“Light on steps typical Feder pink—terrible . . . Light behind dancers too bright—light stinks . . . Tell Feder light on Edna has terrible green value instead of white or lavender . . .
“What about the goddammed thunder? . . . What happened to Virgil Thomson sound effects between the acts? Why wasn’t it started sooner? Thunder ending a little too high . . .
“Jesus Christ, Jack [Carter], learn your lines! . . . TAKE THE WEARINESS OUT OF YOUR BODY WHEN YOU GO UPSTAIRS . . . Jack railroading again . . .
“Christ—first half of scene needs ENORMOUS amount of work.”
By April, the buzz from Harlem had reached the offices of the New York Times, and drama critic Bosley Crowther paid an unusual preopening visit to the Lafayette to observe a rehearsal of this “geographically irreverent Macbeth.” Welles was in rare form for the interview, expounding on the Voodoo Macbeth as every bit as valid as—perhaps even more valid than—the productions of Othello and The Tempest he was said to have directed at the Royalty Theatre in London. (He did no such thing, of course; it could have been Crowther’s mistake, or one more bit of mythmaking on Orson’s part.)
“You see,” Orson explained to Crowther, “these Negroes have never had the misfortune of hearing Elizabethan verse spouted by actors strongly flavoring of well-cured Smithfield [ham]. They read their lines just as they would any others. On the whole, they’re no better or worse than the average white actor before he rediscovered the ‘red plush curtain’ style.” In another interview, Orson was more politically insensitive: Asked why no serious Negro theater movement had ever emerged in the United States, he answered, “Just a matter of an appalling lack of really good Negro actors.” (“It must be remembered that most Negro players are simply Brian Aherne in blackface!” he continued, still stinging from being usurped by Aherne on Broadway.)
Many of the players in Orson’s production of Macbeth had regarded their imperious director warily, privately nicknaming him “Shoebooty” for his lack of decent footwear. As Carlton Moss, a writer and member of the Negro Unit board, recalled, Orson wore “a shoe on one foot and a boot on the other. . . . He was raggedy.” But as the production came together, many enjoyed their first taste of Shakespeare, and no one disputed that Shoebooty pushed himself the hardest. Even in his worst moods Orson seemed to know when to stop just short of landing a permanent insult. He called breaks after midnight and ordered in food and drink for everyone, paying for the sandwiches and beer—and much else—out of his own grocery money.
“A quarter of his growing radio earnings, during Macbeth, went in loans and handouts to the company,” Houseman estimated. “Another quarter was spent on the purchase of props and other necessities (including a severed head) held up by bureaucratic red tape; a third quarter went for meals and cabs; the rest was spent on the entertainment of Jack Carter.”
Outside the theater, things looked far less congenial. Fueled by rumors about the production, local activists started picketing the theater, and skeptical drama critics were already sharpening their knives. One night, as Orson and Canada Lee strolled through the foyer, “four alcoholic zealots” (according to Houseman)—or “one” (according to theater historian Wendy Smith)—lunged at Orson. A razor blade was brandished, and for the second time Lee intervened to save him. “Canada quickly overpowered and disarmed the man, who was allegedly put up to it by a Communist faction,” wrote Mona Z. Smith, Lee’s biographer.
Most of the cast and crew of the Voodoo Macbeth had the same protective feelings for Orson. One night, as rehearsal broke for the predawn feast that had become a nightly ritual—Orson’s gift to his hungry charges—an actor stopped and exclaimed, “When I die, if I go to heaven and he’s not there—if Orson’s not there—I’m gonna picket!” Everyone in the theater fell over laughing. “That’s how much we loved him,” Rosetta LeNoire recalled.
The hoopla surrounding the Harlem opening of Macbeth was a product of Orson’s long experience at self-promotion. Luminous stencils promoting the all-black Macbeth were painted on Harlem street corners. When a free preview was held two days before the opening night, it drew an audience of three thousand, and emergency police had to be called out to disperse the overflow. On April 15, the official premiere, two brass bands of the brightly uniformed Monarch Negro Elks marched through Harlem carrying Macbeth banners, finishing with a flourish in front of the Lafayette. By 6:30 P.M., an estimated ten thousand people clogged the front of the theater, the crowd spreading for blocks and blocks. The face value of the tickets was forty cents; scalpers outside were asking $1.50.
