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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  At the center of the maelstrom, however, was a fierce commander. Watching Welles on the first day of the Horse Eats Hat rehearsals, “still thinking we were friends,” Edwin Denby recalled, “I called out something or other, some criticism I had in mind. He answered from the stage and put me down completely. Not in a disagreeable way. But it was clear enough to me that, now, he was the director.”

  Virginia had a similar revelation during an early rehearsal, when she told her husband she didn’t think his direction for her was “right” for a particular scene. “I don’t care what you think,” Orson replied brusquely, echoing sharp advice from Hilton Edwards. “Just do it.” Virginia had been sipping on a malted—an ice cream drink—and now she flung it in his face. “It wasn’t anything terribly serious,” recalled Arlene Francis, “we went right on with rehearsal.” From then on, however, Virginia never questioned her director.

  The occasional outburst notwithstanding, Orson was a “kind, intelligent, generous director and tireless,” recalled Arlene Francis. Compared with the Voodoo Macbeth, Horse Eats Hat was great fun, and Orson reserved his shouting matches for the irascible Abe Feder. Orson often drew his mood from the material, and his mood during Horse Eats Hat was merry and ebullient. The company included many friends, and they were led by the example of Joseph Cotten, whose attitude was beautifully attuned to Orson’s. “[Cotten] had a wonderful sense of humor—and such warmth,” said Denby. “It’s easy in farce to forget the warmth, but that’s what has to sustain it.”

  Orson insisted that the lighting, the music, and the action be timed like fast-action clockwork. The actors should race ahead, improvising to cover any gaffes, just as Orson did the first time he performed sleight of hand at the Todd School. Mistakes forced actors into creativity.

  Houseman returned from Canada just in time for the first dress rehearsal—and he found all of Orson’s clockwork chaos unsettling. “It was difficult to differentiate the catastrophes which were deliberately planned from the accidental disasters,” Houseman observed later, “some of which were so splendid we absorbed them into the show.”

  Orson had only four weeks to stage Horse Eats Hat, even as he was preparing to star in a second Broadway production while commuting to Chicago on Sundays for the sold-out Wonder Show. He always had other stray obligations, and sometimes his own clock ran amok.

  One day, for instance, Orson forgot the afternoon installment of Big Sister. He was “sitting in the barbershop, and I heard the theme song come on.” His friend Everett Sloane, who could imitate anyone, stepped in, duplicating Orson’s voice. But that was the end of Orson’s job on Big Sister.

  He was pushing his luck—rehearsing two different plays, performing in multiple radio shows, “and living it up in between times too,” as Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, “I may as well confess.” He was still doing the lunch-hour program, and was in the habit of writing little lead-ins for the daily verse recitations. “Particularly if [the poem] was obscure and I thought the housewives toiling over their stoves needed a little help,” Welles said, “I’d make a little remark to ‘humanize it,’ as they say.” One day, the poem was a selection from “Sonnets from the Portuguese” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Out of which I could make neither head nor tail,” he said. Reaching for a witty aside to save the day, his mind went back to a line from The Barretts of Wimpole Street. “There was a well-received joke made by Robert Browning—a real quote of his, used in the play, in which he was asked the meaning of a poem, and he read it, reread it, and reread it, and finally said, ‘When this was written only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant. Now only God does.’ It is a good line. . . .

  “So I thought I’d say that, because I knew the way I would read this poem would be jabberwocky. So I told the nice little story to the housewives, and when I got to the punch line, what I said was this: ‘When this was written only Bravin Drivet Griving—When Grompit Drivet—When this was written only Gropit Drivet—When Gris was Drivet Grinning—’ There were twenty account people in the control room and they began waving and turning purple and everything, and I just put down the script and said, ‘Good morning, ladies,’ and walked out of the studio and was never seen again. I never had the nerve to come back.

  “That was the end of my career with Cornstarch.”

  After the remarkable success of his Negro Unit Shakespeare, the New York theater world eagerly awaited Horse Eats Hat. This time, Orson was serving not only as director, but as coauthor of the adaptation and the lead actor onstage. Some critics had their daggers sharpened for him, predicting the end of the one-hit wunderkind.

