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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  His earnings would depend on the size of the crowds, he told Houseman, but he planned to recycle the money he made into the Mercury Theatre’s fall season. From the Mercury troupe itself, Orson would borrow only his three “slaves”—William Alland, Richard Baer, and Richard Wilson, the last of whom would help launch the vaudeville tour before joining the Bass Rocks summer theater. Although publicity would link the vaudeville act to the Mercury, nothing really was required of Houseman—which was for the best, as Houseman (who was flabbergasted by Orson’s plans) had been looking forward to a restful summer.

  Whenever Welles and Houseman talked about the future, however, their mutual regard and shared aspirations were renewed. Although Houseman was skeptical, he took the surprising news to the New York press. After opening in Chicago on June 9, Welles would play vaudeville theaters in a condensed version of The Green Goddess. “The tour will probably continue on into the summer,” reported the New York Times, “depending, of course, on the show’s reception and the stamina of Mr. Welles.”

  The show business columnists lapped it up: “Orson Welles Goes into Vaudeville!” Was there any better way to thumb his nose at the New York theater establishment, which still doubted his promises about Five Kings? Or to prove he was one of a kind, once and for all?

  On Friday, June 2, Orson was back in New York for the last Campbell Playhouse of the season: “Victoria Regina,” with Helen Hayes reprising her role from the Broadway hit of 1935.

  With the Campbell series suspended for the summer, Orson was able to appear in other radio programs. Two days after “Victoria Regina,” he stepped in for John Barrymore in the romantic comedy “Business Before Pleasure,” offered by the Knickerbocker Playhouse on WABC. Barrymore, still performing in My Dear Children, had fallen off the wagon again, though the official word was that he had been “stricken” with illness.

  In more ways than one the shadow of Barrymore hung over the Green Goddess tour, right down to the young actress, red-haired Susan Fox, whom Orson cast as the damsel in distress: later Fox would marry a Barrymore on the Drew side of the family tree. If the Great Profile could pay his grocery bills with My Dear Children, why shouldn’t Orson perform hokum in vaudeville?

  Part of the attraction in doing The Green Goddess was that, like Too Much Johnson, the twenty-minute vaudeville act gave him a chance to employ film footage to supplement the performance. “Using stock footage from a New York film house that had a library of scenes and situations that could easily be spliced into any motion picture, and shooting just a few insert shots himself,” according to Frank Brady, who researched this “lost” footage as diligently as that of Too Much Johnson, Welles “created a four-minute introduction” to the plot of the play, opening on a map of India and narrowing in on Mount Everest.

  “Next,” wrote Brady, “the film cuts to an airplane, flying at night, lights ablaze in its windows, in the midst of a terrible lightning storm, and being deluged with torrential rains.”

  The plane crashes spectacularly. “There was no soundtrack incorporated into the film, but a recording of an airplane motor accompanied by thunder, wind, rain, and then the boom of the airplane crash was to be synchronized with the film and played on the public address system.” Again, as with Too Much Johnson, when the film footage ended, the “live” show began.

  Wearing a bejeweled turban and long flowing robe, coated in dark pancake makeup, Orson would enter after the crash footage. He portrayed the Rajah of Rukh—“a tall, well-built man of forty dressed in the extreme of Eastern gorgeousness,” according to the script. Welles had played the same character in the Campbell Playhouse broadcast earlier in the year, recalling the performance Morris Ankrum had given in the Chicago road show Orson had enjoyed as a boy.

  The plot of The Green Goddess concerned the survivors of the plane crash, who are brought before the evil Rajah, the ruler of a remote mythical kingdom. The Rajah takes an unsavory interest in one of the survivors, the beautiful wife (Susan Fox) of a British officer, who is another passenger on the downed plane. While attempting to seduce the beautiful wife, the Rajah threatens to sacrifice the foreigners to the idol of the kingdom, the Green Goddess.

  One week after the season’s last Campbell Playhouse broadcast, Orson’s vaudeville act opened at the RKO Palace at Randolph and La Salle. After “One Man Swing Band” Vic Hyde, the musical comedy duo Arren and Broderick, the acrobatic Variety Gambols, and the precision-dancing Six Grays, Welles took the stage in full regalia: “The Man Who Scared the World and Then Charmed It,” as he billed himself. Four or five times a day, Orson and his patchwork troupe performed The Green Goddess as a lead-in to the new MGM romantic comedy Bridal Suite.

