L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

His first choice, CBS, passed. No blondes, no Humphrey Bogart-style Sam Spade, no audience was the network’s prediction. Webb disagreed. Authenticity was what would make his show unique. Webb went to NBC. It was desperate for programming, having recently lost prized performers Bing Crosby, Jack Benny, and Amos ‘n’ Andy to CBS—so desperate it was willing to give a true-to-life police documentary a go. There was just one condition: Webb had to have access to LAPD case files.

This was not necessarily an easy sell. Pat Novak for Hire had presented policemen in an almost uniformly bad light. (Nearly every episode featured a dumb, brutal police officer who hinders, threatens, and sometimes beats Novak as he attempts to solve the case.) So it was with some uncertainty that Wynn and Brasher took Webb to meet their captain, Jack Donahoe. They were fortunate in their choice. The good-natured Donahoe agreed to provide case notes to help Webb work up a pilot program that he could present to then-Asst. Chief Joe Reed. Webb was delighted when Reed pronounced the pilot “good and accurate.” The show then went to Chief Horrall, who informed Webb “he was on the right track, reflecting the day-to-day drudgery of police work.” It wasn’t exactly the reaction Webb was hoping for, but it got Webb what he needed—a departmental blessing and access to its case notes. In June 1949, the first episode of radio Dragnet went on the air, Friday evening at 10:00 p.m.

From the start, Webb was fanatical about getting the details right. Five soundmen were employed to create a range of more than three hundred special effects. Wherever possible, the program used actual recordings from the department. Soundmen staked out the City Hall garage to capture the roar of police cruisers speeding away; they also recorded the everyday background noise of City Hall. When a script called for a long-distance phone call from Los Angeles to Fountain Green, Utah, sound engineers placed a real call, and recorded the relay clicks and point-to-point operator comments. Terminology was precise and correct. A suggestion to replace “attention all units” with the more dramatic “calling all cars” was brushed aside. Understatement rather than the exaggerated accents, over-the-top sound effects, and histrionic acting that characterized most crime radio programs was the order of the day. The most important part of the new program, though, was its central character, played by Jack Webb himself, Sgt. Joe Friday.

In those days, your typical homicide detective had a very distinctive look. “His suits are not cheap, though they don’t always look well pressed,” wrote newspaperwoman Agnes Underwood, “and while not loud, would hardly be called dark, conservative business numbers.” Their ties, however, “shout like a movie homicide detective.”

If they are foppish about their ties, they are vainer in their searches to turn up the snazziest bands for their wrist watches…. The bands are dreams of matinee idols’ jewelers: gold stretch, mesh, hand-tooled leather, or carved silver. If one of these lads keeps looking at his watch, he’s not worried about the time, he’s trying to display his newest bracelet to his associates, even if he has to roll back his shirt cuff to guarantee they’ll see it.

There was “nothing sissy about the bracelet competitions,” Underwood continued, “for the bands bind brawny wrists, backing up tremendous fists, made more lethal by heavy rings on the third finger of the left hand. That’s one reason they don’t get beaten up like movie detectives; they know how to use those fists.”

Joe Friday (as played by Jack Webb) was different. He was young, tall, and almost painfully slim. (Despite being six feet tall, he weighed a mere 165 pounds, just five pounds over the LAPD’s minimum weight.) He dressed casually, in sports coats and a tie, but his demeanor was anything but casual. Friday was an organization man, professional through and through, courteous in his interactions with others, but determined to resolve the case before him. Contrary to the image that later emerged, Friday was not an emotionless automaton. In fact, his most famous phrase, “Just the facts, ma’am,” is one he never uttered. Nor was the original Joe Friday the painfully square detective of the 1960 series who battled “killer reefer.” Dragnet was vérité, like reality TV. At the same time, Joe Friday was the perfect noir hero, a jaded idealist, strangely single, who walked the mean streets of Los Angeles but who himself was “neither tarnished nor afraid.”