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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Not long afterward, Orson was supposed to take over the Bijou, launching actor and technical rehearsals for ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. But the theater and other vendors demanded payments in advance. Carpenter was summoned to a showdown at the Phoenix office. Where was the promised $10,000? Well, Carpenter had good news and bad news. He had just visited the elderly protectress, who had authorized the $10,000. The bad news: it turned out that their benefactor was more passionately devoted to theater buildings than to the plays themselves. The $10,000, she stipulated, could be used only for renovating and redecorating the rundown Bijou.

  After a long, tense silence, Orson began to laugh. His laughter built into cascading roars. “If Orson had not started to laugh,” Houseman recalled, “I doubt if Francis Carpenter would have left the premises . . . alive. His hilarity was infectious. Actors who dropped in to inquire about the start of rehearsals found us, an hour later, still howling, roaring, crowing and slapping ourselves in wild and uncontrollable hysteria.” The pair adjourned for an elaborate lunch, during which they decided to cancel the show, vacate the Sardi office, and suspend their partnership.

  It was vintage Orson Welles: the fun was in the doing, and the doing was done. He held nothing against Carpenter, who was still welcome in Welles projects as late as 1956, when he appeared among the cast of King Lear at New York’s City Center. Welles and Houseman parted as friends, promising to stay in touch, but without any real certainty that they would get together again.

  With the Broadway season drawing to a close, Orson sent five-alarm telegrams to his guardian and his former headmaster. “The money has a count of three days yet before it’s out. And I mean down and out.” He pleaded with Roger Hill for a onetime job staging the Todd Troupers’ last play of the school year, always a major endeavor. Seeing how downhearted his prize pupil was, Hill drew up “a face-saving offer,” in his words, “a very formal-looking document with everything nominated in the bond” that pledged $100 monthly to Orson, from May through August, in exchange for his directing the spring play. The Hills also arranged for the couple to lodge in a cottage near Lake Geneva for the rest of the summer. Orson could concentrate on his writing. In return, Hill would take half ownership of the profits of anything Orson wrote.

  Within days of the collapse of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Orson and Virginia fled New York, heading first to Dartmouth in New Hampshire to see Orson’s Todd classmate William Mowry Jr. play Brutus in an innovative college production of Julius Caesar. It was a very unusual production, involving minimal scenery: raised platforms of varying heights, with the main action taking place under pools of light and the rest of the stage plunged into darkness. By the end of April Orson and Virginia were back in Wheaton with the Nicolsons, attending the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s season finale. Orson made a few public appearances in Chicago, addressing groups on “general subjects of the stage,” including a presentation at the Circuit Theatre, sponsored by the Round Table of the University of Chicago, that was broadcast locally.

  Skipper Hill and musical maestro Carl Hendrickson had already planned the last play of the school year, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by the time Orson arrived in Woodstock just before his twentieth birthday on May 6. Hill’s daughter Joan was playing the female lead, Eliza. Although Orson took over the reins of directing, there was little of the publicity fanfare that had marked the previous year’s summer festival, and Chicago critics were not bused to the school for performances. Uncle Tom’s Cabin rarely came up in Hill’s later conversations with Welles, except in jokes about the prop gun that misfired in a climactic scene. Orson ghosted a glowing front-page notice in the Woodstock Daily Sentinel that gave all credit for masterminding the show to Hill.

  After commencement, the Welleses repaired to their summer rental on the south shore of Lake Geneva, half an hour north of Woodstock. Their hope was that they would find peace and inspiration in the idyllic resort community, with the mansions of Chicago industrialists sprinkled around a picturesque lake and beautiful countryside. Lake Geneva was not as rarefied as Ravinia, but the food was excellent, and there were genuine tourist attractions, including the University of Chicago’s world-renowned Yerkes Observatory. That summer, the young couple could see Ethel Barrymore’s daughter, Ethel Barrymore Colt, and her touring company perform She Stoops to Conquer; they also took in productions by a local summer stock group, the Belfry Players.

