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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Orson’s more pressing relationship troubles involved not Virginia but John Houseman. By this time the Mercury partners were barely on speaking terms, and Houseman’s grasp of Orson’s doings came from brief sightings, reports, and gossip from the “Houseman people.” Houseman had embarked on another declaration of independence, signing a contract with the new American Lyric Theatre to direct the premiere of an opera based on Stephen Vincent Benét’s The Devil and Daniel Webster. “I did not tell Orson of my decision,” wrote Houseman in his memoir, “and when he read about it in the New York Times he said nothing about it either.”

  In his book Houseman dates this “decision,” taking on a project that would steal time from the Mercury, to after the last performances of Five Kings in Philadelphia in April. In fact, the New York Times carried news of Houseman’s project on March 5, the week of the Boston premiere of Five Kings. In the tense days leading up to the premiere, Houseman’s announcement that he would be directing another play for a different company could not have sent an encouraging signal about Five Kings to the Theatre Guild principals. And it also might have had something to do with that phone-throwing incident.

  The partners still met every Friday night for the Campbell Playhouse broadcast. The radio season was going smoothly under the stewardship of Houseman, Paul Stewart, and Howard Koch, using stories and casting approved by Orson. Not every episode boasted an Oscar-nominated costar like Margaret Sullavan (who returned, months after “Rebecca,” for “Show Boat”), but the series did feature Helen Hayes in “Arrowsmith” on February 3, Madeleine Carroll in “The Green Goddess” on February 10, and Laurence Olivier and Wallace Beery in “Beau Geste” on March 17. The Mercury Theatre regulars in the revolving cast included, often enough, “Anna Stafford,” and performers from the Five Kings cast. The emphasis on popular plays and novels continued with stories such as Elmer Rice’s “Counsellor at Law” (January 6); “Mutiny on the Bounty,” with Orson as a convincingly sadistic Captain Bligh (January 13); Dashiell Hammett’s “The Glass Key” (March 10); and Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s “Twentieth Century” (March 24).

  By plane, train, or limousine, Welles and Houseman traveled to the weekly radio appointment together—from Boston, then later from Washington and Philadelphia—but their conversations grew increasingly uncomfortable, until finally only silence stretched between them.

  Another source of irritation for Welles was the English actor Maurice Evans, who toured several weeks behind Five Kings in the same cities, performing an uncut Hamlet (with Whitford Kane as the gravedigger) and a faithful Henry IV, in which Evans also essayed Falstaff, “a part which Orson regarded (as he did every great classical role),” Houseman wrote, “as exclusively his own.” Reviewers couldn’t resist comparing the two actors’ approaches to Shakespeare—the traditional versus the revisionist—along with their takes on Falstaff. After Five Kings left town, Elinor Hughes mused in the Boston Herald that Welles’s Falstaff was “the most striking figure” in his production, and that Orson had succeeded in creating a “Falstaff in decline, old, shabby, a little fearful, looking forward to a dreary old age and trying to feather his nest while he could. He did not rouse much laughter, but he succeeded in evoking pity.” Evans’s Falstaff, by comparison, was the traditionally “jolly, cheerful old rascal, as full of tricks as of sack, fond of a good joke, a merry companion and a frankly unscrupulous but amusing rogue.” Orson’s greasy ragtag getup as the fat knight may have attracted more attention, Hughes observed, but Evans’s physical transformation and makeup were also “truly astonishing.”

  The comparisons, while not always unfavorable to Orson, were irksome just the same. Never shy in his opinions, he was known to pillory other Shakespearean actors in interviews and conversations, singling out everyone from Dame Judith Anderson and Margaret Webster (Evans’s director) to even, on rare occasions, Laurence Olivier, whom he normally admired. (“The first two scenes” of Olivier’s King Lear for the BBC, Welles told Henry Jaglom during their talks, “are the worst things I ever saw in my life, bar none.”) And Evans was one of his recurring targets. “Almost any bum can get a crack at Boris [Godunov] or Lear,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich. “Sometimes the bums even make it with the public. Look at Maurice Evans. He took on practically everything in Shakespeare, the critics raved, and the people packed in to see him.”

