by Simon Callow
This was a matter much in the minds of Americans, who were daily reminded in the press that they alone of all Western nations had failed to devise a system of civil defence against attack from the air. Only three days before, Air Raid, a play by Archibald MacLeish, vividly directed by William Robson, had been broadcast, bringing home the brutal bombing of helpless citizenry, ‘awakening many listeners,’ in LeRoy Bannerman’s words, ‘to the swift and violent terror advanced by the warplane.’3 The sense that war in Europe was daily more likely was not far from anyone’s mind, the feeling of defencelessness creating a mood of national jumpiness – compounded that fall by reports of terrifying hurricanes that had ravaged the East Coast. ‘You really had the feeling,’4 said Eric Barnouw in an interview, ‘that the world might come to an end at any minute.’ The vividness of the dramatisation stems from its imitation of the newscasts whose bulletins so frequently concerned events ominously gathering in Europe. Neither Koch nor Houseman nor Welles intended any serious parallel, of course; they were simply trying to liven up a dull book, using what was all around them, on the air and in the papers.
What no one at all could have predicted was that anyone might have thought that an actual invasion from Mars was being reported. There was no attempt to conceal the fact that the listener was hearing a dramatisation of a novel, from the beginning of the programme, with its standard announcement (‘CBS present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in a radio play by Howard Koch suggested by the H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds’) and the appropriately but conventionally chilling introduction from Welles, taken with only small modifications from the novella: ‘We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s but as mortal as his own … [who] regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. In the thirty-eighth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.’5 Only towards the end of this introduction does Koch start the process of relocation. ‘It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October 30, the Crossley service estimated that 32 million people were listening in on radios …’ So the programme is clearly framed as a broadcast within a broadcast. Then comes the neatly devised sequence of weather report, musical interlude (from the non-existent Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York), news flash about peculiar explosions, more music, more announcements, rambling interview with Professor Pierson, head of the Observatory at Princeton (a gruff and bumbling and highly recognisable Welles), followed by the brilliant on-the-spot reporting sequences.
It was at this point (8.12 p.m. according to Houseman) that the crucial event occurred which precipitated the subsequent panic. The programme that had freed up the slot which gave the Mercury access to the air waves at all was the massively popular Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, that most improbable of radio successes, featuring a ventriloquist and his anarchic dummy. Just under a quarter of an hour into the programme, the monocled dummy, his operator and the assembled zanies including Mortimer Snerd, Effie Klinker, Ersel Twing, Vera Vague and Professor Lionel Carp, were given a rest while a vocalist trilled. Immediately, and rather depressingly for the vocalist in question, a large proportion of the listeners would reach for their dials and twiddle until they found something more congenial, usually returning to the dummy after a few minutes. On the night of 30 October 1938, 12 per cent of Bergen and McCarthy’s audience, twiddling away, suddenly found themselves listening, appalled, to a news report of an invasion, by now well under way, by Martians.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been handed a message that came in from Grover’s Mill by telephone. Just a moment. At least forty people, including six state troopers, lie dead in a field east of the village of Grover’s Mill, their bodies burned and distorted beyond all recognition.’ Music was played; experts were interviewed, then a reporter started to describe the scene. ‘Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now it’s another one and another. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing’s body. It’s large as a bear and it glistens like black leather. But that face … it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate … this is the most extraordinary experience. I can’t find words … I’m pulling this microphone with me as I talk … hold on, will you please, I’ll be back in a minute.’ Shortly afterwards, they heard the microphone fall to the ground, then dead silence. There were more announcements, in the excitable, stentorian tones familiar from newsreels. The heads of the armed forces were brought to the microphone, and then finally, the Secretary of the Interior: ‘we must continue the performance of our duties each and every one of us, so that we may confront this destructive adversary with a nation united, courageous, and consecrated to the preservation of human supremacy on this earth.’
