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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Houseman listened to the Hamlet broadcast wistfully. Orson’s Shakespeare for radio, which had received less hype than Leslie Howard’s production, was surprisingly good. Welles’s partner returned to Project 891 shortly thereafter, relieved to be back after his dispiriting experience with Howard. “It was pleasant, after the big-time frustrations,” Houseman recalled, “to find myself once again in my faded-rose basement [at the Maxine Elliott], with Augusta Weissberger chirping at me from behind her typewriter and the normal bureaucratic agitations of the WPA enveloping me once again.”

  Houseman believed that Orson viewed his own “juvenile lead” in Ten Million Ghosts as the same kind of failure as his episode with Howard, “a sort of absurd and shameful interlude of which the least said the better.” As partners, they had soared to spectacular heights in 1936; apart, they had faltered. Now, happily reunited, they plunged into the next Project 891 production: Dr. Faustus.

  The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus, by the Elizabethan tragedian Christopher Marlowe, was first performed in the late sixteenth century. Orson had an enduring fondness for Faustus, which alternated blank verse with prose to tell the tragic legend of a scholar who sells his soul to Lucifer for twenty-four years of power, during which time he roams the world performing dark sorcery. Charles Gounod’s opera, based on Goethe’s classic play Faust, had been in regular rotation at the Ravinia Festival, and Fanny Butcher, the “Armchair Playgoer” columnist for the Chicago Tribune, loved reminding readers that Marlowe’s play predated Goethe’s by two hundred years. Orson had read Marlowe’s play as a youth, and he had floated Dr. Faustus as a possible production in the early days of the Woodstock summer theater in 1934.

  In his memoir Run-Through, John Houseman propounded his often quoted theory that his partner’s “deep personal identification” with Faustus-Faust stemmed from a personal belief in Satan. “The first time I met him,” wrote Houseman, “he was writing a play about the Fiend and illustrating it with drawings that were, in fact, grotesque caricatures of himself.” Faustus’s bargain with the devil was “uncomfortably close to the shape of Welles’s own personal myth,” he wrote. In short, the producer believed, Orson sold his own soul in exchange for acclamation of his genius and a guarantee of fame. Houseman even claimed that Orson’s lifelong sleeplessness and frequent nightmares were due to his fear of the devil. “No sooner were his eyes closed than, out of the darkness, troupes of demons—the symbols of his sins—surrounded and claimed him.” It was “a very real obsession,” Houseman claimed. “At twenty-one Orson was sure he was doomed.”

  Thanks in large part to Houseman, this notion has become firmly established in Welles folklore. In truth, Welles’s interest in the supernatural was far more complicated and unorthodox. He followed no organized religion, and his mother, a Christian who drifted toward secularism and Eastern spiritualism, had shaped his ideas about God and the devil. Welles avoided the subject of religion in interviews, but as a boy who saw both of his parents die at a young age, he may have suffered nightmares, or felt a sense of foreboding, without subscribing to the devil.

  Orson believed in evil, however, both as a concrete force in the world—personified, just then, by Hitler’s rise in Germany—and as an effective dramatic tool. He was keenly aware of the relationship between humankind and the devil as an ancient thread in storytelling, not least in the Bible. “Many of the big characters I’ve played are various forms of Faust, and I am against every form of Faust,” Welles mused in his interview sessions with Peter Bogdanovich, “because I believe it’s impossible for a man to be great without admitting that there’s something greater than himself, whether it’s the law, or God, or art.”

  As a student of the theater, Orson had read the legend of Faust and seen it performed in multiple productions. Now, as an actor, he welcomed the opportunity to play a man shadowed by evil. And, as a director, he had found a vehicle that was equal to his greatness.

  Working on the script for Faustus throughout the time when he was involved with Horse Eats Hat, Orson had revised and streamlined Marlowe’s text, preserving the high-flown rhetoric while tapering the lengthy speeches. Shaving off lesser characters, shifting around entire scenes, he converted what had previously been a three-hour, five-act endurance test into a seventy-five-minute one-act play with no intermission.

