The War of the Worlds Murder (9 page)

“You’re lucky you weren’t sued.”

“We paid Joe Holland’s bills. Our Caesar even wound up apologizing to Brutus...but I never saw it that way. So I mounted that dagger in an attempt to provide our gifted boy with a conscience of sorts.”

“How’s that working out?”

Houseman twitched a wry smile. “Not terribly well, so far. As you can see, his response was merely to
sign
the weapon....”

Footsteps on the iron stairs announced a new arrival—and it couldn’t be Welles, because his alternate scolding and praise continued from below—and then Paul Stewart, looking mournful and tired, his sunken cheeks blue with beard, stepped inside. An acetate recording in a brown-paper sleeve was tucked under his arm. His gray suit looked rumpled, his blue tie already loose at his collar.

“Mr. Gibson,” Stewart said with a nod, as the writer rose briefly, returning the nod. Stewart handed the shellac disc across to Houseman. “Here it is, Jack. Any chance Orson will finish that harangue by Sunday?”

Placing the disc neatly next to the record player on the table, Houseman said, “I believe he’ll release his prisoners, any moment now.”

Stewart deposited himself on the daybed, nearer Houseman than Gibson. “Breakfast on the way?”

With a nod that took about three seconds, Houseman replied, “Breakfast is indeed on the way. The mission is Miss Holliday’s.”

“We oughta put that kid on the Mercury program,” Stewart said. “I think she’s a natural comedienne.”

“Despite her constant tears,” Houseman said, “I tend to agree...ah. Here’s Howard.”

Koch had clanged up the stairs and was in the cubbyhole’s doorway. He, too, looked haggard and unshaven, his tan suit and yellow tie like clothes he’d removed from a hamper, after wadding.

The two writers exchanged warm greetings, and Koch dropped himself on the daybed next to Stewart. He eyed the transcription disc grimly.

“So,” Koch said to Stewart. “You’ve brought the evidence.”

Stewart smirked humorlessly. “Some is found at the scene of every crime.”

Welles’s voice had ceased. The sound of movement below indicated the cast had finally been dismissed. Everyone in the electrician’s booth office lighted up a cigarette and a swirl of blue smoke was waiting when Welles’s heavy trod could finally be heard coming up those iron stairs.

Gibson didn’t know what to expect—an exhausted tyrant, most likely.

And yet the figure framed in the doorway appeared energetic and strangely cherubic. His big body, both tall and bordering
on heavyset, his arms limp at his sides, his head rather large for even this formidable frame, with a small mouth in the round face no less a baby’s for the cheeks needing a shave.

Most amazing were the vaguely Asian eyes which seemed to light with delight upon the sight of Gibson.

“My dear Walter,” he said, moving quickly to the writer, who got quickly to his feet. Welles’s expression might have been that of a man reunited with his oldest friend after a painful separation. “How kind of you to sit in with us on this postmortem.”

“Glad to help,” was all Gibson could think to say. The charm, the charisma of this twenty-three-year-old seemed to consume Gibson’s very air, his ability to think clearly.

Welles strode to the vacant chair next to Gibson, opposite the seated Houseman—whose expression seemed to define boredom—and said to everyone but Gibson, “Our poor friend has already put up with far too many indignities from me.”

Seeking out one face at a time, Welles continued his tale.

“I bring Walter in yesterday, out of his own busy schedule, and then have the wretched rudeness not even to show up at our rehearsal, much less seek him out at our mutual hotel!”

He deposited his weight on the chair next to Gibson, motioning for the writer to sit. Now Welles’s gaze was back on Gibson, and his tone was intimate as he said, “I’m afraid it was unavoidable. My current stage production is a train wreck, and my first responsibility was to be the engineer who got it back up on the tracks.”

Gibson swallowed, nodded.

Welles turned toward Houseman. “Now, Housey...please tell me that breakfast has been ordered.”

Houseman nodded once, a quicker one than before. “But Miss Holliday informs me that you have run up a personal tab at Longchamps in the sum of two hundred dollars.”

Welles waved that off. “I assume, after she stopped crying, that you gave her some money and sent her off like a good little girl.”

Again Houseman nodded. He was leaning back now, the hands folded over his belly.

