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BOOK: The War of the Worlds Murder

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Many (including Welles) consider Houseman to be an enemy of Welles’s reputation; and yet for all the dirty laundry aired in his memoirs, Houseman’s respect and love for the artist and man are palpable. It seems to me most of Welles’s films—from
Citizen Kane
(1941) to
Touch of Evil
(1958), from
Othello
(1952) to
Chimes at Midnight
—are driven by the subtext of this failed friendship. Their bittersweet platonic “affair” provided me with a solid central conflict for a novel about this event and these times.

If the portrait herein of Houseman is largely drawn from his own memoirs, the sketches of other real figures come from straight biographies: Bernard Herrmann in Steven C. Smith’s
A Heart at Fire’s Center
(1991); and Judy Holliday in Will Holtzman’s
Judy Holliday: A Biography
(1982). Obviously, neither Herrmann nor Holliday are central figures here, but my interest in and love for the work of both made including them irresistible. Others in the Mercury Theatre world were excluded due to
space limitations, or redundancy: Joseph Cotten, for example, didn’t have anything to do with “The War of the Worlds,” and Richard Wilson was just another of the faithful Welles “stooges” who are represented herein by William Alland.

Most of the characters in this novel are real people, and appear under their own names. Dolores Donovan is a fictional character, however, as are such minor players as the security guards at the Columbia Broadcasting Building, the “thugs” in the alley sequence, and other spear-carriers. Throughout the “War of the Worlds” section, I have centered on real people caught up in the panic, but have changed or slightly modified their names, to give me more latitude.

The experience of the New York State troopers comes from Carmine J. Motto’s
In Crime’s Way
(2000) and my friend Jim Doherty’s excellent
Just the Facts—True Tales of Cops & Criminals
(2004); Jim pointed me toward this colorful, amusing incident. A highly respected serious study,
The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic
(1940) by Hadly Cantril, provided a factual basis for the stories of the Dorn sisters, James Roberts Jr., and several lesser players herein. The Ben Gross storyline is derived from the critic’s lively autobiography,
I Looked and I Listened
(1954, revised 1970).
Ponzi Schemes, Invaders from Mars & More Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
(1992) by Joseph Bulgatz provided not only a great overview article, but the basis for the Chapman family’s experience. Into Bulgatz’s description of a farm family’s reaction to the broadcast, I folded in the fact (relished by Welles) that numerous kids recognized the voice of the Shadow, and hence were
not
fooled, plus the famous foray of several farmers who tilted against the windmill of a Grovers Mill water tower (an event Welles—whose unfinished film of
Don Quixote
costarred Patty McCormack, star of my
Mommy
films—no doubt also relished).

A great website—
www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk
—provided great general background, plus the story of the Princeton journalism student and the geology professor who drove to Grovers Mill on the night of the “invasion.”

Two books—both containing Howard Koch’s classic script for the radio play—are vital to any examination of the incident (the Cantril study also includes the Koch script).
The Panic Broadcast: Portrait of an Event
(1970) includes Koch’s own memoir of the event and a many-years-later visit to Grovers Mill.
The Complete War of the Worlds
(2001), Brian Holmsten and Alex Lubertozzi, editors, is a definitive work, lavishly illustrated, including not just Koch’s script but the H.G. Wells novella and even a CD of the original broadcast in the context of an aural documentary narrated by John Callaway; it includes the historic on-air meeting of Welles (Orson) and Wells (H.G.).

For the record, the excerpts herein are transcriptions by me from the broadcast, not taken from the actual script, which does not include certain pauses, ad-libs and actor’s on-the-fly “revisions.” I use these excerpts not to tell the story of the play, but to give context to the national panic attack, and for the full impact of the piece, readers are urged to seek out Koch’s complete, excellent script as well as the broadcast itself (and
The Complete War of the Worlds
provides both).

A rare audio-only laser disc,
Theatre of the Imagination: Radio Stories by Orson Welles & the Mercury Theatre
(1988), includes detailed liner notes and a Leonard Maltin–narrated documentary written by Frank Beacham, “The Mercury Company Remembers,” with Houseman, William Alland, Richard Wilson and other Mercury Theatre veterans talking
not just about Welles and the radio show, but specifically about “The War of the Worlds” (Houseman is particularly compelling). The liner notes—unsigned but presumably by Beacham, who (with longtime Welles crony Wilson) produced the laser disc—includes the following piece of information about
The Shadow
radio show: “Welles became the lead because of his friendship with Walter Gibson, a fellow magician.”

