Orson Welles, Vol I (71 page)

Meanwhile, back to the inferno. At the dress rehearsal, the young costume designer Leo van Witsen (originally hired for
Too Much Johnson
) was summarily dismissed; somewhat unfairly, it would seem, since he had never been given a line on what he was supposed to be doing. Costumes were being supplied by Brooks Costumes on the cheap, but they had provided the worst tailor on their staff to execute and alter them; as a result, nothing fitted. Millia Davenport took over, simplifying things; the only simplification that
occurred on the entire production. There had never been such a complex lighting plot. There were (for the Mercury) an unprecedented number of eighty-five lights, each of which had a number and a name, and which had to be unplugged throughout the show. All the dimmers were operated manually, and separately. The huge task of co-ordinating this was achieved by a system of counts which were quite
audible during performances, but which fortuitously abetted Welles’s notion of having the auditorium filled with cries, shouts and
whispers coming from all parts of the theatre. Howard Teichmann was operating the board from the wings, and was unable to see the effect of what he was doing; Jean Rosenthal had no intercom facility, and could only keep in touch with him by telephone. The greatest
difficulty was lighting the huge cyclorama which stretched two hundred foot against the back wall. Inspired by the play’s lines ‘You have built a system as Bajazet built his pyramids, out of human skulls’ and ‘You need loaves and they fling you heads’ Welles and his designer, Tichacek, had the notion of creating a sort of cranial panorama, a wall of skulls. Bill Alland suggested that they use hallowe’en
masks; Dick Barr and other apprentices were sent out to scour the shops: ‘We pre-empted all the masks in New York that year. I never did find out what the kids substituted because there were literally no masks left in the shops.’
³⁰
They ended up with 5,000 unpainted, white masks, which had to be bent a quarter of an inch around, then glued on to the cyclorama and finally sprayed with a sort of
purplish paint. The colour and angle of the light varied according to dramatic need: for Robespierre’s nocturnal meditations it turned ‘a steely-gray, vicious, as though the whole pile were about to fall on him and stone him to death … at the end of the play, as Danton goes to his execution, the whole wall of skulls split apart to reveal a narrow slit against a blue sky topped by glittering steel’
³¹
(Richard France). For the final curtain, drums rolled, the guillotine knife flashed down, and there was a sudden blackout.

The difficulty for Jean Rosenthal, designing the light, was to isolate the sections of the cyclorama and avoid spill, which would have ruined the concentrated effect. This feature of the design, which everyone who worked on the production recalls for its originality and
boldness, is curiously little alluded to or described in the reviews; the truth is that it was impossible finally to make it work. ‘I kept saying, “it’s going to look like a lot of pebbles, Orson.” Well, I was wrong. It didn’t look like pebbles. It just looked like a purple cyke. They didn’t see it at all,’
³²
said Teichmann. No doubt with time, and a certain amount of calm a solution could have
been found; but neither were available any more. Hysteria pitch was approaching. ‘Orson yelled out for some lights. Jeannie looked at me and bowed her head and pulled the main switches and went down. “You’re asking for lights from
Horse Eats Hat
. We’re not doing any more, we’re going home.” We pulled all the switches, and that was that. We were all so groggy.’
³³
The desperate struggle against
machinery and time began to look unwinnable. No doubt many of Welles’s ideas were excellent, though he seemed to be making them up as he
went along. Improvisation within a simple operation can work; to improvise at this level of technology is to put an impossible burden on everyone. Welles obviously began to think that anything could be done, if he shouted hard and long enough. But the human beings
rebelled, realising, perhaps, that he was just thrashing around – in the dark, almost literally. The light at the first preview was improvised: a homicidal procedure on that particular set. Immediately after the preview, at nearly midnight, there was a further lighting rehearsal at which they managed to plot the first act (the entire show lasted no more than ninety minutes). The next preview
was cancelled while lamps were hung, rehung and hung again. Miraculously, no serious accidents had occurred, though Kevin O’Morrison, making a rapid exit to the cellar with a large group of extras, reached for a crossbar that had been moved, lost his footing and fell twenty-five foot to a concrete floor below. He got up and walked away, unharmed.

