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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Les Misérables was a milestone in Orson’s radio career. “Well-staged and engrossing,” wrote Radio Daily, which was the broadcasting counterpart of Variety and had first begun to follow him closely in the summer of 1937. His script brilliantly condensed the book; all the acting, his included, was gripping. “Welles has projected his skill into the stellar ranks of dramatic radio entertainment.”

  Later in August, Orson wrote and starred in another well-received adaptation—this time of John Galsworthy’s prison drama Escape for the prestigious Columbia Workshop series. “A fine piece of entertainment,” said the Radio Daily critic.

  Then, in the first week of September, he joined an all-star cast including Tallulah Bankhead, Cedric Hardwicke, Helen Menken, and Estelle Winwood for an abridged Twelfth Night—his third national Shakespeare broadcast in a single year. “It was easy to detect that Helen Menken and Orson Welles had broadcasting experience,” a New York Times reviewer reported. “They played to the invisible auditors and with intense feeling, as was revealed by their gestures, grimaces and grins.” Radio Daily called it “the finest broadcast” of the network’s summer Shakespeare program.

  Finally, by the end of that happy summer of 1937, Orson had caught scent of a real prize: the lead role in a weekly broadcast series.

  The Mutual Network owned the rights to The Shadow, based on an adventure hero created by the pulp-fiction writer Walter B. Gibson. The series had been a modest hit during its first radio incarnation earlier in the 1930s, with actor Frank Readick introducing each episode with the deathless line, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!”

  The original series had been dropped in 1936 after a five-year run, but New York advertising agencies—representing the main sponsor, Blue Coal—wanted to resume the show in the fall, combining the narrator with the character of the Shadow. They were looking for a high-profile actor to play the Shadow’s alter ego, the wealthy and brainy scientist Lamont Cranston, who has “the power to cloud men’s minds so they cannot see him,” and who “devotes his life to righting wrongs.” The Shadow was far from Shakespeare, but if he could land the job it would keep Orson and Virginia in groceries for months—and make Orson, for the first time, a national radio celebrity.

  Virginia learned she was pregnant in July. The news thrilled the couple, who told Chicago friends and relatives first. “Orson devoted himself to me that summer,” Virginia told her daughter Chris Welles Feder years later. “Every day we swam in the pool and lazed in the garden. We paid no attention to Doctor [Bernstein] when he wrote us from Chicago, ‘I hear you have a lovely house with four spare bedrooms.’ We didn’t need any company except each other and Budget.”

  In fact, the couple had plenty of company. They hosted regular “weenie roasts” for neighbors and friends in Sneden’s Landing including Ben and Rose Hecht, and Hecht’s writing partner Charles MacArthur and his wife, actress Helen Hayes. Hecht and MacArthur sometimes brought along their friends Charles Lederer and Herman L. Mankiewicz, New York writers who’d gone to Hollywood but still toiled occasionally on wishful Broadway projects. Chubby Sherman, Whitford Kane, Alexander Woollcott, and Marc Blitzstein visited often. John Houseman was “rarely” invited, Welles pointedly informed Barbara Leaming.

  Hecht and MacArthur, the former Chicago reporters who collaborated on the defining newsroom comedy The Front Page, also wrote for Hollywood studios on demand, receiving high-paying assignments while writing and directing the occasional quirky independent picture for their own production unit. Orson had much in common with both of them, especially MacArthur—including a schoolboy love of practical jokes. One day, MacArthur found himself wondering whether any of the Welleses’ illustrious guests urinated in the swimming pool. He and Orson tracked down a chemist who had developed “a clear colorless liquid, which if put in the pool immediately detected urine when anybody would pee,” Welles told Leaming. “We put this stuff in and we invited our friends out, naturally, at the weekend, and they were swimming around in raspberry-colored clouds. They were all doing it, you see!”

  Virginia Welles had initially been wary of The Cradle Will Rock, urging her husband to steer clear of its inflammatory politics. Like everyone else, though, she eventually surrendered to Blitzstein’s good heart and charm. In his unproduced screenplay about Cradle, Orson depicts his wife as performing snippets of the pro-labor musical during their parties at Sneden’s Landing, gaily taking over from Blitzstein on the piano.

