The War of the Worlds Murder (8 page)

Welles and the Mercury had a reputation, from their informal
Cradle Will Rock
to their street-dress
Julius Caesar
, for making Highbrow Thea-tah accessible to the masses. But right now the resolutely middlebrow Walter Gibson was feeling pretty lowbrow....

One of the actors was not in costume, and after a while, Gibson recognized him: Bill Alland, the little big-voice guy
who had sat in for Welles at the radio-show rehearsal yesterday afternoon. He seemed to be filling in for Welles again, so that the director did not have to be distracted by his own acting.

In fact, early on, Gibson—who’d tucked himself in a seat toward the back of the house—spotted Welles up in the seventh row, on the aisle, with his feet up on the seat in front of him. Now and then, in rolled-up shirtsleeves and suspenders and dark baggy trousers, the great man-boy would rise and pace that aisle—although on his return, that pacing would be backward, his eyes always on the stage.

During the forty or so minutes that Gibson watched, Welles at first was eating ice cream—pistachio?—with a spoon from a quart container, and then was smoking a cigar large enough for a relay-race baton, its sweetly fragrant smoke wafting all the way back to Gibson.

Though mostly the writer was viewing the director from the rear, Gibson did get glimpses of that famous baby face, always frowning, and could strongly sense that Welles was restraining himself. Gibson could not just sense that Welles wanted to interrupt; waves of that desire seemed to roll up the aisle.

However, as Howard Koch had told Gibson,
Danton’s Death
had been in previews already—with previews for last night and tonight and tomorrow night cancelled to make way for more rehearsal—and now the next preview loomed on Monday with
real
opening night on the following Wednesday.

According to both Paul Stewart and Koch, Welles was having fits with this play, and disaster had courted it: not long ago, the elevator had collapsed, hurling an actor into the basement, where the man had broken his leg (he had been replaced, and Stewart had wryly commented that the other actors considered him “the lucky one”).

Needing to function smoothly on a stage littered with perils, the actors—navigating a stage strewn with gaping holes, catwalks and scaffolding—had lobbied for several uninterrupted run-throughs (Orson normally did not wait till the end to give notes, but constantly called the proceedings to a halt, to provide a running commentary).

When the guillotine finally fell, Welles rose grandly from his aisle seat and roared, “All right, children—we’ve killed this thing! The question is, do we put it out of its misery, or try for resurrection?”

The cast had lined itself up as if waiting for a firing squad. They hung their heads; they looked bleary-eyed and exhausted.

Their condition did not appear wholly lost on Welles, whose voice modulated into a gruff warmth, though the volume continued to rumble the house seats.

“Here at the Mercury,” he said, “we are compelled to work under pressure—that is because we must make up in intensity and creativity what we lack in money! We can’t afford to take a show out on the road to whip it into shape. We have finally mastered the technical aspects of this production. Now, my children...”

Virtually every one of the haggard “children” on stage was older than Welles, some by a decade or two.

“...we must attempt to breathe life into this corpse.”

A hand tapped on Gibson’s shoulder, and he practically jumped from his seat. He looked back and up at the heart-shaped face of the sweetly pretty blonde in the fuzzy pink sweater who’d been slumbering in the box office booth. Her hair was a tumble of curls atop her head, and her blue eyes had an apologetic cast.

“Are you Mr. Gibson?” she asked, in a squeaky little voice that was at once comic and appealing. She had a womanly shape
for a kid. “If you are, Mr. Houseman would like to see you...” Her voice lowered an octave. “...upstairs.”

Whether intended or not, the effect was comic and Gibson, standing in the aisle facing the girl, said, “That sounds almost as ominous as the French Revolution.”

“More ominous than that,” she squeaked, rolling her eyes.

Soon he was following her through the lobby—not an unpleasant task, as the movement of her backside beneath the tight dark woolen dress had a hypnotic effect—and then up several flights of stairs to the upper balcony. Welles’s booming voice, alternately furious at incompetence and lavish with praise, filled the house.

After a long, complicated climb, the shapely teenager led him to yet more steps, iron ones up into what had clearly been an electrician’s booth.

The girl stepped inside the narrow, stuffy room, Gibson poised in the doorway behind her. Welles’s voice, muffled, going over tiny details, leached through the twin holes in the wall that had once been used, presumably, for follow spots in the Comedy Theatre’s musical days.

