I called the museum’s curator, and basically told them, “Let’s make a deal. You have something I want, and I have something I believe you will want.” I told them of my interview decades earlier, and explained my idea. He was enthusiastic to learn about my rare interview with the man who recorded one of the darkest moments in American history. The museum overnighted me a copy of the film, along with permission to use it in my report. In exchange I donated my original cassette recording of the 1966 interview to them, as well as a copy of the letter sent to me afterward by Zapruder, thanking me and saying he thought the radio program turned out better than he had expected.
With some careful editing, removing a pause here and there, I made the idea work. In the new edit, Abraham Zapruder is heard describing the images unfolding on the screen in his own words. My original recording of the 1966 interview, as well as the newly edited videotape with Zapruder’s narrative, are now part of the “Marvin Scott Collection,” among the permanent assassination archives at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dealey Plaza. Gary Mack, the museum’s curator, said he was amazed such an informative interview still existed, claiming that it added “significant information to Zapruder’s testimony before the Warren Commission and in the Clay Shaw trial.”
Time-Life bought Zapruder’s film from him in 1963, for $150,000—the equivalent of $1 million in today’s currency. Zapruder donated a portion of that to the widow of J.D. Tippit, the police officer shot by Lee Harvey Oswald. Though he never wanted to see a profit from his film, in 1999 the U.S. government paid the Zapruder family $16 million for it. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, that’s a record $615,383 per second, for 26.6 seconds of film.
Abe Zapruder died of cancer in 1970, at the age of 62—a quiet but dignified man, who never expected to be immortalized by the moment in history his images have frozen in time.
15
THE NIGHT THE MARTIANS LANDED
“Awesome Orson” By Hulton Archive, Getty Images.
Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, is perhaps the only historical site in the world made famous by an event that never happened. The story of a terrifying night that put the tiny hamlet on the map and had more than one million people across the country running for the hills, fearful of being annihilated by an invading army of aliens from Mars, has endured for almost 80 years. For decades, a bullet-riddled water tower has stood on flimsy metal legs, serving as a mute reminder of the great “battle” that was waged here on a foggy night on October 30th, 1938.
The town of Grover’s Mill—named for an old grist mill that once provided feed and flour for farmers—was the imaginary landing site for the Martians that Sunday night. Cigar-shaped spaceships 30 yards long were said to be dropping like locusts, first into the rich New Jersey farmland, then into dozens of other towns and cities across the nation. Strange-looking creatures carrying death-ray guns were reported to be destroying everything in sight. In the minds of hundreds of thousands of people, these events were terrifyingly real.
In reality, of course, there was no danger at all. The “invasion” originated in a New York studio, where Orson Welles and a group of actors were dramatizing a devilishly convincing adaptation of H.G. Welles’s 1898 science-fiction thriller, The War of the Worlds. The program was produced to be the night-before-Halloween presentation of the Mercury Theatre on the Air. An estimated six million people were listening to the program when it aired over 100 stations affiliated with the Columbia Broadcasting System.
With anxieties already high over the imminent threat of war in Europe and the United States becoming involved, people were fixated on their radios, and had become accustomed to news bulletins interrupting their regular programs. Listeners’ anxieties heightened when they heard the radio announcer interrupt a live music broadcast to declare: “A bulletin from Trenton, New Jersey. At least 40 people, including six state troopers, lie dead in a field east of the village of Grover’s Mill.”
Paul Moran was ten back then, and heard the report with terror. He said his mother and aunt had taken their rosary beads, got down on their knees and started praying.
“They thought the world was coming to an end.”
* * *
During my four visits to Grover’s Mill to re-tell the story of the night America panicked, I found it incredible to think that people actually believed Martians had invaded the New Jersey farmland. The broadcasters had in fact announced that they were presenting a dramatization—but few listeners paid attention amid the clamor of “breaking news” bulletins.
To give the story greater authenticity, the producers had directed their $75-a-week scriptwriter to make it sound like a news program, with frequent bulletins. The beginning of the program seemed plausible enough: a weather report, followed by dance music. This, however, was soon interrupted with frequent “bulletin updates” from the fictitious Intercontinental Radio News. First it was revealed that astronomers had detected unusual gas explosions on Mars. A few minutes later, listeners were informed that a shock of almost earthquake-level intensity had been registered near Grover’s Mill, a small town six miles east of Princeton.
Don Perrine told me that his father had found the reports of what was supposedly happening a mile and a half from his home so believable, that he hurriedly packed his wife and three sons into his car and driven them to relatives’ homes in Trenton. He wasn’t the only one—there was a mass exodus out of town. One terrified farmer pulled up to a gas station, filled up his tank, got back in the car and drove off, forgetting to remove the hose from the tank. 76-year-old Willie Dock raced home to grab his shotgun and sat out the night on his porch, determined to keep the Martians off his property. Though he never fired a shot, it took some doing to convince him there were no Martians. Others, however, did fire shots that night—at a high water tower, shrouded in dense fog, which they thought was an alien spaceship.
