The War of the Worlds Murder

by Max Allan Collins

  Welles shook his head. “No, this will work. I know it will. The potential here is for our most important broadcast.”

  This opinion seemed to amaze Stewart, whose eyes were unblinking marbles under the dark slashes of eyebrow. “Really?...Well, I was just hoping to get through the thing without any of our reputations suffering.... Now, of course, Orson, I won’t be refining the sound effects until Saturday. Ora has specifically requested that I tell you she will do her best to bring Mars to Earth, effectively...not to judge her by these preliminary, perfunctory efforts.”

  “Dear Ora,” Welles said wistfully, looking ceilingward, as if contemplating his first love, “she is a wonder. The best sound man we could ever hope for, despite a lack of cock and balls.”

  Gibson wondered if he’d actually heard that....

  From the doorway, Judy Holliday said, “Oh Mr. Welles, that’s terrible,” and burst into tears.

  Welles went to her, put an arm around her shoulder, and said, “There, there...you mustn’t let such boy talk upset you so. I had no idea a gentle flower had planted itself in this doorway.”

  “Can I...can I have the food sent up?”

  “I’ll fire your little ass if you don’t!”

  She disappeared, her feet travelling down the iron steps sounding like a barrage of bullets, punctuating Welles’s roar of hearty laughter.

  The other men were smiling and chuckling, except for Gibson, an Alice still trying to get used to Wonderland.

  Within minutes, a skinny, put-upon waiter in a white shirt and dark pants brought up a picnic basket, and left without waiting for a tip that he seemed to already know wasn’t going to come. Houseman played host and opened the basket on his card-table desk, lifting the metal hats covering each plate, passing out the food to its intended recipient. Miss Holliday reappeared with a coffeepot and cups, and distributed those as well. Welles disappeared with his two plates—two large steaks, one in the company of a single sour-cream-and-butter-slathered baked potato—behind the partition, to sit at the secretary’s desk there and eat unobserved.

  The table was a good height for both Houseman and Gibson to eat their breakfasts, while Koch and Stewart—still seated on the daybed—seemed at ease eating off the plates in their laps, old hands at this.

  Welles did call over a complaint about the single potato, until Houseman reminded him: “Your diet—remember?” To which Welles mumbled an unintelligible answer, a pouting child responding to a firm parent.

  Then Welles, from behind the partition, ordered: “Well, play the goddamned thing, Housey!”

  And Houseman placed the record on the record player, turned up the volume and they all ate while they listened to the rehearsal recording.

  Minus the excitement of the studio, Koch’s “War of the Worlds” adaptation played even less excitingly, seeming terribly flat and uncompelling to Gibson. They finished their breakfast about halfway through—Martians were killing people at Grovers Mill—and suddenly Miss Holliday materialized again, to gather the plates and put them into the picnic basket, and vanish once more.

  Gibson hardly noticed that Welles had taken the chair next to him again. The boy genius showed no emotion as he listened, sitting with arms folded, his expression as distant as it was blank.

  When the recording reached its conclusion, and Bill Alland was signing off pretending to be Welles, the listener’s “obedient servant,” Houseman lifted the tone arm and the needle scratched just a bit. Then their host returned the acetate to its sleeve and looked at Welles, arching an eyebrow as if to say, “Well?”

  “It stinks,” Welles said.

  From the corner of his eye, Gibson saw Koch essentially collapse into himself; and Stewart closed his eyes, as if he’d chosen to respond by going to sleep.

  “It’s corny,” Welles went on, shrugging grandly. His voice was soft, no longer filling the room, making Koch and Stewart listen carefully to hear their work dismissed. “Unbelievable. Dull as dishwater. Also ghastly—no one’s going to believe a word of it.... Paul, what does the cast think?”

  Stewart swallowed. “They think it’s pretty thin.”

  “And John Dietz? He’s been a good judge.”

  “Our esteemed sound engineer thinks it’s weak. One of our worst shows.”

  Welles turned to Gibson. “What’s your opinion, Walter?”

  “It starts well,” Gibson managed.

  Welles exploded off the chair. “Exactly right! Precisely right!”

  Then the big man somehow managed to move around the little area, waving his arms, his eyes wild.

