There's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos

37 The Martian Invasion

162 There’s More to New Jersey . . . The brief ridiculed the accusation that Mrs. Eaton was a Communist, pointing out that the term had even been used to describe the president of the United States. (Mabel said her husband had called her “a radical red nut like Roosevelt.”) And besides, observed her lawyers, even the Soviet Union had laws upholding marriage and morality. The husband’s lawyer, J. Raymond Tiffany, who had handled the case since it began, argued that Mrs. Eaton was a publicity seeker who had no real interest in the children. He said that she had not visited her son and daughter since the divorce and had not even sent Christmas cards and gifts to them. He reminded the court of Mrs. Eaton’s alleged acts of rage against her husband. Tiffany cited Mrs. Eaton’s dangerous beliefs: she was an active Communist who would raise her children as enemies of the United States. In those days the field of psychology was regarded with some suspicion; Tiffany charged that Mrs. Eaton had left the children at home to go on “psychological weekends” at which she had been unfaithful to her husband. On April 30, 1937, the court issued its unanimous decision. The judges ruled emphatically that Ms. Eaton’s religious and political beliefs were irrelevant to the case; that it had been wrong for Grosman’s lower court to have taken them into consideration in determining custody. The Jersey court decision was a victory for civil liberty and freedom of speech. But it was not much of a victory for Mrs. Eaton. The judges (all male) denied Mabel Eaton custody of the children because of her record of violence toward her husband. 37 The Martian Invasion On an October night in 1938, a bunch of actors in a Manhattan radio studio convinced a portion of the American public that an invasion force from Mars had landed in New Jersey. The Martian Invasion 163 The central figure in this story is Orson Welles, the celebrated actor, playwright, and director. The twenty-eight-year-old Welles had a program on the CBS radio network entitled The Mercury Theatre on the Air. For broadcast on Halloween eve, Welles thought it would be fun to do an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s old science fiction novel of a Martian invasion of the Earth, The War of the Worlds. (H. G. Wells and Orson Welles were not related, by the way.) H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel was set in Victorian England. Orson Welles and his co-producer, John Houseman, decided to change the setting to 1938 America, and the project was turned over to Howard Koch, the program ’s scriptwriter. Koch recalled in later years that he was thinking about this assignment as he was driving back on Monday from a weekend trip to visit his parents in upstate New York. It struck him that he should get a map so that he could work out the locales for the script. He stopped at a gas station and asked the attendant for a map. Since this was a section of Route 9 in New Jersey, he wound up with a map of the Garden State. When he returned to his office, he laid out the map on his desk, closed his eyes, and put his pencil point down on the map. Grovers Mill was the place where his pencil landed. Koch liked the sound of the town’s name, which is why Grovers Mill became the Omaha Beach of the Martian invasion. Radio worked fast in those days, and amazingly, the script was written , the sound effects set, and the show rehearsed in less than a week. At 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 30, the show was broadcast live on CBS. Koch had written a major part of the script in the form of radio news bulletins, as if the events were unfolding in what we would call “real time.” Listeners hear a weather report, followed by music supposedly coming from a dance band at a New York hotel. This is interrupted by a bulletin announcing that astronomers have seen curious gas explosions on the planet Mars. A professor “Richard Pierson” (played by Welles) from the Princeton Observatory is then interviewed about the phenomenon by reporter “Carl Phillips.” Then comes news that there have been earthquake-like shocks within twenty miles of Princeton. 164 There...