The War of the Worlds Murder

Chapter TEN





THE TRIAL





WALTER GIBSON HAD BEEN SCHEDULED to go back on the train to Philly on Monday morning, and—though hardly a lick of work on the project for which he’d been brought to Manhattan had been accomplished—that was what he did. Most of the way he slept, because he’d lingered at the Mercury Theatre as the Danton’s Death rehearsal got underway shortly after midnight. Around dawn, he’d exchanged casual but friendly good-byes with both Houseman and Welles, the latter assuring him they’d be getting together again soon, to “really get down to work” on the Shadow script.

The aftermath of the “invasion,” then, was something Gibson witnessed secondhand. He saw the newspaper headlines—RADIO LISTENERS IN PANIC, TAKING WAR DRAMA AS FACT (the Times); FAKE RADIO “WAR” STIRS TERROR THROUGH U.S. (the Daily News); and the Herald Tribune wrote of “hysteria, panic and sudden conversions to religion,” in the wake of the invasion from Mars.

Contacted in England, H.G. Wells himself objected to the Welles adaptation, complaining (without having actually heard the broadcast) that apparently too many liberties had been taken with his material, and that he was “deeply concerned” that his work would be used “to cause distress and alarm throughout the United States.” (Later Wells and Welles would meet and the former would express a revised opinion, backing Orson all the way, and wondering why it was that Americans were so easily fooled—hadn’t they ever heard of Hallowe’en?)

CBS issued an elaborate apology and announced a new policy of banning any such simulated news broadcasts, which NBC also pompously adopted. Both CBS and the Mercury Theatre denied that the broadcast had been designed as a publicity stunt to promote the upcoming opening of Danton’s Death. The Federal Communications Commission studied the “regrettable” matter, but never took action, despite a dozen formal protests.

The talk of criminal charges fluttered away in a day—there had been no deaths, so the “murders” the press tried to scare Welles with (in the immediate aftermath of the broadcast) were as big a hoax as the broadcast itself.

And while the litigation war drums pounded for some weeks, none of the claims went anywhere, though Welles—over the protests of Davidson Taylor and William Paley—did honor a request for the price of a pair of black shoes, size 9B, whose prospective owner had used the designated funds to buy a bus ticket to escape the Martians.

Public indignation raged only briefly, though some of it was stinging, the New York Times scolding Welles and CBS for creating a “wave of panic in which it inundated the nation.”

But somehow the entire event was best characterized by the final phone call the CBS switchboard received, around three A.M. after the broadcast, which was from a truck driver in Chicago who asked if this was the network that put on the show about the Martian invasion; when the switchboard operator confirmed as much, the listener said his wife had got so riled up over the show, she ran outside, fell down the stairs and broke her leg. A long pause, and then:

“Jeez,” the listener said wistfully, “that was a wonderful broadcast....”

Welles liked to display a cable he received from the real FDR (as opposed to Kenny Delmar), who commented on the Mars Invasion upstaging Charlie McCarthy: THIS ONLY GOES TO PROVE, MY BEAMISH BOY, THAT THE INTELLIGENT PEOPLE WERE ALL LISTENING TO THE DUMMY, AND ALL THE DUMMIES WERE LISTENING TO YOU.

Such whimsy soon came to dominate coverage of the event, and within days the public’s reaction had shifted to amusement and even appreciation.

A New York Tribune writer, Dorothy Thompson, said it best: “Unwittingly, Mr. Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre on the Air have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of all time—they have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition to create a nationwide panic.”

This, the writer said, indicated the “appalling dangers and enormous effectiveness of popular and theatrical demagoguery.... Hitler managed to scare all of Europe to its knees a month ago, but he at least had an army and an air force to back up his shrieking words. But Mr. Welles scared thousands into demoralization with nothing at all.”

She went to say that Welles had thrown a “brilliant and cruel light” on education in America; that thousands of the populace had been shown to be stupid, lacking in nerve but not short of ignorance; that primeval fears lay beneath the “thinnest surface of civilized man”; and “how easy it was to start a mass delusion.”

The Nation made a chilling point similar to Thompson’s: the real cause of the panic was “the sea of insecurity and actual ignorance over which a superficial literacy and sophistication are spread like a thin crust.”

Many years later, Welles would admit, “The thing that gave me the idea for it was that we had a lot of real radio nuts on as commentators at this period—people who wanted to keep us out of European entanglements, and a fascist priest called Father Coughlin. And people believed anything they heard on the radio. So I said, ‘Let’s do something impossible and make them believe it.’ And then tell them, show them, that it’s only...radio.”

