The War of the Worlds Murder

Chapter ONE





RADIO DAZE





WALTER GIBSON HAD NEVER BEEN on an expense account before.

Not even in the earliest days of his writing career, when he’d been a reporter on the North American in Philly, and then the Evening Ledger—never.

Of course, even then his work out in the field had been limited, once the editor learned of the Gibson facility for puzzles and quizzes. Turning out “brain tests” and crossword puzzles—not to mention articles on magic and bunco games—Gibson had spent more time in an office in front of a typewriter than out news gathering.

The irony was, Walter Gibson had the soul of an adventurer—his mind, since earliest childhood, had brimmed with magic and mysticism and men of action. He enjoyed the great out-of-doors; and he craved the companionship and conversation of lively, intelligent people—as fetching as his wife Jewel was, her ability to stand toe-to-toe with him intellectually, on any number of esoteric topics, had attracted him most.

From his teens on, he’d performed in semi-professional magic acts and had sought, successfully, the scintillating company of stage magicians, including some of the most eminent—Thurston, Blackstone, Dunninger, even Houdini.

And yet Walter Gibson’s talent for storytelling, his ease with words, had condemned him to this jail cell of a career. Not that this was a sentence he minded serving: self-expression was his overriding obsession; and the challenge of a writing assignment energized him, though each one consigned him further to a solitary life in a small room with his only company a typewriter and his imagination. Even his association with those illustrious magicians had led primarily to ghostwriting articles and books for them.

Under his nom de plume Maxwell Grant, Gibson had learned to be content with the adventures of his famous character, the Shadow, playing out in the theater of his mind; and the conversations in which he found himself most often engaged were between characters of his own creation, speaking to each other with sharp, pointed intelligence, courtesy of his flying fingers.

Right now those famous fingertips (“1,440,000 WORDS WERE WRITTEN BY MAXWELL GRANT IN LESS THAN 10 MONTHS ON A CORONA TYPEWRITER,” went one national ad) were bandaged; well, all but his thumbs. He looked like someone who had ill-advisedly placed his fingertips on a stove’s burner; instead, he was a professional writer of pulp magazines who had yesterday completed his twenty-fourth 50,000-word Shadow novel of the year, opening up the remaining months of 1938 for other assignments.

Though he was not by nature a greedy man, Gibson wrote for money; despite his pen name’s fame, and his popular character’s prominence, his pay rate for pulp publisher Street and Smith did not compare to those of writers in the slick magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, much less authors of hardcover books—pulpsters like Dash Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner had made the switch, but Gibson had never had room enough in his schedule to give it a try. These were hard times, and the $500 per novel was good money only if he kept up his output.

After all, a writer couldn’t sell a story he hadn’t written. So Gibson’s motto was: Write till it hurts; then write some more.

As he rode through Manhattan in the back of a Yellow Cab, wraithed in his own cigarette smoke, Gibson sat with a small valise on the floor and his portable Corona typewriter on the seat next to him, a rider as important as himself—at least.

With his salt-and-pepper hair neatly combed back, his round-lensed wire-frame spectacles, his oval face with the regular, intelligent features, he looked more like a lawyer or a businessman than the master of intrigue who dispatched the cloaked avenger known as the Shadow to take on campaigns against crime (any time he visited New York, he only half-consciously scouted locations for such gangster tales), and to bring down world-domination-minded masterminds like the Voodoo Master and Shiwan Khan.

He’d come down this morning by train from Maine—his home was in Philly, but he and Jewel had a cabin up north, on Little Sebago Lake, where they were spending more and more of their time. No stranger to Manhattan, he and his wife had lived in an apartment on West 46th for about a year, so he could be closer to the editorial offices of Street and Smith.

But he’d found the city distracting, too many plays and movies and restaurants to tempt a writer away from work; plus he was spending not nearly enough time with his son Robert (who lived with first wife Charlotte). Returning to Philadelphia and then building the cabin in Maine had made seeing Bobby more practical; the boy had been summering with his father and stepmother these past several years.

The cabin provided a kind of knotty-pine womb for Gibson’s ideas to grow within. He would sit at a large pinewood desk in a corner of the central room with its vaulted ceilings, chain-smoking (cigarettes his chief stress reliever) and dreaming up yarns. No phone was allowed (calls came in to the cabin next door, where his cousin Eaton lived) with the silence punctuated only by the calls of loons and other birds out on the lake.

