Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane

by McGilligan, Patrick

  They arrived to the news that a packed audience of 1,200 in evening dress was still in place at the Metropolitan Theatre, awaiting the show. Shocked, the company sprang into action. Racing to the theater, the crew prepared the sets and lighting in full view of the audience. Seattle was McClintic’s birthplace, and he took the stage as master of ceremonies, narrating the preparations to cheers and applause, urging the stage manager, prop master, and wardrobe mistress each to take a bow as they finished their work. The performance didn’t start until one o’clock in the morning, and lasted until four. The cast woke up late and exhausted but proud.

  From Seattle, the Cornell tour snaked down the coast to Oakland and then to its only stop in southern California, Los Angeles—Orson’s first visit to the motion picture capital.

  Katharine Cornell was beloved in the city, having set a record for nonmusical box office receipts there when she toured with The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1932. This time her company’s three plays would rotate for two weeks at the downtown Biltmore Theatre, where as usual Cornell was stalked backstage by Hollywood producers bringing her flowers and film offers. But Cornell was a theater purist, and though she regularly promised MGM production chief Irving Thalberg that she would make a screen test, she never did, and she withstood all temptations to play her signature role, Elizabeth Barrett, onscreen. (Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, inherited the character for the MGM picture, which would be released later in 1934.) It would be another ten years before Cornell stooped to her only screen appearance: a fleeting cameo as herself in Stage Door.

  No matter how much they loved movies, most of the cast and certainly Orson felt the same devotion to the theater. Orson may have tried to look up Samson Raphaelson, and he and other young cast members toured the area, gawking from outside at the gated Hollywood studios. The two-week stand was a tremendous success, garnering excellent receipts and reviews (Orson earned his first mention in the Los Angeles Times with critic Edwin Schallert writing that he made a “very acceptable” Mercutio). But the collective success was overshadowed by a predawn car crash at the end of the run that involved young cast members and sent three players to the hospital; the company was forced to leave behind another actor, charged with drunkenness.

  Road tours, then as now, are remembered for their triumphs but also for their crises and calamities. The car crash in Los Angeles was the worst setback, but not the only one. In Oakland, for example, the scheduled space was divided into a theater and a basketball court; backboard shots and referees’ whistles could be heard faintly as the troupe performed. In Colorado Springs, Colorado, Cornell and the other actresses were forced to share a single dressing room that had only one mirror. In Amarillo, Texas, the actors played through a dust storm so loud they strained to hear their cues.

  Orson, who loved mishaps and challenges, stored it all away for future reference. Much has been written about his involvement in this storied tour, often focusing on his immaturity, or on his inability to match the performances of more seasoned players in the company. Orson’s Marchbanks, Basil Rathbone wrote in his autobiography, was “so fatuously unpleasant that Morell became, by contrast, a deeply sympathetic character, which most certainly was not Shaw’s intention.” Then again, Orson “was supposed to be a boy wonder verging on the phenomenon of genius. With this type of advance publicity much should be forgiven him.”

  Another player in the troupe, John Hoysradt, who roomed with Orson for much of the tour and later joined his Mercury Theatre, told author Richard France that “Orson at the time always played to the top row of the third balcony, both in make-up and projectivity.”17 Welles himself agreed, telling the BBC years later that his performances on Cornell’s tour were sometimes “terribly campy” and constituted “one of the poorer moments in the American theater.”

  The tour’s impresario, Guthrie McClintic, later wrote that the eighteen-year-old Welles was “effective” when portraying Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, “but left more than a little to be desired when he undertook Marchbanks in Candida. That he got by was by no means enough.” But the stage director conceded that he himself lacked experience working with touring repertory companies, and admitted that the overall casting had involved “plenty of compromise.” McClintic insisted, “It was not the actors’ fault that they were better in some parts than others.”

  In particular, McClintic lamented his own mistakes in staging the Shakespeare play. The touring version was too somber, he reflected, its emotionalism telegraphed, its heavy scenery oppressive. Gradually, as the tour progressed, Romeo and Juliet—less popular with audiences and critics—saw fewer performances, while Candida was phased out entirely. The Barretts of Wimpole Street, old hat for Cornell, was the most reliable offering for the sticks.