  “And he was bad?” asked Bogdanovich.

  “Worse!” Welles roared back. “He was poor.”

  But Orson was fascinated by Evans’s undisputed success with critics and crowds. As late as January 1940, when he was developing Citizen Kane in Hollywood, he sneaked off to Evans’s sold-out Los Angeles opening of Hamlet, leaving the theater after the performance shaking his head in disgust and wondering how the old smoothie got away with it.

  By the time Five Kings arrived at the National Theater in Washington, D.C., for dates during the second week of March, there were still technical jams and delays on some nights, including the opening night. But ticket sales were brisk, and the ovations continued. Welles had chopped forty minutes from the play in Boston, and even Houseman admitted that “a dramatic form had begun to appear.” The reviews were as good as could be expected, considering that certain critics still pined for more orthodox Shakespeare and a merry old Falstaff.

  But the production had been woefully underbudgeted from the outset: it took ten boxcars just to transport the scenery and equipment from city to city, and in Boston the overtime expenses for the stagehands and performers had taken the Mercury already more than $20,000 over the original total estimate of bringing Five Kings from the road to Broadway. The undue costs included a $1,400 bill for damages from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, after Welles threw a party, ostensibly in honor of the straitlaced Robert Speaight, complete with burlesque entertainers and—though the extent of the destruction varies wildly from account to account—furniture tossed out a twelfth-story window.

  Theatre Guild officials held Houseman “personally responsible” for the steep production costs, which augured a mounting financial disaster, and they insisted that the Mercury pay its share of the overages. (“In their mouths,” Houseman wrote pointedly, “ ‘genius’ had become a dirty word.”) Although Orson announced his plans to tune up the show further in Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Chicago before bringing it to Broadway, the Guild agreed to pay the production’s bills only through Philadelphia before reassessing its involvement. The Guild insisted that Orson’s all-night overtime rehearsals must cease. When Houseman protested that his partner was “incapable of working by day,” the Guild responded that if he wanted to work at night Orson could pay the extra expenses out of his own pocket. “Which he did,” Houseman noted drily, “during the next ten days, to the tune of several thousand dollars, borrowed against his future radio earnings.”

  The standoff with the Guild reached the ears of the press. “Guild officials have been burning for weeks,” Variety noted. “Theatre Guild and Welles May Phfft, It’s Reported,” read the headline in the Washington Daily News. The New York Times reported more sedately that the Guild was “unwilling to meet additional expenses incurred by carting around a cumbersome production on the road and other charges resulting from whipping a show into shape.” The press painted a grim picture of opposing camps inside an embattled production, with “certain members of the Five Kings company growing more allergic to twenty-three-year-old director Orson Welles every day,” according to the Washington Daily News. “Backstage ruffs are constantly being raised when Welles turns what the actors call ‘prima donna,’ and they growl that while insisting on long rehearsals he offers little constructive advice.” The other camp, including many Mercury loyalists who would go on to work with Welles repeatedly in years to come, saw their leader as a valiant artist willing to expend all the goodwill and capital at his command in order to fulfill his impossible quest.

  He was a maddening egotist to some, but a likable hero to others. “Enormously likeable,” recalled Burgess Meredith. “He laughed up
roariously and constantly and made you laugh with him. And he was an appreciative listener.” And, regardless of their feelings about Orson himself, most in the company felt that Five Kings had finally begun to hum and click by the time the company left Washington, D.C., for Philadelphia.

  But the production met its match in Philadelphia’s Chestnut Theater, ill-suited in every way to Orson’s vision. It wasn’t just the fact that the actors had to use dressing rooms in “an adjacent theatre, taking a bridge to get them back,” in Callow’s words—an exercise that did little for the company’s morale. It was something worse, which Orson could not have foreseen, though perhaps John Houseman or Jean Rosenthal should have: inexplicably, no one had scouted the theater carefully enough to learn that its stage was raked—tilted—precluding the use of the Mercury’s massive revolving platform. Before the show could go on, the stage had to be made level, at considerable added effort and cost, with the entire rotating platform shoved upstage (away from the audience) to adjust for sight lines and the fire curtain.

