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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Moving swiftly, by the end of October Rice had authorized and allocated funds for several distinct New York units of the Federal Theatre Project: a “Living Newspaper” that would produce news-oriented plays in conjunction with the Newspaper Guild, which also had been hit hard by the Depression; a “Popular Price” theater for experimental works; and a “Negro Theatre,” cosponsored by the New York Urban League, that would occupy Harlem theater space and produce plays to employ the many out-of-work black citizens. The Negro Theatre Project—or Negro Unit, as it became informally known—was a particularly urgent mission for the Federal Theatre Project; black theater had suffered a sharp decline even before the Depression, and the Harlem community led the New York neighborhoods in unemployment.

  Actress Rose McClendon took the lead in early planning for the Negro Theatre Project, and she was embraced by all factions, including black communists in Harlem, who were numerous and influential in those days. After she was diagnosed with cancer, however, she declined formal leadership of the project, offering instead to work with a white coadministrator who might be helpful in building bridges to both white uptown society and Broadway stage artists. Her recommendation for the job was her friend John Houseman. Widely respected for his diplomatic touch as well as his creative personality, Houseman had demonstrated his sensitivity to black artists when staging Four Saints in Three Acts.

  Houseman accepted, leaving ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, the Phoenix Theatre, and his partner Nathan Zatkin behind. He promptly gave orders to refurbish the Negro Unit’s planned playhouse, the fabled Lafayette Theatre on Seventh Avenue near 131st Street, which had been in disrepair since going dark in the summer of 1934. Houseman signed federal forms to renovate and modernize the theater with improved lighting and sound. After consulting with Harlem residents and Federal Theatre Project staff members, Houseman announced that the Negro Unit would be divided into two halves: one to focus on plays set in contemporary Negro locales, written, directed, and performed by Harlemites; the other to present classical works featuring all-black casts.

  The first Negro Unit plays were announced in the week before Christmas. The lineup included St. Louis Woman by Countee Cullen and Arva Bartemps; an untitled commission by Zora Neale Hurston; Walk Together Children by actor-playwright Frank Wilson; and an all-black Macbeth. The name Orson Welles was not mentioned.

  Once Houseman was ensconced in his position, and the all-black Macbeth made the list, however, Orson was in the pipeline. What he always needed more than anything else—money to bankroll his ideas—was suddenly within his grasp. The minute Houseman came to the Welleses’ apartment and asked him to direct Macbeth for the Negro Unit, Orson said yes.

  Later that same night, Orson phoned Houseman to convey a Big Idea for the production: they should set the all-black Macbeth in Haiti. The conceit was salvaged from the ill-fated Caribbean Romeo and Juliet—but it was Virginia, Orson always claimed, who recognized the play’s dramatic parallels to the story of Henri Christophe, a former slave who helped lead the rebellion that brought independence to Haiti in 1804. After purging his enemies and proclaiming himself King Henry I, the autocratic Christophe became increasingly unpopular, and killed himself before he could be ousted in a coup.

  Virginia may have had the idea, but Orson was primed for it: He knew Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones, and the 1933 film starring Paul Robeson. In his days at Todd School he had memorized Wendell Phillips’s tribute to Toussaint Louverture, the “black Napoleon” who was the military genius of the Haitian revolution and another inspiration for this new Macbeth. Orson had probably visited Haiti on his Caribbean trip with Dr. Maurice Bernstein in 1927; he was familiar enough with the island’s history to rattle it off on the phone to Houseman. He worked deep into the night, and when the producer returned the next day, Orson revealed a plasticine model of the stage set, spread across his ironing board, for the “Voodoo Macbeth”—a castle in a jungle clime.

  Orson’s size and energy were Bunyanesque, and he sowed excitement like Johnny Appleseed. With contagious enthusiasm, he raved to Houseman about the possibilities: atmospheric tropical scenery, native costumes, spooky lighting, incessant chanting and drumming. If Houseman himself had any genius, on this day it was the kind Orson always preferred in a partner: the genius to believe in him, to be swept along by his vision, and to shout yes.

