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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  ORSON

  The possibility hasn’t even occurred to me.

  Orson knew he could count on Sherman. The same went for Da Silva and Geer, who were as professional as they were politically committed. But no one knew whether any others in the cast would step up and perform their parts, even though most of the actors had made their way to the Venice and found scattered seats among the civilian audience around the theater. Tickets and fees were waived, and the downtown crowd poured into the theater. The mood was celebratory. When the Italian flag was spotted hanging from a balcony, the despised fascist symbol was yanked down to cheers and laughter. Orson had told people to spread the word, and though the Venice was nearly three times as large as the Maxine Elliott, it was standing room only long before the curtain rose.

  Just before 9 P.M., Welles and Houseman shook hands backstage with Blitzstein, then made their entrance from the wings, “like partners in a vaudeville act,” in Houseman’s words. The audience cheered lustily, then fell quiet. Houseman spoke first, telling the spectators that as artists and men of the theater the Project 891 partners found themselves with no other choice but to defy the WPA and present their musical. But they were making an artistic statement, Houseman stressed, not a political one.

  When it came his turn, Orson, “looking tall and boyish,” in Houseman’s account, began by thanking everyone for coming. In his own unproduced script, orson speaks “conversationally—apparently without raising his voice.” Lehman Engle thought at the time that Welles gave a “too-long speech,” as if to apologize for “the situation, the scenes, the deficiencies of this kind of presentation.” But composer Virgil Thomson recalled his words emerging from “the most beautiful voice in the world.”

  This is what ORSON says in his script:

  ORSON

  Marc Blitzstein’s opera was written for a large orchestra. The musicians are forbidden to play. Our singers, our actors are forbidden to perform tonight in their own theatre. They are forbidden to stand on any stage, including this one.

  (with a faint, slightly conspiratorial smile)

  But I understand that most of them came along with you, our audience, on your famous . . . long march.

  Laughter.

  And if those members of the audience who happen to have rehearsed this show would feel an irresistible urge to stand up where they are, and join the performance—I don’t believe there’s any law forbidding that in our free country.

  (seriously)

  I hope the rest of you appreciate what a risk they will be taking. They earn their living in the Federal Theatre, and they could find themselves tomorrow morning without a job.

  Marc’s show was meant to have a lot of scenery. But that’s all behind us—twenty blocks behind us, and under lock and key. No playwright, no composer since the world began has ever been so lonely.

  He’s up there, and we’re down here—about a thousand of us. But we don’t just have to stare at him—

  We can keep him company.

  Curtain!

  The curtain rose to reveal the composer, seated at his rented piano in short sleeves and suspenders, with a glass of water and a bowl of peanuts close by for munching during his performance. Blitzstein looked a tad forlorn. He had played and sung his agitprop musical in parlors all over town, but never in front of a packed theater. Bathed in the lone spotlight, Bitzstein announced the setting in what Houseman described as a precise, high-pitched voice. “A street corner—Steeltown, U.S.A.!” Blitzstein began to stroke the piano, nervously singing the first lines of the first song.

  Then, to everyone’s astonishment, Blitzstein’s music was joined by a faint soprano voice—emanating from a “pale and frightened-looking” woman in a green dress, according to Orson’s account—who rose from her box seat.

  The woman was Olive Stanton, a WPA actress who, everybody knew, stood to lose her paycheck by performing. “It is almost impossible, at this distance in time, to convey the throat-catching, sickeningly exciting quality of that moment or to describe the emotions of gratitude and love with which we saw and heard” the actress, Houseman wrote. Other actors started joining in, standing and speaking and singing from orchestra seats, the balcony, the aisles. Feder swiveled his sole spotlight to catch them. One brave accordionist accompanied Blitzstein from the balcony, flouting the musicians’ union. A few cast members watched in stony silence, but Chubby Sherman ably filled in for several of them. Even the Harlem chorus took the gamble and sang their parts.