Limousines arrived from two directions—“Harlemites in ermine, orchids and gardenias,” in the words of Wendy Smith, “Broadways in mufti.” Theatergoers stepped out of fancy cars, floodlights sweeping around them. The celebrities in attendance included actress Fredi Washington, beloved in Harlem for her role as the light-skinned Negro who tries to pass for white in the film Imitation of Life, and Joe Louis, one year away from being crowned world heavyweight champion. Edna Ferber, author of Show Boat, came to the opening, along with Harlem Renaissance photographer Carl Van Vechten and playwright Elmer Rice, who had given the go-aheads for the Negro Unit before quitting the Federal Theatre Project. Hallie Flanagan arrived from Washington, D.C., to give newsreel interviews and see for herself the show that had stirred so much alarm. “Excitement,” reported the New York Times, “fairly rocked the Lafayette Theatre.”
An hour later than scheduled, with a crash of cymbals and an overture that quoted from “Yamekraw—A Negro Rhapsody,” a 1927 work by Harlem stride pianist James P. Johnson, the curtain rose on the Voodoo Macbeth. The sight of its richly realized jungle setting drew a gasp from the sold-out audience, including about one hundred men and women standing in the back and aisles. The three witches launched into Shakespeare’s spiel, amid the drumming and voodoo chants. “Within five minutes,” Houseman wrote later, “we knew that victory was ours.”
With his imperious presence and deliberate manner, Jack Carter commanded the stage. Edna Thomas stood out in Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene. Canada Lee made an indelible impression as Banquo’s cigar-smoking ghost. The audience was riveted, right down to the final dire prophecy, which Orson in his clever revision had plucked from the first act and shifted to the end: holding up Macbeth’s severed head, Hecate proclaims, “The charm’s wound up!”
Orson hovered anxiously in the wings, his borrowed white shirt drenched, as the curtain fell and the spectators sprang to their feet, cheering wildly. The actors pulled him onstage to join the bows, and eventually, after many salvos of applause, the stage manager gave up on the curtain, and the audience swarmed onstage to embrace the young director and his company.23
If Orson’s Voodoo Macbeth was a resounding popular success, it was also, like many of his plays and films in years to come, a Rorschach test for reviewers. The opinions of the white first-stringers ranged wildly; often, there were stray pearls of praise amid reviews that were otherwise racially derogatory pans.
“The production is rather weird,” wrote Burns Mantle of the New York Daily News, adding, “This is not the speech of Negroes, nor within their grasp.” (Yet it was also “a spectacular theater experience,” he admitted.) Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times described the “darktown version” of Macbeth as a “weird, vari-colored, raree show,” though it boasted scenes and moments that were “a triumph of theatre art.” John Mason Brown of the New York Post called Orson’s direction “inept,” his Macbeth the murder of a classic. Robert Garland in the World-Telegram said the play was “colorful, exciting, and a good colored show.” Percy Hammond of the New York Herald Tribune lamented “the inability of so melodious a race to sing the music of Shakespeare,” and denounced the show as “an exhibition of deluxe boondoggling” that proved the waste and fraud of the Federal Theatre Project.
This last review, in a Hearst paper, rankled certain members of the Macbeth cast, and had mysterious consequences. Soon after Hammond’s review appeared, one of the
lead drummers, a “dwarf with gold teeth” who encouraged Orson to call him Jazbo, approached the director. “The dialogue, reminiscent of a Tarzan film,” Welles told Peter Noble, “went something like this:
“Jazbo: ‘This critic bad man.’
“O.W.: ‘Yes, he is a bad man.’
“Jazbo: ‘You want we make beri-beri on this bad man?’
“O.W. (slightly bewildered): ‘Yes, go right ahead and make all the beri-beri you want.’ ”
The voodoo drummer marched away purposefully. Ten days later, Hammond, the dean of New York critics, died of pneumonia. Macbeth was Hammond’s last major review. “I realize on reflection that this story is a little hard to believe,” Welles liked to say, “but it is circumstantially true.”
