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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  “It’s all pleasing but not restful,” Orson admitted in a letter to his wife. He attended the Dock Street Theater production of The Beaux’ Strategem and, accompanied by Atlanta attorney Henry A. Newman, another guest at the Villa, paid courtesy calls on local civic figures and personalities in the arts. “I know all this visiting sounds unlike me,” he wrote to Virginia. “I guess a vacation ought to make you feel as much unlike yourself as possible.” He addressed all his letters to “Dearest,” and invariably closed with “I love you.” In the letters he sounds genuinely warm toward Virginia: “I miss you,” he wrote. “Please don’t be blue in the hospital—and please get well sooner than you’re supposed to.”

  On the Thursday following Easter, after several days of solitude to ponder the future, Orson flew back to New York.

  With John Houseman busy on the Stephen Vincent Benét opera, Orson was alone in trying to salvage the future of Five Kings. He still needed to raise an extraordinary amount of money, but that wasn’t his only challenge: he also had to fight a rearguard action against nervous actors being tempted by job offers promising more stability and reliable pay.

  Burgess Meredith, for one, was flooded with offers from other producers; he had spoken informally with Guthrie McClintic and Katharine Cornell about joining one of their planned late spring productions. For Welles, this was a double blow: Meredith was both a friend and an example to the other cast members. Orson begged Meredith to give him a little more time to dig up some money. John Emery, too, was worried enough that he began making inquiries to other producers. Besides Welles himself, Meredith and Emery were the production’s only real drawing cards. And how could Five Kings go on without its Prince Hal and Hotspur?

  Orson announced that the show’s New York opening would have to be postponed—but only until the fall. He would not shave his beard, he vowed, until he played Falstaff on Broadway.

  That was more than bluster. Welles intended to deplete his own trust fund to keep the show alive on the road in tryouts. Until now, he had enjoyed only limited access to his trust fund—he hardly even knew how much money it contained—but Orson had convinced himself that the bank would advance him a loan on the principal. But he still needed Dr. Maurice Bernstein’s cooperation, and his guardian was skeptical. Orson resolved to fly to Chicago to reassure Bernstein and then meet with the bankers. His powers of persuasion would carry the day.

  Before he left New York, however, Orson agreed to make a screen test for RKO.

  The studio was planning a remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and officials were tempted by the idea of having Orson play the title role. Hollywood had grown more persistent, and earlier in the year, Welles had said no unequivocally when producer Sam Goldwyn dangled the part of Hindley, the enemy of Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights. The reason he declined, reportedly, was that he also wanted to write and direct the picture—but the direction was already in the capable hands of William Wyler, and Hindley was hardly a leading role. Orson was still ambivalent about Hollywood. He still saw himself, first and foremost, as a man of the theater.

  Victor Hugo’s Hunchback was tantalizing, however. One of Orson’s idols, Lon Chaney, had played the role magnificently in the silent era, and the part would appeal to any actor who relished makeup and metamorphosis. This time, the New York Times reported, “Welles has indicated that he may be willing to settle for less” than a writing and directing deal.

  Of all the studios, RKO had become his most stubborn Hollywood suitor. The company’s new president, George J. Schaefer, had started out before World War I as secretary to the film pioneer Lewis J. Selznick, who was the father of agent Myron Selznick and producer David O. Selznick. Schaefer had risen through the sales and management ranks of Paramount in the first half of the 1930s, during which time he had paved the way for Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur to establish their own autonomous production unit on the Paramount lot. Schaefer had permitted the team to write and direct a series of quirky comedies that no other studio would have dared to bankroll. MacArthur spoke highly of Schaefer as a man who stuck to his word.

  Schaefer specialized in marketing difficult and artistic films. He prided himself on familiarity with smaller theater chains, on knowing, for example, the difference between audiences that could be expected to attend one theater in Boston, and those at another theater across town. After a few years at United Artists, where he expanded the company’s relationships with independent producers, Schaefer had assumed the leadership of the struggling RKO in October 1938. He was moving aggressively to attract new talent, giving top directors such as Howard Hawks and John Ford leeway on pet projects, hoping their films would raise the studio’s profile artistically and commercially. His first meeting with Orson was probably in April in New York, when Schaefer was back east to testify routinely in front of a U.S. Senate subcommittee. Welles, to his own surprise, liked Schaefer in person: he was a pure businessman, like Orson’s father, and a man’s man who loved sailing, like Roger Hill. Schaefer liked Welles, too, and—after receiving encouraging memos from RKO’s New York staff—took a personal interest in recruiting him. He watched Orson’s screen test for The Hunchback of Notre Dame with interest.

