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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Orson’s directing style provoked a range of responses from the actors, and their feelings about his behavior were often closely aligned with their belief in his genius. Actors recognized an artistic temperament when they encountered one. Orson rarely ruffled Joseph Cotten’s feathers, for example. Cotten’s customary aplomb, and his deep friendship with Welles, helped sustain their mutual admiration.

  George Coulouris, on the other hand, was a “grumbler” by nature, “very temperamental and very barometric,” in his own words. “The [Julius Caesar] rehearsals were bad,” Coulouris recalled years later. “He kept us waiting for hours.” Even Coulouris conceded that Orson employed peculiar means to achieve often extraordinary ends. “I think he’s a genius,” Coulouris observed, “but that is to say he’s a genius who has flashes of imagination that galvanize a show, but sometimes the intervals are not galvanic at all.”

  With Caesar, for instance, Coulouris thought Orson wasted too much time drilling crowd movements at the expense of guiding the principals. Welles was “preoccupied with timing and marching,” recalled Coulouris, “and had the cast marching around like idiots for hours.”

  Norman Lloyd, a fastidious man who disliked messy methods and peculiar behavior, was even more grudging in his assessment. “Discipline at rehearsal [for Julius Caesar] was not of a model nature,” Lloyd complained in his memoir Stages: Of Life in Theatre, Film and Television. “Orson might arrive at rehearsal and be amused to talk about something for two hours, or do an imitation of Maurice Evans’s Falstaff or of Guthrie McClintic, with whom he had worked. Or he told jokes. Finally, he would get around to the scene, which he would rehearse once over lightly before he left.”

  Lloyd’s perspective may have been colored by the professional psychodrama he underwent during these rehearsals. In his earnest attempt to strike the right note for the part of Cinna the poet, who is murdered by Caesar’s followers after they mistake him for Cinna the conspirator, he found himself in a war of wills with Orson. This was not a major scene in the play traditionally—the poet Cinna has only a few lines—and Orson did not appear very engaged by the staging of Cinna’s death during rehearsals.

  For weeks, in fact, Orson handed Lloyd over to Marc Blitzstein, who had the actor beating a tom-tom to an accelerating metronome while extras playing the murder mob chanted phrases Orson had poached from Coriolanus. Lloyd felt his big scene was going nowhere.

  He wasn’t the only actor in this production who feared that his performance was disappearing down a hole. In some cases literally: as with Faustus, the trap holes cut into the stage floor created a dangerous risk of plunging into the basement. Orson was “amazed and indignant,” recalled Houseman. “Were they not actors? And were not traps among the oldest and most consecrated devices of the stage? They must stop being amateurish and craven . . .” Until, that is, Welles himself fell into a trap hole flanking the top ramp, plummeting to the cellar floor and spraining his ankle. Then, safety measures were taken.

  The actors were also uneasy about Orson’s penchant—some saw it as a mania—for aural experimentation. Orson brought in radio man Irving Reis to create recordings of Antony’s and Brutus’s speeches for the extras to listen to and practice their reactions. He also asked Reis to create a mix of recorded street sounds—traffic noise, police sirens, and air-raid warnings—which would be broadcast as background ambience during certain scenes. Orson worried the actors by spending an inordinate amount of time fiddling with the levels of this “sound track,” which seemed to them like a tumult drowning out the import and clarity of their lines.

  He drove the cast hard, yet he drove himself hardest. The technical rehearsals, one week before previews, were a hellish experience, with Orson testing the lights and sound “until the stage hands dropped like flies,” according to Lloyd, “and the actors became punch drunk.” Orson prided himself on staying on his feet all day and all night, but when he wasn’t stealing catnaps at a nearby hotel he might be found snoring in the orchestra seats as the company arrived for the morning run-through. The devoted Augusta Weissberger kept him buzzing with fresh coffee; her mother contributed homemade chicken soup.

  Rehearsals were always a chance for Welles to try out and refine his ideas for staging. He had intended, for example, to pad the platforms and ramps to muffle the sound of the marching actors’ boots, but when the padding proved too expensive, he embraced the resulting thundering-herd effect, which enhanced the tension in the crowd scenes. The lighting design, the sound effects cues, and even his beloved trap holes were adjusted each time he revised a scene.

