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The Medium and the Magician

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CRITICAL MEDIA STUDIES

INSTITUTIONS, POLITICS, AND CULTURE
Series Editor
Andrew Calabrese, University of Colorado
Advisory Board
Patricia Aufderheide, American University
Jean-Claude Burgelman, Free University
of Brussels
Simone Chambers, University of Toronto
Nicholas Garnham, University of
Westminster
Hanno Hardt, University of Iowa
Gay Hawkins, The University of New
South Wales
Maria Heller, Eötvös Loránd University
Robert Horwitz, University of California
at San Diego
Douglas Kellner, University of California
at Los Angeles
Gary Marx, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Toby Miller, New York University
Vincent Mosco, Queen’s University
Janice Peck, University of Colorado
Manjunath Pendakur, Southern Illinois
University
Arvind Rajagopal, New York University
Giuseppe Richeri, Università Svizzera
Italiana
Kevin Robins, Goldsmiths College
Saskia Sassen, University of Chicago
Dan Schiller, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
Colin Sparks, University of Westminster
Slavko Splichal, University of Ljubljana
Thomas Streeter, University of Vermont
Liesbet van Zoonen, University of
Amsterdam
Janet Wasko, University of Oregon

Recent Titles in the Series

Changing Concepts of Time
Harold A. Innis
The Medium and the Magician: Orson Welles, the Radio Years, 1934–1952
Paul Heyer
A Fatal Attraction: Public Television and Politics in Italy
Cinzia Padovani
Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge
Liesbet van Zoonen
Forthcoming
Mass Communication and American Social Thought: Key Texts, 1919–1968
Edited by John Durham Peters and Peter Simonson
Globalizing Electioneering: Campaign Consultants, Communications, and Corporate Financing
Gerald Sussman
Contracting Out Hollywood
Edited by Mike Gasher and Greg Elmer
Raymond Williams
Alan O’Connor
Democratizing Global Media: One World, Many Struggles
Edited by Robert A. Hackett and Yuezhi Zhao
The Film Studio
Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan
Raymond Williams
Alan O’Connor
The Blame Game
Eileen Meehan
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The Medium and the Magician

Orson Welles, the Radio Years, 1934–1952

Paul Heyer

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Oxford
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ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Published in the United States of America

by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, MD 20706
www.rowmanlittlefield.com

P.O. Box 317, Oxford OX2 9RU, UK

Copyright © 2005 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the
publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Heyer, Paul, 1946–
The medium and the magician : the radio legacy of Orson Welles, 1934–1952 / Paul
Heyer.
p. cm. — (Critical media studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7425-3796-X (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7425-3797-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Welles, Orson, 1915– I. Title. II. Series.

PN1991.4.W44H49 2005
791.4402’8’092—dc22
2004018363

Printed in the United States of America

∞™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
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A man may see how the world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears.
—Shakespeare, King Lear

My big inventions were in radio and the theatre. Much more than in
movies.
—Orson Welles
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To the memory of Florian Morelli

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Contents

Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: A Man for All Media xiii
Part I. The Road to CBS
Chapter 1 A Voice Is Born 3
Chapter 2 Theatrical Notoriety, Radio Anonymity 15
Chapter 3 Mercury Theatre on the Air 45
Part II. Mercury Does Mars: The Panic Broadcast
Chapter 4 Genesis 75
Chapter 5 Exodus 81
Chapter 6 Revelation 95
Part III. The Sound in the Fury
Chapter 7 Campbell Playhouse 115
Chapter 8 Orson at RKO 151
Chapter 9 The Last Radio Shows 191
Epilogue 211

ix
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x w Contents

Selected Radiography 217

Notes 223
Bibliography 233
Index 239
About the Author 000
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Acknowledgments

