The War of the Worlds Murder

by Max Allan Collins

  That does not mean that the fictionalized memoirs that open and close this novel should be viewed as a verbatim account of my real meeting with Walter Gibson. I will say only that much of it did happen...just not all of it. I do not possess the gift of total recall, so conversations not only with Gibson but such writer friends as Robert J. Randisi, Percy Spurlark Parker and the late Chris Steinbrunner range from approximations to outright fabrications. The encounter with a Mickey Spillane–hating Mystery Writers of America icon (who appears here under a nom de plume) certainly did occur at Bouchercon Six. To this day people talk to me about it, and I don’t know whether to be proud or ashamed.

  I choose not to reveal whether or not Walter Gibson told me of his adventures working with Orson Welles on a Shadow project the weekend “The War of the Worlds” was aired. Certainly none of the official accounts note his presence; however, Gibson did know Welles through magic circles—several sources confirm this—and one source (mentioned below) insists that, so to speak, Gibson cast his own Shadow, recommending the young actor for the radio role of Lamont Cranston. It’s also true that Gibson wore an elaborate Shadow ring, inscribed to him by “Cranston.”

  My longtime research associate, George Hagenauer, is a pulp-magazine enthusiast, and was typically helpful, including devising the “murder” herein, and generally aiding on the magic-oriented aspects of the story.

  Leonard Maltin—to whom this book was dedicated prior to his coming to my aid here, I must add—responded to my cry for research help by connecting me with a man who was present that historic night, directing the CBS radio show that would go on right after “The War of the Worlds.”

  Norman Corwin was in the studio above Studio One in the Columbia Broadcasting Building on October 30, 1938, and in 2004 he was graciously willing to share with me his memories about radio in general and the CBS Building in particular. Mr. Corwin—at 94, sharper than I have ever been—was warm, friendly, funny and patient. Only fans of the Golden Age of Radio will understand what it meant for me to talk to Norman Corwin, not just a pioneer in that medium, but one of the few greats of the form—it was like writing a movie book and being helped by Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin or John Ford. Thank you, Mr. Corwin. Thank you, Leonard.

  That said, I must point out that any inaccuracies in this book are my own. A few are even intentional. Some of what Mr. Corwin told me about life and work in the Columbia Broadcasting Building in the late 1930s did not suit my purposes as a mystery writer, and I ignored or revised the truth into fiction as needed; but while nothing that is wrong here is the fault of Mr. Corwin, or my other research associates, much that is right belongs to them.

  In this vein, I will admit that the term “pulp” was not in widespread use in 1938—“character magazines” would seem to be the correct coinage for the market Walter Gibson mastered. I run into this from time to time—“art deco” is a designation that came along after the period it describes, for example—and, while I generally do my best to avoid anachronisms, I occasionally choose to use a “wrong” term (like “pulps”) because in the larger context of what I’m doing, it’s “right.”

  Also, inconsistencies between sources were frequent here; a typical example: some say the police entered Studio One before the broadcast was over and stared threateningly at Welles through the control-room glass, while other accounts indicate the police rushed in right after the broadcast ended (one even says the police showed up several hours later). In such instances, I trust either my instincts or follow the needs of my narrative.

  The connection between Welles and Gibson is not directly dealt with in Thomas J. Shimeld’s biography of the Shadow creator, Walter B. Gibson and the Shadow (2003). Still, it’s hard for me to imagine writing this novel without that vital resource, and any sense of the man that might be found in these pages results as much from Shimeld’s good book as my own meeting with Gibson. To date, the only other book-length work on Gibson is Man of Magic and Mystery: A Guide to the Work of Walter B. Gibson (1988) by J. Randolph Cox, a bibliographic work of limited but appreciated help to this novel. Other works consulted relating to Gibson include his own The Shadow Scrapbook (1979) (introduction by Chris Steinbrunner); Walter Gibson’s Encyclopedia of Magic & Conjuring (1976); and The Shadow Knows...(1977), Diana Cohen and Irene Burns Hoeflinger, a collection of radio scripts.

  Anthony Tollin has contributed his expertise on the history of radio to numerous fact-filled booklets included with boxed sets of old radio shows on CD and cassette, often for the first-rate Radio Spirits. Such booklets on both the Shadow and Orson Welles were most helpful here.