  And not until they arrived at the Chestnut did the stage managers learn for the first time that, “for technical reasons which I never even tried to understand,” in Houseman’s words, the electric current in Philadelphia was “incompatible with the wretched little motor that drove our turntable.” The Philadelphia opening had to be postponed for at least a day while the backstage team corrected the pitch of the stage and desperately sought expert advice for the electrical conversion.

  Orson was apoplectic. For the Theatre Guild, which was still footing the bill, this glitch in the proceedings was the last straw. The Guild demanded that Five Kings go on at the Chestnut according to schedule, even if it meant having the actors themselves rotate the scenery.

  Was there ever a nobler folly than the opening night of Five Kings in Philadelphia? When the electric converter failed to arrive in time, the actors stepped in, hand-cranking the iron windlass, torturously turning the stage, with Orson lashing them on like grunting sailors crowded into a rowboat amid a terrible storm, struggling to align their oars as their vessel crashed through waves toward the great white whale, always just out of sight ahead.

  “As a stage colossus,” J. H. Keen wrote in the Philadelphia Daily News, Five Kings “is something to gape at as one might a prehistoric creature brought back to life. But as an entertainment, it has something to be desired.” In the Bulletin, Robert E. P. Sensenderfer described the production as “a gigantic Shakespeare vaudeville” performed “without particular inspiration.” Edwin H. Schloss in the Record found the drama strident, the comedy overly juicy, and—the unkindest cut of all—Orson’s Falstaff inferior to that of Maurice Evans.

  The best notices came from a few New York scribes who descended on Philadelphia for what might be their last chance to witness the audacious Shakespeare production. “The Welles flair for spectacle” was intact, cheered the loyal Herbert Drake in the New York Herald Tribune. “The battle scenes are the best I ever saw on any stage.” Ashton Stevens and Maurice Bernstein traveled together to Philadelphia and told Orson he had done his finest work. But the handwriting was on the wall: even before the reviews hit the newsstands, the Theatre Guild organization had quietly withdrawn its backing.

  Orson was almost relieved. He had felt from the start that the Guild was too tasteful for the Mercury Theatre. And he was a true believer who always took the long view. Waiving his salary for the Philadelphia run, he got “up at dawn,” Houseman wrote, “rehearsing all day, replacing actors, pouring in his radio money, trimming and vitalizing Five Kings” with Broadway still in mind. Before the company broke for Easter, Welles threw another shindig for cast and crew, reassuring everyone that Five Kings would go back on the road and arrive in New York before summer. He would find the money somewhere, somehow.

  After the play closed in Philadelphia, Orson rushed to New York to knock on the doors of supportive, well-heeled friends. After hearing Welles sketch his air castles past midnight one night, Tallulah Bankhead—the wife of cast member John Emery—brought him to see her neighbor Marc Connelly, a playwright and director who had loved Horse Eats Hat. Connelly was sympathetic, but neither he nor Bankhead had the deep pockets—or nerve—to bail out such a problematic production. “It’s [Welles’s] optimism I remember most,” Connelly recalled. “He fully expected somebody to come up with twenty five thousand dollars in cash at that hour of the morning.”

  Looking for a savior, Orson chatted up at least one restaurateur whose establishment he could be counted on to frequent in years to come. According to Frank Brady, Marc Connelly phoned Sherman Billingsley, the proprietor of the Stork Club, and the three of them—Orson, Bankhead, and Connelly—“coaxed and wheedled him and cajoled” him “until dawn broke over Manhattan.” But the effort was futile: “even Orson’s promise to turn over his inheritance from his father failed to convince Billingsley to invest in Shakespeare.” Barbara Leaming wrote that the young Toots Shor offered Orson “several thousand dollars” he’d been saving in hopes of starting his own place one day. “As desperate as he was, Orson turned down his friend. Shor would not have been able to open his famous New York restaurant had Orson accepted.” Whatever the case, Orson failed to find a wealthy New Yorker to make the kind of investment he needed. “In this desperate attempt to salvage Five Kings he received no help from me,” wrote Houseman, now busy with rehearsals for The Devil and Daniel Webster.

