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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  And there were other sources of restlessness—not least the perpetually forthcoming Five Kings. The Mercury players were tired of treading water and waiting for the mastermind: they wanted guarantees for the summer and fall. Houseman spoke publicly about taking the innovative Shakespeare production on the road for a summerlong West Coast tour, leading to a fall 1938 opening in New York. He arranged with Lawrence Langer and Theresa Helburn, his friends at the prestigious Theatre Guild, to reinforce the Mercury by coproducing Five Kings with “part of the backing and the fat pickings of its 60,000 subscription list,” as the Time cover story noted. But when the first casting choice was leaked, it was another outsider: sure enough—Burgess Meredith as Prince Hal/Henry V.

  On the last day of May, the partners announced that Five Kings would be postponed until the fall—and another play would precede it on the fall schedule. Orson had decided to direct a revival of Oscar Wilde’s farce The Importance of Being Earnest, with Chubby Sherman and George Coulouris as the stars. It was going to be workshopped in August as a “guest attraction” in a summer theater friendly to the Mercury. However, “a sizeable number of the Mercury actors were not too anxious” to commit to the Wilde farce, according to the Times account; they had their hearts set on Five Kings, whose projected lengthy tryout tour and Broadway run would “insure longer employment.”

  The lead role of “Ernest,” who juggles a double life as a gentleman and a wastrel, was tailor-made for the company’s foremost farceur. Chubby Sherman’s casting in the role was even reported in the New York Times, although the actor would tell Richard France years later, “Orson never so much as mentioned wanting me in anything after Shoemaker.” By early June, with Lloyd, Price, and a few other Mercury actors bolting from the company, Sherman was torn between the factions. Starring in the Wilde comedy should have pleased him, but it would mean disappointing the other actors who were pulling for Five Kings—and make Sherman an unwilling symbol of loyalty to Orson.

  Tempted by another producer’s fall Broadway musical revue, Sherman stalled. He may simply have been waiting until the Mercury partners were out of town. On June 23, 1938, almost three weeks after reporting that Sherman would be showcased in The Importance of Being Earnest, the Times broke the news that he was quitting the Mercury.

  Sherman was the oldest, most conspicuous of “Orson’s people.” He and Orson had known each other since the late 1920s, the heyday of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. In a sense, Sherman, Welles, and Houseman, were three Musketeers, dating back to their dreams of a repertory company in 1936 and their wishful plans for ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.

  Orson had long believed in Sherman’s acting prowess (“The Mercury Fuehrer had expected to build his production of the Oscar Wilde work around Mr. S.,” the Times noted). Sherman had emerged as a valued, versatile stalwart of the Mercury ensemble under Orson’s direction—while also serving as Orson’s casting director and his assistant director for Mercury plays and outside projects like The Second Hurricane. Often an invaluable spokesman for his fellow actors, Sherman was known within the company as its “conscience,” Houseman wrote.

  One of Sherman’s frustrations was he wanted to direct plays for the Mercury. Decades later, Orson insisted to Barbara Leaming that he tried to give Sherman such a chance on a nascent production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure late in 1937. Sherman cast the play, reimagined in a New Orleans setting, and convened a few read-throughs. From “what I heard,” Welles told Leaming, “it was really very good.” Welles claimed that Houseman unaccountably canceled Sherman’s directing debut, “Orson was terribly puzzled by the cancellation,” wrote Leaming—although many Mercury projects fell by the wayside in similar fashion.

  The pain of Sherman’s defection was compounded when Welles learned that Whitford Kane, who, as an actor and director at the Goodman Theatre, had been his idol—and who was Sherman’s life partner—had mounted a whispering campaign against him.

  Tension between Welles and Kane had been mounting for some time. From the earliest run-throughs of The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Kane contributed “the only discordant note” in the production, taking “exception to what he regarded as Welles’s lack of respect,” said Houseman. Among other things bothering Kane was that his role gradually shrank as Welles’s script compressed the scenes involving his character, the shoemaker who becomes lord mayor, in order to shift the focus to Sherman.