  While in Lake Geneva, the couple were visited more than once by Dr. Maurice Bernstein and Hazel Moore, as well as Orson’s mother’s favorite cousin, “Uncle” Dudley Crafts Watson, who delivered a stereopticon lecture to a local club. Watson always said that the natural splendors of Lake Geneva, where he was born, inspired his affinity for painting landscapes.

  Orson’s brother, Richard, had finally been discharged from Kankakee State Hospital, and had taken up temporary residence in Chicago. With almost no money left from his meager inheritance, Richard was working at Hull House, teaching arts and crafts to its impoverished residents. “He got fired from Hull House,” Welles told Barbara Leaming, “because he took a hooker upstairs and locked himself in with her and they couldn’t get him down for days.” Although this anecdote, burnishing Richard’s credentials as a Lothario, can’t be verified in Hull House archives, Orson must have seen his brother a few times over the summer. Their relationship was strained but cordial. Most people regarded Richard warily; although docile, he was always borrowing money and claiming things he had never done, sparking dustups wherever he worked, even at the settlement house.

  Orson and Virginia paid occasional visits to Chicago, where they had the loan of Ashton Stevens’s apartment on Bellevue Place. They also stole weekends in Wheaton, spending long afternoons golfing, then dining and dancing in the company of Virginia’s parents.

  To family and friends, Orson seemed unusually subdued. Leo Nicolson, who hated the fact that his daughter had abandoned her family for the theater, tried to talk Orson into a career as a stockbroker, offering to set him up with friends in the Loop. Orson demurred. Nicolson was insistent, proclaiming that he didn’t want his daughter living hand to mouth, married to a failure. Forced into a privileged country-club milieu in the depths of the Depression, holding his tongue while a hard-drinking businessman berated the arts and show business, Orson felt his spine stiffen.

  Virginia was on Orson’s side. No longer tempted by suburban high society, she felt she had more in common with the black sheep of the Nicolson family: her father’s brother, John Urban Nicolson, a poet who had translated Villon’s complete works and a modern edition of The Canterbury Tales with illustrations by Rockwell Kent.

  When Orson had a goal, he pursued it single-mindedly. But that summer, for the first time in a long while, he had no real goal. He and Virginia spent many evenings in Lake Geneva going to films like John Ford’s The Informer and Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran, a documentary re-creation of life on the Aran Islands, which served mainly to remind Orson of the three years that had passed since his time in Ireland, and how stalled he was in life.20

  Orson wrote incessantly over the summer of 1935, but he kept shifting gears, and “the literary product of this period was not particularly promising or voluminous,” Hill recalled. What little he accomplished has vanished. “Mainly he worked on the old standby, an Irish travel book,” Hill remembered. “Also, he turned out a long and rambling piece which was planned for magazine use entitled ‘Now I Am 21’ or something of the sort. It elucidated in lengthy form his philosophy on life, love, literature, art, the drama, and what not. If his travel book was halted for this, so this was halted for another Big Idea—a daily radio program which would be a sort of super-almanac. ‘June 28: This date is famous because of the birth of so-and-so in 1522. Also, the signing of such-and-such a treaty of 1614 etc.’ The incidents had to be dramatized.

  “A sort of March of All-Time.”

  There would be many crossroads in Orson’s life, but the summer of 1935 was one of the most fateful. What should he do with h
is talent and profession? He was gifted with a deep vein of creativity—even genius, perhaps, as newspaper clippings reminded him. But did he have the character and discipline to channel that genius into a career?

  Living modestly, dining out on the Nicolsons, and collecting the monthlies from Dr. Bernstein and Skipper, Orson and Virginia managed to save a surprising amount of money that summer. The respite breathed new life into them, and by the end of August Orson had made a decision. He would leave the past behind him: the Midwest, his summer projects, and along with them his doubts about his own future. He believed in his own luck, and in the kindness of fate. He would kick away the logjams in his path. He and Virginia would return to New York, and this time they would succeed.

