The War of the Worlds Murder - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,48
smaller podium (piano nearby) and his twenty-seven-piece orchestra. To Welles’s right was the horizontal picture window of the control booth, behind which were numerous anxious faces, belonging to CBS exec Davidson Taylor (in the sub-control room’s separate adjacent pane), Howard Koch, Paul Stewart, and John Houseman; next to Houseman, engineer John Dietz in his headphones, attending his console, lacked the anxiety of the others, seeming instead coolly focused and professional. Assembled before Welles were his actors, some on their feet, at microphones, script in hand, awaiting their cues within the rectangle of carpet, others at the two tables where they sat waiting for their own time to come.
A few moments before, Welles had casually asked if any one had seen his wife Virginia around today, or even this morning. No one had, or at least so they professed. Then, as a seeming afterthought, he said, “Say, somebody said George Balanchine was hanging around, earlier—anyone see him?” No, they said.
Now Welles was at his conductor’s post, a microphone stand with its large CBS head on a skinny chrome neck squeezed between him and his music stand. His Andy Gump-ish assistant Alland (aka Vakhtangov)—in a fedora and suspenders—was one of the actors this evening, but right now was attending to his charge. He handed up to Welles a large bottle of pineapple juice, which the director chugged—part throat remedy, part superstition—then passed the empty bottle back.
Alland walked over to set the bottle on one of the actor tables—already cluttered with Sunday newspapers and magazines, as well as scripts—and returned to the carpeted square.
Welles cleared his throat, clamped on his earphones, loosened his tie, made rubbery motions with his mouth, limbering up his face. High on the wall behind Welles—where everyone but himself had a good view of it—was a round gray clock with white hands; alongside this circle a rectangular extension held two bold white-letter warnings, the upper one of which was lighted up now: STAND BY. Hands lifted in a conductor’s manner, echoing nearby Herrmann who stood poised before his musicians, Welles waited, poised to begin. Then—though he couldn’t see the second white warning flash on—he somehow heeded the words perfectly: ON THE AIR, and...
...cued his announcer, Dan Seymour, who rather liltingly, even lightly intoned: “The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre on the Air in ‘The War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells.”
The other Welles threw Herrmann his cue and the maestro led his musicians in twenty seconds of the Mercury Theatre theme: “Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B Flat Minor.”
Then Seymour, hand to his ear in time-honored announcer fashion, said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the director of the Mercury Theatre, and the star of these broadcasts—Orson Welles.”
Not missing a beat, Welles spoke into the microphone in a fashion both intimate and important: “We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s, and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that—as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns—they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water....”
Welles paused.
“With infinite complacence,” he continued, “people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs—serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small, spinning fragment of solar driftwood which, by chance or design, man has inherited out of the dark mystery of time and space.”
Another dramatic beat, then Welles pressed on: “Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle...intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic...regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”
After the slightest breath, Welles changed his tone from vaguely portentous to briskly matter of fact: “In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. Near the end of October, business was better, war scare was over, more men were back at work, sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October thirtieth, the Crosley service estimated that thirty-two million people were listening in on radios....”
A starry night seemingly like any other had settled over Grovers Mill, a bump in the New Jersey roadside consisting of little more than a gas station, general store, feed store and mill pond. Eight miles east of Trenton, the state capital, fifty miles southwest of New York, this