  Originally scheduled to premiere on November 6, Julius Caesar had to be postponed until November 11, its first public performance to be preceded by one week of invitation-only previews. The Mercury was in a bad financial state, and Houseman, still moonlighting some days as a professor at Vassar, was fast coming unglued. “All our investors’ money” had been spent, he recalled, largely on the renovation and actors’ salaries. The unpaid bills were accumulating.

  Lloyd was not alone in foreseeing a personal and professional fiasco in the making, for him and the nascent Mercury Theatre. Lloyd did not warm to Welles any faster than Welles warmed to Lloyd, and the actor was increasingly flummoxed by the director’s seeming indifference to his scenes. Finally, just before the first dress rehearsal, Lloyd confronted Welles, saying he felt unrehearsed and wanted to drop the poet’s death scene altogether. “He [Orson] accepted this calmly,” Lloyd recalled. “If I didn’t want to go on, that was all right.”

  In his book Run-Through, Houseman offered a plausible explanation for the impasse between Welles and Lloyd. “In every production we did together,” he observed, “there were one or more moments which came to embarrass or bore [Welles]—either because he had become disillusioned with the performers or because he realized that his own original conception of the scene had failed, and he was uncertain which way to turn. In Julius Caesar the lynching of Cinna the Poet had become such a block.”

  The audience was always the real test for Orson, and he treated previews as a last chance for changes—a derring-do-or-die. When the Mercury Theatre finally opened its doors and performed Julius Caesar for its initial invitation-only audience in the first week of November, the lighting, music, and sound cues were a mess, according to most accounts, and the crowd scenes dragged. Still, no one thought the show was terrible—until the curtain came down.

  Lloyd was watching in the wings, feeling “really very angry” that Orson had called his bluff and dropped Cinna’s death scene from the invitation-only performance. Lloyd refused to come out and line up with the rest of the company for the expected ovation and bows. Then an astonishing thing happened: the ovation never came. Accounts differ, but according to most who were there, a smattering of applause trickled quickly into silence. Then the audience simply stood and filed out of the theater. The cast was in shock, Orson stupefied and humiliated.

  The Mercury’s publicist Henry Senber darted onstage, sputtering, “Jesus, Orson! We can’t even get one curtain call!” Furious, Orson stared down at Senber, “cleared his throat, produced a large blob of phlegm and spat right in Hank’s face,” according to Lloyd’s memoir. As everyone froze in horror, Senber reared back to punch Orson in the face. The publicist would have delivered his blow, too, if Orson hadn’t grabbed Senber by the shoulders first. “Spit in my face! Please! Please! Spit in my face!” the director pleaded. “Hank did so,” Lloyd reported in his memoir. “The terrible moment had passed, and they were friends again.”

  Julius Caesar was doomed, unless Orson could save it. Over the next several days, as the date of the true premiere neared, he plunged into round-the-clock salvation. No more experimentation: now was the time for ruthless decision making. Orson’s prerecorded ambient sound track, which only distracted everyone, was abandoned. (“What was brilliant on the sophisticated electronic equipment at the radio station,” wrote Andrea Janet Nouryeh, “sounded laughable when played on the inadequate sound system at th
e theater.”) The lighting cues were narrowed, simplified.

  Returning to the original Shakespeare he knew and loved from boyhood, Welles trimmed scenes, reshuffled others, taking chunks out of certain roles in favor of others. (He subtracted from Octavius and Mark Antony in particular, reducing George Coulouris to “a highly effective but one-dimensional” portrait of Antony, thought Houseman.) Orson had long toyed with the idea of eliminating the intermission, and now he did it.

  At last Orson came around to the nagging issue of Cinna the poet, which he had been evading and postponing. In Act Three, Scene 3, of Shakespeare’s original, Cinna wanders onstage after dreaming about the assassinated Caesar. He is accosted by a gang of thugs galvanized by Mark Antony to seek out the conspirators and avenge Caesar. The thugs mistake Cinna the poet for Cinna the conspirator. He pleads with them as they close in. No, I am Cinna the poet!

