UNITED STATES—Unlike in most radio dramas, the station break in War of the Worlds would come about two-thirds of the way through, and not at the halfway mark. Apparently, no one in the Mercury realized that listeners who tuned in late and missed the opening announcements would have to wait almost 40 minutes for a disclaimer explaining that the show was pure fiction.
Radio audiences had come to expect that fictional programs would be interrupted on the half-hour for station identification, this meek intrusion of the Columbia Broadcasting System. Breaking news, on the other hand, failed to follow those rules. People who believed the hoax to be real would be even more convinced when the station break failed to come at 8:30 p.m.
These changes also removed several clues that might have helped late listeners figure out that the invasion was fake. Two moments that interrupted the fictional news-broadcast with regular dramatic scenes were deleted or revised. At John Houseman’s suggestion Howard Koch also removed some specific mentions of the passage of time, such as one character’s reference to “last night’s massacre.” The first draft had clearly established that the invasion occurred over several days, but the revision made it seem as though the broadcast proceeded in real-time.
As many observers later noted, having the Martians conquer an entire planet in less than 40 minutes made no logical sense. But Houseman explained in the first volume of his memoirs, Run Through, that he wanted to make the transitions from actual time to fictional time as seamless as possible, in order to draw listeners into the story. Each change added immeasurably to the show’s believability. Without meaning to, Koch, Houseman, and Stewart had made it much more likely that some listeners would be fooled by War of the Worlds. And with its ability to conjure pictures and sounds in the mind’s eye, radio drama could depict unspeakable Lovecraftian horrors.
All the same, nobody had any great hopes for the “War of the Worlds” broadcast. Ben Gross recalled approaching one of the Mercury’s actors during that last week of October to ask what Welles had prepared for Sunday night. “Just between us, it’s lousy,” the actor said, adding that the broadcast would “probably bore you to death.” Welles later told the Saturday Evening Post that he had called the studio to see how things were shaping up and received a similarly dismal review. “Very dull. Very dull,” a technician told him. “It’ll put ’em to sleep.” Welles now faced disaster on two fronts, with both his theatrical company and his radio series marching toward disaster. Finally, War of the Worlds had gained Welles’ full attention.
Midafternoon on October 30, 1938, just hours before airtime, Welles arrived in CBS’s Studio One for last-minute rehearsals with the cast and crew. Almost immediately, he lost his temper with the material. But such outbursts were typical in the frantic hours before each Mercury Theatre broadcast. Welles routinely berated his collaborators—calling them lazy, ignorant, incompetent, and many other insults—all while complaining of the mess they’d given him to clean up. He delighted in making his cast and crew scramble by radically revising the show at the last minute, adding new things and taking others out.
The contrast between how newspaper journalists experienced the supposed panic, and what they wrote, could be stark. In 1954, Ben Gross, the New York Daily News’ radio editor, published a memoir in which he recalled the streets of Manhattan in a state of lunar desertion as his taxi sped to CBS headquarters just as War of the Worlds was ending. Yet that observation failed to stop the Daily News from splashing the panic story across this legendary cover a few hours later.
From the initial newspaper items about Welles radio broadcast on Oct. 31, 1938 (Happy Halloween), the apocryphal apocalypse only grew in the retelling. A curious (but predictable) phenomenon occurred: As the show receded in time and became more infamous, more and more people claimed to have heard it. Graydon Miller’s father, Kenneth shared that his family in Arco, Idaho got a phone call from neighbors to turn on the broadcast and were drawn in to twenty minutes of terror that turned into the unthinkable and went poof! As weeks, months, and years passed, the audience’s size swelled to such an extent that you might actually believe most of America was tuned to CBS that night.
Far fewer people heard the broadcast—and fewer still panicked—than most people believe today. The night the program aired; the C.E. Hooper ratings service telephoned 5,000 households for its national ratings survey. “To what program are you listening?” the service asked respondents. Only two percent answered a radio “play” or “the Orson Welles program,” or something similar indicating CBS.
None said a “news broadcast,” according to a summary published in Broadcasting. In other words, 98 percent of those surveyed were listening to something else, or nothing at all, on Oct. 30, 1938. This miniscule rating is not surprising. Welles’ program was scheduled against one of the most popular national programs at the time—ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s comedy-variety show. Which begs the question: what can you say about a country that adores a ventriloquist and his wooden ventriloquist doll on the unseen the radio.
Indeed, Orson years later said, “I should have been run out of town on a rail, but I got a ticket to Hollywood.”
To be continued…