  The notion for this novel seemed a natural—that the sixth “disaster” novel would involve the world’s most famous fake disaster. And I frankly thought it would be a relatively easy book to write, compared to such major events as the Pearl Harbor attack and the sinking of the Lusitania. What George Hagenauer later reminded me—when I was drowning in research—was that when I wrote my Black Dahlia novel, Angel in Black (2001), the single Orson Welles chapter took as much research as the entire rest of the book, which covered a very complicated and convoluted murder case.

  This novel took much longer to write than is usually my process, because I just could not stop reading about Welles and watching his films. In terms of the latter, the late Charlie Roberts of Darker Image Video provided numerous rare items, including the American Film Institute tribute to Welles, a BBC documentary on the filmmaker, and a vintage TV play, “The Night America Trembled.” I screened most of Welles’s films, including Chimes at Midnight (1966) and The Immortal Story (1968), criminally unavailable in the United States, and three documentaries: Gary Graver’s Working with Orson Welles (1995); It’s All True (1994), narrated by my pal Miguel Ferrer; and The Dominici Affair (2001), which explores a famous French murder case (the latter two films attempt to assemble and complete unfinished Welles projects).

  And Welles touches on “The War of the Worlds” in his wonderful free-form documentary, F for Fake (1973)—in which he wanders between shots in a Shadow cape and slouch hat, and all “excerpts” from the broadcast are bogus!

  Books on this great American filmmaker/actor are not in short supply, and the ones I found most beneficial are Citizen Welles (1989), Frank Brady; Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (1997), Simon Callow; the Welles-approved Orson Welles: A Biography (1995), Barbara Learning; and Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (1996), David Thomson.

  But I would like to single out This Is Orson Welles by Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, as a wonderful collection of interviews (edited and rewritten and shaped by Welles). The revised, expanded edition of 1998 is much preferred, as the additional autobiographical introductory essay (“My Orson”) by Bogdanovich is well worth the price of admission, and arguably the best glimpse into the real Welles available anywhere. No one writes about the important figures of classic Hollywood with more intelligence, candor, humor, warmth, insight and humanity than Bogdanovich.

  Other Welles books consulted include: Citizen Kane: The Fiftieth-Anniversary Album (1990), Harlan Lebo; The Making of Citizen Kane (1985), Robert L. Carringer; Orson Welles (1971), Maurice Bessy; the controversial Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius (1985), Charles Higham; Orson Welles: Actor and Director (1977), Joseph McBride; Orson Welles (1986), John Russell Taylor; Orson Welles Interviews (2002), edited by Mark W. Estrin; Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life (2003), Peter Conrad; and Orson Welles (1972), Joseph McBride. Years ago I read Pauline Kael’s The Citizen Kane Book (1971), but I find it unkind and poorly researched, and didn’t bother to dip back in.

  A few magazines were of use: “The Man from Mercury” in the June, 1938, Coronet included many photos of the theater company at work; and Photocrime (a 1944 one-shot from “The editors of LOOK”) included a photospread mystery story starring magician Orson Welles—a George Hagenauer find.

  My portrait of Welles is a “best guess” based upon all I’ve read and seen, but its roots are in the memoirs of hi
s estranged ex-partner, John Houseman. Including Houseman as a character was a treat, if a challenge, as I loved Houseman’s Professor Kingsfield in the film and television series, The Paper Chase; his autobiographical Entertainers and the Entertained (1986) and Run-through (1972) are fascinating, frank, vividly written accounts.

  Many (including Welles) consider Houseman to be an enemy of Welles’s reputation; and yet for all the dirty laundry aired in his memoirs, Houseman’s respect and love for the artist and man are palpable. It seems to me most of Welles’s films—from Citizen Kane (1941) to Touch of Evil (1958), from Othello (1952) to Chimes at Midnight—are driven by the subtext of this failed friendship. Their bittersweet platonic “affair” provided me with a solid central conflict for a novel about this event and these times.