  Throughout the fall, as Orson proved himself in American School of the Air broadcasts, voicing characters of all kinds—from little girls to Great and Famous Men—word spread about the resourceful young actor. Two weeks before Christmas, CBS gave him his first billed role: a special program featuring scenes from the life of composer Frédéric Chopin, who died of tuberculosis. The fifteen-minute show was a one-off, the annual Christmas Seals promotion sponsored by the National Tuberculosis Association, but nonetheless it was Orson’s first starring role in a national radio broadcast, and the first time his name would appear in publicity material fed to scores of newspapers across the country. His mother, a lover of Chopin’s music, would have chuckled.

  On Christmas Eve, Orson strolled into Saks Fifth Avenue, he told Barbara Leaming, hoping to grab a last-minute gift for Virginia. “To maneuver himself through the crush of last-minute shoppers,” Leaming wrote, “Orson arrived in a wheelchair, so that people would step aside to make way for him.” The actor went straight for a mink stole, frowning at the price tag and pointing out to the salesmen that this very stole would be going on sale the day after Christmas. Couldn’t they give it to him at the same discount now? “Otherwise, I have nothing for my wife,” he moaned piteously.

  The salesmen huddled and voted to give it to him at the lower price. “It was a flash of Christmas sentiment on their part,” Orson said, and “great shrewdness on mine.”

  CHAPTER 11

  1936

  King Orson

  The surprising news that a twenty-year-old white actor from the Midwest would direct the Negro Unit’s production of Macbeth broke in the New York Times on the first Sunday of 1936. Elmer Rice, the head of the New York branch of the Federal Theatre Project, told the Times that the “costumes and settings” of the all-black adaptation of the Shakespeare play would be “suggested by Martinique under the empire.”22

  Orson Welles’s reputation as an actor may have been spreading, but as a stage director he was still an unknown quantity in New York. His only credits were a few prep school plays, a little-noticed program in Dublin, and one play for his own summer theater. But Orson lived by his own clock, which always ticked faster than everyone else’s. Whether it was a sprint or a marathon, he was always perched over the starting line, straining at the bit. To him, the three and a half years since he graduated from Todd School felt like an eternity. He was ready.

  The Negro Unit was humming along by the time Welles’s involvement was announced. The first Harlem production, Frank Wilson’s Walk Together Chillun, directed by Wilson, a black actor who had appeared in Porgy on Broadway, was rehearsing in halls and churches pending the reopening of the refurbished Lafayette Theatre. The unit’s second play, Conjur’ Man Dies, also had a white director born in Wisconsin: Joseph Losey, whose New York theater credits dated back to 1933. Chillun and Conjur’ Man fulfilled the program’s mandate for Negro-oriented plays, while the third production, Macbeth, would be its first classical work.

  Orson threw himself into the script, relocating Shakespeare’s play in a timeless “mythical place” that could be “anywhere in the West Indies,” he told the New York Times a few months later: Martinique, Haiti, or elsewhere. The adaptation itself must have come easily to him—after all, he had been tweaking Shakespeare since boyhood—but the finished product was an underrated accomplishment. He shortened some speeches, combined others, altered place names to fit the setting. (“Changing ‘blasted heath’ to ‘fetid jungle’ was not as ridiculous as you might think,” Welles told Peter Noble.) Shakespeare’s three sinister witches became voodoo priestesses, and the chorus was expanded to add as many
black Harlemites as possible to the cast. He tinkered with the script throughout auditions and rehearsals, as would become his habit, tailoring scenes to his evolving needs.

  At the same time, Orson started assembling a backstage team that would add luster to his Voodoo Macbeth. He began with a major figure in modern music, a composer who happened to be John Houseman’s roommate: Virgil Thomson. A driving force in contemporary music, Thomson had worked with Houseman on the all-black opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Although the job would pay a weekly wage of only $23.86—the same compensation allotted to everyone under WPA auspices—the composer agreed to score Macbeth on that modest basis.

  Almost twenty years older than Orson, Thomson was educated at Harvard and Cambridge, and had sharpened his classical sensibility while living among cultural expatriates in Paris in the twenties. (Not a few people in Houseman’s circle wore their degrees from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton like sheriff’s badges.) Pale-faced, with a high forehead, Thomson spoke in a piercing voice; he was a charismatic presence and his opinions were always forceful.