  The audience that streamed into the Maxine Elliott on the last Saturday of September had varied expectations, but few could have matched the reality. When the curtain rose on Horse Eats Hat, what the audience saw was a singular production: French surrealism shaking hands with the Marx Brothers. As different from the Voodoo Macbeth as night from day, it was a play in which Joseph Cotten rose up in the air on a chandelier and squirted seltzer over the chorus and crowd; in which Bil Baird stood up in a box seat, appeared to trip drunkenly, then caught his foot in the railing, dangling wildly over the audience; in which the script’s coauthor, Edwin Denby, bent over to play the rear end of a horse.

  With his false nose, padded stomach, and shining dome, Orson led the exuberance. In one scene, when he was supposed to punch Baird, sending him into a backflip, Orson actually connected, hard. “He loses his mind in a case like that,” Baird told Barbara Leaming decades later, laughing. “That’s very Orson!”

  The whole show was very Orson—a wild ride on an exploding merry-go-round—and Horse Eats Hat divided the critics even as it consolidated Orson’s reputation for risk taking and controversy. Richard Watts Jr., in the conservative New York Herald Tribune, declared Horse Eats Hat “a dismal embarrassment.” The Hearst-owned New York Journal American wrote that the retooled French farce “represents a new low in the tide of drama.” “Wacky—utterly wacky,” opined the New York Daily News, “but, paradoxically, not wacky enough.” The New York Times also equivocated: “Half the audience was pretty indignant, and the other half quite amused.”

  Some critics were offended by the naughty humor: characters running around in undergarments, all the racy dialogue. An often cited example was the line “It’s nice to see a pretty little pussy,” which was “spoken to a maid,” as Barbara Leaming wrote, who has just “tossed her skirts behind her.” “Sewage!” the Hearst papers declared. Everett Dirksen, a Republican congressman from Illinois, took to the Congressional Record to condemn the play as another example of “salacious tripe” from the Federal Theatre Project. (Such plays were “full of Communists,” echoed Harrison Grey Fiske in the Saturday Evening Post.) Nervous Project officials rushed in from Washington to see the show for themselves, forcing a number of minor script changes on Orson (“pussy” became “lassie”).

  There were plenty of people who enjoyed Horse Eats Hat, however, including Cue Magazine’s reviewer, who saw it as “a demented piece of surrealism which comes perilously close to being a work of genuine theater art.” And nothing could dissuade its most zealous fans. The author John Dos Passos ran into playwright Marc Connelly in the lobby one night. The two realized they had been seated on opposite sides of the theater, shrieking the loudest with laughter. “I thought it was the best theatre production I had ever seen in the United States,” another Project director, Joseph Losey, said later. Hallie Flanagan herself rated Horse Eats Hat as “inspired lunacy,” saying that she felt bad for those who missed it, and “even sorrier for those who didn’t enjoy it.”

  Some missed it because of the scarcity of tickets. Horse Eats Hat was a box office smash, selling out the ten-week run. “Some New Yorkers came to see it ten, fifteen, and in one case twenty-one times,” Houseman wrote. Mere mention of the play usually brought a grin to Orson’s face, especially later in his life, when times were harder. “The best of the Mercury shows,” he flatly told Peter Bogdanovich (although Proj
ect 891 predated the Mercury Theatre per se). When an oral historian asked L. Arnold Weissberger, Orson’s lawyer and financial manager (and secretary Augusta Weissberger’s brother), which of his client’s plays he recalled most warmly, the lawyer answered easily, “The fondest memories are held by Horse Eats Hat.”

  Around the time that Horse Eats Hat was opening at the Maxine Elliott on West Forty-Second Street, Sidney Kingsley was busy over at the St. James Theater, on West Forty-Fourth, with the first blocking rehearsals for Ten Million Ghosts. Orson lost weight dashing from daytime rehearsals to nighttime performances six blocks away.

  Despite his experience staging Dead End, Kingsley was an insecure director. He used a tackboard with thread and colored pins to choreograph the action, shifting the pins contemplatively throughout the rehearsals. Orson was the blue pin, and he didn’t think much of the playwright as a director, according to fellow cast member Martin Gabel, who knew him from Big Sister. “He didn’t like anybody directing him,” Gabel told Barbara Leaming.

