Max Collins: The War of the Worlds Murder

There Welles was, a few hours after Gibson had last seen him at the theater, now on trial before a battery of reporters, looking schoolboy contrite, a little bewildered and vaguely devilish with his goatee-ish need of a shave.

He was “deeply shocked and deeply regretful,” and when asked if he was aware of the panic such a broadcast might stir up, he claimed, “Definitely not.”

Some found him charming in the press conference; other shifty. Some saw a “palpably shaken,” repentant young man, while others considered him “hammy,” and “insulting” in the transparent way he feigned surprised dismay. One report had him, on the way out, flashing Jack Houseman a wink and an OK sign.

Welles’s writer, Howard Koch, who had so brilliantly executed the prank in play form, missed the fuss, at least initially. Sunday night, when he got home, he had listened to the rest of the broadcast, felt satisfied they’d all transcended the weak material, and dropped exhausted into bed. He had slept through the ringing phone, as Paul Stewart tried to alert him to the panic and the press.

Hallowe’en morning, he’d gone out to get a haircut and heard odd, even ominous snatches of conversation on the sidewalk, pedestrians talking of “panic” and “invasion.” The scriptwriter thought that perhaps the inevitable war with Hitler had finally broken out.

When he asked his barber what was going on, the haircutter showed him a front page with a headline blaring, NATION IN A PANIC FROM MARTIAN BROADCAST.

Like Welles, Koch wondered if he was finished; but a call from Hollywood soon came, and the co-organizer of the Martian Invasion would go on to one of the most distinguished careers in the history of screenwriting, including a little picture in 1942 called Casablanca .

Welles had not been ruined, either, though there was no saving Danton’s Death from the director’s pretensions. The production could not even ride the biggest wave of publicity the city had ever seen, and-after mostly withering reviews-closed after a mere twenty-one performances. The Mercury Theatre would not last another season.

In later years Welles liked to point out that broadcasts in other countries, patterned on his “War of the Worlds,” had resulted in jail for their perpetrators and that one radio station in Spain had even been burned to the ground.

“But I got a contract in Hollywood,” he said.

Back in 1938, Welles and the Mercury were now suddenly world-famous. Within a week of the “invasion,” The Mercury Theatre on the Air went from being an unsponsored, “sustaining” show to acquiring Campbell Soup as a sponsor. Changes were made-popular novels joined literary warhorses as grist for the Mercury mill, and each week a famous guest star appeared. For an adaptation of Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca , Bernard Herrmann composed a full score, which prefigured his many famous film scores. Much of it was used by Herrmann, in fact, for the 1943 film of Jane Eyre , starring and produced by Welles from a script cowritten by Houseman.

Hollywood, of course, was Welles’s ultimate reward for the “Mars invasion,” and perhaps his punishment. He was greeted as a genius, then denounced for considering himself such; his talent led to Citizen Kane , the 1941 film that tops most “best films of all time” lists, but his arrogance in lampooning William Randolph Hearst (and the newspaper magnate’s mistress Marion Davies) created enemies who threw obstacles in Welles’s career path his entire life.

In 1975, in our little corner of the Palmer House bar, the white-haired, spectacled Gibson had spent almost two hours with me, sharing the secret story of his “weekend with Orson.” He seemed a little tired, but I was a kid, wired up by what I’d heard, and didn’t know when to stop.

“What happened to the Shadow project?” I asked.

“ That ‘weed of crime’ bore no evil fruit,” Gibson said, invoking the famous closing lines of the Shadow radio show. “And like the Mystery Writers of America say, crime doesn’t pay…enough.”

“Well, the proposed Shadow movie was with Warner Bros., right?”

“Yes, but after the Mars broadcast, every studio in Hollywood was waving contracts at Orson, and the one he took, of course, was with RKO…which he famously described as a ‘the biggest train set a boy ever had.’ ”

“So he just dropped it, the Shadow movie, when-”

“No. Orson often came back to a project, again and again-some of his finished films were shot over many years, remember. Around 1945, after he’d had some setbacks, we talked again about doing the Shadow feature, and that dialogue continued sporadically over the years-hell, just a couple of years ago, I was approached about a Shadow TV pilot that Orson was behind.”

“He’s a little…heavy to play the Shadow now, isn’t he?”

Gibson smiled and sipped the last of his latest glass of beer. “Well, he still dresses like the Shadow-the slouch hat, the dark clothes…. Sometimes I think, for all his Shakespearean proclivities, of every role he ever played, Orson liked the Shadow best.”

I let out a laugh. “It’s the whole magician persona-the cape, the aura of the unexplained, the sly smile….”

Our pitcher of beer was almost gone. Gibson poured me half a glass, and himself the same. We were approaching the end.

“You know,” Gibson said, something bittersweet entering his voice, “Jack Houseman and Orson-one of the really great artistic teams in show business history-split up a few years after the broadcast. And I always thought Jack’s prank on Orson, the murderous ‘lesson’ he tried to teach him, was the first crack in the wall.”

“But you said Orson only laughed about it?”

Gibson nodded, eyes tight behind the lenses. “As I’m sure you know, Orson has a big booming laugh, and it covers up a lot of different emotions-it can be filled with contempt as easily as amusement.”

“And you sensed that, that night?”

He didn’t answer directly, saying instead, “Houseman made the Hollywood trip, too, you know-they did the radio show from out there, took the cast with them…Joe Cotten had never been in a movie before Kane . Herrmann took the ride, too, did the Kane music, beautifully. But Orson and Houseman quarreled-they say Orson threw a burning Sterno dish at Houseman, set a curtain on fire…this was at Chasen’s.”

“Only, Houseman did work on Kane , right?”

“He worked with Mankiewicz, out of Orson’s presence. Their draft of the Kane script was another Houseman prank-Kane was based more on Orson himself than Hearst!”

“And Welles didn’t even realize it?”

Shaking his head, laughing, Gibson said, “Of course he did! But it was his perverse, willful nature to do it anyway, and he emphasized the resemblance even more in his drafts…. He and Houseman only worked a time or two together, after that. Currently, sadly…they’re enemies. Each the sworn nemesis of the other.”

I shook my head. “Funny-here Houseman is, quarter of a century later, having his greatest success as an old man…”

The 1973 film The Paper Chase had been a big hit with Houseman portraying crusty Professor Kingsfield, which had sparked a latter-day acting career for the producer.

Gibson picked up on it. “… while Welles had his greatest success as a young man, with the Mercury Theatre and Kane . Odd bookends to two careers, both of which would probably’ve been greater if they’d remained collaborators.”

We sipped beer.

I smiled at him in open admiration. “You know, for a fan like me? Boggles my mind to imagine a Shadow film written by you and directed by, and starring, Orson Welles!”