Trevanian Books/Cybernotes Companion

'...Many years later, I was working with the director/producer of Ed Murrow's ground-breaking television interview program, Person to Person, and over dinner he mentioned that as a young production assistant he had worked on the famous Welles broadcast and had sat in on the ensuing press conference that Orson Welles had so deftly manipulated as to create 'history' out of whole cloth. I expressed my admiration of Welles' quick thinking, and he agreed, but he said that, in fact, Welles' reaction hadn't been totally off the cuff. During a break in the final rehearsal of the program, someone had suggested that some of the audience might mistake the show for a real news broadcast. Young Welles chuckled and said, "Good. We could use a little publicity!" (As indeed they could. Recall that Welles had recently taken the role of the Shadow…not a thing a successful actor/producer/director would do.)...Over the years, Mr Welles himself added to these mythogenic streams. When, in his later career, he was reduced to giving lectures and appearing on late night talk shows, doing hand magic and heavy-handed take-offs on himself, he often found an eager audience for his rambling tales of past glory...including the time he managed to frighten 'half the eastern seaboard'. To this day, there are historians of the media who believe that half of the eastern seaboard was running wildly around in an effort to escape while the other half was cowering in their basements, crazed with fear of green-eyed monsters. Barnum was wrong when he said 'there's one born every minute'. There are thousands.'