The War of the Worlds Murder d-6

by Max Allan Collins

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 M ay 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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BROADWAY MALADY OF 1938

  Through the early morning fog came the brooding bray of a great liner-the Queen Mary-steaming through the Narrows, turning north toward the slender island of Manhattan. Elsewhere, chugging through darkness still shrouding New Jersey, a train carried sightseeing families (115,000 daily, even in this Depression) as well as hopeful youths seeking fortune and fame, while in the city, night workers were just starting home (some of them anyway), their steps as sharp as a tap dancer’s, though considerably less regular, on sidewalks otherwise uncharacteristically quiet. Nearby, the occasional automobile and water wagon haunted empty streets, and in perhaps half a dozen nightclubs around the big town, bands played on, mostly after-hours improv sessions by musicians seeking to use up the last shreds of a night long since turned to morning. In the next half hour, alarm clocks would begin to trill across the Upper East and Upper West Side alike, and in Hell’s Kitchen and the Gashouse, too, as well as Greenwich Village and Chelsea, their ringing ricocheting off mostly vacant streets.

  And in a taxi, moving through skyscraper canyons that were still sporadically lit by neon, Walter Gibson was making his way from the St. Regis-an absurdly posh hotel at which the writer would never have stayed, off expense account-to a theater at 41st and Broadway that had once been called the Comedy. Now, as its still-burning neon insisted, visible from Sixth Avenue to Broadway, it was the

  M

  E

  R

  C

  U

  R

  Y

  after the theater company that inhabited it.

  Like the St. Regis, the Mercury had an Edwardian facade, though the former seemed to have frozen spectacularly in time around the turn of the century, while the latter with its glittering green-and-gold woodwork had a freshly painted, facelifted feel, more out of last week.

  This impression continued as Gibson moved through a small lobby, quietly classy
with its pearl-gray walls and crystal chandelier. A pretty, plump blonde of perhaps fifteen in a fuzzy pink sweater could be seen through the box-office window, where she was sleeping on her arms, like a schoolgirl taking a teacher-enforced nap.

  Careful not to wake her, Gibson crept into the theater itself-no one, at 4:32 A.M., was taking tickets.

  For Broadway, the auditorium was rather intimate, a rococo affair with two balconies and perhaps seven hundred seats. The licks of paint and the fancy touches (the gilt feathering on the facade, the chandelier in the lobby) appeared to represent the Mercury’s major investment in refurbishing the old house-the red aisle carpeting and the wine-color frayed seats had been sewn, though not with thread precisely matching the originals, and the walls and proscenium had the patchy look of plaster repairs and selective painting that were practical first, and cosmetic a distant second.

  A showman of sorts himself, Gibson knew that the Mercury putting its money in the outside and outer lobby made sense: these imperfections would disappear in the dark, and anyway, the productions on stage would consume the eyes and dazzle the imaginations of playgoers.

  This Gibson knew at a glance, as he took in the stunning, almost mind-boggling stage set of the Welles production about to open: Danton’s Death.

  The play, while hardly a household word, happened to be one with which Gibson was familiar-he’d seen an elaborate Broadway production of it, about ten years before, directed by the legendary showman Max Reinhardt, who had filled the stage with mob scenes and grandeur. Written by Georg Buechner, a political activist who died at twenty-four in 1837, the play centered on a brief though pivotal episode in the French Revolution. Set in the spring of 1794, Danton’s Death reflected the full social and political upheaval of the Reign of Terror.

  By ironic coincidence, Gibson had spent Thursday evening (on the Welles expense account) taking in a picture at the Astor starring Norma Shearer-Marie Antoinette. But the Mercury version of the French Revolution did not seem to have much in common with the MGM take on the same subject matter…though Gibson could see how the movie company currently courting the boy director, Warner Bros.-who after all gave birth to Little Caesar-might well be attracted to Welles’s expressionistic, melodramatic approach….

  A dress rehearsal was in full swing, but it was the set that commanded Gibson’s immediate attention.

  Dominating was a massive curved backdrop arrayed with hundreds of blank masks that, through shifting dramatic lighting (blood-red, steel-gray, garish purple) now might suggest the murderous mob, later invoke the skulls of the mob’s victims, or even the tribunal deciding life or death for the play’s characters.

  In front of that wall of faces, just behind the forestage, rose a four-sided tower with steps on either side, so that actors could emerge from beneath-a pit had been carved out of the stage itself-and if that weren’t enough, the structure contained a working elevator that climbed a good twelve feet. The platform that rode the elevator was used in many ways-a rostrum, garret, salon, prison cell and, finally, at its full height, the scaffold of a guillotine.

  Gibson watched, impressed but not quite getting the point of any of it, despite having seen that earlier production. Lighting effects seemed to shoot from every direction, performers appearing or disappearing as if from thin air, this lone actor orating to an unseen shouting multitude, that small group emerging from the darkness to discuss the effect of the Revolution on their lives and potential deaths. Occasionally music interrupted the drama, a revolutionary hymn, a macabre celebratory chorus chanting “Carmagnole,” with the actor playing Danton obviously speaking English as a second language, as he expressed his opposition to “pipple in welwet gowns.”

  Welles and the Mercury had a reputation, from their informal Cradle Will Rock to their street-dress Julius Caesar, for making Highbrow Thea-tah accessible to the masses. But right now the resolutely middlebrow Walter Gibson was feeling pretty lowbrow….