  According to the account of biographer Frank Brady—though no other—Welles seated himself onstage, not far from Blitzstein, reassuring the composer by his presence as he described for the audience “the changes in scenes, the fact that a telephone just rang or an explosion had occurred, or stage business or sound effects that, under the circumstances, could not be produced visually or aurally.” In Orson’s unproduced script, the director defers to Blitzstein and steps offstage, later sneaking out with his wife to the stage door alley for a break during intermission. In Welles’s scripted re-creation, the couple muse about quitting the theater for Hollywood:

  “Aren’t you just a little bit tempted by Hollywood?” VIRGINIA asks.

  “Hollywood,” ORSON replies, “is a place where you must never sit down because when you stand up you’re sixty-five years old”—an amusing line from an older, wiser Welles.

  Blitzstein’s performance gained force and majesty, and two hours after it began the first public preview of The Cradle Will Rock ended with his thunderous musical refrain:

  When you can’t climb down, and you can’t sit still;

  That’s a storm that’s going to last until

  The final wind blows . . . and when the wind blows . . .

  The Cradle Will Rock!

  “All hell broke loose” when Blitzstein and the cast finished up, wrote Houseman. In Orson’s later-in-life script, the show concluded to “that huge Niagara roar . . . that mighty, loving explosion which can be heard but once or twice in a theatre lifetime.”

  The show ended with wild applause, cheering, dancing in the aisles, exploding flashbulbs, and a “joyous blizzard of leaflets,” wrote Orson. Welles, Blitzstein, and Houseman converged at center stage, taking exultant bows. Finally, Orson stepped forward and quieted the tumult, gesturing to a distinguished gentleman in a cream suit who had emerged from backstage to stand beside them. “When you have all sat down,” said Orson with a smile, “the one man standing will be the poet—Archibald MacLeish.” MacLeish then gave a brief speech telling them all that they had just experienced the dawn of a bright new day in the American theater.

  The next morning Orson caught a plane to Washington, where he hoped to make a personal appeal to Harry Hopkins to issue a continuance for The Cradle Will Rock. Last night he’d been forced into defiance, but now his only goal was to rescue the production. “I kept thinking we could save the situation, somehow,” he told Henry Jaglom decades later.

  But Hopkins was unavailable, and Welles had to settle for two high-level Works Progress Administration officials, both of them New Deal liberals: David Niles, a close aide of Hopkins; and Ellen Woodward, who handled women’s issues inside the WPA. A secretary transcribed the afternoon conference.

  The impasse over The Cradle Will Rock had nearly caused “a riot in the streets,” Orson began dramatically, and now was the time for the WPA to compromise. To save face, he suggested, last night’s unauthorized preview could be reclassified internally as a “dress rehearsal.” What he and John Houseman sought was an exemption from the budget freeze that would allow a series of similar dress rehearsals in lieu of an official opening.

  Taking the lead, Niles dismissed Welles’s suggestion as just a matter of semantics. He did not understand why Project 891 was unwilling to comply with the nationwide order to postpone all arts project openings. Orson and his company could have all the dress rehearsals they wanted after July 1; postponement was neither censorship nor cancellation.

  Niles framed the issue as
a matter of loyalty to the embattled Federal Theatre Project and the WPA. All New Deal programs were under political assault, Niles explained, and well-intentioned administrators were forced to make sensitive decisions. Project 891 had cast the beleaguered New York branch in an unfair light. “The pressure on them is terrific,” Niles said.

  Orson countered that postponing Cradle hurt his cast and crew just as unfairly. The WPA was not going to keep issuing work-relief checks for rehearsals of a show that no longer needed rehearsing—a show that had now given very public previews.

  When Niles was interrupted by a phone call, Welles took the opportunity to ask Woodward if she’d been able to bring the issue before Hopkins. “I had lunch with him,” Woodward replied tersely, implying that Hopkins had left it up to them.

  After the call, Niles renewed his insistence on loyalty. He stressed that the Federal Theatre Project was “part of a national picture,” and the New Deal program had the “right to expect” all its participants to “pull together through this terrible thing.” Welles tried to argue, but Niles cut him off repeatedly. “You are hiding behind the letter of what you call a preview performance,” Niles scolded him. “Or dress rehearsal—as [opposed to] the public opening. From your point of view there is no difference. The real difference is in the minds of the public—no matter what you call it—it is a theatrical performance for which we have sold tickets.”