  The atmosphere during The Shoemaker’s Holiday was also affected by a generation gap, as the “youthful spirit” of most of the cast “clashed bitterly with the habits of the older performers,” according to Andrea Janet Nouryeh. Kane and actress Marian Warring-Manley, playing the lord mayor’s wife, led this small older group. When Welles held forth at rehearsals, telling anecdotes mocking the Shakespearean actor Maurice Evans, Kane bristled. He took Orson aside, questioning some of his directing decisions and warning him about eroding the company’s morale. Welles was open to outside opinion, if he was in the right mood. Not this time: “He’s above taking advice,” Kane complained to Ashton Stevens, adding that Orson would be “a much better liked young person” if he listened to his elders.

  When The Shoemaker’s Holiday was closed to make way for Heartbreak House, Kane was effectively dropped from the Mercury. “The fate of The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” wrote Andrea Janet Nouryeh, “angered both Hiram Sherman and Whitford Kane.”

  There was another, more personal factor: in the domestic rift between Welles and his wife, Sherman and Kane sided with Virginia. The two knew all about Orson’s late-night carousing—Orson often dragged Sherman on his rounds of parties and nightclubs—and, as homebodies themselves, they empathized with the suffering wife. Besides, Orson was always handing Sherman the check and darting out the door to grab a taxi. “The high-livers were killing me,” Sherman complained years later. Orson exploited too much of Sherman’s energy, work time, and playtime too. “The pace [for Sherman] had become so wild, the mood so intense and violent,” Houseman wrote, “as to be physically and mentally unendurable.”

  Sherman’s departure threw the already splintered Mercury into disarray. And with his featured player gone, Orson lost interest in The Importance of Being Earnest.31 The company found itself once again on tenterhooks, waiting for its mastermind to choose a new opening play for the fall season. “Coincidental with rumored rifts in the Mercury, several important company members have turned to other managements in order to ‘get set’ for next season,” reported the Times.

  As he often did at times of crisis, Orson telephoned Roger Hill in the wake of Sherman’s departure. The Todd School headmaster knew Sherman almost as well as Orson did, and never lost his fondness for the good-humored actor. In later years, Hill raised Sherman’s name with Welles repeatedly—in part because he nurtured a pet theory (influenced by Houseman’s memoir) that Sherman’s departure was the first domino to fall in the Mercury’s ultimate collapse.

  “It always seemed to me that Chubby’s leaving the Mercury was the reason for its demise,” Hill insisted during one conversation. “You were so high on him and, all of a sudden, he called you on the phone and said he wanted to make more money somewhere else.”

  “Yes,” Orson replied sympathetically, “he had a good play where he could get a bigger salary. I didn’t have a major part for him then, so it was a natural thing to do.”

  “Yes, but I remember your phone call and you were pretty—”

  “Upset,” Orson admitted.

  “Upset,” repeated Hill. “Of course, we all have simplistic answers, but it seemed to me that Chubby killed the Mercury.”

  “I don’t really think so because the Mercury went on to Hollywood fame.”

  “No, I mean the Mercury Theatre,” Hill persisted.

  “The Mercury Theatre was killed by lack of funds,” Orson parried evenly, “and our subsequent move to Hollywood. Hollywood was really the only choice. It wasn’t because of Chubby leaving. I think all acting companies have a life span. The Mercury Theatre c
ame to an end.”

  But the Mercury Theatre was not dead yet. Orson was never the type to be deterred by catastrophe, or even slowed by it, for very long.

  Late in June, on the pretext of escaping from the hay-fever environs of Sneden’s Landing, Welles moved into the air-conditioned St. Regis Hotel to concentrate on the launch of the radio series. Just two months had passed since the birth of his daughter, Christopher, but Welles was content to leave his troubled domestic life behind for the summer; while not unloving, he was destined to be an absentee father who left child rearing to the mothers of his children.

