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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  When Orson was alone, he worked swiftly and furiously. Slashing away at Shakespeare’s script, he boldly combined and transposed, excising a number of scenes—including the play’s battle scenes, believing “there was never a production of Caesar with actual armies in synthetic combat that was less than a little silly.” Most of the actors would carry painted rubber daggers, but Cassius and Brutus would carry real steel weapons, which would gleam in the light.

  The final script would be “a total reworking of Shakespeare,” as the scholar Andrea Janet Nouryeh wrote in her unpublished 1987 thesis, “The Mercury Theatre: A History.” “It was problematic,” commented Nouryeh, “when students came to matinees with their copies of the play. These performances were always punctuated with the noise of rapidly riffling pages.”

  Never mind Shakespeare: the big news from Crawford Notch, Orson wrote to Virginia in mid-September, was that he had cinched the role of the Shadow. The ironclad six-month contract for the radio program was his most lucrative yet, including a clause that allowed him to skip the reading rehearsals. The year before, he had been happy to earn $18.50 a shot for appearances on American School of the Air. Now he would be guaranteed $185 weekly as the Shadow. “I wouldn’t bore you with these technicalities of contract,” Orson wrote to Virginia, “except that I think we ought to know we’re sure of next winter’s bills.”

  Orson promised to return to New York in time for the premiere of the first show on the last Sunday of September. He also hoped to have the Julius Caesar script ready by then, with about two weeks left before the first scheduled rehearsal, allowing him a brief window of time to escape with his wife “somewhere together on a toot,” he wrote, “somewhere ridiculous and delightful where I won’t even have a script to think about and you won’t have a house to worry over.” The Caribbean, perhaps . . . but even Chicago was a possibility, if Virginia preferred.

  “Let me know and I’ll make reservations anywhere,” he wrote to her. “I love you, Orson.”

  The moment Orson returned from New Hampshire, however, his imagined free time evaporated. He plunged into The Shadow and urgent groundwork for Julius Caesar, spending most of his days at the Mercury Theatre and many overnights at the Algonquin Hotel, writing Virginia love notes on hotel stationery. Despite good intentions, they did not have their “toot,” then or ever. When The Shadow and the Mercury kept him away from Sneden’s Landing, Chubby Sherman and Whitford Kane took the trip in his stead, telling Virginia “tales of Orson.”

  Along with the script for Julius Caesar, Orson returned from New England with a sheaf of drawings and another plasticine model of the stage set, like the one he had presented to John Houseman for the Voodoo Macbeth. He handed them over to Sam Leve, whose design work would be supervised by Jean Rosenthal, with instructions to spend as little money as possible. Later, when the program was drawn up, Leve would find his name conspicuously absent, because Orson insisted that the set design stemmed from his ideas. It was the first rude implementation of a Mercury Theatre policy that enforced “Production by Orson Welles” as the one credit that could override all others.

  “They were Welles’s shows,” Houseman himself said later. As a member of the Mercury team, “you were production material,” Rosenthal said. “If [Welles] liked you, the association could be pleasant. If not, it was injurious. As a director, he approached other talents as he did his gargantuan meals—with a voracious appetite. Your contributions to the feast he either spat out or set aside untouched, or he ate them up, assimilated them, with a gusto which was extraordinarily flattering.”

  On this production Rosenthal took over the lighting from Abe Feder, who had moved on after The Cradle Will Rock. Orson gave Rosenthal instructions for lighting effects that would create an unusually darkened stage with pools of illumination for the shifting scenes. “Orson dictated clearly and exactly the look he wanted . . . a very simple look based on the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg,” Rosenthal recalled. The visual scheme was both dramatic and expedient, with the lighting serving as a curtain to open and close scenes rapidly, reinforcing the fast and fluid pace Orson wanted. Rosenthal was less contentious than Feder, but when he felt like it Welles screamed at her too.

  Many writers have described Orson as exploiting people mercilessly, underemphasizing their creative contributions while stealing the credit, as if this were not true of many great directors. “Some of the people around him felt they were being used,” Houseman observed later, though for many others “it was a wonderful collaborative experience.”

