The War of the Worlds Murder d-6

by Max Allan Collins

  The confab over, the three pulled chairs up near Herrmann, but none of them could quite bring themselves to actually sit at the murder table.

  “Maybe it’s in bad taste,” Herrmann said, hands folded on the tabletop like a schoolboy at his desk, “but I find this exciting.”

  “It is poor taste,” Welles said.

  “Still, it is exciting. Can’t wait to call Lucille.” His wife. “Jack, do you think they’ll arrest Orson?”

  Houseman said, “I should hope not.”

  “Would they arrest me?”

  “Why, Benny?” Houseman said dryly. “Would you like them to?”

  Herrmann chuckled. “Well, it might be an interesting experience. Composers don’t often get tossed in the clink, you know.”

  Welles said, “Benny, shut up.”

  Herrmann, blinking behind the glasses, got to his feet; his face flushed, he said, “You can’t talk to me like that!”

  Houseman said, “Of course he can. He does it all the time. Sit down and do, please, shut up.”

  Herrmann huffed and puffed, but sat himself down.

  Perhaps fifteen endless minutes of silence had dragged by, when Gibson stood and stretched. “Jack, did you leave that connecting door unlocked?”

  Houseman frowned. “I believe so.”

  “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  The writer got up.

  Welles and Houseman both frowned at him, but Gibson said, “Don’t worry about it,” and a few moments later he was standing in the adjacent studio.

  Something had been nagging him, and he went to the pile of painter’s tarps along one side and knelt. He sorted through them, and wrapped in one on the bottom, he found a heavy towel-large, like a beach towel-caked with dark red.

  Obviously, this cloth had wiped up the blood on the table and been stowed here, before an escape had been made….

  Gibson sniffed the bloody stain, then returned the cloth to its hiding place, grunted a single laugh, rose and reentered Studio Seven.

  He’d barely reached his chair when a knock on the door was followed by Taylor’s voice, “I’m back-time to go, fellows.”

  Houseman rose and unlocked the door and let the executive in.

  “I have a cab waiting,” Taylor said. “We’ll use the service elevator, and we should head off the press.”

  Welles said, “The police told us not to leave….”

  “Bill Paley’s out there-in his pajamas and slippers with his topcoat over them, is how fast he came-and he’s told the police that we will fully cooperate over the coming days, but that the network would not stand for the browbeating of its staff in this atmosphere.”

  Houseman said, “Really, unless they’re prepared to arrest us, we have every right to go.”

  The exec nodded. “So it’s the reporters who are the threat, now. Orson, they’ll make you their whipping boy, given half a chance-the papers have been looking for a way to give radio a black eye, and this may be it.”

  Herrmann was sent back to Studio One, to leave the building with the other musicians, actors and staff. The reporters would be after bigger fish than the man who conducted that sluggish “Stardust” tonight.

  Through the rabbit’s warren of hallways, Davidson Taylor led Welles, Houseman and Gibson to the service elevator. What no one had counted on was Ben Gross’s familiarity with the building.

  The Daily News reporter had anticipated the backdoor route, and he-and half a dozen other reporters, who knew enough to follow Gross’s lead-were waiting armed and ready with questions.

  As they waited for the elevator to arrive, Gross used his lead position to get out the first query: “How many deaths have been reported to CBS? We hear thousands….”

  Welles said nothing, swallowing, eyes darting from unfriendly face to unfriendly face.

  Another reporter shouted, “How about traffic deaths? We have reports of the Jersey and upstate New York ditches teeming with corpses.”

  Gibson felt a sudden surge of claustrophobia as the faces and waving pencils and the sea of fedoras with press passes stuck in the hatbands surged forward….

  Another voice: “What word about rioting? How about that fatal stampede in Jersey…?”

  Hands up in surrender, Welles said, “Please…”

  And another: “How about suicides? Have you heard about the one on Riverside Drive?”

  Taylor said, “Call my office tomorrow for a statement, gentlemen.”

  Gross asked, “Don’t you have any statement to make tonight, to the reading public, Mr. Welles?”

  “None whatsoever!”

  The elevator, thankfully, was there, and they stepped aboard and shut the gate on the hungry newshound horde.