  Virginia was an appealing pianist and a competent actress, who independent of her husband appeared in at least one of Rudy Burckhardt’s short sixteen-millimeter experimental films. She also mused about writing a novel someday. But she did not pretend to be “artistic.” Nor was she determinedly progressive or bohemian, though so many in their circle were. Orson appreciated the fact that his beautiful wife preserved her debutante “persona,” as he put it, her pearl necklaces and cashmere sweaters. “That was part of her great charm to me,” he recalled. “If she’d turned into a little bit of Greenwich Village, I would have been horrified. She stayed true to herself.”

  “My world is just too random for her,” the character ORSON confides to BLITZSTEIN in his unproduced Cradle script. “Too damn full of surprise. Don’t forget that where she comes from the big excitement is the menfolk getting gussied up in pink riding coats to go fox hunting, for Christ’s sake, where there aren’t even any foxes.”

  That summer, though, the world seemed the couple’s oyster. Their first child was about to arrive, and movie producers came calling with offers tempting enough to drown out any warnings from the cynical Hecht and MacArthur.

  One of the first producers to approach Welles was David O. Selznick, who wended his way backstage one night at Faustus, then wined and dined the young man at “21.” “They got on very well,” David Thomson wrote in Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick. “David had no doubts about Welles’s talent, and they were two equally spoiled boys.” Selznick invited the wunderkind to run his story department in Hollywood. Orson took the offer under advisement. He was “intrigued and flattered,” Welles wrote to Selznick later, but his “ultimate aim” was to be an “actor-director.” In an early hint of his equivocal attitude toward his producing partner, Orson told Selznick that John Houseman was better suited to the Hollywood job and he’d recommend him heartily. Orson was “always interested in being rid of” Houseman, David Thomson wrote in another one of his books, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles.

  Producer Sam Goldwyn was next, chatting up Orson while visiting Hecht and MacArthur at Sneden’s Landing. In his script about Cradle, Welles quoted a Goldwynism from their brief flirtation: “For Orson, I could write a blanket check.”

  But it would take more than money to persuade Orson to make the switch to Hollywood. A personal connection with one of his suitors would have helped. While he could wax nostalgic about the moguls, in person they did not beguile him. Selznick: “He thought he was the greatest thing since Jesus,” Orson told Henry Jaglom forty years later. He considered Goldwyn “a monster,” and Louis B. Mayer “the worst of them all.”

  Virginia vacillated. “We could try the movies—just for a while,” her character coaxes ORSON in the script about Cradle. But Welles was still dedicated to the stage, like Katharine Cornell, and besides, he kept telling people he was on a “lucky streak” in the theater. “I loved movies,” he told Peter Bogdanovich years later. “It just didn’t occur to me to want to make ’em. Peter, there are maybe dozens of people scattered over the world who care passionately about films and don’t want to direct. I was one of them.”

  John Houseman, in his memoir, was precise about what happened next. That version of events, recycled in many books, bolstered Houseman’s portrait of Orson as his own worst enemy—often rescued by Houseman.

  By late August, according to Houseman, producer Arthur Hopkins had canceled his plans for a Broadway production of King Lear, offended by interviews in which Orson grandstanded about the plan
ned production. “The Wonder Boy, without once referring to Mr. Hopkins, had expatiated on his own ideas for the production of King Lear,” explained Houseman, “and on his personal conception of the old king’s progressive stages of madness.”

  In mid-August, according to Houseman, he stopped at Sneden’s Landing on his way back from Vassar, to pay his respects to the Welleses. Orson was in low spirits that day, Houseman claimed, because of the imminent cancellation of King Lear. When Houseman informed Virginia that he was a professor now, he recalled, she laughed rudely and excused herself for bed. (“Virginia looks great in pyjamas,” Orson observed in his unproduced script about Cradle.) Welles and Houseman then stayed up late socializing, reviving their friendship and camaraderie.

  At the end of the night, according to Houseman, Orson was walking him to his car and then suddenly wheeled on him, saying, “Why the hell don’t we start a theater of our own?”

