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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  There was one highlight, Atkinson observed: Orson Welles was “excellent.”

  In this regard, critics around town were nearly unanimous—the young lead had carried a rather nebulous play on his strong shoulders. Whitney Bolton in the New York Telegraph declared flatly: “Orson Welles was the triumph of the hour—he is bluff, defiant, bullock-like and brutal.” Gilbert W. Gabriel wrote in the New York American, “For such a young actor as Welles to play McGafferty as ruthlessly, as interestingly as he did, was a genuine feat.” Gabriel hailed Orson as “one of the most promising artists of our day.”

  The second-nighters had to pay for their tickets, shelling out $5.50 each; and that stratospheric price, in the depths of the Depression, left the house only half filled. When the curtain rose, and the parable of power and tragedy embodied in Orson’s character unfolded, some affluent ticket holders took umbrage at the words of the Greek chorus, which excoriated America’s fat cats. There were boos and hisses from the audience.

  The final performance, on Sunday, was presold to capacity, to supporters of New Theater and New Masses. The left-wing publications had solved the problem of whether to endorse the play by scheduling a symposium after the show. Poet Stanley Burnshaw, playwright John Howard Lawson, and the U.S. Communist Party’s cultural spokesman V. J. Jerome—three ideologues—would interrogate MacLeish and analyze the play. “The Party’s plan was clear, if a trifle ingenuous: to capture alive America’s most fashionable poet and put him to work—eager and eloquent on the side of the Revolution,” wrote Houseman.

  The Sunday crowd was raucous, and Orson delighted in the turnout, drawing on the audience’s energy for his outsize performance. With his aging makeup, his strapping presence, and his snake charmer’s voice, he beguiled the audience before it could figure out whether McGafferty was good or evil, a symbol or a human being. Whenever he played a “negative” character—one of his great strengths, as he realized—Orson was liberated from pieties. He always refused to dehumanize villainy, and he was a seductive, irresistible villain. He “approached political themes through paradox” in his work, Joseph McBride has written. When François Truffaut wrote that Orson always examined “the angel within the beast, the heart in the monster, the secret of the tyrant . . . the weakness of the strong,” he was writing about Welles the director, but the same could be said of Welles’s work as an actor.

  That night, MacLeish’s ringing verse was met with repeated cheers and applause. Onstage afterward, MacLeish faced the symposium panelists, who were hard-pressed to define politically what they had just witnessed. Suffering from flu and a high fever, MacLeish listened politely to their questions, but resisted labels in his elusive answers. The last of the three speakers, V. J. Jerome, declared that the play couldn’t be too bad, considering the hostile reaction of the well-heeled audience the night before. “The hiss of the bourgeoisie is the applause of the proletariat!” he proclaimed—a line so good MacLeish should have lifted it for the play.

  Jerome did have some nits to pick: Panic was not sufficiently pro–working class, he declared. (It was true: like his parents, Orson in his more political stage and screen works always stopped short of blind identification with the proletariat.) Later, in the New Masses, Jerome wrote his own critical review: “Capitalism faces destruction [in Panic,] but it is necessary to declare who will do the destroying. Will it be the voluntary surrender of life, in the manner of McGafferty?” Jerome’s lengthy notice avoided mentioning Orson by name, however.

  Orson sat in the back of the theater, listening to the panel. He was a staunch left-liberal, much like Skipper, but never programmatically left-wing; his conversation, letters, and later published newspaper columns all show a resistance to rhetoric or zealotry, which he loathed. Orson later claimed to Barbara Leaming that he disrupted the symposium—“I thought they were talking such nonsense that I began to hoot and holler,” he said, until “leftists ordered him ejected from the theater”—but no one else has recalled any such dramatic ejection, and the story seems another “fantasy memory.”

  That final night seems to have been overwhelmingly positive, however: Panic had escaped an ideological auto-da-fé. The third-night audience “did not come to like that play,” as MacLeish wrote to Houseman afterward. But “they went away liking it—more than liking it.”

  Just as important, for three nights Orson Welles reigned supreme in New York, hailed as a major talent by practically every critic in town. For the young actor, Panic was a triumph, personally and professionally, to rival Jew Süss.

