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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  One of his most important broadcasts to date came on April 11, 1937, just before Virginia’s return from South America. Orson and Archibald MacLeish were still crossing paths, finding themselves side by side at parties, civic occasions, and political benefits, more and more these days for the anti-Franco Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. MacLeish had written another “verse play” especially for radio—for the sophisticated Columbia Workshop series. Now he offered Orson the lead role.

  The play, “Fall of the City,” was a parable of encroaching totalitarianism, the story of a modern metropolis whose citizens gather to hail an approaching conqueror as their savior—topical material for an audience transfixed by the specter of fascism in Europe.

  CBS producer-director Irving Reis arranged to broadcast the program from the Seventh Regiment Armory, with hundreds of college students making crowd noises in the cavernous space. Isolated in a soundproof booth, Orson played a radio announcer narrating the disquieting spectacle from his safe perch high atop a tower above a central square in the city. Working alongside Welles for the first time was actor Burgess Meredith, playing the pacifist Orator. Bernard Herrmann was again on hand to conduct the score—four trumpets, four trombones, and eight drums—enhancing the “brilliantly orchestrated cacophony,” in the words of Herrmann’s biographer Steven C. Smith.

  MacLeish’s work was followed closely by the New York and national press, and millions of Americans were expected to tune in for “Fall of the City,” despite the fact that its Sunday night slot pitted it against Jack Benny’s popular radio program. MacLeish had wanted Orson this time not for his booming voice, but for his ability to summon a matter-of-fact tone that would rise to wonder as the drama unfolded. Orson had inherited his mother’s gift for recital, and a knack for striking just the right note in performance, often with very little rehearsal.

  Orson’s narration of the action would guide “Fall of the City” to its solemn climax, the armored conqueror marching into the central square and opening his visor to reveal his face:

  There is no one.

  No one at all.

  No one.

  The helmet is hollow.

  The metal is empty.

  The armor is empty.

  I tell you there is no

  One at all there.

  Welles, hailed now by Time magazine as “one of the country’s ablest classical actors,” lent prestige to the broadcast, one in which radio itself seemed “artistically [to] come of age.” One of America’s leading cultural critics, Gilbert Seldes, wrote in Scribner’s that Welles gave his role “the breathless excitement of actuality,” and said that the broadcast itself was “so important, in so many different ways, as to make everything else in the field comparatively negligible.” The success of “Fall of the City” helped usher in a number of original radio plays commissioned by the Workshop from authors such as Maxwell Anderson, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Vincent Benét.

  After the success of these two radio dramas—the two-part adaptation of Hamlet, followed by “Fall of the City”—the Workshop gave Welles a third important opportunity, inviting him to fashion an abridged version of Macbeth for radio, this time taking the title role himself. The radio Macbeth was scheduled to be broadcast on two consecutive Sundays in early May, coinciding with Orson’s twenty-second birthday.

  Again, it was Irving Reis, not Orson, who directed. Once more, Bernard Herrmann was in charge of the music. This was the third time Orson worked closely with Herrmann, and each time occasioned a building block in their relationship. Orson arrived late with his Macbeth script, the pages twice as long as the time slot. By the time he and the cast had wrestled the pages into readiness, so much had changed that Herrmann had to jettison much of his score.

  No problem. “No music!” Orson told Herrmann. “No music at all!” Instead, he summoned into the studio an elderly man sporting a kilt and toting a bagpipe. Standing at the microphone on a podium in the center of the room (“as he always did,” wrote Houseman, making it “impossible for anyone to communicate with him on equal terms”), Orson instructed the piper, “Every time I raise this hand, you come in and play!’ He turned to the trumpets and drums. “Every time I lift this hand, you play a fanfare!’ ”

  Standing stiffly before his newly marginalized orchestra, Herrmann could barely control his rage. “Trust me, Benny!” Orson coaxed the conductor. “That’s how we went on the air,” recalled Herrmann. “Every time Orson raised either hand, which he did frequently in the role of Macbeth, trumpets, drums and bagpipe came in fortissimo . . . and so did a whole lot of sound cues, including wind machines and thunder sheets.”