  “Why don’t we?” agreed Houseman. They returned indoors, brimming with excitement. When their eyes strayed to a back issue of American Mercury, H. L. Mencken’s crusading literary monthly, they took the magazine’s name as an inspiration for their new organization: the Mercury Theatre. “I did not go home that night or the next day or the day after that,” remembered Houseman. “It was mid-August, and if we wanted our theatre for the 1937–1938 season we had not a moment to lose.”

  But Houseman’s chronology, at the least, was off. The two had clearly settled on the theater partnership as far back as August 3, when the New York Times announced that Welles and Houseman were planning a fall season “of classical revivals at a popular scale in a small Broadway house.” The first show, according to the Times, would be The Merchant of Venice, performed as “a comedy of manners and not a melodrama.”

  The very next Sunday, August 8, Herbert Drake, a drama reporter who was a fan of both Welles and Houseman, expanded on their fall plans in the New York Herald Tribune. The Merchant of Venice had quickly evanesced, replaced now by a fall schedule that would offer “a modern dress” Julius Caesar, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (“the goriest work of Webster,” in Drake’s words), Ben Jonson’s The Silent Woman, and George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House. “And in the spring,” Drake wrote, “the whole Henry IV cycle, parts one and two, and Henry V.”

  Moreover, in that first week of August, the idea of a new repertory theater would not yet have conflicted with Orson’s plans to adapt and star in King Lear for Arthur Hopkins—a production the Times was still reporting as “due about Christmas time.” So what Welles told Leaming is plausible: that Hopkins got cold feet weeks later, not because of Orson’s grandstanding, but because the producer had trouble raising money.

  Houseman’s account of the revival of their partnership in mid-August was a conflation of several meetings throughout August. Houseman himself told the story about the name “Mercury Theatre” differently in 1950, remarking to an interviewer that Marc Blitzstein had suggested it by pointing to a copy of the magazine during a visit to the partners’ New York office.

  Regardless, by the end of August, the Mercury had been incorporated in the state capital, Albany, with Houseman as president, Welles as vice president, and the still faithful Augusta Weissberger as secretary. The two principal partners would split 70 percent of the stock equally. (The other 30 percent was set aside for major investors.) By August 29, the plans were solid enough to merit a grand proclamation—issued jointly by Welles and Houseman—on the front page of the weekend drama section of the New York Times.

  The partners promised to lead New York audiences on “a voyage of discovery” with their new Mercury Theatre. The first production, Julius Caesar, would be ready sometime “early in November.” Next on their schedule was Shaw’s Heartbreak House, “his most important play,” for which the partners were in the process of seeking the playwright’s permission. Other plays they hoped to produce, according to the article, included William Gillette’s Too Much Johnson, another Americanized nineteenth-century French farce à la Horse Eats Hat; English dramatist John Webster’s seventeenth-century macabre tragedy The Duchess of Malfi; and Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson’s comic The Silent Woman, also known as Epicene.

  “We shall produce four or five plays each season,” the partners pledged in the Times. “The majority of these will be plays of the past—preferably those that seem to have an emotional or factual bearing on contemporary life. Definitely we prefer not to fix our program rigidly too far ahead. New plays, new ideas may turn up any day.”

  They would set their top ticket price at $2 (Broadway tickets often ran as high as $4.40), and Julius Caesar would run for four or five weeks. “After that, without clinging to the European system of repertory, with its disturbing, wasteful, nightly change of bill, the Mercury Theatre expects to maintain a repertory of its current season’s productions.”

  John Houseman excelled at logistics: setting up a management structure for operations, organizing the theater building and staff. The task of finding adequate financing also fell to him. Working out of temporary offices in the Empire Theatre building, Houseman started lobbying well-heeled friends, trying to scrounge the $10,500 he saw as the bare minimum for the start-up. It all had to be accomplished within two months, with budget strictures that left him constantly “paralyzed with embarrassment and fear.”