Orson Welles’s papers, correspondences, tapes (in both reel-to-reel and cassette
formats) and the acetate disks of many of his radio programs are housed in Indi-
ana University’s Lilly Library as the “Orson Welles mss. collection.” It is an ex-
traordinary resource. Seeing the original scripts of the Mercury Theatre on the Air
programs and the disks that transcribed them was like gazing upon a Rosetta
Stone of broadcast radio. I wish to thank Lilly staff members Sue Presnell, He-
lena Walsh, Elizabeth Powers, and David Greenebaum, who patiently and gra-
ciously guided me through the archive during my visits. Helena’s assistance in
helping me track down and select photographs for this book has been invaluable.
Welles’s radio work was so diverse and prolific that not all of it has found its
way to the Lilly repository. A good deal of what he did for the CBS and the Mu-
tual Networks is housed at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York,
where I made good use of my membership. Other broadcasts, especially those he
did in Europe, I was able to acquire from Original Radio Classics in Vancouver,
British Columbia, and from Radio Yesteryear in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.
Alas, both outlets no longer operate, but much of what was in their extensive
collections can still be found through a diligent search of the Internet. I hesi-
tate to list specific sites, since they tend to come and go like summer squalls.
Anyone who tries to fathom the Welles legacy is indebted to those who have
come before, and there have been many, as my bibliography attests. Neverthe-
less, special mention must be made regarding the work of Jonathan Rosenbaum
and Bret Wood, whose biographical bibliographies guided me through well-
charted but not fully explored territory. Jonathan, along with Welles scholars

xi
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xii w Acknowledgments

Michael Anderegg and Jim Naremore, have been unusually generous in giving
me their time, constructive criticism, and encouragement. I, of course, bear
complete responsibility for the various positions and opinions contained herein.
A high point of the project has been the invitation to write and narrate a
radio documentary for Australia’s national network, ABC, commemorating
the sixtieth anniversary of Welles’s infamous War of the Worlds broadcast. When
Mars Attacked (1998) was made possible through the support of Matthew
Leonard, the producer of ABC’s Radio-Eye, who also allowed me to suggest ma-
terial for their monthlong tribute to Welles’s radio legacy. During what turned
out to be two Welles-related trips to Australia, Hart Cohen was a gracious host
and valuable source of ideas and encouragement. Terry Guthridge, Andrew
Preston, and Sue Turnbull in Melbourne, and Collette Snowdon in Adelaide,
provided unlimited hospitality and superb itinerary arranging.
Special thanks must go to my research assistant, radio documentary co-
producer, and Welles aficionado extraordinaire, Blair Davis. Blair’s editorial
reading of each draft, diligent fact finding, and ongoing supportive critique
have sustained this project every step of the way. Carole Akazawa provided
me with life support and my debt to her is beyond words.
Throughout the writing of this book, friends and colleagues in Canada, the
United States, and Australia have provided sustained encouragement, especially
Jan Anderson, Patricia Anderson, David Black, Howard Blue, Aniko Bo-
droghkozy, Bill Buxton, Robert Campbell, Frank Chorba, Ian Chunn, David
Crowley, Abby Dancey, Dominique Darmon, Peter Davis, Ian Dawe, Melissa
Fennell, Elaine Fenton, Jonathan Finn, Philippa Gates, Rick Gruneau, Evelyn
Hassen, Vincent Hayward, Karla Hennig, Penelope Ironstone-Catterall, Iwona
Irwin-Zarecka, Liss Jeffrey, Barbara Jenkins, Yasmin Jiwani, Rowland Lorimer,
Oya Majlesi, John Max, Gary McCarron, Rick McCormick, Eric McLuhan,
Lucie Menkveld, Holly Moist, Vanneau Neesham, Maria Paule, Gary Porter,
DeNel Sedo, Neena Shahani, Matt Soar, Steven Stack, Will Straw, Paul
Tiessen, Iqbal Velji, Robert Walker, Julian Weaver, James Wong, Denyse Zen-
ner, and Ania Zofia. Sylvia Hoang has provided invaluable computer assistance
and Julie Pong has been once again my indexer extraordinaire.
And finally, I am fortunate to have such a supportive editorial team. An-
drew Calabrese, Erica Fast, and Brenda Hadenfeldt at Rowman & Littlefield
have been a delight to work with for this, my second book under their aegis.
Their sense that the work of Orson Welles fits within a tradition of critical
media studies has helped add valuable new emphasis to my project. Erica’s
editorial guidance was always astute and her encouragement inspiring. April
Leo perceptively and efficiently handled the production process.
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Introduction: A Man for All Media