By now a small but significant proportion of the audience (with a heavy concentration in the New Jersey area) were in a state of high hysteria. The Mercury audience had effectively doubled from its usual 3.6 per cent of the total audience (Bergen and McCarthy had a regular listenership of 34.7 per cent) to six million. Before the programme was even halfway through, the CBS switchboard was jammed with demands for verification, as were switchboards all over the country (Koch reports an operator who very properly replied to a question as to whether the world was coming to an end, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t have that information here’).6 Other listeners assumed that the broadcast was the unvarnished truth needing no verification. Hadley Cantril writes in the introduction to The Invasion from Mars, his masterly sociological account of the incident, that out of the then 32,000,000 families in the United States, 27,500,000 had radios – ‘a greater proportion than have telephones, automobiles, plumbing, electricity, newspapers or magazines’. The radio was their principal, in some cases their only, source of information about the wider world. They were accustomed to trusting it; why should they doubt the familiar voices, describing events in their familiar manner? The nature of radio, whose unique appeal to the audience’s imagination Welles and his collaborators had so brilliantly exploited in their earlier broadcasts, made the Martian broadcast horribly convincing.
Despite the fact that three times during the course of the rest of the programme an announcement was made to remind listeners that they were tuned in to the Mercury Theatre of the Air who were presenting an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, the pictures that had been evoked in the minds of those who had accidentally tuned to the on-the-spot reports were entirely real. Some of them just sat down and waited to die; others desperately tried to call relatives, but found all the lines engaged. Some took to the streets, some went to church. The numbers involved were relatively small, but they were scattered across the country, creating tiny pockets of panic. In Harlem, a black congregation fell to its knees; in Indianapolis a woman ran screaming into a church where evening service was being held and shouted ‘New York has been destroyed. It’s the end of the world. Go home and prepare to die.’ A woman gave premature birth, and another fell down a whole flight of stairs (her husband, according to Norman Corwin, called CBS to thank them for the broadcast. ‘Geez, it was a wonderful programme!’). In Newark, New Jersey, all the occupants of a block of flats left their homes with wet towels round their heads as improvised gas masks. In Staten Island, Connie Casamassina was just about to get married. Latecomers to the reception took the microphone from the singing waiter and announced the invasion. ‘Everyone ran to get their coats. I took the microphone and started to cry – “Please don’t spoil my wedding day” – and then my husband started singing hymns, and I decided I was going to dance the Charleston. And I did, for 15 minutes straight. I did every step there is in the Charleston.’7
This outburst of mediaeval
millennial frenzy was short-lived. The Mienerts of Manasquan Park, New Jersey, leaping into the car – taking the dog and the canary with them – paused in their headlong flight down the motorway to ask the latest news from bewildered passers-by, who, not having heard the broadcast, could tell them nothing. Desperate for information Mr Mienert called his cousin in Freehold, NJ, ‘whose farm I knew was in the destructive path’.8 ‘Are the Martians there?’ he asked. ‘No,’ his cousin said, ‘but the Tuttles are, and we’re about to sit down to dinner.’ The Mienerts went back home and started to clean up the paint. Inside the CBS building it was a different matter. The panic reached the control room of the studio. Having uttered the last scripted lines of Professor Pierson, a slightly shaky Welles announced ‘out of character’, as he said, that the programme had ‘no further significance than 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! … so good-bye, everybody,’9 he continued, rising to some rather forced jocularity, ‘and remember, please, for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and there’s no one there, that was no Martian … it’s Hallowe’en.’
The laughter died on Welles’s lips the moment the programme was over. Terrified listeners who had called CBS angrily threatened violence against Welles and the company on discovering that they were victims of what seemed to them to be a malicious hoax. ‘Someone had called threatening to blow up the CBS building, so we called the police and hid in the ladies’10 room on the studio floor,’ wrote Dick Barr. ‘Houseman denies this, but I distinctly remember a group of frightened men squeezed in the ladies’ room of the CBS building.’ Reporters besieged the building; when they could get through by telephone, they asked Welles or Houseman how they felt about the many deaths the broadcast had caused. Bewildered, frightened and genuinely remorseful, with no means of checking what the reporters were telling them, they could only protest the innocence of their intentions. Columbia were very nervous and steeled themselves for the legal actions which duly followed. They put out hourly disclaimers, affirming the fictional nature of the broadcast. The planned official midnight Hallowe’en broadcast, in which ghosts were to figure prominently, was cancelled.
