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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Some aimed mockery at Orson himself. Beginning his review by joking about the boy wonder’s actual age (“Orson is 23 years old. Or is it 22. No, he was 22 last year . . .”), Arthur Pollock of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle turned his review into a meditation on onetime prodigies past their prime. “He has grown tired of being spoken of as a slip of a boy, treated as a phenomenon and a prodigy,” wrote Pollock. However, Welles remained “a little precious” and Danton’s Death therefore seemed “the product of a boy playing with blocks, doing stunts with them.”

  As for Danton’s Death, Sidney B. Whipple wrote in the New York World Telegram, “Its only purpose . . . was to demonstrate the undeniable talent of one man.” “Except as a director’s holiday,” John Mason Brown complained in the Evening Post, “it proves a bore.” Richard Lockridge in the New York Sun said the Mercury production was “all switchboard and no soul.”

  The left-wing press, already wary of Danton’s Death, threw the Mercury overboard. “It is dull as ditch water and completely muddled,” wrote Ruth McKenney in New Masses. “Unless you are a specialist in the French Revolution, which I’m not, it’s practically impossible to figure out what all the guillotining is about.” She questioned the production design—the elevator platform, the stage holes and dark lighting—saying it all made her as nervous as the actors must have been.

  Not all the notices were poor. The play and Orson’s direction and performance came in for praise from several noted reviewers, including the usually influential Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times. Atkinson declared the production tingling and theatrical, crackling with relevance. Welles had vividly staged the production, while acting his role “with some of the melodramatic solemnity of The Shadow.” Atkinson too prefaced his review with a mention of the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, and closed it with a gentle gibe: “Ladies and gentlemen, you have been reading a review of a performance. . . . There is no occasion for harm.”

  But Danton’s Death could not turn back the tide of adverse publicity. The play itself was part of the problem (“Actually, it’s not a great play, a piece of shit, really,” cheerfully admitted leading man Martin Gabel years later, though with “some wonderful things in it”), and the Mercury’s customary audience stayed away. “The ticket agencies ignored us,” wrote Houseman. “Half of our theatre parties were canceled.” The partners held on by their fingernails for a few weeks, their finances in free fall, until the final dagger was plunged—by one of Orson’s idols.

  After one performance, the legendary Max Reinhardt came backstage to make the rounds of people he knew, including Vladimir Sokoloff, who had played Robespierre in his 1927 production. Slowly, Reinhardt made his way over to the director, forty years his junior. Before his idol, Welles felt acutely aware of the Mercury production’s shortcomings, and of his own limitations as an actor.

  “You are the best Schauspieler in America,” Reinhardt told Welles.35 “You must do the great parts.”

  A wonderful compliment—but only for his acting. “Nothing about the production,” Orson told Jaglom. “All he could do was tell me what a great actor I was.”

  “So he didn’t like the production,” Jaglom remarked.

  “Of course not. Couldn’t blame him.”

  The partners closed Danton’s Death on November 19 after just twenty-one performances. Budgeted at $10,000, the production cost close to $50,000, Andrea Janet Nouryeh estimated. Two weeks later, after glumly talking it over, Welles and Houseman announced that the Mercury would lease its building and stage to other producers. The partners still intended to coproduce Five Kings with the Theatre Guild after the New Year, planning rehearsals to start in mid-December. A new Marc Blitzstein musical was also possible, and “that harum scarum production Too Much Johnson,” as the New York Times reported reassuringly, “has already been rehearsed and can be put on the stage very quickly when the auguries are propitious.” For now, though, the auguries were dismal.

  Yet, in typical fashion, Orson managed quickly to shift gears. He, Virginia, and baby Christopher left for a monthlong stay on the Todd School campus. Barbara Leaming wrote that Welles was “exhausted and depressed, his personal and professional life [a] shambles,” although this assessment came from Roger Hill—not Welles, who relished the chance to get away from the defeat and recharge. He could please Virginia, who wanted to spend Thanksgiving in Wheaton with her family. He could find solitude on the Todd School grounds while working on the script for Five Kings. He could see his friend Ashton Stevens and hear Stevens’s advice. He would see his guardian and wrangle with the bank overseeing his trust fund.

  And each week he could head to Chicago and fly back to New York for the radio show.

