Daily Mail UK Feature by William Hazelgrove on the War of the Worlds Broadcast

The Real Carnage behind Orson Welles War of the Worlds Broadcast By William Elliott Hazelgrove

When I researched Dead Air The Night Orson Welles Terrified America, I found it hard to believe that intelligent people could believe Martians had landed on earth and were exterminating people with poison gas and heat rays. But in going through hundreds of newspapers and eyewitness accounts, I found out that through a perfect storm of events, millions of Americans did believe in fact the end of the world was at hand. Here is how it happened. At 8 PM Eastern on Halloween eve, October 30, 1938, Orson Welles broadcast his seventeenth episode of Mercury Theatre on the Air from a CBS studio high up in the Manhattan skyline. The twenty-three-year-old proclaimed genius was putting on a radio play based on an old novel by HG Wells called War of the Worlds. It was a fantastic story about Martians coming to earth and incinerating and gassing humans with heat ray guns and tentacles pumping out poisonous gas. Who would believe such a story from a man who raced around Manhattan in an ambulance to get from one radio show to another on time and had made his mark as the voice of The Shadow. Martians…really? But people did believe, in fact, up to twelve million people listened and believed Martians had landed and were exterminating the human race. The entire country had been on edge from Hitler’s threat to invade the Sudetenland weeks before and touch off World War II. The depression had dragged on. Radio had grown with ninety percent of the population possessing a radio and Congress had just required all cars to have an AM radio with the AM Amplitude Act. The radio show Amos and Andy was so popular utility companies reported people didn’t flush toilets during the show and movies stopped to play the latest episode along with a show featuring a dummy who belched out theatrics named Charlie McCarthy. The Golden Age of radio was in full swing as BREAKING NEWS BULLETINS peppered the American people with news of imminent war, natural catastrophes, and horrific crimes. People were waiting for the other shoe to drop as autumn closed in on Halloween and leaves scraped down sidewalks. Mercury Theatre on the Air’s seventeenth show began on October 30, 1938, at 8 PM Eastern. Orson Welles used a revolutionary breaking news format for his radio show which was really a broadcast in a broadcast. The beginning starts with Ramon Roquello and his orchestra playing in the ballroom of a local New York hotel when suddenly the first breaking news bulletin pulls listeners to Grovers Mill New Jersey where a Martian cylinder has landed. When the cylinder opens the Martians begin incinerating people. Orson’s on the spot reporter, Frank Reddick, is vaporized on the air as Orson holds up his hands for quiet in the studio and begins six seconds of dead air. This is the terrifying heart of the broadcast where the third wall of radio is pierced, and radio itself becomes part of the story. Six seconds of dead air convinces the listeners they have just heard a man burned alive and die. Now the Martians are heading for New York and the rest of the country. By now, people have left their radios, jumped in their cars, subways, taxis, started running, hiding, anything to get away from the awful terror Orson Welles unleashed from his broadcast that used the real names of towns and streets. Police stations and CBS switchboards lit up with frantic callers halfway into the broadcast. CBS executives and the police try to gain entrance to the studio to stop the broadcast, but Orson’s partner, John Houseman, keeps the door locked so Orson can make it to the station break and finish unleashing the terror. The Manhattan switchboards are overwhelmed with calls and police stations are overrun by people with their belongings demanding gas masks and demanding to know where to escape the murdering Martians. Traffic becomes a demolition derby as motorists listen and drive seventy miles an hour through stoplights and don’t stop for the police. Suddenly, everyone was speeding while the 126 affiliates of CBS spread Orson Welles broadcast from coast to coast. A Hollywood executive and his wife driving in the Redwood