“Mr. Gibson is here, Mr. Houseman,” the girl said, rather timidly.

Gibson took in the office with a few glances: an exposed paint-peeling radiator, hot enough to fry an egg on; a bulletin board with a much-annotated 1938 calendar courtesy of some bank, various reviews with sections underlined, and a sheet boldly labelled
MERCURY THEATRE 1937–38 SUBSCRIBERS LIST;
8-by-10s of actors and production sketches taped haphazardly to the walls; and a couple battered secondhand-looking bookcases brimming with scripts and books and boxes of Mercury letterhead and envelopes, in stylish brown ink.

Nothing unexpected, really, with a single exception: on the wall, riding some nails, was a large sharp-looking hunting knife with a gleaming blade and a light-brown wooden handle bearing a bold
ORSON WELLES
autograph.

The space itself had been divided by a beaverboard partition into two even smaller offices—the nearer was a secretarial area, with a small gray metal desk and typewriter, unattended, a row of filing cabinets behind; the other side had a glorified card table with a chair behind it and several chairs in front of it, a daybed hugging the left wall. On the table were two telephones, and a small portable Victrola, and seated behind the table, hands folded like a school teacher patiently waiting to reprimand a wayward student, was a formidable fellow who projected various contradictory messages.

His yellow-and-black checkered sportcoat said casual, his black bow tie said formal; his dark slashes of eyebrow on an egg-shaped noggin (well on its way to being completely bald), sent signals of strength, while a languid weakness was implied by a feminine, sensuous-lipped mouth that seemed permanently formed in a mild condescending smile. Or was it a sneer?

And his eyes seemed at once drowsy and keenly alert.

“Thank you, Judy,” their host said, in a British-tinged voice—was the tone kind, or patronizing?—and rose, extending a soft hand across the table. “John Houseman, Mr. Gibson. Please call me Jack.”

“And I’m Walter,” the writer said, Houseman’s soft hand providing a firm handshake.

The stocky study in contrasts sat and gestured to the chair opposite for Gibson. In the background, Welles’s voice droned on and on about a hundred details, while Miss Holliday was frozen in the doorway, like Lot’s wife.

“Is that all, Mr. Houseman?” she quavered.

“It is not.” Houseman lifted his arm, slid back a sleeve, and gave a royal look to his wristwatch. “My sense is that our resident genius is winding down, and we’re expecting both Mr. Stewart and Mr. Koch within the next ten minutes. Would you be so kind, Miss Holliday, as to go next door to Longchamps and order Mr. Welles’s usual repast, and...is standard eggs and bacon and potatoes suitable, Mr. Gibson?”

“Sure.”

Houseman twitched a polite smile the writer’s way, and to Miss Holliday intoned, “Three standard breakfasts plus my usual lox, onion and scrambled eggs. Only a
single
baked potato for Mr. Welles—he informs us that he’s dieting.”

Miss Holliday was moving from shoe to shoe. Her hands were fig-leafed before her and she seemed clearly distraught. “But Mr. Houseman...I told you before—Longchamps won’t give us credit anymore. I had to pay cash myself for his ice cream tonight.”

“For which you will be reimbursed.”

Her eyes widened. “Mr. Houseman—Mr. Welles owes them over two hundred dollars.”

“Shit!” The word exploded from Houseman, as if trying to escape from the prissy prison of the man. “You tell those fucking people that I will personally vouch for Mr. Welles.”

Tears were flowing down the girl’s apple cheeks. “But Mr. Houseman...”

“God-
damn
-it!” Houseman stood, fished a billfold from inside his jacket, and handed Gibson a twenty-dollar bill, which the stunned writer passed to the girl, who padded over for it.

Arm outstretched like the pope blessing the masses, Houseman said, “Pay the bastards in cash, and don’t mention Mr. Welles by name!”

“But Mr. Houseman,” she sobbed, “they’ll know it’s for him....”

“Order the steaks separately, my dear—as if for two people—and if they ask if the two meals are for Mr. Welles, lie through your delightful pretty teeth.”

“Oh, Mr. Houseman...”

“
Do
it.”

She swallowed, nodded, and disappeared, her footsteps on the metal stairs ringing like gunshots punctuating Welles’s ongoing harangue.