  After that glorious weekend, it was back to the future. Halfheartedly, Orson sought other jobs, but he was conflicted about stooping to anything less prestigious. “The truth is my personal success in Panic (except in one or two quarters) was so marked I can’t get work,” Orson lamented to Skipper. “There is the waiting for the big enough part in the big enough play, and the sense of obligation, if you understand.”

  He spent much of his time working on “Bright Lucifer.” When he wasn’t writing, he chummed around with Hiram “Chubby” Sherman, a fellow traveler in left-liberal circles, who shared a Greenwich Village flat with his onetime mentor, now life partner, Whitford Kane. Sherman talked about launching a summer stock theater in Springfield, Illinois, where Sherman was born and where Orson had relatives on his mother’s side. That sounded like fun to Orson. “It’s a chance to do a lot of plays you wouldn’t dare to even in a summer theater,” he wrote to Skipper. “More than that it’s a chance for Virginia to try her wings as a leading lady.”

  Sherman thought they might offer “Bright Lucifer” as a work in progress in Springfield as part of the summer program. Orson redoubled his efforts to finish the play and get it on the boards—if not in Springfield for the summer of 1935, perhaps at the Opera House in Woodstock. Orson planned to direct and star, and he still wanted Skipper as his producer.

  In the two years that Orson had been working fitfully on it, “Bright Lucifer” had evolved into a semiautobiographical stew involving three characters who summer together on Indian reservation lands in northern Wisconsin. One of the characters was an embittered orphaned teenager plagued by hay fever; another was the teenager’s adult guardian, an unscrupulous tabloid reporter of the Hearst variety; and the third, a part Orson envisioned for himself, was the reporter’s brother, a star of horror films who stirs up trouble with a ghoulish prank on the Indians.

  Convinced that Skipper would be won over by the finished product, Orson slaved away late every night, with Virginia as his amanuensis. Despite his first Broadway earnings, he was more than ever financially dependent: although Dr. Bernstein had raised Orson’s monthly allowance to $150 after his marriage, the couple needed extra money to tide them over, and now he wrote to ask Roger Hill for a $50 monthly stipend as an advance against the future royalties of Everybody’s Shakespeare. In return, he offered Hill all the profits from “Bright Lucifer” in perpetuity. He promised the new work would deliver both substance and commercial potential: “a horror play with a literary quality and logic (so far unheard of in this kind of thing), as well as a lot of horror!” He guaranteed: “Tense moments. Screams. Absolutely everything except sex!”

  By the time Virginia finished typing the final draft, the couple’s finances had deteriorated so dramatically (“situation dire”) that Orson felt his best option was to return to the Midwest as soon as possible and stage “Bright Lucifer” as a Todd School production—perhaps in the early spring, he wrote to the headmaster, then reprising it for commencement. Orson could perform triple duty, directing and starring in the play while teaching drama to Todd Troupers. All Hill, the putative producer, had to do was supply the teacher’s salary. “The Todd Theatre Festival presents Bright Lucifer!” Orson wrote to Skipper Hill. “Think of the educational value for the boys to be able to attend rehearsals of a real professional production! The publicity value!” All Skipper had to do was give “Bright Lucifer” a fair reading. “If you like it, we can start for Woodstock! . . . It
might be a hit. If Chicago goes for it for even a week we can produce it in New York.”

  Hill wrote back, enclosing some welcome money, but he said he hadn’t found the time to read “Bright Lucifer” yet; this was puzzling and dismaying. As the letters from Woodstock slowed down, with nothing said about “Bright Lucifer,” Orson scrambled to hatch other projects to interest the headmaster. He and Virginia brainstormed a play that would combine Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer with his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “probably the grandest stuff ever written for kids,” in Orson’s words. Why had no one else ever thought of such a wonderful idea? “I believe the copyrights have at last expired, hence the movie of a couple of years ago,” Orson explained. “It is ours, then, for the dramatizing, and it’s a gold mine. I’m sure of it. I’ll swear to it!” He was too old to play Tom or Huck, but the Todd boys could play those parts, and he would find a black actor for the runaway slave Jim. Orson would portray “the younger, the louder and the funnier of the two hams [the Dauphin and the Duke], the crooks Tom and Huck encounter and go down the river on a raft with”; he thought he might persuade Whitford Kane to play the Duke, “the elder and ginnier” swindler. Or, if the headmaster preferred, Orson could just write and direct the show, and the whole thing could be cast “with the cream of the Troupers.”

