The War of the Worlds Murder (4 page)

In the meantime, between this steady diet of comedy, music and news, a hardy handful of creators attempted to bring quality drama to the networks. Arch Oboler, with his pioneering
, Twilight Zone–
like
Lights Out
used innovative sound effects to project his movies of the mind, while radio’s “poet laureate” Norman Corwin trusted well-chosen words to grant his fantasies and satires literary qualities rare in a medium that already seemed crass
.

At age twenty-two, Orson Welles—acclaimed and controversial as the boy genius of Broadway, a radio veteran thanks to a rich deep voice beyond his years—brought his skills and his talented associates to a project called
First-Person Singular,
soon to be renamed
The Mercury Theatre on the Air.
He was the star, narrator, writer, producer and director—at least according to the press releases—and a more ambitious slate of radio adaptations would be difficult to imagine: the first season (1937) began with an outstanding version of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula,
and was followed in short order by
Treasure Island, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Around the World in 80 Days
and
Julius Caesar,
among others
.

But the 1938 season found the celebrated, acclaimed new series up against the most popular radio show in the nation—Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy’s aforementioned
Chase & Sanborn Hour,
which pulled in about 35 percent of the radio audience. After seven broadcasts in its new Sunday-night slot against America’s most popular puppet
, The Mercury Theatre on the Air
was drawing less than four percent
.

Something would have to be done
.

CHAPTER ONE

RADIO DAZE

W
ALTER
G
IBSON HAD NEVER BEEN
on an expense account before.

Not even in the earliest days of his writing career, when he’d been a reporter on the
North American
in Philly, and then the
Evening Ledger
—never.

Of course, even then his work out in the field had been limited, once the editor learned of the Gibson facility for puzzles and quizzes. Turning out “brain tests” and crossword puzzles—not to mention articles on magic and bunco games—Gibson had spent more time in an office in front of a typewriter than out news gathering.

The irony was, Walter Gibson had the soul of an adventurer—his mind, since earliest childhood, had brimmed with magic and mysticism and men of action. He enjoyed the great out-of-doors; and he craved the companionship and conversation of lively, intelligent people—as fetching as his wife Jewel was, her ability to stand toe-to-toe with him intellectually, on any number of esoteric topics, had attracted him most.

From his teens on, he’d performed in semi-professional magic acts and had sought, successfully, the scintillating company of stage magicians, including some of the most eminent—Thurston, Blackstone, Dunninger, even Houdini.

And yet Walter Gibson’s talent for storytelling, his ease with words, had condemned him to this jail cell of a career. Not that this was a sentence he minded serving: self-expression was his overriding obsession; and the challenge of a writing assignment energized him, though each one consigned him further to a solitary life in a small room with his only company a typewriter and his imagination. Even his association with those illustrious magicians had led primarily to ghostwriting articles and books for them.

Under his nom de plume Maxwell Grant, Gibson had learned to be content with the adventures of his famous character, the Shadow, playing out in the theater of his mind; and the conversations in which he found himself most often engaged were between characters of his own creation, speaking to each other with sharp, pointed intelligence, courtesy of his flying fingers.

Right now those famous fingertips (“
1,440,000 WORDS WERE WRITTEN BY MAXWELL GRANT IN LESS THAN 10 MONTHS ON A CORONA TYPEWRITER,
” went one national ad) were bandaged; well, all but his thumbs. He looked like someone who had ill-advisedly placed his fingertips on a stove’s burner; instead, he was a professional writer of pulp magazines who had yesterday completed his twenty-fourth 50,000-word
Shadow
novel of the year, opening up the remaining months of 1938 for other assignments.

Though he was not by nature a greedy man, Gibson wrote for money; despite his pen name’s fame, and his popular character’s prominence, his pay rate for pulp publisher Street and Smith did not compare to those of writers in the slick magazines like
The Saturday Evening Post
and
Collier’s
, much less authors of hardcover books—pulpsters like Dash Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner had made the switch, but Gibson had never had room enough in his schedule to give it a try. These were hard times, and the $500 per novel was good money only if he kept up his output.

After all, a writer couldn’t sell a story he hadn’t written. So Gibson’s motto was:
Write till it hurts; then write some more
.

As he rode through Manhattan in the back of a Yellow Cab, wraithed in his own cigarette smoke, Gibson sat with a small valise on the floor and his portable Corona typewriter on the seat next to him, a rider as important as himself—at least.

With his salt-and-pepper hair neatly combed back, his round-lensed wire-frame spectacles, his oval face with the regular, intelligent features, he looked more like a lawyer or a businessman than the master of intrigue who dispatched the cloaked avenger known as the Shadow to take on campaigns against crime (any time he visited New York, he only half-consciously scouted locations for such gangster tales), and to bring down world-domination-minded masterminds like the Voodoo Master and Shiwan Khan.

He’d come down this morning by train from Maine—his home was in Philly, but he and Jewel had a cabin up north, on Little Sebago Lake, where they were spending more and more of their time. No stranger to Manhattan, he and his wife had lived in an apartment on West 46
^th
for about a year, so he could be closer to the editorial offices of Street and Smith.

But he’d found the city distracting, too many plays and movies and restaurants to tempt a writer away from work; plus he was spending not nearly enough time with his son Robert (who lived with first wife Charlotte). Returning to Philadelphia and then building the cabin in Maine had made seeing Bobby more practical; the boy had been summering with his father and stepmother these past several years.

