Today In History: October 30, 1938

From Simon Callow’s Orson Welles: Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu:

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 on 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.

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 conveniently 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.’ 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 …

By now a small but significant portion of the audience (with heavy concentration in the New Jersey area) were in a state of high hysteria. The Mercury audience had effectively doubled from its usual 3.6 per cent of the total audience (Bergen and McCarthy had a regular listenership of 34.7 per cent) to six million. Before the programme was even halfway through, the CBS switchboard was jammed with demands for verification, as were switchboards all over the country (Koch reports an operator who very properly replied to a question as to whether the world was coming to an end, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t have that information here.’) Other listeners assumed that the broadcast was the unvarnished truth needing no verification … The nature of radio, whose unique appeal to the audience’s imagination Welles and his collaborators had so brilliantly exploited in their earlier broadcasts, made the Martian broadcast horribly convincing …

Terrified listeners who had called CBS angrily threatened violence against Welles and the company on discovering that they were victims of what seemed to them to be a malicious hoax … Reporters besieged the building; when they could get through by telephone, they asked Welles or Houseman how they felt about the many deaths the broadcast had caused. Bewildered, frightened and genuinely remorseful, with no means of checking what the reporters were telling them, they could only protest the innocence of their intentions. Columbia were very nervous and steeled themselves for the legal actions which duly followed. They put out hourly disclaimers, affirming the fictional nature of the broadcast. The planned official midnight Hallowe’en broadcast, in which ghosts were to figure prominently, was cancelled …

Welles himself was palpably shaken by the furore he had unleashed.

In a newsreel interview with assembled pressmen, he apologises, unshaven and boyish, for the distress unwittingly caused. He has the attitude of a repentant schoolboy, big-eyed, serious-mouthed, frightened and exhilarated at the same time: circumspect, but nervously ready to burst out laughing. He says, his voice nervously high-pitched and slightly adenoidal, that the only anxiety they had before the broadcast was that it might have been boring, his only thought as he came off the air that he hadn’t given a very good performance. It was planned simply as a Hallowe’en joke, he says, (‘I’d every hope people would be excited, just as they are in a melodrama’) and he certainly would never do anything like it again. He is charming, but shifty, not quite sure whether he’d got off without any more serious penalties. (Legal actions were filed against both CBS and the Mercury; all failed.) Later, Welles became more articulate about the incident. ‘The most terrifying thing,’ he told the Saturday Evening Post ‘is suddenly becoming aware that you are not alone. In this case the earth, thinking itself alone, suddenly became aware that another planet was prowling around.’ He had another theory, too: ‘the last two generations are softened up because they were deprived in their childhoods, through mistaken theories of education, of the tales of blood and horror which used to be part of the routine training of the young. Under the old system the child felt at home among ghosts and goblins, and did not grow up to be a push-over for sensational canards. But the ban on gruesome fairy tales, terrifying nursemaids and other standard sources of horror has left most of the population without any protection against fee-fi-fo-fum stuff.’ This second theory seems very personal: the need to embrace demons; the necessity of healthy terror and – presumably – guilt.

The War of the Worlds incident, though giving rise to an extraordinary event, and revealing some remarkable aspects of America in 1938, was one of the most purely fortuitous events of Welles’s career. His personal responsiblity for it is negligible, beyond having directed it with great flair. Houseman precisely analyses the skill of the production, especially its slow build-up of tension; but most of the people who had been frightened by it had only joined the programme a third of the way through, so they were never subject to that manipulation. Nor was Welles responsible for the adaptation. He later attempted to claim authorship for the script, but there is a great deal of entirely conclusive evidence on the contrary … There is, moreover, no evidence that the programme was planned as the devilishly clever Hallowe’en prank that it seemed to be. Describing the programme as a practical joke was an idea improvised on the spot as a sop to the panic released during the broadcast. Nor was there a conscious attempt to play on fears of a European invasion. The fact is that Welles had barely thought about the programme, being wholly occupied until the very last minute by his losing struggle with Danton’s Death.

Welles was praised for having his finger on the pulse of his times, and for being the conman of the century, able to make anybody believe anything. The truth is that he was more surprised than anyone at what had happened, and extremely irritated by it … For Welles in October 1938, the immediate result of the broadcast was notoreity. People who had never been to the theatre, who had never so much as read a review and who would never have dreamed of consciously tuning in to the Mercury Theatre of the Air, suddenly knew who he was. And not just in America: the news of the panic flashed round the world, where the incident was held up (particularly in Europe) as proof, if any were needed, of the ingrained idiocy of Americans. ‘America today hardly knows whether to laugh or to be angry,’ scoffed the London Times. ‘Here is a nation which, alone of the big nations, has deemed it unnecessary to rehearse for protection against attack from the air by fellow-beings on this earth and suddenly believes itself – and for little enough reason – faced with a more fearful attack from another world.’ It was left to the more popular end of the market to report on Welles himself: the Daily Express piece was headed HE’S A LAD. Recapitulating favourite yarns it hailed him as ‘America’s best villainous radio voice,’ whose ‘ha-ha’s and hee-hee’s are adored by millions.’ The Star (STORMY WELLES) offered a more sober assessment: ‘he has had a career almost as remarkable as his broadcast … making history at the Mercury Theatre, New York.’ The Evening News was also more interested in his theatrical reputation: ‘by his energetic direction and ruthless manhandling of the classics, he has made his theatre, the Mercury, the liveliest in New York … the broadcast has set the seal on his reputation as the enfant terrible of the New York stage.’ It had entirely done that, though its most important effects were to come.

Excerpt from my diary, my senior year in high school:

Then we threw darts and sang the score of The Music Man. He said, “Hey! I have a tape of The Fantasticks!” And he went rummaging around for it but instead he found another tape – with a coo of delight. “Oh! I know! Want to hear War of the Worlds?” I’d heard of it, knew what it was about, knew it was Orson Welles, but had never heard it – so I said yes. Brett put the tape in (he loves it) – then he went around turning off all the lights in his room except for a tiny one on his bedside table.

Then he said, “Okay – get on the bed.”

Then he climbed on the bed beside me and we listened to it. We pretended it was real. We pretended that we were a married couple in the 1920s and just normally listening to the radio – and then that comes on. It was SO MUCH MORE FREAKY that way. I convinced myself that I totally believed it. It was really fun.

Then when they announced that it was a recording, we both started screaming and laughing and rolling around, going, “I can’t believe that!!!”