The War of the Worlds Murder - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,76

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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....