Background

Lester Kroll was born on September 1, 1898 in New York City, New York, United States. His family background and early years are shadowy, in part because he was always secretive about his family background.

Education

Little is known about his education. According to records, he dropped out of school at an early age.

Career

He held a variety of jobs in New York during the 1920s. According to one rumor, he was, among other things, a taxicab driver, though he claimed to have been an editor of a "taxicab publication. " He was unable or unwilling to make his alimony payments and served a jail sentence for his refusal. After his release, he founded the Marital Relations Institute and made himself its director.

He provided counseling and information to persons seeking marital advice, charging a $5 fee. It was at this time that he began to use the name John J. Anthony, feeling that it had a more dignified sound than his legal name. He also began to fabricate impressive educational credentials for himself, claiming to hold three university degrees and to have studied with Sigmund Freud in Europe, all of which he later denied.

By the mid-1930s the Marital Relations Institute was beginning to show some signs of success. In 1935 it issued the first of a series of reports on alimony and divorce that purported to prove that 69 percent of the women who sent their husbands to jail for nonpayment of alimony were pathological. The next year, the Marital Relations Institute submitted to the New York State legislature several reports calling for changes in New York marriage and divorce laws, including premarital blood tests, the extension of the waiting period between the issuance of a marriage license and the wedding ceremony, and the establishment of a separate court to deal with marital and domestic problems.

As early as 1930, Anthony was heard on New York radio station WMCA, offering advice on marriage and domestic life, but the Marital Relations Institute occupied most of his time until 1937. In September 1936 a WMCA program called "The Goodwill Court" had gone onto a national network and had enjoyed tremendous audience success. By December, however, the show had drawn such sharp criticism from the legal profession that the New York Supreme Court ruled that judges and lawyers who went on the show (which specialized in dispensing legal advice in response to listeners' queries) would be disbarred, and therefore, the show was canceled that month, leaving a large hole in WMCA's program schedule.

Anthony went to WMCA with a proposal to do a show similar to "Goodwill Court, " but instead of having lawyers and judges respond to listeners' inquiries about legal matters, he would answer the audience's questions about domestic and marital problems. WMCA's management was eager to find a replacement for their highly successful--and lucrative--show, and in August 1937, Anthony's program "The Goodwill Hour" premiered on the Mutual Network. The show drew considerable criticism from various psychiatric and psychological organizations, but it was popular with Sunday-night listeners, and in 1938, Ironized Yeast became its national sponsor.

The format of the show was simple. An announcer (Roland Winters) would open the show with a line such as "You have a friend and adviser in John J. Anthony. " Anthony would then say, "What is your problem, madam [or sir]?" A client, selected by Anthony from the cards and letters sent to him, would then deliver a three- or four-minute monologue, typically describing a problem with sex, alcohol, money, infidelity, or another source of domestic stress. Anthony would then make a suitably pious or general suggestion, advising the person to try harder, pray, or be more forgiving. He would then go on to the next guest.

The program was extremely successful. By 1939, Anthony was being paid $3, 000 a week and his radio show was being carried on 700 stations. His minimum fee for a counseling session at the Marital Relations Institute had gone to $25, and his book, Marriage and Family Problems and How to Solve Them (1939), was selling well.

In 1940 his show jumped from the Mutual Network to the National Broadcasting Company's Blue Network, and in 1943 it moved back to Mutual, picking up Clark Chewing Gum as its sponsor.

Anthony's show lost its network distribution in 1953, and he moved to Los Angeles. In 1954, Los Angeles station KTTV gave Anthony a half-hour weekly television show with essentially the same format as the one he had developed for radio, but the program did not receive network distribution and was canceled after a brief run.

Anthony was a moderately competent non-objective painter, and he had a show at the Arthur Brown Gallery in Manhattan in 1949. After moving to Los Angeles, he tried to develop his artistic talent commercially by investing in a product called Talking Pictures, which used phonograph records as a system for teaching people how to paint. The project was unsuccessful.

After the demise of his television program and the failure of his art project, Anthony continued to lecture and to work on West Coast radio, but he was basically in retirement.

In 1964, Anthony was appointed a commissioner of the Human Relations Board for Los Angeles County. In 1967 he played a divorce-court judge in the movie Divorce, American Style, and he continued to appear on radio and television shows and to lecture.

He died in San Francisco.

Although Anthony claimed authorship for a number of titles, most of them seem to have been pamphlets issued by his Marital Relations Institute. His only published book, Marriage and Family Problems and How to Solve Them (1939), was reissued as Mr. Anthony Solves Your Personal Problems (1945). Sources of information on Anthony are sparse and often contradictory. The Billy Rose Theater Collection of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center has some publicity photographs and three scrapbooks of clippings on Anthony. The Broadcast Pioneers Library in Washington, D. C. , has a letter from Anthony dated 1961 that purports to summarize his career. In fact, it is devoid of useful facts or information.

Achievements

• Anthony was among the first and most successful of America's many media psychologists, and the success of "The Goodwill Hour" helped to establish a small but enduring niche in radio and television for "human interest" shows such as "Queen for a Day" and "This Is Your Life. " But Anthony's persistent claims to have been a moving force in the reform of marriage and divorce laws and in the establishment of premarriage courses in college curricula are hard to credit. Certainly, Anthony was among the first to recognize the commercial potential of popular psychology. An inveterate showman given to exaggeration, braggadocio, and--when useful--outright lies, he saw that advice, packaged correctly, could make good money. He was one of the most successful practitioners of the psychological self-help tradition that has since become so thoroughly entrenched in American popular taste.

Connections

Anthony married young and in 1929 divorced his first wife, Stella; they had two children.

His second wife, the former Etille Sorella, produced most of his radio shows. They had one child.

Spouse:

Stella Kroll

She was an Earl Carroll showgirl.

Spouse:

Etille (Sorella) Kroll

Son:

John Kroll

He was a Newsweek drama and film critic.