Ernest Hemingway

Orson Welles, Radio, and The War of the Worlds

October 28, 2014 by richardpells Leave a Comment

As also posted on Yale Books Unbound: http://blog.yupnet.org/2014/10/30/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds

October 30, 1938. The night before Halloween in America. After dinner, at 8:00 in the evening, Eastern Standard Time, families throughout the country gathered in their living rooms, as they usually did, to listen to the radio. At that hour, the highest-rated show on the radio was NBC’s Chase and Sanborn Hour, starring Edgar Bergen and his two celebrated puppets, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. (American audiences did not seem bemused by the idea of a ventriloquist performing on the radio despite their inability to see whether or not his lips moved.)

When a musical interlude interrupted the comic dialogue between Bergen and Charlie, many listeners apparently switched the radio dial to CBS. Instantly, they found themselves in the midst of hysterical news bulletins describing a battalion of Martians landing in New Jersey. Given that Americans were now accustomed to, if no less unsettled by, constant news reports on the radio of crises in Europe and warfare in China, the Martian invasion sounded credible. And some in the audience, especially in New Jersey and New York, panicked.

What the audience really heard was a dramatization by The Mercury Theater on the Air of H.G. Welles’s 1897 novel, The War of the Worlds. The program was conceived, directed, and narrated by a 23-year-old former magician and current theater actor, Orson Welles. Already labeled a “boy genius” for his modernist versions of Shakespearean plays in New York, featured on the cover of Time magazine and profiled in the New Yorker, Welles created in his rendition of The War of the Worlds what became the most legendary radio broadcast in the history of the medium. Three years later, in 1941, Welles directed, co-wrote, and starred in another illustrious venture, this time in Hollywood: Citizen Kane, the most influential movie in the history of the American cinema.

At the end of his own movie, Radio Days (1987), Woody Allen remarks mournfully: “I’ve never forgotten. . . any of the voices we would hear on the radio. Though the truth is, with the passing of each [year], those voices do seem to grow dimmer and dimmer.” The golden age of network radio was brief. It lasted for only twenty-five years, from the mid-1920s when the NBC and CBS networks were launched, to the end of the 1940s when television supplanted radio as the principal form of household entertainment.

But for those Americans who grew up during the Depression or World War II, network radio was indispensable. NBC and CBS offered an array of programs: comedies, adventure series, mysteries, dramas, classical music, jazz, and news. The stars on radio, besides Edgar Bergen, included Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Arturo Toscanini, Benny Goodman, and Edward R. Murrow, among many others. Only the movies were more popular, and more important, during these years. Orson Welles became a master of both mediums.

Like many of his predecessors in America’s culture—Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway—Welles was an entertainer as well as an artist. He did not share the elitist preconceptions of his European counterparts. Instead he understood that art in America had to attract and enthrall audiences before they could be enlightened or encouraged to see the world differently. He was steeped in the European traditions of literature and painting, but he used these to become a virtuoso of American mass culture.

Welles had one other attribute that distinguished him from his American and European forbears: his magisterial voice. Whether on stage, on the radio, or in the movies, Welles realized that his voice could beguile an audience—as it did in his narration of The War of the Worlds, in his portrait of both the charismatic young Charles Foster Kane and in Kane’s King Lear-like old age, and in his captivating portrait of the amoral Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949). In fact, Welles had all the wittiest dialogue, some of which he wrote himself, in The Third Man, including the most memorable lines in the film: “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

At that moment in the movie, as in Citizen Kane and The War of the Worlds, Welles was the enchanting magician and raconteur, the global celebrity who could terrify and mesmerize audiences, while also making them ultimately laugh at their naïveté. He was a wizard at intuiting what his audiences feared and needed.

Since 1938, we have confronted a plethora of evil Martians. Nazis, Communists, sandal-clad revolutionaries, terrorists. From Pearl Harbor to the erection of the Berlin Wall to the jungles of Vietnam to the destruction of the World Trade Center, we have been engaged in a perpetual war of the worlds. So, in America, as Orson Welles recognized, it is always Halloween.

The Culture of Kansas City

May 8, 2014 by richardpells Leave a Comment

Most people who’ve never been there think of Kansas City as an overgrown cow-town. Yet when I was growing up in Kansas City in the 1940s and 1950s, the city had a reputation as one of the centers of modern American culture—especially in literature, art, music, and movies.

In 1959, when I was a freshman at Rutgers University, I was supposed to write a term paper for an English class. My father, a violinist with the Kansas City Philharmonic, arranged for me to meet with the conductor of the Philharmonic over Christmas vacation so that he could tell me about what the culture of the city was really like. He spent three hours with me on a Saturday afternoon, and that was my introduction to the surprising cultural history of the city in which I was born and raised.

What were the contributions that Kansas City made to American culture in the 20th century? None was more important or influential than the impact the city had on Ernest Hemingway. For six months, from October 1917 to April 1918, Hemingway worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. For all the mythology of what Hemingway absorbed from his fellow-expatriates in the 1920s in Paris, it was at the Star that Hemingway learned how to write—particularly the unadorned prose, bereft of adjectives and adverbs, that became his trademark in his novels and short stories, and shaped the prose of his successors throughout the rest of the century.

At the beginning of the century a real estate developer named J.C. Nichols visited Seville, Spain. He was so impressed with the architecture of Seville that he reproduced it in what he called the Country Club Plaza, which opened in 1922, and was the first outdoor shopping mall in the United States. Close to the Plaza, the Nelson Art Galley opened in 1933, and became one of the most important museums for Chinese art in America. At the same time in the 1930s, Thomas Hart Benton made his home in Kansas City where his rural esthetic, his portraits of farm dwellers and Depression-scarred city folk, blossomed.

In addition, ever since African American jazz musicians began to move north from New Orleans in 1918, Kansas City developed into a home of jazz, rivaling Chicago and New York. Indeed, no jazz saxophonist had more of a stimulus on what became known as “modern” jazz than Charlie Parker, who was born in Kansas City in 1920 and developed his musical techniques with jazz bands in the city until he moved to New York in 1939.

But perhaps it was at the movies that Kansas City had its greatest effect. Walt Disney’s family moved to Kansas City in 1911, and he remained in the city until 1928 when he departed for Hollywood. Before Disney left, however, he invented his greatest creation—Mickey Mouse, which launched Disney’s career as one of the most imaginative animators in film history. Meanwhile, Robert Altman was born in Kansas City in 1925, and grew up there before migrating to Hollywood in 1946. Altman started his film career as a television director, but soon graduated to the movies. In the 1970s, he made three of the most formidable films of the decade—MASH, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Nashville.

Like most northern and midwestern cities in the late 20th century, the demography of Kansas City changed as white people moved to the suburbs in Kansas and the city’s population became largely African American. Still, when I attended the 50th reunion of my high school class in 2009, we all remembered what the city had given us as grateful recipients of its cultural heritage.