  If the portrait herein of Houseman is largely drawn from his own memoirs, the sketches of other real figures come from straight biographies: Bernard Herrmann in Steven C. Smith’s A Heart at Fire’s Center (1991); and Judy Holliday in Will Holtzman’s Judy Holliday: A Biography (1982). Obviously, neither Herrmann nor Holliday are central figures here, but my interest in and love for the work of both made including them irresistible. Others in the Mercury Theatre world were excluded due to space limitations, or redundancy: Joseph Cotten, for example, didn’t have anything to do with “The War of the Worlds,” and Richard Wilson was just another of the faithful Welles “stooges” who are represented herein by William Alland.

  Most of the characters in this novel are real people, and appear under their own names. Dolores Donovan is a fictional character, however, as are such minor players as the security guards at the Columbia Broadcasting Building, the “thugs” in the alley sequence, and other spear-carriers. Throughout the “War of the Worlds” section, I have centered on real people caught up in the panic, but have changed or slightly modified their names, to give me more latitude.

  The experience of the New York State troopers comes from Carmine J. Motto’s In Crime’s Way (2000) and my friend Jim Doherty’s excellent Just the Facts—True Tales of Cops & Criminals (2004); Jim pointed me toward this colorful, amusing incident. A highly respected serious study, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic (1940) by Hadly Cantril, provided a factual basis for the stories of the Dorn sisters, James Roberts Jr., and several lesser players herein. The Ben Gross storyline is derived from the critic’s lively autobiography, I Looked and I Listened (1954, revised 1970). Ponzi Schemes, Invaders from Mars & More Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1992) by Joseph Bulgatz provided not only a great overview article, but the basis for the Chapman family’s experience. Into Bulgatz’s description of a farm family’s reaction to the broadcast, I folded in the fact (relished by Welles) that numerous kids recognized the voice of the Shadow, and hence were not fooled, plus the famous foray of several farmers who tilted against the windmill of a Grovers Mill water tower (an event Welles—whose unfinished film of Don Quixote costarred Patty McCormack, star of my Mommy films—no doubt also relished).

  A great website—www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk—provided great general background, plus the story of the Princeton journalism student and the geology professor who drove to Grovers Mill on the night of the “invasion.”

  Two books—both containing Howard Koch’s classic script for the radio play—are vital to any examination of the incident (the Cantril study also includes the Koch script). The Panic Broadcast: Portrait of an Event (1970) includes Koch’s own memoir of the event and a many-years-later visit to Grovers Mill. The Complete War of the Worlds (2001), Brian Holmsten and Alex Lubertozzi, editors, is a definitive work, lavishly illustrated, including not just Koch’s script but the H.G. Wells novella and even a CD of the original broadcast in the context of an aural documentary narrated by John Callaway; it includes the historic on-air meeting of Welles (Orson) and Wells (H.G.).

  For the record, the excerpts herein are transcriptions by me from the broadcast, not taken from the actual script, which does not include certain pauses, ad-libs and actor’s on-the-fly “revisions.” I use these excerpts not to tell the story of the play, but to give context to the national panic attack, and for the full impact of the piece, readers are urged to seek out Koch’s complete, excellent script as well as the broadcast itself (and The Complete War of the Worlds provides both).

  A rare audio-only laser disc, Theatre of the Imagination: Radio Stories by Orson Welles & the Mercury Theatre (1988), includes detailed liner notes and a Leonard Maltin–narrated documentary written by Frank Beacham, “The Mercury Company Remembers,” with Houseman, William Alland, Richard Wilson and other Mercury Theatre veterans talking not just about Welles and the radio show, but specifically about “The War of the Worlds” (Houseman is particularly compelling). The liner notes—unsigned but presumably by Beacham, who (with longtime Welles crony Wilson) produced the laser disc—includes the following piece of information about The Shadow radio show: “Welles became the lead because of his friendship with Walter Gibson, a fellow magician.”