  The Mercury Theater on the Air was in the doghouse at CBS for several weeks after the “War of the Worlds” controversy. But the curse was lifted after an advertising agency representative, Ward Wheelock, approached Welles and Houseman on behalf of the Campbell soup company, with an offer to take over the series and sponsor it commercially, as a promising venue for advertising. The company wanted to rename the series The Campbell Playhouse. The program would stay on CBS but move to Fridays, with a prime one-hour slot at 9 P.M. The partners would still control the series creatively, but under new strictures. In return for “big money” for salaries and productions, the sponsors wanted to reorient the radio show toward popular plays and novels, with guest stars from Broadway and Hollywood. The new budget would accommodate the rights to the stage hits and current best sellers that had previously been beyond the reach of the Mercury Theatre on the Air.

  Wearing their “most conservative suits and stiff collars,” according to Houseman, he and Welles visited Campbell’s New Jersey headquarters, touring the plant and lunching with company officials in the executive dining room, where the partners “smacked their lips over the thin, briny liquid of which we were about to become the champions.”

  America’s greatest Schauspieler charmed the soup sellers, flattering their product and telling them, according to Frank Brady’s account, “This is a great big chance for me and a great big challenge. With my faith in radio and your display of confidence in me by becoming the sponsor we can possibly create something important. Let’s hope nobody’s mistaken.”

  Orson declared radio to be “the best storyteller there is,” and when someone in the room referred to a radio script as similar to a stage play, Welles hastened to correct the remark. “It’s not a play,” he said. “It’s a story. Radio broadcasting is different from motion pictures and the theater and I’d like to keep it that way. The illusion I’d like to create is the illusion of the story.” (A version of this exchange would be incorporated into his patter for the first new broadcast.)

  The deal with Campbell, which was consummated and announced before Danton’s Death had closed officially, tempered the demoralizing effect of the stage debacle—and opened a new channel of revenue for the strapped Mercury operation. Orson alone stood to rake in “approximately $1,500” weekly, Brady wrote, “depending on other fees and expenses.”

  The Mercury Theatre on the Air continued on the air for only one month after the “War of the Worlds” episode. While Orson oversaw planning for the new Campbell Playhouse, he also hosted and starred in the final shows of the original series. Among them, on the Sunday after the broadcast and panic, was a program offering selections from both Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Orson’s “especially funny and unbuttoned” turn (in Frank Brady’s words) as the patriarch in Clarence Day’s Life with Father. This was followed by “three first-class works”: another take on Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers; another Booth Tarkington, his 1919 stage hit Clarence, which had starred Alfred Lunt; and the last show on December 4, a powerful treatment of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, Orson’s early champion.

  The Campbell Playhouse was launched five days later, on December 9. With the enhanced budget now available to him, Orson scored a coup by arranging for the first dra
matization of Daphne du Maurier’s thriller Rebecca, a best seller then in its ninth printing. (Producer David O. Selznick had just purchased the screen rights.) Margaret Sullavan, whose performance in Three Comrades would be nominated for an Oscar in 1938, flew from Hollywood to play the nameless wife of Maxim de Winter, who is haunted by the death of his first wife, Rebecca. Orson took the plane from Chicago to host the show and play de Winter.

  The sponsor’s announcer for the renamed series introduced Orson as “the white hope of the American stage,” a young man who “writes his own radio scripts and directs them, and makes them live and breathe with the warmth of his genius,” and whose “magical” life story “combines the best features of Baron von Munchausen and Alice in Wonderland.” There was more such hyperbole, of the sort that both Houseman and Simon Callow would disapprove of in their later accounts of Welles’s career. In truth, Orson didn’t mind.

  The show itself was excellent, with Orson broodingly romantic as de Winter and Sullavan touching as his fearful second wife. Mildred Natwick was the sinister Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper fanatically loyal to the dead wife, and other Mercury players acquitted themselves well in supporting parts. In addition to joining in the soup advertisements, Orson bantered with Sullavan at the end of the drama; brief interviews like those in Cecil B. DeMille’s Lux Radio Theatre were a new feature of the show. Then, via transatlantic shortwave, Welles and Sullavan conversed with du Maurier live from England, where the author had stayed up till three o’clock in the morning to listen in.

