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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  The date and circumstances of her hiring at the Mercury have been blurred by varying accounts, but her addition to the company was not officially announced until the spring of 1938. Houseman was so floored by how “unbelievably lovely” Fitzgerald was upon meeting her for the first time that he was reduced to asking “a few routine questions about her experience in the theatre, to which she gave lying answers.” Ushered then into Orson’s presence, she was flattered to realize that the “boy genius” (as she described Welles years later) was also “absolutely bowled over by me. He looked at me like Michelangelo’s God looking at Adam and Eve before the fall.”

  On New Year’s Eve—the night before the official premiere of Shoemaker’s Holiday—Orson summoned his wife to dine and dance at the Waldorf Astoria. “Many of our friends couldn’t get over how light-footed I was for a woman six months pregnant,” Virginia recalled. Such togetherness was increasingly rare for them.

  A few weeks later, “fed up with seeing so little of Orson,” in her words, Virginia improvised a trip to New York, hoping to surprise him in his room at the Algonquin after the curtain fell on Julius Caesar. “It was a very cold night in January and I was in my seventh month,” Virginia recalled. Swearing the front desk to secrecy, she took over his suite, waiting for him—waiting, waiting.

  “The sun came up and there was still no sign of Orson,” Virginia ruefully confessed to her daughter Chris Welles Feder many years later. “I decided there was little point in waiting any longer, but before going home, I wanted to leave a love note on his pillow.

  “That’s when I opened a desk drawer, looking for some notepaper . . .”

  Virginia discovered that Orson’s desk drawer was stuffed with what, in her naïveté (“I never dreamed he would go looking for pleasure with other women”), she first took to be fan mail. After skimming the perfumed letters, however, she realized they were “love notes.” “That made the shock more terrible,” Virginia recalled, “my being so innocent and trusting. It seemed every ballerina in New York had written to him, and there were also letters from my good friend Geraldine. I couldn’t believe, at first, that Orson would actually send Geraldine to stay with me when he’d been having an affair with her.”

  Orson had betrayed their marriage. Feeling suddenly dazed, dead inside, Virginia staggered over to the hotel window, intending to leap out and commit suicide. But she could not pry the window open. “God knows I tried,” she told her daughter.

  Instead, Virginia returned home to Sneden’s Landing, vowing to maintain her dignity and not to confront her husband or Fitzgerald until her child was born. “I wouldn’t hold it against her,” Virginia told her daughter, “because in those days, you simply fell into bed with anyone who asked you to, especially if you were an actress trying to get ahead.”

  After a while, however, Virginia began to second-guess her fears. She wondered if the “love notes” meant anything after all, if she had let her imagination run away with her. Orson was attentive and loving whenever she was around, and the rest of the time he was so busy professionally. There were only so many hours in the day. She wondered “how Orson found the time to be unfaithful to me with Geraldine or anyone else.”

  Indeed, Virginia had jumped to conclusions. And at least when it came to Geraldine Fitzgerald, her suspicions of Orson’s infidelity were premature.

  Orson was indeed amorously involved with a number of ballerinas, though in his usual indeterminate fashion. “My period of ballerinas,” he told Barbara Leaming with a laugh, “and none of them were a disappointment. I got terribly interested in ballerinas. I didn’t consciously go out to collect them, but life just worked out that way.” Leaming did not name any of these ballerinas; Frank Brady, citing Virginia as his source, listed two: Tilly Losch and Vera Zorina. (In his book about Welles, without substantiation or elaboration, David Thomson enterprisingly added a third: prima ballerina Tamara Toumanova.)

  The first, Losch, began her career as a ballerina before becoming an interpretive dancer, an actress, and later a painter (and a countess). Born in Austria in 1903—Welles refers to her as the “older” ballerina among his conquests—as a child Losch trained in dance at the Vienna Opera. Short of stature but amazingly lithe, she had acted for Max Reinhardt in Berlin and London, danced for George Balanchine, and choreographed for her own ballet company in London and Paris. She performed notably in a few Hollywood films, including The Good Earth, a Best Picture nominee, in 1937. Losch designed her own clothes and also took them off for art photographers, posing in the nude. A femme fatale with a kitten face ringed by dark red bobbed hair, she collected interesting men, one of whom was Orson. She met him in New York in late 1937.

