The War of the Worlds Murder (28 page)

“But I’ll need more than one, right?”

“Very possibly,” Houseman granted.

And Welles slipped an arm around his friend and began to laugh and laugh and laugh, a Falstaffian roar of a laugh that seemed to relieve Houseman a great deal. But Gibson sensed some hysteria in it.

Which was only fair, after all, considering the hysteria Orson Welles had launched tonight.

The
Times
sign was announcing the time: twelve
A.M.

Midnight.

“It’s Hallowe’en, everyone,” Welles thundered. “It is finally...at long last, really and truly...Hallowe’en.”

CHAPTER TEN

THE TRIAL

W
ALTER
G
IBSON HAD BEEN SCHEDULED
to go back on the train to Philly on Monday morning, and—though hardly a lick of work on the project for which he’d been brought to Manhattan had been accomplished—that was what he did. Most of the way he slept, because he’d lingered at the Mercury Theatre as the
Danton’s Death
rehearsal got underway shortly after midnight. Around dawn, he’d exchanged casual but friendly good-byes with both Houseman and Welles, the latter assuring him they’d be getting together again soon, to “really get down to work” on the Shadow script.

The aftermath of the “invasion,” then, was something Gibson witnessed secondhand. He saw the newspaper headlines—
RADIO LISTENERS IN PANIC, TAKING WAR DRAMA AS FACT
(the
Times
);
FAKE RADIO “WAR” STIRS TERROR THROUGH U.S.
(the
Daily News
); and the
Herald Tribune
wrote of “hysteria, panic and sudden conversions to religion,” in the wake of the invasion from Mars.

Contacted in England, H.G. Wells himself objected to the Welles adaptation, complaining (without having actually heard the broadcast) that apparently too many liberties had been taken with his material, and that he was “deeply concerned” that his
work would be used “to cause distress and alarm throughout the United States.” (Later Wells and Welles would meet and the former would express a revised opinion, backing Orson all the way, and wondering why it was that Americans were so easily fooled—hadn’t they ever heard of Hallowe’en?)

CBS issued an elaborate apology and announced a new policy of banning any such simulated news broadcasts, which NBC also pompously adopted. Both CBS and the Mercury Theatre denied that the broadcast had been designed as a publicity stunt to promote the upcoming opening of
Danton’s Death
. The Federal Communications Commission studied the “regrettable” matter, but never took action, despite a dozen formal protests.

The talk of criminal charges fluttered away in a day—there had been no deaths, so the “murders” the press tried to scare Welles with (in the immediate aftermath of the broadcast) were as big a hoax as the broadcast itself.

And while the litigation war drums pounded for some weeks, none of the claims went anywhere, though Welles—over the protests of Davidson Taylor and William Paley—did honor a request for the price of a pair of black shoes, size 9B, whose prospective owner had used the designated funds to buy a bus ticket to escape the Martians.

Public indignation raged only briefly, though some of it was stinging, the
New York Times
scolding Welles and CBS for creating a “wave of panic in which it inundated the nation.”

But somehow the entire event was best characterized by the final phone call the CBS switchboard received, around three
A.M.
after the broadcast, which was from a truck driver in Chicago who asked if this was the network that put on the show about the Martian invasion; when the switchboard operator confirmed
as much, the listener said his wife had got so riled up over the show, she ran outside, fell down the stairs and broke her leg. A long pause, and then:

“Jeez,” the listener said wistfully, “that was a
wonderful
broadcast....”

Welles liked to display a cable he received from the real FDR (as opposed to Kenny Delmar), who commented on the Mars Invasion upstaging Charlie McCarthy:
THIS ONLY GOES TO PROVE, MY BEAMISH BOY, THAT THE INTELLIGENT PEOPLE WERE ALL LISTENING TO THE DUMMY, AND ALL THE DUMMIES WERE LISTENING TO YOU.