  “Orson’s people” often fared best. The composer was perhaps his closest backstage ally, and his credit would follow Orson’s in the program: “Music by Marc Blitzstein.” According to Blitzstein’s biographer Howard Pollack, the composer was paid only a modest $200 for his Julius Caesar score, but he also was given a small percentage of the box office gross, and an extra $50 per week when Caesar went on the road in 1938. His contract also guaranteed a revival of The Cradle Will Rock. But Julius Caesar was hardly another Marc Blitzstein musical: the composer achieved his music and effects with a union-minimum four-piece ensemble: trumpet, French horn, Hammond organ, percussion. He evoked Mussolini’s “Giovinezza” for Caesar’s anthem, and sweetened a sonnet for the young page Lucius to sing to the doomed Brutus.

  “[Blitzstein’s] name could be counted on to help attract that leftist front that had rallied behind The Cradle and that Welles and Houseman now hoped might support their new company,” wrote Pollack in Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World. The leftist groups and organizations were crucial to the Mercury’s hopes for success. Houseman even wrote a piece for the communist organ The Daily Worker, assuring left-wing theater enthusiasts that the new Mercury Theatre was another step toward “a real People’s Theatre in America.”

  Blitztein and Orson remained close friends; and when the Columbia Workshop commissioned a half-hour musical from Blitzstein, he wrote an episode that revolved around a composer’s search for the right socially conscious lyrics to match his melody. Blitzstein dedicated his first original radio opera, called I’ve Got the Tune, to Welles, who was announced to play the lead role. When Orson’s schedule conspired against it, Blitzstein himself stepped into the part—but Welles was there in the booth, along with Houseman and composer Kurt Weill, when the show was broadcast by WABC on October 24, 1937.

  Despite its newly hung sign, the Mercury Theatre was still being renovated in early November, when Orson needed to start blocking the cast. For about two weeks the cast had to be transported to the old film studios at Fort Lee in New Jersey, where the ramps and platforms were under construction. For most of the troupe, the journey involved a subway trip, a ferry across the Hudson, and finally a bus ride to Fort Lee. (Orson arrived in a chauffeured limousine—one of his many new perks.)

  The Mercury partners had assembled a company that would go down in Broadway history. George Coulouris had thought little of Orson when they shared a dressing room during the short-lived Ten Million Ghosts; he changed his mind after seeing Faustus, phoning Orson to praise the show. Orson returned the favor generously, offering Coulouris his choice of two parts in the first Mercury Theatre production. “If you want to play Mark Antony, I’ll play Brutus, and if you want to play Brutus, I’ll play Antony.” Coulouris chose Antony.

  Chubby Sherman was a shoo-in to be a founding member of the Mercury ensemble, and Orson cast him in the role of “envious Casca,” as Mark Antony calls him, one of Caesar’s assassins. Another core member was Joseph Cotten, who saw Orson nearly every day in the radio studios, or at the theater. Cotten would play several parts, including Publius, another conspirator. Martin Gabel was not very lean or hungry-looking, as Shakespeare described Cassius, but rather short and stocky. But he was an intense actor with a commanding voice, and his proven history with Orson won him that role.

  The part of Caesar went to Joseph Holland, an American-born actor who had trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and toured nationally with
Katharine Cornell in Shaw’s Saint Joan in 1936. John Hoysradt, Orson’s roommate in 1933–1934 during the Cornell tour and now a neighbor at Sneden’s Landing, became Decius Brutus. John A. Willard (Trebonius) and Grover Burgess (Ligarius) were veteran multitalents. The two female principals were Evelyn Allen as Calpurnia and Muriel Brassler as Portia. “As so often happened in Welles’ classical productions,” Houseman wrote, the actresses usually played lesser roles, and were “decorative, adequate and hardly memorable.” (Houseman failed to mention that the same could be said of the roles as written.)

  Actor Norman Lloyd, who was cast as Cinna the poet, was one of “Houseman’s people.” Houseman had urged Orson to meet with his friend Lloyd, a classically trained actor with a résumé full of small Broadway parts and appearances in left-wing and Federal Theatre Project productions. Orson approved Lloyd for the first Mercury season at the going minimum. Elliott Reid28 (Cinna the conspirator) and Arthur Anderson (Lucius the page) were not yet out of their teens, both just starting out in radio, where they had met Orson. Stefan Schnabel (Metullus Cimber) was the son of the Austrian classical pianist Arthur Schnabel and the contralto Therese Behr. A Jewish refugee from Hitler, Schnabel had cut his teeth in the Old Vic company of Hamlet starring a British actor Orson was just getting to know, Laurence Olivier.