  “Goddamnit, Howard, how you could blow this opportunity! I give you the key to this thing, and you throw it away! Threw it out the window!”

  “Orson,” Koch said, “I don’t know what you mean—”

  “And you, Paul,” Welles said to the man who was doing his directing for him, “how you could betray me like this?”

  Stewart didn’t seem hurt or impressed, merely asked, “How so?”

  Welles’s tone shifted entirely, became genteel as he said to Gibson, “Walter, would you mind moving over for me?”

  Gibson did.

  “There’s a dear.” With a huge arm, Welles violently swept the chair Gibson had been sitting in and it clattered against the wall. Welles then filled the space the chair had inhabited, and loomed over the two men seated on the daybed, as if he were parent and they wayward children.

  Voice booming, he said, “How many times have I told the two of you that the Mercury’s responsibility is to bring experimental techniques to this untapped medium.... Not to just treat our material like a ‘play’—the less a radio drama resembles a play, the better it’s going to be!”

  Welles thrust a finger at Gibson, who jumped in his chair a bit. “This man, who does not work in our medium on a daily basis...though I might point out his instincts about that medium only gave me the part that put us all on the map...immediately honed in on what will separate this show from all the rest.”

  Houseman, sitting back, hands folded on his belly, said in a voice that tried too hard to be nonchalant, “And what would that be, Orson?”

  For the first time, Gibson realized that behind Houseman’s mask was something else—insecurity, even fear....

  With a weight-of-the-world sigh, Orson Welles picked up the chair he’d tossed aside, righted it and sat, shaking his head slowly, a man devastated by disappointment.

  “I suggested that we use news bulletins,” Welles said quietly...too quietly, “and eyewitness accounts.”

  “We did,” Koch said, pain in his voice.

  “You did...at the start—exactly twice.”

  Koch nodded. “Right. To get us into the piece.”

  Again Welles exploded, exasperated. “Howard—it is the piece! We need newscast simulations, absolutely believable.... We need that dance-band remote broadcast not to be interrupted once, like our recent ‘Sherlock Holmes’ broadcast was, but again and again.... We need real names, details, we need the illusion of up-to-the-second reality. Why do you think I had you change it from London to New Jersey? Why did I insist you do it modern-day, not in turn-of-the-century London?”

  “Actually,” Koch said, raising a timid forefinger, “that was my idea...”

  “Does it matter whose idea it is? Good God man, this is a collaboration! And the goal of this collaboration is to execute my vision!...Flash news bulletins, eyewitness accounts, as the Mars invasion is happening. Keep that going throughout the entire hour!”

  Stewart said, “That’s impossible—the story covers months. It has to be resolved.”

  “Fine, but keep it immediate as long as possible—for the first half of the thing, at the very least.”

  Houseman sat forward. “Orson—don’t you realize that if we present...fake newscasts, for a half hour or more...”

  “Up until the station break midway, precisely.”

  Houseman swallowed and tried again. “Don’t you realize, Orson, that listeners are apt to m
isunderstand.”

  Stewart snorted a laugh. “What, and think Martians are really invading?”

  Welles was sitting with his arms folded now, his expression that of a pixie—a damn big pixie, but a pixie.

  “And why not?” he asked.

  Everyone sat forward, except Welles.

  Houseman said, “Surely, you don’t mean to fool our listeners into...”

  “If that’s all the more intelligent they are, why in hell not? Let me tell you where I got this idea. Back in 1926, a BBC broadcast out of Edinburgh, Scotland, presented a false news report about an unemployed mob in London sacking the National Gallery, blowing up Big Ben, hanging the Minister of Traffic to a tramway post, and blowing up the Houses of Parliament.”

  Everyone but Welles sat open-mouthed.

  Welles, eyes twinkling, continued, “The ‘newscast’ concluded with the destruction of the BBC’s flagship station.... After the broadcast, the BBC—and the police and the newspapers—were besieged with frantic citizens calling to see what was happening, and to find out what they could do in this terrible crisis.”

  Then he laughed and laughed, patting his knees like a department-store Santa Claus.

  “You see it was a period of unusual labor strife—days before a general strike—and...what’s wrong? You all look as if your best friend died.”