  One of Orson’s masterstrokes was placing John Houseman in charge of scripts for the new radio series. Orson had long viewed Houseman as a shrewd script editor—commending him to David O. Selznick for just that purpose on one occasion—and now he gave his partner a lightning tutorial in writing and editing for radio.

  Orson chose Robert Louis Stevenson’s pirate story Treasure Island and Bram Stoker’s vampire tale Dracula for the first two shows, announcing Treasure Island first but later switching to Dracula for the premiere. He loved the fact that the Irish-born Stoker once served as an aide-de-camp to the legendary English actor-manager Henry Irving, and he considered Dracula “the most hair-raising, marvelous book in the world.” Orson could play two principal roles: solicitor Jonathan Harker, who narrates the horror story, and Count Dracula himself. As for Stevenson’s novel, he knew the text almost by memory from boyhood—and that play, too, offered him two important parts: the innkeeper’s son (the story’s narrator) Jim Hawkins, and the colorful pirate Long John Silver. Both novels thus allowed Orson to fulfill the concept behind the “First Person Singular” series.

  Since Orson was the star of the show, the script discussions tended to involve building a structure around his favorite scenes. Orson always wanted an unconventional approach, with subjective narrative passages—diary excerpts, letters, stream of consciousness. Dracula is an epistolary novel with multiple narrators, and he wanted the radio adaptation to honor that conceit. Equally important, the radio scripts all had to be punctuated with music and sound effects; like lighting in theater, the music and effects served to accent the mood and heighten the drama. For the radio version of “Dracula,” Welles taught Houseman to be creative with these effects, inserting cracks of thunder, whistling wind, clopping hooves, crashing waves, and more.

  Orson could sometimes get mired in effects, going to such lengths that he drove the technicians crazy. But time and again, that summer and throughout his radio career, his imaginative efforts enhanced the shows. To attain the ambience of the Château d’If for a summer adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, for instance, he again arranged actors and microphones in a men’s room. For a version of A Tale of Two Cities, he expended an inordinate amount of time trying to capture the sound of Sydney Carton’s decapitation, which had to simulate the head being severed and dropping into a basket. A sound specialist experimented with a melon, a pillow, a coconut, and a leg of lamb before Orson finally chose a head of cabbage.

  After talking the stories over with Houseman, Welles left his partner to his own devices. Orson would drop in regularly to make criticisms and changes in the scripts, but the first drafts were Houseman’s responsibility. Houseman worked much the way Orson himself often worked on scripts, lying in bed in his apartment that summer, surrounded by copies of the book they were adapting, samples of usable scripts for reference, and an array of tools: scissors, a paste pot, a supply of pencils. It was an important job, and Houseman mastered it.

  Though the story may be apocryphal, Houseman claimed that the partners stayed up all night at Reuben’s Delicatessen on East Fifty-Eighth Street, brainstorming the “Dracula” script, after Orson shuffled it ahead of “Treasure Island” “two days before rehearsal.” Fueled by coffee, cognac, and two meals (the second one of “large steaks, very rare, followed by cheesecake and more coffee and brandy”), they finished with breakfast at dawn, Houseman wrote. They certainly pulled similar all-nighters several times that summer to meet deadlines for the radio series.

  As producer of the program, Orson always had other business to mind, casting major roles even as the script was in progress, molding the parts to available actors. For “Dracula,” Orson turned to the Mercury stage ensemble: Martin Gabel would play Professor Van Helsing, Dracula’s archenemy; and George Coulouris would be Dr. Seward, Harker’s romantic rival. Orson lured his radio colleagues Agnes Moorehead to play Mina, Harker’s fiancée; and Ray Collins to portray the Russian boat captain transporting Dracula’s body to England.

