The War of the Worlds Murder (5 page)

“Very kind of you, Walter—may I call you Walter?”

“If I might risk Orson, certainly.”

“Please!” Welles’s warm laugh had nothing to do with the Shadow’s sinister one. “Walter, I know we’re going to be great friends.”

Gibson shook his head—actors. “The last time I saw you...Orson...was on the cover of
Time
. What’s the occasion?”

Welles dove right in: “Walter, I have an interesting offer from Hollywood. They’ve made several lousy pictures out there about our character, as I’m sure you know.”

Our character
apparently meant the Shadow. Gibson smiled to himself at this presumption, but kept this reaction out of his
voice as he replied: “You’re telling me? The wife and I walked out on both of ’em.”

Welles chuckled. “Frankly, I didn’t bother going. People I trusted warned me off. I mean, honestly, Walter, with a character as wonderful and famous as ours, how
could
they? I mean,
Rod LaRocque
! Didn’t he single-handedly kill off silent pictures?”

“I don’t know about that, Orson—but he made a good stab at killing off talkies with those two crummy Shadow pictures.”

“Agreed! Warner Brothers agrees, as well. They are prepared to make up for those B-movie embarrassments, if we can come up with a worthy scenario.”

“A top-budget affair this time? With a first-rate director, and a real star, you mean?”

“Precisely!”

“What director?”

“Why me, of course.”

“And the star?”

“You’re speaking to him!”

“...Have you ever directed before, Orson? I mean, a moving picture?”

Welles did not miss a beat: “Actually, my dear fellow, I
have
taken a few experimental steps—I made a short film as a student, and recently I dabbled in the art for a stage production we did of Gillette’s farce,
Too Much Johnson
, with the Mercury players.”

“Ah,” Gibson said noncomittally.

“But the point is I have been staging plays with a cinema director’s eye from the beginning—you’ve heard of my voodoo
Macbeth
, and my Nazi-ified
Julius Caesar
, no doubt?”

Gibson had; he followed the radio Shadow’s career with a certain proprietary interest...and anyway, the
Time
magazine article had covered all of that and more.

“Where would I come in?” Gibson asked.

“I’m told there’s nothing you can’t write.”

Smiling to himself again, Gibson thought:
he knows this secondhand; he doesn’t read the magazine featuring “our” character, apparently
....

“Well, that’s true,” Gibson said. Welles wasn’t the only one who could afford to be immodest. “But where did you hear it, Orson?”

“Our mutual friends among the magic community, of course.”

“Ah,” Gibson said again. Nothing noncommital about it, this time.

“I believe,” Welles said, with the richness of voice and surety of a revival-tent preacher, “that only the creator of my famous character can help me properly conceive it...
re
conceive it...for the screen. Are you willing to try?”

“I’m...interested.”

“And your schedule, Walter?”

“I’ll be done for the year, with my Shadow work, within days.”

“How is next week, then?”

“Feasible.”

“I would of course be paying for first-class travel and hotel accommodations—you’ll be here at the St. Regis, where I’m living currently. Full expense account. How...‘feasible’ is that, Walter?”

“Entirely.”

Hanging up the phone, Gibson had the feeling that he’d just spoken to a man of wisdom and experience far beyond the author’s own. And yet he knew that Orson Welles was almost ten years younger than himself....

The cab drew up to 485 Madison Avenue, and Gibson—typewriter handle in one bandaged hand, valise in the other—was
deposited (for an outrageous fifty cents including tip—he mentally noted that for his expense account) on the sidewalk above which loomed the massive overhang of the marquee that boldly stated
CBS RADIO THEATRE
. The Welles program, though, received no boost, as the side panels touted:

THE CHRYSLER CORPORATION PRESENTS MAJOR BOWES ORIGINAL AMATEUR HOUR.

By craning his neck like any other rube of a tourist, he could see the vertical sign stretching nine or ten stories above:

C

B

S

R

A

D

I

O

T

H

E

A

T

R

E

but he could also see that lower floors of the impressive building had windows bearing less grandiose imprimaturs, such as
CARLOS TAP AND BALLET
and
MIDTOWN TAX SERVICE
.