  Thomson knew Orson glancingly from Panic, but now Houseman brought the two men together for a dinner at their midtown apartment—the first time Houseman had opened his home to his young partner. Orson regaled Thomson with his ideas for the score: a backdrop of near-constant percussion, native chanting, and jungle sound effects that would envelop the stage in an otherworldly atmosphere. Thomson was unsure how to take the younger man’s formidable personality, and at first the two crossed swords, with Thomson trying “to beat him down because I felt he was full of bluff,” the composer recalled. “His verbalization of what he wanted to do in the theatre was not entirely convincing. I argued hard and not always fairly.” When the dueling grew heated, Houseman stepped in, whispering to Thomson to “stop it,” reassuring him that Orson was “a very, very good man in the theater.” Houseman’s endorsement quieted Thomson’s nerves, and sealed the composer’s involvement.

  Welles and Thomson never grew close, but Orson courted the composer over a series of working dinners during the planning of Macbeth. Orson was very specific about the musical bridges and noise effects he needed for scenes, and Thomson later took pride in saying that he wrote very little original music for the Voodoo Macbeth. “I would not humiliate myself to write precisely on his demand,” the composer boasted. Instead, Thomson came up with “sound effects and ready-made music—trumpet call, battle scenes and percussive scenes when he wanted them—and of course, the waltzes for the party scene” after Macbeth has murdered Banquo.

  “Orson Welles knew nothing about musical ideas,” Thomson insisted in later interviews. As the son of a musician, however, and a knowledgeable aficionado of classical and popular music, Orson certainly knew how to defer to prima donnas. “Instead of telling you in musical terms he’d say, ‘This is what I want to accomplish,’ ” recalled Leonard de Paur, who conducted the orchestra for Macbeth. “Ninety-nine percent of the time he was right.” Thomson warmed to Orson over time, and the two would collaborate on other projects. Years later, the composer conceded that he’d found the charismatic young man intimidating. “Orson was nearly always likeable,” Thomson said. “He was never hateful or brutal with me, though I was a little terrified of his firmness. He was extremely professional and knew exactly what he wanted.”

  Houseman and Thomson belonged to the same circle, and from the beginning there was a distinction between “Houseman’s people” and “Orson’s people.” Houseman seemed to know everyone in high society and artist-bohemian circles, while Orson had spent his life so far piecing together his own network of show business contacts and artistic personalities.

  To design the Voodoo Macbeth, the partners gathered a team of rising stars, many of them from Wisconsin or Chicago. Houseman recommended the Milwaukee-born lighting prodigy Abe Feder, another veteran of Four Saints in Three Acts. As a teenager, Feder had been starstruck by the Great Thurston, Orson’s early idol. He had designed lighting for the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and also styled the lighting for Yiddish theater in the Bronx and minor Broadway plays.

  Costume and scenic designer Nat Karson also had Chicago credentials. A well-known caricaturist before turning to theater, Karson had created the mural for the Chicago’s Board of Education building; he too had worked at the Goodman Theatre, and more recently had teamed with Feder on the lighting and design of several New York plays. Together, the two designers were tasked with realizing Orson’s vision for Broadway-level costuming, scenery, and lighting—all on a thrift budget of less than $2,000.

  Karson was an easygoing fellow, and he accepted both Orson’s plasticine model and his instructions to dress the set in lush, sinister colors. Feder was more opinionated, and he fell into many shouting matches with Orson, who believed he understood lighting as well as anyone. Orson enjoyed a good shouting match—especially when he was the director, and when he had Houseman, the ultimate boss, backing him up.

  At the producer’s urging, Orson engaged an assistant director from Houseman’s coterie: Thomas Anderson, a black Harlemite who had acted in Four Saints in Three Acts. Another Four Saints veteran was Edward Perry, who was recruited as stage manager. Leonard de Paur, the music director of the Negro Unit, would orchestrate and conduct Thomson’s music.

