, sinking fast." Sarnoff stayed at his post for the next 72 hours, broadcasting in Morse the world's first news of the disaster. The passionate Sarnoff climbed the ranks at the Marconi Company and in 1915 wrote a memo to the great inventor himself about a vision he had of a "radio music box" which could broadcast music into every American home. Marconi thought his idea crazy; in those days, shipping and amateur wireless enthusiasts used radio, but who would want to actually "listen" to it?
Marconi must have kicked himself. After the First World War, his American assets were absorbed into General Electric. The old Marconi Company became RCA and Sarnoff got the green light. "Radio music boxes" became radio receivers. Eventually RCA's National Broadcasting Company would dominate America's golden age of radio, with Sarnoff at the helm.
Grace was 15 when the first radio station in the world, KDKA Pittsburgh, went to air in 1920. Two years later Kolin Hager, programme director of WGY in Schenectady, New York, a General Electric station, invented radio drama. His concept was One Man's Family, which later became a major daytime serial on NBC until the 1960s. The first plays were broadcast "live", but from the late 1920s radio shows could be recorded on machines such as the Blattnerphone and the Marconi-Stille. Sound was recorded magnetically on rapidly spinning reels of steel wire. Editing was crude. By cutting the wire, any unwanted section could be removed before tying the ends together again.
The big breakthrough came in the early 1930s, when programmes were being "transcribed" onto wax discs from which a matrix could be made. Pressings were stamped from the matrix and distributed to hundreds of different radio stations. Technology had spawned a new industry. In February 1932 America invented the "soap opera" when Colgate-Palmolive's Super Suds sponsored the first daytime serial on the NBC network. Not to be outdone, Procter & Gamble's Oxydol followed suit and a new genre was born. The transcription business had begun and with it came Grace's lifelong career. But not just yet.
LIFE in El Paso honed Grace's survival instincts. She'd been brought up hard and knew the meaning of a dollar.
Encircled by the mile-high Franklin Mountains, El Paso was named after a pass cut by the Rio Grande. Temperatures soar to 108 degrees Fahrenheit at the drop of a sombrero. Cotton, peanuts, beans and sorghum grow in the surrounding countryside. On the outskirts, a massive statue of the crucifixion atop the 4,576-ft Sierra de Cristo Rey marks the point where Mexico, Texas and New Mexico meet. This is the country where Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid in 1881, and Pancho Villa's marauders raided the town of Columbus in 1916. Over the border in Ciudad Juarez, girls were still available for fifty cents.
Small wonder that Margaret Gibson counselled her daughters to get wise to the commercial world. They studied practical things at school like bookkeeping, shorthand and typing. Subjects like history weren't going to get them a decent living and a share of the American dream.
For all its faults, El Paso would always be home. Fifty years later Grace returned for visits, a local hero, the hometown girl made good. Her sister Dora and brother Calvin still lived there. Soft-spoken Calvin was a Will Rogers-type character who worked for the American Telephone Company virtually all his life. Her generosity to family members was boundless. Calvin and his wife were able to point out appliances in their home: "Grace bought that refrigerator the year before last . Grace got us that television set last year." (When a Gibson executive once paid them a visit with duty-free Scotch, they wrote and told Grace how generous he was. "What do you mean generous?" replied Grace. "He put it on his expenses.")
Grace finished high school in El Paso. Years after, at an office party in Sydney, she sang and danced her old high school song at two in the morning.
She skipped college and worked in a local bank, rising to the top of the typing pool. Along the way she learned a lot about money and certainly the care of it. Then, like thousands of other star-struck young American girls of the time, she followed Bertha and Dora to Hollywood. Any job she could get in the movies, she'd take.
Grace, ever one for a legend, liked to recount her experiences working at Central Casting. Australian newspaper reporters lapped it up. Her life in Hollywood was like a page from an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. It was the Prohibition era, the Roaring 20s, a time when flappers danced the Blackbottom, and Grace smuggled hooch into parties under her fur coat. "I was quite gay then," she once remarked, "though not the way it's meant today!" By all accounts, she was the consummate party animal.
Somewhere along the line she got married.
Her first husband, Thomas Atchison, remains a mystery. There was some speculation that he was an American, and a singer, but probably not a very good one. As a friend later observed, "Although certain staff members knew of Grace's previous marriage, they considered it none of their business to ask. Also, there was too much respect for her second husband Ronnie Parr to show interest." In a bizarre coincidence, Grace's mother and her three daughters all married twice. Her mother was a Gibson, and then became a Wheelock; Bertha was first a Graves, then became a Watt; Dora married a Make, then a Sullivan.
Almost by accident, Grace stumbled into radio.
When the Radio Transcription Company of America opened its doors, it was one of the first studios to record radio dramas for syndication to stations around the United States. And Grace Gibson, errand girl, switchboard operator and two-fingered typist, was one of its first employees. Before long, her magnetic personality landed her the job of auditioning and selling the company's programmes to potential sponsors. Grace described it as "exactly the same as I did all through my life".
Business boomed for Grace in the depths of the Great Depression. By 1932 Americans had purchased close to 30 million radio sets. Listening to the radio was America's favourite nightly pastime. Radio was a cheap form of escape. A five-tube, mahogany-finished Silvertone radio receiver from Sears, Roebuck was $24.95-four dollars down, with four-dollar monthly instalments.
Hollywood was the last boomtown, an oasis in a depressed America where one quarter of the labour force was out of work and out on the road. The fabulously rich still celebrated their wealth. Film stars and moguls filled their swimming pools with lotus blossoms and imported maple trees from Japan for a night of Oriental bacchanalia, then discarded them the next day as though the Roaring Twenties had never ended.
Then came 1933. And in the way that one of her serials might have unfolded, two men were poised to enter Grace's life and change it forever. One would bring her to Australia; the other would marry her there.
THE first man came from a background that couldn't have been more different to Hollywood: the urbane public accountant and former meatworks manager Alfred Edward Bennett, known to all as A. E. Bennett. A member of the Theosophical Society of Australia, he was managing director at its Sydney radio station, 2GB. Bennett believed that wireless should be utilized for "the Nation's uplift and progress". He also believed Australia needed strong leaders and openly admired Mussolini. Immersed in the work of the All for Australia League, he was defeated as a United Australia Party candidate in 1931. His elder brother was the controversial General Gordon Bennett, a highly decorated officer during World War I who is best remembered for his role in the Fall of Singapore; as commander of the Australian 8th Division, he escaped before the surrender, leaving his men to become prisoners of the Japanese.
Despite his unlikely qualifications, A. E. Bennett was a shrewd broadcaster. He promoted many of radio's early stars such as the young New Zealand crooner Jack Davey, Charles Cousens, and Eric Colman, brother of Hollywood actor Ronald. He soon became the vigorous chief spokesman for Australia's fledgling...
