The delays continued. On the night of the second scheduled preview, Welles and Gabel stalled with recitations from Julius Caesar before finally deciding the scenery wasn’t ready and canceling again. Then, before the next scheduled preview, at the end of the third week in October, disaster struck—actual, physical disaster. Orson’s huge center-stage elevator contraption collapsed during a run-through, sending several actors to the hospital, including Erskine Sanford, who broke a leg and had to be replaced in the cast. Welles and Houseman canceled all future planned previews as Jean Rosenthal scrambled to fix the “technical difficulties,” working feverishly to construct an improved elevator. The premiere then was moved into the first week of November—in part “because the cast and technical staff bordered on sheer exhaustion from intensive rehearsals,” as the New York Times reported.
“Orson continued to rehearse while morale deteriorated,” Houseman wrote later, although the producer conceded that he himself attended only “a few rehearsals.” (His “people” kept him informed.) Houseman was busy with his futile fund-raising efforts (the entire season’s $17,000 was by now nearly exhausted) and with supervisory work on the scripts for the fall radio series.
Finally, on Friday and Saturday, October 28 and 29, the Mercury offered two “perfectly smooth” previews of Danton’s Death. At last, it seemed, the jinx was behind them. That Sunday, the cast would gather for rehearsal after the Mercury Theatre on the Air radio broadcast. Several days remained before the press opening, plenty of time for Orson to pull a rabbit out of his hat, as he always seemed to do.
It was also the day before Halloween, one of Orson’s favorite holidays.
The fall season of Mercury Theater on the Air had been launched grandly on September 11 with a condensed Julius Caesar. The series had continued with radio versions of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (September 18); several of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (September 25); a concise version of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, with Orson playing both the fate-tossed orphan Oliver and the villainous Fagin (October 2); Edward Ellsberg’s Hell on Ice, the saga of a famous nineteenth-century arctic voyage (October 9); Orson’s first adaptation of a Booth Tarkington story, the 1916 best seller Seventeen (October 16); and Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (October 23).
The original “First Person Singular” conceit had involved Orson narrating each episode; that conceit was dropped for the new season, but the host still introduced and closed each show with his own musings. And the schedule was still stocked with his favorite authors, some of them—Charlotte Brontë, Arthur Conan Doyle, Booth Tarkington, and Jules Verne—destined for return engagements in his career.
The program now aired at 8 P.M. EST on Sundays, opposite the number one show in that time slot: The Chase and Sanborn Hour, informally known as “The Charlie McCarthy Show” after its star, the wisecracking dummy voiced by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. The Crosley Index of radio ratings showed The Chase and Sanborn Hour drawing 34.7 percent of possible listeners, while Mercury Theater on the Air attracted only about 3.6 percent. After ten or twelve minutes of opening banter with the puppet, however, Bergen usually yielded the microphone to a popular singer, and the Mercury show got a bump in ratings as the audience turned the dial to see what else was available.
Having been upgraded from its summer replacement status, the fall series was allowed a deeper budget for staff. Paul Stewart, who had directed most of the summer shows, was now better salaried as director of the series. Houseman took the lead on the scripts through September; but when the difficulties with Danton’s Death overwhelmed him, he hired Howard Koch, a tall, spindly Columbia Law School graduate turned playwright, to take over the main writing responsibilities.
Koch had written a short-lived Broadway comedy in 1929, but since that time, he had carved out a reputation for earnest drama. The Lonely Man, which Koch wrote for the Federal Theatre Project, posited a reincarnated Abraham Lincoln as a college professor mediating a labor strike. When The Lonely Man was produced in Chicago in mid-1937, with Walter Huston’s son, John, playing Lincoln’s surrogate, critics acclaimed the production and the playwright. Hardly a dewy-eyed novice (he was older than Houseman), Koch signed a six-month contract with Mercury with a clause giving him the future rights to any radio script he wrote. His capable assistant and secretary Anne Froelick, a onetime actress, was hired with him. Koch did his first writing on “Hell on Ice” in the second week of October.
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, wit
h 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.
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 59