  One of Orson’s key conscripts was choreographer Asadata Dafora Horton, who led his own unique African performance troupe in New York. A native of Sierra Leone, Horton had studied and sung at La Scala, and launched a pioneering series of African music and dance concerts with the drumming overseen by the Haitian-born master Alphonse Cimber. Orson had seen Horton’s African opera Kykunkor at Carnegie Hall on the last leg of the Katharine Cornell tour, and the witch doctor’s incantations and tribal drumming hypnotized him.

  Horton was just the man to organize the chanting and drumming for the Voodoo Macbeth—even though that meant ordering up “five” (according to Houseman) or “twelve” (Welles) live black goats to be sacrificed in order, according to supposed tribal custom, to furnish fresh drum skins. The resourceful secretary Houseman had hired for Negro Unit operations, Augusta Weissberger, managed to get the peculiar expense billed back to the Federal Theatre Project.

  Project guidelines mandated that 90 percent of the cast and crew be unemployed black Harlem residents. In all, about 750 people were registered as active members of the Negro Unit; perhaps a fifth of these were “real professionals,” according to Federal Theatre Project historian Wendy Smith, but that proportion included seamstresses and elocutionists as well as stagehands and musicians. The small number of actors who had worked professionally had “scant résumés as extras or chorus dancers.”

  Casting his leads from this undersized pool was arguably Orson’s greatest hurdle, but he had long ago learned how to scour a roomful of dubious casting choices and connect with “the one.” Sometimes he cast on sight, believing—as an actor with a distinct physical presence who incorporated “externals” in his own work—that the look of a person went a long way toward building the character and performance. At other times he cast decidedly against type and appearance.

  At the beginning of their partnership, Welles and Houseman tried to agree about the casting of their plays, especially when it came to the lead roles. Many of the actors were drawn from either Orson’s or Houseman’s camp, but Houseman almost always deferred to his director, and if they disagreed about a casting choice, the decision—and risk—was Orson’s.

  For the role of Macbeth, they needed an imposing actor. Auditioning candidates on the platform of a vast recreation hall that belonged to the Harlem Elks, Welles and Houseman considered Juano Hernandez, a strapping Puerto Rican actor, but Hernandez was so busy in theater and radio that they lost him to an actual paying job. Another promising entry was Cherokee Thornton, who had played a voodoo dancer in Louisiana on Broadway in 1933.

  Orson eventually brought the casting around to Jack Carter, a giant of a man who rippled with muscles and flashed cold gray eyes. The caramel-skinne
d son of a black Harlem physician and a white Ziegfeld chorus girl, the handsome, strapping Carter was known, almost more than for his emoting and singing, as a “fashion plate and man about Harlem,” in the words of the Amsterdam News. Casting Carter was a gamble: the actor had notoriously been indicted for complicity in a murder during a drunken brawl in a Harlem speakeasy in 1933. Carter was accused of holding a gun on the proprietor while a local gangster stabbed a victim to death. Carter was acquitted, but the trial had dominated the front pages of Harlem newspapers.

  A reliable stage presence since 1920, Carter had played a wide variety of roles in Harlem shows and on the road with the Lafayette Players, before the Lafayette core ensemble left New York for Los Angeles in 1928. He thrilled audiences as the brutal Crown in the original Theatre Guild cast of Porgy. It’s unclear whether Orson saw Porgy, but he definitely saw and remembered Carter’s lead role in Stevedore, as a union roustabout framed for an assault on a white woman. “He was beautiful!” Welles told Barbara Leaming. “A black Barrymore.”

  Carter was a perpetually angry man, and his audition seethed with fury. Carter’s brand of “slightly derailed energy,” in Orson’s words, mirrored the director’s own. After the audition, “Orson threw his arms around Jack, his eyes brimming with tears of gratitude and admiration,” Houseman wrote. The part was his.

  Another performer from Porgy was Rose McClendon, who had helped organize the Negro Unit. Early on, McClendon had been penciled in as Lady Macbeth, and she would have played the part if her cancer diagnosis hadn’t been complicated by pleurisy and pneumonia after the New Year. McClendon never recovered, and her lingering illness ended in her death in June 1936. Orson replaced her with Edna Thomas, an actress of elegance and gravitas who had appeared in both the 1929 Porgy revival and Stevedore and was another veteran of the Lafayette Players.