  Virginia sat in the front of the theater for the premiere. The next week, she attended a luncheon at the English Speaking Union featuring her husband as guest of honor. Dr. Maurice Bernstein, Ashton Stevens, and the Roger Hills all came to see the show, shaking their heads at Orson’s cheek and the show’s glitches. John Barrymore stopped by the Palace to pay his respects—and repay his debt to Welles—by leaping onstage for a cameo. “Imagine the two of us, clowning around up there in front of those poor, bewildered little gatherings of people,” Welles told Barbara Leaming.

  Not everyone was bewildered. A Chicago teenager, who “thought Orson the most fascinating and sexy actor,” cut high school classes with friends to sit through the show twice. Rita Myers Gagnon wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times in the days following Welles’s death in 1985, reminiscing about the thrill of it. At one point in the drama, Gagnon recalled, Orson was supposed to fire a gun at an enemy standing across the stage. “During the second show, the gun failed to go off,” she recalled, “and without losing a beat, Orson dashed across the stage and beat the villain to death with the gun butt.” She and her friends were “enthralled.”

  Since he “disapproved” of the whole embarrassing idea, John Houseman waited until the troupe’s very last Chicago performance before making his reluctant pilgrimage from New York. Though the Green Goddess cast included professionals with fine credentials (one of them was Stephen Appleby from his own disastrous Valley Forge), Houseman remembered only “a troupe consisting of Wilson, Vakhtangov and Baer in pith helmets and plain turbans and a girl whom I had never seen before in white riding breeches. The audience was puzzled and apathetic.” After the performance, heading back to the hotel with his partner, Orson stopped the taxi and pointed toward the back entrance of a downtown building. “That’s where they brought my father out—feet first,” Welles told Houseman.

  After Chicago, it was off to sleepy Steubenville, Ohio, for an all-day Sunday gig. Then “Orson Welles and Co.” traveled on to the Stanley Theatre in Pittsburgh, where the Green Goddess troupe joined a new series of revue acts, including the comic duo Jack Talley and Terry Howard, the dancing Statler Twins, and the Coon Creek Girls (hillbilly singers who had entertained the king and queen of England at the White House). Captain Fury, starring Orson’s old rival Brian Aherne, was the onscreen attraction at the huge picture palace.

  The special filmed opening of The Green Goddess made the show almost as much of a wild card on the road as Five Kings, and in Pittsburgh, on opening day, “everything—but everything!—happened to Welles” and his vaudeville act, as the trade paper Variety amusingly reported.

  “First the screen prolog came on upside down with the sound accompaniment blasting the ears of the customers to pieces and even extended for a minute or so into the sketch itself; then the noise effects went haywire when the boys remembered to put them on at all, and finally the stage mikes picked that particular time to go berserk and sound off a series of buzzing blasts right through the dialog.

  “Welles stepped out of character at the outset, begged the audience’s permission to start all over again. The mike buzzing promptly stopped and then started anew. By this time, Welles and his company had gritted their teeth and decided to go through the motions anyway. Half the lines were lost completely and the others were meaningl
ess. At the conclusion, ‘the man who scared the world, then charmed it’—that’s his current billing—mopped a furrowed brow and apologized profusely for the fiasco, and a more earnest, gracious apology has never come from the tortured despair of any actor. Welles was plainly sick about it, so much so that he even told the patrons they could get their money back at the box office and that he’d stand personally responsible for the refunds. He meant it, too, but a checkup revealed that not a single return was made, a tribute to Welles’s sincerity.

  “All in all it was a performance no performer could have possibly ever conjured in the dread of his wildest nightmare.” And Variety added this grace note: “Welles took the whole thing like a major, had a heart-to-heart talk with the crew after the performance, told the boys it was just one of those things and by the second show everything was going smoothly.”

