Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane

by McGilligan, Patrick

  “Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

  “In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October 30, the Crosley service estimated that thirty-two million people were listening in on radios.”

  The episode then shifted into “the first of the banalities that had so worried John Houseman,” in John Gosling’s words: the tail end of a prosaic weather report, which segued into a dance number emanating from the fictional Meridian Room “of the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York,” where the Ramon Raquello Orchestra was leading off with “a touch of the Spanish.” A news flash interrupted the tango number—“La Cumparsita”—to announce that explosions of incandescent gas had been reported on the planet Mars. The report was followed by a return to music, this time “Bobby Millette playing ‘Stardust’ from the Hotel Martinet in Brooklyn,” interrupted by a brief announcement that “in a few moments” the “noted astronomer” Professor Pierson of Princeton Observatory would be on hand to comment on the phenomenon.

  Then it was back to the orchestra music playing on and on . . . until, at long last, six minutes into the show, reporter Carl Phillips (Frank Readick) materialized at the Princeton Observatory (“a large, semi-circular room, pitch black except for an oblong split in the ceiling”) to interview Professor Pierson (Welles), who has observed the blasts on his giant telescope.

  The sage professor was unalarmed.

  PHILLIPS

  You’re quite convinced as a scientist that living intelligence as we know it does not exist on Mars?

  PIERSON

  I should say the chances against it are a thousand to one.

  Then, interrupting the interview, a telegram was rush-delivered to the professor, and Phillips asked permission to read the wire aloud to listeners. A shock of “almost earthquake intensity” had struck “within a radius of twenty miles of Princeton,” Phillips reported. It was probably a meteorite, the professor interjected reassuringly, “merely a coincidence.” Phillips signed off and the faux broadcast returned to “our New York studio,” where solitary piano playing faded in.

  By now, almost twelve minutes into the broadcast, Nelson Eddy had begun to warble “Neapolitan Love Song” on NBC’s top-rated Charlie McCarthy program, and its listeners were beginning to twiddle the dials to see what else was on. Six million people eventually listened to “War of the Worlds,” social scientist Hadley Cantril later estimated—and a sizable percentage of them tuned in to CBS just in time to hear the bulletins about the Martian invasion, without having absorbed the disclaimers.

  Suddenly, “a huge flaming object, believed to be a meteorite,” was reported to have fallen on a “farm in the neighborhood of Grovers Mill, New Jersey, twenty-two miles from Trenton.” Eyewitnesses Phillips and Professor Pierson, materializing within seconds at the Grovers Mill farm—already thronged with police and onlookers—described a huge rocket cylinder protruding from a vast pit. As they extracted a local account from the hayseed proprietor (Ray Collins), the top of the rocket rotated like a screw, and out of the shadows wriggled large glistening monsters with tentacles, shooting jets of flame.

  PHILLIPS

  . . . It’s spreading everywhere. It’s coming this way. About twenty yards to my right . . .

  (CRASH OF MICROPHONE . . . THEN DEAD SILENCE . . . )

  Other bulletins reported the aliens as an invading army, piloting huge metal tripods emitting a poisonous gas that wreaked death and devastation. The rocket cylinders and tripods had begun to sprout all across America, slaughtering brave police and soldiers and civilians. Any resistance seemed futile, according to the bulletins. A radio announcer (Collins), “speaking from the roof of the Broadcasting Building, New York City,” described the advancing tide of “great machines” on America’s greatest metropolis, the smoke and gas, fleeing people, “thousands of them, dropping in like rats.” At last, the Martian enemy reached Times Square.

  An eerie silence was then followed by a quavering on shortwave.

  OPERATOR FOUR

  2 X 2 L calling C Q.

  2 X 2 L calling C Q.

  2 X 2 L calling C Q New York.

  Isn’t there anyone on the air?

  Isn’t there anyone on the air?

  Isn’t there anyone . . . ?