  The twenty-one professionals would earn $40 per week as mandated by Equity. Junior players, less established, were paid $25. More than a dozen extras, young and ambitious, would earn $1 a day playing attendants, citizens, soldiers, and senators—until they threatened a strike during rehearsals and their salaries were raised to $15 weekly. The extras were “the cream of the New York beginners’ crop,” in the words of Mercury stage manager Walter Ash; they included the strike leader and future film director John Berry. (One supernumerary, George Lloyd, played the “dead” Caesar for a whole scene, breathing through a papier-mâché mask designed by Bil Baird.)

  Finally, Orson telephoned the blond, handsome William Mowry Jr., the Todd School football player who knew his Shakespeare, and invited him to make his professional debut as the tribune Flavius, who opposes Caesar. Edgerton Paul, busy in a Theatre Guild production, passed the stand-in torch to Mowry, who had played Brutus at Dartmouth. Mowry obliged, “even [serving as Orson’s stand-in] through—this is hard for some people to believe—some of the dress rehearsals,” he later recalled.

  Avoiding rehearsals until the last moment may have seemed a bad habit, but it served Orson well, helping him avoid the boredom of repetition, while keeping the other actors on edge. He never stood in quite the same place, or spoke in quite the same manner, as the stand-in.

  One day, William Alland—the aspiring actor who’d dogged Welles’s steps during The Second Hurricane—caught up with him outside the theater and impressed him by spouting from memory Mark Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar. He was rewarded with the small part of Marcullus. More important, Alland—or “Vakhtangov,” as Orson dubbed him in honor of the influential Soviet stage director—became the first of many young people who pledged a kind of informal fellowship with Orson and his genius. Indeed, Alland and others who followed in his footsteps became known to insiders as “Orson’s slaves”—holding script, running errands, delivering food to his dressing room, and competing to serve his whims.

  Though Orson was always, singularly, Orson Welles, his personality seemed to morph and metastasize with each success. The happy summer of 1937, the time alone in New Hampshire, and the launching of the Mercury Theatre clearly marked a fork in the road. Orson was no longer the young unknown dubbed “Shoebooty” by the all-black company of the Voodoo Macbeth. These days he wore expensive shoes. He had a chauffeur, a speedboat, and a country home. He transformed himself physically too, nowadays indulging in morning shaves and manicures before settling in for a long lunch at “21.” Dieting to keep slender and boyish, he adopted a consciously foppish style—“wild camp,” he called it later—modeled after actor-director Alfred Lunt. (“One of the best actors we ever had!”) “I see myself in those old stills,” Welles told Leaming, “and I see somebody that could very easily be thought of as a faggot.”

  Orson’s carefully presented anecdotes about his womanizing were often anecdotes about coitus interruptus or fumbling lovemaking in practice. Indeed, there were so many boastful anecdotes—mixed with so many disclaimers about dandyism and impotence—that some critics and scholars have raised doubts about his heterosexuality.

  In one early French book about Welles, Maurice Bessy described him as “a Don Juan at heart,” adding, “Welles knows—and has openly stated—that the mythic Don Juan is simply an unsatisfied homosexual, for whom the incessant quest for an ideal woman masks his search for himself.” Speaking to Henry Jaglom, Welles claimed he went to court to stop Bessy’s book, which is still in print today. “He’s a mean, little, crooked fairy,” Welles said of Bessy, adding that the author used to join him and Micheál MacLíammóir for meals in Paris during the filming of Othello. “Well, when I am with a homosexual, I get a little homosexual. To make them feel at home, you see? Just to keep Michael comfortable, I kind of camped a little. To bring him out. So he wouldn’t feel he was with a terrible straight. Bessy might have seen that.”

