She Lives with a Liar …

She Lives with a Liar …

Marian—Molly McGee—Jordan Has Managed to Have an Ideal Home Life with Jim—Fiber—Jordan, Even If He Never Catches Mice With the Use of Falling Mercury

Jim and Marian appear below as their youngsters know them—out of character—and, right, Molly caught in one of her frequent moments of wonder over Fibber’s latest tall story

By Randall Lewis Milligan

Fibber McGee looks innocent enough, doesn’t he? But then there’s no telling when he’ll pull the tallest story no far in-wanted. At right, Fibber and Molly display the leading characters in the travelling marionette show that bears their famous narrow.

Before we start Calling anyone names, let the truth do it. Last January 1 the Burlington Liars’ club of Wisconsin, which yearly promotes the international Olympics for liars, awarded the World’s Championship title to none other than Fibber McGee.

In spite of the cries of professionalism that were hurled in Fibber’s direction by disgruntled amateurs, he won the title with a mouse-catching yarn. He claimed the weather was so cold where he lived that it gave him an idea how to catch a pesky mouse. He bought the largest thermometer he could and put a piece of cheese under it. The next morning he got up and found the mouse trapped. During the night the mercury had dropped so low that it pinned to the floor the mouse nibbling the piece of cheese.

Any man who can invent a fib like that deserves to be called Fibber, but what’s it like to have to live with the world’s champion liar?

Marian Jordon can tell you, for she’s Jim Jordan’s wife and Jim Jordan is Fibber McGee in private life. Marian Jordan is not only his wife, she is also the other half of the act of Fibber McGee and Molly that you hear over the air.

Are they as Marian and Jim Jordan one of the carefree couples taking life as a grand joke, another flash in the radio pan? Or are they as husband and wife in the difficult, demanding contacts of working together, living together and spending twenty-four hours a day together? Who takes care of their youngsters? What with rehearsals, broadcasts, auditions and such they certainly off to school from a leisurely breakfast table.

Well, what are they like? Harebrained and braggadocio, with a vagrant current of shrewdness running underneath—that’s Fibber. A stouthearted, practical, joking elf of a wife—that’s Molly.

Both are of medium height and weight. Marian is more blond than Jim. Both have gray eyes and an almost identical way of turning that gray gaze on you. You can’t soft soap Marian and Jim—nothing like that gets over with them.

There is, uncannily, a resemblance between them. They do look alike, somehow, the alikeness that comes sometimes between two people who really belong together. Their births and back grounds were the same, beginning back about the turn of the century.

It was in Peoria where Marian and Jim were born, about two years apart. They were through grammar school and well along in high school when they first met. Neither had blazed a name across local theater marquees, nor were they panicking their friends with their talent for pure craziness. They were just kids and they had fun. But a mutual feeling of “we’ll stick together” grew up between the two, naturally and quietly.

After high school Jim did something totally unexpected. He had a pleasant tenor voice and he went out on the road with a vaudeville company. Nothing remarkable, but he wanted to do it and his natural feeling for the theater and a gift for establishing in tuitive contact with audiences began to blossom in him. He enjoyed every bit of his work.

“Everybody at home told me I might as well forget Jim,” reminisces Marian. “They said if he was going to be an actor I should cut things short and forget him. So I stayed home two years and Jim came to see me when he could.”

But she didn’t give him up. Instead they got married. The families held consultations, wavered, then insisted, then gave in. Marian, the little home girl, went out the road with Jim, and worked into his act in a way that delighted him.

She always had done kid imitations around home. She, too, came of Irish descent and there was fun and humor in her life. Once away and married to Jim, it was astonishing how quickly her ideas unfolded. Marian discovered she could sing, with a little coaching, and Jim helped teach her how to put her part over. They were having an elegant time, eating regularly, planning to have their own company later, as soon as they could swing it.

But the planets in their orbits decreed differently, and arranged for one of those happy little additions to Jim and Marian’s company of two. They were a long way from home, and young. Jim was 21 and Marian 19. They went back to Peoria.

