The War of the Worlds Murder (13 page)

“You mean—he owns the joint, but doesn’t hang around here.”

“That’s right. His cronies may pass along my having frequented his establishment, which I’m sure will give Mr. Madden
a few moments of...irritation. Just as I’m enjoying a few moments of amusement, contemplating as much.”

“But you don’t think he’ll do anything about it.”

“What can he do? I’m a public figure. He lays a hand on me, threatens me in any way, and, poof...he’s back in, yes, ‘stir.’ Anyway, I haven’t been seeing Tilly in some time. Weeks. I have other interests now.”

“Like your wife, you mean?”

Welles’s head tilted to one side; he sighed, but smiled as he did. “Do my excesses offend you, Walter?”

“I shouldn’t have said that. My apologies.”

“No, no, I understand. But I ask
you
to understand—I married too young. Before I’d sown my fair share of wild oats. And my nature is simply not monogamous. I’ve explained this to Virginia, and she must either learn to accept me, as I am, or we will, sadly, have to go our separate ways.”

Welles was intent on walking back to the Mercury, to check on the status of the stage repairs, and asked Gibson to keep him company. Glad for the chance to walk off the big meal, Gibson quickly accepted.

Now approaching two
A.M.,
Broadway was still alive but just starting to wind down a bit. As he strolled alongside the big man in the flowing black cape and slouch hat, Gibson contemplated how successful Welles (that baby nose hidden by a false hawk beak, anyway) might truly be at bringing the Shadow to life on screen.

Of course, the Shadow persona was actually secondary: the suave, sophisticated, man-about-town millionaire who was the Shadow’s secret identity—Lamont Cranston—Welles embodied perfectly, not only physically, but in life.

As they passed a particularly dark alley, a pair of hands reached out and plucked Gibson from Welles’s side, yanking the writer into the darkness. Two other large figures emerged from the shadows and thrust Welles into the alley as well.

Suddenly the two men had their backs to a brick wall and a trio of burly thugs in overcoats and battered hats—two fedoras and a porkpie—stood before them like a tribunal as imagined by Damon Runyon.

The trio was swathed in shadow, but one thing stood out clearly: the .45 automatic in the hand of the largest of them, the fleshy one in the middle, wearing the porkpie hat.

Welles, indignant, said, “What do you want with us? You want our money? You can have it! Then go, and go to hell.”

Gibson said nothing; he was trembling—scared out of his wits.

The man with the gun said, “We don’t want your money. We want your undivided attention—get it?”

“I’ve got it,” Welles said, sneering.

“Think you’re pretty cute, lording it up at the boss’s own place. Well, you lay off that little dancer, or the next time we talk, this rod’ll do the talking.”

“Cheap patter,” Welles said, “from cheap hoods....”

“Orson,” Gibson said. “Let it go...”

The guy with the gun said to the thug at his right, “Give him something to remember us by, Louie...”

Louie raised a fist, but Welles stepped forward and slammed his own fist into the man’s belly. As Louie crumpled, the man with the gun took a step forward and Welles knocked the gun from his grasp, slapping the man’s hand as if knocking a toy from a child’s hand.

The sound of it, spinning away on the cement into the blackness, gave Gibson courage. He shoved the third hood, the one who’d grabbed him in the first place, and then the entire trio of oversized goons were tripping over themselves, as Welles pushed Louie into the fellow with the porkpie.

Then Welles ran from the alley, calling, “Taxi!”

Gibson, right behind him, sharp footsteps on the pavement echoing, followed the flapping cape of Lamont Cranston as the hailed taxi screeched to a stop, and the actor and the writer scrambled into the backseat.

“St. Regis, please,” Welles said, regally casual, but breathing hard.

“Damn!” Gibson said, looking back toward the mouth of the alley—no sign of the hoods. They’d apparently disappeared into the dark, as Welles and Gibson made their escape.

Again, a hand settled on the writer’s shoulder. “Are you all right, Walter?”

“I may need a change of underwear.” He gave his host a hard look. “That was a little
reckless
, wasn’t it?”

Welles snorted. “I wasn’t going to let those overgrown Dead End Kids get away with that nonsense.”

“The leader had a gun!”

The cab driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror were on them.

Welles said, “He wouldn’t have fired, not so close to Broadway, not with a dozen cops around. They were just trying to scare us.”

Gibson blew out air. “Well, where I’m concerned, it worked like a charm.”

When the taxi pulled up at the St. Regis, a doorman approaching, Welles said, “Get some rest—I’m heading back
to the Mercury. We’ll have breakfast in my room, around ten, then go over to CBS together around noon. Agreeable?”

But Welles did not wait for an answer, and the taxi glided away, the moon face smiling at him, a cheerfully demented, if slightly overweight elf.

In his room, between the Egyptian-cotton sheets, Gibson lay exhausted but exhilarated—and it took him a good hour to go to sleep.

It wasn’t that he was disturbed, and certainly his fear had passed: but story ideas were humming through his mind. Soon he had an image of himself at the antique writing desk, starting another story, not realizing he was only dreaming....

SUNDAY

OCTOBER 30, 1938

W
ALTER
G
IBSON’S FAMOUS CREATION WAS
not the only Shadow cast by radio in 1938—the shadow of war also served to keep listeners on edge, and in a far more disturbing fashion
....