  Leaming, Welles’s authorized biographer, suggests an inaccurate time frame for the romance, writing that Orson’s tryst with Losch coincided with a broadcast of The Shadow in late 1937. Welles approached this infidelity with “enormous guilt,” Leaming wrote; then, as he and Losch prepared for “a go at it,” Orson was shaken by the sound of his own voice booming from the radio in the hotel room.29 “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? . . .” The coincidence spelled coitus terminus. “Imagine what it did!” Welles told Leaming. “The impotence lasted for one night.”

  In fact, the “love notes” Virginia found in Orson’s suite preceded the actual lovemaking, such as it was, by several months, and the date dovetailed with one of the final broadcasts of The Shadow in the spring of 1938. This rough chronology can be worked out from Losch’s archival papers, which include a series of telegrams and messages between her and Welles that track the rising fervor of their relationship through April and May. Most of these surviving communications are brief and coded. (April 23, 1938: OW to Losch at the Ambassador Hotel: “PLEASE.”) Most are marked UNSIGNED, and many close with professions of love and devotion from Welles to Losch. One series of telegrams begins in early March 1938 and runs through Orson’s birthday on May 6. (OW to Losch at the Ambassador: “I HAVE A COLD THIS IS MY BIRTHDAY LOVE.”) The telegrams, which peak with a flurry of activity in mid-May, hint that Losch was the chaser, not the chased. (Unsigned, undated Losch to OW: “I TINK I BETTER GIVE UP.”) Their relationship suffered from a number of “COMPLICATIONS” (a recurring word) that interfered with several planned rendezvous—and these complications weren’t limited to the threat of discovery by Virginia. Even as his relationship with Losch was drawing to a close, Orson also had begun to pursue the second ballerina identified by Virginia: Vera Zorina.

  Losch was a free-spirited, modern woman who apparently tabulated her lovers on notepaper, listing the number of times she had bedded them. Next to Orson’s name, she put only three marks over nine months, from the fall of 1937 to May 18, 1938. And “bedded” does not necessarily mean they had sexual relations; she may have included the night, for example, when The Shadow cramped Orson’s style.

  On that last date, May 18, Losch sailed for Europe. The night before, Orson had telegraphed her: “GOING TOMORROW . . . I CAN’T STAND IT . . . DON’T . . . I MUST SEE YOU TONIGHT, LOVE.” Yet the ballerina stayed overseas for the rest of the year, ending their barely consummated affair forever.

  CHAPTER 14

  January–August 1938

  “I am the Mercury Theatre”

  Throughout the winter and spring, the curtain for Julius Caesar rose nightly at nine, except on Sundays; and most weeks there were two or three matinees. The long run could not help but tax Orson’s acting interest. He could stand a long run, he told Peter Bogdanovich, only when he was touring: “then I don’t mind being in the same play.” He stayed away from the theater until nearly curtain time many nights, sometimes dining out sumptuously beforehand. Composer Virgil Thomson, who was expecting to work on the Mercury’s penciled-in production of The Duchess of Malfi, recalled arguing on behalf of his musical ideas over a dinner with Orson and Virginia at Sardi’s: oysters, champagne and burgundy, red meat and fixings, dessert and brandy. “You win,” Orson told him afterward, standing up to go and play B
rutus. “The dinner did it. And it’s lucky I’m playing tragedy tonight, which needs no timing. Comedy would be difficult.”

  Perhaps it was hard for him to take Julius Caesar quite as seriously, Welles admitted to Bogdanovich, after he dined with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, one of George Bernard Shaw’s most treasured actresses, now in her seventies. The original Eliza Doolittle, “Mrs. Pat” was also Shaw’s inspiration for the character of Hesione Hushabye in Heartbreak House, another play on the Mercury’s future schedule. Orson revered Mrs. Pat, a doyenne from another age, and spent hours with her even though she detested his Caesar. Mrs. Pat was hilarious on the subject: “They have no reverence, those boys. They speak the lines as if they had written them themselves.” Even Orson’s performance offended her. His Brutus was “like an obstetrician who very seriously visits a lady in order to placate her nerves.” She was confounded by the modern-dress conceit, Mrs. Pat told Orson: “Why do you have everybody dressed up like chauffeurs?”