Not that silence was required for him to create: he’d written one Shadow novel while the carpenters built his office around him. He’d written much of another at a party in New York, with other guests reading the yarn over his shoulder—the experience had only exhilarated him.

Trips to New York were commonplace to Gibson, who enjoyed delivering plot synopses in person to editor John Nanovic, who’d become a good friend. Nanovic made useful suggestions, and Gibson felt the editor had come to know the Shadow as well as his creator.

Unlike a lot of editors, Nanovic did not stint on the compliments. He frequently told Gibson (in varying words), “You’ve got the newspaperman’s knack for giving me just enough facts to take me into the next paragraph...and the magician’s flare to intrigue me with hints of what’s to come.”

Later this afternoon, he would meet with Nanovic. Right now (it was just after one-thirty) he had his first stop to make—at the Columbia Broadcasting Building at Madison Avenue and 45th Street. The Shadow had been born in this building, and yet the father of the character had never visited the birthsite before.

Technically, of course, Gibson was the character’s stepfather. In 1930 a radio show had been introduced at CBS, Detective Story, that based its episodes on stories from the Street and Smith pulp magazine of the same name; a sinister-voiced narrator—dubbed the Shadow—presented the tales. A voice actor named Frank Readick gave the narrator a haunting laugh and a spooky presence that had made something of a national sensation.

Instead of serving to promote Detective Story Magazine as intended, however, the show inspired listeners to request at their newsstands “that Shadow detective magazine.”

Which was where Walter Gibson came in. Frank Blackwell, then the Street and Smith editor, challenged Gibson to come up with a character to go with the memorable name and the spooky voice.

Already Gibson had been toying with the idea of doing a mystery-story hero who was himself mysterious, and a little nasty, unlike the straightforward goody-two-shoes heroes of other mystery series—an avenger who would wear not a white hat, but a black one. He reflected upon his magician friends and came up with a character who combined the hypnotic power of Thurston and Blackstone with Houdini’s penchant for escapes. By early 1931, “Maxwell Grant” had begun his punishing, profitable run, charting the adventures of this tall, black-cloaked figure with the broad-brim black felt hat tucked over a hawkish countenance.

And by 1937, the radio show had dropped its narrator-version of the Shadow to adapt Gibson’s avenging hero—embodied by a new young actor with a magical second-baritone: Orson Welles.

Though Gibson had helped develop the radio version of the Shadow with scriptwriter Edward Hale Bierstadt (it had been gratifying to hear Ed say how much he loved Gibson’s yarns), the creator of the character was contractually tied up with Street and Smith to produce those twenty-four novels a year. So the radio Shadow had gone its own way, deviating somewhat from Gibson’s vision—rather over emphasizing the character’s rich-man-about-town secret identity, Lamont Cranston (admittedly a perfect fit for Welles)—but staying mostly on course...and becoming a household word among radio listeners.

Which meant—everybody in America.

The Columbia Broadcasting Building was no longer home to the Shadow show—it was a Mutual program now, and broadcast out of New York’s powerhouse WOR—but the skyscraper remained home to Orson Welles, whose amazingly resonant voice and ironic delivery had much to do with the radio Shadow’s success.

Welles had just finished his two-season run as the Shadow to take on a more ambitious project—The Mercury Theatre on the Air, an extension of the wunderkind’s acclaimed Broadway theater company—and so Gibson had been surprised to be contacted by the showman himself, to discuss a Shadow project.

Not as surprised as Jewel, however, when she came rushing breathlessly into the cabin with news that a phone call from the famous young radio actor awaited next door...

...where Gibson gave both his wife and his message-screening cousin a long cool look that told them this was business and that they were dismissed, and the two were reluctantly taking their leave when the writer brought the receiver to his ear.

“Do I have the honor of speaking to my illustrious father?”

The deep voice on the other end of the line, filtered through long-distance, had the processed sound of the Shadow on the air, attempting to frighten that week’s evildoer.

Gibson, however, neither frightened nor impressed easily.

“Hello, Mr. Welles,” he said.

The two men had met exactly once, at a Society of Magicians gathering in Manhattan where the radio actor had performed as a perfectly respectable amateur magician—respectable for a celebrity, at least.

“This is a much overdue call,” Welles said, amusement and something like chagrin in his formidable voice. “I have been told that...in the beginning...” The latter had proper Biblical weight. “...you personally recommended me to the Shadow’s sponsor.”