  The Campbell Playhouse was off and running—fast. “A good start,” the New York Times radio columnist wrote, if “marred by too many commercial interruptions.” A few months later, when Louis Reid reviewed the first months of weekly broadcasts in the high-toned Saturday Review of Literature, he hailed “the fabulous Orson Welles” as “a radio dramatic talent of an unusually high order” who had raised the intelligence quotient for “the armchair audience.”

  Orson never made so much money having so much fun. At this low point of the Mercury Theatre, and many other times in years ahead, radio paid untold dividends, and not only financially. Years later, during a long discussion of screen acting (“You shouldn’t play to the camera at all,” Orson insisted), Peter Bogdanovich asked Welles how he rated radio as an acting medium.

  “I was happy in it, Peter,” Welles responded quickly and unambiguously, “the happiest I’ve ever been as an actor. It’s so . . . what do I want to say, impersonal? No, private.

  “It’s as close as you can get, and still get paid for it, to the great private joy of singing in the bathtub. The microphone’s a friend, you know. The camera’s a critic.”

  John Houseman did not share his partner’s happiness. In his memoir, he complained that after the premiere of The Campbell Playhouse the grunt work was left to him, director Paul Stewart, writer Howard Koch, and “a flock of slaves and piece workers,” while Orson gave orders, took bows, and then flew back to the Midwest to toil away mysteriously on Five Kings.

  CHAPTER 16

  December 1938–July 1939

  “I Had a Lot of Fun”

  Five Kings was fated to be the great white whale that Orson chased across miles and years. From its first incarnation at the Todd School, through the ill-fated Mercury Theatre production of 1939 and several makeshift stage and radio versions, climaxing with his 1966 film Chimes at Midnight—“perhaps the greatest adaptation of Shakespeare that the cinema has yet produced,” in the words of scholar Dudley Andrew—Orson, like Ahab, pursued his Moby Dick obsessively.

  Between his flights back and forth to New York, he camped out at the Todd School in early December, working on his script and staging plans for the marathon Shakespeare production. With the New Year fast approaching, the Theatre Guild’s agreement with the Mercury Theatre, which stipulated the dates for out-of-town tryouts before a Broadway opening in the latter half of the 1938–1939 season, dictated full speed.

  Welles returned to New York in time for the December 23 radio show, “A Christmas Carol,” in which he played both Tiny Tim and Ebenezer Scrooge. Lionel Barrymore had traditionally performed the holiday classic on radio for Christmas Day, and Orson had announced during the “Rebecca” broadcast that Barrymore would play Scrooge for The Campbell Playhouse this year. But Barrymore, fighting an illness, dropped out of the broadcast, giving Orson his blessing to go ahead without him. Orson would give the eminent actor another chance the next Christmas.

  Orson presented radio adaptations of Dickens’s stories as often as those of any author. And while he was generally averse to sentimentality in his plays and films, he loved the Christmas spirit and would produce many Christmas broadcasts over the years. He and the Mercury players offered a “Christmas Carol” of great warmth and atmosphere, featuring Joseph Cotten as Fred, Scrooge’s nephew and only living relative; and Virginia Welles as Belle, the lost love of Scrooge’s past.

  For the final show of 1938, Orson joined Katharine Hepburn in a December 30 broadcast version of Ernest Hemingway’s World War I novel A Farewell to Arms. (Perhaps Hemingway wasn’t so horrified by Welles after all.)

  In the week between “A Christmas Carol” and “A Farewell to Arms,” Orson used the ballroom of the Claridge Hotel on Times Square to finalize the casting of Five Kings.

  Back in June, Orson had chosen a Mercury Theatre newcomer, Burgess Meredith, to play the young Prince Hal, who would become King Henry V. After making his debut in Eva Le Gallienne’s 1930 production of Romeo and Juliet, Meredith had become one of Broadway’s most admired young actors. He and Orson were friendly whenever their paths crossed. In late spring, just as Meredith was about to sail abroad after a painful divorce, Orson wined and dined him to discuss the lead in Five Kings. Orson was “one of the most persuasive and entertaining males I ever knew,” Meredith recalled. Welles brought him to Sneden’s Landing and set him up with “a lovely French girl who made me forget my marital troubles,” Meredith remembered, and even hired a five-man Harlem band to serenade him as he boarded his ship for Paris. The contract Meredith signed gave him top billing and a paycheck above Orson’s—a reported $1,000 weekly.