  Orson caught catnaps in the St. James Theater during rehearsals for Ten Million Ghosts, and at least once he nodded off during an actual performance, according to actor George Coulouris, who was onstage with him. A specialist in cultivated villains, Coulouris shared a dressing room with the Broadway whiz kid, who seemed always to be dozing off, or missing rehearsals, or “dashing off to Chicago” for a silly radio show.

  Twelve years older than Welles, Coulouris had started out in his native England performing Shakespearean repertory at the Old Vic. He had seen Katharine Cornell’s production of Romeo and Juliet, but hardly viewed Orson as the highlight. (Like Welles, Coulouris had once played Tybalt; “He acts in a very strange way,” Coulouris thought, “as if he’s chewing gum the whole time.”) Coulouris loathed the very notion of an all-black Macbeth, and was especially affronted by the story of Orson’s trip to assume the lead in Detroit. (“My God, why did he have to do Shakespeare in blackface?!” he complained in later interviews. “Just for publicity!”)

  So began the relationship between Orson Welles and the man who would put an indelible stamp on the role of banker Walter Parks Thatcher in Citizen Kane.

  The cast all knew that Ten Million Ghosts was a weak play with an unconfident director, and Orson realized he was not entirely convincing as a doomed romantic hero, the poet-aviator who is willing to die for his ideals. It was the sort of matinee idol part that tempted him now and again, but those roles were invariably too pat for him. One day Kingsley dressed Orson down in front of the others, telling him he was the only actor who wasn’t doing a credible job. Orson slumped off to his dressing room, fighting back tears. He took failures as a director less personally than shortcomings as an actor.

  When Ten Million Ghosts opened in late October, Orson ceded the role of Mugglethorpe in Horse Eats Hat to Edgerton Paul. The Sidney Kingsley play was not much fun, and the critics laid into Kingsley’s script. “The characters are placard stencils,” declared Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times, calling the dramatic plotting and incident a “cumbersome snarl.” The play was “inadequate for the big subject,” said Broadway chronicler George Ross. Ten Million Ghosts limped along for only ten days before the production was abruptly closed. “We went down,” recalled Coulouris, “and the theater was locked up. We hadn’t been told.”

  But none of the reviewers blamed Orson, who looked “unexpectedly handsome” in his pencil-thin mustache, as Richard Watts Jr. observed in the New York Herald Tribune. Orson himself later praised the play’s “wonderful Donald Oenslager settings and some imaginative lantern-slide effects,” and admitted that he’d “learned a good deal from this production”—including “one excellent piece of stagecraft” he’d use later in a film.

  “The munitions-makers are in a private theatre, watching newsreels from the battlefields showing wholesale slaughter,” said Welles in Peter Noble’s book. “As the newsreels show young men being needlessly butchered, I, as the idealistic youngster, rose to my feet and protested against the whole bloody affair. The munitions-makers also rose to their feet and, silhouetted against the scene of butchery, they retorted, ‘But this is our business.’

  “Second Act Curtain.”

  This echoes the scene early in Citizen Kane, following the News on the March newsreel about Charles Foster Kane. As a group of newsreel reporters and their editor are silhouetted against the screen, the editor says the news digest needs something—a stronger thrust, an “angle.”

  “Nobody’s face is really seen,” the Citizen Kane script reads. “Sections of their bodies are picked out by a table light, a silhouette is thrown on the screen, and their faces and bodies are thrown into silhouette against the brilliant slanting rays of light from the projection booth.”

  Years later, however, Welles rejected Peter Noble’s account. “That is one of the biggest pieces of Schweinerei I’ve ever heard in my life,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, claiming he was in his dressing room during that scene every night before the play abruptly closed, and never once saw the newsreel scene—the rare scene in the flop play commented on favorably by nearly every reviewer who wrote about Ten Million Ghosts.25

  CHAPTER 12

  1936–1937

  In Show Business It’s Called Friendship

  Not without a sigh of relief, Orson returned to Horse Eats Hat at the Maxine Elliott. By the time the Americanized French farce closed in early December, the Wonder Show radio series had finished its limited run and Ten Million Ghosts was a faint memory.

