The War of the Worlds Murder (7 page)

“More like late,” Stewart said. “He’ll probably still be rehearsing the cast when we get there....”

FRIDAY

OCTOBER 28, 1938

O
N
M
AY 6, 1915
, O
RSON
Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, not far from Chicago, Illinois. His family was well-off, even well-to-do, his father an inventor and a hotelier, his mother a renowned pianist. From early childhood, he was surrounded by friends of the family who were intellectuals and artists—musicians, writers, actors, painters, and the occasional industrialist. He was welcomed as a prodigy, a child genius, and Orson lived up to the challenge. Before long a headline in a Madison newspaper was proclaiming him: “Cartoonist, Actor, Poet—and Only Ten!”

“My father,” he once said, “was a gentle, sensitive soul whose kindness, generosity and tolerance made him much beloved.... From him I inherited the love of travel, which has become ingrained within me. From my mother I inherited a real and lasting love of music and the spoken word, without which no human being is really a complete and satisfactory person.”

His father, however, often travelled without him; and his mother died within days of the boy’s ninth birthday. His guardian, Dr. Maurice Bernstein (a former lover of Orson’s mother), shared with the parents a belief in the boy’s genius—Bernstein gave the child a conductor’s baton at age three. The guardian (“Dadda,” Orson called him) also introduced young Orson to magic tricks, and gave him a puppet theater where the precocious one could concoct his own shows
.

He was fifteen when his father died, and his youth thereafter was spent in a series of progressive schools; by high school he was an old hand at producing Shakespeare, coming up with a version of
Julius Caesar
that won top prize from the Chicago Drama League for a student production (once the jury had been shown proof that the young actors were not professionals)
.

At sixteen, he set out from the latest of these schools for Europe with five hundred dollars and a dream of becoming an artist—he had painted and drawn since age two. He wound up in Dublin, broke—travelling by donkey cart, paying his way with his artwork after the money ran out—and presented himself to the prestigious Gate Theatre company as an American Broadway star, “the sensation of the New York Theatre Guild.”

His confidence was credible, if not his story, and soon in this old city with its rich theatrical tradition, the young actor was on stage, winning good notices—playing a duke, the ghost in
Hamlet,
and even the King of Persia. Soon offers came from England, but when the boy tried to follow up on these opportunities, the Ministry of Labor refused a work permit, and Orson Welles returned to America, a seasoned veteran of the Dublin stage
.

But Broadway was—initially—unimpressed, and young Welles sought theatrical satisfaction offstage, creating an annotated stage edition of Shakespeare’s works
(The Mercury Shakespeare)
and returning to the pursuit of painting, first in Morocco, then Spain. When playwright Thornton Wilder recommended him to Katharine Cornell, the celebrated actress hired him to appear in touring productions of
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
and
Romeo and Juliet.

Operating out of Chicago, Welles further dabbled in theater in nearby rural Woodstock, organizing a festival through the Todd School, one of the progressive institutions he’d attended as a child. In addition to attracting attention, and making his first short film, Welles won a wife, a lovely and privileged eighteen-year-old actress, Virginia Nicholson
.

His touring for Katharine Cornell finally led to Broadway, where a struggling producer—John Houseman—saw the teenager’s performance as Tybalt in
Romeo and Juliet,
and knew at once his own destiny would be bound up with that of this “monstrous boy—flatfooted and graceless, yet swift and agile...from which issued a voice of such clarity and power that it tore like a high wind through the genteel, modulated voices of the well-trained professionals around him.”

At thirty-three, the balding, stocky former Jacques Haussmann—born in Bucharest to an English mother and French father, a successful grain merchant turned Broadway writer/producer/director—was at a personal crossroads. Despite an intimidating bearing, including the accent of a cultured English gentleman, Houseman had little confidence in himself—“My shame and fear were almost unbearable, my ineptitude so glaring”—and in the nineteen-year-old Welles, Houseman saw in full bloom the qualities he himself lacked
.

A partnership began with Houseman hiring the teenager to play a sixty-year-old failed industrialist in the prophetically titled Archibald MacLeish play
, Panic.
The show ran only three performances, but Welles was praised, and a partnership was forged, Houseman as business administrator, Welles as artistic director. Together they mounted New York’s most compelling theatrical productions of the mid-1950s. For the Federal Theatre, a WPA project designed to create work for actors, they staged an innovative, all-black-cast
Macbeth
in a striking Haitian voodoo setting designed by Welles himself. Then, with barely two nickels to rub together, the two men created their own repertory company, the Mercury Theatre
.

Their first production
, Julius Caesar,
was performed in modern dress in a stark, startling setting—actors in business suits and fascist military uniforms against a blood-red background. Their most famous production, Marc Blitzstein’s opera
The Cradle Will Rock,
found the dynamic duo thumbing their noses at the WPA shutting them down, and skirting union demands despite the play’s (and their own) left-wing stance, by staging the show from the audience, actors standing and performing their lines in the aisles amid dazzled theatergoers
.

During this same period, Welles had become a popular radio actor—a brilliant serialization in 1937 of
Les Miserables
had paved the way for future glories, and by 1938
The March of Time
and
Shadow
star was making a thousand dollars a week...even before he brought his and Jack Houseman’s repertory company, the Mercury Theatre, to CBS
.

