Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (79 page)

On Sundays, Orson typically spent all day at CBS, overseeing final changes to that night’s script while deciding with Houseman on the next week’s story. On October 23, during rehearsals for the broadcast of “Around the World in Eighty Days,” the partners agreed on a Halloween Eve adaptation of
The War of the Worlds
, H. G. Wells’s 1898 science fiction novel about a Martian invasion. Their decision was halfhearted, Houseman insisted later. “Neither Orson nor I remembered it at all clearly. It is just possible that neither of us had ever read it.”

Although there is disagreement about the origin of key ideas in the script, it’s hard to believe that Orson did not outline the basic concept, as he always did, or that in a roomful of people he did not collate the best ideas and decide on the approach. The original novel was set mostly in London, in the year the book was published, with the story narrated in the first person by a scientist who is one of the two protagonists. Orson wanted the story relocated to present-day America, a tactic he often adopted with adaptations, and he asked for it to be reworked as a routine radio musicale interrupted by urgent bulletins from newscasters.

The conceit may have been partly indebted to Archibald MacLeish, whose new verse play for the
Columbia Workshop
series “Air Raid,” was scheduled for broadcast by WABC the following week. Welles had doubtless read advance galleys of the “Air Raid” script, which “four days before the famous ‘War of the Worlds’ [broadcast],” in the words of MacLeish’s biographer Scott Donaldson, “used the same technique of apparently reliable reportage by an announcer” to recount the advent of a conqueror, raining death from the skies—a narrative device that echoed MacLeish’s earlier “Fall of the City.” And Orson’s friend Ray Collins played the on-the-spot announcer in “Air Raid,” when it was broadcast on October 27.

But Welles was also inspired by the fact that many radio programs of the day, including his own September 25 broadcast of “The Immortal Sherlock Holmes,” had been interrupted by bulletins about overseas crises and catastrophes. His radio scripts were always built around his own performance, and in the case of “War of the Worlds,” it was established early in the conception that he would play Professor Pierson, a noted astronomer who is interviewed during the news bulletins, and who would be the only character to survive to the end of the story—and the broadcast.

Although it was only his third script assignment, Howard Koch would handle the heavy lifting on “War of the Worlds,” while Welles and Houseman coped with the crisis-filled days of final rehearsals before the long-delayed first public previews of
Danton’s Death.
Koch took that Monday off to refresh his muse, traveling upstate to visit his family. On the way back to New York, he stopped at a gas station on Route 9W. This stop—plus perusing a local map—gave him the idea of having the Martians launch their attack on a place he called Grovers Mill, an unincorporated village surrounded by farmland near Princeton, New Jersey.

Yet Koch felt uninspired by the assignment, and he phoned Houseman on Monday or Tuesday, amid hectic rehearsals of
Danton’s Death
, complaining that the tale of the Martian invasion was silly beyond redemption, and they should switch to
Lorna Doone
, another option on the table. Houseman said later that he ran Koch’s objections past Welles, then phoned back: “The answer is a firm no. It is Orson’s favorite project.”
³⁴

With the shrug of a professional, Koch embarked on six feverish days of grinding out the script, which he recalled in his autobiography,
As Time Goes By
, as “a nightmare of scenes written and rewritten, pages speeding back and forth to the studio, with that Sunday deadline staring me in the face. Once the Martians had landed, I deployed the opposing forces over an ever-widening area, making moves and countermoves between the invaders and defenders. After a while I found myself enjoying the destruction I was wreaking like a drunken general.”

Working in close phone consultation with Houseman, Koch turned out the first draft of the sixty-page “War of the Worlds” script by midweek. (A single page of radio script corresponded roughly to one minute of air time.) Usually the first drafts were ready by Wednesday night, “when Orson was supposed to read it but seldom did,” as Houseman said in
Run-Through
, “particularly during the last month’s rehearsals of
Danton’s Death.”
Come Thursday, Paul Stewart, whom Orson trusted from his earliest radio days, oversaw a dry-run rehearsal with a makeshift cast while “Koch and I,” Houseman said, “made whatever adjustments and changes seemed needed in the script.” An acetate recording was made of the dry run for Orson’s critique on Thursday night. This input “we would accept or dispute,” Houseman wrote, and the script was “reshaped and rewritten, sometimes drastically” over the next forty-eight hours.