  Houseman held out a hand in the fashion of a traffic cop. “Orson, you surely can’t be suggesting—”

  “Oh, Housey, if a few loonies buy what we’re doing, what’s the harm? It’ll make a wonderful Hallowe’en prank, and we’ll have terrific publicity.”

  Koch, thinking aloud, said, “Well, we certainly can’t go on the air cold....”

  “No, of course not!” Welles blurted. “We’ll have a standard opening. And is it our fault...” Welles smiled with infinite innocence. “...if after Charlie McCarthy’s opening monologue, listeners just happen to check around their dial for something more lively than Chase and Sanborn’s weekly guest singer, and happen upon our little charade?”

  Stewart was starting to smile. “Well, I don’t think it will work—I don’t think anyone will fall for this. But it’s a hell of a good way to bring some extra punch to this yarn.”

  Koch was nodding. “It would be easy enough to rework it that way, too.”

  But Houseman was shaking his head, gloomily. “I don’t approve. I do think people might well be fooled, just as those British listeners were. It’s irresponsible, and it’s cruel, not to mention a risky venture for the Mercury—I can envision lawsuits, and—”

  “Ah, Housey,” Welles said, “don’t be a little girl!”

  Houseman looked daggers across the desk. “Orson, you need to take more care. Or one day your comeuppance will come, and it will not be a pleasant thing to behold.”

  Welles waved that off. “It’s the medium of radio that needs the comeuppance, that needs to get the starch taken out of it. It’s the voice of authority, nowadays—too much so. And maybe we’ll just give a little kick to the seat of the voice of authority’s pants. Anyway, what’s your alternative—any of you? To go on the air with this boring hour of hokum?”

  Leaning forward, as if taking everyone into his confidence, which he was, Welles said, “My little hoax notion will save this show...but in case you’re right, Housey, and things do get a little out of hand, like in England that time—let’s just keep this to ourselves. After all, it’s like a magic trick—a prank only works if the pranksters don’t let anybody else in on the joke....”

  SATURDAY

  OCTOBER 29, 1938

  BROADWAY BEGAN AS A COWPATH, only to be transformed by neon—chiefly red with dabs of yellow—into the blazing nighttime main stem of the world’s largest frontier town. But as garish as it was by night, Broadway by day was drab and even dreary. Around Times Square, a score of dance halls thrived (ten cents per “beautiful hostess”), and all along the Great White Way, sidewalk spielers offered health soap, hand-painted ties, reducing belts, hot buttery ears of corn, and Get Rich Quick real-estate booklets. Good-looking gals shilled bus rides to Chinatown, and a haberdashery shouted “Going Out of Business Sale” (in its tenth year). Bus terminals, with their foul-smelling, lumbering coaches, offered cheaper fare than the train, and adventurous tourists and locals alike were invited to partake of an array of theaters, movie palaces, hotels and cafes—also flea circuses, chop-suey parlors, burlesque houses, sideshows and clip joints. Millionaires mingled with panhandlers, youthful new stage stars brushed shoulders with aging burlesque comics, and current heavyweight champs bumped into derelicts who’d once been contenders or even champs themselves.

  The current shabby state of Broadway could be traced to Prohibition—later aided and abetted by the Depression—when “nightclubs” first came into vogue. From the turn of the century, upper- and middle-class Americans had sought European-style amusement in the form of exhibitions and expositions, rooftop gardens and crystal palaces, while the working class sought out the sawdust-under-foot fun provided by beer halls and carnivals. But Prohibition had sent American nightlife down its own quirky, particular path....

  A “nightclub” sought to circumvent the liquor laws by presenting itself as private, with members who dropped by for fine food, top entertainment, good conversation and, of course, their favorite soft drinks. That anyone who knocked three times might enter, and that the drinks were invariably hard, was the reality behind a fantasy kept alive by a casually law-breaking populace and their on-the-take law enforcement agencies.

  By the time Prohibition was winding down, with the Depression kicking in, nightclub life was an American social tradition like baseball, circuses and the picture show. But the glittery clubs of the speakeasy era were an endangered species, saved from extinction by, as Fortune magazine put it, the “recent success of what is commonly known as the big Broadway joint, the gaudy bargain offer of fifty hot babies and a five-course dinner for $1.50 and no cover charge.”

