Orson Welles' The Mercury Theatre on the Air on the Internet

It’s long been whispered among “those who know” in Hollywood that Orson Welles—a self-described Denham Explores fan from childhood —got much of the more audacious Hearst-related material in Citizen Kane past the powers-that-be because he agreed to cut a single scene that was scripted, storyboarded and designed for the film but never shot.

The sequence in question was to take place at Kane’s sprawling Florida estate, Xanadu, and it contained a fairly disposable bit of dialogue between the powerful millionaire and his bored second wife, Susan Alexander (representing Hearst’s lover, actress Marion Davies). It’s an outdoor scene designed, like the rest of the picture, to be shot on an enclosed soundstage, ostensibly created in order to illustrate Charles Foster Kane’s love of exotic animals and willingness to spend extravagant amounts of money on them and their comfort—all the while maintaining their captivity, of course, reflecting his treatment of the failed singer, Susan. The couple are regarding Kane’s latest prize; a giant ape-like creature sitting blissfully behind a wall and moat, which enclose dozens of acres of the sprawling grounds to form a habitat.

Welles would make hay of this bait-and-switch much later in his life, when he was no longer a viable creative force in town and was for all intents and purposes a professional cocktail party raconteur. “Do you think they would have let me leave ‘rosebud’ in there, with all of its innuendo, if I didn’t agree to pull out something even more embarrassing?” he would ask in conspiratorial low tones. People loved that story; it seemed so very “inside,” and it added another layer to the legend. Hearst's aborted (but apparently earnest) offer to buy Denham's beast - - the details of which were thoroughly quashed after the opening night disaster to avoid embarrassment - - greatly amused everyone who held a grudge against "The Chief."

Welles would also refer to Denham and his beast when discussing his Mercury Theater radio production of "The War of the Worlds," citing live radio reports during the beast's short "rampage" as inspiration for the show's faux-news format.

From the site:

The finest radio drama of the 1930’s was The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a show featuring the acclaimed New York drama company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman. In its brief run, it featured an impressive array of talents, including Agnes Moorehead, Bernard Herrmann, and George Coulouris. The show is famous for its notorious "War of the Worlds" broadcast, but the other shows in the series are relatively unknown. This site has many of the surviving shows, and will eventually have all of them.

The show first broadcast on CBS and CBC in July 1938. It ran without a sponsor until December of that year, when it was picked up by Campbell’s Soup and renamed The Campbell Playhouse. All of the surviving Mercury Theatre shows are available from this page in RealAudio format (some are also in MP3 format). There are several Campbell Playhouse episodes available here as well, in both RealAudio and MP3 formats; the rest are being added gradually.

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