Houseman bowed slightly. “And with that piece of the puzzle, there was little left to solve.”
Gibson gestured with an open hand. “Your accomplice was free to clean up and slip out, while we played out our part of the charade. By the way, Leo the elevator ‘boy’ told me of the woman who left the building, obviously not wanting to be recognized, not long after your accomplice would have made her getaway; he thought she might be Mrs. Welles, but then of course neither Mrs. Welles nor Balanchine were ever at the Columbia Broadcasting Building today. You had their names written into the reception book, knowing Welles’s habit to check up on who’d dropped by, natural enough with all the affairs of the heart he’s been juggling-and easy enough to find a Virginia Welles signature to copy. So I was sent scurrying after suspects who hadn’t even been present when the crime was committed. Classic use of the first tactic of magic-misdirection.”
Onstage Welles was sensing the disbelief around him.
“What is this skeptical murmur?” he said. “Every word is factual-it’s all true!”
“Tell us another one,” somebody said from the audience.
Laughter and catcalls followed, even a little light sarcastic applause.
One of the press photographers in the pit called something up to Welles, and the director leaned over at stage’s edge to hear what the photog had to say. Smiling, the wunderkind got to his feet.
“So you don’t believe me? Come with me, my flock of doubters-follow me, boys! And girls….”
All of them-cast members still in full Danton’s Death French Revolution drag-marched up the aisle after their leader and out into the crisp October night, as if looking for a Bastille to sack.
Gibson walked alongside Houseman. “So you wanted to teach him a lesson-and you enlisted someone else who wanted to get back at Orson, huh?”
With a sideways glance, Houseman said, “You understand, of course, I never imagined this panic would be so extensive-I would not have put Orson through that horror show, had I known-”
“Sure.” Gibson fired up a Camel as they walked, waved out the match, sent it gutterbound. “But I think you did anticipate some kind of panic, otherwise you wouldn’t have tried to talk our bumptious boy out of doing the show in so overt a ‘newscast’ fashion.”
“Granted-had I foreseen the extent of it, however, I wouldn’t have found it necessary to provide him that other opportunity for a comeuppance….”
“So where’s the murder weapon?”
“Back on the Mercury office wall.”
In Times Square, on southeast corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, awash in neon and with a good view of the Times Building and its lighted bulletin, the so-called Moving News sign that circled the venerable paper’s building, Welles assembled his Revolutionary army.
“There,” he said, and pointed, as if to a star. In a way, he was: his own.
ORSON WELLES CAUSES PANIC, the sign flashed. MARS INVASION BROADCAST FRIGHTENS NATION.
His company, believers again, emitted ooohs and aaaahs, then began to applaud. And Welles, despite all that hovered over him, began to smile, and took a small, humble bow.
A shapely figure in one of the French low-cut peasant dresses slipped an arm through Welles’s. “Hi, Orson. Hope you don’t mind-Jack gave me a part in the chorus.”
Welles’s eyes narrowed, then widened, as he realized who was standing beside him. “Dolores?”
“No hard feelings?” Dolores Donovan said, with mischievous malice, and perhaps some affection.
For a moment he looked stricken, as if the lovely blue-eyed strawberry-blonde might be an apparition; then his eyes searched for Houseman, who ambled up to his other side, Gibson following. Everyone was doused in the red of a dancing neon advertising soap flakes.
Sounding like a little boy, Welles said, “Housey-it was just a…?”
“ ‘Hoax’ is the word, I believe.” Houseman touched Welles’s sleeve. “And my dear Orson, I would never have subjected you this terrible practical joke, had I known-”
Welles hugged Dolores, kissed her on the mouth. Then he looked at her tenderly and said, “I’m so glad you’re alive-and by God, I’m glad, too, to have an actress of your caliber in my company.”
Then he turned her loose, and-giving Houseman a hard look-said, “Is this that lesson you promised?”
“It was meant to be, but-”
“But I’ll need more than one, right?”
“Very possibly,” Houseman granted.
And Welles slipped an arm around his friend and began to laugh and laugh and laugh, a Falstaffian roar of a laugh that seemed to relieve Houseman a great deal. But Gibson sensed some hysteria in it.
Which was only fair, after all, considering the hysteria Orson Welles had launched tonight.
The Times sign was announcing the time: twelve A.M.
Midnight.
“It’s Hallowe’en, everyone,” Welles thundered. “It is finally…at long last, really and truly…Hallowe’en.”
CHAPTER TEN
Walter Gibson had been scheduled to go back on the train to Philly on Monday morning, and-though hardly a lick of work on the project for which he’d been brought to Manhattan had been accomplished-that was what he did. Most of the way he slept, because he’d lingered at the Mercury Theatre as the Danton’s Death rehearsal got underway shortly after midnight. Around dawn, he’d exchanged casual but friendly good-byes with both Houseman and Welles, the latter assuring him they’d be getting together again soon, to “really get down to work” on the Shadow script.
The aftermath of the “invasion,” then, was something Gibson witnessed secondhand. He saw the newspaper headlines-RADIO LISTENERS IN PANIC, TAKING WAR DRAMA AS FACT (the Times); FAKE RADIO “WAR” STIRS TERROR THROUGH U.S. (the Daily News); and the Herald Tribune wrote of “hysteria, panic and sudden conversions to religion,” in the wake of the invasion from Mars.
Contacted in England, H.G. Wells himself objected to the Welles adaptation, complaining (without having actually heard the broadcast) that apparently too many liberties had been taken with his material, and that he was “deeply concerned” that his work would be used “to cause distress and alarm throughout the United States.” (Later Wells and Welles would meet and the former would express a revised opinion, backing Orson all the way, and wondering why it was that Americans were so easily fooled-hadn’t they ever heard of Hallowe’en?)
CBS issued an elaborate apology and announced a new policy of banning any such simulated news broadcasts, which NBC also pompously adopted. Both CBS and the Mercury Theatre denied that the broadcast had been designed as a publicity stunt to promote the upcoming opening of Danton’s Death. The Federal Communications Commission studied the “regrettable” matter, but never took action, despite a dozen formal protests.
The talk of criminal charges fluttered away in a day-there had been no deaths, so the “murders” the press tried to scare Welles with (in the immediate aftermath of the broadcast) were as big a hoax as the broadcast itself.
And while the litigation war drums pounded for some weeks, none of the claims went anywhere, though Welles-over the protests of Davidson Taylor and William Paley-did honor a request for the price of a pair of black shoes, size 9B, whose prospective owner had used the designated funds to buy a bus ticket to escape the Martians.
Public indignation raged only briefly, though some of it was stinging, the New York Times scolding Welles and CBS for creating a “wave of panic in which it inundated the nation.”