Gibson had indeed pointed the way toward Welles as an ideal radio Shadow—he had been impressed with Welles’s stagecraft (even if his magic was merely competent) and by his rich, worldly voice. Also, Welles had done work on The March of Time radio show that had bowled both Gibson and Jewel over; so when the Shadow creator’s counsel was sought in matters of casting, he’d thought immediately of Welles.

In fact he had said, “There’s only one actor on the face of the earth who, using only his voice, can do justice to the Shadow.”

Nonetheless, this was Gibson’s first direct contact (since that Society of Magic gathering, where they’d been introduced and shared a few words) with the actor who had brought his character to life, and to radio fame.

“I may have played a small role in getting you that part, Mr. Welles,” Gibson admitted. “But you’ve more than made up for it by boosting the circulation of The Shadow Magazine with your fine work.”

“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...reconceive 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.”

“That’s right.”

Friendly now, Stewart put a hand on his guest’s shoulder. “You’ve made me a few pennies, Mr. Grant.”

“Gibson. How so?”

“I’ve played half a dozen villains on your Shadow show.”

“Ah.”

Stewart raised an eyebrow. “If this mug of mine ever gets in front of a camera, maybe I better get used to that. Gable doesn’t have anything to worry about.”

The ice broken, Gibson said, “Uh, I can either sit and be an eavesdropper for a few minutes...this is my first time at a major network setup like this...or I can head over to the St. Regis. Whatever’s you pleasure, Mr. Stewart.”

“Call me Paul, and I really would love to have you join us. Might even trouble you for an opinion or two—we’re having some real problems with this one.”

“This week’s program, you mean? Why, what piece are you doing?”

Gibson knew the Mercury usually adapted a famous literary work.

Stewart was lighting up a cigarette. “One by that other Wells...H.G. War of the Worlds.” He waved his match out, made a face. “I’m sure it seemed fresh and frightening at the turn of the century, but we’re having no little tough time making it something a modern audience can appreciate.”

“It’s a great story, Paul...and you people always do a fine job. I’m sure it’ll be a real crowd pleaser.”

“Let’s hope.” Stewart snapped his fingers. “You know, there’s a couple people who’ll want to meet you! We’re a good fifteen minutes away from starting this thing.... Mind if I send ’em up?”

“Not at all.”

Stewart disappeared out the door, and Gibson sat at the network rep’s desk and looked out the window where his host was approaching one of those actors milling around. The director pointed to Gibson’s window and did some explaining, and the actor—a mustached fellow with slicked-back black hair, who looked like he might specialize in slightly gone-to-seed gigolos—was nodding and smiling.

Then the actor—one of the few not in shirtsleeves, tie not even loosened—came Gibson’s way, heading up the small flight of steps, and within seconds the author was on his feet shaking hands with the man.

“At last we meet!” the actor said, in a silky baritone.

Gibson smiled a little. “I’m afraid you have the advantage on me, sir....”

“I’m the Shadow!...The first Shadow, that is.”

After a single laugh, the author said, “Frank Readick! The man who put me on the map. That voice and delivery of yours got me the Shadow assignment in the first place.”

Readick chuckled. “Small world, huh? Two Shadows on the same show? And me, the original, working for my replacement, yet!...Ah, but I was just a glorified announcer, until you made a character of the guy, and then of course Orson brought him to life.”

“But they’re still using your laugh and your opening: ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men!’ ”

“Well, the Shadow may know,” Readick said, head tilted, “but don’t bring that up with Orson. It’s a sore point.”

The two men sat, Gibson at the desk.

“What’s your role in ‘War of the Worlds,’ Frank?”

“Mostly I’m a reporter on the scene of the alien landing. I have a couple roles, actually, which is typical for voice actors on an ensemble show like this. But it’s a good part, the Carl Phillips reporter one, I mean. I’m the one describing the monsters, plus I get to be burned alive on the air!”

“What fun,” Gibson said, appreciatively. “Not just your ordinary death scene. But Mr. Stewart doesn’t seem as enthusiastic about the piece.”

“Well, Paul’s a tough taskmaster. But the thing is a little...I don’t know, it’s missing something. Just kinda lays there. You know, when Orson did ‘Dracula,’ that vampire came alive...or as alive as the living dead can come. But these monsters just aren’t making the grade. What the hell—it’s early yet.”

“Early? You broadcast on Sunday!”

Readick shook his head, grinned. “Oh, Welles and his buddy Jack Houseman, and Paul...and for that matter Howard, their writer...they’re maniacs, polishing and goosing these things up till the last second.” He pointed out the window to the podium. “Hell, Orson rewrites and cuts and shapes while he’s on the air. He’s a madman! A wonderful madman, but a madman.”