Then calamity struck, as it inevitably must
in the presence of so much tension. The elevator (a cheap one, the only one they could afford) always operated fitfully; at a run-through, it juddered and suddenly collapsed. Erskine Sandford, sitting aristocratically at the tea table inside the elevator, was hurled to the floor and broke his leg; he was rushed to hospital, never appearing in the show. He was the lucky one. As the actors stood round,
ashen-faced, Jeannie Rosenthal demanded three days to get it working, which she was given. It failed again, this time at a public preview, bringing the show to a halt. Welles and Gabel played scenes from
Julius Caesar
to divert the audience; finally Rosenthal gave up, and the show had to be cancelled, Houseman appearing onstage with a hurriedly snatched-up piece of paper on which he claimed was
recorded the audience’s majority decision to come back to another performance instead of having their money back. It was at about this moment in the infernal proceedings that Howard Koch, only recently appointed to the writing team of the Mercury Theatre of the Air, was handed a copy of
The War of the Worlds
‘with instructions from Houseman to dramatise it in the form of news bulletins’.
³⁴
Finding the book dull and dated, he tried to persuade them to switch to something else. The only alternative, he was told, was
Lorna Doone
, at which prospect he understandably blanched and agreed to attempt to liven up Wells, H.G.

H
OWARD KOCH’S
breakthrough with
The War of the Worlds
came when he decided to change the location of the novel from England to America, randomly selecting the New Jersey village of Grover’s Mill as the site of the invasion. From then on, realistic imperatives dictated the course of the script. He would use news bulletins, as Houseman had
suggested, interrupting a programme to give the reports added urgency and credibility; a broadcast of music from a hotel seemed the most likely. ‘Radio was full at that time of remote programs from hotels,’
¹
said Eric Barnouw, ‘they were always filling in time by going to the Hotel Pennsylvania, and so forth.’ The adaptation he produced, though ingenious, reads fairly creakily, and the second
half, in which the apparently lone survivor of the invasion, Professor Pierson of Princeton, meets an artilleryman living underground before stumbing towards the light at the end of the Holland Tunnel, is frankly dull, quite unlike the usual brilliant montages and swiftly succeeding scenes so characteristic of the Mercury Theatre of the Air.

There was certainly no jubilation when the script
was presented to Houseman and Welles. Snatching a few minutes from the nightmarish activities in the theatre, they picked at it in their usual way, pulling it about structurally and demanding more realism. In this they were stymied by the legal department of CBS, who demanded a number of changes in the names of real organisations, though they were able to retain the place names. As usual a mid-week
recording of the material was made; again it met with little favour. Welles dismissed the script as ‘corny’, urging Koch to break it up more and more. Paul Stewart devised the sound effects and rehearsed them in careful detail; these might be spectacular enough to distract attention from the thinness of the piece. Even the technicians were unenthusiastic about the show; the secretaries denounced
it as silly. Finally at noon on Sunday, tearing himself away from another
Danton’s Death
lighting rehearsal, Welles arrived at the studio direct from the theatre, and assaulted the unsatisfactory material.
‘All during rehearsals,’ wrote Dick Barr, ‘Orson railed at the text, cursing the writers, and at the whole idea of his presenting so silly a show.’
²
He hardly changed the script. What he did
was to play it for all it was worth, and then some more.

Focusing on the device of an interrupted programme, he dared to attempt a verisimilitude that had rarely been essayed before. The apparent breakdowns in transmission, the desperate irruptions of dance music, the sadly tinkling piano were all held longer than would be thought possible. The actors too were galvanised into startlingly real
and precisely observed performances. Frank Readick as Carl Phillips, the reporter on the spot who describes the invasion and then collapses dead at his mike, had listened over and over again to a recording of the report of the explosion of the Hindenburg air balloon from a year or two before and exactly imitated the original commentator’s graduation from comfortable report through growing disbelief
to naked horror. Using skills honed on
The March of Time
, the show became, until about its halfway point, a brilliantly effective transposition of the original novel, sharp enough to make even the most sceptical listener wonder, however idly, how Americans might react to the unprecedented event of an invasion, not from Mars, of course, but from Europe – from Germany or perhaps even from England.