Forest in California hear the broadcast and try to get back home to their children but run out of gas. They write later that all they could do was wait to be incinerated by the invading Martians. People run out of restaurants without paying their checks. Bartenders leave customers to drink as much as they want. A man just out of surgery jumps out of his hospital bed, dresses, and drives himself home bleeding all over his car. A woman who had a baby is left when all the nurses run into the hallway and start crying. Another woman who had just been married finds herself alone at her reception and has the band strike up the Charleston while she dances for a half hour. A man comes home to find his wife staring at a bottle of cyanide at her kitchen table saying she would rather poison herself than let the Martians get her. A man gets a call from his crying daughter at college and drives the hundred miles to her college in his Studebaker, takes the doors off his car, and packs it with crying girls, tying some down across the hood and the trunk, and then driving full speed back down the highway. A bus full of people in North Carolina stops and a man jumps on and tells the driver Martians are killing everyone, and it is the end of the world. The bus driver, in a fit of panic takes his passengers on the wildest ride of their lives while trying to get away from the Martians. A young actress in Manhattan runs out of her apartment and falls down the stairs and breaks her arm. The next day she is featured all over the nation in front page articles proclaiming her a war casualty. People run into churches and scream that it is the end of the world while panicked congregations run out. In theatres, people shout Martians are killing everyone and the theaters empty out in minutes. A ma who has had an affair confesses to his wife only to find out later the broadcast wasn’t real. People in Concrete Washington run for the mountains after a power failure occurs during the broadcast. People run out of apartment buildings with wet blankets over their heads while hospitals all over the country admit people for shock and heart attacks. Men in Grovers Mill New Jersey, where the Martians land, ride around with shotguns and shoot up a water tower they think is one of the murdering Martians. The military issues an alert stating Martians are not invading and that there is no danger. Operators across the country answer calls saying four words. There are no Martians. Phone lines clog all over the country as people try and call loved ones for last goodbyes. Panic spreads as ten million people from the Charlie McCarthy show begin twisting the dial when Eddie Nelson begins to sing, and they land on War of the Worlds. Many people don’t even hear the broadcast but are told by family members to run for their lives. A man drives through his garage door, then looks at his wife and says, “Well, at least we don’t have to fix it.” The big newspapers tell the tale the next morning. RADIO PLAY TERRIFIES NATION, RADIO FAKE SCARES NATION, FAKE RADIO WAR STIRS TERROR THROUGH US. The terror continues until the morning when the hoax is revealed. Orson and CBS receive death threats and lawsuits are launched while the FCC surveys the damage and considers censoring radio. A press conference is held where Orson Welles pleads innocent, but this does nothing to quell the anger at Welles and CBS. It takes the famous columnist, Dorthy Parker, in an editorial to proclaim Welles a genius for showing how gullible, uneducated, and ignorant Americans are to believe such a ridiculous radio show. The columnist proclaims Orson a hero for showing what Adolf Hitler could do with the radio. Orson comes out smelling like a rose with a contract from RKO to go to Hollywood where he will make the greatest film ever, Citizen Kane. Years later during a bond drive, Orson is attacked in a hotel lobby by a man screaming he would kill him if he ever saw him again. Later, it was found his wife had committed suicide on the night of the broadcast of the War of the Worlds. Many have said Orson Welles never intended to create the mass panic of War of the Worlds. Part magician, thespian, conman, genius, the War of the Worlds broadcast was Orson’s greatest sleight of hand. Of course he meant to do it.