  Within minutes, Taylor had ushered the trio through the alley to the cab waiting out front, and they were en route to the Mercury Theatre. After all that fuss, life seemed to be going on as usual in late-night Manhattan-cars stopping for traffic, pedestrians out strolling, no riots, no stampedes to speak of….

  At the theater, the company had gone ahead and started rehearsing under the direction of one of Welles’s assistants-Danton’s Death would open shortly, and life (and the show) went on, whether their director deigned to drop by or not. The company was used to their leader being absent in battle, due to this radio show or that romantic rendezvous or just a restaurant meal that had gotten out of hand.

  So no otherworldly sense of drama seized the auditorium-other than the cast half-falling downstairs as they were singing “Carmagnole”-and the only sign that something special was up were the several resourceful newspaper photographers who’d figured out that this was where Orson Welles would wind up, tonight.

  The cast froze in the midst of their song as Welles climbed to the stage and asked them to take a break and take seats at the front of the auditorium.

  When they had, he stood with the expressionistic sets as a bold backdrop, with its blankly staring and accusatory array of masks, and told them what had happened this evening. He told the story briefly but melodramatically, and Gibson could not tell whether the contrition in his voice and manner were sincere-particularly when he seemed to be posing for the photographers below, eyes raised to heaven, arms outstretched in crucifixion mode, an early Christian saint in need of a shave…and as Welles’s beard tended to grow in most heavily in the goatee area, a paradoxical satanic aspect cast its shadow.

  On the other hand, Gibson had no doubt that all the talk of deaths-with the threat of multiple murder charges hovering-had made both Welles and Houseman genuinely remorseful, not to mention confused and frightened.

  Finally, the boy-genius smiled a little, shrugged, and said, “Well, let’s just say I don’t think we’ll choose anything quite like ‘War of the Worlds’ again.”

  Standing next to Houseman in the aisle, Gibson had been watching the actors. He whispered to the producer, “Why is the company taking this so…so lightly?”

  “They don’t believe him,” Houseman said.

  “Why not?”

  “He’s the boy who cried wolf-this is simply the most outrageous of his many outrageous excuses for keeping them waiting.”

  Gibson chuckled. “Well, I can see that, actually.”

  Houseman turned his head, raised an eyebrow. “You can, my boy?”

  “Yes-you see, Jack, those three ‘thugs’ that accosted us last night, outside the Cotton Club?… They were actors Orson hired.”

  “Ah. You’re starting to understand how he thinks.”

  Gibson nodded. “Yes, I heard somebody mention that he once hired actors to play police, as a practical joke on an actor friend with outstanding warrants.”

  “Yes indeed.”

  “So he hired those actors-knowing I wouldn’t recognize them-to give validity, through me, an outsider, to that wild excuse he made to you and the cast, based on a nonexistent grudge between him and Owney Madden, over some dancer.”

  Houseman’s head tilted to one side. “Well-analyzed-though the dancer exists
, she just wasn’t Madden’s protegee. You are proving yourself quite a Shadow-worthy detective, Mr. Gibson.”

  “You know why I left our little temporary prison cell back at CBS, don’t you? And slipped back into Studio Eight?”

  “I can’t say that I do. I was, frankly, wondering.”

  “I found your bloody towel. The one that was used to wipe up all that blood. I sniffed it, by the way. Sickly sweet. Karo syrup, I’d say. Standard ingredient in stage blood.”

  Houseman bestowed a tiny smile. “How did you become aware that I had a passkey of my own?”

  “Louis the janitor told me-I almost missed it, when he said you’d returned the key ‘first thing.’ But then that seemed an odd way to put it, unless you had borrowed the key the day before, to have a duplicate made, and then returned it to Louis-‘first thing.’ ”

  Houseman bowed slightly. “And with that piece of the puzzle, there was little left to solve.”

