The War of the Worlds Murder by Max Allan Collins Page A
Authors: Max Allan Collins
Tags: Disaster Series
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to America, a seasoned veteran of the Dublin stage .
But Broadway was—initially—unimpressed, and young Welles sought theatrical satisfaction offstage, creating an annotated stage edition of Shakespeare’s works (The Mercury Shakespeare) and returning to the pursuit of painting, first in Morocco, then Spain. When playwright Thornton Wilder recommended him to Katharine Cornell, the celebrated actress hired him to appear in touring productions of The Barretts of Wimpole Street and Romeo and Juliet.
Operating out of Chicago, Welles further dabbled in theater in nearby rural Woodstock, organizing a festival through the Todd School, one of the progressive institutions he’d attended as a child. In addition to attracting attention, and making his first short film, Welles won a wife, a lovely and privileged eighteen-year-old actress, Virginia Nicholson .
His touring for Katharine Cornell finally led to Broadway, where a struggling producer—John Houseman—saw the teenager’s performance as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, and knew at once his own destiny would be bound up with that of this “monstrous boy—flatfooted and graceless, yet swift and agile...from which issued a voice of such clarity and power that it tore like a high wind through the genteel, modulated voices of the well-trained professionals around him.”
At thirty-three, the balding, stocky former Jacques Haussmann—born in Bucharest to an English mother and French father, a successful grain merchant turned Broadway writer/producer/director—was at a personal crossroads. Despite an intimidating bearing, including the accent of a cultured English gentleman, Houseman had little confidence in himself—“My shame and fear were almost unbearable, my ineptitude so glaring”—and in the nineteen-year-old Welles, Houseman saw in full bloom the qualities he himself lacked .
A partnership began with Houseman hiring the teenager to play a sixty-year-old failed industrialist in the prophetically titled Archibald MacLeish play , Panic. The show ran only three performances, but Welles was praised, and a partnership was forged, Houseman as business administrator, Welles as artistic director. Together they mounted New York’s most compelling theatrical productions of the mid-1950s. For the Federal Theatre, a WPA project designed to create work for actors, they staged an innovative, all-black-cast Macbeth in a striking Haitian voodoo setting designed by Welles himself. Then, with barely two nickels to rub together, the two men created their own repertory company, the Mercury Theatre .
Their first production , Julius Caesar, was performed in modern dress in a stark, startling setting—actors in business suits and fascist military uniforms against a blood-red background. Their most famous production, Marc Blitzstein’s opera The Cradle Will Rock, found the dynamic duo thumbing their noses at the WPA shutting them down, and skirting union demands despite the play’s (and their own) left-wing stance, by staging the show from the audience, actors standing and performing their lines in the aisles amid dazzled theatergoers .
During this same period, Welles had become a popular radio actor—a brilliant serialization in 1937 of Les Miserables had paved the way for future glories, and by 1938 The March of Time and Shadow star was making a thousand dollars a week...even before he brought his and Jack Houseman’s repertory company, the Mercury Theatre, to CBS .
In October 1938, Orson Welles was twenty-three years old .
CHAPTER TWO
BROADWAY MALADY OF 1938
T HROUGH THE EARLY MORNING FOG came the brooding bray of a great liner—the Queen Mary —steaming through the Narrows, turning north toward the slender island of Manhattan. Elsewhere, chugging through darkness still shrouding New Jersey, a train carried sightseeing families (115,000 daily, even in this Depression) as well as hopeful youths seeking fortune and fame, while in the city, night workers were just starting
But Broadway was—initially—unimpressed, and young Welles sought theatrical satisfaction offstage, creating an annotated stage edition of Shakespeare’s works (The Mercury Shakespeare) and returning to the pursuit of painting, first in Morocco, then Spain. When playwright Thornton Wilder recommended him to Katharine Cornell, the celebrated actress hired him to appear in touring productions of The Barretts of Wimpole Street and Romeo and Juliet.
Operating out of Chicago, Welles further dabbled in theater in nearby rural Woodstock, organizing a festival through the Todd School, one of the progressive institutions he’d attended as a child. In addition to attracting attention, and making his first short film, Welles won a wife, a lovely and privileged eighteen-year-old actress, Virginia Nicholson .
His touring for Katharine Cornell finally led to Broadway, where a struggling producer—John Houseman—saw the teenager’s performance as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, and knew at once his own destiny would be bound up with that of this “monstrous boy—flatfooted and graceless, yet swift and agile...from which issued a voice of such clarity and power that it tore like a high wind through the genteel, modulated voices of the well-trained professionals around him.”
At thirty-three, the balding, stocky former Jacques Haussmann—born in Bucharest to an English mother and French father, a successful grain merchant turned Broadway writer/producer/director—was at a personal crossroads. Despite an intimidating bearing, including the accent of a cultured English gentleman, Houseman had little confidence in himself—“My shame and fear were almost unbearable, my ineptitude so glaring”—and in the nineteen-year-old Welles, Houseman saw in full bloom the qualities he himself lacked .
A partnership began with Houseman hiring the teenager to play a sixty-year-old failed industrialist in the prophetically titled Archibald MacLeish play , Panic. The show ran only three performances, but Welles was praised, and a partnership was forged, Houseman as business administrator, Welles as artistic director. Together they mounted New York’s most compelling theatrical productions of the mid-1950s. For the Federal Theatre, a WPA project designed to create work for actors, they staged an innovative, all-black-cast Macbeth in a striking Haitian voodoo setting designed by Welles himself. Then, with barely two nickels to rub together, the two men created their own repertory company, the Mercury Theatre .
Their first production , Julius Caesar, was performed in modern dress in a stark, startling setting—actors in business suits and fascist military uniforms against a blood-red background. Their most famous production, Marc Blitzstein’s opera The Cradle Will Rock, found the dynamic duo thumbing their noses at the WPA shutting them down, and skirting union demands despite the play’s (and their own) left-wing stance, by staging the show from the audience, actors standing and performing their lines in the aisles amid dazzled theatergoers .
During this same period, Welles had become a popular radio actor—a brilliant serialization in 1937 of Les Miserables had paved the way for future glories, and by 1938 The March of Time and Shadow star was making a thousand dollars a week...even before he brought his and Jack Houseman’s repertory company, the Mercury Theatre, to CBS .
In October 1938, Orson Welles was twenty-three years old .
CHAPTER TWO
BROADWAY MALADY OF 1938
T HROUGH THE EARLY MORNING FOG came the brooding bray of a great liner—the Queen Mary —steaming through the Narrows, turning north toward the slender island of Manhattan. Elsewhere, chugging through darkness still shrouding New Jersey, a train carried sightseeing families (115,000 daily, even in this Depression) as well as hopeful youths seeking fortune and fame, while in the city, night workers were just starting
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