  The Nicolsons were not pleased with the decision, but no one else who knew the couple was surprised when they said good-bye at the end of August. They were still so young. Virginia Nicolson Welles was only eighteen, Orson just twenty.

  The Hills gave the couple an old Essex motorcar to drive east and then junk. Orson still didn’t know how to drive, so Virginia drove the whole way at a safe crawl. Orson talked a blue streak, reciting poetry to keep her alert at the wheel. They pulled into Manhattan and abandoned the car in a hotel lot, and almost immediately their luck—fate—turned.

  Orson picked up an “odd job at Columbia [CBS],” he wrote to Hill excitedly, with other radio work promised to follow. The couple moved into “the loveliest English basement apartment on 14th Street you could imagine.” The place they found, at 319 West Fourteenth Street, was close to Chubby Sherman and Whitford Kane’s place, a bookstore, and a “chink laundry,” in Orson’s phrase. They committed to a one-year lease, reflecting their freshly sunny outlook. “Space, charm, electric ice-box, garden, and all for fifty-five dollars a month! Virginia’s having the time of her life living here. A real home and all the rest of it,” he told the headmaster. “There’s plenty of room for you when you come.”

  Moreover, Orson reported, his rapport with John Houseman was paying off: the Phoenix Theatre was resurgent. “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore goes into rehearsal in less than ten days!”

  The “odd job” was Orson’s first appearance on a national radio program. One of his actor acquaintances, Paul Stewart, had recommended him to the producer of American School of the Air, a long-running educational series that CBS broadcast into U.S. public schools for half an hour one morning a week. The educational series was a source of small but appreciated paychecks to many in show business, and among the struggling actors hired along with Orson was a tall, dapper Virginian whose gentlemanly exterior concealed the spirit of a scamp.

  Ten years older than Orson, Joseph Cotten was a late bloomer in show business. Born in Petersburg, Virginia, the son of an assistant postmaster, Cotten had studied acting at the Robert Nugent Hickman School of Expression in Washington, D.C., where he learned to moderate his drawl and paid for his tuition by selling vacuum cleaners and playing center on a semi-professional football team. Unable to find immediate work as an actor in New York, Cotten retreated to Miami, selling advertising for the Miami Herald while writing occasional drama criticism for it. Cotten performed with Miami’s Civic Theater for several years before returning to New York as an assistant stage manager for producer David Belasco. The handsome Virginian had begun picking up minor Broadway parts (he had appeared, for example, in Guthrie McClintic’s production of Jezebel), but American School of the Air was his meal ticket.

  When he showed up at the CBS studios on Madison Avenue, Welles was introduced to Cotten by Knowles Entrikin, the network’s producer. “During our chat Orson put the contents of his pipe in the wastebasket and set the office afire,” Cotten wrote in his autobiography, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere. “I remember Knowles saying at a later time, ‘That young man certainly left an impression!’ ”

  Cotten’s experience with a newspaper and as a struggling actor resonated with Orson, and he liked Cotten at once. As talented as he was handsome, Cotten was also self-deprecating to a fault. Though he was serious about acting, Cotten took his profession lightly and never seemed ruffled by the ups and downs. He has been born the same year as Richard Welles, and Orson quickly forged a brotherly relationship with “Jo,” as Welles always spelled it. Cotten and Welles were soon grinning across a table mischievously as the cast read through the day’s script. “This one was about rubber trees in the jungle,” Cotten recalled. “A couple of the lines suddenly took on a double meaning and very rude connotations. Instead of biting our tongues and ignoring the moment, Orson and I lost control and broke into choirboy giggles. Knowles stopped the rehearsal and warned us. He used words like schoolchildren, unprofessional and bad manners.

  “I see nothing funny about the line ‘barrels and barrels of pith,’ ” Entrikin scolded them.

  (“Thick silence in Studio Two,” recalled Cotten. “Eyes of all actors remained glued to their scripts.”)

