The War of the Worlds Murder - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,18
eyes always on the stage.
During the forty or so minutes that Gibson watched, Welles at first was eating ice cream—pistachio?—with a spoon from a quart container, and then was smoking a cigar large enough for a relay-race baton, its sweetly fragrant smoke wafting all the way back to Gibson.
Though mostly the writer was viewing the director from the rear, Gibson did get glimpses of that famous baby face, always frowning, and could strongly sense that Welles was restraining himself. Gibson could not just sense that Welles wanted to interrupt; waves of that desire seemed to roll up the aisle.
However, as Howard Koch had told Gibson, Danton’s Death had been in previews already—with previews for last night and tonight and tomorrow night cancelled to make way for more rehearsal—and now the next preview loomed on Monday with real opening night on the following Wednesday.
According to both Paul Stewart and Koch, Welles was having fits with this play, and disaster had courted it: not long ago, the elevator had collapsed, hurling an actor into the basement, where the man had broken his leg (he had been replaced, and Stewart had wryly commented that the other actors considered him “the lucky one”).
Needing to function smoothly on a stage littered with perils, the actors—navigating a stage strewn with gaping holes, catwalks and scaffolding—had lobbied for several uninterrupted run-throughs (Orson normally did not wait till the end to give notes, but constantly called the proceedings to a halt, to provide a running commentary).
When the guillotine finally fell, Welles rose grandly from his aisle seat and roared, “All right, children—we’ve killed this thing! The question is, do we put it out of its misery, or try for resurrection?”
The cast had lined itself up as if waiting for a firing squad. They hung their heads; they looked bleary-eyed and exhausted.
Their condition did not appear wholly lost on Welles, whose voice modulated into a gruff warmth, though the volume continued to rumble the house seats.
“Here at the Mercury,” he said, “we are compelled to work under pressure—that is because we must make up in intensity and creativity what we lack in money! We can’t afford to take a show out on the road to whip it into shape. We have finally mastered the technical aspects of this production. Now, my children...”
Virtually every one of the haggard “children” on stage was older than Welles, some by a decade or two.
“...we must attempt to breathe life into this corpse.”
A hand tapped on Gibson’s shoulder, and he practically jumped from his seat. He looked back and up at the heart-shaped face of the sweetly pretty blonde in the fuzzy pink sweater who’d been slumbering in the box office booth. Her hair was a tumble of curls atop her head, and her blue eyes had an apologetic cast.
“Are you Mr. Gibson?” she asked, in a squeaky little voice that was at once comic and appealing. She had a womanly shape for a kid. “If you are, Mr. Houseman would like to see you...” Her voice lowered an octave. “...upstairs.”
Whether intended or not, the effect was comic and Gibson, standing in the aisle facing the girl, said, “That sounds almost as ominous as the French Revolution.”
“More ominous than that,” she squeaked, rolling her eyes.
Soon he was following her through the lobby—not an unpleasant task, as the movement of her backside beneath the tight dark woolen dress had a hypnotic effect—and then up several flights of stairs to the upper balcony. Welles’s booming voice, alternately furious at incompetence and lavish with praise, filled the house.
After a long, complicated climb, the shapely teenager led him to yet more steps, iron ones up into what had clearly been an electrician’s booth.
The girl stepped inside the narrow, stuffy room, Gibson poised in the doorway behind her. Welles’s voice, muffled, going over tiny details, leached through the twin holes in the wall that had once been used, presumably, for follow spots in the Comedy Theatre’s musical days.
“Mr. Gibson is here, Mr. Houseman,” the girl said, rather timidly.
Gibson took in the office with a few glances: an exposed paint-peeling radiator, hot enough to fry an egg on; a bulletin board with a much-annotated 1938 calendar courtesy of some bank, various reviews with sections underlined, and a sheet boldly labelled MERCURY THEATRE 1937–38 SUBSCRIBERS LIST; 8-by-10s of actors and production sketches taped haphazardly to the walls; and a couple battered secondhand-looking bookcases brimming with scripts and books and boxes of Mercury letterhead and envelopes, in stylish brown ink.