Welles sighed grandly. “I suppose we must listen to this thing.... Does anyone have anything to say, first? How did it go in the studio?”

Stewart shrugged. “It’s not our finest hour, but I think it’s shaped up—thanks to Howard, here.”

Koch said, “Maybe we should have done ‘Lorna Doone,’ after all.”

Welles shook his head. “No, this will work. I know it will. The potential here is for our most important broadcast.”

This opinion seemed to amaze Stewart, whose eyes were unblinking marbles under the dark slashes of eyebrow. “Really?...Well, I was just hoping to get through the thing without any of our reputations suffering.... Now, of course, Orson, I won’t be refining the sound effects until Saturday. Ora has specifically requested that I tell you she will do her best to bring Mars to Earth, effectively...not to judge her by these preliminary, perfunctory efforts.”

“Dear Ora,” Welles said wistfully, looking ceilingward, as if contemplating his first love, “she is a wonder. The best sound man we could ever hope for, despite a lack of cock and balls.”

Gibson wondered if he’d actually heard that....

From the doorway, Judy Holliday said, “Oh Mr. Welles, that’s terrible,” and burst into tears.

Welles went to her, put an arm around her shoulder, and said, “There, there...you mustn’t let such boy talk upset you so. I had no idea a gentle flower had planted itself in this doorway.”

“Can I...can I have the food sent up?”

“I’ll fire your little ass if you don’t!”

She disappeared, her feet travelling down the iron steps sounding like a barrage of bullets, punctuating Welles’s roar of hearty laughter.

The other men were smiling and chuckling, except for Gibson, an Alice still trying to get used to Wonderland.

Within minutes, a skinny, put-upon waiter in a white shirt and dark pants brought up a picnic basket, and left without waiting for a tip that he seemed to already know wasn’t going to come. Houseman played host and opened the basket on his card-table desk, lifting the metal hats covering each plate, passing out the food to its intended recipient. Miss Holliday reappeared with a coffeepot and cups, and distributed those as well. Welles disappeared with his two plates—two large steaks, one in the company of a single sour-cream-and-butter-slathered baked potato—behind the partition, to sit at the secretary’s desk there and eat unobserved.

The table was a good height for both Houseman and Gibson to eat their breakfasts, while Koch and Stewart—still seated on the daybed—seemed at ease eating off the plates in their laps, old hands at this.

Welles did call over a complaint about the single potato, until Houseman reminded him: “Your diet—remember?” To which Welles mumbled an unintelligible answer, a pouting child responding to a firm parent.

Then Welles, from behind the partition, ordered: “Well, play the goddamned thing, Housey!”

And Houseman placed the record on the record player, turned up the volume and they all ate while they listened to the rehearsal recording.

Minus the excitement of the studio, Koch’s “War of the Worlds” adaptation played even less excitingly, seeming terribly flat and uncompelling to Gibson. They finished their breakfast about halfway through—Martians were killing people at Grovers Mill—and suddenly Miss Holliday materialized again, to gather the plates and put them into the picnic basket, and vanish once more.

Gibson hardly noticed that Welles had taken the chair next to him again. The boy genius showed no emotion as he listened, sitting with arms folded, his expression as distant as it was blank.

When the recording reached its conclusion, and Bill Alland was signing off pretending to be Welles, the listener’s “obedient servant,” Houseman lifted the tone arm and the needle scratched just a bit. Then their host returned the acetate to its sleeve and looked at Welles, arching an eyebrow as if to say, “Well?”

“It stinks,” Welles said.

From the corner of his eye, Gibson saw Koch essentially collapse into himself; and Stewart closed his eyes, as if he’d chosen to respond by going to sleep.

“It’s corny,” Welles went on, shrugging grandly. His voice was soft, no longer filling the room, making Koch and Stewart listen carefully to hear their work dismissed. “Unbelievable. Dull as dishwater. Also ghastly—no one’s going to believe a word of it.... Paul, what does the cast think?”

Stewart swallowed. “They think it’s pretty thin.”

“And John Dietz? He’s been a good judge.”

“Our esteemed sound engineer thinks it’s weak. One of our worst shows.”

Welles turned to Gibson. “What’s your opinion, Walter?”

“It starts well,” Gibson managed.

Welles exploded off the chair. “Exactly right! Precisely right!”