But at a Hallowe’en Day news conference in 1938, Welles told a different story. By the time Gibson saw excerpts in a newsreel, the furor had already died down, and last week seemed ancient history.

There Welles was, a few hours after Gibson had last seen him at the theater, now on trial before a battery of reporters, looking schoolboy contrite, a little bewildered and vaguely devilish with his goatee-ish need of a shave.

He was “deeply shocked and deeply regretful,” and when asked if he was aware of the panic such a broadcast might stir up, he claimed, “Definitely not.”

Some found him charming in the press conference; other shifty. Some saw a “palpably shaken,” repentant young man, while others considered him “hammy,” and “insulting” in the transparent way he feigned surprised dismay. One report had him, on the way out, flashing Jack Houseman a wink and an OK sign.

Welles’s writer, Howard Koch, who had so brilliantly executed the prank in play form, missed the fuss, at least initially. Sunday night, when he got home, he had listened to the rest of the broadcast, felt satisfied they’d all transcended the weak material, and dropped exhausted into bed. He had slept through the ringing phone, as Paul Stewart tried to alert him to the panic and the press.

Hallowe’en morning, he’d gone out to get a haircut and heard odd, even ominous snatches of conversation on the sidewalk, pedestrians talking of “panic” and “invasion.” The scriptwriter thought that perhaps the inevitable war with Hitler had finally broken out.

When he asked his barber what was going on, the haircutter showed him a front page with a headline blaring, NATION IN A PANIC FROM MARTIAN BROADCAST.

Like Welles, Koch wondered if he was finished; but a call from Hollywood soon came, and the co-organizer of the Martian Invasion would go on to one of the most distinguished careers in the history of screenwriting, including a little picture in 1942 called Casablanca.

Welles had not been ruined, either, though there was no saving Danton’s Death from the director’s pretensions. The production could not even ride the biggest wave of publicity the city had ever seen, and—after mostly withering reviews—closed after a mere twenty-one performances. The Mercury Theatre would not last another season.

In later years Welles liked to point out that broadcasts in other countries, patterned on his “War of the Worlds,” had resulted in jail for their perpetrators and that one radio station in Spain had even been burned to the ground.

“But I got a contract in Hollywood,” he said.

Back in 1938, Welles and the Mercury were now suddenly world-famous. Within a week of the “invasion,” The Mercury Theatre on the Air went from being an unsponsored, “sustaining” show to acquiring Campbell Soup as a sponsor. Changes were made—popular novels joined literary warhorses as grist for the Mercury mill, and each week a famous guest star appeared. For an adaptation of Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca, Bernard Herrmann composed a full score, which prefigured his many famous film scores. Much of it was used by Herrmann, in fact, for the 1943 film of Jane Eyre, starring and produced by Welles from a script cowritten by Houseman.

Hollywood, of course, was Welles’s ultimate reward for the “Mars invasion,” and perhaps his punishment. He was greeted as a genius, then denounced for considering himself such; his talent led to Citizen Kane, the 1941 film that tops most “best films of all time” lists, but his arrogance in lampooning William Randolph Hearst (and the newspaper magnate’s mistress Marion Davies) created enemies who threw obstacles in Welles’s career path his entire life.


In 1975, in our little corner of the Palmer House bar, the white-haired, spectacled Gibson had spent almost two hours with me, sharing the secret story of his “weekend with Orson.” He seemed a little tired, but I was a kid, wired up by what I’d heard, and didn’t know when to stop.

“What happened to the Shadow project?” I asked.

“That ‘weed of crime’ bore no evil fruit,” Gibson said, invoking the famous closing lines of the Shadow radio show. “And like the Mystery Writers of America say, crime doesn’t pay...enough.”

“Well, the proposed Shadow movie was with Warner Bros., right?”

“Yes, but after the Mars broadcast, every studio in Hollywood was waving contracts at Orson, and the one he took, of course, was with RKO...which he famously described as a ‘the biggest train set a boy ever had.’ ”

“So he just dropped it, the Shadow movie, when—”

“No. Orson often came back to a project, again and again—some of his finished films were shot over many years, remember. Around 1945, after he’d had some setbacks, we talked again about doing the Shadow feature, and that dialogue continued sporadically over the years—hell, just a couple of years ago, I was approached about a Shadow TV pilot that Orson was behind.”