Meanwhile, Welles had something else on his mind. He had a dress rehearsal to get back to, the only slightly less nightmarish Danton’s Death. Dick Barr had been sent back to the theatre to tell the impatiently waiting actors what had happened, but they didn’t believe his story; to them it was simply the most outrageous of Welles’s many outrageous excuses. Finally Barr was reduced to taking them out into Times Square to show them the Moving News sign: ORSON WELLES FRIGHTENS THE NATION. Rehearsals were cancelled, while Welles prepared to face the wrath of America. The press was in seventh heaven. Columns of newsprint in Monday’s papers were devoted to descriptions of what had happened and columns more to analysis of the event. It was held to offer on the one hand, doleful evidence of the gullibility of the American people, and on the other, worrying proof of the power of radio. This part of the analysis was not entirely objective, the press having for some time been fighting a losing battle with radio as the chief disseminator of news. The opportunity was seized to berate its manipulative ways. In a piece entitled FRIGHTED WITH FALSE FIRE, quoting Hamlet’s scorn at Claudius’s reaction to the Mousetrap, a New York World Telegram columnist hoped that ‘young Mr Welles, a student of Shakespeare, might have remembered Hamlet, and remembering, might have foreseen the effect of too much dramatic realism on an audience already strung to high nervous tension … let all chains, all stations, avoid the use of the news broadcasting technique when there is any possibility of any listener mistaking fiction for fact.’11 In response the broadcasting companies solemnly pledged never to present a programme again in the form of a news broadcast.
Anxiety was expressed as to the reaction of the populace in the event of a real air raid. There were even calls for censorship, fiercely resisted. ‘The dictators in Europe use radio to make their people believe falsehoods. We want nothing like that here. Better have American radio remain free to make occasional blunders than start a course that might in time deprive it of freedom to broadcast uncensored truth.’ The New York Tribune columnist, Dorothy Thompson, in a striking piece, acclaimed the broadcast: ‘one of the most fascinating and important events of all time … it is the story of the century … far from blaming Mr Orson Welles, he ought to be given a congressional medal and a national prize for having made the most amazing and important of contributions to the social sciences … he made the scare to end all scares, the menace to end menaces, the unreason to end unreason, the perfect demonstration that the menace is not from Mars but from the theatrical demagogues.’12
Welles himself was palpably shaken by the furore he had unleashed. In a newsreel interview with assembled pressmen, he apologises, unshaven and boyish, for the distress unwittingly caused. He has the attitude of a repentant schoolboy, big-eyed, serious-mouthed, frightened and exhilarated at the same time: circumspect, but nervously ready to burst out laughing. He says, his voice nervously high-pitched and slightly adenoidal, that the only anxiety they had before the broadcast was that it might have been boring, his only thought as he came off the air that he hadn’t given a very good performance. It was planned simply as a Hallowe’en joke, he says, (‘I’d every hope people would be excited, just as they are in a melodrama’) and he certainly would never do anything like it again. He is charming, but shifty, not quite sure whether he’d got off without any more serious penalties. (Legal actions were filed against both CBS and the Mercury; all failed.) Later, Welles became more articulate about the incident. ‘The most terrifying thing,’13 he told the Saturday Evening Post, ‘is suddenly becoming aware that you are not alone. In this case the earth, thinking itself alone, suddenly became aware that another planet was prowling around.’ He had another theory, too: ‘the last two generations are softened up because they were deprived in their childhoods, through mistaken theories of education, of the tales of blood and horror which used to be part of the routine training of the young. Under the old system the child felt at home among ghosts and goblins, and did not grow up to be a push-over for sensational canards. But the ban on gruesome fairy tales, terrifying nursemaids and other standard sources of horror has left most of the population without any protection against fee-fi-fo-fum stuff.’ This second theory seems very personal: the need to embrace demons; the necessity of healthy terror and – presumably – guilt.