  The Twain play could be readied in time for Closing Day, Orson assured Hill, and then they could load the Todd boys and sets into Big Bertha and make a tour “of the summer theatres, country clubs, halls, movie houses, lawns, churches and swell homes, playing one-night stands mostly in the summer resort country in the Middle West, in the East. . . . It’s the best publicity ever devised for a prep school. It couldn’t be better!!!!!!” If the tour went well, Big Bertha could take them all to New York for Christmas shows. “Gas. The boys’ meals, some little change. The production is all paid for . . . No Equity! No Union! Simple! Cheap! A little money on advertising, and a lot of free newspaper space. Amusing to audiences.”

  Day after day passed, however, with no word from the headmaster. When Hill’s next letter finally arrived, it was a shock. The school had suffered a difficult year, Hill explained, straining its resources and finances. He could not encourage any staging of “Bright Lucifer,” or of the Mark Twain adaptation. Furthermore, Orson shouldn’t count on any reprise of the summer theater festival, whether at the Opera House or as any kind of Big Bertha road tour.

  “This summer I must devote to old-fashioned, despised, but evidently necessary salesmanship,” Hill admitted. “I’m sure the publicity of last summer has a very genuine cash value to the school in the long run but for the immediate year it was much more offset by my lack of personal work on ‘inquirery’ follow up. We opened with only seventeen new boys this fall. At no previous opening since I’ve been in charge have we had less than twice that many.”

  Deflecting Orson’s interest in a school teaching post, Hill advised him to resist the temptation to return home to Illinois at this point in his career. “It would be better for the married couple to be quite far away from either family,” Skipper wrote. He urged Orson to think about going away somewhere to do some serious writing, even to consider doing summer stock on the East Coast.

  The headmaster’s dismissal of “Bright Lucifer” must have wounded Orson, but he moved on with hardly a backward glance; the play that he had worked on for so long was filed away for future Welles experts to ponder. Many of its personal ingredients—the teenager with hay fever, the smothering guardian, the Wisconsin north woods, and a subplot that alluded to adult-child sexual tensions—have encouraged some to view Orson’s second complete stage play (after “Marching Song”), as thinly disguised breast-baring. Biographer Simon Callow found “Bright Lucifer” to be “among the most curious and personal documents of his that we have,” while scholar James Naremore wrote in The Magic World of Orson Welles that it “embodies Welles’s major themes,” with its mixture of “Midwestern pastoral, grotesque terror, and ‘family drama.’ ”

  Joseph McBride, the author of three books on Welles, noted, “The omnipresent ‘devil drums’ of the north woods Indians are supposed to bring out the diabolical nature (literally) of the cigar-smoking young Orson figure, Eldred Brand, who is described as ‘a persuasive little bitch.’ Welles’s dark self-portrait as a hateful, vengeful demonic youth, resentful of his guardian—sexually, financially, and otherwise—and consumed with indiscriminate rage, make Bright Lucifer a disturbing, though clumsily dramatized, glimpse into his nineteen-year-old psyche.”

  John Houseman had receded into the background for a while after Panic, but he saw more of Orson and Virginia in the spring once they abandoned their place in Westchester County for a cheaper apartment on Riverside Drive. Houseman described the Upper West Side flat as a “curious one-room residence” with a huge iron tub where the man of the house lingered for hours, and which, “covered at night with a board and mattress, served them as a marriage bed.”