  While Virginia was still on her cruise, Orson somehow also spared the time to supervise The Second Hurricane, an unusual opera by Aaron Copland with a libretto by Edwin Denby, staged at the Neighborhood Playhouse of the Henry Street Settlement House on Grand Street.

  Though still at an early point in his career, Copland was on his way to becoming one of the preeminent composers in American history. Motivated by the hardships of the Depression, he had written “a play-opera for high school children,” in his words, telling the story of rescue work by an aviator and several children during a flood caused by a hurricane. The opera, written in a self-consciously Brechtian style, upheld “the revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity,” according to Copland’s biographer Howard Pollack, with the songs and spoken dialogue in everyday American vernacular.

  For several weeks in April, Orson worked in spurts to shape the much-anticipated Copland production. He contrived a clever set: a bare stage flanked by unpainted bleachers, on which sat two divisions of a large children’s chorus. The action would be performed in the open spaces, lit from overhead. On a lofty platform upstage sat an orchestra—twenty musicians in ordinary attire—with Lehman Engel conducting Copland’s score and looking out at the audience.

  For $10 per performance, Orson inveigled Joseph Cotten into playing the aviator, and he and Chubby Sherman culled the other half-dozen young leads, and something like one hundred young people ages eight to nineteen, from the music and drama programs at the Henry Street Music School, Seward Park High School, and the Professional Children’s School. Orson chose many of the students at a glance, then handed the young players and rehearsals over to Sherman.

  Orson’s letters to his wife suggest he was less than thrilled with the material, and when The Second Hurricane was unveiled in late April, the New York Times lamented that Copland’s opera for youth was saddled with an “innocuous little story” and repetitive choral numbers lacking “melodic inspiration.” But “a large and distinguished audience of adults” flocked to see Copland’s “opera-play,” according to the Times, and The Second Hurricane rated as one of the theatrical events of the year in New York. “Composers appreciated the work,” wrote Copland’s biographer, Pollack, “in ways that the casual observer could hardly have suspected.” Virgil Thomson, for example, said, “The music is vigorous and noble. The libretto is fresh and is permeated with a great sweetness.”

  The experimental play-opera hurt Welles no more than it hurt Copland. And it brought him into contact with many young people who would follow him into the future—among them a twenty-year-old budding actor, William Alland, who trailed Welles like a beagle, trying to make himself “useful.” Orson invited Alland to look him up next season, when he might need to fill out the cast of a Shakespeare play. A few years down the road, Orson would cast Alland as the reporter searching for the meaning of “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane.

  From Panic to the Voodoo Macbeth and now “Fall of the City” and The Second Hurricane, Orson’s stage career increasingly dovetailed with his left-liberal politics. In the spring of 1937, after his work with Archibald MacLeish and Aaron Copland, he entered into another collaboration, this time with novelist Ernest Hemingway. And although he joined forces with Hemingway only briefly and disastrously, the job brought him into closer contact with New York’s left-wing documentary collective, F
rontier Films, and one step closer to filmmaking.

  Hemingway, born in 1899 in the middle-class Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, was at the height of his literary reputation. In the late spring, he was working with filmmaker Joris Ivens and author John Dos Passos to complete a propaganda documentary, The Spanish Earth, which exalted anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War. Virgil Thomson and another modernist composer, Marc Blitzstein, were organizing a sound track of Spanish folk music, while Hemingway, in New York in May, finished a voice-over script. Behind the scenes, a group of people who included Archibald MacLeish were looking for someone to narrate the film, and MacLeish thought of Welles.

  Orson met Hemingway for the first time in June, when he went into a studio to record the narration track. The story of their encounter has been told in almost as many versions as there are tellers. The script had been a source of friction, with Ivens and Hemingway quarreling over it. Now, as Orson undertook the narration, he complained aloud about the “pompous and complicated” language. Where Hemingway’s script read, “Here are the faces of men who are close to death,” Welles found the comment unnecessary—especially when it was to be read “at a moment when one saw faces on the screen that were so much more eloquent,” as he later recalled.