  Any criticisms of Orson should be seen in this broader light. Read carefully, his notices suggest an actor who was making shifts and strides on the road, as often happens over the course of a tour. He pleased many critics and most audiences. Wood Soanes of the Oakland Tribune found the young unknown “indifferent” as Mercutio when he first saw Romeo and Juliet in January, then “appreciably improved” one month later. (He also said that Cornell’s Juliet had “matured” during the same period of time.) As for Marchbanks, Orson played him “to the hilt,” Soanes wrote. “He looked and acted the sensitive shy poet without ever suggesting femininity. The choking scene was delightfully accomplished and the hearth episode was memorable.”

  Of course Orson also received negative reviews—often enough negative and positive reviews from different critics in the same city. “Do reviews ever wound you?” Michael Parkinson asked Welles four decades later in an interview on Parkinson’s British television program. “Deeply,” Welles replied without hesitation. “I can remember every bad notice I’ve ever had.” He went on to recall a particularly caustic critique of his Marchbanks, which one reviewer on the Cornell tour likened to “a sea calf whining in a basso profundo.” Welles said the barb still haunted him, and “I’m sure it’s an absolutely accurate description of that performance, which must have been abominable, but it still goes through my head before I go to sleep at night.”

  Offstage, he was certainly full of youthful mischief. On one occasion, in a San Francisco restaurant, Orson offended Cornell’s dignity when she caught him and John Hoysradt strutting around wearing false beards and tuxedos, impersonating stuffy foreign dignitaries. Another time, it is said—perhaps apocryphally—that Orson missed the company train and had to charter a plane to make the next tour stop. In Kansas City, with extra time on his hands, he took a room in a cheap neighborhood, put up a sign, dressed like a swami, and told fortunes. In Atlantic City too, he set up a booth and practiced palmistry on vacationers strolling along the boardwalk. He looked for scars on their knees from unhappy accidents when they were children, and wondered if they had undergone a trauma between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Who hadn’t? He certainly did.

  “About twice a year I wake up and find myself a sinner,” Orson sweetly apologized in a letter to Cornell at one point during the tour. “Somebody slaps me in the face, and after the stars have cleared away and I’ve stopped blubbering, I am aware of the discomforting realities. I see that my boots are roughshod and that I’ve been galloping in them over people’s sensibilities.”

  All agree that Orson was the touring troupe’s livest wire. To McClintic, the young actor was “an arresting, stimulating, and at moments exasperating member of the company.” To actress Brenda Forbes—who was six years Orson’s senior and who already boasted some New York credits—Orson was “the talk of the company and our favorite piece of gossip. His youth, talent and beautiful voice made up for what he lacked in discipline, and in spite of never knowing what he was going to do next, we became very fond of him.”

  After Los Angeles, the repertory company looped back to the mountain states before heading down to Texas, then north again to Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. After wandering for weeks in the plains states and the Midwest, the t
our explored the Deep South and then, in late April, headed for final dates in a cluster of cities on the East Coast and in New England.

  As with his notices, every negative anecdote about Orson seems balanced by a positive one. He was one of the leaders of the steamboat expedition down the Ohio River, when the company turned south in the spring, sailing from Cincinnati to Louisville and enjoying a picnic lunch on board with friends including Hoysradt, Forbes, Cornell, and McClintic. On Sunday nights, “whenever we could,” Cornell remembered, Orson joined her and Hoysradt, listening to Toscanini conduct the New York Philharmonic on the radio. The same small group enjoyed the most beautiful of days in Charleston, sipping mint juleps at the Villa Margherita.

  The “low point” may well have been New Orleans, where, according to Forbes, Orson and his friends ordered everything at Antoine’s—snails, oysters Rockefeller, lobster thermidor. “Everyone ate and drank too richly,” recalled Forbes.

