But somehow the entire event was best characterized by the final phone call the CBS switchboard received, around three A.M. after the broadcast, which was from a truck driver in Chicago who asked if this was the network that put on the show about the Martian invasion; when the switchboard operator confirmed as much, the listener said his wife had got so riled up over the show, she ran outside, fell down the stairs and broke her leg. A long pause, and then:
“Jeez,” the listener said wistfully, “that was a wonderful broadcast….”
Welles liked to display a cable he received from the real FDR (as opposed to Kenny Delmar), who commented on the Mars Invasion upstaging Charlie McCarthy: THIS ONLY GOES TO PROVE, MY BEAMISH BOY, THAT THE INTELLIGENT PEOPLE WERE ALL LISTENING TO THE DUMMY, AND ALL THE DUMMIES WERE LISTENING TO YOU.
Such whimsy soon came to dominate coverage of the event, and within days the public’s reaction had shifted to amusement and even appreciation.
A New York Tribune writer, Dorothy Thompson, said it best: “Unwittingly, Mr. Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre on the Air have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of all time-they have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition to create a nationwide panic.”
This, the writer said, indicated the “appalling dangers and enormous effectiveness of popular and theatrical demagoguery…. Hitler managed to scare all of Europe to its knees a month ago, but he at least had an army and an air force to back up his shrieking words. But Mr. Welles scared thousands into demoralization with nothing at all.”
She went to say that Welles had thrown a “brilliant and cruel light” on education in America; that thousands of the populace had been shown to be stupid, lacking in nerve but not short of ignorance; that primeval fears lay beneath the “thinnest surface of civilized man”; and “how easy it was to start a mass delusion.”
The Nation made a chilling point similar to Thompson’s: the real cause of the panic was “the sea of insecurity and actual ignorance over which a superficial literacy and sophistication are spread like a thin crust.”
Many years later, Welles would admit, “The thing that gave me the idea for it was that we had a lot of real radio nuts on as commentators at this period-people who wanted to keep us out of European entanglements, and a fascist priest called Father Coughlin. And people believed anything they heard on the radio. So I said, ‘Let’s do something impossible and make them believe it.’ And then tell them, show them, that it’s only…radio.”
But at a Hallowe’en Day news conference in 1938, Welles told a different story. By the time Gibson saw excerpts in a newsreel, the furor had already died down, and last week seemed ancient history.
There Welles was, a few hours after Gibson had last seen him at the theater, now on trial before a battery of reporters, looking schoolboy contrite, a little bewildered and vaguely devilish with his goatee-ish need of a shave.
He was “deeply shocked and deeply regretful,” and when asked if he was aware of the panic such a broadcast might stir up, he claimed, “Definitely not.”
Some found him charming in the press conference; other shifty. Some saw a “palpably shaken,” repentant young man, while others considered him “hammy,” and “insulting” in the transparent way he feigned surprised dismay. One report had him, on the way out, flashing Jack Houseman a wink and an OK sign.
Welles’s writer, Howard Koch, who had so brilliantly executed the prank in play form, missed the fuss, at least initially. Sunday night, when he got home, he had listened to the rest of the broadcast, felt satisfied they’d all transcended the weak material, and dropped exhausted into bed. He had slept through the ringing phone, as Paul Stewart tried to alert him to the panic and the press.
Hallowe’en morning, he’d gone out to get a haircut and heard odd, even ominous snatches of conversation on the sidewalk, pedestrians talking of “panic” and “invasion.” The scriptwriter thought that perhaps the inevitable war with Hitler had finally broken out.
When he asked his barber what was going on, the haircutter showed him a front page with a headline blaring, NATION IN A PANIC FROM MARTIAN BROADCAST.
Like Welles, Koch wondered if he was finished; but a call from Hollywood soon came, and the co-organizer of the Martian Invasion would go on to one of the most distinguished careers in the history of screenwriting, including a little picture in 1942 called Casablanca.
Welles had not been ruined, either, though there was no saving Danton’s Death from the director’s pretensions. The production could not even ride the biggest wave of publicity the city had ever seen, and-after mostly withering reviews-closed after a mere twenty-one performances. The Mercury Theatre would not last another season.
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.”