The cabin provided a kind of knotty-pine womb for Gibson’s ideas to grow within. He would sit at a large pinewood desk in a corner of the central room with its vaulted ceilings,
chain-smoking (cigarettes his chief stress reliever) and dreaming up yarns. No phone was allowed (calls came in to the cabin next door, where his cousin Eaton lived) with the silence punctuated only by the calls of loons and other birds out on the lake.

Not that silence was required for him to create: he’d written one Shadow novel while the carpenters built his office around him. He’d written much of another at a party in New York, with other guests reading the yarn over his shoulder—the experience had only exhilarated him.

Trips to New York were commonplace to Gibson, who enjoyed delivering plot synopses in person to editor John Nanovic, who’d become a good friend. Nanovic made useful suggestions, and Gibson felt the editor had come to know the Shadow as well as his creator.

Unlike a lot of editors, Nanovic did not stint on the compliments. He frequently told Gibson (in varying words), “You’ve got the newspaperman’s knack for giving me just enough facts to take me into the next paragraph...and the magician’s flare to intrigue me with hints of what’s to come.”

Later this afternoon, he would meet with Nanovic. Right now (it was just after one-thirty) he had his first stop to make—at the Columbia Broadcasting Building at Madison Avenue and 45
^th
Street. The Shadow had been born in this building, and yet the father of the character had never visited the birthsite before.

Technically, of course, Gibson was the character’s
step
father. In 1930 a radio show had been introduced at CBS,
Detective Story
, that based its episodes on stories from the Street and Smith pulp magazine of the same name; a sinister-voiced narrator—dubbed the Shadow—presented the tales. A voice actor named Frank Readick gave the narrator a haunting laugh and a spooky presence that had made something of a national sensation.

Instead of serving to promote
Detective Story Magazine
as intended, however, the show inspired listeners to request at their newsstands “that Shadow detective magazine.”

Which was where Walter Gibson came in. Frank Blackwell, then the Street and Smith editor, challenged Gibson to come up with a character to go with the memorable name and the spooky voice.

Already Gibson had been toying with the idea of doing a mystery-story hero who was himself mysterious, and a little nasty, unlike the straightforward goody-two-shoes heroes of other mystery series—an avenger who would wear not a white hat, but a black one. He reflected upon his magician friends and came up with a character who combined the hypnotic power of Thurston and Blackstone with Houdini’s penchant for escapes. By early 1931, “Maxwell Grant” had begun his punishing, profitable run, charting the adventures of this tall, black-cloaked figure with the broad-brim
black
felt hat tucked over a hawkish countenance.

And by 1937, the radio show had dropped its narrator-version of the Shadow to adapt Gibson’s avenging hero—embodied by a new young actor with a magical second-baritone: Orson Welles.

Though Gibson had helped develop the radio version of the Shadow with scriptwriter Edward Hale Bierstadt (it had been gratifying to hear Ed say how much he loved Gibson’s yarns), the creator of the character was contractually tied up with Street and Smith to produce those twenty-four novels a year. So the radio Shadow had gone its own way, deviating somewhat from Gibson’s vision—rather over emphasizing the character’s rich-man-about-town secret identity, Lamont Cranston (admittedly a perfect fit for Welles)—but staying mostly on course...and becoming a household word among radio listeners.

Which meant—everybody in America.

The Columbia Broadcasting Building was no longer home to the Shadow show—it was a Mutual program now, and broadcast out of New York’s powerhouse WOR—but the skyscraper remained home to Orson Welles, whose amazingly resonant voice and ironic delivery had much to do with the radio Shadow’s success.

Welles had just finished his two-season run as the Shadow to take on a more ambitious project—
The Mercury Theatre on the Air
, an extension of the wunderkind’s acclaimed Broadway theater company—and so Gibson had been surprised to be contacted by the showman himself, to discuss a Shadow project.

Not as surprised as Jewel, however, when she came rushing breathlessly into the cabin with news that a phone call from the famous young radio actor awaited next door...

...where Gibson gave both his wife and his message-screening cousin a long cool look that told them this was business and that they were dismissed, and the two were reluctantly taking their leave when the writer brought the receiver to his ear.

“Do I have the honor of speaking to my illustrious father?”

The deep voice on the other end of the line, filtered through long-distance, had the processed sound of the Shadow on the air, attempting to frighten that week’s evildoer.

Gibson, however, neither frightened nor impressed easily.

“Hello, Mr. Welles,” he said.

The two men had met exactly once, at a Society of Magicians gathering in Manhattan where the radio actor had performed as a perfectly respectable amateur magician—respectable for a celebrity, at least.

“This is a much overdue call,” Welles said, amusement and something like chagrin in his formidable voice. “I have been told
that...in the beginning...” The latter had proper Biblical weight. “...you personally recommended me to the Shadow’s sponsor.”

Gibson had indeed pointed the way toward Welles as an ideal radio Shadow—he had been impressed with Welles’s stagecraft (even if his magic was merely competent) and by his rich, worldly voice. Also, Welles had done work on
The March of Time
radio show that had bowled both Gibson and Jewel over; so when the Shadow creator’s counsel was sought in matters of casting, he’d thought immediately of Welles.

In fact he had said, “There’s only one actor on the face of the earth who, using only his voice, can do justice to the Shadow.”

Nonetheless, this was Gibson’s first direct contact (since that Society of Magic gathering, where they’d been introduced and shared a few words) with the actor who had brought his character to life, and to radio fame.

“I may have played a small role in getting you that part, Mr. Welles,” Gibson admitted. “But you’ve more than made up for it by boosting the circulation of
The Shadow Magazine
with your fine work.”