Few twentieth-century artists have achieved renown in such a variety of media

as Orson Welles. If we consider first, as most do, his work in film then the
renown is threefold: director, actor, writer. Major creative outpourings are also
a result of his involvement in theater and radio. Noteworthy minor contribu-
tions mark his forays into sound recording and television. And all this from
someone who seriously contemplated becoming a painter, co-wrote Everybody’s
Shakespeare at eighteen, and had a lifelong career as a stage magician. A learned
commentator, let us call him or her critic X (since the observation has no doubt
been made independently several times), once noted with reference to artist Y,
that Y’s major achievement is his or her reputation. Well, for Orson, that too.
Needless to say there is no shortage of biographies. And, although there is
no book-length autobiography, we do have a comprehensive volume of in-
terviews conducted by Peter Bogdanovich, who has a knack for asking per-
ceptive questions. Nevertheless, we are still not ready to declare “that’s a
wrap” to our assessment of the legacy of this multimedia legend. At least one
chapter remains unfinished: radio.
No Welles commentator has failed to mention its importance, yet none
have placed it center stage as they have with film or theater. This is under-
standable. Welles’s movies are bigger. They combine a high art aesthetic with
the entertainment conventions of popular culture and endure in regularly ac-
cessible formats. Theater, his first love, although more elusive than radio
(since performances are not usually recorded), is usually privileged above it
artistically in assessments of his work.

xiii
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xiv w Introduction

Even in the field of radio studies, important recent works, such as Susan
Douglas’s Listening In and Gerald Nachman’s Raised on Radio, while readily
acknowledging Welles’s broadcast legacy as significant, give it only fleeting
consideration apart from the obligatory assessment of his War of the Worlds
broadcast. Michele Hilmes’s Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952
goes somewhat further. It contains a perceptive ten-page section on Welles,
replete with a plea for a fuller assessment of his radio career, one that the
present study endeavors to answer.
In making a case for radio, my contention is simple and I hope suggestive.
From 1934 through 1952, as an innovator and personality, Welles had an im-
pact on broadcast radio as great as the one he exerted on film and theater, an
observation he made himself on several occasions. This career can be seen as
being composed of four phases, which subsequent chapters explore: the first,
1934–1938, saw him make the transition from an anonymous voice to a ris-
ing star; the second, 1938–1940, is comprised of the CBS years, in which his
Mercury Theatre on the Air and Campbell Playhouse set new standards for ra-
dio drama; the third phase encompasses the diverse array of broadcasts he did
during, and on behalf of, the war effort; and finally we have his sporadic post-
war output in the United States, later augmented by work in two British-
based syndicated series.
Numbers often prove little, yet it is worth pondering how many years it
took for the audience who saw his most famous film, Citizen Kane (1941), to
equal the listenership of even one episode of the Mercury Theatre on the Air,
Campbell Playhouse, or The Adventures of Harry Lime. Hilmes is of a like mind
with respect to the influence of radio as a whole when she declares that it has
far exceeded what most media commentators would lead us to believe.
Today, of course, classical radio does seem an ephemeral medium for the
public at large—despite the many taped broadcasts now available, especially
on the Internet, to collectors—while film has become the art form of the past
one hundred years and Welles one of its greatest practitioners. Yet even here
there is radio. Conventions he employed in sound broadcasting profoundly
influenced his cinema, as I try to show by assessing the feature films he made
during the years in which he worked in radio.
However, what has inspired me most in writing this radio portrait is the
appropriateness of Welles’s genius to the medium: the unique marriage of
voice and imagination. On stage he could be awkward and the audience at
times unresponsive to his productions. With film he was managing a collab-
orative endeavor that often proved unmanageable. But on the podium for
CBS, conducting and acting in a Mercury Theatre presentation for an invisi-
ble audience, he had a time deadline that could not be circumvented. He
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Introduction w xv

