Flotsam & Jetsam

"It's awfully necessary for me to keep busy," says Australian-born Cyril Ritchard. one of the most resourceful actors and directors in show business. "I can't bear to be out of work. I'm stagestruck, I love variety and I cannot say no." To ward off purely imagined signs of creeping inactivity, peripatetic Actor Ritchard last week said yes to a new broadcasting venture: hosting "the best of BBC dramas" (daily at 2 p.m.) over Manhattan's city-owned, high-toned station WNYC.

The Cyril Ritchard Theater, designed to give radio drama a chance for a comeback against heavy TV odds, kicked off with a tape of Richard (High Wind in Jamaica] Hughes's 1924 play Danger, the first radio play ever produced. Though it was a disappointing debut ("A number of those English accents are so phony, you know," explains Ritchard), the balance of the first week's plays bore out the host's claim to a "varied diet" of entertainment. "The show has no rigid format," says Ritchard, "for there is always an audience for anything provocative, intelligent, gay."

Simply Drifting. Ritchard might well have been describing Ritchard. As a highly flexible Superman of the arts, big (6 ft. 2 in., 194 Ibs.), urbane Cyril Ritchard is also the fey earth visitor (and director) of Broadway's hit play A Visit to a Small Planet, a sort of personal gilly for his neat bag of vaudevillian's tricks. This spring, between performances, he made flying trips cross-country to play the leading comedy role in the Metropolitan Opera's Gilbert-and-Sullivanish souffle, La Perichole, which he also staged. "I sound like a sick walrus when I'm in good voice," he says. Within a matter of months he also bested Mike Wallace on Night Beat, played the bean peddler in TV's Jack and the Beanstalk, made some records with Bea Lillie, played all the parts in a recording of Alice in Wonderland, recorded Peter and the Wolf with the Philadelphia Orchestra, did several benefits and filled various speaking engagements. "I simply drift around like flotsam and jetsam," he says with creaks and squeaks in his voice, his sad, pale eyes playing out of a square, pinkish face.

17th Century Progress. A brilliantly organized drifter, Ritchard is up at the uncommonly early (for actors) hour of 8 a.m., makes jottings in his "unemotional" diary, breakfasts alone in his elegant West Side apartment, which was decorated for him by Mrs. Oscar Hammerstein II as a sort of tribute to the memory of his late wife. Actress Madge Elliott.

Born Cyril Trimnell-Ritchard 58 years ago ("Just say I was born and progressed in the 17th century"), he was educated by convent nuns, packed off to Sydney University to study medicine. After one year he hooked up in musical shows "as a pimply novice" with his boyhood idol, Actress Elliott. In 1935 Madge and Cyril, dubbed by Noel Coward "the singing Lunts," were married "with 3,000 people in the cathedral and 20,000 in the streets." Later in the U.S., Ritchard wasted his directorial skills on a dismal flop called Buy Me Blue Ribbons ("The reviews were simply blasting"), became identified as a periwigged fop in Restoration comedies ("That was my Mary Pickford period--all those long, blonde wigs").

Ritchard can barely remember his first serious TVenture as a Studio One Pontius Pilate. "All I know is I cried all the way through it, I was so moved." The role of Captain Hook in Mary Martin's Peter Pan returned to him some of his worldly wise Restoration hauteur, which is almost consciously blended with a spicy, oddly boyish personality. "My background may be common," he says, "but I have specialized in elegance." Although he will try to fit in more TV this fall, he finds TV comedy without an audience "the most difficult thing in the medium. The camera crews are so blase. I prefer those wonderful blue-haired ladies that come to your matinees."

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