“Frank, one thing I don’t get—isn’t Orson the director? Paul introduced himself as that, and as far as I can see, he’s the one running things.”

“Paul directs the rehearsals—he does the casting, gets these things on their feet. You see, Orson is busy with this latest play the Mercury is putting on—it opens in about a week—and anyway, the boy wonder is always involved in multiple things. But on Sunday, believe me, it’ll be Orson’s show, all right. Top to bottom.”

“Then Orson is the director.”

Readick’s eyes tightened. “I’d say more...conductor. He stands up there on that podium like Toscanini and wrings the ‘music’ outa these scripts.”

“So it’s not an ‘in-name-only’ thing.”

“You mean like Cecil B. DeMille on the Lux Radio Theatre? Not at all—ol’ C.B. just plays the director on that show. Strictly an actor. Orson...he’s a real DeMille around this place.”

The author and actor chatted a few more minutes, then the latter took his leave. And his place in the mike-area rectangle.

A few minutes later, while Gibson sat smoking a Camel and watching through the window—as Stewart moved around the room giving instructions to actors, sound-effects technicians and even the orchestra conductor—another figure slipped into the cubicle.

An Ichabod Crane of a spindly six-two or -three, in his early thirties, with a spade-shaped face and unruly blond hair, in a rumpled tan suit and dark-brown tie, the fellow had the abashed manner of someone reluctantly knocking on your door for charity. He also had hollow, tired eyes and the pallor of one who rarely got outside.

In other words, a writer.

“Mr. Gibson?” The voice was earnest and even a little timid, which was almost a relief after all these sonorous radio tones.

“Yes?” Gibson got to his feet.

“I’m Howard Koch—the one-man Mercury writing staff.” He extended his hand, which Gibson promptly shook. “I’ve been turning these sixty-page shows out at a rate of one a week, all season so far. And you must be the only man on the planet who thinks I’m a piker.”

With a burst of a laugh, Gibson sat back down, gesturing for Koch to pull up a chair and join him. “We pulp writers do make you hardworking radio writers look like you’re loafin’...but then, I don’t have to put up with the endless meetings and rewrites.”

Koch rolled his eyes. “It does get a little hairy around here. Welles and Houseman consider sleep a luxury—their saving grace is they deny themselves, too.”

“Even I don’t envy you your time schedule, Howard...considering you’re adapting and carving up huge novels, most of the time, to fill a little old hour.”

Koch chuckled wryly. “It’s either that or pad out a short story to the same purpose. Butchered or bloated, those are the options.”

“Say what you will, but my wife and I would never miss your show.”

With half a smile, Koch said, “Even when you’re on deadline?”

“Howard, I’m like you—always on deadline.”

With a sigh, the radio writer said, “I just wish I had something better this afternoon, to share with you. This one’s kind of a...a mess, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t know why. Destroying the world ought to fill an hour perfectly well. And hell, you’ve got Martians doing it!”

“That’s the problem. It’s so goddamn unbelievable. With what’s going on in the world right now, fantasy has its appeal, all right...but it can be a hard sell to people beaten down by horrific realities.”

“Maybe the fact that it takes place forty years ago will make the fantasy go down smoother.”

Koch shifted in his seat. “Walter, tell ya the truth, that was the first change I made: I thought that hurt the reality of it—radio has an immediacy. Sure, we can go back to the foggy London of Sherlock Holmes and lose ourselves there; or to Treasure Island with Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins. But to do science fiction, something futuristic, that’s set forty years back? I don’t think so.”

“So, then, you’ve modernized it?”

“Yes—it’s happening today, and it’s happening in America, not London.”

“Ah!” Gibson stubbed out his Camel in a glass ashtray, with CBS in it. “So where do the Martians land, now? Times Square?”

“Actually, I thought somewhere out in the obscure countryside would be better. Something rural, where the contrast would be great...and where an invading army might logically deploy itself.”

Nodding, Gibson said, “I like that. You’ve thought about this, really thought it through. Sounds to me you’re doing fine—where exactly then did you have them land?”

“Grovers Mill, New Jersey.”

“Where?”

The radio writer patted the air with both hands, his tone apologetic. “Let me explain—Monday’s my only day off. I was making a quick trip up the Hudson, to see my family, and I was on Route Nine West—”

“Which took you through New Jersey.”