  As Hemingway listened to Orson’s narration and side comments from a booth, he was appalled. According to Peter Viertel in his memoir Dangerous Friends, the novelist found Welle’s voice actorly and effeminate. “Every time Orson said the word infantry,” Hemingway told Viertel, “it was like a cocksucker swallowing.”

  According to Welles, the trouble began when he tried to persuade Hemingway to drop some of his precious text. “Mr. Hemingway,” he said, “it would be better if one saw the faces all alone, without commentary.” To Hemingway, this was too much. “You fucking effeminate boys of the theatre,” he shouted, “what do you know about real war?”

  “Taking the bull by the horns, I began to make effeminate gestures,” Welles recalled. “I said to him, ‘Mr. Hemingway, how strong you are and how big you are!’ That enraged him and he picked up a chair; I picked up another and, right there, in front of the images of the Spanish Civil War, as they marched across the screen, we had a terrible scuffle. It was something marvelous: two guys like us in front of these images representing people in the act of struggling and dying.

  “We ended by toasting each other over a bottle of whiskey.”

  Did all of this happen exactly that way? Welles gave similar accounts every time he was asked about the incident, but at least one of Hemingway’s biographers found his version “quite fanciful.” Another quoted an eyewitness to the recording session who recalled the two men having a serious, thoughtful discussion of the script, with Hemingway ultimately vetoing Welles’s suggested changes.

  Whatever the case, no one disputes that Hemingway found Welles’s mellifluous narration mismatched to the stark, realistic images, and in the end it was dropped. Orson was miffed, but perhaps Hemingway—who took over the narration himself—was right. And Welles left the studio with an anecdote he would tell for decades, insisting that he and Hemingway remained friendly for the rest of their lives.

  The more important by-product of Orson’s participation in The Spanish Earth was not fighting with Ernest Hemingway but growing closer to composer Marc Blitzstein, who was working on the musical sound track for the film. After the musical warm-up of The Second Hurricane, Orson spent the first half of 1937 planning a new Project 891 production: Blitzstein’s militantly pro–labor union musical The Cradle Will Rock.

  The standard version of the events surrounding The Cradle Will Rock, as historian Barry B. Witham has noted, makes for “a great theatre story.” The mythology surrounding the storied production owes much to John Houseman’s book Run-Through, which offers a typically colorful but also typically faulty chronicle that has since influenced numerous other accounts.

  Though Welles never got around to writing an autobiography, one of his last major pieces of writing was an unproduced screenplay, which he finished a year before his death, about the staging of Cradle. Welles frankly conceded that the script took liberties with the reality. “What I have written is not strictly factual,” the narration explains, “but it is essentially the truth.” He took pains to create sympathetic portraits of key individuals: his wife, Virginia; Marc Blitzstein; even Houseman himself.

  To the end of his life, Welles always spoke of Blitzstein warmly and with esteem. “Serious rather than solemn,” he wrote in his unproduced script, “he brightens a room when he enters it. His political beliefs are like moral convictions but are held with the most perfect serenity. In the Church he would be called saintly. A total stranger to extravagance in any form, he is mannerly, widely educated, unaffectedly civilized, a man of natural authority and unstudied charm. If he sounds a little too good to be true, he is, almost, just that. It never occurs to him that his mere presence is a kind of rebuke to the rest of us.”

  The two men had met backstage after a performance of Horse Eats Hat, months earlier. From the first, Orson was “personally taken” with Blitzstein—a lithe, dapper man, ten years older than himself, several inches shorter, with sparkling blue-gray eyes, receding short brown hair, and a Gypsy mustache. Blitzstein had been married—he wrote The Cradle Will Rock after the death of his wife, novelist Eva Goldbeck, earlier in 1936—but he was open about his homosexuality. A communist who acted and dressed like a boulevardier, Blitzstein had a personality that charmed everyone. “I really loved him very much,” Orson told Barbara Leaming.

  One of Blitzstein’s endearing qualities was his absolute faith in the unproduced musical he’d written, the agitprop The Cradle Will Rock, in which downtrodden workers in an allegorical Steeltown, U.S.A., rise up against Mister Mister, the town bully and capitalist boss.