  One of the actors was not in costume, and after a while, Gibson recognized him: Bill Alland, the little big-voice guy who had sat in for Welles at the radio-show rehearsal yesterday afternoon. He seemed to be filling in for Welles again, so that the director did not have to be distracted by his own acting.

  In fact, early on, Gibson-who’d tucked himself in a seat toward the back of the house-spotted Welles up in the seventh row, on the aisle, with his feet up on the seat in front of him. Now and then, in rolled-up shirtsleeves and suspenders and dark baggy trousers, the great man-boy would rise and pace that aisle-although on his return, that pacing would be backward, his eyes always on the stage.

  During the forty or so minutes that Gibson watched, Welles at first was eating ice cream-pistachio? — with a spoon from a quart container, and then was smoking a cigar large enough for a relay-race baton, its sweetly fragrant smoke wafting all the way back to Gibson.

  Though mostly the writer was viewing the director from the rear, Gibson did get glimpses of that famous baby face, always frowning, and could strongly sense that Welles was restraining himself. Gibson could not just sense that Welles wanted to interrupt; waves of that desire seemed to roll up the aisle.

  However, as Howard Koch had told Gibson, Danton’s Death had been in previews already-with previews for last night and tonight and tomorrow night cancelled to make way for more rehearsal-and now the next preview loomed on Monday with real opening night on the following Wednesday.

  According to both Paul Stewart and Koch, Welles was having fits with this play, and disaster had courted it: not long ago, the elevator had collapsed, hurling an actor into the basement, where the man had broken his leg (he had been replaced, and Stewart had wryly commented that the other actors considered him “the lucky one”).

  Needing to function smoothly on a stage littered with perils, the actors-navigating a stage strewn with gaping holes, catwalks and scaffolding-had lobbied for several uninterrupted run-throughs (Orson normally did not wait till the end to give notes, but constantly called the proceedings to a halt, to provide a running commentary).

  When the guillotine finally fell, Welles rose grandly from his aisle seat and roared, “All right, children-we’ve killed this thing! The question is, do we put it out of its misery, or try for resurrection?”

  The cast had lined itself up as if waiting for a firing squad. They hung their heads; they looked bleary-eyed and exhausted.

  Their condition did not appear wholly lost on Welles, whose voice modulated into a gruff warmth, though the volume continued to rumble the house seats.

  “Here at the Mercury,” he said, “we are compelled to work under pressure-that is because we must make up in intensity and creativity what we lack in money! We can’t afford to take a show out on the road to whip it into shape. We have finally mastered the technical aspects of this production. Now, my children…”

  Virtually every one of the haggard “children” on stage was older than Welles, some by a decade or two.

  “…we must attempt to breathe life into this corpse.”

  A hand tapped on Gibson’s shoulder, and he practically jumped from his seat. He looked back and up at the heart-shaped face of the sweetly pretty blonde in the fuzzy pink sweater who’d been slumbering in the box office booth. Her hair was a tumble of curls atop her head, and her blue eyes had an apologetic cast.

  “Are you Mr. Gibson?” she asked, in a squeaky little voice that was at once comic and appealing. She had a womanly shape for a kid. “If you are, Mr. Houseman would like to see you…” Her voice lowered an octave. “…upstairs.”

  Whether intended or not, the effect was comic and Gibson, standing in the aisle facing the girl, said, “That sounds almost as ominous as the French Revolution.”

  “More ominous than that,” she squeaked, rolling her eyes.

  Soon he was following her through the lobby-not an unpleasant task, as the movement of her backside beneath the tight dark woolen dress had a hypnotic effect-and then up several flights of stairs to the upper balcony. Welles’s
booming voice, alternately furious at incompetence and lavish with praise, filled the house.

  After a long, complicated climb, the shapely teenager led him to yet more steps, iron ones up into what had clearly been an electrician’s booth.

  The girl stepped inside the narrow, stuffy room, Gibson poised in the doorway behind her. Welles’s voice, muffled, going over tiny details, leached through the twin holes in the wall that had once been used, presumably, for follow spots in the Comedy Theatre’s musical days.

  “Mr. Gibson is here, Mr. Houseman,” the girl said, rather timidly.

  Gibson took in the office with a few glances: an exposed paint-peeling radiator, hot enough to fry an egg on; a bulletin board with a much-annotated 1938 calendar courtesy of some bank, various reviews with sections underlined, and a sheet boldly labelled MERCURY THEATRE 1937-38 SUBSCRIBERS LIST; 8-by-10s of actors and production sketches taped haphazardly to the walls; and a couple battered secondhand-looking bookcases brimming with scripts and books and boxes of Mercury letterhead and envelopes, in stylish brown ink.

  Nothing unexpected, really, with a single exception: on the wall, riding some nails, was a large sharp-looking hunting knife with a gleaming blade and a light-brown wooden handle bearing a bold ORSON WELLES autograph.

  The space itself had been divided by a beaverboard partition into two even smaller offices-the nearer was a secretarial area, with a small gray metal desk and typewriter, unattended, a row of filing cabinets behind; the other side had a glorified card table with a chair behind it and several chairs in front of it, a daybed hugging the left wall. On the table were two telephones, and a small portable Victrola, and seated behind the table, hands folded like a school teacher patiently waiting to reprimand a wayward student, was a formidable fellow who projected various contradictory messages.

  His yellow-and-black checkered sportcoat said casual, his black bow tie said formal; his dark slashes of eyebrow on an egg-shaped noggin (well on its way to being completely bald), sent signals of strength, while a languid weakness was implied by a feminine, sensuous-lipped mouth that seemed permanently formed in a mild condescending smile. Or was it a sneer?