  The impasse with Five Kings had softened Orson’s resistance to Hollywood. But he also had been gravitating toward a cinematic style for some time. He had been using blackouts and onstage curtains to minimize the time between scene shifts. The revolving platform of Five Kings, as critic Nelson B. Bell wrote in the Washington Post, was a type of “motion picture technique,” bringing mobility to the settings and characters “in such a way that the effect is one of continuous action and dialogue with a revolutionary blending of scenes.” The revolving stage also reminded the Philadelphia News critic J. H. Keen of “an old-time motion picture.” The actors in Five Kings noticed the same cinematic quality: “The battle of Agincourt was staged like a long dolly shot, the set turning full circle and thirty or forty extras running in full heat, cannons booming, smoke billowing, trumpets blaring,” Burgess Meredith wrote in his memoir So Far, So Good.

  In April 1938, however, Five Kings was still Orson’s top priority, and after the screen test he rushed to the First National Bank in Chicago, where he made an impassioned pitch for a loan against the inheritance he stood to receive at age twenty-five. The money would go to alleviate the crippling debt the Mercury owed to its cast, crew, and suppliers, which Andrea Janet Nouryeh estimated at $36,000 in outstanding bills for Danton’s Death and Five Kings, plus $2,000 still outstanding from the Mercury’s first season. Dr. Bernstein was also in the room, having agreed in advance not to oppose Orson. The bankers listened politely.

  During the meeting, the telephone rang: Hollywood calling. (The call was relayed from Dr. Bernstein’s office, according to Bernstein, who later reported the incident to the Chicago Tribune.) An RKO representative was on the line with another offer, raising the ante. “Well, $250,000 is a lot of money, but I can’t consider it,” Welles said as the bankers listened, “No there’s no use your flying here. I’m definitely not interested in the movies.” Not yet.

  The bank would consent to a loan, but only $10,000. Orson grabbed at it, though he knew it wouldn’t be enough to save Five Kings. He quietly passed the word to people in New York, and soon his cast moved on. John Emery stepped into the role of Heathcliff in the new Broadway production of Wuthering Heights. Burgess Meredith accepted a screen offer that would take him to Hollywood throughout the fall. It was hard to imagine Five Kings without him.

  Orson blamed everyone for the demise of Five Kings, especially himself, but he took Meredith’s abandonment personally. Years later, running into him after a long silence between them, Orson wheeled on him accusingly. “Do you know why we closed that show? The only reason?” Meredith said, “No. Why?” Welles told him, “Because you quit, you ran out.”

  “I felt physically and mentally unable to go on,” Meredith wrote in his memoir. “Very little went right in that production. For years I relived it in my
nightmares. Orson had too many responsibilities. . . . You can blame Orson only in the sense that he should have demanded the kind of help he needed. The confusion threw us all—befogged everyone who was in it. We will always remember it as a towering drama that almost came to pass, but that finally turned into a nightmare. It was a brilliant concept of a great man, but the mechanical problems were never solved. None of us came up to the vision.”

  Orson’s twenty-fourth birthday was just around the corner in the spring of 1939. Chastened by his setbacks, he had no impulse to celebrate, but neither did he care to leave Chicago, apart from flying back to New York every Friday for The Campbell Playhouse. He had many reasons to linger in Chicago: he had friends there, and favorite bookstores and restaurants and magic shops. He could roam through the Art Institute. Chicago gave him solace.

  Welles repaid a favor to Gertrude Lawrence, conspicuously attending her new road production of Skylark in the last week of April, and leading the standing ovations that welcomed her to the Harris Theatre downtown. Skylark was one of Samson Raphaelson’s hit plays, and the Roger Hills happily accompanied Orson and Virginia to the opening.