Even when Orson ignored the first draft, he closely heeded the practice recording. Listening “rather gloomily” to the recording “between
Danton
rehearsals, in Orson’s room at the St. Regis, sitting on the floor because all the chairs were still covered with coils of unrolled and unedited film,” according to Houseman, the “dead tired” star and host of the series pronounced the show dull and corny. “We all agreed,” Houseman said, “that its only chance of coming off lay in emphasizing its newscast style—its simultaneous, eyewitness quality.”

Exactly how Orson suggested punching up the script Houseman does not say, although he frequently mentions the contributions of others, including himself. “All night we sat up—Howard, Paul, Annie and I, spicing the script with circumstantial allusions and authentic detail.”

On Friday, the script went to network censors. This was standard operating procedure for radio programs, with censors, for example, requesting changes to the names of actual entities (“New Jersey National Guard” becoming “state militia,” and so on) to avoid any risk of offense or lawsuits.

On Saturday afternoon, Stewart, who also acted in many of the
Mercury Theatre on the Air
broadcasts, including “War of the Worlds,” convened another rehearsal. After closely consulting with Welles, Stewart added preliminary sound effects during the Saturday rehearsal, again conducted at the CBS studio while Orson was readying the second public preview of
Danton’s Death
sixteen blocks south.

On Sunday, October 30, Orson arrived shortly after noon for the customary daylong preparations for the evening broadcast, and in the studio he was the leader beyond dispute.

For the program’s musical element, Bernard Herrmann was constrained by a script that called for his classically trained musicians (many of them from the New York Philharmonic) to devote themselves to such popular chestnuts as “Stardust” and “La Cumparsita.” Herrmann also contributed solo piano snippets to fill the tense intervals before the newscaster broke in to announce “We now return you to our New York studio . . .”

Apart from Dan Seymour, the announcer who introduced the program on behalf of the network, the cast was drawn from the Mercury stage company and Orson’s coterie of radio friends. The theater contingent included the all-purpose William Herz, who was the Stony Creek theater manager; and several of Orson’s young “slaves,” such as William Alland and Richard Wilson. Orson gave Howard Smith, who had been reliably hilarious in
Too Much Johnson
, an apposite, dramatic, and moving part as a valiant bomber pilot who attempts to delay the Martian onslaught by sacrificing himself in a suicide mission. From radio came Frank Readick, who had preceded Orson as the voice of the Shadow and appeared in
Les Misérables
and other shows with Welles; Carl Frank, also from
The Shadow
; Kenny Delmar, who had acted in “Fall of the City”; and the always dependable Ray Collins.

Readick had a crucial role as newsman Carl Phillips, who reports the alien invasion before perishing. Frank played the second announcer, who interrupts the musical broadcast with breaking news about the Martians. Delmar, a former child actor in D. W. Griffith films, voiced three parts, including a standout turn as the U.S. Secretary of the Interior. Collins played Farmer Wilmuth (who owns the land where the Martians crash), then Harry McDonald (a radio executive), and finally a rooftop radio announcer (whose dire fate is shared by all Manhattan).

Orson trusted these actors and sought their reactions to the script, their opinions about what worked and what fell flat. “Orson railed at the text, cursing the writers,” recalled the newest young “slave,” Richard Baer, who assisted in the studio that day. The first rehearsal with the cast occasioned many small changes in dialogue, with all hands contributing feedback about tone and characterization, trying to knock all the corniness out of the draft. “Oh Kenny, you know what I want,” Welles told Delmar, who was known for his dead-on impersonation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Delmar met his suggestion halfway with his portrayal of the interior secretary, his grave proclamation about the “national emergency” slyly evoking FDR.