  Now Welles and Lloyd revisited everything to do with Cinna: his costume, his mannerisms, his line readings. Lloyd had thought all along that Cinna should be dressed as an ordinary clerk, while Orson thought the character ought to have a hint of the Byronic poet about him. Lloyd had an idea: Cinna’s death scene could evoke the tragedy of Maxwell Bodenheim, a real-life alcoholic Greenwich Village figure known for handing out poems for spare change in Washington Square. Orson knew about Bodenheim from Chicago, where the poet had once run a literary journal with Ben Hecht. Melding his own vision of the Byronic poet with Lloyd’s hapless one, Orson reconstructed the scene. He and Lloyd clashed repeatedly, and Lloyd threatened to quit, but Orson pushed ahead, mediating their differences throughout the long night before the next-to-last preview.

  Orson blocked the scene anew. Now the thugs would appear singly onstage, then collect into small groups, edging closer to Cinna as they formed a mob. As he found himself surrounded, Lloyd would desperately pull scraps of poetry out of his pockets as proof of his identity. The mob would grab at the scraps, crumple the poetry, hurl it back into his face.

  “At two in the morning,” according to Houseman, “the scene began to work, getting tauter and more dangerous as the night wore on. At four-thirty we stopped and it was announced that the Cinna the Poet scene would be in the show for the [next preview] matinee.”

  Before the performance, the word spread backstage that critic John Mason Brown from the New York Evening Post was in the audience, having been granted special permission by Welles and Houseman to attend the preview because a previous commitment kept him away from the premiere. With the hectic revisions of the last few days still drying on the page, not many felt confidence in the production. As Coulouris prepared to make his first entrance from the darkened basement under the stage, the actor was heard to predict (“in a voice loud enough to be heard by the entire front half of the orchestra,” Houseman recalled) that this play and the Mercury would fold after the previews.

  But Coulouris was wrong. In that desperate moment, Julius Caesar came gloriously alive. And the immediacy and universality of Orson’s bold, modern-dress vision was capped by his vivid staging of Cinna the poet’s death. Lloyd went down screaming, “I’m Cinna, the poet! The poet! The poet!”—blotted out by the mob and Orson’s blood-red lighting. The killing was followed by a sustained loud peal from a Hammond organ lasting almost a minute. The audience gaped in shock. “An unforgettably sinister thing,” Joseph Wood Krutch later wrote in The Nation.

  That day at the preview matinee, the ovation was overwhelming. Afterward, the New York Evening Post’s critic took the rare step of heading backstage. John Mason Brown shook Orson’s hand and congratulated Houseman, telling them what he later wrote in the Post: that the Mercury Theatre’s maiden presentation of Julius Caesar was hands-down “the most exciting, the most imaginative, the most topical, the most awesome and the most absorbing” play of the new Broadway season.

  The official premiere on November 11, 1937, came amid the rising tide of fascism in Europe and widespread fear of an approaching world war. The first-night crowd was plunged into a past that eerily seemed to foretell the present day: the stage in darkness, the lone voice hailing Caesar, a figure resembling Mussolini striding forward in military uniform with a fascist salute. Orson’s Shakespeare adaptations were never fusty. He had sharpened Julius Caesar like an assassin’s knife held aloft, amid beams of light that simulated the Wagnerian stage tricks of Hitler’s Germany.

  The performances peaked on opening night; the actors would enjoy the best notices of their careers. Caesar’s spectacular assassination (complete with Orson’s real daggers) thrilled the audience, and Cinna’s dance of death was lauded in review after review—Cinna’s demise was reminiscent of “the hoodlum element you find in any big city after a war,” as Welles told the New York Post, “a mob that is without the stuff that makes them intelligently alive, a lynching mob, the kind of a mob that gives you a Hitler or a Mussolini.”