  “It’s true!” Welles told Bogdanovich. “It spoiled it for me. Ever since then, it looked like a whole convention of Rolls-Royces.”

  At times, Orson’s pensive performance as Brutus lapsed almost into muttering. One night, during one of his seemingly endless soliloquies, someone in the theater suddenly shouted out: “Louder!” As often with Orson, accounts of his response vary, and each of them is credible: scholar Richard France wrote that Orson simply glared at the audience before continuing his recitation; biographer Frank Brady wrote that Welles was stricken with humiliation, begging Joseph Cotten to keep him company in his dressing room after the show—“This is awful! Did you hear him? He shouted ‘Louder’! I’ll never get over this.”

  One episode everyone remembered—though, again, not necessarily the same way—was the April night when Orson accidentally stabbed Joseph Holland through the chest with his real dagger during the assassination scene. Holland crumpled to the stage floor, lying still and bleeding profusely; the other actors feared the worst. After the scene ended, Holland was rushed into a taxi and driven to the nearest hospital. He would spend a month recuperating, with John Hoysradt taking his place as Caesar.

  Perhaps Orson was overcome with remorse, drowning his guilt in Scotch, as cast member Arthur Anderson wrote in his memoir. Or maybe he switched the blame onto Holland, as the play’s producer recalled. “When [Orson] learned that his victim was not in danger,” Houseman wrote, “he developed an angry conviction that the blame was entirely Joe’s for making a wrong move and impaling himself on Brutus’s stationary blade.” Perhaps, just as likely, Orson did both.

  Suddenly, Orson had an abundance of Caesars to juggle. He was responsible for organizing the number two company of Julius Caesar, casting Tom Powers as Brutus, Edmond O’Brien as Antony, and Lawrence Fletcher as Caesar, then drilling the troupe on the stage of the National Theatre, before they were sent on the road to New England at the end of January. He and Martin Gabel performed the play’s famous quarrel scene on radio several times that season. And, in March, Orson led the original ensemble into a studio to record the entire production on a set of five twelve-inch two-sided discs: a mammoth undertaking, the first time any complete play had been preserved for a long-playing album. Around the same time, Orson also took a hand in the Mercury’s similarly full-length recording of The Cradle Will Rock, one of the first Broadway musical LPs.

  No surprise that people wondered when Orson slept, or with whom.

  Despite all this activity, the Mercury’s home stage was now empty at night—and it threatened to stay that way for weeks, even months. While Welles and Houseman now had three plays on Broadway—Julius Caesar and The Shoemaker’s Holiday alternating in repertory at the National, and The Cradle Will Rock licensed to an outside producer at the Windsor—the partners could not nail down the next Mercury production.

  As a stopgap, they introduced Worklight Theatre, a series of Sunday night showcases of works in progress. The first of its presentations, staged on the second Sunday in January, was Dear Abigail, a domestic drama set in a New England fishing village in the 1840s, written by David Howard, whom Orson knew through radio. A bare-bones offering, one step up from a reading, it featured Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead, with Orson listed as codirector along with radio man Knowles Entrikin. Other works in progress were scheduled for the next several Sundays, but after a month the extra effort proved too much; the Worklight experiment was canceled, and The Cradle Will Rock returned to the Mercury after the expensive orchestra-seat sales flagged at the Windsor.

  Welles and Houseman hoped to produce Shaw’s Heartbreak House, but they had not heard from the playwright, who tightly controlled the rights. With foolish optimism, Orson thought he might be able to throw together his envisioned “marathon production” of Shakespeare’s Henry IV (Part 1 and Part 2) in combination with Henry V, first announced in the New York press the previous August. Orson would play Falstaff, with Vincent Price announced as Prince Hal, who later becomes King Henry V. It was a project Orson long had talked about, amounting to another stab at his Todd School graduation play.