  The road company of I Married an Angel had been playing in Chicago since early March, and Orson also led the applause for Vera Zorina in the last weeks of its acclaimed run. John Houseman interpreted one of Welles’s visits to Chicago as an excuse to spend a night with “the ballerina,” but in fact Zorina was happily ensconced in a suite at the Ambassador East with her new husband, George Balanchine. The couple greeted Orson as a friend: he always sincerely praised Zorina’s performances, and she always listened sympathetically to his heartaches.

  Recovered from her operation, Virginia spent most of May and June in Chicago; she and Orson socialized with her parents and made excursions to Woodstock, staying on the Todd School campus. Virginia, like Houseman, was still suspicious of Zorina, but nowadays Orson behaved sweetly and attentively to his wife whenever they were together, and she accepted his reassurance that he and Zorina were merely friends.

  Despite his setbacks, Orson did not seem especially downhearted. “Like any genius he must have had his share of demons but he handled them well,” Burgess Meredith mused in his memoir. “I never heard a word of despair from Orson.” Instead, he quietly threw himself into a personal crusade that was as important to him, in its way, as Five Kings. He intended to save John Barrymore.

  Shuttling to New York for the radio show, Orson heard from a friend, the bedridden dramaturg Edward Sheldon, that Barrymore was behaving erratically in a road show of the comedy My Dear Children, in which he parodied himself as a ham actor who is also a great lover. Part of the in-joke was that Barrymore’s fourth wife, Elaine Barrie, was playing one of his three insubordinate daughters. (Indeed, his character literally spanked Barrie at one point in the play.) But after Barrymore consistently disrupted performances with missed lines and antics, his wife withdrew after the Saint Louis engagement, announcing she was going to file for divorce. Otto Preminger, who was directing the Broadway tryout, hastily rehearsed a new actress in her part for the next city on the tour, Chicago, where My Dear Children was due to open on May 8.

  Barrymore was drinking more heavily than usual, and Sheldon feared that the great actor was at death’s door. Hurrying back to Chicago, Welles rushed to the Ambassador East, where Barrymore’s older siblings, Lionel and Ethel, were waiting for their miscreant brother. They had come to Chicago after hearing the same news. Orson knew all three of the fabled Barrymores, having dined with Ethel at Ravinia, acted with Lionel on the radio, and accompanied his father to meet the legendary John backstage in various Shakespeare productions. With his encyclopedic knowledge of theater, Orson had an almost scholarly knowledge of the Barrymore family tree, and loved talking about the Barrymores as exemplars: their real family name (Blythe); their American father, Maurice Barrymore (“an aristocrat”); and their maternal grandmother, Mrs. Drew (“the greatest actress-manager in America before the days of Fanny Kemble”).

  With Orson taking the lead, the three rescuers scoured the South Side in search of the youngest Barrymore, only to find him “pie-eyed in a cathouse,” in Orson’s words, though quite alive. “He wasn’t dying at all—of course he was dying, but he wasn’t dying any more than he was any other day.” With the siblings reunited, “there followed a great warm weekend,” after which the rescuers entered into a rehabilitation pact, taking turns sitting in the front row at My Dear Children for the next few weeks, reminding the black sheep of his obligations.

  When Orson spoke of John Barrymore in later years, he grew misty-eyed about their bond. “He was so generous to a young theater man like myself, and so kindly and so gentlemanly and so warm,” he told Barbara Leaming. “He was such a good man!” In terms that echoed the stumbles of his own career, his own mixed legacy as an actor, and the lowbrow turns of his later career—touting California wine, off-brand bourbon, and English peas in TV commercials whose scripts he berated—Orson insisted on Barrymore’s courage and greatness as an actor.

  Barrymore’s habitual drunkenness at the end of his life was a masquerade, according to Welles. The celebrated actor feared he was losing his mental faculties, and Orson believed that Barrymore may have suffered from what would later become known as Alzheimer’s disease. Barrymore worried that he was following in the steps of his actor-father, Maurice, also a hell-raiser, whose death was preceded by a mental breakdown when he was onstage with his nineteen-year-old son John. Welles was convinced that Barrymore exaggerated his drunkenness to get through “terrible” plays like My Dear Children, in which he was portraying “an over-emoting Shakespearean actor, past his prime and debt-ridden. It was a painful self-parody,” in Welles’s words. But Barrymore worked “as a man of honor because he owed debts,” and always performed as best he could under the circumstances. “He knew he was prostituting himself and that everybody he cared about was ashamed of him, but he managed to play it as though it were a great lark, and to bring the audience into it as though they were at a party. A great performance, really.”