  2 X 2 L . . .

  This was followed by five seconds of absolute silence. At this point, more than forty minutes into the show—later than usual, because of the long slow buildup—there was inserted a “middle break” or intermission of roughly twenty seconds for station identification, during which time the audience received the courtesy of a routine reminder that the episode was an “original dramatization” by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the Air.

  By then, it was too late for the audience members who had tuned in after the opening, or had listened distractedly without heeding the program’s disclaimers. The next day, newspapers across the country carried reports of people panicking in response to the broadcast. “A wave of mass hysteria” swept America, according to the New York Times. The broadcast “disrupted households, interrupted religious services, created traffic jams and clogged communications systems.” Calls lit up police switchboards; citizens rushed out of their houses with wet towels covering their faces; traffic accidents, heart attacks, and suicide attempts were reported.

  In the control booth on the twentieth floor of the Columbia Broadcasting System building, just before intermission, network official Davidson Taylor took the first phone call from the outside world. When a shaken Taylor insisted that the show be stopped, Houseman blocked him physically from leaving the booth and interrupting the broadcast. Soon the network switchboard was lighting up, and blue-uniformed security guards were swarming the floor.

  Having no clue why guards had suddenly appeared, Orson waved them off as he plunged into the second half of “War of the Worlds,” a searching conversation about the prospects of a difficult future between a surviving stranger (Carl Frank) and the professor (Welles). The latter makes a lonely and eerie journey through the Holland Tunnel, arriving to paint a doomsday picture of New York City. But the Martians are all dead, the professor reveals. Earthly bacteria have defeated them.

  Then the professor turned host, signing off in his usual confidential manner: “This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that ‘The War of the Worlds’ has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be, the Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo.”

  Only those people who weren’t busy panicking heard it.

  Drenched in sweat, Orson finished with a flourish and a cheeky smile. But he and Houseman barely had time to exchange glances before building guards whisked them into a room to be debriefed by agitated studio officials. CBS staff members scurried around confiscating the incriminating scripts and props and recording equipment. Welles and Houseman were amazed to hear accounts of the ongoing nationwide scare. “I’ve often wondered if you had any idea, before you did it,” Peter Bogdanovich asked Welles decades later, “that ‘The War of the Worlds’ was going to get that kind of response.” “The kind of response, yes,” replied Welles. “That was merrily anticipated by us all. The size of it, of course, was flabbergasting.”

  A half hour later, Welles took the lead in facing the first newspaper reporters who had rushed to the studio. The reporters were “looking for blood,” in his words, and they were disappointed “when they found I wasn’t hemorrhaging.” He was peppered with disconcerting questions about fatal traffic accidents, stampedes of people, suicides—all of which later proved to be “the worst kind of hyperbole,” in the wor
ds of John Gosling. Still half disbelieving, Welles was meek and mild, explaining apologetically that the story was clearly a dramatization. They had chosen the Martian invasion only reluctantly, in fact, because “it was our thought that perhaps people might be bored or annoyed at hearing a tale so improbable.”

  Hurrying to the Mercury for their scheduled stage rehearsal, he and Houseman pushed past another pack of reporters. Inside the theater, the cast of Danton’s Death waited—including several actors who had participated in the “War of the Worlds” broadcast and arrived before them. The actors were incredulous at the news, and some went outside to see the news ticker in Times Square: ORSON WELLES CAUSES PANIC. “Needless to say,” recalled Guy Kingsley, who acted in both Danton’s Death and “War of the Worlds,” “the rehearsal came absolutely to a dead halt.”

  Welles had a rare night of sleeplessness not of his own devising. He spent much of the night on the phone with Roger Hill and other confidants and supporters, checking on news reports from around the country. He spoke with his lawyer, Arnold Weissberger, who told him that, although his CBS contract assigned legal responsibility for the broadcasts to the network, which had vetted the script, the reported accidents and fatalities were a gray area with regard to his liability.