  Forbes’s memories of her fellow actor varied in interviews, and she saved one story for her autobiography, published in 1994. “The young men” of the company, Forbes recounted in Five Minutes, Miss Forbes, paid innumerable visits to the red-light district in New Orleans. “One particular night, when most of us were fast asleep in our berths, Orson Welles returned highly elated and full of mischief. He climbed to my upper berth puffing and wheezing (he was a big man even then) and plunked himself down on top of me. What a situation—both horrifying and hysterically funny. Apparently Orson enjoyed himself. Scrunching up railway bed linen to protect myself, I did not.

  “Neither one of us ever referred to that night again.”

  As much as his stint with the Gate Theatre, Katharine Cornell’s tour was a coming-of-age experience for Welles, restoring his belief in himself as an actor, while encouraging him to contemplate an even more ambitious plan for his future.

  The idea had been growing in his mind since boyhood. Dissatisfied by the prospect of a career as a mere actor, he was drawn instead to the careers of actor-managers like Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir, or one he had met earlier in Chicago, Fritz Leiber. His months on the road with Cornell exemplified the type of actor he wanted to be: the head of his own touring repertory company. Edwards needed MacLíammóir for their partnership, and Cornell needed Guthrie McClintic as her coproducer and director. But they were all actor-managers of the breed Orson had grown up following and admiring and longing to emulate.

  As a boy, he had watched classical theater presented by the companies of great actor-managers in the twilight of their lifelong tours, and had been privileged to shake the hands of more than a few. He devoured books about the great luminaries like David Garrick, Henry Irving, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and Sir Ben Greet, who did it all: played leads; designed the sets, lighting, and costumes; staged and produced their shows. Orson had the skills to pursue that tradition; he had proved it repeatedly at the Todd School. More important, besides these skills Orson also had belief in himself, energy, drive, and willpower.

  Before anyone else would have declared such a path possible, Orson was talking about presiding over his own repertory troupe—such apparently idle talk always serving him as a kind of rehearsal for later reality. He talked about his ambitions incessantly during the Cornell tour. Orson could be “gauche and tiresome,” Brenda Forbes recalled, “always talking about plans for his own theater.”

  He would have his chance, sooner than he knew.

  By spring, doubt was brewing behind the scenes that Romeo and Juliet would be ready for Broadway in the first half of 1934, as originally announced. McClintic was unhappy with the sets and his own ponderous staging; the heavy trappings seemed to be affecting his wife’s performance, which lacked charm. In April, when McClintic rejoined the tour in Cincinnati to talk it over with her, they decided to close Romeo and Juliet “for the season,” according to Cornell. “All one-night stands from then on—and threw away the sets.” The company would disperse after the tour to regroup for Broadway in the fall of 1934, when McClintic would reconceive Romeo and Juliet.

  The decision had little to do with Orson, but he was devastated to learn that his appointment with Broadway had been postponed. Defeat and disappointment often galvanized him, and he speedily contacted the scenic designer Robert Edmond Jones and his wife, Margaret Carrington, who were busy staging an Othello starring Carrington’s brother, Walter Huston, for the annual summer drama festival in Central City, Colorado. The couple had mused about bringing their Othello to Broadway afterward. Now that Romeo and Juliet looked doubtful, Orson asked, was there a part for him in their show? Jones and Carrington liked him, but they shied away from promises. “That hurt for a while,” Orson wrote to Skipper.

  For five minutes, perhaps, but not much longer. By now, Orson’s dreams of launching his own repertory company were already urging him in an independent direction. With the summer yawning ahead, the last thing Orson wanted to do was return to his lonely Rush Street writing studio, or, worse, to Dr. Maurice Bernstein’s stifling supervision in Highland Park. But there was another potential base of operations, a natural sanctuary where he was bound to prosper: the Todd School. After all, hadn’t he been a virtual actor-manager there, even as a student?

  Knowing time was short, he sent silver-tongued letters to Roger Hill, hoping to head off the headmaster’s usual summer at Camp Tosebo. Together, Orson proposed, they could organize a serious summer theater operation, using school facilities that were vacant in the off-season. They could hire professionals for the leads, supplementing the core company with Todd boys and young apprentices—charging their parents a fee that would help pay for the professionals. They could rent the Woodstock Opera House on the town square, and even use Big Bertha to chauffeur the major drama critics in from Chicago, supplying them with typewriters and “some picturesque black chef,” in Orson’s words, on board to whip up meals for the scribes.