  Like Horse Eats Hat, this was every ounce Orson’s show. Writing decades later, Houseman claimed that it was difficult “to describe the creative workings” of their partnership “with any degree of honesty or accuracy,” that their “mutual functions were only vaguely defined.” While it’s true that their skills sometimes overlapped—Houseman could be an ingenious editor of Orson’s ideas—it is not hard to say which of the partners repeatedly took the creative lead in choosing and revamping the scripts, designing the shows, and casting the main characters; or which of them directed the shows while usually starring in them.

  Orson would play Faustus, of course, and he wanted his friend the brawny Harlemite Jack Carter as his Mephistopheles, the demon who tempts Faustus with power. (“MEPHISTOPHILIS,” Orson emphasized in his unproduced screenplay for the film of about The Cradle Will Rock, “Marlowe’s spelling!”) Carter agreed to shave his head for the part, and even took up residence with the Welleses in their Fourteenth Street apartment “for ten days before the opening to keep him from going on a binge,” as Welles recalled to Barbara Leaming. The personal bond between the men would make for a surprisingly tender and rueful onstage relationship between Faustus and Mephistopheles.

  By the end of November rehearsals for Faustus had begun, with some of the cast members coming directly from Horse Eats Hat into the poetic tragedy. Orson had earmarked one of the comedic roles for his understudy Edgerton Paul, and another for monologuist Harry McKee, who was among the comedians Orson collected from vaudeville shows. Paula Laurence, an actress from Panic who had become a close friend of Virginia Welles, would appear as the masked Helen of Troy. (Faustus has a famous line about her beauty: “The face that launched a thousand ships!”) Joseph Cotten, already a lucky charm for Orson, would play a scholar loyal to Faustus. (Cotten was billed, wittily, as “Joseph Wooll,” to get around Equity rules that prohibited his continued employment in the Federal Theatre Project.) Orson enlisted Bil Baird to craft giant puppets embodying the Seven Deadly Sins, and Paul Bowles to compose eerie music for a small ensemble that included oboe, saxophone, clarinet, trombone, and harp, along with a booming thunder drum.

  Easily bored, Orson liked to make the obstacle course harder each time he entered a new arena. His Big Idea for Faustus involved draping the stage with black velvet to create a stygian void. Borrowing from the language of magic, he derived the notion from “black art,” a technique used by magicians for making people and objects “disappear” into the scenery. Shafts of light would capture the characters as they emerged from the dark anterior of the stage, or from trap holes in the floor, or from under black cones raised or lowered from the rafters. Welles also wanted a lighting grid more intricate and ambitious than that for the Voodoo Macbeth, and an innovative loudspeaker system that could envelop the auditorium in music and sound effects.

  The more intimate scenes of the play would be presented on a new extension of the Maxine Elliott stage, a kind of ship’s prow thrusting twenty feet into the orchestra seats—the first Broadway stage to break the “fourth wall” of the proscenium arch.

  In later years, many have debated the originality of Orson’s stage designs, suggesting that lighting designer Abe Feder (or, for later plays, scene designer Sam Leve) made decisive contributions to the overall visual look. The controversy was exacerbated by Orson’s acrimonious relationship with some of the parties, and by his penchant for taking public credit for the design, in the program and in promotional interviews. It’s true that Orson’s stage designers were responsible for executing his concepts, but ideas like the “black art” in Faustus indisputably came from him. “Everything originated in Orson’s hea
d,” Paula Laurence recalled. “It was the duty of everybody to fill it out.”

  Orson’s imperious habits continued. For the first time at Faustus rehearsals in early December, he addressed the actors and crew through a microphone, part of the public-address system put in place for music and effects. He still preferred to rehearse late at night, often arriving hectically from radio appearances. He tended to work out of sequence, concentrating on certain actors, holding back on problematic scenes, shifting the elements around until time ran out, or he felt inspired. He was notorious for stalling rehearsals, or sometimes interrupting them altogether, to change the mood. He told anecdotes and jokes or imitated the tics of famous people, with Guthrie McClintic a frequent target (though in public he often praised McClintic as a director whose experience as a onetime actor had taught him how to direct actors productively).