  Welles’s own portrayal of Brutus (“a fine patrician type, his face sensitive and intellectual” as Orson described the character in Everybody’s Shakespeare) added to the opening-night triumph. Almost stealthily Orson had nursed his characterization, committing himself to the character incrementally, while employing his stand-in and juggling his other chores. Welles was often a “king actor,” as he once famously proclaimed in an interview—that is, an actor specializing in kingly performances; but the manner in which he played kingly men always revealed—as Truffaut said (and as Welles agreed)—“the fragility of great authority.” But he was also capable of playing, as in Julius Caesar, a high-minded loser swept away by the dark tide of history.

  Dressed to stand apart from the other players in his custom-made double-breasted blue pinstripe suit, Welles offered a ruminative Brutus whose soft conversational manner, in the context of such bombast, allowed him to dominate his scenes. Highlighted by his simple and powerful oration at the forum, his characterization served as “a foil to the staginess of the production as a whole,” in the words of John Mason Brown. “There can no longer be any question of his skill as a player,” Richard Watts Jr. wrote of his performance in the New York Herald Tribune.

  The last tableau of the show brought to its feet the capacity crowd that had been privileged to witness the birth of the Mercury Theatre. Fittingly, the final lines belonged to George Coulouris, Orson’s doubting Thomas, who now as Mark Antony strode gravely to center stage and stared out over the audience, declaiming in Brutus’s memory, “And say to all the world this was a man!”

  The Nuremberg lights enveloped the ensemble in white brilliance. The theater broke into a frenzy. People shouted hosannas. Women tossed their hats into the air. Critics risked their deadlines to stand in place fiercely applauding with reddened hands.

  John Anderson wrote in the Journal and American: “Mr. Welles has schemed it out with resourcefulness and imagination, energy, daring, and perception.” Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times: “Theatrically brilliant.” Richard Watts Jr. in the Herald Tribune called it “the great Julius Caesar of our time.” John Mason Brown spoke for all: “The touch of genius is upon it.”

  Julius Caesar opened just one day after Broadway welcomed another breathlessly awaited Shakespeare production, Antony and Cleopatra, a big-budget star vehicle for actress Tallulah Bankhead. Bankhead’s foray into Shakespeare cost an inordinate $100,000 to mount onstage, with Virgil Thomson’s score and Cecil Beaton’s costumes among the expenses. Brooks Atkinson criticized it as “elaborately encumbered,” other critics joined in the mockery, and Antony and Cleopatra closed after just five performances.

  Bankhead rushed over to see Orson’s bargain Shakespeare, then joined the well-wishers backstage. Welles told her the Mercury’s Julius Caesar had cost all of $6,000. “Six thousand dollars!” Bankhead shrieked. “That’s less than one of my fucking breastplates.”

  As always with Welles, there were skeptics, most of them falling into one of two categories: Shakespeare purists, who were offended; and anticommunists, who were suspicious of the implications of a modern-d
ress Julius Caesar staged by refugees from the Federal Theatre Project. Stark Young in the New Republic wrote that he was “on the whole pretty much disappointed” in the production; Mary McCarthy in the Partisan Review complained that Welles “cut the play to pieces,” then further ruined it with his own “cloying and monotonous performance.”

  But their voices were drowned out by the Niagara roar of acclaim, and by the sound of ticket office telephones, barraged by eager subscribers to the coming Mercury season. The first week of performances sold out, with many standees; the second-night press list rose to 120. “At the box-office as well as in the opinion of the critics,” reported the New York Times, “the Mercury Theatre . . . has started life with a hit.”

  But the Mercury also started life with a debt, and it was more than $6,000. Friends of the project pleaded with the partners to forgo their plans for a revolving repertory schedule, which would require deeper investment, expense, and liability. Instead, the Mercury should pay the bills by keeping Julius Caesar onstage for as long as the theater could sell out.

  At a celebratory dinner at “21,” over two bottles of champagne, Welles and Houseman talked things over—and decided cheerily that they were not interested in playing it safe. They were still committed to the idea of a repertory theater. “Neither Welles nor I was primarily interested in money,” recalled Houseman. Within days of the premiere, the Mercury management sent out publicity for the second production of the season, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday. “The plan is to open it Christmas week,” wrote the New York Times, “later alternating it in repertory with Julius Caesar.”