Further panic ensued when the broadcast was again interrupted with an update and the announcer intoned, “Those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars. The battle that took place tonight in Grover’s Mill has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by an army in modern times. 7,000 armed men with rifles and machine guns, pitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders from Mars...120 known survivors.”
The actor playing the role of an on-scene reporter brought credibility to the ridiculous. Excitedly but authoritatively, he described how the creatures from the spaceship were advancing with mirror-like devices in their hands, from which shot jets of flame. “Now the whole field has caught fire—the woods, the barns. It’s spreading everywhere. It’s coming this way...about 20 yards to my right...” Then there was a thunderous crash…then silence.
The reaction to all of this was as incredible as the yarn itself. As the actors continued their hour-long dramatization, they remained oblivious to the panic gripping the nation. In Indianapolis, a husband came home to find his wife attempting suicide, screaming that she would rather die by poison than by Martian death rays. Another woman was reported to have screamed out in church, “It’s the end of the world!” As additional Martian cylinders were reported falling in New York City, Buffalo, Chicago, St. Louis and other cities, police switchboards were flooded with calls from hysterical people who wanted to know what to do to protect themselves. Some demanded gas masks; others huddled in closets and attics in hopes of eluding the alien creatures.
Eddie Kemp remembered: “A lot of people heading for the hills of Pennsylvania in an attempt to escape the aliens from the red planet.” All the roads into and out of Grover’s Mill were clogged. As residents escaped, curiosity-seekers flooded in, hoping to see the aliens for themselves. Hundreds of strangers trampled across the cornfield on David Wilson’s farm; unable to find the Wilmuth farm, the fictional location where the broadcasters pinpointed all the action, they figured the announcer had meant to say Wilson. One local entrepreneur took advantage of the chaos, charging motorist
s 50 cents to park near the so-called Martian landing spot.
It wasn’t until Orson Welles came out of character on the program to allay the fears of the nation that the panic abated that Halloween eve. He assured his listeners that the broadcast was simply a “radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying ‘boo!’”
“We couldn’t soap all your windows and steal your garden gates,” Welles continued, “so we did the next best thing: we annihilated the entire world before your very ears.”
The explanation did little to stem the tide of lawsuits that were then filed against Welles and CBS for injuries and damage caused by the panic their broadcast had created. These claims ran into the millions, though without precedent for any of them, none ever came to trial. CBS apologized for the hoax, and said it would never happen again. The chairman of the Federal Communication Commission called the whole episode “regrettable,” and subsequently tightened regulations on broadcasters.
* * *
Years later, a full moon illuminating the night sky, I walked across the cornfield of the former Wilson farm, pushing aside giant stalks of corn while I tried to visualize what people had been feeling that Halloween eve, and why they reacted the way they did. Holding a recording of the broadcast to my ear, I couldn’t but find it all incomprehensible.
Grover’s Mill had become the focal point of the fictional drama entirely by chance. Scriptwriter Howard Koch had picked it by closing his eyes and dropping a pencil onto a New Jersey road map.
“I liked the sound,” he recalled. “It had an authentic ring to it.” In the whole sleepy hamlet, I managed to find only a few survivors of the night the Martians “invaded” their town. Some were too embarrassed to admit that they had been among those who were caught up in the mass hysteria. Others spoke reluctantly about the events that had brought such notoriety to their peaceful town.
So how could more than a million people have been led to believe that such an outlandish story was true?
Paul Moran told me, “Unlike television, where you see all the action, on radio you imagine things based on the sounds you hear,” and he remembered that the program had been very realistic. Princeton University undertook a two-year research project to determine the causes behind the mass hysteria, and concluded that the panic had not been the result of nationwide stupidity, but rather a reflection on America’s jitters in a warring, chaotic world.
Despite the widespread belief that such an event could never happen again, it did—11 years later in Quito, Ecuador, when radio station HCQRX ran its own version of the invasion-from-Mars program. The station’s listeners reacted much the way their North American counterparts did, and there was panic in the streets. But this time, when the people learned the truth, far greater tragedy ensued: an enraged mob stormed the three-story building that housed the radio station and burned it down, killing 15 people trapped inside.
Although Orson Welles’s broadcast on the invasion at Grover’s Mill is now part of American folklore, there are no annual parades or celebrations in the town to observe it. However, there is an eight-foot-high bronze monument to the unique event that rests near a pond in the tiny hamlet’s Van Nest Park. In bold, raised letters, it says “Martian Landing Site,” and reads, “This was to become a landmark in broadcast history, provoking continuing thought about media responsibility, social psychology and civil defense.”
The residents of Grover’s Mill, however, would eventually find themselves in a much closer connection to Mars than even they would have imagined. In a development tinged with irony, 38 years after the fictional Mars landing, the RCA Space Center—located just down the road from Grover’s Mill—built the sophisticated communications system for the two Viking spacecraft that would land on Mars in 1976. The news prompted one resident to declare, “It’s about time we returned the visit.”
16
THE BEATLES—COMING TO AMERICA
Ringo Starr, during The Beatles first US visit in 1964, telling me how excited the group was over their American reception.