  The next morning, he woke to accusatory headlines. “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact,” was on the front page of the usually staid New York Times. In the Daily News, the banner headline was “Fake Radio ‘War’ Terrorizes N.Y.,” with a subhead: “Scores Flee Homes; 15 in Hospital.” The same type of coverage, emphasizing Welles’s name as the responsible party, appeared in dozens of smaller cities and lesser newspapers.

  Orson huddled with Henry Senber, the Mercury publicist, and a representative from the network, which was anxious to limit the legal implications and any public relations damage. The press was clamoring for a statement from Welles. Both he and Senber thought that offering only a tidy publicity release would antagonize the newsmen. A press conference was a better idea.

  So Orson appeared at the CBS building in the late morning—pale and unshaven, in a conventional suit and tie, looking more like a door-to-door salesman than a national bogeyman. He faced a thronged room of reporters and photographers anxious for his explanation.

  For a decade, newspapers had gradually lost ground to radio in both advertising revenue and timely reporting—owing precisely to the innovation of flash news bulletins of the type Welles had dramatized in “War of the Worlds.” Among the old-school newsmen there was a distinct “anti-radio” sentiment, as Variety noted in its account of the broadcast and the panic, and this in turn lent an anti-Orson slant to the press coverage. “Editorials ranted about how irresponsible CBS and Welles were, insisting that I would never be offered another job in show business and how lucky I was not to be in jail,” Welles recalled. “Most self-serving of all, they assured their readers that newspapers would never sink to such reckless disregard for the public’s welfare.”

  Biographers writing decades after the “War of the Worlds” broadcast have suspected Welles of cleverly concocting the national panic, or of being secretly unrepentant as he apologized to newspapermen on the next morning. Although his (and Houseman’s) first reaction to the panic had been astonishment and laughter, this had been swiftly overtaken by legitimate fears and concerns for himself, his career, and the future of the Mercury Theatre.

  In newsreel footage of his Monday press conference, the young mastermind looks “palpably shaken,” in the words of Simon Callow. He first reads a prepared statement, in a voice “nervously high-pitched and slightly adenoidal.” (This was Orson’s true voice, without pretense or bluster.) “If I’d planned to wreck my career,” he told the journalists (some of whom “looked sympathetic,” according to Radio Mirror, “and some who didn’t”), “I couldn’t have gone about it better.” He insisted the show was meant as a Halloween prank. “I’d every hope people would be excited, just as they are in a melodrama,” Welles said. A reporter asked, “Were you aware of the terror such a broadcast would stir up?” and he answered, “Definitely not.” But Orson was also sarcastic about gullible listeners, and when another reporter went too far, demanding if in hindsight Welles thought he should have toned down the language, he bristled artistically. “You don’t play murder in soft words,” Orson averred.

  His show of contrition won over many of the newsmen, but the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opened a government investigation into the episode. Columbia Broadcasting System vice president W. B. Lewis announced that, henceforth, simulated newscasts would be banned from network radio dramas (some weeks later, the FCC cited this new policy as one reason for dropping its inquiry). Lawsuits filed against Welles and CBS rose to nearly $1 million, though none was ultimately actionable. And Welles received anonymous death threats; one promised to kill him during his curtain speech on the opening night of Danton’s Death. “For a few days,” he recalled, “I was a combination Benedict Arnold and John Wilkes Booth.”

  The cause of the hysteria among listeners would be studied for decades to come, and still is debated today. The New York Times thought the nationwide panic stemmed from the “war scare in Europe” (the Munich agreement permitting the German annexation of Czechoslovakia had occurred earlier that month), and because “radio frequently had interrupted regularly scheduled programs” to report on the crisis abroad. Rabbi Jonah B. Wise of the Central Synagogue on Lexington Avenue theorized that people were susceptible to panic because of the human Frankenstein monster running Germany: “Last Saturday night,” Rabbi Wise was quoted, “people in the whole of the United States were running away in panic fear from Adolf Hitler.” Other experts thought the Martians’ poisonous vapor evoked for many horrifying memories of the deadly gas used in World War I, and the widespread apprehension that this weapon would return in the next war.