also had more artistic control than in any other performing art; sometimes
diabolical control, as evidenced in the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast
on 30 October 1938. My analysis of this broadcast serves as a centerpiece for
this study.
A major reason why Welles was so effective on radio, and other media,
was his grasp of the nature and possibilities of those media to further what he
always called “the illusion of the story.” The War of the Worlds broadcast
turned radio on itself by simulating a live on-the-spot newscast, something I
call radio vérité, complete with overlapping and awkward dialogue, micro-
phone feedback, and those chilling moments of dead air when the Martians
attack—techniques virtually unheard of in previous radio drama. Putting it
in terms that media theorist Marshall McLuhan might favor, we could say
that the Panic Broadcast made the medium of radio news the content in a
story presented through the medium of radio drama.
My invocation of the name McLuhan in the name of Welles has another
basis. In his classic work, Understanding Media, McLuhan discusses the Panic
Broadcast as a key auditory text in revealing aspects of the nature of radio in
general. Although he did not write about Welles elsewhere, conversations I
have had with his son, Eric, indicate that Marshall’s fascination with Orson
extended even beyond the infamous radio play. It could be argued that just
as McLuhan, a polymath intellectual and major figure in the media studies or
media ecology tradition, understood media perhaps better than any intellec-
tual of the twentieth century, so Welles, as a practicing artist, seemed to grasp
better than any of his contemporaries how the properties of various media
could be used to further his creative intentions.
This grasp of media led to the multimedia aspect of many of his produc-
tions: the unusual lighting and use of African drummers in his Voodoo Mac-
beth; the radio-inspired use of loudspeakers positioned in various parts of the
theater (early surround sound) in his production of Marlowe’s Faust; and of
course, the use of radio-inspired sound, along with elements of painting and
photography, in Citizen Kane.
If Welles can be seen as a media theorist by way of his artistic practice, he
can also be seen as a critical media theorist. Throughout his life he was a stri-
dent advocate for social justice, speaking out regularly against racism, anti-
Semitism, and fascism. He would do this allegorically in his stage and radio
plays, and directly in print and radio editorials. Although never a socialist
per se, he was pro-labor, a strong supporter of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and a
critic of monopoly capitalism (an implicit theme in Citizen Kane). As
Howard Blue points out in his excellent study, Words at War: World War II
Era Radio and the Postwar Broadcasting Industry Blacklist, an FBI file was
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xvi w Introduction

opened on Welles in 1942 and his name would appear later on several black-
lists. One surprising and unsettling aspect of my archival research into
Welles’s radio career was to uncover among his papers life-threatening hate
mail triggered by his political commitments.
In the pages that follow, a great variety of Welles’s broadcasts are
assessed—to comment on all of them would require several volumes. Some
are discussed extensively, others briefly, while a few must unfortunately be
passed over entirely. The criteria for those programs warranting fuller cover-
age are these: artistic merit and/or popular appeal. These two criteria of
course sometimes converge, as in the case of Dracula (11 July 1938), which
was Welles’s Mercury Theatre radio debut; the War of the Worlds; and A
Christmas Carol (23 December 1938 and 24 December 1939). Less an artistic
than a ratings success, programs such as Rebecca (9 December 1938), the first
broadcast in Welles’s Campbell Playhouse series, merit assessment on that ba-
sis. On the other hand, less well-known but brilliantly conceived productions
such as Hell on Ice (9 October 1938) are introduced to the reader.
Finally, to foreground radio while backgrounding Welles’s work in theater
and film is an admittedly inaccurate reflection of his artistic priorities. I beg
indulgence on two counts. First, an ample biographical literature already ex-
ists showing the relevance of various parts of his artistic output to the whole
(readers familiar with any of these writings might want to skip the overview
of his early life outlined in the first chapter and the summaries I provide of
some of his more well-known films). Second, this study is as much about ra-
dio during a time when it was our dominant mass medium as it is about this
visionary artist who contributed so greatly to radio’s prominence.