  Gibson gestured with an open hand. “Your accomplice was free to clean up and slip out, while we played out our part of the charade. By the way, Leo the elevator ‘boy’ told me of the woman who left the building, obviously not wanting to be recognized, not long after your accomplice would have made her getaway; he thought she might be Mrs. Welles, but then of course neither Mrs. Welles nor Balanchine were ever at the Columbia Broadcasting Building today. You had their names written into the reception book, knowing Welles’s habit to check up on who’d dropped by, natural enough with all the affairs of the heart he’s been juggling-and easy enough to find a Virginia Welles signature to copy. So I was sent scurrying after suspects who hadn’t even been present when the crime was committed. Classic use of the first tactic of magic-misdirection.”

  Onstage Welles was sensing the disbelief around him.

  “What is this skeptical murmur?” he said. “Every word is factual-it’s all true!”

  “Tell us another one,” somebody said from the audience.

  Laughter and catcalls followed, even a little light sarcastic applause.

  One of the press photographers in the pit called something up to Welles, and the director leaned over at stage’s edge to hear what the photog had to say. Smiling, the wunderkind got to his feet.

  “So you don’t believe me? Come with me, my flock of doubters-follow me, boys! And girls….”

  All of them-cast members still in full Danton’s Death French Revolution drag-marched up the aisle after their leader and out into the crisp October night, as if looking for a Bastille to sack.

  Gibson walked alongside Houseman. “So you wanted to teach him a lesson-and you enlisted someone else who wanted to get back at Orson, huh?”

  With a sideways glance, Houseman said, “You understand, of course, I never imagined this panic would be so extensive-I would not have put Orson through that horror show, had I known-”

  “Sure.” Gibson fired up a Camel as they walked, waved out the match, sent it gutterbound. “But I think you did anticipate some kind of panic, otherwise you wouldn’t have tried to talk our bumptious boy out of doing the show in so overt a ‘newscast’ fashion.”

  “Granted-had I foreseen the extent of it, however, I wouldn’t have found it necessary to provide him that other opportunity for a comeuppance….”

  “So where’s the murder weapon?”

  “Back on the Mercury office wall.”

  In Times Square, on southeast corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, awash in neon and with a good view of the Times Building and its lighted bulletin, the so-called Moving News sign that circled the venerable paper’s building, Welles assembled his Revolutionary army.

  “There,” he said, and pointed, as if to a star. In a way, he was: his own.

  ORSON WELLES CAUSES PANIC, the sign flashed. MARS INVASION BROADCAST FRIGHTENS NATION.

  His company, believers again, emitted ooohs and aaaahs, then began to applaud. And Welles, despite all that hovered over him, began to smile, and took a small, humble bow.

  A shapely figure in one of the French low-cut peasant dresses slipped an arm through Welles’s. “Hi, Orson. Hope you don’t mind-Jack gave me a part in the chorus.”

  Welles’s eyes narrowed, then widened, as he realized who was standing beside him. “Dolores?”

  “No hard feelings?” Dolores Donovan said, with mischievous malice, and perhaps some affection.

  For a moment he looked stricken, as if the lovely blue-eyed strawberry-blonde might be an apparition; then his eyes searched for Houseman, who ambled up to his other side, Gibson following. Everyone was doused in the red of a dancing neon advertising soap flakes.

  Sounding like a little boy, Welles said, “Housey-it was just a…?”

  “ ‘Hoax’ is the word, I believe.” Houseman touched Welles’s sleeve. “And my dear Orson, I would never have subjected you this terrible practical joke, had I known-”

  Welles hugged Dolores, kissed her on the mouth. Then he looked at her tenderly and said, “I’m so glad you’re alive-and by God, I’m glad, too, to have an actress of your caliber in my company.”

  Then he turned her loose, and-giving Houseman a hard look-said, “Is this that lesson you promised?”

  “It was meant to be, but-”

  “But I’ll need more than one, right?”

  “Very possibly,” Houseman granted.

  And Welles slipped an arm around his friend and began to laugh and laugh and laugh, a Falstaffian roar of a laugh that seemed to relieve Houseman a great deal. But Gibson sensed some hysteria in it.

  Which was only fair, after all, considering the hysteria Orson Welles had launched tonight.

  The Times sign was announcing the time: twelve A.M.

  Midnight.

  “It’s Hallowe’en, everyone,” Welles thundered. “It is finally…at long last, really and truly…Hallowe’en.”

  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 pr
otests 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.”