  Take the French Casino, a swooping, curving art-moderne exercise in scarlet and silver, their terraced rows of tables comfortably seating fifteen hundred. The same number of patrons could be welcomed by the International Casino (not a casino at all), in the heart of Times Square, a red and gold wonder with “curtains” that were mirrors riding on electric tracks, and a flooded, frozen stage accommodating the Ice Frolics. Billy Rose’s Casino de Paree—the remodeled New Yorker Theater on Broadway—offered a five-buck meal, gorgeous chorus girls, headliner Gypsy Rose Lee (America’s most famous striptease artiste) and the Benny Goodman orchestra.

  An impressive new arrival—perched on the top floor of a building at Broadway and 48th Street—was actually an old standby, a relocated Cotton Club, the famed Harlem landmark that had (in 1936) found its white clientele increasingly reluctant to travel to a Depression-ravaged ghetto for their entertainment.

  The Cotton Club began in the fall of 1923 in an old theater on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue, its primary owner one Owney Madden, who’d come from Liverpool as a child to New York’s fabled Hell’s Kitchen, where he developed from a banty rooster nicknamed “the Killer” into a dapper, sophisticated elder statesman of racketeers.

  Despite the Harlem location, Madden ran the Cotton Club strictly for white patrons—Negroes were allowed solely on stage and/or in service capacities—in the manner of a posh downtown club, only showcasing exotic uptown talent. Cover charge was three dollars, beer a buck a bottle, the food prices (including neighborhood favorites like Southern fried chicken and Kansas City–style barbecue ribs) in line with the better Broadway clubs.

  That the Cotton Club’s late show began after-hours—when the late shows of other clubs were over—attracted entertainers, making it an “in” spot for the likes of Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante and Milton Berle. On a big stage—invoking the antebellum South via white plantation-style columns and a stove-cabin backdrop—cavorted a chorus line of gorgeous “high-yallar” gals (light-skinned black beauties, “Tall, Tan and Terrific!”); all u
nder twenty-one, these girls were among the best singers and dancers in New York, and the show they gave was as wild as it was scantily clad. Both Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington had reigned over Cotton Club house bands through the years, and Ethel Waters and Lena Horne made their mark there.

  The new club on Broadway opened in the fall of ’36, and Calloway, Ellington and such other “colored” stars as Louis Armstrong, Steppin’ Fetchit and Dorothy Dandridge (with her sisters) made it the hottest nightspot in Manhattan, pulling in thirty thousand dollars a week (despite the Depression), a new dance called the Boogie Woogie creating a sensation. The stage shows featured choreography, music, costumes and sets challenging Broadway’s best.

  Was it any wonder young Orson Welles was a frequent patron?

  CHAPTER THREE

  COTTON CLUBBED

  THAT HUMAN WHIRLING DERVISH, CAB Calloway—wide eyes and wider smile turned skyward—was blazing through “Minnie the Moocher,” in tailored tails, forelock flopping, working that conductor’s baton as if nonchalantly yet energetically battling an invisible swordsman. Not merely his orchestra but the entire crowd—Walter Gibson and Orson Welles included—echoed the charismatic bandleader’s “Hi-de-ho” chant.

  Gibson had been to the original Cotton Club a few times, once with first-wife Charlotte and then again with Jewel, and he rather preferred the thatched-roof jungle look of the lavish reinvented club over the former one’s Old South, moss-draped oak tree atmosphere. He full well realized the cannibal stereotype was even more offensive than that of the happy cotton-pickin’ slave, but a tongue-in-cheek humor took the edge off. And, unlike the former club, this one welcomed Negro patrons—though relegated them to the rear.

  Gibson felt underdressed in his brown suit with a striped red-and-yellow tie, and he’d worn his vest, to seem at least a little respectable. He’d never guessed, leaving on this work trip, that he’d be going nightclubbing with Orson Welles, who in a black suit with black bow tie, black cape and black fedora didn’t seem to have thrown off his Shadow persona, even if he had stepped down from the role on the radio.