The War of the Worlds Murder - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,33
pavement echoing, followed the flapping cape of Lamont Cranston as the hailed taxi screeched to a stop, and the actor and the writer scrambled into the backseat.
“St. Regis, please,” Welles said, regally casual, but breathing hard.
“Damn!” Gibson said, looking back toward the mouth of the alley—no sign of the hoods. They’d apparently disappeared into the dark, as Welles and Gibson made their escape.
Again, a hand settled on the writer’s shoulder. “Are you all right, Walter?”
“I may need a change of underwear.” He gave his host a hard look. “That was a little reckless, wasn’t it?”
Welles snorted. “I wasn’t going to let those overgrown Dead End Kids get away with that nonsense.”
“The leader had a gun!”
The cab driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror were on them.
Welles said, “He wouldn’t have fired, not so close to Broadway, not with a dozen cops around. They were just trying to scare us.”
Gibson blew out air. “Well, where I’m concerned, it worked like a charm.”
When the taxi pulled up at the St. Regis, a doorman approaching, Welles said, “Get some rest—I’m heading back to the Mercury. We’ll have breakfast in my room, around ten, then go over to CBS together around noon. Agreeable?”
But Welles did not wait for an answer, and the taxi glided away, the moon face smiling at him, a cheerfully demented, if slightly overweight elf.
In his room, between the Egyptian-cotton sheets, Gibson lay exhausted but exhilarated—and it took him a good hour to go to sleep.
It wasn’t that he was disturbed, and certainly his fear had passed: but story ideas were humming through his mind. Soon he had an image of himself at the antique writing desk, starting another story, not realizing he was only dreaming....
SUNDAY
OCTOBER 30, 1938
WALTER GIBSON’S FAMOUS CREATION WAS not the only Shadow cast by radio in 1938—the shadow of war also served to keep listeners on edge, and in a far more disturbing fashion....
For several months prior to The Mercury Theatre on the Air’s broadcast of a certain H.G. Wells science-fiction yarn, listeners had been alerted to the troublesome state of the world, homes all across the nation taken hostage by talking boxes in their living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms and automobiles. The same gizmo that was sharing household hints and fudge recipes, cowboy adventures and comedy shows, weather reports and advertisements for corn plasters, popular tunes and classical music, was also bombarding America with the latest disasters, subjecting them to an endless parade of ominous international events. At no other time since the beginning of broadcasting had the collective audience been held in such a rapt, fearful grip, with listeners quite accustomed to their favorite programs being interrupted for news updates...and the news was never good....
In his September address to the annual Nazi party congress in Nuremberg, German dictator Adolf Hitler demanded autonomy over an area on the Czech border known as Sudetenland. It seemed over three million “Sudeten Germans,” as the Führer called them, were “tortured souls” who could not “obtain rights and help themselves,” so the Nazis had to do it for them. (The translation Americans heard was provided by the dean of radio commentators, H.V. Kaltenborn, who just months before had been chosen by Orson Welles to narrate the Mercury radio broadcast of “Julius Caesar,” to add “a dimension of realism and immediacy.”) On October 3, Germany made its triumphant drive into the town of Asch, and a week later, Hitler’s troops occupied the Sudetenland.
Hearing of such an ill-boding event firsthand was already old hat to American radio listeners. Hitler’s conquests became a kind of serial for grown-ups, the Czech crisis playing out over three tense weeks—listeners hearing firsthand the march step of Nazi boots, the accusations and the threats, the rumblings of war that included the Far Eastern menace of the Japanese. At the height of the European crisis, about a month before the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, a presentation of “Sherlock Holmes” by The Mercury Theatre on the Air had been interrupted by a news bulletin, irritating (but also making an impression on) Orson Welles.
Most Americans felt the inevitability of involvement of the U.S.A. in a world conflict in which its allies were either threatened or already embroiled: as the Germans marched into Austria, the English people were issued gas masks, and all of Europe noted with alarm Hitler calling up to active duty one million weekend soldiers from the German army reserve.
Radio statistics indicated that the medium’s audience had never been larger; what the numbers didn’t spell out was that these