“Exactly. Anyway, I stopped at a gas station and picked up a road map of the state, knowing the next day, at work, I’d have to be figuring out my...or I should say the Martians’...battle plan. So back in my office in New York, getting down to it, I spread the map out on the floor, closed my eyes...and dropped a pencil.”

“On Grovers Mill.”

“Right. I liked the ring of it—sounded like the real place it was. Plus, it’s near Princeton, and I have this astronomer character in the show, called Professor Pierson, who works out of the Princeton Observatory.”

“Luck was on your side.”

“We’ll see.” He spread his hands out in the air, his eyes gleaming, suddenly. “I can tell you that that map became my best friend. There I was, deploying the opposing forces over an ever-widening area, wreaking havoc like a drunken general...making moves and countermoves between invaders and defenders.”

“It’s good to be God.”

“You’ll have to check with Orson for the answer to that one! But...I did enjoy destroying New Jersey.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

He chuckled, like a kid about to share a terrible, wonderful secret. “If you hang around to listen, Walter, you’ll find I also demolish the very Columbia Broadcasting Building we’re seated in.”

“Wishful thinking, no doubt. Howard, why are you recording this rehearsal?”

“Well, I’m not doing anything—I’m just the writer. I’m somewhere about ten rungs in importance below Ora Nichols, the sound-effects gal. Why record it in advance? Timing, for one thing—Paul will be sitting by his script in the booth next to us, stopwatch in hand, to see if we’re long or short. But mostly it’s so Orson can attend without attending—so he can listen to the acetate tonight and make his notes for me to do revisions, and to make production demands of Paul, even music suggestions to Benny—Benny Herrmann, that is, our in-house maestro.”

With Koch seated at his side, Gibson listened to the rehearsal and went through several more Camels; because they were recording, no stops could be made—the invasion from Mars went forward even with flubs.

The adaptation of the Wells novella began imaginatively enough with a news bulletin interrupting a remote broadcast of a dance band. Then a second bulletin took reporter Carl Phillips (former Shadow, Frank Readick) to the Princeton Observatory to interview Professor Pierson, played by a small man with a big voice. Soon the two men were at the scene, and a more or less conventional fantasy melodrama played out.

When it was finished, director Stewart emerged from the adjacent control booth to speak to Koch, with Gibson still at the radio writer’s side.

“Well?” Stewart asked.

“It wasn’t terrible,” Koch said.

“No,” Stewart admitted. “It was worse than terrible: it wasn’t good.” The director pulled a chair up. He looked to his guest. “What do you think, Walter?”

“I don’t know that my opinion matters.”

“I’d like to hear it.”

“Well, you don’t have the sound effects perfected yet....”

“No,” Stewart granted. “We’ll be doing that on Saturday. Ora’s the best—the effects’ll be first-rate by air.”

“Good. And that one actor was obviously filling in for Orson.”

“Yes. Bill Alland. He always sits in for Orson on these rehearsals.”

“He’s not bad, but Orson’s a star, with the greatest voice in radio. He’ll sell this.”

Stewart nodded. “What works for you? What doesn’t?”

Gibson shrugged. “It starts out great. Those news bulletins are compelling. I like the bit, after the Holocaust, where the ham radio fella is wondering if he’s the last person on earth, alive.” He glanced at Koch. “All that plays into the immediacy of the medium that you were talking about.”

Stewart grunted. “More bulletins, you think?” He seemed to be asking Gibson as much as Koch.

Koch threw up his hands. “We better wait for Orson on this. He’ll have an opinion.”

Stewart arched a dark eyebrow. “An opinion?”

Everyone stood, and after some small talk, Gibson was about to take his leave when Stewart was called to the phone. Since good-byes hadn’t been exchanged yet, Gibson waited politely. Stewart returned a few minutes later.

“That was Orson,” the director said. “He’s tied up at the theater working on Danton’s Death—the new play. I told him you sat through the rehearsal, Walter, and he’d like you to join us when we listen to the acetate, and help us brainstorm over how to fix this thing.”

“Well...I’d be glad to. It’s an honor.”

Koch smirked. “Not really. Orson loves to charm free help out of professionals.”

Gibson lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I’m on expense account. What time?”

Stewart sighed. “That’s the bad part—can you make five A.M. over at the Mercury Theatre?”

“Sure.” Gibson shook his head, and chortled, “But I didn’t figure a theater-type like Orson Welles for such an early hour.”

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





FRIDAY





OCTOBER 28, 1938





ON MAY 6, 1915, ORSON 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.