  Although he worked often and happily with many gay and bisexual artists onstage and screen—Marc Blitzstein is just one example—Orson too often wielded homosexuality as a blunt weapon in arguments. He made his enemies into egregious homosexuals: Captain Mueller, Micheál MacLíammóir, even John Houseman. Virgil Thomson and Houseman “roomed together,” Welles reminded Jaglom, adding, “They were lovers.” There is no proof of this, and Thomson had a lifelong homosexual companion, the painter Maurice Grosser. But Orson was convinced that Houseman was a closet homosexual who had a crush on him. About three weeks after they met, Welles went on, speaking to Jaglom, “He said to me, ‘I keep dreaming of you riding bareback on a horse.’ And I should have taken that more seriously. But I just laughed.”

  Respected Welles experts such as Simon Callow and Joseph McBride have given some credence to scuttlebutt about the director’s affairs with men, while tracing homosexuality as “an increasingly overt theme” in late-career works such as Chimes at Midnight (as suggested by the Hal-Poins relationship) and F for Fake (whose protagonist is the gay art forger Elmyr de Hory).

  According to Callow, who tried hard to pinpoint Orson’s sexuality, William Alland “avers that without question” that Welles and longtime crony Francis Carpenter, cast as Octavius in Orson’s new production, “had a sexual relationship.” But how did Alland know for sure? The author leaves this stone unturned, and for what it is worth, Carpenter—“camp beyond the dreams of Quentin Crisp,” according to Callow—was married and had children.

  William Mowry Jr. also believed that Welles engaged in the “bisexual chic” that was prevalent in New York artist circles. But Mowry too balked at supplying the details in his Columbia University oral history, insisting, “I know he had [some] men. . . . But I think he did it only to prove to himself that he was [heterosexual].”

  Regardless, Mowry believed that Welles spent most of his time chasing women. “Some of the girls in the Mercury Theatre got their jobs through sleeping with Orson,” Mowry insisted, adding, “He tried to screw the girl who became my first wife”—a dramatic recitalist named Sherrard Pollard from the Neighborhood Playhouse, who was also involved with the Mercury. Orson “tried” for Pollard simply because he could. Orson was “sadistic in many ways,” said Mowry.

  But there is scant proof of active bisexuality on Orson’s part. Some people prefer their geniuses to be pansexual, and some geniuses may find it useful to be seen that way too. Orson’s newly preening behavior in the fall of 1937 may have been deliberate misdirection. Orson cultivated the image of a dandy, even while women constantly fluttered around him. He covered all the assumptions while affirming none.

  Gone was the young, attentive Orson, sensitive to the hunger of his fellow actors. Orson shed the egalitarianism of
the Federal Theatre Project, dining on steak and mushrooms from Longchamps in front of everyone during the rehearsals. The scent of the food, and Orson’s indifference, infuriated some of the actors—perhaps not the worst thing for a play about a conspiracy to bring down an autocrat. The despotic Orson rubbed it in by ordering a magnificent chocolate cake from Schrafft’s, contemplating it solemnly, then finally ordering it removed, untouched. “I’ve had my dessert, my spiritual dessert,” he’d announce, before turning with a sigh to half a grapefruit.

  More than a few films have incorporated Orson Welles as a character, and one of the best is Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (2008), which takes audiences behind the scenes of Julius Caesar in the fall of 1937. While Linklater’s film makes no pretense of strict accuracy, the script weaves the facts into credible fiction, and Christian McKay’s performance, as flamboyant as it is loving, is the best fictional Orson on screen to date.

  As depicted scathingly in Me and Orson Welles, the Mercury ensemble underwent the now customary Welles regimen during Julius Caesar: torturous late-night rehearsals, battles royal over the complicated sound and lighting cues, the angry shouting matches between Welles and Houseman that had become ritualized.

  Since he was now paying them over his and Houseman’s signature, Orson no longer treated the actors like amateurs on the dole. If a performer asked, “Why am I doing this in such and such a scene?” Orson might snap, “Because of your Friday paycheck!” When the actors got distracted, he would settle them down by shouting, “All right, children!” When otherwise disciplined actors started hamming it up, he cried, “Shame on you!” Coming from a twenty-two-year-old, his tactics irked some of the older cast members. Perhaps Orson really exploded only “a few times,” as Elliott Reid recalled, but when he did “it was a formidable thing to watch”: he popped up like a jack-in-the-box from the back of the theater, streaked down the aisle like a comet, and leaped onstage, screaming all the way.