  “Will Mr. Cotten or Mr. Welles,” Entrikin continued, “please tell us what is funny about the line ‘barrels and barrels of pith’ so that we may all join in with their laughter?” The air was as dead as Grant in his tomb. Then Entrikin made “the mistake of the day,” Cotten recalled. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, if indeed that is what we all are,” the director announced with a glare, “we will now go back to the beginning of the scene.”

  The line “barrels and barrels of pith” belonged to another actor, Ray Collins, and this time Collins too collapsed. “His manuscript simply slid from his helpless fingers,” Cotten wrote. “Most of the other actors doubled over, the sound man hid behind his bulky equipment, the orchestra sought refuge in the shadow of the bass fiddle, and the two culprits fled the building in hysterical tears. After a few days, when Knowles’s face had lost its angry crimson color, he allowed it to smile as he shook hands and accepted apologies.”21

  Never again would Entrikin cast Welles and Cotten in the same School of the Air episode. But he couldn’t keep them apart. It was in the fall of 1935 that Orson first began to round up his future Mercury Theatre. He would never find a better adjutant than Paul Stewart, as sturdy a foot soldier as Ray Collins, as close a comrade as Joseph Cotten.

  Stewart was a native New Yorker, educated at Columbia University and Brooklyn Law School. He had quit the legal profession to go into acting, and was playing small parts on Broadway and in radio when he met Welles, seven years his junior. His vaguely sinister looks doomed him as a leading man; he would spend much of his career playing villains or losers, as well as directing prolifically in radio and, later, for television.

  If Cotten was Orson’s wishful mirror image, Collins was the born-in-a-trunk trouper of show business folklore. Forty-five by the time he met Orson, seemingly ancient by comparison, Collins was another player with a whiff of newspaper background, the son of the drama critic for the Sacramento Bee. Collins had performed with the William J. Elleford and Del Lawrence stock companies on the West Coast, and toured in vaudeville and legitimate companies across North America, appearing with his first wife, Margaret Marriott, in everything from musicals to Shakespeare.

  In the early 1920s, Collins followed his ambitions to New York, hoping to become a leading man. Held back by his stocky build and avuncular looks, he found a few good parts on Broadway, but in 1929 he began to concentrate on radio, where he gained a reputation as one of the most dependable actors in the business.

  As Orson turned this important corner in life, weaning himself from the Midwest and his past, he was starting to assemble a professional family that would follow him throughout his career.

  John Houseman and Nathan Zatkin had leased another theatre, the President on West Forty-Eighth Street, and announced a new season for the Phoenix Theatre, featuring plays that “while known, are risky propositions in the commercial theatre,” according to the New York Times. The ambitious list, posted early in the summer of 1935, included Countee Cullen’s all-black revamping of Medea, starring Rose McClendon; a translation of the Belgian play Le Cocu Magni
fique; a night of Cocteau and Strindberg one-acts; and “a couple of new American plays.”

  By the time Orson returned to New York, however—and largely because he had returned—this list was replaced by a single play: ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, now slated for an early October opening. The interested parties met regularly at the Welleses’ new apartment on West Fourteenth Street, or two doors down at Whitford Kane and Chubby Sherman’s flat. (“If they borrow another pot from us,” Kane wrote to Florence Stevens, “I’ll kill them.”) But ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore was a chimera, gradually dissolving over the fall of 1935.

  Though no one realized it immediately, the play’s death knell was sounded in mid-October by a headline in the New York Times: “$27,000,000 in Jobs for National Arts.” The article announced the appointment of a new regional head of the Federal Theatre Project in New York.

  Earlier that spring, the Federal Relief Appropriation Act had allocated $5 billion under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to create jobs for America’s hungry and unemployed. In midsummer, Hallie Flanagan, the director of Vassar College’s Experimental Theatre, was named head of the Federal Theatre Project, part of the WPA relief operation, which was tasked with stimulating work for thousands of jobless stage artists. New York was the largest branch of the project, and in October Flanagan appointed the playwright Elmer Rice to head that branch. The president of the Authors League of America, Rice was a respected experimental playwright and an outspoken foe of commercial theater.