Then the big man somehow managed to move around the little area, waving his arms, his eyes wild.

“Goddamnit, Howard, how you could blow this opportunity! I give you the key to this thing, and you throw it away! Threw it out the window!”

“Orson,” Koch said, “I don’t know what you mean—”

“And you, Paul,” Welles said to the man who was doing his directing for him, “how you could betray me like this?”

Stewart didn’t seem hurt or impressed, merely asked, “How so?”

Welles’s tone shifted entirely, became genteel as he said to Gibson, “Walter, would you mind moving over for me?”

Gibson did.

“There’s a dear.” With a huge arm, Welles violently swept the chair Gibson had been sitting in and it clattered against the wall. Welles then filled the space the chair had inhabited, and loomed over the two men seated on the daybed, as if he were parent and they wayward children.

Voice booming, he said, “How many times have I told the two of you that the Mercury’s responsibility is to bring experimental techniques to this untapped medium....
Not
to just treat our material like a ‘play’—the less a radio drama resembles a play, the better it’s going to be!”

Welles thrust a finger at Gibson, who jumped in his chair a bit. “
This man
, who does
not
work in our medium on a daily basis...though I might point out his instincts about that medium only gave me the
part
that put us
all
on the map...
immediately
honed in on what will separate this show from all the rest.”

Houseman, sitting back, hands folded on his belly, said in a voice that tried too hard to be nonchalant, “And what would that be, Orson?”

For the first time, Gibson realized that behind Houseman’s mask was something else—insecurity, even fear....

With a weight-of-the-world sigh, Orson Welles picked up the chair he’d tossed aside, righted it and sat, shaking his head slowly, a man devastated by disappointment.

“I suggested that we use news bulletins,” Welles said quietly...too quietly, “and eyewitness accounts.”

“We
did
,” Koch said, pain in his voice.

“You did...at the start—exactly twice.”

Koch nodded. “Right. To get us into the piece.”

Again Welles exploded, exasperated. “Howard—it
is
the piece! We need newscast simulations, absolutely believable.... We need that dance-band remote broadcast not to be interrupted once, like our recent ‘Sherlock Holmes’ broadcast was, but again and again.... We need
real
names, details, we need the illusion of up-to-the-second reality. Why do you think I had you change it from London to New Jersey? Why did I insist you do it modern-day, not in turn-of-the-century London?”

“Actually,” Koch said, raising a timid forefinger, “that was my idea...”

“Does it matter whose idea it is? Good God man, this is a collaboration! And the goal of this collaboration is to execute my vision!...Flash news bulletins, eyewitness accounts, as the Mars invasion is happening. Keep that going throughout the entire hour!”

Stewart said, “That’s impossible—the story covers months. It has to be resolved.”

“Fine, but keep it immediate as long as possible—for the first half of the thing, at the very least.”

Houseman sat forward. “Orson—don’t you realize that if we present...fake newscasts, for a half hour or more...”

“Up until the station break midway, precisely.”

Houseman swallowed and tried again. “Don’t you realize, Orson, that listeners are apt to misunderstand.”

Stewart snorted a laugh. “What, and think Martians are really invading?”

Welles was sitting with his arms folded now, his expression that of a pixie—a damn big pixie, but a pixie.

“And why not?” he asked.

Everyone sat forward, except Welles.

Houseman said, “Surely, you don’t mean to fool our listeners into...”

“If that’s all the more intelligent they are, why in hell not? Let me tell you where I got this idea. Back in 1926, a BBC broadcast out of Edinburgh, Scotland, presented a false news report about an unemployed mob in London sacking the National Gallery, blowing up Big Ben, hanging the Minister of Traffic to a tramway post, and blowing up the Houses of Parliament.”

Everyone but Welles sat open-mouthed.

Welles, eyes twinkling, continued, “The ‘newscast’ concluded with the destruction of the BBC’s flagship station.... After the broadcast, the BBC—and the police and the newspapers—were besieged with frantic citizens calling to see what was happening, and to find out what they could do in this terrible crisis.”

Then he laughed and laughed, patting his knees like a department-store Santa Claus.

“You see it was a period of unusual labor strife—days before a general strike—and...what’s wrong? You all look as if your best friend died.”