  The panic was routinely cited as a product of radio’s sweeping power, although the New York Times was among the outlets that patiently pointed out the role of willful ignorance. Any listener fooled by the drama would have had to ignore the clear newspaper listings for the show (“Today: 8:00–9:00—Play—H.G. Wells’s ‘War of the Worlds’—WABC”), its explicit introduction, and three additional announcements during the broadcast “emphasizing its fictional nature.” The freethinking journalist and broadcaster Dorothy Thompson, named the second most influential woman in the United States (after Eleanor Roosevelt) in a poll the following year, spoke for America’s more sophisticated citizenry when she declared that Welles and his actors had “shown up the incredible stupidity, lack of nerve and ignorance of thousands.” Or as Orson’s early booster, Alexander Woollcott, teased him in a telegram: “This only goes to prove, my beamish boy, that the intelligent people were all listening to a dummy, and all the dummies were listening to you.”

  One undeniable result of the panic was that Orson Welles was suddenly a household name. Heretofore, his name had been known only to Broadway aficionados and readers of the theater press and Radio Daily. Even when Orson had appeared on the cover of Time, the profile was relegated to the magazine’s theater section. Now the broadcast and panic had made front-page headlines not only in every state of the union but around the globe. (According to Welles, even Adolf Hitler referred scathingly to the “War of the Worlds” panic in a Munich speech, offering it as evidence of the corrupt and decadent state of democracies.)

  Orson’s fame had spilled beyond the realm of show business; the potential audience for his future projects had grown exponentially. For the first time, his name became grist for editorialists, political columnists, humorists, and even sports reporters, who now compared the odds in horse races to the odds of Martians landing in New Jersey. “On Broadway, he was well known, all right,” wrote Radio Mirror. “But Broadway isn’t America, and it’s doubtful if all his excellent work on the New York stage would ever have made him matter much to the rest of the country. And then, an accident, an innocent mistake, a blunder . . . And everyb
ody in the country knew who he was.

  “Overnight.”

  Fate. Everything was fate.

  The days leading up to a Broadway premiere were always make-or-break for Orson. They were a time for final adjustments and improvements. That was true of many Broadway shows, but especially of Mercury productions. Could Orson have worked some crucial eleventh-hour magic to save Danton’s Death? We’ll never know. The “War of the Worlds” maelstrom took over. Three days after the broadcast, on the day of the opening that would seal the Mercury’s fate, he and Houseman were still unsure if they would be jailed, sued, or fired by CBS.

  The critics and columnists covering theater in New York, who were all loyal to print, saw the “War of the Worlds” controversy as another episode in a fractious year for the Mercury, after the summer of rumored discontent, the changing of the guard among the actors, the widely reported crises causing the postponement of Too Much Johnson, and the months-long problems and delays plaguing Danton’s Death. The broadcast and panic enlarged the bull’s-eye that had hung on the boy wonder’s back since the Voodoo Macbeth.

  At the end of the November 2 premiere, the huge elevator contraption rose to its highest level above the stage floor, the guillotine blade emerged under the gleam of a single bright light, and the blade fell on Danton. The stage went to black, the curtain fell, and the play ended—as dead as Danton.

  Reporting their negative verdicts, some critics referred to the broadcast and panic. “Having loosed the Martians upon us,” the previously supportive Richard Watts Jr. began in the New York Herald Tribune, “Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre now attempt to turn us over to the blood-letting leaders of the French Revolution.” Watts went on to describe the production as mannered, stately, and artificial, and its message as fuzzy. Welles the actor was “merely oratorical” in his role. “For the Mercury,” Watts said (a self-fulfilling prediction), “the honeymoon is over.”