The uniformed guard in the lobby found Gibson’s name on a list, had him sign in, and sent him over to an elevator, where he
and the elevator operator rode up to the twentieth floor. Mildly disappointed by the lack of show biz trappings—he might have been inside any nameless office building, to get a tooth drilled or have a wife followed—Gibson found nothing to get excited about at his destination, either: the twentieth-floor lobby was an unimpressive, sterile world of walls covered in a light-green industrial paint broken up by the occasional potted plant and some art-moderne chairs and sofas out of the latest
Sears and Roebuck
catalogue.

Next to a bulletin board—covered in schedules and lists that might just as easily have referred to bus-station not radio-station timetables—sat an attractive strawberry-blonde receptionist of perhaps twenty-five. In her smart white blouse with navy buttons and a navy scarf with white polka dots knotted at her throat, and with her heart-shaped face and light-blue eyes and fair lightly freckled complexion, she was a heart-stopper, even to a married man. Or was that, especially to a married man? Candy-apple red lipstick made her guardedly professional smile as dazzling as one you might see in a Sunday supplement toothpaste ad.

“Walter Gibson to see Mr. Welles.”

She checked a clipboard and said, “Your name is here, Mr. Gibson...but I’m afraid Mr. Welles isn’t.”

“He said to meet him in Studio One at one-thirty. I’m a tad early.”

“Ah. Well, it’s right through there.” With a tapering finger whose scarlet nail polish matched the lush lipstick, she pointed toward a doorless doorway just to Gibson’s left. “Studio One is the first door down.... If the ‘On the Air’ light is on, don’t go in.”

Gibson frowned. “My understanding is the show isn’t broadcast till Sunday night.”

“It isn’t—but every week, Mr. Welles makes an acetate recording of the Thursday afternoon rehearsal. To review the week’s program.”

“Is everyone around here as knowledgeable as you, miss?”

“It’s Miss Donovan, Mr. Gibson. Probably not—but like every receptionist or secretary you’re likely to meet in this building, I’m an aspiring actress.”

“Ah. Any luck?”

“I fill in on several of the soaps, as needed, and I’ve had some bits with the
The Mercury Theatre
, too, and even
The Columbia Workshop
. Guess you’d say I’m kind of an understudy.”

“An understudy in radio. That’s a new one on me.”

“Well, you have to understand that the voice actors in this town have to bicycle all over the place—NBC’s over at Sixth Avenue and Fiftieth, and Mutual’s on the other side of the world—Broadway and Fortieth. You know, Orson...Mr. Welles...he sometimes travels by ambulance.”

Gibson grinned. “Sounds like Mr. Welles is as big a character as they say?”

“Oh, he’s wonderful. You’ll fall in love with him.”

Something in the girl’s expression made Gibson wonder if she might be speaking from experience.

Miss Donovan allowed the author to leave his valise and typewriter with her, behind her desk, and was kind enough to inquire about how he’d hurt his “poor fingers.” To prevent this from dominating every other conversation of the day, Gibson ducked into the men’s room and removed the bandages from his fingertips, which looked reddish but nearly healed.

The
ON THE AIR
sign over the Studio One door was not alighted, so Gibson moved on through a vestibule that separated the hallway from the studio, apparently for soundproofing
purposes. He pushed open a door whose window was round, like a porthole, and found himself on a small landing, with a chrome banister, five steps above the floor of a large noisy chamber bustling with men who mostly had their suitcoats off—a sea of suspenders, rolled-up sleeves and puffing cigarettes.

Gibson was no stranger to radio: well over ten years ago, the writer had appeared on station WIP in Philly, presenting puzzles and their solutions. And he’d written and helped produce a series for magician Howard Thurston early in the decade.

But an operation of this scale was beyond his experience, and he felt a bit like Dorothy having her first look at Oz.

The walls of the big, high-ceilinged room were light gray, and the few doors sky-blue with those porthole-style windows. The far left wall and the facing one alternated dark drapes with sound-baffling panels the color of caramel. To Gibson’s left was a plywood, carpeted podium a little larger than a cardtable with a microphone and a music stand. The podium faced the short end of a twelve-foot by twenty-four-foot space marked off with white words on the dark-painted cement floor saying, on all four sides,
MICROPHONE AREA
. Within this carpeted rectangle resided four well-spaced microphones on stands (every mike in the room wore either a little metal CBS hat or dickey).