  This was the first time Orson was in charge of a true broadcast series—rather than a one-off serial like Les Misérables—and every major decision was his. Whereas in the past he had relied largely on Houseman’s extended circle of bohemians and artists—Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles, Aaron Copland, Lehman Engel—to provide music for his productions, now he was working with Bernard Herrmann, not just as an actor but for the first time as Herrman’s boss. It was an adjustment for both men. Herrmann had to align his musical ideas to the scenes as Orson described them, before the script for “Dracula” was actually completed, preparing not only main themes and recurrent motifs, but also the incidental touches and musical bridges that would bolster narrative transitions throughout the radio drama. According to his biographer Steven C. Smith, Herrmann created a sparse but “thrilling” score, with a stinging theme “for muted brass and graveyard bell, and a crackling variant of the Dies Irae for Jonathan Harker’s driverless coach ride up the Borgo Pass.”

  Published anecdotes tend to emphasize the tempestuousness of the relationship between Welles and Herrmann, who had been thrown together awkwardly on several previous radio programs. But even before the replacement series, and increasingly over the summer, the two men developed mutual warmth and appreciation. “Both men deeply respected the other’s strong will, nonconformity, and old-world romanticism,” wrote Smith.

  Both believed in radio and its potential for artful popular entertainment. Like Orson, Herrmann was a connoisseur; his own symphonic work was distinguished and original, but he was obliged to earn his daily bread creating musical pastiches. When outlining the music he wanted for specific scenes, Orson was quite a pasticheur himself; he sometimes behaved “almost as a precocious child,” Herrmann recalled, with “an instinctive, intuitive understanding of what should be done.” When Herrmann did not like one of Orson’s musical ideas, he would cross his arms, frown, and say, “I don’t know how I would do that . . .” Orson would trot out every means of persuasion he had: charm, negotiation, shouting, and cursing. But Herrmann knew those tactics; he used them himself. And while Welles was more musically literate than most nonmusicians, he loved being able to count on Herrmann’s superiority.

  One of Welles’s essential characteristics as an artist, Herrmann recognized, was that “Orson was an improviser,” who never settled on “one way to do anything” but enjoyed tinkering right up to air time. For Herrmann, Orson’s creative, extemporaneous spirit made the mundane work of radio music far more stimulating. “At the start of every broadcast Orson was an unknown quantity,” Herrmann remembered. “As he went along his mood would assert itself and the temperature would start to increase till the point of incandescence. . . . Even when his shows weren’t good they were better than other people’s successes. . . . Horses’ hooves are horses’ hooves—yet they felt different with Orson—why? I think it had to do with the element of the unknown, the surprises, and the uncomfortable excitement of improvisation.

  “He inspired us all—the musicians, the actors, the sound-effects men and the engineers. They’d all tell you they never worked on shows like Welles’s.”

  Radio, Welles’s longtime associate Richard Wilson once observed, was “the only medium that imposed a discipline that Orson would recognize . . . and that was the clock.” The script, actors, sound effects, and music had to be ready for the live broadcast every Monday at 9 P.M. The show had to start on time
, and it had to fill a precise block of time. Otherwise the network signal would go dead from coast to coast.

  On Monday, July 11, 1938, the Mercury Theatre went on the air for the first time. From one corner of the studio, Bernard Herrmann led the network orchestra of moonlighting symphony musicians in the series theme—the opening strains of Tchaikovsky’s lushly romantic Piano Concerto No. 1 in B Flat Minor. Wearing earphones, Orson raised his own baton as he stood in front of the main microphone on a podium in the middle of the room. He would preside grandly over the acting ensemble, twisting and gesticulating as he guided the actors’ pace and intensity; cueing the dialogue, sound effects, and music. Besides directing, narrating, and playing Dracula and Jonathan Harker, Orson voiced several smaller parts.

  For the first time Welles signed off on a radio show in his own name and voice, supplying a brief valedictory to end the episode. From the first, his trademark sign-off was sly, and he was intimate with the invisible audience. “When you go to bed tonight, don’t worry,” he murmured, “put out the lights and go to sleep . . . (A wolf’s howl is heard.) It’s all right, you can rest peacefully, that’s just a sound effect . . . it’s nothing at all . . . I think it’s nothing . . .” As his voice faded, the genial host reminded viewers never to forget that vampires do exist.