Such whimsy soon came to dominate coverage of the event, and within days the public’s reaction had shifted to amusement and even appreciation.

A New York
Tribune
writer, Dorothy Thompson, said it best: “Unwittingly, Mr. Orson Welles and
The Mercury Theatre on the Air
have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of all time—they have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition to create a nationwide panic.”

This, the writer said, indicated the “appalling dangers and enormous effectiveness of popular and theatrical demagoguery.... Hitler managed to scare all of Europe to its knees a month ago, but he at least had an army and an air force to back up his shrieking words. But Mr. Welles scared thousands into demoralization with nothing at all.”

She went to say that Welles had thrown a “brilliant and cruel light” on education in America; that thousands of the populace had been shown to be stupid, lacking in nerve but not short of ignorance; that primeval fears lay beneath the
“thinnest surface of civilized man”; and “how easy it was to start a mass delusion.”

The
Nation
made a chilling point similar to Thompson’s: the real cause of the panic was “the sea of insecurity and actual ignorance over which a superficial literacy and sophistication are spread like a thin crust.”

Many years later, Welles would admit, “The thing that gave me the idea for it was that we had a lot of real radio nuts on as commentators at this period—people who wanted to keep us out of European entanglements, and a fascist priest called Father Coughlin. And people believed anything they heard on the radio. So I said, ‘Let’s do something impossible and make them believe it.’ And then tell them, show them, that it’s only...radio.”

But at a Hallowe’en Day news conference in 1938, Welles told a different story. By the time Gibson saw excerpts in a newsreel, the furor had already died down, and last week seemed ancient history.

There Welles was, a few hours after Gibson had last seen him at the theater, now on trial before a battery of reporters, looking schoolboy contrite, a little bewildered and vaguely devilish with his goatee-ish need of a shave.

He was “deeply shocked and deeply regretful,” and when asked if he was aware of the panic such a broadcast might stir up, he claimed, “Definitely not.”

Some found him charming in the press conference; other shifty. Some saw a “palpably shaken,” repentant young man, while others considered him “hammy,” and “insulting” in the transparent way he feigned surprised dismay. One report had him, on the way out, flashing Jack Houseman a wink and an OK sign.

Welles’s writer, Howard Koch, who had so brilliantly executed the prank in play form, missed the fuss, at least initially. Sunday night, when he got home, he had listened to the rest of the broadcast, felt satisfied they’d all transcended the weak material, and dropped exhausted into bed. He had slept through the ringing phone, as Paul Stewart tried to alert him to the panic and the press.

Hallowe’en morning, he’d gone out to get a haircut and heard odd, even ominous snatches of conversation on the sidewalk, pedestrians talking of “panic” and “invasion.” The scriptwriter thought that perhaps the inevitable war with Hitler had finally broken out.

When he asked his barber what was going on, the haircutter showed him a front page with a headline blaring,
NATION IN A PANIC FROM MARTIAN BROADCAST.

Like Welles, Koch wondered if he was finished; but a call from Hollywood soon came, and the co-organizer of the Martian Invasion would go on to one of the most distinguished careers in the history of screenwriting, including a little picture in 1942 called
Casablanca
.

Welles had not been ruined, either, though there was no saving
Danton’s Death
from the director’s pretensions. The production could not even ride the biggest wave of publicity the city had ever seen, and—after mostly withering reviews—closed after a mere twenty-one performances. The Mercury Theatre would not last another season.

In later years Welles liked to point out that broadcasts in other countries, patterned on his “War of the Worlds,” had resulted in jail for their perpetrators and that one radio station in Spain had even been burned to the ground.

“But
I
got a contract in Hollywood,” he said.

