Max Collins: The War of the Worlds Murder

“There,” he said, and pointed, as if to a star. In a way, he was: his own.

ORSON WELLES CAUSES PANIC, the sign flashed. MARS INVASION BROADCAST FRIGHTENS NATION.

His company, believers again, emitted ooohs and aaaahs , then began to applaud. And Welles, despite all that hovered over him, began to smile, and took a small, humble bow.

A shapely figure in one of the French low-cut peasant dresses slipped an arm through Welles’s. “Hi, Orson. Hope you don’t mind-Jack gave me a part in the chorus.”

Welles’s eyes narrowed, then widened, as he realized who was standing beside him. “Dolores?”

“No hard feelings?” Dolores Donovan said, with mischievous malice, and perhaps some affection.

For a moment he looked stricken, as if the lovely blue-eyed strawberry-blonde might be an apparition; then his eyes searched for Houseman, who ambled up to his other side, Gibson following. Everyone was doused in the red of a dancing neon advertising soap flakes.

Sounding like a little boy, Welles said, “Housey-it was just a…?”

“ ‘Hoax’ is the word, I believe.” Houseman touched Welles’s sleeve. “And my dear Orson, I would never have subjected you this terrible practical joke, had I known-”

Welles hugged Dolores, kissed her on the mouth. Then he looked at her tenderly and said, “I’m so glad you’re alive-and by God, I’m glad, too, to have an actress of your caliber in my company.”

Then he turned her loose, and-giving Houseman a hard look-said, “Is this that lesson you promised?”

“It was meant to be, but-”

“But I’ll need more than one, right?”

“Very possibly,” Houseman granted.

And Welles slipped an arm around his friend and began to laugh and laugh and laugh, a Falstaffian roar of a laugh that seemed to relieve Houseman a great deal. But Gibson sensed some hysteria in it.

Which was only fair, after all, considering the hysteria Orson Welles had launched tonight.

The Times sign was announcing the time: twelve A.M.

Midnight.

“It’s Hallowe’en, everyone,” Welles thundered. “It is finally…at long last, really and truly…Hallowe’en.”

Walter Gibson had been scheduled to go back on the train to Philly on Monday morning, and-though hardly a lick of work on the project for which he’d been brought to Manhattan had been accomplished-that was what he did. Most of the way he slept, because he’d lingered at the Mercury Theatre as the Danton’s Death rehearsal got underway shortly after midnight. Around dawn, he’d exchanged casual but friendly good-byes with both Houseman and Welles, the latter assuring him they’d be getting together again soon, to “really get down to work” on the Shadow script.

The aftermath of the “invasion,” then, was something Gibson witnessed secondhand. He saw the newspaper headlines-RADIO LISTENERS IN PANIC, TAKING WAR DRAMA AS FACT (the Times ); FAKE RADIO “WAR” STIRS TERROR THROUGH U.S. (the Daily News ); and the Herald Tribune wrote of “hysteria, panic and sudden conversions to religion,” in the wake of the invasion from Mars.

Contacted in England, H.G. Wells himself objected to the Welles adaptation, complaining (without having actually heard the broadcast) that apparently too many liberties had been taken with his material, and that he was “deeply concerned” that his work would be used “to cause distress and alarm throughout the United States.” (Later Wells and Welles would meet and the former would express a revised opinion, backing Orson all the way, and wondering why it was that Americans were so easily fooled-hadn’t they ever heard of Hallowe’en?)

CBS issued an elaborate apology and announced a new policy of banning any such simulated news broadcasts, which NBC also pompously adopted. Both CBS and the Mercury Theatre denied that the broadcast had been designed as a publicity stunt to promote the upcoming opening of Danton’s Death . The Federal Communications Commission studied the “regrettable” matter, but never took action, despite a dozen formal protests.

The talk of criminal charges fluttered away in a day-there had been no deaths, so the “murders” the press tried to scare Welles with (in the immediate aftermath of the broadcast) were as big a hoax as the broadcast itself.

And while the litigation war drums pounded for some weeks, none of the claims went anywhere, though Welles-over the protests of Davidson Taylor and William Paley-did honor a request for the price of a pair of black shoes, size 9B, whose prospective owner had used the designated funds to buy a bus ticket to escape the Martians.

Public indignation raged only briefly, though some of it was stinging, the New York Times scolding Welles and CBS for creating a “wave of panic in which it inundated the nation.”

But somehow the entire event was best characterized by the final phone call the CBS switchboard received, around three A.M. after the broadcast, which was from a truck driver in Chicago who asked if this was the network that put on the show about the Martian invasion; when the switchboard operator confirmed as much, the listener said his wife had got so riled up over the show, she ran outside, fell down the stairs and broke her leg. A long pause, and then:

“Jeez,” the listener said wistfully, “that was a wonderful broadcast….”

Welles liked to display a cable he received from the real FDR (as opposed to Kenny Delmar), who commented on the Mars Invasion upstaging Charlie McCarthy: THIS ONLY GOES TO PROVE, MY BEAMISH BOY, THAT THE INTELLIGENT PEOPLE WERE ALL LISTENING TO THE DUMMY, AND ALL THE DUMMIES WERE LISTENING TO YOU.

Such whimsy soon came to dominate coverage of the event, and within days the public’s reaction had shifted to amusement and even appreciation.

A New York Tribune writer, Dorothy Thompson, said it best: “Unwittingly, Mr. Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre on the Air have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of all time-they have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition to create a nationwide panic.”

This, the writer said, indicated the “appalling dangers and enormous effectiveness of popular and theatrical demagoguery…. Hitler managed to scare all of Europe to its knees a month ago, but he at least had an army and an air force to back up his shrieking words. But Mr. Welles scared thousands into demoralization with nothing at all.”

She went to say that Welles had thrown a “brilliant and cruel light” on education in America; that thousands of the populace had been shown to be stupid, lacking in nerve but not short of ignorance; that primeval fears lay beneath the “thinnest surface of civilized man”; and “how easy it was to start a mass delusion.”

The Nation made a chilling point similar to Thompson’s: the real cause of the panic was “the sea of insecurity and actual ignorance over which a superficial literacy and sophistication are spread like a thin crust.”

Many years later, Welles would admit, “The thing that gave me the idea for it was that we had a lot of real radio nuts on as commentators at this period-people who wanted to keep us out of European entanglements, and a fascist priest called Father Coughlin. And people believed anything they heard on the radio. So I said, ‘Let’s do something impossible and make them believe it.’ And then tell them, show them, that it’s only…radio.”

But at a Hallowe’en Day news conference in 1938, Welles told a different story. By the time Gibson saw excerpts in a newsreel, the furor had already died down, and last week seemed ancient history.