  Barrymore repaid Orson’s devotion with mutual admiration. Once, discussing acting with Peter Bogdanovich, Welles described how Barrymore pulled himself together during an otherwise banal B movie to give a wonderful recital of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. The picture’s director gushed compliments after the take, saluting Barrymore as “the greatest actor in the world.” Barrymore supposedly snorted his reponse: “There are only two great actors—Charles Chaplin and Orson Welles.” Although “I’ve never felt any sort of secure pride in that department,” Welles continued, he prized that compliment above any other he ever received.

  Bogdanovich then asked if Welles believed he was “as great an actor” as Chaplin.

  “We aren’t in the same league, Peter,” Welles replied. “Or even the same game.”

  “Are you a greater actor than Barrymore?” Bogdanovich persisted.

  “Of course not. In his time and mine, nobody in our language was ever as good as Barrymore . . . or as bad.”

  He then added this intriguing observation about his own acting talent: “What I really have in common with Jack,” Welles went on ruefully, “is a lack of vocation. He himself played the part of an actor because that was the role that he’d been given by life. He didn’t love acting. Neither do I. We both loved the theater, though. I know I hold it, as he did, in awe and respect. A vocation has to do with the simple pleasure that you have in doing your job. Charlie [Chaplin] was a happier actor because he was born for it.”

  Orson had turned twenty-four by May 19, the day of the “Bad Man” episode of The Campbell Playhouse, costarring Ida Lupino. He stayed in New York into the following week to announce the official world’s fair poem, winner of a nationwide contest, reading the poem to an audience of several hundred at a meeting of the Academy of American Poets in the Federal Building.

  Orson had returned to the weekly radio show to find that actor-director Paul Stewart had instituted some modest
changes and improvements that helped keep the show running smoothly while the Five Kings tryout preoccupied Welles. Welles erupted in anger at Stewart, dismissing him in front of the cast and crew, according to John Houseman, only to appear later outside Stewart’s apartment door at 3 A.M., “prostrate with remorse,” successfully persuading his old friend and vital associate to return to his job on the program. In later interviews, Orson would sometimes grumble that Stewart exaggerated his contributions to the radio show. But for posterity, Welles described Stewart to Peter Bogdanovich as “a lovely man. For years he was one of the main pillars of our Mercury broadcasts; he can’t be given too much credit.”

  Houseman, who had marched out of the studio in solidarity with Stewart, also returned for the very next broadcast. “Orson and I saw little of each other that spring except on Fridays,” Houseman remembered. The two men had not discussed the future of their partnership other than to agree to forfeit their long-term lease on the Mercury Theatre building, for which they had no real concrete plans.

  Taking Houseman aside now, Orson said he had been fielding offers from various movie studios, but he was not ready to accede to Hollywood. (In mid-May, his agent, Albert Schneider, rebuffed another offer from RKO’s George Schaefer, wiring him that “new developments regarding Welles make it impossible to consider films at this time.”) Orson told Houseman he was still counting on his help in bringing Five Kings to Broadway early in the fall. The Mercury Theatre associates at Bass Rocks were moving ahead with plans for summer theater in Cape Cod, but without Orson and Virginia’s participation. The Mercury would lend its brand name to Bass Rocks, while making it clear that neither of the partners was creatively involved.

  When Orson announced what he was planning instead for the summer, Houseman could scarcely believe his ears. Welles had decided to strike out on his own—in vaudeville. The year before, according to Barbara Leaming, Orson had sprung onstage at a Forty-Second Street burlesque house, playing the straight man to a baggy-pants comedian friend, and this spontaneous lark convinced him that there was fun and money to be had on the dying revue circuit. For a while, Welles told Houseman, he’d considered whipping together a solo act as a magician, but Virginia had nudged him in a different direction. He was going to star in a stripped-down, tabloid (“tab”) version of William Archer’s The Green Goddess, an old-fashioned tingler from 1920 that the Mercury had already adapted for radio. The Green Goddess was already booked for a string of midwestern theaters and would open in Chicago.