The War of the Worlds Murder by Max Allan Collins

the medium that you were talking about.”
    Stewart grunted. “More bulletins, you think?” He seemed to be asking Gibson as much as Koch.
    Koch threw up his hands. “We better wait for Orson on this. He’ll have an opinion.”
    Stewart arched a dark eyebrow. “ An opinion?”
    Everyone stood, and after some small talk, Gibson was about to take his leave when Stewart was called to the phone. Since good-byes hadn’t been exchanged yet, Gibson waited politely. Stewart returned a few minutes later.
    “That was Orson,” the director said. “He’s tied up at the theater working on Danton’s Death —the new play. I told himyou sat through the rehearsal, Walter, and he’d like you to join us when we listen to the acetate, and help us brainstorm over how to fix this thing.”
    “Well...I’d be glad to. It’s an honor.”
    Koch smirked. “Not really. Orson loves to charm free help out of professionals.”
    Gibson lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I’m on expense account. What time?”
    Stewart sighed. “That’s the bad part—can you make five A.M. over at the Mercury Theatre?”
    “Sure.” Gibson shook his head, and chortled, “But I didn’t figure a theater-type like Orson Welles for such an early hour.”
    “More like late,” Stewart said. “He’ll probably still be rehearsing the cast when we get there....”

FRIDAY

OCTOBER 28, 1938

    O N M AY 6, 1915 , O RSON Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, not far from Chicago, Illinois. His family was well-off, even well-to-do, his father an inventor and a hotelier, his mother a renowned pianist. From early childhood, he was surrounded by friends of the family who were intellectuals and artists—musicians, writers, actors, painters, and the occasional industrialist. He was welcomed as a prodigy, a child genius, and Orson lived up to the challenge. Before long a headline in a Madison newspaper was proclaiming him: “Cartoonist, Actor, Poet—and Only Ten!”
    “My father,” he once said, “was a gentle, sensitive soul whose kindness, generosity and tolerance made him much beloved.... From him I inherited the love of travel, which has become ingrained within me. From my mother I inherited a real and lasting love of music and the spoken word, without which no human being is really a complete and satisfactory person.”
    His father, however, often travelled without him; and his mother died within days of the boy’s ninth birthday. His guardian, Dr. Maurice Bernstein (a former lover of Orson’s mother), shared with the parents a belief in the boy’s genius—Bernstein gave the child a conductor’s baton at age three. The guardian (“Dadda,” Orson called him) also introduced young Orson to magic tricks, and gave him a puppet theater where the precocious one could concoct his own shows .
    He was fifteen when his father died, and his youth thereafter was spent in a series of progressive schools; by high school he was an old hand at producing Shakespeare, coming up with a version of Julius Caesar that won top prize from the Chicago Drama League for a student production (once the jury had been shown proof that the young actors were not professionals) .
    At sixteen, he set out from the latest of these schools for Europe with five hundred dollars and a dream of becoming an artist—he had painted and drawn since age two. He wound up in Dublin, broke—travelling by donkey cart, paying his way with his artwork after the money ran out—and presented himself to the prestigious Gate Theatre company as an American Broadway star, “the sensation of the New York Theatre Guild.”
    His confidence was credible, if not his story, and soon in this old city with its rich theatrical tradition, the young actor was on stage, winning good notices—playing a duke, the ghost in Hamlet, and even the King of Persia. Soon offers came from England, but when the boy tried to follow up on these opportunities, the Ministry of Labor refused a work permit, and Orson Welles returned