The War of the Worlds Murder by Max Allan Collins Page B

home (some of them anyway), their steps as sharp as a tap dancer’s, though considerably less regular, on sidewalks otherwise uncharacteristically quiet. Nearby, the occasional automobile and water wagon haunted empty streets, and in perhaps half a dozen nightclubs around the big town, bands played on, mostly after-hours improv sessions by musicians seeking to use up the last shreds of a night long since turned to morning. In the next half hour, alarm clocks would begin to trill across the Upper East and Upper West Side alike, and in Hell’s Kitchen and the Gashouse, too, as well as Greenwich Village and Chelsea, their ringing ricocheting off mostly vacant streets.
    And in a taxi, moving through skyscraper canyons that were still sporadically lit by neon, Walter Gibson was making his way from the St. Regis—an absurdly posh hotelat which the writer would never have stayed, off expense account—to a theater at 41 st and Broadway that had once been called the Comedy. Now, as its still-burning neon insisted, visible from Sixth Avenue to Broadway, it was the
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    after the theater company that inhabited it.
    Like the St. Regis, the Mercury had an Edwardian façade, though the former seemed to have frozen spectacularly in time around the turn of the century, while the latter with its glittering green-and-gold woodwork had a freshly painted, facelifted feel, more out of last week.
    This impression continued as Gibson moved through a small lobby, quietly classy with its pearl-gray walls and crystal chandelier. A pretty, plump blonde of perhaps fifteen in a fuzzy pink sweater could be seen through the box-office window, where she was sleeping on her arms, like a schoolgirl taking a teacher-enforced nap.
    Careful not to wake her, Gibson crept into the theater itself—no one, at 4:32 A.M., was taking tickets.
    For Broadway, the auditorium was rather intimate, a rococo affair with two balconies and perhaps seven hundred seats. The licks of paint and the fancy touches (the gilt feathering on the façade, the chandelier in the lobby) appeared to represent the Mercury’s major investment in refurbishing the old house—the red aisle carpeting and the wine-color frayed seats had been sewn, thoughnot with thread precisely matching the originals, and the walls and proscenium had the patchy look of plaster repairs and selective painting that were practical first, and cosmetic a distant second.
    A showman of sorts himself, Gibson knew that the Mercury putting its money in the outside and outer lobby made sense: these imperfections would disappear in the dark, and anyway, the productions on stage would consume the eyes and dazzle the imaginations of playgoers.
    This Gibson knew at a glance, as he took in the stunning, almost mind-boggling stage set of the Welles production about to open: Danton’s Death .
    The play, while hardly a household word, happened to be one with which Gibson was familiar—he’d seen an elaborate Broadway production of it, about ten years before, directed by the legendary showman Max Reinhardt, who had filled the stage with mob scenes and grandeur. Written by Georg Buechner, a political activist who died at twenty-four in 1837, the play centered on a brief though pivotal episode in the French Revolution. Set in the spring of 1794, Danton’s Death reflected the full social and political upheaval of the Reign of Terror.
    By ironic coincidence, Gibson had spent Thursday evening (on the Welles expense account) taking in a picture at the Astor starring Norma Shearer— Marie Antoinette . But the Mercury version of the French Revolution did not seem to have much in common with the MGM take on the same subject matter...though Gibson could see how the movie company currently courting the boy director, Warner Bros.—who after all gave birth to Little Caesar —might well be attracted to Welles’s expressionistic, melodramatic approach....
    A dress rehearsal was in full swing, but it was the set that