The War of the Worlds Murder

SUNDAY

W alter G ibson’s famous creation was not the only Shadow cast by radio in 1938-the shadow of war also served to keep listeners on edge, and in a far more disturbing fashion….

For several months prior to The Mercury Theatre on the Air’s broadcast of a certain H.G. Wells science-fiction yarn, listeners had been alerted to the troublesome state of the world, homes all across the nation taken hostage by talking boxes in their living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms and automobiles. The same gizmo that was sharing household hints and fudge recipes, cowboy adventures and comedy shows, weather reports and advertisements for corn plasters, popular tunes and classical music, was also bombarding America with the latest disasters, subjecting them to an endless parade of ominous international events. At no other time since the beginning of broadcasting had the collective audience been held in such a rapt, fearful grip, with listeners quite accustomed to their favorite programs being interrupted for news updates…and the news was never good….

In his September address to the annual Nazi party congress in Nuremberg, German dictator Adolf Hitler demanded autonomy over an area on the Czech border known as Sudetenland. It seemed over three million “Sudeten Germans,” as the Fuhrer called them, were “tortured souls” who could not “obtain rights and help themselves,” so the Nazis had to do it for them. (The translation Americans heard was provided by the dean of radio commentators, H.V. Kaltenborn, who just months before had been chosen by Orson Welles to narrate the Mercury radio broadcast of “Julius Caesar,” to add “a dimension of realism and immediacy.”) On October 3, Germany made its triumphant drive into the town of Asch, and a week later, Hitler’s troops occupied the Sudetenland.

Hearing of such an ill-boding event firsthand was already old hat to American radio listeners. Hitler’s conquests became a kind of serial for grown-ups, the Czech crisis playing out over three tense weeks-listeners hearing firsthand the march step of Nazi boots, the accusations and the threats, the rumblings of war that included the Far Eastern menace of the Japanese. At the height of the European crisis, about a month before the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, a presentation of “Sherlock Holmes” by The Mercury Theatre on the Air had been interrupted by a news bulletin, irritating (but also making an impression on) Orson Welles.

Most Americans felt the inevitability of involvement of the U.S.A. in a world conflict in which its allies were either threatened or already embroiled: as the Germans marched into Austria, the English people were issued gas masks, and all of Europe noted with alarm Hitler calling up to active duty one million weekend soldiers from the German army reserve.

Radio statistics indicated that the medium’s audience had never been larger; what the numbers didn’t spell out was that these masses of listeners had never been more worried. Days before the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, Leni Riefenstahl-German filmmaker and rumored mistress of the Fuhrer-was in Manhattan promoting her documentary about the 1936 Olympics, finding critical acceptance and public hostility. Meanwhile in Rome, the voice of fascism-the newspaper II Tevere-ordered the boycott of the films of Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers and the Ritz Brothers, the humor of these Jewish filmmakers condemned as “not Aryan.”

And the looming war was not the sole source of American jitters-earlier in 1938, a hurricane had hit the East Coast with devastating power; and, the year previous, the first disaster ever to be broadcast live exposed thousands to the explosion of the Hindenburg. When the German zeppelin caught fire at its mooring in Lakehurst, New Jersey, the announcer had been in the midst of describing the huge craft’s grandeur, only to witness…and report in “on the spot” fashion…the bursting flames and the dying people and all the ensuing chaos. His sobs-even his retching-had gone out over the air waves, “live”….

Just four days before the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, CBS’s prestigious (if little-listened-to) Columbia Workshop aired a verse play by Archibald MacLeish: “Air Raid.” Orson Welles listened to the production on a break rehearsing Danton’s Death, because he had loaned his friend and Mercury regular, Ray Collins, to the production to be its narrator, a mock announcer reporting an air raid from a European tenement rooftop-the whine of attacking planes could be heard, the explosions of their dropped bombs, the sounds of a confused populace running for shelter, machine-gun fire, the screams of victims, including a young boy….

Though written in verse, and clearly a play, the approach invoked a live news report. Welles heard this realistic radio drama a few hours before he made his suggestions to Howard Koch, John Houseman and Paul Stewart, about revising the script for “War of the Worlds” into a collage of broadcasts interrupted by news bulletins.

As one of the participants in the “War of the Worlds” broadcast would reflect many years later, “The American people had been hanging on their radios, getting most of their news no longer from the press, but over the air. A new technique of ‘on-the-spot’ reporting had been developed and eagerly accepted by an anxious and news-hungry world. The Mercury Theatre on the Air, by faithfully copying every detail of the new technique-including its imperfections-found an already enervated audience ready to accept its wildest fantasies….”