  Blitzstein’s score incorporated a dazzling array of musical forms and styles, including “recitatives, arias, revue patters, tap dances, suites, chorales, silly symphony, continuous incidental commentary music, lullaby music,” as he described it. The music was sung through in the manner of a Kurt Weill–Bertolt Brecht opera, and in fact the composer dedicated the play to Brecht, the German anticapitalist playwright. An early mentor and confidant to Blitzstein, Brecht had urged him to enlarge a pivotal character in the musical, a girl forced into prostitution, extending her role thematically to “figurative prostitution—the sell-out of one’s talent and dignity to the powers that be.”

  Blitzstein had spent the second half of 1936 auditioning his work around New York, pounding the piano and giving one-man shows of his musical in the living rooms of wary backers and producers. When Orson saw Blitzstein give his run-through, however, the composer’s zeal won him over, and launched their friendship. At first Orson considered directing The Cradle Will Rock for New York’s Theatre Guild, but that unlikely idea fell through. Then, although it was far more explicitly left-wing than anything he and Houseman had done together, Orson vowed to produce it for Project 891.

  At first, Houseman sniffed disapprovingly, largely because Orson seemed to take Cradle for granted long before his partner had even seen Blitzstein’s run-through. “He and Virgil [Thomson] were in a huff because of this marriage between Marc and myself,” Welles recalled later. While kind to Houseman in his unpublished script, Welles acknowledges their constant rivalry and resentments. The relationship perplexes VIRGINIA (the character as portrayed in the script). “I’m somebody he happens to need,” ORSON (the character) explains to VIRGINIA. “And vice versa. In show business we call it friendship.”

  Eventually Houseman was treated to Blitzstein’s demonstration, and he surrendered to the composer’s charm. Early in March, Welles, Houseman, Blitzstein, the actor Howard Da Silva, and Federal Theatre Project chief Hallie Flanagan met for a dinner party at the apartment Houseman now shared with Virgil Thomson on East Fifty-Fifth Street. Da Silva, a rising star who’d recently appeared in the Group Theatre’s Waiting for Lefty, knew Welles mainly from radio gigs, but
they had barely exchanged a word until the day when Orson stopped Da Silva and said he wanted his big, loud voice for the lead role of union organizer Larry Foreman in The Cradle Will Rock. That night at the apartment, Da Silva and Blitzstein sang big and loud, and Flanagan went “crazy” over their living-room performance, in Blitzstein’s words. Though she was “terrified about it for the Project,” because of its left-wing politics, Flanagan approved Cradle as the next Project 891 show. “Orson and Jack are optimistic,” Blitzstein wrote in a letter, “I pessimistic.”

  Once again, Orson proved a master of catch-as-catch-can casting. Along with Da Silva, he recruited Will Geer, another actor known for his firebrand politics, for Mister Mister. A few players crossed over from Faustus, including Chubby Sherman as Junior Mister; Orson wanted Sherman for his light touch onstage and his assistance backstage. Orson also brought in a few powerful singers from the Negro Unit, including Eric Burroughs, the Hecate of his Voodoo Macbeth. Olive Stanton, whom he picked to play the Moll, the girl who prostitutes herself to survive, had appeared in a minor role in a previous Federal Theatre Project play. (Her father, the former press agent and producer Sanford Stanton, was a political editor and columnist for Hearst’s New York Journal-American.) Most of the other actors were newcomers hired not for their experience or political background, but primarily for their clear, strong voices. “To make up our chorus of thirty-two we borrowed or traded singers from other [Project] units,” wrote Houseman.

  Swept away by the prospect of directing his first Broadway musical, Welles talked Blitzstein into an elaborate stage design calling for fluorescent platforms with glass bottoms that would slide back and forth, amid velour portals, carrying the scenery and props. While he supervised the design, Orson entrusted the bulk of initial rehearsals to Blitzstein, who provided his own piano accompaniment and drilled the singers. Orson dashed in and out, liaising with lighting specialist Abe Feder and scene designer Sam Leve, a Yale graduate who had joined Project 891 on Faustus.