  Almost as good a catch was the tall, dashing John Emery, who agreed to portray Hotspur, Prince Hal’s rival. Otherwise known (unfairly) as “Tallulah Bankhead’s husband,” Emery came from a distinguished English theatrical family who had graced the stage since the early eighteenth century. Gifted with a lustrous voice, Emery had played several significant Shakespearean roles, including Laertes to John Gielgud’s Hamlet on Broadway in 1936. Both Emery and Burgess Meredith had also figured prominently in the 1935 revival of The Barretts of Wimpole Street starring Katharine Cornell.

  Welles also ranged outside the established Mercury ensemble for other principal characters. As Henry IV, he cast Morris Ankrum, whose Illinois background gave him a foot in the door with Orson. Welles fondly remembered Ankrum, a veteran of Broadway and Hollywood Westerns, from the road show of The Green Goddess, a thriller he’d seen in Chicago as a boy in the fall of 1922. An actress and playwright, Margaret Curtis, was engaged to portray Princess Catherine, the French consort of Henry V. Robert Speaight, a longtime poetry recitalist and a Shakepearean with a powerful voice, had created the role of Archbishop Thomas Becket in T. S. Eliot’s celebrated verse drama Murder in the Cathedral; Orson gave him the important role of the Chorus in Five Kings, a part that would combine the plays’ narrative prologues with selections from Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland to knit the play’s sections together.

  Gus Schilling, one of the burlesque comedians Orson palled around with, was brought on board to play Prince Hal’s friend from his wild youth, the former soldier, thief, and coward Bardolph. Orson also found a role for “Mrs. Schilling,” though some doubt that she and Schilling were married: a stripper usually billed as “The Ball of Fire,” her name was Betty Rowland, and she would play the knife-wielding prostitute Doll Tearsheet, one of Falstaff’s companions at the Boar’s He
ad Tavern.

  Orson cast Mercury players Edgar Barrier as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Guy Kingsley as Gloucester, Eustace Wyatt as Northumberland, Erskine Sanford as the Lord Chief Justice, and William Mowry Jr. as the King of France. Stage and radio regulars George Duthie, Frank Readick, Francis Carpenter, Edgerton Paul, John Berry, William Herz, William Alland, Richard Wilson, and Richard Baer helped fill out the sizable cast.

  “All of a sudden, the Mercury Theatre has come to life,” the New York Times reported excitedly on December 29, 1938. After Five Kings, the Mercury partners told the press, both Too Much Johnson and the rumored new Marc Blitzstein musical were in the hopper.

  By this time, the casting was nearly complete, and after the New Year Orson launched the first read-throughs and rehearsals. The Welles family moved into an apartment on Fifty-Seventh Street, near the East River, and Orson let his beard grow for Falstaff. Boston would host the first out-of-town performance, but the marathon Shakespeare play would touch down in several other cities before its scheduled February opening on Broadway—a tight deadline set months earlier by John Houseman and the Theatre Guild, which sold advance tickets to subscribers.

  Welles returned from his sabbatical in Woodstock with a vision for staging Five Kings on a huge revolving platform that would occupy almost the entire stage, shifting scenes and actors from castle to tavern to battlefield without blackouts or interruptions. “Again,” Jean Rosenthal wrote, “Orson was startlingly lucid about what he wanted and how it should look.” James Morcom, who had worked on the abortive Too Much Johnson, was handed the daunting task of the scenic design. Rosenthal would supervise the lighting and technical effects. Millia Davenport returned for the costuming, codpieces and all. Back in the spring, Virgil Thomson had been hired to compose music for Five Kings, but he had given up waiting for a script and left for Paris. The assignment was handed to Aaron Copland, who knew Orson from The Second Hurricane. For $1,000 plus royalties—which he would never see—Copland wrote incidental music for voices and chamber ensemble (including a Hammond organ), enhancing the production’s “period flavor” by drawing on “English and French folk songs, traditional sacred music, and [Guillame] Dufay and [Jean-Baptiste] Lully,” according to Copland’s biographer Howard Pollack.