The War of the Worlds incident, though giving rise to an extraordinary event, and revealing some remarkable aspects of America in 1938, was one of the most purely fortuitous events of Welles’s career. His personal responsibility for it is negligible, beyond having directed it with great flair. Houseman precisely analyses the skill of the production, especially its slow build-up of tension; but most of the people who had been frightened by it had only joined the programme a third of the way through, so they were never subject to that manipulation. Nor was Welles responsible for the adaptation. He later attempted to claim authorship for the script, but there is a great deal of entirely conclusive evidence to the contrary. When in 1940 Hadley Cantril published the script as part of his study of the phenomenon, Welles tried by every means to prevent him from attributing it to Howard Koch; Cantril courteously replied that as Koch had written it, Koch would be credited with it – and so he was, to Welles’s inexpressible fury. There is, moreover, no evidence that the programme was planned as the devilishly clever Hallowe’en prank that it seemed to be. Describing the programme as a practical joke was an idea improvised on the spot as a sop to the panic released during the broadcast. Nor was there a conscious attempt to play on fears of a European invasion. The fact is that Welles had barely thought about the programme, being wholly occupied until the very last minute by his losing struggle with Danton’s Death
.
Welles was praised for having his finger on the pulse of his times, and for being the conman of the century, able to make anybody believe anything. The truth is that he was more surprised than anyone at what had happened, and extremely irritated by it: the day after the broadcast, a Mercury employee who wandered into the auditorium eating a Mars bar was sacked on the spot. In years to come, his attitude was first one of vexation that he should be so persistently associated with this accidental event, but then he absorbed it comfortably into his myth, adding, in later life, a final puckish touch: ‘Now it’s been pointed out,’ he said on the Dean Martin show in the early seventies, ‘that various flying saucer scares all over the world have taken place since that broadcast … everyone doesn’t laugh anymore. But most people do. And there’s a theory this is my doing. That my job was to soften you up … ladies and gentlemen, go on laughing. You’ll be happier that way. Stay happy as long as you can. And until the day when our new masters choose to announce that the conquest of the earth is completed, I remain, as always, obediently yours.’
For Welles in October 1938, the immediate result of the broadcast was notoriety. People who had never been to the theatre, who had never so much as read a review and who would never have dreamed of consciously tuning in to the Mercury Theatre of the Air, suddenly knew who he was. And not just in America: the news of the panic flashed round the world, where the incident was held up (particularly in Europe) as proof, if any were needed, of the ingrained idiocy of Americans. ‘America today hardly knows whether to laugh or to be angry,’14 scoffed the London Times. ‘Here is a nation which, alone of the big nations, has deemed it unnecessary to rehearse for protection against attack from the air by fellow-beings on this earth and suddenly believes itself – and for little enough reason – faced with a more fearful attack from another world.’ It was left to the more popular end of the market to report on Welles himself: the Daily Express piece was headed HE’S A LAD.15 Recapitulating favourite yarns it hailed him as ‘America’s best villainous radio voice’, whose ‘ha-ha’s and hee-hee’s are adored by millions’. The Star (STORMY WELLES) offered a more sober assessment: ‘he has had a career almost as remarkable as his broadcast … making history at the Mercury Theatre, New York.’16 The Evening News was also more interested in his theatrical reputation: ‘by his energetic direction and ruthless manhandling of the classics, he has made his theatre, the Mercury, the liveliest in New York … the broadcast has set the seal on his reputation as the enfant terrible of the New York stage.’17 It had certainly done that, though its most important effects were to come. It was a sort of time-bomb, whose full force was not felt until a year later. One immediate outcome, however, was that Campbell Soup decided at last to sponsor the Mercury Theatre of the Air; CBS withdrew with some relief. Meanwhile, Danton’s Death finally opened to the press.