  He found a permanent venue for the new organization in the intimate Comedy Theatre on West Forty-First Street and Broadway, which had a small orchestra pit, two balconies, and 687 seats. (It was identified as the Mercury’s likely home in the earliest August press coverage.) The partners enlisted Jean Rosenthal to oversee the renovation, and more care and money was spent on reinforcing the rotting floorboards and upgrading the lighting than on repairing the carpeting or frayed seats. For their first production, Orson demanded an extended apron like that of his Faustus, although it meant losing pricey orchestra seats. The woodwork and lobby were given a shine. One day a truck delivered a vertical sign: M-E-R-C-U-R-Y.

  As always, Orson took charge creatively. He would give Julius Caesar, he vowed in the New York Times, “much of the speed and violence that it must have had on the Elizabethan stage. The Roman Senators, when they murder the dictator, will not be clad (any more than were the Elizabethan actors), in the traditional nineteenth century stage togas.”

  Privately, he announced he was departing for ten days of seclusion in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, to escape the hay fever season and find inspiration for the script. Virginia, now suffering from morning sickness, was offended by the implication that her husband couldn’t find sufficient peace and creative emanations at home. The night before Orson left, they quarreled.

  Virginia wanted her husband to find a part for her in the Mercury’s Julius Caesar, no matter how small. “He stared at me as though I’d lost my mind,” she recalled years later. “How could I dream of staying up all night in the theater when I was going to have his child? I had to swear on his mother’s grave that I’d stay home every night, drink my milk and be in bed by ten o’clock.”

  What about you? Virginia wondered aloud. Her husband was rarely home by ten o’clock these days. More than once she had begged him “to cut back on his radio work,” she told her daughter years later, but “he reminded me that if it weren’t for the big bucks he was making in radio, we couldn’t afford to live in Sneden’s Landing or to start a family.” Orson said he did his best to get home after late-night jobs, even splurging on the speedboat that facilitated his river crossings. “That was becoming such a rare event that I told him he might as well give up the boat and swim across,” Virginia recalled. “I meant it as a joke, but he didn’t find it funny.”

  It was not their first fight, but it was their most acrimonious to date, and the letters he sent from the Crawford House, an inn located in the one-horse town of Crawford Notch, New Hampshire, were defensive if unapologetic. “I eat and sleep and poke around in the mountains, and I have entirely forgotten the sound of my own voice,” Orson
wrote sweetly to Virginia. “There is only one flaw in my little heaven but it lets in a hell of a draft. I miss my beautiful, beautiful, beautiful wife.” With few other guests to distract him, Orson was able to work hard on Julius Caesar and—to follow it—the second planned Mercury play, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, which he’d added to the original announced list as a ribald change of pace.27

  Julius Caesar was arguably the Shakespeare play he knew best. He had seen it performed any number of times, in important productions and local versions, like the one at Dartmouth College with William Mowry Jr. among the cast in the spring of 1936. He had mounted his own stripped-down production for the Todd School in tenth grade, and edited Shakespeare’s original play for inclusion in Everybody’s Shakespeare.

  Up in Crawford Notch, Orson first breathed life into his own vision of Julius Caesar. He envisioned his actors in modern street garb, moving freely across an unadorned stage. He conceived stark, dramatic lighting, and hoped, in his treatment of the assassination plot against Caesar, to echo “the same kind of hysteria that exists in certain dictator-ruled countries of today,” in the words of a subsequent Mercury Theatre press release.

  As ever, Orson would make a virtue out of the low budget, planning raised platforms and a series of interlocking ramps for different levels of stage action. The brick wall at the back of the stage would be painted an unsettling color: that of dried blood. Marrying ideas from Panic and Faustus, he called for lights to beam up from holes in the platforms, ramps, and stage floor.

  The costuming would also be inexpensive. The character of Caesar would appear first in a black-belted uniform (his first gesture a fascist salute). The bulk of the cast would be dressed in khaki doughboy uniforms dyed dark olive green, with Sam Browne belts and boots, or in cheap hoodlum suits with upturned collars and low-brimmed hats. One exception to the general wardrobe was Brutus, the part Orson had earmarked for himself. An idealist turned betrayer, Brutus would be elegantly dressed in a custom-made double-breasted blue pinstripe suit.