The first full afternoon rehearsal incorporated all the music and special effects that had been prepared with Orson’s involvement during the week. His sometimes exasperating perfectionism when it came to ambient sound fell heavily on the shoulders of sound engineer John Dietz and special effects engineer Ora Daigle Nichols, one of the few women at the top of her field. (Nichols had trained as a musician, and her experience included providing live accompaniment to silent motion pictures.) Among Nichols’s storied contributions to the “War of the Worlds” broadcast was the sinister reverberation of the Martian hatch opening up for the first time, which she achieved “by slowly unscrewing the lid of an empty pickle jar in a nearby toilet cubicle,” according to John Gosling in his authoritative
Waging the War of the Worlds.

The second full rehearsal of the day was for timing, with station break announcements added. The goal was to reach sixty minutes precisely—although, as always, Orson made so many alterations during each run-through the length of the show was elastic until it was performed live. And “War of the Worlds” was especially slippery to calculate. The script called for action-packed re-creations of Martian attacks, followed by long stretches of dead air, suggesting that the speaker’s live feed had been cut off by calamity. The silences segued into the piano tinkling, as though the radio station were on automatic control.

As the afternoon wore on, Orson daringly dragged out both the silences and the music (the orchestral excerpts of popular standards and Herrmann’s piano tinkling) along with his own rumbling impersonation of a Princeton professor who seemed fond of his own brilliance. Houseman complained vigorously, insisting that suspense was giving way to tedium, but Welles shook him off. “Over my protests, lines were restored that had been cut at earlier rehearsals,” Houseman recalled, “I cried there would be no listener left. Welles stretched them out even longer.”

Everyone took breaks except Orson. He busily ironed out wrinkles, huddling with Herrmann and the musicians, the sound team, the actors. The cast and crew gulped milk shakes and sandwiches as evening fell. Orson sipped pineapple juice, soothing his vocal cords. Frank Readick wandered downstairs to the CBS library, where he listened to recordings of Herbert Morrison’s anguished eyewitness reportage of the
Hindenburg
disaster in 1937, which would inform the shocked and heart-piercing tone of his own eventual performance.

However divergent the eyewitness accounts of this radio production, they all agree on their portrait of the single-minded and clearheaded Welles, shaping the evolution and quality of “War of the Worlds” in spite of the staff’s continued opposition and skepticism, thoroughly in command of the show’s concept and details. Every important decision was his to make; he was the producer and star, and the highest artistic executive. Influenced by Houseman, later critics made a concerted effort to disparage Orson’s writing contribution to important scripts such as “War of the Worlds” and
Citizen Kane
; Pauline Kael, for instance, claimed astonishingly that “by the time of the ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast, on Halloween, 1938 Welles wasn’t doing any of the writing,” and Simon Callow in his multivolume biography insisted that Welles had “barely thought about the program, being wholly occupied until the very last minute by his losing struggle with
Danton’s Death.”

A network spot before the broadcast advertised “Orson Welles and the
Mercury Theater on the Air
in a radio play by Howard Koch suggested by the H. G. Wells novel
The War of the Worlds.”
But Koch himself, while steadfastly defending the importance of his own contribution to the script, never denied Welles his share of credit. Orson’s actual writing on the radio scripts often took place at the eleventh hour on those crazy Sundays, but while it “may have been brief,” Koch told Richard France, “it was very important. He could do wonders in a few minutes.”

Indeed, many say Orson performed wonders on that Halloween eve, as the rehearsals gathered momentum and the show snowballed into readiness. Most say that no one, not even Welles, had the slightest inkling that this episode was different from any other. Despite the eight-hour workday he had already put in, Orson was still in a state of high excitement when, a few minutes before eight o’clock, he took one last swig of pineapple juice and stepped onto the podium. In suspenders and shirtsleeves, holding a baton, Orson raised his arms to cue the musical theme.

The “War of the Worlds” broadcast began like all the others, with the lead-in announcer introducing Orson as the producer and star of the show. Then Orson leaned into the microphone and spoke, some of his eloquent words drawn straight from the novel:

“We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space.