Les Miserables

Where the Mercury Company Began

A full year before War of the Worlds made him notorious, Orson Welles was already working out what radio could do. He was twenty-two years old in the summer of 1937, and he had never written or directed for the medium before — he'd only performed in other people's shows. Les Misérables changed that. Welles adapted Victor Hugo's sprawling novel into seven half-hour episodes for WOR-Mutual, directing the production, narrating it, and playing Jean Valjean himself. The series aired Friday nights at ten, from July 23 through September 3, 1937, recorded at the WOR studios in New York.

What makes the series worth knowing isn't only the famous name attached. You're hearing a company find itself. Martin Gabel, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Everett Sloane, Alice Frost, Frank Readick, and a handful of younger players who would go on to define the Mercury sound — Richard Wilson, William Alland, even a young Richard Widmark in one of his earliest radio credits — were assembling here, weeks before the Mercury Theatre formally existed. Welles and John Houseman founded the company in August 1937, with total assets of $100, while these broadcasts were already on the air.

The Story and How They Told It

Hugo's novel is enormous, and Welles had to make hard choices. He condensed the book into seven dramatic high points, each carrying its own title: "The Bishop," "Javert," "The Trial," "Cosette," "The Grave," "The Barricade," and "Conclusion." The first episode opens where the moral center of the whole novel sits — Jean Valjean stealing the bishop's silver, the act that sets everything in motion.

Welles played Valjean, the thief pursued for years by the relentless Inspector Javert (Martin Gabel). Alice Frost played Fantine; Ray Collins played Fauchelevent; Bill Johnstone played Marius. The role of Cosette was split between two performers: Estelle Levy played her as a child, and Virginia Nicolson — Welles's first wife, whom he had married in 1934 and who was sometimes billed as Virginia Welles — took over as the older Cosette. Peggy Allenby, Hiram Sherman, Betty Garde, Adelaide Klein, and Frank Readick rounded out the cast.

The most important artistic decision Welles made was structural. He served as the series' narrator, reading the passages of Hugo's prose that linked the dramatic scenes together — and he did it in the first person, threading the storytelling voice directly into the action. Music was used sparingly, nothing like the elaborate scores that would later define his Mercury productions. The voice carried it. That first-person narration technique was new to American radio drama, and Welles would build the rest of his radio career on it. When CBS came calling a year later, remembering this work, the series they commissioned was initially promoted as First Person Singular — it went to air on July 11, 1938, exactly one year after the Les Misérables premiere, as The Mercury Theatre on the Air. Welles's biographer Simon Callow called the Les Misérables production "one of his earliest, finest and most serious achievements on radio."

What Survives

All seven episodes survive in good sound quality, totaling about three hours and seventeen minutes — and that survival was nearly an accident. The recordings sat untouched for nearly three decades after broadcast and were almost discarded in 1966 before an archivist named David Goldin rescued them. They were eventually released by the Smithsonian Institution under its Historical Performances imprint, accompanied by a 29-page illustrated booklet by Welles historian Michael Dawson detailing each episode's production. A set of those Smithsonian cassettes is now part of the Orson Welles-Chris Welles Feder Collection at the University of Michigan, donated in 2012 by Welles's eldest daughter; the same archive holds the Richard Wilson-Orson Welles Papers, with Mercury Theatre material kept by Wilson, who appears in this very cast.

That recovery matters because of what these recordings actually are. The Mercury company was later described as "the most talked-about rep company in theater and on radio," but in the summer of 1937, they were still becoming that — assembling, week by week, the voices and instincts that would carry through to Citizen Kane in 1941. Collins, Moorehead, Sloane, Readick, Wilson, and Alland all crossed from these broadcasts into the Mercury films. Frost and Gabel costarred with Welles months later in the Mercury's celebrated Broadway Julius Caesar, which opened in November 1937. Welles himself would call Ray Collins "the finest actor I've ever worked with." All of that lay ahead. What you hear in these seven episodes is the beginning of it.