The verdict of the black press meant the most to the play’s cast and crew, however, and when it came it was nearly unanimous. “Magnificent and spectacular,” Roi Ottley exclaimed in the Amsterdam News. “Our hosannas are extended to Orson Welles.” Harlem could stand proud, Errol Aubrey Jones said in the New York Age. “The theatre lives again! Hurrah!” Ralph Matthews declared in the nationally circulated Afro-American of Baltimore: “It marked Harlem’s cultural coming of age.” Even the once doubtful Daily Worker loved the show. Decrying an “unjustified prediction of failure” by the capitalist press, the communist newspaper hailed the Harlem version of Macbeth “as magnificent proof of the dramatic ability of the Negro people.”
As Simon Callow wrote, “Every single notice, good or bad—there were no indifferent ones—makes you long to see the show.” The Voodoo Macbeth proved a box office success, selling out every performance for ten weeks through June, with audiences of “terribly chic people from downtown,” in Welles’s words, vying with all “the respectable black bourgeoisie” of Harlem for the available seating. The Federal Theatre Project quickly approved plans to move the show to Broadway and tour it to selected cities.
In a career that spanned more than half a century, Welles had few unqualified triumphs. There was Dublin, when he was just a sprig; there was the handful of Panic performances; and then there was the Voodoo Macbeth. “That was magical,” he reminisced in 1982. “I think it’s the great success of my life.”
Dr. Maurice Bernstein and Roger Hill traveled to New York to see Orson’s headline-making production. The director turned twenty-one in May, shortly after the Voodoo Macbeth opened. Around this time, looking like a Byronic art history major, he sat for Harlem Renaissance photographer Carl Van Vechten. One nationally syndicated Broadway columnist, O. O. McIntyre, dubbed him “the newest wonder kiddie of the theater,” adding, “The Rialto, always skeptical, expects him to be top man in another five years. Or a flash in the pan.”
Never again would he lack for party invitations. His radio work accelerated, and Orson also had the rare pleasure of impersonating himself on a March of Time segment covering the sensational premiere of Macbeth. “The greatest thrill of my life—I don’t know why it thrilled me (it does still, to think of it now),” he told Peter Bogdanovich years later. “I guess because I thought March of Time was such a great thing to be on. . . . I’ve never felt since that I’ve had it made as much as I did that one afternoon.”
Virginia lobbied for a vacation, but Orson was more allergic to vacations than to pollen. Macbeth had brought him fame but no fortune. Now more than ever Orson badly needed income. Suddenly, he was the toast of New York, and he believed in projecting the image of success to nurture the reality of it. New radio programming would not begin until the fall, and in the meantime he had to make do with The March of Time, his noontime poetry gig, and odd jobs to pay the grocer.
Meanwhile, Macbeth played in Harlem until June 20, when Eric Burroughs, clutching Macbeth’s severed head, delivered the final line for the last time at the Lafayette, amending it to: “Peace! It’s wonderful!” Orson then had to tune up the show for the Adelphia Theater on West Fifty-Fourth Street where the production was to have a two-week Broadway run starting on July 4.
Jack Carter lasted only a week in the midtown rendition before disappearing one night after Act One—either because of “the heat,” as the New York Times reported the next morning, or because he was besotted, with drink as Barbara Leaming later wrote. (“Harlem simmered yesterday with another version,” the Times added, “something to the effect that Mr. Carter was annoyed when another principal missed a cue.”) The levelheaded Maurice Ellis took over, picking up the role of Macbeth for Act Two and then for the rest of the Broadway dates and the ensuing national tour. Carter’s desertion did not seem to bother Orson; he preserved his passionate friendship with the black actor, and would cast him again.
During its Broadway run, Orson and the crew worked to adapt the production for the road. In the months to come, the Voodoo Macbeth would visit Bridgeport, Hartford, Dallas, Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Syracuse, playing everywhere to huge crowds and abundant praise. By the time it was over, more than 100,000 Americans saw Orson’s production, and a number of local Negro Theatre groups and all-black classical experiments were inspired by its example.
Orson did not go on tour with the Voodoo Macbeth—with one fabled exception. Late in life, he told interviewers that he rushed to Detroit that September to step in for Ellis when the actor fell ill and couldn’t take the stage as Macbeth. Orson even seized the opportunity to “black up” for the lead. “The only time anybody’s ever blacked up to play Macbeth!” Orson liked to boast. “I was a much darker Macbeth than Jack was. I had to prove that I belonged.”24
Although his name was freely used in the show’s publicity, Welles received no earnings for the national tour. And while the show was the best possible public relations for the Federal Theatre Project, the production never actually turned a profit—in Harlem, on Broadway, or on tour—largely because of the cheap ticket prices mandated by federal sponsorship. According to surviving records, expenses for the tour came to $97,000—while receipts totaled no more than $14,000.