“He’s a little...heavy to play the Shadow now, isn’t he?”

Gibson smiled and sipped the last of his latest glass of beer. “Well, he still dresses like the Shadow—the slouch hat, the dark clothes.... Sometimes I think, for all his Shakespearean proclivities, of every role he ever played, Orson liked the Shadow best.”

I let out a laugh. “It’s the whole magician persona—the cape, the aura of the unexplained, the sly smile....”

Our pitcher of beer was almost gone. Gibson poured me half a glass, and himself the same. We were approaching the end.

“You know,” Gibson said, something bittersweet entering his voice, “Jack Houseman and Orson—one of the really great artistic teams in show business history—split up a few years after the broadcast. And I always thought Jack’s prank on Orson, the murderous ‘lesson’ he tried to teach him, was the first crack in the wall.”

“But you said Orson only laughed about it?”

Gibson nodded, eyes tight behind the lenses. “As I’m sure you know, Orson has a big booming laugh, and it covers up a lot of different emotions—it can be filled with contempt as easily as amusement.”

“And you sensed that, that night?”

He didn’t answer directly, saying instead, “Houseman made the Hollywood trip, too, you know—they did the radio show from out there, took the cast with them...Joe Cotten had never been in a movie before Kane. Herrmann took the ride, too, did the Kane music, beautifully. But Orson and Houseman quarreled—they say Orson threw a burning Sterno dish at Houseman, set a curtain on fire...this was at Chasen’s.”

“Only, Houseman did work on Kane, right?”

“He worked with Mankiewicz, out of Orson’s presence. Their draft of the Kane script was another Houseman prank—Kane was based more on Orson himself than Hearst!”

“And Welles didn’t even realize it?”

Shaking his head, laughing, Gibson said, “Of course he did! But it was his perverse, willful nature to do it anyway, and he emphasized the resemblance even more in his drafts.... He and Houseman only worked a time or two together, after that. Currently, sadly...they’re enemies. Each the sworn nemesis of the other.”

I shook my head. “Funny—here Houseman is, quarter of a century later, having his greatest success as an old man...”

The 1973 film The Paper Chase had been a big hit with Houseman portraying crusty Professor Kingsfield, which had sparked a latter-day acting career for the producer.

Gibson picked up on it. “... while Welles had his greatest success as a young man, with the Mercury Theatre and Kane. Odd bookends to two careers, both of which would probably’ve been greater if they’d remained collaborators.”

We sipped beer.

I smiled at him in open admiration. “You know, for a fan like me? Boggles my mind to imagine a Shadow film written by you and directed by, and starring, Orson Welles!”

The jowly, avuncular face split in a bittersweet grin. “That would’ve been fun. But it’s not like I don’t have anything to show for it all.”

“How so?”

With a magician’s grace and showmanship, he removed the impressive gold ring with the fire opal, the replica of the Shadow’s ring that he said he always wore.

“I received this in the mail,” Gibson said, “about a month after that memorable weekend. There was no note, but the return address was the St. Regis Hotel.... Look at the inscription.”

Inside the ring were the words: From Lamont Cranston.

“You know,” Gibson said, “I sent Orson a package once myself, keeping an old promise....”

Again Gibson stared into the past.

“During the Second World War,” he said, “Orson put up a tent on Cahuenga Boulevard in L.A., and he and his Mercury players put on The Mercury Wonder Show, strictly for servicemen, and for free—sawing Rita Hayworth and Marlene Dietrich in half, Agnes Moorehead playing the calliope, Joe Cotten playing stooge, lots of pretty starlets of the Dolores Donovan variety, as magician’s assistants. He took his magic show to a lot of army camps, too.”

I had no idea where this was going, but I remained as hypnotized by this great pulp storyteller as the victims of the Shadow.

“Hearing about this magic show prompted me to keep my promise,” Gibson said. “I sent him the works on my Hindu wand routine...the one Houdini liked, but didn’t live to use? And Orson put it in his act—the night he got it.”

That seemed as good a curtain line as any, and I picked up the check. Then we walked out into the lobby, chatting, and at the elevators went our separate ways.

I talked to Gibson once more, casually, at another Bouchercon a few years later in New York, where he performed his magic act for an enthusiastic audience of mystery writers and fans. In his last years, Gibson enjoyed these fun encounters with his public (he, too, became a Bouchercon Guest of Honor), thanks to the efforts of enthusiasts like Otto Penzler, Anthony Tollin and J. Randolph Cox. The man who was “Maxwell Grant” finally had a little of the large fame he deserved.