Vital to this novel, Leonard Maltin’s rich, rewarding
The Great American Broadcast: A Celebration of Radio’s Golden Age
(1997) is an anecdotal history of the medium. The next most valuable work to this effort was a lavishly photo-illustrated children’s book,
Radio Workers
(1940) by Alice V. Keliher (editor), Franz Hess, Marion LeBron, Rudolf Modley and Stuart Ayers. General radio histories consulted include
Don’t Touch That Dial: Radio Programming in American Life from 1920 to 1950
(1979), J. Fred MacDonald;
On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio
(1998), John Dunning;
On the Air: Pioneers of American Broadcasting
(1988), Amy Henderson;
Tune in Yesterday: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio 1925–1976
(1976), John Dunning (including an especially detailed entry on Mercury and “War of the Worlds”); and
The Encyclopedia of American Radio
(1996, 2000), Ron Lackmann.

The following aided in re-creating the nightclub scene in 1930s New York:
Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret
(1991), James Gavin;
Jazz: A History of America’s Music
(2000), Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns;
Nightclub Nights: Art, Legend, and Style, 1920–1960
(2001), Susan Waggoner; and
The Night Club Era
(1933), Stanley Baker. In the Baker book, material on Owney Madden was particularly useful, as was
The Mafia Encyclopedia
(1987) by Carl Sifakis. Another Sifakis
book,
Hoaxes and Scams: A Compendium of Deceptions, Ruses and Swindles
(1993), was also consulted.

I screened a somewhat rare TV movie, director Joseph Sargent’s
The Night That Panicked America
(1975), which does an excellent job of re-creating the broadcast and its circumstances, as well as dealing with fictional but typical examples of listener reaction. The late Paul Shenar is excellent as Welles, and John Bosley, John Ritter, Meredith Baxter and other TV stalwarts of the ’70s do right by material written by Nicholas Meyer, who would go on to write and direct the wonderful film
Time After Time
, in which H.G. Wells uses his time machine to chase Jack the Ripper to the future. Paul Stewart is one of the main characters and is listed as a consultant; strangely, John Houseman is not depicted.

There’s no sham about the thanks I need to express to my patient editor, Natalee Rosenstein, and her associate Esther Strauss, who were typically understanding when the research for this book made what I’d assumed would be the easiest to write of these novels very possibly the hardest. My thanks go to my always supportive wife, Barb; my son and website guru, Nate (
www.maxallancollins.com
); and the able Dominick Abel, friend and agent (in that order).

My approach to the “disaster” novels has always been to research the event, first, and come up with an appropriate mystery, second, so that my fiction would interweave and complement and even grow out of the facts. As I explored the Mars Invasion Panic, I start wondering if I dared make the murder itself a hoax—I ran the basic concept by Barb, Nate and George Hagenauer, and all of them thought my approach would be both amusing and appropriate. In the aftermath of the broadcast, both Welles and Houseman believed they might well face multiple
murder charges for the deaths their stunt provoked (the media leading the pair to believe many had died, when in fact no one had). Sending out this message from the Punkin Patch, I can only bid my readers good-bye, and assure them that...I didn’t mean it...and remain their obedient servant.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo credit: Bamford Studio

M
AX
A
LLAN
C
OLLINS IS THE
New York Times
best-selling author of
Road to Perdition
and multiple award-winning novels, screenplays, comic books, comic strips, trading cards, short stories, movie novelizations, and historical fiction. He has scripted the
Dick Tracy
comic strip,
Batman
comic books, and written tie-in novels based on the
CSI
,
Bones
, and
Dark Angel
TV series; collaborated with legendary mystery author Mickey Spillane; and authored numerous mystery series including Quarry, Nolan, Mallory, Eliot Ness, and the best-selling Nathan Heller historical thrillers. His additional Disaster series mystery novels include
The Titanic Murders
,
The Hindenburg Murders
,
The Pearl Harbor Murders
,
The Lusitania Murders
, and
The London Blitz Murders
.