Just outside the microphone rectangle a couple of tables were home to coffee and sandwiches, or the aftermath thereof, along with scripts, magazines, newspapers, and ashtrays. Cigarettes bobbling, half a dozen actors wandered with folded-open script in hand, fingers pressed to an ear, reading aloud, and adding to the general chaos.

To Gibson’s left, beyond the podium, a small orchestra was arrayed, seven pieces plus a grand piano; their leader, a bespectacled, rather odd-looking man, sat at the piano, frowning as he made notes on his score, paying no heed to the musicians filing in and taking their seats and going through little practice scales and other warm-ups.

Across the room, beyond and behind the carpeted
MICROPHONE AREA
, lurked a sound-effects station, including a table with two turntables for Victrola records, a wooden door on a heavy frame (for opening or closing as a script demanded), a bench with an odd assortment of items (saw and hammer, milk-bottle rack, coconut shells, etc.), a flat box of sand on the floor, and a rack of electronic gizmos. A statuesque middle-aged woman, who in her floral-print frock might have been a housewife, sorted through the inventory of this area, assembling things in order—cellophane for the crackle of fire, a bundle of straw for noises in underbrush, a large potato with a knife stuck in it—her pleasant face mildly contorted with intensity.

Though this was a fairly massive studio, it lacked audience seating. Gibson knew elsewhere in this building, the ground floor most likely, would be at least one theater-style studio, for programs like tonight’s
Major Bowes Amateur Hour
. Game shows and comedies benefitted from spectators: those presenting the dramatic fare
The Mercury Theatre on the Air
specialized in might find that a distraction.

A door adjacent to the one he’d come in opened suddenly, and Gibson—mildly startled—whirled to see a small, dark man with salt-and-pepper hair lean out, his striped tie hanging like the flag on a football play. Indeed, the entire manner
of this fellow was that of a referee, calling foul at this stranger’s interference.

“Can I help you?” Though diminutive, the man had an intimidating bearing—including an actor’s strong baritone, and eyes that bored into you.

“I’m Walter Gibson—I had an appointment with Mr. Welles.”

The man—like so many here, in suspenders and rolled-up shirtsleeves—stepped onto the landing and his features softened but his eyes remained skeptical, a maitre d’ not convinced you should be seated.

“Mr. Gibson, I don’t doubt what you say.... Orson is fairly cavalier about not keeping me informed about guests he’s invited...but we’re about to rehearse and record Sunday’s show.”

“I take it Orson isn’t here.”

The man twitched a smile. “No. He always says he’s going to participate in these recorded rehearsals, and we always wait half an hour past the time he sets, before starting without him.”

“How often does he actually show up?”

“So far, never.” Gibson’s reluctant host frowned, the cacophony of musicians, actors and sound effects making it hard to converse. “Step in here, would you?...I’m Paul Stewart, by the way.”

The two men shook hands as they pushed through a portholed door. They entered a cubicle adjacent to the control booth, where a desk faced a window out onto the studio; this, Gibson knew, was where the network rep would likely sit.

With no rep present, however, this cubicle made a good place to talk.

Through a doorless doorway was the actual control booth, with its bank of slanted panels with switches and dials against
a generous horizontal window onto the studio. An engineer in earphones was already seated there, ready to “mix” the show, i.e., bring voices and sound effects up or down. A chair next to the engineer, with a microphone and headset waiting, would be the director’s post, Gibson knew.

But what, then, was that podium out there for? And where was their famous “child” director? As if reading his guest’s mind, Stewart spoke.

“Mr. Gibson, I’m the program director, and my hands are going to be very full. Maybe you’d like to sit here and watch—there’s always an off chance Orson might stop by.”

“I wouldn’t mind at that. I’m a writer, by the way—you may know me better as Maxwell Grant.”

Stewart’s eyes narrowed. He sighed, shook his head, his expression softening with chagrin. “My apologies—Orson
did
mention you—the Shadow author. He’s planning a project with you, I’m told.”