  Orson also took what sometimes seemed an inordinate amount of time with his own performance. He relied heavily on stand-ins during rehearsals, and was slow even to memorize his dialogue. Fumbling his lines during Faustus rehearsals, Frank Brady wrote, Orson would mutter, “Latin, Latin, Latin, down to line twenty-eight.”

  Early in January, the lighting run-throughs began. Orson had demanded a complex lighting scheme, with hundreds of setups and cues, and it was a nightmare to organize. When the actors went home around 2 A.M., Welles, Houseman, Feder, and the stage managers stayed behind, along with “a few insanely devoted volunteers (usually including Jack Carter) and a handful of girlfriends and wives (led by Virginia Welles),” according to Houseman, “taking turns dozing and ‘standing in’ for the actors—moving back and forth, up and down on the bare, perforated stage while Orson, Feder and I yelled at them and each other.” Around four in the morning they sent out for hamburgers, milk shakes, and brandy from Times Square, finally packing it in after sunrise so that Orson could race off to a radio appointment.

  The black velvet stage and deep trap holes posed genuine dangers for the actors. Orson himself was injured during one rehearsal, plummeting several feet through the stage. Some of the trap holes were modified thereafter, although Welles always thought that an injury incurred onstage was as honorable as a soldier’s battle wound.

  Hallie Flanagan came to one dress rehearsal and left with nothing but praise for the work in progress. Not every visit was so harmonious: when Houseman arrived unexpectedly with a trio of influential friends—designer Pavel Tchelitchew, the poet and novelist Charles Henri Ford, and a Russian princess—Orson refused to raise the curtain, shouting at Houseman about “Russian pederasts and international whores” until the producer beat a hasty retreat. Sometimes, these pitched battles between producer and director seemed contrived for public entertainment. Usually, Houseman was the loser.

  Some members of the cast and crew found Orson’s Big Ideas as mystifying as his methodology of crafting his shows in disconnected bits and pieces. His premieres could be as suspenseful for the actors as for audiences. “Welles’s dress rehearsals and previews were nearly always catastrophic,” Houseman wrote later, “especially if he was performing. I think he enjoyed these near disasters; they gave him a pleasing sense, later, of having brought order out of chaos and of having, singlehanded, plucked victory from defeat.” Charles Higham said that as a filmmaker, Orson carried this attitude over into a “fear of completion.” Film scholar Joseph McBride has called this “the ‘air of frenzy’ school of Welles mythology, initiated by Houseman.” Yet Houseman never wrote, directed, designed, and starred in a play or film, and his observations later in life were undoubtedly influenced by the eventual rift in their friendship.

  As Faustus approached its January 8, 1937, premiere, Broadway observers wondered anew whether the genius would fizzle. Posters for the latest Project 891 promised “The Magic of Macbeth” with “The Humor of Horse Eats Hat.” Most nights, the theater announced, the curtain would be delayed until 9 P.M. to accommodate Orson’s numerous radio engagements.

  But what a magical show Faustus turned out to be! A puff of smoke introduced Orson as Faustus, in a shoulder-length beard and a medieval costume, looking, as David Thomson wrote, “somewhere between Christ and Rasputin.” His performance as Faustus—“ravenous, sweating and human,” in Houseman’s words—did not jell until the premiere. On opening night, however, Welles took possession of the stage in a way New York had not witnessed before. And it wasn’t just Orson: ensemble and effects, darkness and lighting—all came together on cue.

  Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times described this Faustus as “brilliantly original.” “Arresting originality,” wrote Richard Lockridge in the New York Sun. “Often startling,” said Douglas Gilbert in the New York World-Telegram; “ingeniously done.” There was plenty of reflected glory to go around: featured players like Jack Carter, character actors like Harry McKee, and even lighting designer Abe Feder were praised by critics. But the lion’s share of praise went to the director and star, now acclaimed in both categories. Atkinson applauded Welles as a robust and commanding actor, who spoke the verse “with a deliberation that clarifies the meaning and invigorates the sound of words.” Orson supplied “a forthright Faustus, having care for the diction while pacing well his successive emotion,” Gilbert wrote in the World-Telegram. Richard Watts Jr. in the New York Herald Tribune said Welles cut “a striking and eloquent figure in the title role.”

