The War of the Worlds Murder - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,11
the bandages from his fingertips, which looked reddish but nearly healed.
The ON THE AIR sign over the Studio One door was not alighted, so Gibson moved on through a vestibule that separated the hallway from the studio, apparently for soundproofing purposes. He pushed open a door whose window was round, like a porthole, and found himself on a small landing, with a chrome banister, five steps above the floor of a large noisy chamber bustling with men who mostly had their suitcoats off—a sea of suspenders, rolled-up sleeves and puffing cigarettes.
Gibson was no stranger to radio: well over ten years ago, the writer had appeared on station WIP in Philly, presenting puzzles and their solutions. And he’d written and helped produce a series for magician Howard Thurston early in the decade.
But an operation of this scale was beyond his experience, and he felt a bit like Dorothy having her first look at Oz.
The walls of the big, high-ceilinged room were light gray, and the few doors sky-blue with those porthole-style windows. The far left wall and the facing one alternated dark drapes with sound-baffling panels the color of caramel. To Gibson’s left was a plywood, carpeted podium a little larger than a cardtable with a microphone and a music stand. The podium faced the short end of a twelve-foot by twenty-four-foot space marked off with white words on the dark-painted cement floor saying, on all four sides, MICROPHONE AREA. Within this carpeted rectangle resided four well-spaced microphones on stands (every mike in the room wore either a little metal CBS hat or dickey).
Just outside the microphone rectangle a couple of tables were home to coffee and sandwiches, or the aftermath thereof, along with scripts, magazines, newspapers, and ashtrays. Cigarettes bobbling, half a dozen actors wandered with folded-open script in hand, fingers pressed to an ear, reading aloud, and adding to the general chaos.
To Gibson’s left, beyond the podium, a small orchestra was arrayed, seven pieces plus a grand piano; their leader, a bespectacled, rather odd-looking man, sat at the piano, frowning as he made notes on his score, paying no heed to the musicians filing in and taking their seats and going through little practice scales and other warm-ups.
Across the room, beyond and behind the carpeted MICROPHONE AREA, lurked a sound-effects station, including a table with two turntables for Victrola records, a wooden door on a heavy frame (for opening or closing as a script demanded), a bench with an odd assortment of items (saw and hammer, milk-bottle rack, coconut shells, etc.), a flat box of sand on the floor, and a rack of electronic gizmos. A statuesque middle-aged woman, who in her floral-print frock might have been a housewife, sorted through the inventory of this area, assembling things in order—cellophane for the crackle of fire, a bundle of straw for noises in underbrush, a large potato with a knife stuck in it—her pleasant face mildly contorted with intensity.
Though this was a fairly massive studio, it lacked audience seating. Gibson knew elsewhere in this building, the ground floor most likely, would be at least one theater-style studio, for programs like tonight’s Major Bowes Amateur Hour. Game shows and comedies benefitted from spectators: those presenting the dramatic fare The Mercury Theatre on the Air specialized in might find that a distraction.
A door adjacent to the one he’d come in opened suddenly, and Gibson—mildly startled—whirled to see a small, dark man with salt-and-pepper hair lean out, his striped tie hanging like the flag on a football play. Indeed, the entire manner of this fellow was that of a referee, calling foul at this stranger’s interference.
“Can I help you?” Though diminutive, the man had an intimidating bearing—including an actor’s strong baritone, and eyes that bored into you.
“I’m Walter Gibson—I had an appointment with Mr. Welles.”
The man—like so many here, in suspenders and rolled-up shirtsleeves—stepped onto the landing and his features softened but his eyes remained skeptical, a maitre d’ not convinced you should be seated.
“Mr. Gibson, I don’t doubt what you say.... Orson is fairly cavalier about not keeping me informed about guests he’s invited...but we’re about to rehearse and record Sunday’s show.”
“I take it Orson isn’t here.”
The man twitched a smile. “No. He always says he’s going to participate in these recorded rehearsals, and we always wait half an hour past the time he sets, before starting without him.”
“How often does he actually show up?”
“So far, never.” Gibson’s reluctant host frowned, the cacophony of musicians, actors and sound effects making it hard