In the usual manner their families were so glad to have them back, with the baby and all, that they collectively begged then to quit this living in a suitcase and settle down and give their little daughter a safe, orderly home and decent schooling. Jim listened soberly. So did Marian. They looked at each other for support, listened again to their elders, and Jim put his hopes and his pride in his make-up box on a closet shelf and went out to get a sensible, business man’s job.

He got them, half a dozen of them, but they didn’t last. They weren’t for him, and he certainly wasn’t for them.

“We got out,” volunteered Jim, and his eyes twinkled. “We went back to the road because we both wanted to so much we couldn’t give up. And we took Kathryn and she loved it, too. She was never healthier or happier in her whole life.”

Things really got going for the Jordon trio after that. The dream of their own company materialized, they played the best circuits, to good houses in prosperous cities. And, oh yes, another trek back to Peoria when Jimmie, Junior, was born.

It wasn’t luck that carried the Jordons along. It was work and experience and intuition. Bit by bit, laugh by laugh, they learned the value of an inflection here, a lifted eyebrow there, a pause, an uncertain gesture. Wit and humor they both had. But they added to that a canny and hard-won-knowl-edge of what and when and how to do it. They never miss an opportunity and they don’t waste good material in lines or characters.

Marian and Jim came to radio when they moved to Chicago to give Kathryn and Jimmie the established home and sound schooling their own parents had feared they never would have. Radio was rearing its head in a decidedly permanent and aggressive fashion. People were having favorites and listening to programs as ardently as they had gone to the movies during the preceding decade.

They started on WENR in 1929, as Uncle Luke and his wife, Mirandy, in a skit entitled Smackout. There the two sang, storied, made friends. And then, of course, you remember the famous Smith family, which argued, laughed and had its ups and downs over a period of some four years.

Other shows came and went, attended by much publicity and dynamic personality displays. Maybe sponsors, maybe not. The Smith Family disappeared after four years, but Smackout went on and on. Until, just last year, they ran into John J. Louis of the Needham, Louis and Brorby advertising agency. Or rather Mr. Louis ran into them. He was looking for a new radio program, something that would mean a lot to people who weren’t even interested in Broadway.

So before they realized it Jim and Marian Jordon were Fibber and Molly McGee. They went to New York for the premiere of their new network show and stayed there for four weeks, four weeks in which they built themselves quite an enviable reputation as network funsters.

Marian’s smile is the same as it was a year ago, and Jim’s gray eyes are just as steady. They are never too hurried or too importantly impatient to keep things going smoothly at rehearsals and around the studios. Their own life is held at the same smooth pace. They don’t measure success by the sudden acquisition of expensive objects or clothes or cars. They live in the same apartment, drive the same car, and enjoy the same pleasures.

At the studio, when calls come from inside or outside, the callers bracket the two together.

“May I speak to Marian and Jim?”

“Are Marian and Jim there?”

Never the Jordons. It’s Marian and Jim to the whole world. One can handle any matter that comes up to the entire satisfaction of the other, though sometimes it is revealing to see how Marian defers to Jim and turns the final decisions to him. And how Jim, in turn, will not issue an ultimatum until he knows how Marian feels.

But we were talking, or rather they were, about the theater. It is ingrained in them. The subtle relation between the audience and them is their favorite stimulant and spur. Unlike many radio personalities who prefer to work in blind studios, Marian and Jim broadcast before a studio audience. They are too close to life and the people who live it to want to feel shut away in an aura of invisibility and hush-hush.

Fibber McGee and Molly—Jim and Marian Jordan—may be heard over an NBC network every Monday evening at 8 p. m. EDT (7 EST; 6CST; 5MST; 4 PST). The pair also take part in Kaltenmeyer’s Kindergarten which is broadcast Saturdays over an NBS network at 5:30 p. m. EDT (4:30 EST; 3:30 CST; 2:30 MST; 1:30 PST).