  The argument dragged on, but Niles refused to budge. Backed into a corner, Orson played his trump card. “We are asking for a series of dress rehearsals,” he insisted. “If that is of no use, there is another way for us—a commercial theatre. It is not used as a weapon—for us it is a least disagreeable one—last night’s affair was a strong argument for the continuance of Federal Theatre. The point is that our gesture did not represent in our minds any form of defiance whatsoever . . . [and] from the point of view of New York City it would be to the advantage of WPA for The Cradle Will Rock to open at the Maxine Elliott Theatre in New York tonight.”

  Niles said he did not like the implied ultimatum.

  “I’m telling you, without this being a threat,” Orson persisted, keeping his words and tone even, “if we are not permitted to put the play on by a series of dress rehearsals that we will simply put this play on a commercial basis. Mr. Houseman and I have nothing—absolutely nothing—to gain by keeping our WPA jobs. We are sincere government workers as you are.

  “However defiant our gesture may be, it was kept within the letter of the law. Since [you] do not believe that our suggestion of instituting a series of dress rehearsals will work, we will put the play on a commercial basis,” he said. “We are very anxious not to put the play on a commercial basis, but we will.”

  Niles then asked Woodward whether the WPA would grant any future support to Project 891 for Cradle if Welles went through with his plan to mount the play commercially. “Our position is clear,” Woodward said. “If you decide to go ahead with a commercial production of the play, then I see no reason for Mrs. Flanagan not to drop this thing.”

  The conference ended on this sour note. Orson said he planned to speak to Archibald MacLeish about making a final plea to Harry Hopkins. The WPA officials told Orson they would never reach Hopkins, and he left Washington later in the day knowing the officials were right.

  Slumped in his seat on the return flight, Welles tried to collect his thoughts. The work he had done under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project—the Voodoo Macbeth, Horse Eats Hat, and Faustus—had immeasurably boosted his career and stature. He owed a lot to Hallie Flanagan and her support. Now his defiant stand might harm the New Deal program irreparably. He worried “about the political wisdom of it all,” he told Leaming years later.

  In the past year, Orson’s political convictions had grown stronger and deeper. Even when his plays were not expressly political, he enjoyed many professional and personal relationships with progressives who were devoted to the Federal Theatre Project, and he had committed himself to numerous liberal and left-wing issues, from equal rights to support for the Republican forces in Spanish Civil War to pro-worker causes. His collaboration with Blitzstein had consolidated his beliefs. He would go on to lend his name to progressive causes for years to come, addressing timely topics in his newspaper columns and radio forums, and taking positions that were both antifascist and socially critical of America. Welles would become “the American Brecht,” historian Michael Denning went so far as to say in his book The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, “the single most important Popular Front artist in theater, radio, and film, both politically and aesthetically.”

  The left wing of the 1930s generally embraced the New Deal, the Works Project Administration, and the Federal Theatre Project, but this was different. Returning to New York, Barbara Leaming wrote, Welles felt he had “failed” in his mission to obtain special permission to continue with “dress rehearsal” performances of The Cradle Will Rock. That had been his sincere goal. “But it might be as exact,” countered historian Barry B. Witham, “to characterize Welles as victorious in acquiring the undisputed rights to a production” originally underwritten by the federal government.

  The Cradle Will Rock now belonged to Blitzstein, Houseman, and Welles.

  Curiously, Houseman, usually the diplomat of the partnership, absented himself from the Washington summit. But Orson may have wanted to go it alone, and this was another situation in which his celebrity carried more weight than Houseman’s.