  Vital to this novel, Leonard Maltin’s rich, rewarding The Great American Broadcast: A Celebration of Radio’s Golden Age (1997) is an anecdotal history of the medium. The next most valuable work to this effort was a lavishly photo-illustrated children’s book, Radio Workers (1940) by Alice V. Keliher (editor), Franz Hess, Marion LeBron, Rudolf Modley and Stuart Ayers. General radio histories consulted include Don’t Touch That Dial: Radio Programming in American Life from 1920 to 1950 (1979), J. Fred MacDonald; On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (1998), John Dunning; On the Air: Pioneers of American Broadcasting (1988), Amy Henderson; Tune in Yesterday: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio 1925–1976 (1976), John Dunning (including an especially detailed entry on Mercury and “War of the Worlds”); and The Encyclopedia of American Radio (1996, 2000), Ron Lackmann.

  The following aided in re-creating the nightclub scene in 1930s New York: Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret (1991), James Gavin; Jazz: A History of America’s Music (2000), Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns; Nightclub Nights: Art, Legend, and Style, 1920–1960 (2001), Susan Waggoner; and The Night Club Era (1933), Stanley Baker. In the Baker book, material on Owney Madden was particularly useful, as was The Mafia Encyclopedia (1987) by Carl Sifakis. Another Sifakis book, Hoaxes and Scams: A Compendium of Deceptions, Ruses and Swindles (1993), was also consulted.

  I screened a somewhat rare TV movie, director Joseph Sargent’s The Night That Panicked America (1975), which does an excellent job of re-creating the broadcast and its circumstances, as well as dealing with fictional but typical examples of listener reaction. The late Paul Shenar is excellent as Welles, and John Bosley, John Ritter, Meredith Baxter and other TV stalwarts of the ’70s do right by material written by Nicholas Meyer, who would go on to write and direct the wonderful film Time After Time, in which H.G. Wells uses his time machine to chase Jack the Ripper to the future. Paul Stewart is one of the main characters and is listed as a consultant; strangely, John Houseman is not depicted.

  There’s no sham about the thanks I need to express to my patient editor, Natalee Rosenstein, and her associate Esther Strauss, who were typically understanding when the research for this book made what I’d assumed would be the easiest to write of these novels very possibly the hardest. My thanks go to my always supportive wife, Barb; my son and website guru, Nate (www.maxallancollins.com); and the able Dominick Abel, friend and agent (in that order).

  My approach to the “disaster” novels has always been to research the event, first, and come up with an appropriate mystery, second, so that my fiction would interweave and complement and even grow out of the facts. As I explored the Mars Invasion Panic, I start wondering if I dared make the murder itself a hoax—I ran the basic concept by Barb, Nate and George Hagenauer, and all of them thought my approach would be both amusing and appropriate. In the aftermath of the broadcast, both Welles and Houseman believed they might well face multiple murder charges for the deaths their stu
nt provoked (the media leading the pair to believe many had died, when in fact no one had). Sending out this message from the Punkin Patch, I can only bid my readers good-bye, and assure them that...I didn’t mean it...and remain their obedient servant.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo credit: Bamford Studio

  MAX ALLAN COLLINS IS THE New York Times best-selling author of Road to Perdition and multiple award-winning novels, screenplays, comic books, comic strips, trading cards, short stories, movie novelizations, and historical fiction. He has scripted the Dick Tracy comic strip, Batman comic books, and written tie-in novels based on the CSI, Bones, and Dark Angel TV series; collaborated with legendary mystery author Mickey Spillane; and authored numerous mystery series including Quarry, Nolan, Mallory, Eliot Ness, and the best-selling Nathan Heller historical thrillers. His additional Disaster series mystery novels include The Titanic Murders, The Hindenburg Murders, The Pearl Harbor Murders, The Lusitania Murders, and The London Blitz Murders.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication Page

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE: A HALLOWE’EN SHADOW PLAY

  THURSDAY: OCTOBER 27, 1938

  CHAPTER ONE: RADIO DAZE

  FRIDAY: OCTOBER 28, 1938

  CHAPTER TWO: BROADWAY MALADY OF 1938

  SATURDAY: OCTOBER 29, 1938

  CHAPTER THREE: COTTON CLUBBED

  SUNDAY: OCTOBER 30, 1938

  CHAPTER FOUR: SHANGHAIED LADY

  CHAPTER FIVE: NOW YOU SEE IT

  CHAPTER SIX: WAR OF THE WELLES

  CHAPTER SEVEN: JOURNEY INTO FEAR

  CHAPTER EIGHT: PUNKIN PATCH