  Despite his stumbles with Big Sister and the Cornstarch-sponsored show, Orson continued to thrive on the radio. The fall of 1936 found him playing Great Men with increasing frequency on The March of Time and the similarly prestigious Cavalcade of America, a feel-good historical anthology series sponsored by Du Pont. At times he sneaked his politics into his portraits of Great Men: in a mid-November episode of Cavalcade, on “The Story of Rubber,” he portrayed a stentorian John D. Rockefeller. He played the part “rather too unsympathetically for the taste of the Du Ponts,” he recalled laughingly years later.

  Another of his Great Men was the munitions and arms dealer Sir Basil Zaharoff, the inspiration for the greedy death merchant at the center of Ten Million Ghosts. When Zaharoff died, on November 27, 1936, Orson played him in the March of Time installment reporting his death. The script’s fictionalized opening sequence showed secretaries “burning Zaharoff’s papers in the immense fireplace in the great hall of his chateau—the secret records (the narrator tells us) of a lifetime’s involvement in wars, plots, revolutions and assassinations,” scholar Robert L. Carringer wrote, discovering seeds of Citizen Kane in the episode. “Other scenes present witnesses who testify to Zaharoff’s ruthlessness. Finally, Zaharoff himself appears—an old man nearing death, alone, except for servants in the gigantic palace in Monte Carlo that he had acquired for his longtime mistress. [Zaharoff’s] dying wish is to be wheeled out ‘in the sun by the rosebush.’ ” (Orson confirmed this to Peter Bogdanovich: “I got the idea for the hidden-camera sequence in the Kane ‘news digest’ ” from the March of Time episode, he explained, “in which Zaharoff, the great munitions-maker, was being moved around in his rose garden, just talking about the roses, in the last days before he died.”)

  Radio producers were now beginning to tap him for showcase productions. CBS launched an experimental series, the Columbia Workshop, that mingled dramatizations of classic literary works with original scripts by established authors; Irving Reis and Norman Corwin were the producers. In the fall of 1936 Welles was invited to condense and dramatize his first Shakespeare play for the series.

  Was it coincidence or gamesmanship that prompted Orson to choose Hamlet, the play John Houseman was staging, almost simultaneously, on Broadway? After out-of-town tryouts, Houseman’s version had opened at the Imperial Theatre in early November, collecting polite reviews (“a handsome production,” wrote the New York Times) that usually found lead actor Leslie Howard disappointing compared with John
Gielgud’s transcendent Hamlet earlier in the year. Houseman had a trying time with Howard, who was also serving as codirector and who overrode him on major decisions. The production lasted thirty-nine performances before departing for Chicago.

  Orson’s radio Hamlet was spread over two half-hour broadcasts on successive Sundays in November. He had a cast that included Alexander Scourby (Claudius); Rosamond Pinchot (Gertrude); Edgerton Paul (Polonius); Joseph Cotten (Laertes); Hiram Sherman (Bernardo); and his wife, Virginia, in a small part. Although he was not credited for it on the air, the script was his too—Orson’s first full-length script to be broadcast. He even oversaw the publicity, which reflected his view of the medium in general, promising an “intimacy of interpretation not possible in stage production.”

  The radio Hamlet was a milestone not only for the medium, but also for himself. At twenty-one years old, he had found another means of bringing classical plays to the masses. Orson made the broadcast, which was one of the rare times in his career when he played Hamlet, a resounding success. “His voice,” as radio scholar Bernice W. Kliman wrote in Hamlet: Film, Television and Audio Performance, was “a remarkable instrument evoking visualizations as well as clarifying interpretative choices,” his whispered asides suggesting “interiority or complicity with the audience.”

  Also, it was on the Columbia Workshop program that Orson first encountered the New York–born, Juilliard-trained composer and conductor Bernard Herrmann, who led the orchestra. At twenty-four, Herrmann already had an estimable career as a symphonic composer when he was not at his day job for CBS. Herrmann was as acerbic and combustible as he was gifted, and just before the Hamlet broadcast, when a cue went wrong and he broke his baton, he tossed his script into the air and walked out of the studio. A chuckling Orson dragged him back. “We didn’t have time to get the notes back in order on his stand, so he was one cue off all through it,” Welles recalled. “So we had the fanfares when it was supposed to be quiet, approaching menace when it was supposed to be a gay party, and all live; it was riotous. Nothing to do [about it]—he just went on. It got funnier and funnier.”