This was a matter much in the minds of Americans, who were daily reminded in the press that they alone of all Western nations had failed to devise a system of civil defence against attack from the air. Only three days before,
Air Raid
, a play by Archibald MacLeish, vividly directed by William Robson, had been broadcast, bringing home the brutal bombing of helpless citizenry, ‘awakening many
listeners,’ in LeRoy Bannerman’s words, ‘to the swift and violent terror advanced by the warplane.’
³
The sense that war in Europe was daily more likely was not far from anyone’s mind, the feeling of defencelessness creating a mood of national jumpiness – compounded that fall by reports of terrifying hurricanes that had ravaged the East Coast. ‘You really had the feeling,’
⁴
said Eric Barnouw in
an interview, ‘that the world might come to an end at any minute.’ The vividness of the dramatisation stems from its imitation of the newscasts whose bulletins so frequently concerned events ominously gathering in Europe. Neither Koch nor Houseman nor Welles intended any serious parallel, of course; they were simply trying to liven up a dull book, using what was all around them, on the air and in
the papers.

What no one at all could have predicted was that anyone might
have thought that an actual invasion from Mars was being reported. There was no attempt to conceal the fact that the listener was hearing a dramatisation of a novel, from the beginning of the programme, with its standard announcement (‘CBS present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in a radio play by Howard
Koch suggested by the H.G. Wells novel
The War of the Worlds
’) and the appropriately but conventionally chilling introduction from Welles, taken with only small modifications from the novella: ‘We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s but as mortal as his own … [who] regarded this earth with envious eyes
and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. In the thirty-eighth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.’
⁵
Only towards the end of this introduction does Koch start the process of relocation. ‘It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October 30, the Crossley
service estimated that 32 million people were listening in on radios …’ So the programme is clearly framed as a broadcast within a broadcast. Then comes the neatly devised sequence of weather report, musical interlude (from the non-existent Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York), news flash about peculiar explosions, more music, more announcements, rambling interview with Professor Pierson, head
of the Observatory at Princeton (a gruff and bumbling and highly recognisable Welles), followed by the brilliant on-the-spot reporting sequences.

It was at this point (8.12 p.m. according to Houseman) that the crucial event occurred which precipitated the subsequent panic. The programme that had freed up the slot which gave the Mercury access to the air waves at all was the massively popular
Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show
, that most improbable of radio successes, featuring a ventriloquist and his anarchic dummy. Just under a quarter of an hour into the programme, the monocled dummy, his operator and the assembled zanies including Mortimer Snerd, Effie Klinker, Ersel Twing, Vera Vague and Professor Lionel Carp, were given a rest while a vocalist trilled. Immediately, and rather
depressingly for the vocalist in question, a large proportion of the listeners would reach for their dials and twiddle until they found something more congenial, usually returning to the dummy after a few minutes. On the night of 30 October 1938, 12 per cent of
Bergen and McCarthy
’s audience, twiddling away, suddenly found themselves listening, appalled, to
a news report of an invasion, by now
well under way, by Martians.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been handed a message that came in from Grover’s Mill by telephone. Just a moment. At least forty people, including six state troopers, lie dead in a field east of the village of Grover’s Mill, their bodies burned and distorted beyond all recognition.’ Music was played; experts were interviewed, then a reporter started to describe
the scene. ‘Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now it’s another one and another. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing’s body. It’s large as a bear and it glistens like black leather. But that face … it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped
with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate … this is the most extraordinary experience. I can’t find words … I’m pulling this microphone with me as I talk … hold on, will you please, I’ll be back in a minute.’ Shortly afterwards, they heard the microphone fall to the ground, then dead silence. There were more announcements, in the excitable, stentorian tones familiar
from newsreels. The heads of the armed forces were brought to the microphone, and then finally, the Secretary of the Interior: ‘we must continue the performance of our duties each and every one of us, so that we may confront this destructive adversary with a nation united, courageous, and consecrated to the preservation of human supremacy on this earth.’