  Stage manager Walter Ash had stayed behind in Philadelphia, watching over the scenery, costumes, and equipment until he received word of where to ship the stuff. On April 5 Welles telegraphed a pitiful surrender:

  DEAR WALTER WE HAVE MORE MONEY TROUBLES THAN WE DREAMT STOP THERE IS NO LONGER ANY CHOICE FOR US FIVE KINGS CANNOT COME IN THIS SPRING OF COURSE IT MUST THIS AUTUMN STOP TERRIBLY SORRY NOT TO HAVE BETTER NEWS AND NOT TO HAVE BEEN DEFINITE BEFORE NOW STOP PLEASE UNDERSTAND AND COME BACK TO US AND THANKS WALTER FOR EVERYTHING

  ALL MY LOVE ORSON.

  All the production material was addressed to a New York warehouse—“seventeen tons” of it, according to Houseman. The storage charges would accumulate for the next twenty-plus years.

  Welles was emotionally and physically drained. For the first time, during the Five Kings tour, the press had begun to remark on his drawn appearance and weight gain. In Washington, D.C., a newspaperman described him as “puffy,” and when Orson stepped off the train in Charleston, South Carolina, alone on Easter Sunday morning, a local reporter described him as “portly.” When he paid an emergency visit to a doctor in New York, on the Saturday before Easter, he was told that he needed a break from the grueling work and pressures, and that “if he didn’t take an immediate vacation of a few days, soon he would be forced to take one for a couple of years.”

  With his wife, Virginia, in a hospital recovering from a routine procedure (or so Orson’s letters suggest), Welles followed his doctor’s orders and headed south. His Sneden’s Landing friends Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur often stayed at the elegant Villa Margherita in Charleston, where the writers had established a tradition of retreating for inspiration when they were stuck in the middle of a script. MacArthur and his wife, Helen Hayes, had just returned from a Jamaican vacation and were now spending the Easter weekend there before heading home to New York. In a letter to Virginia, Orson said he thought the celebrated actress, his onetime neighbor and a frequent guest on his radio shows, “looks better than I’ve ever seen her,” adding that it “makes me think how much my lovely wife needs and deserves the sun.”

  “There were two trains coming south,” Welles told the local press, “one of them to Charleston. I got that one, because Charleston is the most beautiful city in America.” He remembered Charleston fondly from the Cornell tour three years before. “The people are different [here],” Orson said. “The first thing I did when I arrived here was to go to church. During the day I went to five parties. That isn’t the way to rest, is it?”

  Initially at the train station, Orson was taken aback by the
newsmen waiting for him and by their stream of questions about the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, which had taken place months before and was ancient history to him. “If your questions are to be about that, the interview will have to end now,” he snapped. (“He almost shuddered when the Martian invasion drama was mentioned,” one reporter observed.) Softening later, Orson met with the same newsmen. The local press saw him as a radio celebrity and was principally interested in “War of the Worlds”; he didn’t have to field a single question about Five Kings. Orson explained that nothing he could say could dispel people’s impression of the controversial broadcast and the ensuing panic, which had surprised him as much as anyone. “Anything I say will render me flippant in the minds of other people,” he said.

  On the Monday following Easter, Welles said, he had “rented a book” and headed to the Middleton Place, a plantation with famous landscaped gardens, “to read and to rest. Tomorrow I am going to get another book and go to another garden.” He lunched more than once with Charlie MacArthur, who got Orson excited about his plans for a script telling the story of Gavrilo Princip, the young Bosnian assassin whose killing of Archduke Ferdinand triggered World War I. As they sat drinking mint juleps and brainstorming, MacArthur told Orson that the story could make either a play or, perhaps better, a film. With encouragement from Orson, MacArthur promised to start writing.