  The reviews were never unanimous, and the anti-Orson camp was hardening too. Some of the naysayers found Welles a vainglorious actor; others were skeptical of him as an overreaching director. The conservative New York Daily News and, the Hearst publications had developed a Pavlovian reaction to the mere mention of his name. Some in the press were suspicious of anything produced under Federal Theatre Project auspices. Gilbert W. Gabriel in Heart’s New York American called the Marlowe adaptation empty, pretentious, and unexciting. Wilella Waldorf in the New York Post found the speeches “pedestrian,” with Welles so in love with his own part that he “strangles it to death.”

  Was it genuine Marlowe? Authentically Elizabethan? Detractors would always split hairs over Welles and his classical adaptations. But with Faustus, most critics agreed, Welles had discovered a corpse in the library, a classical drama rarely produced on the U.S. stage, and exhumed it vividly for popular consumption.

  Audiences were less divided. According to Federal Theatre Project records, Faustus ran for 128 performances, with 80,000 ticket holders and 3,600 standees over a three-month run. And the audiences seemed unusually attentive, as more than one columnist noted: few arrived late for the curtain, and fewer still rushed off without joining the standing ovations at the end.

  Faustus was Welles and Houseman’s third extraordinary success in a row. The play’s director and star could no longer be dismissed as a flash in the pan. The press clamored for interviews. Dinner party invitations surged. Job offers streamed Orson’s way.

  “The world was treating me so well that I was like somebody at his own birthday party!” Welles told Barbara Leaming.

  Orson was never happier than when he was overextended, dashing from his radio gigs in a taxi—or, soon, a hired ambulance—in time to don his costume and makeup before taking the stage. But Virginia was exhausted by the work and trials of the past year and demanded a getaway.

  In the second half of March, she left on a Caribbean cruise, with her ultimate destination Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname. The couple vowed not to worry about communicating over the distances, but Orson missed Virginia the moment she was gone. He tried to phone the steamship as it passed through Trinidad. Writing “in the icy, strained light of a late winter’s early morning,” Orson said he was lonesome and feeling a “big aching vacancy” in his heart. Their dog Bridget—nicknamed Budget as a reminder of hard times—sends “her dearest love with a resounding lick.”

  Orson assured his wife that he was taking all his meals alone, and doing almost nothing that wasn’t related to work. He had dragooned Chubby Sherman into accompanying him to one cocktail party, h
e reported, but it was “a dolorous little function,” from which they escaped after ten minutes. With CBS Radio conductor Lehman Engel, he had just started to “look over talent” for Aaron Copland’s The Second Hurricane, which he had agreed to stage at New York’s Settlement House. But his collaborator on Horse Eats Hat, Edwin Denby, had managed to insert a ballet into the script. “A most unfortunate and self-conscious little addition,” Orson wrote. “If it stays, I don’t.

  “Absolutely no more news of me,” Orson added sweetly in his letter. “Enough to say I am desperately, wildly, despairingly lonely for my beautiful and wonderful wife.”

  His letters to Virginia say nothing of his older brother, Richard, who turned up in New York for a brief visit sometime during the long run of Faustus. Richard, now thirty-one, was “tattered and incoherent,” according to Frank Brady’s book Citizen Welles, and “the two men barely got on, Orson feeling that his brother, at best, an intrusion, was not to be trusted. Richard was confused as to wanting to become involved in the circle of his now famous younger brother, while simultaneously wanting to asperse, out of jealousy, that same reputation.” Augusta Weissberger told Peter Noble that she met Richard around this time. “He was pleasant and slight and rather quiet,” Weissberger recalled. After New York, Richard moved on to Washington, D.C.; he claimed brief involvement in Federal Theatre Project productions there—although, as always with Richard, the facts were elusive.

  The microphone jobs were coming more easily now, rising in both number and prestige—and Orson channeled a portion of his earnings into Project 891. “I was probably the only person in American history who ever personally subsidized a government agency,” he joked later.