  Orson had managed to put aside a little savings on the tour, and he volunteered $1,000 of his own as the seed money. True, the headmaster and Todd School would be taking the greater financial risk, but they could pay the professionals something like (“here I blush a little”) $25 weekly while extracting $300 to $500 per Todd boy from the boys’ affluent parents.

  Hill was enthusiastic about Orson’s latest Big Idea, his wife a little less so. Orson and the headmaster talked it over by letter and phone, agreeing that the “luminous” (Orson’s word) Whitford Kane, revered in Chicago for his tenure with the Goodman Theatre, would be a perfect figurehead for the summer theater festival. Orson wrote Kane a coaxing letter, even promising “a job for Chub!”—Kane’s protégé Hiram “Chubby” Sherman, one of the Goodman’s best comedic actors. Kane tentatively agreed to sign on as “director-in-chief,” a scoop that was given to Charles Collins for the Tribune.

  Still touring the South, Orson stayed up late after the curtain calls writing drafts of the first press material. By early April, as the company arrived in Nashville, booked for several days at the Ryman Auditorium, the Big Summer Theater Idea had begun to take more definite shape.

  One of Orson’s brainstorms was inviting two of the actor-managers who had inspired him—Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir—to come and join his dream, spending the summer in leading roles for his new theater company in the heart of America. “I am trying my hand at production,” he told the pair, promising “a kind of holiday and lots of fun.” Edwards could direct one or more shows, and both men could be involved in the production designs.

  When Edwards and MacLíammóir replied, asking for particulars, Orson sat down in his room at the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Nashville and gave the evolving update on hotel stationery. By their presence alone, the two statesmen of Irish theater would “inspire a professional company of quality, and a school full of eager amateurs of quantity.” The Dubliners could count on “a pretty superlative company,” among them Whitford Kane (an Irish stage luminary whose name was well known to the Gate’s cofounders), Chubby Sherman, Florence Stevens (M
rs. Ashton Stevens), Brenda Forbes, “a couple of more really top-notch stars,” and “let us pray, Hilton Edwards and the inimitable Michael . . . quite enough to antidote the effect of Orson Welles in any theater.”

  The selection of plays, according to Orson’s letter of April 12, 1934, was “a question upon which we should like to hear from you.” But he listed some tempting possibilities, demonstrating his breadth and sophistication: Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus; Arthur Schnitzler’s Living Hours; Charles Dickens’s Bleak House; and, from Dostoyevsky, stage versions of either The Idiot or The Brothers Karamazov. While Orson could offer Edwards and MacLíammóir only “very literally pin money,” he vowed to cover their round-trip travel from Dublin to Woodstock, as well as “all your expenses during your stay,” including “very comfortable rooms” and hearty meals (“by an excellent chef”—from the Todd School staff, that is). They would have the run of the school, with its “submarine-lit swimming pool, its riding stables, its machine and print shops, cottages and dormitories, private experimental theater, luxurious land yacht for transportation, and its fifty acres of American woodlands.” And the Dubliners were promised “as much free time and freedom as you want” to explore Chicago and the ongoing world’s fair there.

  The Chicago press corps was already champing at the bit to “boost” the homegrown enterprise, Orson assured the two men, even “three months before its first day of rehearsal.” Indeed, even before they accepted Orson’s offer, Charles Collins announced “the summer school of the theater” in the April 22 issue of the Tribune. Collins identified Whitford Kane as the director of the summer theater, with the Gate Theatre founders “Edwards and MacLinnoir” (not yet famous enough in Chicago for correct spelling) lending the program “a distinctly Irish flavor.” The Dubliners did not officially join the operation until a week after that item appeared in print, when their cable of acceptance reached Orson at the Washington Duke Hotel in Durham, North Carolina. It was a closer call than it appeared: Hilton Edwards was wary of the idea, and they had dithered over the prospect of spending their summer at work in the American Midwest instead of sportively in Europe. But MacLíammóir talked his partner into it.