Gibson nodded toward where she’d stood. “Does she
always
cry like that?”

“Only when I swear.”

“Ah.”

“I do it for her own good—swear at her, that is.”

“Is that so?”

Houseman nodded sagely. “She’s a nice girl, from a respectable family, but...sad to say...she wants to be in show business. So I’m breaking her in, so to speak. If she wants to make it in this trade, she’ll need to acclimate herself to coarseness.”

Gibson was shaking his head. “A kid that nervous? You really think she could make it in show biz?”

“Don’t underestimate Judy, Walter. She’s smarter than either of us...and her sense of finance is admirable.” Houseman shifted in his chair. “That is, frankly, why I asked to see you, prior to our little
Mercury on the Air
staff meeting. Which I understand you’ve agreed to attend?”

“I have. I figure I’m on Orson’s dime, no matter how you look at it.”

An eyebrow arched. “Actually—you’re on the Mercury Theatre’s dime...which is how
I
look at it.”

“Not sure I understand, Jack.”

The permanent sneer twitched, and Houseman folded his hands on the table again. His head tilted to one side, and his eyes were hooded as he said, “My young partner has no sense of money. He throws it to the wind. You’ve seen the production he’s mounting, currently?”

“I have. It’s...”

“Impressive. And a bewildering exercise in pretention, as well...but he is the artistic director, not I. This theater, this old warhorse, needed renovation—one of the first things, first expenses, we undertook was to put in a new stage.”

“Ah. And Mr. Welles ripped much of that stage out, for this production, for that fancy tower he rigged.”

The drowsy eyes flared; the sneer took on a tinge of pleasure. “You are bright man, Mr. Gibson, and perceptive.”

“And you have called me here to request that I not abuse my expense account.”

Houseman nodded once; he exuded the wisdom of Buddha. Also the stature.

“Jack, it’s not in my nature to take advantage. Mr. Welles made the St. Regis reservation...”

Another nod. “For his own convenience, since he’s living there, more or less.”

“More or less?”

“He’s a married man, you know—with a baby girl, as well as a wife. They live on Sneden’s Landing, well out of the city. But Orson, while he’s working, has decided to stay mostly in town.”

“And he’s always working.”

“You already have a grasp of the situation, Walter.”

Gibson shrugged. “Don’t worry yourself, Jack—I am not by nature extravagant. I need to take cabs, because I don’t have my
car here in the city; and I have to eat. But I won’t be running up any elaborate bills to stiff the Mercury.”

Houseman’s tiny smile seemed somehow huge. “You are a gentleman. And I understand Orson owes you much.”

“All I did was recommend him to the producers of the Shadow show, once upon a time.”

“Yes, but that was the Welles watershed—without his success as the Shadow, we’d have no radio program. I know he is very grateful to you.”

Gibson did not point out that Welles had waited until just a few days ago to thank him. For some reason, he glanced at the hunting knife, displayed on the wall, just to his left.

“You’ve noticed our little memento from
Julius Caesar
, I see,” Houseman said with a smile as sly as it was slight. “That’s our eternal reminder to our enthusiastic leader that even a genius must contain his enthusiasm.”

“How’s that?” Gibson asked.

“Well, all of the other conspirators in our production were satisfied with heavy rubber daggers, with aluminum-painted blades. Not good enough for Brutus, that is, Orson, who felt the final confrontation with the tyrant required the reality of a gleaming blade.”

Houseman gestured casually to the mounted hunting knife.

“For more than one hundred performances, Brutus held that sharp point against our Caesar’s chest; then as, actor Joe Holland clung to Orson, in beautifully performed death agonies, Brutus would make the final thrust, with a turn of his body.”

The producer tented his fingertips and continued.

“One spring night—without either Orson or Mr. Holland being aware of it—the blade went through the cloth and
slipped...quite painlessly...into Joe Holland’s chest, and through an artery in the region of his heart. No one realized anything had gone awry, until Orson himself slipped in the blood.... In the blackout following Antony exclaiming, ‘Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,’ we were able to cart Joe’s inert form from the stage. As the show continued, he was taken by taxi to the nearest hospital.”

“My God, but he survived?”

“After several days...and several transfusions. Orson initially experienced a brief spasm of guilt, but soon managed to convince himself it was Joe’s fault, for turning incorrectly and impaling himself.”