For several months prior to
The Mercury Theatre on the Air’
s broadcast of a certain H.G. Wells science-fiction yarn, listeners had been alerted to the troublesome state of the world, homes all across the nation taken hostage by talking boxes in their living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms and automobiles. The same gizmo that was sharing household hints and fudge recipes, cowboy adventures and comedy shows, weather reports and advertisements for corn plasters, popular tunes and classical music, was also bombarding America with the latest disasters, subjecting them to an endless parade of ominous international events. At no other time since the beginning of broadcasting had the collective audience been held in such a rapt, fearful grip, with listeners quite accustomed to their favorite programs being interrupted for news updates...and the news was never good
....

In his September address to the annual Nazi party congress in Nuremberg, German dictator Adolf Hitler demanded autonomy over an area on the Czech border known as Sudetenland. It seemed over three million “Sudeten Germans,” as the Führer called them, were “tortured souls” who could not “obtain rights and help themselves,” so the Nazis had to do it for them. (The translation Americans heard was provided by the dean of radio commentators, H.V. Kaltenborn, who just months before had been chosen by Orson Welles to narrate the Mercury radio broadcast of “Julius Caesar,” to add “a dimension of realism and immediacy.”) On October 3, Germany made its triumphant drive into the town of Asch, and a week later, Hitler’s troops occupied the Sudetenland
.

Hearing of such an ill-boding event firsthand was already old hat to American radio listeners. Hitler’s conquests became a kind of serial for grown-ups, the Czech crisis playing out over three tense weeks—listeners hearing firsthand the march step of Nazi boots, the accusations and the threats, the rumblings of war that included the Far Eastern menace of the Japanese. At the height of the European crisis, about a month before the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, a presentation of “Sherlock Holmes” by
The Mercury Theatre on the Air
had been interrupted by a news bulletin, irritating (but also making an impression on) Orson Welles
.

Most Americans felt the inevitability of involvement of the U.S.A. in a world conflict in which its allies were either threatened or already embroiled: as the Germans marched into Austria, the English people were issued gas masks, and all of Europe noted with alarm Hitler calling up to active duty one million weekend soldiers from the German army reserve
.

Radio statistics indicated that the medium’s audience had never been larger; what the numbers didn’t spell out was that these masses of listeners had never been more worried. Days before the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, Leni Riefenstahl—German filmmaker and rumored mistress of the Führer—was in Manhattan promoting her documentary about the 1936 Olympics, finding critical acceptance and public hostility. Meanwhile in Rome, the voice of fascism—the newspaper
II Tevere—
ordered the boycott of the films of Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers and the Ritz Brothers, the humor of these Jewish filmmakers condemned as “not Aryan.”

And the looming war was not the sole source of American jitters—earlier in 1938, a hurricane had hit the East Coast with devastating power; and, the year previous, the first disaster ever to be broadcast live exposed thousands to the explosion of the
Hindenburg.
When the German zeppelin caught fire at its mooring in Lakehurst, New Jersey, the announcer had been in the midst of describing the huge craft’s grandeur, only to witness...and report in “on the spot” fashion...the bursting flames and the dying people and all the ensuing chaos. His sobs—even his retching—had gone out over the air waves, “live”
....

Just four days before the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, CBS’s prestigious (if little-listened-to)
Columbia Workshop
aired a verse play by Archibald MacLeish: “Air Raid.” Orson Welles listened to the production on a break rehearsing
Danton’s Death,
because he had loaned his friend and Mercury regular, Ray Collins, to the production to be its narrator, a mock announcer reporting an air raid from a European tenement rooftop—the whine of attacking planes could be heard, the explosions of their dropped bombs, the sounds of a confused populace running for shelter, machine-gun fire, the screams of victims, including a young boy
....

Though written in verse, and clearly a play, the approach invoked a live news report. Welles heard this realistic radio drama a few hours before he made his suggestions to Howard Koch, John Houseman and Paul Stewart, about revising the script for “War of the Worlds” into a collage of broadcasts interrupted by news bulletins
.

As one of the participants in the “War of the Worlds” broadcast would reflect many years later, “The American people had been hanging on their radios, getting most of their news no longer from the press, but over the air. A new technique of ‘on-the-spot’ reporting had been developed and eagerly accepted by an anxious and news-hungry world
. The Mercury Theatre on the Air,
by faithfully copying every detail of the new technique—including its imperfections—found an already enervated audience ready to accept its wildest fantasies
....”

CHAPTER FOUR

SHANGHAIED LADY

T
HOUGH HE’D HAD A GOOD
(if dream-troubled) night’s sleep—his breakfast with Orson at the director’s suite had not been till ten
A.M.
—Walter Gibson felt logy, almost groggy, in the aftermath of the Welles morning repast. Enough orange juice, coffee, eggs, sausage, hash brown potatoes with melted cheese, and assorted muffins and sweet rolls had been delivered by St. Regis butlers to attend the gastric needs of your average lumberjack camp.

Perhaps in an ill-advised effort to keep up with his host, Gibson ate around a Paul Bunyan’s worth. Welles ate easily two Bunyan’s plus one Babe the Blue Ox’s worth to boot, conversation scant, the food commanding the boy-man’s full attention. What conversation had preceded and followed the feast touched little on the Shadow project, concentrating instead on their mutual fascination with magic. Welles inquired how Gibson had developed that interest.