He was still active as a freelance writer—and practicing magician—right up to his death in 1996.

Welles left us in October of 1985, at an ancient and yet so very young seventy. He had become the quintessential maverick of moviemakers, seeking money and shooting movies in every corner of the globe, funding his films with acting jobs that were often beneath him and, most famously, as a TV commercial pitchman for wine and other products; despite the legend that, after Citizen Kane, he had no real career as a director, his body of work—not counting scores of acting appearances, and projects finished by others or as yet unreleased—includes thirteen films, most of which are wonderful, every one of which is of interest.

He, too, was active up to the day he died: in a manner that would have suited Gibson, the Shadow actor departed at a desk, working on a screenplay.

At his typewriter.





A TIP OF THE SHADOW’S SLOUCH HAT





AUTHOR’S NOTE: THE READER IS advised not to peruse this bibliographic essay prior to finishing the novel.

The War of the Worlds Murder—like previous books in my so-called “disaster” series—features a real-life crime-fiction writer as the amateur detective in a fact-based mystery. This is, however, the first time I have used a writer I actually met and spoke to at length.

That does not mean that the fictionalized memoirs that open and close this novel should be viewed as a verbatim account of my real meeting with Walter Gibson. I will say only that much of it did happen...just not all of it. I do not possess the gift of total recall, so conversations not only with Gibson but such writer friends as Robert J. Randisi, Percy Spurlark Parker and the late Chris Steinbrunner range from approximations to outright fabrications. The encounter with a Mickey Spillane–hating Mystery Writers of America icon (who appears here under a nom de plume) certainly did occur at Bouchercon Six. To this day people talk to me about it, and I don’t know whether to be proud or ashamed.

I choose not to reveal whether or not Walter Gibson told me of his adventures working with Orson Welles on a Shadow project the weekend “The War of the Worlds” was aired. Certainly none of the official accounts note his presence; however, Gibson did know Welles through magic circles—several sources confirm this—and one source (mentioned below) insists that, so to speak, Gibson cast his own Shadow, recommending the young actor for the radio role of Lamont Cranston. It’s also true that Gibson wore an elaborate Shadow ring, inscribed to him by “Cranston.”

My longtime research associate, George Hagenauer, is a pulp-magazine enthusiast, and was typically helpful, including devising the “murder” herein, and generally aiding on the magic-oriented aspects of the story.

Leonard Maltin—to whom this book was dedicated prior to his coming to my aid here, I must add—responded to my cry for research help by connecting me with a man who was present that historic night, directing the CBS radio show that would go on right after “The War of the Worlds.”

Norman Corwin was in the studio above Studio One in the Columbia Broadcasting Building on October 30, 1938, and in 2004 he was graciously willing to share with me his memories about radio in general and the CBS Building in particular. Mr. Corwin—at 94, sharper than I have ever been—was warm, friendly, funny and patient. Only fans of the Golden Age of Radio will understand what it meant for me to talk to Norman Corwin, not just a pioneer in that medium, but one of the few greats of the form—it was like writing a movie book and being helped by Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin or John Ford. Thank you, Mr. Corwin. Thank you, Leonard.

That said, I must point out that any inaccuracies in this book are my own. A few are even intentional. Some of what Mr. Corwin told me about life and work in the Columbia Broadcasting Building in the late 1930s did not suit my purposes as a mystery writer, and I ignored or revised the truth into fiction as needed; but while nothing that is wrong here is the fault of Mr. Corwin, or my other research associates, much that is right belongs to them.

In this vein, I will admit that the term “pulp” was not in widespread use in 1938—“character magazines” would seem to be the correct coinage for the market Walter Gibson mastered. I run into this from time to time—“art deco” is a designation that came along after the period it describes, for example—and, while I generally do my best to avoid anachronisms, I occasionally choose to use a “wrong” term (like “pulps”) because in the larger context of what I’m doing, it’s “right.”

Also, inconsistencies between sources were frequent here; a typical example: some say the police entered Studio One before the broadcast was over and stared threateningly at Welles through the control-room glass, while other accounts indicate the police rushed in right after the broadcast ended (one even says the police showed up several hours later). In such instances, I trust either my instincts or follow the needs of my narrative.