  At first the two men met for coffee here and there, trading notes on plays and performers they loved or detested, finding true kinship in their shared enthusiasms and ambitions. After Nathan Zatkin procured a new “temporary headquarters of the catatonic Phoenix Theatre” in the Sardi Building on West Forty-Fourth Street, they began meeting in the Sardi office, “talking, dreaming, laughing and vaguely developing schemes for bricks without straw,” as Houseman recalled in Run-Through. “ ‘Planning’ is the wrong word for what we did together—then or later. Of the manifold projects we cooked up in the four and a half years of our association—the ones that succeeded and the ones that failed, the ones that were begun and abandoned and the ones that never got started—each was an improvisation, an inspiration or an escape.”

  The Phoenix office quickly became a haven for out-of-work theater people, with Chubby Sherman, Francis Carpenter, and others dropping by to join in the building of air castles. The big question was what, if anything, the dormant Phoenix enterprise should attempt next. Orson’s “dominant drive,” Houseman recalled, “was a desire to expose the anemic elegance of Guthrie McClintic’s Romeo and Juliet through an Elizabethan production of such energy and violence as New York had never seen.” But a competing Shakespeare play was too obvious a move for Welles. Instead, he and Houseman narrowed the other prospects down to works by two of Shakespeare’s contemporaries: Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.

  By April, with support from Roger Hill suspended, Orson was anxious to get a Phoenix production up and going as fast as humanly possible. “It did not matter too much what it was, nor that it was too late in the season, nor that we had no way of financing it,” recalled Houseman. Orson chose ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and over a weekend spent “in and on his bathtub,” in Houseman’s words, he whipped up artful sketches of “a handsome and extremely complex Italian street scene (complete with balconies and interiors), in which the stage became a theatrical crossroads where the physical and emotional crises of the tragedy converged.” The costume drawings followed, and a short time later Zatkin found a venue: the Bijou Theatre at one end of Shubert Alley, a run-down shell available on reasonable terms.

  The partners quickly rounded up a cast and launched read-throughs in Chubby Sherman and Whitford Kane’s basement apartment on West Fourteenth Street. Alexander Scourby, who was attracting attention in plays at the New School for Social Research; and Miriam Batista, who had recited Shakespeare in vaudeville, were cast as the incestuous lovers Annabella and Giovanni. The role of Bergetto, the play’s ill-fated buffoon, went to Chubby Sherman, “of whose talent,” Houseman wrote, Orson “was so fanatically convinced that he would not rest till he had proved it to the world.”

  On Panic, Houseman had been Orson’s boss. ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore would be their first real collaboration. With his intense personality and creative drive, Orson led the way, adapting the script, designing the scenery, and directing the play. “I watched him, with growing wonder,” Houseman wrote i
n his memoir, “take as mannered and decadent a work as John Ford’s tragedy, bend it to his will and recreate it, on the stage of his imagination, in the vivid dramatic light of his own imagination. . . .

  “I was almost thirty-three years old. Welles was twenty. But in my working relationship with this astonishing boy whose theatrical experience was so much greater and richer than mine, it was I who was the pupil, he the teacher. In certain fields I was his senior, possessed of painfully acquired knowledge that was wider and more comprehensive than his; but what amazed and awed me in Orson was his astounding and, apparently, innate dramatic instinct.”

  Still, the Phoenix faced a familiar hurdle: funding. Francis Carpenter, for whom Orson had set aside a small role in the play, convinced the partners that he had a lifeline to a deep-pocketed angel. “The most outrageous of Orson’s many singular friends,” as Houseman put it, Carpenter vowed to extract $10,000 from “an aging lady of great wealth,” who was his “protectress.”

  As the play’s scheduled May opening neared, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore was in a heightened state of readiness—“cast, designed, housed,” in Houseman’s words—but still penniless. No longer able to afford the rent on Riverside Drive, Orson and Virginia sneaked off to join Carpenter on Long Island, where he was squatting at a mansion owned by the elderly “protectress.” A devilish character, Carpenter cleverly borrowed what little money the Welleses had and then left them to their own devices, the mansion empty, its refrigerator bare. After three days without a decent meal—or any sign of Carpenter—they surrendered and wired to Dr. Bernstein. The couple moved back into the Algonquin, “signing for things,” as Orson wrote to Skipper. “We are broke . . . our income and our heart.”