  When Orson returned from Washington, however, there was little public bluster over the Federal Theatre Project, for or against. Welles and Houseman merely announced that they’d purchased the rights to The Cradle Will Rock from Blitzstein in order to present it in a two-week run at the Venice, starting the very next day: Friday, June 18. Houseman obtained temporary financing from affluent friends and supporters. With his elaborate sets gone forever—confiscated by the WPA, they were later destroyed—Orson tinkered minimally with the impromptu staging from their first night at the Venice. Blitzstein still took the stage alone, while the actors and singers fanned out in the auditorium’s seats and aisles. The WPA kindly allowed a leave of absence for actors drawing federal paychecks, and in order to perform himself, Blitzstein joined Equity and the musicians’ union.

  Over the summer, Project 891 was quietly allowed to die. Orson resigned from the Federal Theatre Project first, while his partner lingered in the powder-room office, supervising a skeleton staff until mid-August, when Houseman left to fulfill a one-year appointment, arranged by Hallie Flanagan, as head of Vassar’s Experimental Theatre and Drama Department.

  CHAPTER 13

  1937–1938

  Tales of Orson, Real and Imagined

  If anything, the brouhaha over The Cradle Will Rock added to Orson’s professional mystique. Personally, too, it seemed a blessing. He took off more time than usual that July and August, and Virginia later called the summer of 1937 “one of the happiest times in our marriage.”

  In the late spring, the couple found a country residence on the left bank of the Hudson in Sneden’s Landing, a hamlet about twenty miles north of New York City in Rockland County. A longtime haven for artists and entertainers, Sneden’s Landing gave the Welleses a chance to live in a proper home a long way from Broadway, with a vegetable garden, a good-sized swimming pool, and extra bedrooms for guests. Orson made regular forays into New York by speedboat, his new indulgence, racing back and forth across the river to the train stop.

  In the last week of May, shortly before the crisis with Cradle, Orson had been receptive when producer Arthur Hopkins invited him to play the title role in King Lear on Broadway in the fall of 1937. While Hopkins decided whether to direct the production himself, Orson could spend the summer adapting the script, which he knew and treasured, and confer on the costume and stage design with Pavel Tchelitchew (last seen being chased out of a rehearsal of Faustus).

  At the same time, Orson had lined up a surfeit of j
obs to pay for groceries, including his first major opportunity as a broadcast writer-director. As an experiment in summer programming, the Mutual Broadcasting System agreed to let him shoehorn Victor Hugo’s thousand-page magnum opus Les Misérables into seven half-hour broadcasts from WOR, its flagship station in New York, starting July 23.

  Set against the backdrop of early-nineteenth-century French history, culminating in a Paris insurrection, Les Misérables depicts the struggles of an ex-convict to elude a fanatical police inspector and ultimately redeem himself. Orson wrote a script that ingeniously incorporated disparate narrative devices to streamline the sprawling plot, while remaining as faithful as possible to the literary masterpiece. Directing his first important radio series, Welles demonstrated his inventiveness as well as his command of the medium.

  Each of the 10 P.M. weekly broadcasts began with this introduction: “WOR and the Mutual network present Orson Welles, distinguished young author, actor, and director, in an adaptation of this novel, which he has made especially for the radio.” Orson narrated the show and voiced the leading role—Jean Valjean—while cleverly differentiating his polished narrator’s tone from that of the brusque ex-convict and from the other roles he played in the series. (In one courtroom scene, he even played a man mistaken for Valjean.)

  Orson wove many unusual sound effects into the show—simulating the echo and ambience of the Paris sewers, for example, by recording in a convenient men’s room. His Todd School headmaster, Roger Hill, visiting that summer, always claimed that he was in that men’s room, for the occasion, holding the microphone.

  Many in the large cast were already old friends; the result was a kind of informal dress rehearsal for the Mercury Theatre. Orson cast Martin Gabel from Ten Million Ghosts and Big Sister as Javert; and an actress from Big Sister, Alice Frost, as Fantine. He made Virginia his Cosette, and set aside good parts for Everett Sloane, Ray Collins, Will Geer from The Cradle Will Rock, and his old Chicago friends Chubby Sherman and Whitford Kane. This would be Orson’s first time working alongside Kane, and Les Misérables would also be his first time directing Agnes Moorehead, who voiced several different characters in the serial.