  By the end of February, this long-standing brainchild of Welles’s had evolved into one “evening’s entertainment” culled from Henry IV and Henry V, to be followed by a second evening consisting of a condensed Richard III, with one short scene from Richard II. Orson would play Falstaff in the Henrys and Richard II in the Richards. Together the two nights of Shakespeare would be known as Five Kings: “an English cavalcade of the fifteenth century,” in the words of the New York Times. Though commonplace today, the proposed “marathon Shakespeare” was an audacious concept for American theater in 1938. Welles insisted the two Henrys could be ready for audiences as early as mid-April, the Times reported.

  A fencing expert was brought in to drill the Mercury extras in stage fighting as it was practiced in Shakespeare’s day. Orson may have presided over a few read-throughs of scenes as he dived into the text, as some accounts suggest, but when he sank his teeth into something this ambitious, his outpouring of ideas and inspiration kept multiplying the scope and challenges. With all of his responsibilities for Julius Caesar, the Five Kings script seemed forever “in progress,” and Orson couldn’t find time to finish it. The tantalizing project was announced, postponed, and reannounced repeatedly in the first half of 1938. “If possible,” according to a “progress report” in the Times that spring, the “marathon Shakespeare” would debut “early in June and run until July, the Mercury declaring that it recognizes no hiatus between seasons. Besides its house has a cooling system of a sort. . . . There is talk, too, of the whole company going on the road [with Five Kings] this summer.”

  By the first of March, however, Welles and Houseman knew that Five Kings needed time to germinate, and they had to fast-track another play, or risk forfeiting the remainder of the 1937–1938 season. At last, they elected to forge ahead with John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi, a rarely produced sixteenth-century tragedy in the mold of Dr. Faustus. The partners’ enthusiasm for The Duchess of Malfi was bolstered when veteran stage and screen actress Aline MacMahon agreed to join the Mercury in the title role, and Pavel Tchelitchew, whose sketches were among the casualties of Welles and Arthur Hopkins’s canceled King Lear, said yes to designing the show.

  Rehearsals for The Duchess of Malfi were set to begin at the end of the first week of March. Norman Lloyd wrote in his memoir that Welles convened the first reading of the script after midnight, with “eighty or ninety actors, looking at each other and wondering what was going on; there were only eight parts in the show.” Orson took the stage, Lloyd recalled, “fingering the gardenia he was wearing and carrying a large dollar cigar,” having arrived breathlessly from Tony’s, “a very chic eating club.”

  “This is only going to please a few friends and myself,” Welles announced grandly to the assembly before inviting “eight of us up on the stage to read the play, leaving all the others who had been told they might be in The Duchess of Malfi sitting in the audience,”
Lloyd wrote. Whitford Kane, Chubby Sherman, and Lloyd were among the privileged invitees—“the three madmen, each with about three lines”—as the rest watched in piqued silence.

  This is a peculiar anecdote, considering that New York papers already had identified Kane, Sherman, and Lloyd as members of the Duchess of Malfi cast—along with George Coulouris, Vincent Price, Edith Barrett (Price’s wife), and Frederick Tozere, all from The Shoemaker’s Holiday; plus Will Geer from The Cradle Will Rock. Whatever the case, Lloyd insisted that the first reading “didn’t go very well.”

  According to Houseman, the reading began at 10:15 P.M. “It was a disaster,” he said, agreeing on that much with Lloyd. “With the exception of Welles himself, whose fantastic voice seemed ideally suited to Webster’s extravagances, the actors seemed incapable of capturing the mood of the piece, which sounded muddled, verbose, and in its wildest moments, merely foolish. Having failed to ignite in its early scenes, it dragged itself on through the night, growing more dreary and embarrassing.”

  That very night, Orson explained later, he realized for the first time that the Mercury was not a genuine repertory company. It was merely “a group of people” cobbled together for Julius Caesar who were being retrofitted, willy-nilly and at random, into roles for the other Mercury plays. “We didn’t have a strong enough company,” Welles told Barbara Leaming. “I saw they weren’t up to it, and I didn’t have people for three of the leading parts. They just weren’t disciplined classic actors.”