The connection between Welles and Gibson is not directly dealt with in Thomas J. Shimeld’s biography of the Shadow creator, Walter B. Gibson and the Shadow (2003). Still, it’s hard for me to imagine writing this novel without that vital resource, and any sense of the man that might be found in these pages results as much from Shimeld’s good book as my own meeting with Gibson. To date, the only other book-length work on Gibson is Man of Magic and Mystery: A Guide to the Work of Walter B. Gibson (1988) by J. Randolph Cox, a bibliographic work of limited but appreciated help to this novel. Other works consulted relating to Gibson include his own The Shadow Scrapbook (1979) (introduction by Chris Steinbrunner); Walter Gibson’s Encyclopedia of Magic & Conjuring (1976); and The Shadow Knows...(1977), Diana Cohen and Irene Burns Hoeflinger, a collection of radio scripts.

Anthony Tollin has contributed his expertise on the history of radio to numerous fact-filled booklets included with boxed sets of old radio shows on CD and cassette, often for the first-rate Radio Spirits. Such booklets on both the Shadow and Orson Welles were most helpful here.

The notion for this novel seemed a natural—that the sixth “disaster” novel would involve the world’s most famous fake disaster. And I frankly thought it would be a relatively easy book to write, compared to such major events as the Pearl Harbor attack and the sinking of the Lusitania. What George Hagenauer later reminded me—when I was drowning in research—was that when I wrote my Black Dahlia novel, Angel in Black (2001), the single Orson Welles Chapter took as much research as the entire rest of the book, which covered a very complicated and convoluted murder case.

This novel took much longer to write than is usually my process, because I just could not stop reading about Welles and watching his films. In terms of the latter, the late Charlie Roberts of Darker Image Video provided numerous rare items, including the American Film Institute tribute to Welles, a BBC documentary on the filmmaker, and a vintage TV play, “The Night America Trembled.” I screened most of Welles’s films, including Chimes at Midnight (1966) and The Immortal Story (1968), criminally unavailable in the United States, and three documentaries: Gary Graver’s Working with Orson Welles (1995); It’s All True (1994), narrated by my pal Miguel Ferrer; and The Dominici Affair (2001), which explores a famous French murder case (the latter two films attempt to assemble and complete unfinished Welles projects).

And Welles touches on “The War of the Worlds” in his wonderful free-form documentary, F for Fake (1973)—in which he wanders between shots in a Shadow cape and slouch hat, and all “excerpts” from the broadcast are bogus!

Books on this great American filmmaker/actor are not in short supply, and the ones I found most beneficial are Citizen Welles (1989), Frank Brady; Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (1997), Simon Callow; the Welles-approved Orson Welles: A Biography (1995), Barbara Learning; and Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (1996), David Thomson.

But I would like to single out This Is Orson Welles by Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, as a wonderful collection of interviews (edited and rewritten and shaped by Welles). The revised, expanded edition of 1998 is much preferred, as the additional autobiographical introductory essay (“My Orson”) by Bogdanovich is well worth the price of admission, and arguably the best glimpse into the real Welles available anywhere. No one writes about the important figures of classic Hollywood with more intelligence, candor, humor, warmth, insight and humanity than Bogdanovich.

Other Welles books consulted include: Citizen Kane: The Fiftieth-Anniversary Album (1990), Harlan Lebo; The Making of Citizen Kane (1985), Robert L. Carringer; Orson Welles (1971), Maurice Bessy; the controversial Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius (1985), Charles Higham; Orson Welles: Actor and Director (1977), Joseph McBride; Orson Welles (1986), John Russell Taylor; Orson Welles Interviews (2002), edited by Mark W. Estrin; Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life (2003), Peter Conrad; and Orson Welles (1972), Joseph McBride. Years ago I read Pauline Kael’s The Citizen Kane Book (1971), but I find it unkind and poorly researched, and didn’t bother to dip back in.

A few magazines were of use: “The Man from Mercury” in the June, 1938, Coronet included many photos of the theater company at work; and Photocrime (a 1944 one-shot from “The editors of LOOK”) included a photospread mystery story starring magician Orson Welles—a George Hagenauer find.

My portrait of Welles is a “best guess” based upon all I’ve read and seen, but its roots are in the memoirs of his estranged ex-partner, John Houseman. Including Houseman as a character was a treat, if a challenge, as I loved Houseman’s Professor Kingsfield in the film and television series, The Paper Chase; his autobiographical Entertainers and the Entertained (1986) and Run-through (1972) are fascinating, frank, vividly written accounts.

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

MAX ALLAN COLLINS 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.