CBS presented The Dark Tower on the popular radio show Suspense, May 4, 1944, two days before Orson's 29th 
birthday. The tale is based on a 1933 play by Alexander Woollcott and George S. Kaufman. Cast: Hans Conried 
(Stanley Vance), Orson Welles (Damon Wellington and other roles), Jeanette Nolan (Jessica), Verna Felton 
(Martha), John McIntire (Ben Weston). Joseph Kearns (The Man in Black), William Spier (producer, director, 
adaptor, editor).

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"The Dark Tower is a send-up of Welles himself... Welles plays a stage actor, Damon Wellington (note the 
name similarity), with an overinflated ego who has a penchant for being a ham. 'You dare call me a ham!' he 
intones while casually tossing off lines from Shakespeare in casual conversation. He refers to Hollywood as 
a 'cesspool of the arts' and, when his sister Jessica urges him to drink less and eat more, the response 
is, 'Would you have me subsist entirely on food and reach the gargantuan proportions of Orson Welles? That 
ought to needle the "Boy Wonder."' At one point he even notes, 'I have a pressing engagement with a pinup 
girl,' an obvious reference to wife Rita Hayworth. Of Jessica, also an actor, he remarks, 'She has talent 
but no genius' - the reverse of a phrase that had been occasionally applied to Welles himself.

"As the story unfolds we find out that Jessica has been institutionalized after a bad marriage to a 
Svengali-like psychoanalyst, Stanley Vance (Hans Conried)... What makes this scenario so remarkable is the 
character of Stanley, whose pan-European accent bears an uncanny resemblance, or is deliberately inflected, 
to sound like John Houseman. For insiders, the radio play must have seemed like Welles symbolically killing 
Houseman out of resentment for Houseman's role in managing the Mercury Theatre." - Paul Heyer, The Medium 
and the Magician: Orson Welles, the Radio Years, 1934-1952.

The photo used here is a publicity still from Orson Welles' Macbeth (1948) with Orson in the title role and 
Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth. This part was the first of a lifetime of screen and TV roles for Jeanette 
Nolan.

In the 1933 stage play, the main character was named Damon Wells.

A final bit of trivia: "In January 1938, future President of the United States Richard Nixon was cast in 
the Whittier Community Players production of this play. He was cast opposite a high school teacher named 
Thelma 'Pat' Ryan, whom he would later marry." - wiki