In October 1938, Orson Welles was twenty-three years old
.

CHAPTER TWO

BROADWAY MALADY OF 1938

T
HROUGH THE EARLY MORNING FOG
came the brooding bray of a great liner—the
Queen Mary
—steaming through the Narrows, turning north toward the slender island of Manhattan. Elsewhere, chugging through darkness still shrouding New Jersey, a train carried sightseeing families (115,000 daily, even in this Depression) as well as hopeful youths seeking fortune and fame, while in the city, night workers were just starting home (some of them anyway), their steps as sharp as a tap dancer’s, though considerably less regular, on sidewalks otherwise uncharacteristically quiet. Nearby, the occasional automobile and water wagon haunted empty streets, and in perhaps half a dozen nightclubs around the big town, bands played on, mostly after-hours improv sessions by musicians seeking to use up the last shreds of a night long since turned to morning. In the next half hour, alarm clocks would begin to trill across the Upper East and Upper West Side alike, and in Hell’s Kitchen and the Gashouse, too, as well as Greenwich Village and Chelsea, their ringing ricocheting off mostly vacant streets.

And in a taxi, moving through skyscraper canyons that were still sporadically lit by neon, Walter Gibson was making his way from the St. Regis—an absurdly posh hotel
at which the writer would never have stayed, off expense account—to a theater at 41
^st
and Broadway that had once been called the Comedy. Now, as its still-burning neon insisted, visible from Sixth Avenue to Broadway, it was the

M

E

R

C

U

R

Y

after the theater company that inhabited it.

Like the St. Regis, the Mercury had an Edwardian façade, though the former seemed to have frozen spectacularly in time around the turn of the century, while the latter with its glittering green-and-gold woodwork had a freshly painted, facelifted feel, more out of last week.

This impression continued as Gibson moved through a small lobby, quietly classy with its pearl-gray walls and crystal chandelier. A pretty, plump blonde of perhaps fifteen in a fuzzy pink sweater could be seen through the box-office window, where she was sleeping on her arms, like a schoolgirl taking a teacher-enforced nap.

Careful not to wake her, Gibson crept into the theater itself—no one, at 4:32
A.M.,
was taking tickets.

For Broadway, the auditorium was rather intimate, a rococo affair with two balconies and perhaps seven hundred seats. The licks of paint and the fancy touches (the gilt feathering on the façade, the chandelier in the lobby) appeared to represent the Mercury’s major investment in refurbishing the old house—the red aisle carpeting and the wine-color frayed seats had been sewn, though
not with thread precisely matching the originals, and the walls and proscenium had the patchy look of plaster repairs and selective painting that were practical first, and cosmetic a distant second.

A showman of sorts himself, Gibson knew that the Mercury putting its money in the outside and outer lobby made sense: these imperfections would disappear in the dark, and anyway, the productions on stage would consume the eyes and dazzle the imaginations of playgoers.

This Gibson knew at a glance, as he took in the stunning, almost mind-boggling stage set of the Welles production about to open:
Danton’s Death
.

The play, while hardly a household word, happened to be one with which Gibson was familiar—he’d seen an elaborate Broadway production of it, about ten years before, directed by the legendary showman Max Reinhardt, who had filled the stage with mob scenes and grandeur. Written by Georg Buechner, a political activist who died at twenty-four in 1837, the play centered on a brief though pivotal episode in the French Revolution. Set in the spring of 1794,
Danton’s Death
reflected the full social and political upheaval of the Reign of Terror.

By ironic coincidence, Gibson had spent Thursday evening (on the Welles expense account) taking in a picture at the Astor starring Norma Shearer—
Marie Antoinette
. But the Mercury version of the French Revolution did not seem to have much in common with the MGM take on the same subject matter...though Gibson could see how the movie company currently courting the boy director, Warner Bros.—who after all gave birth to
Little Caesar
—might well be attracted to Welles’s expressionistic, melodramatic approach....

A dress rehearsal was in full swing, but it was the set that commanded Gibson’s immediate attention.

Dominating was a massive curved backdrop arrayed with hundreds of blank masks that, through shifting dramatic lighting (blood-red, steel-gray, garish purple) now might suggest the murderous mob, later invoke the skulls of the mob’s victims, or even the tribunal deciding life or death for the play’s characters.

In front of that wall of faces, just behind the forestage, rose a four-sided tower with steps on either side, so that actors could emerge from beneath—a pit had been carved out of the stage itself—and if that weren’t enough, the structure contained a working elevator that climbed a good twelve feet. The platform that rode the elevator was used in many ways—a rostrum, garret, salon, prison cell and, finally, at its full height, the scaffold of a guillotine.

Gibson watched, impressed but not quite getting the point of any of it, despite having seen that earlier production. Lighting effects seemed to shoot from every direction, performers appearing or disappearing as if from thin air, this lone actor orating to an unseen shouting multitude, that small group emerging from the darkness to discuss the effect of the Revolution on their lives and potential deaths. Occasionally music interrupted the drama, a revolutionary hymn, a macabre celebratory chorus chanting “Carmagnole,” with the actor playing Danton obviously speaking English as a second language, as he expressed his opposition to “pipple in welwet gowns.”