In most other ways, though, Orson felt richly compensated by the experience. “I would go up two or three nights a week to Harlem where I was the king,” Welles recalled. “I really was the king!”
An all-black production of Shakespeare was a rare event in America in 1935, and rarer still were black productions that played to integrated audiences. The races were seated together wherever the Voodoo Macbeth traveled on tour, and the Federal Theatre Project management bypassed cities where theaters refused to do this. Orson’s Macbeth was a milestone for civil rights as well as for theater.
Although Orson had grown up within an elite white culture, his mother was a social crusader, his father a Republican when the party of Lincoln was liberal on race. His guardian, Dr. Maurice Bernstein, was an avid New Dealer, and Roger Hill talked Orson’s ears off with his progressive politics. Progressive and populist impulses were as deeply embedded in Orson’s background as elitist airs and privileges.
Orson’s friendships with the out-of-work black Harlemites who populated his Voodoo Macbeth, and the very public crucible of mounting the production, deepened his liberal politics and his sensitivity to black history. He forged a lifelong bond with the black community, initially with organizations in Harlem, supporting theatrical causes, and later with national civil rights organizations on broader issues. First he lent his name; later, when he could, he donated money and time.
Welles would aid in the defense of wrongly arrested Mexican youngsters in the so-called Sleepy Lagoon murder case in Hollywood in 1942; he published a series of articles on prejudice, culminating in his remarkable “Why Race Hate Must Be Outlawed” for Free World in 1944 (“a stirring, nearly Lincolnesque speech,” in David Thomson’s words); and in 1946 he used his ABC radio show Orson Welles Commentaries to crusade for Isaac Woodard Jr., a black Army veteran attacked and blinded by South Carolina police. His commitment to fighting racism would outlast his involvement in all other politics.
Regardless, by the time the Voodoo Macbeth moved on to Broadway, O
rson was done with the Negro Unit. The scrutiny of the factions within the black community inhibited him, and the more militant factions had a point: Why shouldn’t the all-black productions have black directors? Having accomplished his goals with Macbeth, Orson returned to the idea of forming his own company, one he could shape and dominate as its actor-manager.
Leaving the Negro Unit would also mean leaving behind his sometimes awkward relationship with John Houseman, who was formally tied to the company. There were already spiderweb cracks in their relationship. According to Simon Callow, the partners had “a brief violent, personal row on the sidewalk—a taste of things to come,” after the New York Times review of Macbeth complimented “the staging by Orson Welles and John Houseman.” Houseman had next to nothing to do with the staging, and the comment rankled Orson.
Virginia, Orson’s closest confidante, was leery of Houseman, sharing Orson’s suspicion that the older man was infatuated with her husband. “At first,” Welles told Barbara Leaming ruefully, “he fell in love with me.” Virginia also foresaw that the producer’s possessiveness and rivalry were destined to sour the partnership.
After the premiere of Macbeth and all the acclaim for Welles, Houseman was itching to prove his own creativity. Late that spring, he traveled to California to talk with Leslie Howard about staging a new production of Hamlet on Broadway that fall, with Howard starring and codirecting with Houseman. When Houseman returned, Orson told him he was quitting the Harlem operation. Yet the men found themselves talking over the future and brainstorming ideas for what they might do as a team if they were able to break away from the Negro Unit.
Orson left the door open for Houseman, who made the decision to follow him. “Already, I was totally committed to that unreasoning faith in his theatrical genius that was an essential condition of our partnership,” Houseman wrote in his memoir. “Then and later, friends and intimates, especially women, used to reproach me for what they considered my submission to Orson and for devoting so much of my time and energy to promoting his achievements rather than my own. It was difficult to explain to them (since I was not entirely clear about it myself) that if I did subordinate myself consciously and willingly to a man twelve years younger than myself, it was for a compelling and quite selfish reason: it was the price I was willing to pay for my participation in acts of theatrical creation that were far more stimulating and satisfying than any I felt capable of conceiving or creating by myself.”
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 41