Back in 1938, Welles and the Mercury were now suddenly world-famous. Within a week of the “invasion,”
The Mercury Theatre on the Air
went from being an unsponsored, “sustaining” show to acquiring Campbell Soup as a sponsor. Changes were made—popular novels joined literary warhorses as grist for the Mercury mill, and each week a famous guest star appeared. For an adaptation of Daphne DuMaurier’s
Rebecca
, Bernard Herrmann composed a full score, which prefigured his many famous film scores. Much of it was used by Herrmann, in fact, for the 1943 film of
Jane Eyre
, starring and produced by Welles from a script cowritten by Houseman.

Hollywood, of course, was Welles’s ultimate reward for the “Mars invasion,” and perhaps his punishment. He was greeted as a genius, then denounced for considering himself such; his talent led to
Citizen Kane
, the 1941 film that tops most “best films of all time” lists, but his arrogance in lampooning William Randolph Hearst (and the newspaper magnate’s mistress Marion Davies) created enemies who threw obstacles in Welles’s career path his entire life.

In 1975, in our little corner of the Palmer House bar, the white-haired, spectacled Gibson had spent almost two hours with me, sharing the secret story of his “weekend with Orson.” He seemed a little tired, but I was a kid, wired up by what I’d heard, and didn’t know when to stop.

“What happened to the Shadow project?” I asked.

“
That
‘weed of crime’ bore no evil fruit,” Gibson said, invoking the famous closing lines of the Shadow radio show. “And like the Mystery Writers of America say, crime doesn’t pay...enough.”

“Well, the proposed Shadow movie was with Warner Bros., right?”

“Yes, but after the Mars broadcast, every studio in Hollywood was waving contracts at Orson, and the one he took, of course, was with RKO...which he famously described as a ‘the biggest train set a boy ever had.’ ”

“So he just dropped it, the Shadow movie, when—”

“No. Orson often came back to a project, again and again—some of his finished films were shot over many years, remember. Around 1945, after he’d had some setbacks, we talked again about doing the Shadow feature, and that dialogue continued sporadically over the years—hell, just a couple of years ago, I was approached about a Shadow TV pilot that Orson was behind.”

“He’s a little...heavy to play the Shadow now, isn’t he?”

Gibson smiled and sipped the last of his latest glass of beer. “Well, he still dresses like the Shadow—the slouch hat, the dark clothes.... Sometimes I think, for all his Shakespearean proclivities, of every role he ever played, Orson liked the Shadow best.”

I let out a laugh. “It’s the whole magician persona—the cape, the aura of the unexplained, the sly smile....”

Our pitcher of beer was almost gone. Gibson poured me half a glass, and himself the same. We were approaching the end.

“You know,” Gibson said, something bittersweet entering his voice, “Jack Houseman and Orson—one of the really great artistic teams in show business history—split up a few years after the broadcast. And I always thought Jack’s prank on Orson, the murderous ‘lesson’ he tried to teach him, was the first crack in the wall.”

“But you said Orson only laughed about it?”

Gibson nodded, eyes tight behind the lenses. “As I’m sure you know, Orson has a big booming laugh, and it covers up
a lot of different emotions—it can be filled with contempt as easily as amusement.”

“And you sensed that, that night?”

He didn’t answer directly, saying instead, “Houseman made the Hollywood trip, too, you know—they did the radio show from out there, took the cast with them...Joe Cotten had never been in a movie before
Kane
. Herrmann took the ride, too, did the
Kane
music, beautifully. But Orson and Houseman quarreled—they say Orson threw a burning Sterno dish at Houseman, set a curtain on fire...this was at Chasen’s.”

“Only, Houseman did work on
Kane
, right?”

“He worked with Mankiewicz, out of Orson’s presence. Their draft of the
Kane
script was another Houseman prank—Kane was based more on Orson himself than Hearst!”

“And Welles didn’t even realize it?”

Shaking his head, laughing, Gibson said, “Of course he did! But it was his perverse, willful nature to do it anyway, and he emphasized the resemblance even more in
his
drafts.... He and Houseman only worked a time or two together, after that. Currently, sadly...they’re enemies. Each the sworn nemesis of the other.”