Doing Radio Interviews for a Book

You have only fifteen minutes maybe less except for the shows that let you roll thirty minutes. Those are the ones where you can stretch your legs and get into the meat of the book but for  many drive time shows you have less than ten minutes to get your point across and if you blow it there is no do  over because it is live. And so you wait for the phone to ring and set yourself up in a quiet room and tell everyone you are on the radio and please don't open that door or call out my name while I'm on the phone.

So you have your coffee and your notes and you have to be careful not to ramble and not speak too fast but you don't want to squander your time either. Getting a book down to sound bytes that will come across while someone is driving down the expressway is tricky. You have to hit the high points and your book may be three hundred pages but you can only get across a few moments that will stay with the listener  and hopefully get him to buy your book.

So it is one minute now. You have two phones ready in case one fails. The producers usually call right on the minute. And there it is. Hi, Is this William? Yes. Ok. Sixty seconds and you are on. So now you can hear the show. It is buzzing in your ear. A commercial. And then you are on. You will either do this or not. The show sounds distant and then it gets loud, there is a long hiss and now you are live. And we have author William Hazelgrove and his new book Forging A President to tell us about Teddy Roosevelt, William, welcome to the show!

You're on.

The Marc Bernier Show interview on Forging

Order Forging A President

The WGN Rick Kogan Show On a Snowy Night in Chicago

It takes forever to get there but you make it and you are hungry. You duck into Billy Goats and stare at the old journalists on the walls while you eat your two cheeseburgers chips no fries. There is John Belushi on the wall. Hes gone too. But you are there to go on at ten with one of the few real  journalists still left. Rick Kogans show is unique. He reads the books and wants to talk about them. As you emerge from the underground on the slushy sidewalks of Michigan Avenue you can feel Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren maybe Al Capone. They are all there on this cold wintry night.

But you are there to do the show and so you wait across the street  in a Starbucks and kill time. The Tribune Tower is massive and you can see the WGN studio through the window. You used to live not far from the studio in a high rise but that was a long time ago before kids and the suburbs. But the books always pull you back into the city You know you will be up back here one day with all those dead Chicago authors.

So you walk up and down Michigan Avenue and the snow is coming down harder. Not many people out now. It is Sunday night after all. A ten o'clock slot of live radio for thirty minutes is coveted. Especially with a man who can talk books. You finish a cigarette and look at the clock. Its cold. It's time to go into that Chicago night again and fill the air waves. Last of the Mohicans.

Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson

WGN with Rick Kogan

On a Sunday night on the top of the Tribune is the WGN studio where Rick Kogan broadcasts his After Hours show. One of the remaining book shows in Chicago and you want to be on it. Because not only does Rick read your book he talks intelligently about it and you get to sit there and enjoy the company of the newspaper man with a literary nose and believe me when I say he is the last of the Mohicans because newspaper men belong to the last century.

And you have thirty minutes to talk about your book and writing. An eternity in radio time on a station the size of WGN (50KW) and you get to beam out across the state on a Sunday night in September while the city nurses its' first Bears defeat and everyone is pulling down the windows because those first cool nights have rolled in like an early messenger of the winter to come. But for now you concentrate on the task at hand.

And the red light flashes and Rick nods to the producer to cut the music and then you just roll. And he is a pro because he leads the interview and lets you ramble and then takes it over when you veer and you manage to get in all the information (website, signings, multiple books) and you chat off the air and you know some of the same people by now and then you are going back down the elevator past those marble quotes on the wall and you know the digital world is out there still...
but for a moment you saw something greater.

Something better.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
Real Santa...Sometimes you just have to believe



 

Waiting in the Green Room at WGN Chicago

You have glimmers of something passing. Sometimes you just know that what you are seeing might not be around too long. Maybe it was the space reserved for the microphone from the Scopes monkey trial. Maybe it was the foundation of the Chicago Tribune building inscribed on Lower Michigan with Culled in 1920. The slight wisp of snow in the cold darkness as a guard buzzes you into the WGN studio in the bowels of the old Tribune building and you follow a man up to the green room, passing the cases where old microphones reside and black and white pictures of celebrities long passed. Then you sit down and wait and there is no one there in the green room, just you and rows and rows of pictures of people who look curiously human. The celebrity quality is gone and they are just men and women with gray hair, getting old. A thirty minute radio interview on WGN in Chicago is something you want to hang on too. The man doing the interview is the son of a legendary newspaper man from the Chicago Sun Times. You can hear the footfalls and you shake hands and he tells you to relax and do whatever the *&%$ you want. All Chicago old school. Then you are on in front of the WGN microphone telling your story for thirty minutes. You try and imagine people all over Chicago waking up and hearing your voice, but your mind doesn't work that way. All you think is that it is just the two of you talking and it doesn't go near long enough. There are a million things you want to say, but you just can't get it all in and then you are walking back through the silent building and down through the guard room and suddenly outside in the cold. It's barely eight o'clock on a Sunday morning. Chicago is empty and just waking up. You drive through the streets, knowing you have used up one of the moments of your life that will never come back. You hit the city limits, then slip into the past.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January