It wasn’t the biggest story of 1964, but it was one that transformed the music culture of an entire generation.
I was one of 200 reporters and photographers who were at Kennedy Airport that cold Friday afternoon in February, awaiting the arrival of four working-class lads from Liverpool who were about to “invade” the very country that first inspired them to become musicians. The piercing screams of more than 5,000 adoring, wide-eyed fans standing on the observation deck overpowered the whine of the jet engines as Pan Am flight 101 landed at 1:35 p.m.
I had never witnessed such hysteria before, and I had no idea how significant the day would become in music history. There was a crescendo of shouts—“We want the Beatles! We love the Beatles!”—and deafening shrieks when the doors of the plane opened and Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison and John Lennon emerged, waving to the crowd. A strange-looking lot, I thought. What with those funny-looking mod suits and pudding-bowl haircuts, they could have been aliens from another planet. Little did I know, Beatlemania had come to America.
One would have thought these guys would be accustomed to the hysteria that had previously greeted them in Sweden, France, Germany and their native Britain. But they’d been nervous about their visit to the U.S. On the flight over, Lennon was concerned because Americans had been indifferent to the release of two of their records a year earlier, and he was reported to have quipped fearfully at one point, “We won’t make it.” To the contrary, they arrived as conquering heroes just six days after the release of their latest recording, “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” The record sold a quarter of a million copies in just three days, and immediately became the number-one single in the nation.
There was pandemonium at the airport, a near-riot, as thousands of fans pressed forward, trying to catch a closer glimpse of their heartthrob musical quartet. All these years later, I can almost hear those screams ringing in my ears—they were electrifying. I had previously seen bobbysoxers screeching for Frank Sinatra and fans howling for Elvis Presley. But this was a different time, and a different crowd. The Beatles represented a diversion that the nation desperately needed, just 77 days after the assassination of President Kennedy. Beatlemania was also a welcome respite from news of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights struggles in the South.
Disc jockey Bruce Murrow remembered, “Young people were trying to find one another. We weren’t smiling anymore. These guys made us smile.” Another part of the Beatles phenomenon was their pop-cultural timing. American rock-and-roll of the fifties had become tired, bland and in need of revitalization, and the Beatles, who were inspired by the beat of rock-and-roll, were able to blaze a new trail. Their music was vibrant. It was different, and it was new.
Now a frenzy grew among the reporters trying to ask questions of the band during a news conference inside the airport terminal. Some of the questions were inane, like, “Are you a little embarrassed by the lunacy you cause?”
“We love it,” Harrison shot back.
Another reporter said, “A psychiatrist recently said you’re nothing but a bunch of British Elvis Presleys,” to which Lennon responded, “He must be blind.” But it was Ringo who got the biggest laugh. “How do you find America?” a reporter asked. Without missing a beat, Ringo declared, “Turn left at Greenland.” They were upbeat, they were poised, they were charming—and they endeared themselves to the hardcore New York press corps. They were the Beatles.
I followed them into Manhattan, where they were staying at the Plaza Hotel. Police had set up barricades to hold back the crowds. As adults looked on in astonishment, kids screamed at the top of their lungs as limousines pulled up and, one by one, the Beatles got out.
I managed to get in the path of the arriving entourage, close enough to thrust my microphone in front of Ringo.
“How’s the reception?” I shouted as he raced past me.
“Marvelous, fantastic,” was his breathless response. Some adults who said
they’d never heard of the Beatles were stunned by it all.
“Who are they?” exclaimed one woman, who said she was just there because she had seen a crowd and was curious. A waiter in the hotel, who I later interviewed, described the boys as “strange, but polite.” He said they had a taste for unusual cocktails, like Scotch and Coca-Cola.
Two days after their arrival, the Beatles made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. 73 million people tuned in to the broadcast—about 40% of the U.S. population. The Beatles were paid a mere $10,000 for three appearances on the show, a seminal moment in music history. But a couple of days later, the group gave its first concert in the U.S. at the Coliseum in Washington, D.C.—and 20,000 fans went wild. The next day they gave back-to-back performances at New York’s Carnegie Hall, and police had to close the streets around the area because of the frenzy created by thousands of fans. Their talent agent, Sid Bernstein, was a true visionary. He told me that he had booked Carnegie Hall a year earlier, long before most Americans had even heard of the band, purely “on gut instinct.”
In a matter of days, the Beatles had truly conquered America. I met them again later that year, when they returned to the States for a 32-city tour. I greeted Ringo and George Harrison as they got off the plane in New York. The two graciously stopped for a brief interview, and told me how overwhelmed they were by the way they were received in our country. It was understandable; but not everyone was enamored by the band. One reviewer panned their performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, writing, “Musically, they were a near-disaster.” Newsweek magazine concurred, stating, “Visually they were a disaster.” Even Ed Sullivan’s musical director Ray Bloc saw them as a fad, and declared, “I give them a year.” Odds-makers at the time also doubted that they would ever amount to anything big. Years later, McCartney would confess that the group thought they would be good for a couple of years at most.
As I Saw It Page 9