  By the end of the week in Pittsburgh, Orson was livening things up by portraying the Rajah as though embodied by different celebrities. Mercury publicist Henry Senber spread news of the feat. “At the first show he was Charles Laughton,” according to the New York Times, “at the second John Barrymore, Alfred Lunt for third, and Herbert Marshall fourth.”

  The crowds were thinning out, however, and after “Orson Welles and Co.” left Pittsburgh the Stanley dropped variety acts altogether, switching over permanently to film exhibition. The Green Goddess tour tapered off somewhere in the Midwest, but Orson never regretted his impulse to join vaudeville during the last whisper of its heyday, wearing the kind of exotic costume and makeup he loved. “Nobody had ever done worse business than I did,” Welles boasted inversely to Leaming. “You could shoot deer on the main floors of all the great vaudeville houses of America. But I had a lot of fun. It was great to be a vaudeville headliner even if there was nobody out front.”

  By July 4, Orson was back in New York, exhausted and exhilarated. He had a few spot radio jobs coming up, but nothing much else, and July and August stretched emptily ahead.

  George J. Schaefer, the president of RKO, had not given up. He had been impressed by Orson’s Hunchback of Notre Dame screen test and by the unfinished footage for Too Much Johnson, and he was coming around to the idea of letting the young Broadway mastermind form his own film production unit, where he could produce, direct, write, and star in stories of his own choosing. Little by little, Welles’s lawyer, Arnold Weissberger, managed to stoke RKO’s interest, so that the deal was becoming irresistible at just the moment in time when Orson was staring ahead at a hole in his summer.

  By early July, Schaefer was crafting an acting, writing, directing, and producing deal covering two pictures. Prospectively, Orson would stand to receive $30,000 as an actor and $35,000 as a producer, along with 20 percent of the net profits. The first picture would have to be completed by the end of 1939. For the second picture, to be shot in 1940, he would receive $35,000 for acting and $25,000 for producing, with 25 percent of the net profits.

  Although Schaefer discussed possible stories with Welles, he put off any decision on the exact material until after Welles took up offices at RKO in Hollywood. The studio reserved the right to refuse any story, and Orson had an equal right to refuse its suggestions. If no story could be agreed on, Welles’s contract would be “annulled.” After a story had been approved, however, the contract gave Orson leeway to depart “substantially” from the initial outline as he crafted the final script. Welles agreed to show rushes of his film productions to studio officials, and to confer with the studio on editing, but he was allowed to supervise his own editing of the two films. As always, the studio reserved the right of final cut, but Schaefer assured Orson that he would go to great lengths to back his subject choices and support his final cut.

  Schaefer also gave Orson assurances that he could hire John Houseman and other valued members of the Mercury Theatre—both cast and production staff—under his film unit’s budget. Orson could draw on his New York circle in casting his pictures, although the studio had to approve all individual hires.

  One of the most appealing aspects of the contract was unwritten. In their several meetings, Orson had come to trust Schaefer. Orson had not personally liked David O. Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn, or Louis B. Mayer. But Schaefer was a businessman who was buying an artistic product that he believed he could promote with his expertise into small, niche, and foreign markets. If Schaefer was a nonentity by comparison with the more famous studio moguls, he was a nonentity who was willing to gamble big on Orson.

  Welles talked the decision over with Houseman, inviting him to renew their partnership in Hollywood. Houseman had no better prospects; he said yes. “In the excitement of the new contact and the exhilarating prospects of fresh worlds to conquer,” wrote Houseman, “the rancors and miseries of recent months were hastily buried in a shallow grave.”

  Orson had already talked the decision over with his wife, who had long encouraged him to test the Hollywood waters. With no summer plans of her own, Virginia sorely wanted a vacation. Orson had no interest in vacationing. He made a fateful decision, telling Virginia it would be best for her to wait until he established a beachhead in Hollywood before she moved to California with him. His first days would be spent in hotels, and they would be full of haggling. Wherever he went, initially, studio officials, his own retinue, and the press would trail him. Let Orson settle the details of the contract, find a house for the family, and start preparing his first film production. That would take only a few weeks. Then Virginia and one-year-old Christopher could join him.

  Meanwhile, he offered to send his wife to Ireland, where Virginia could spend the rest of the summer with Geraldine Fitzgerald and her husband, Edward William Lindsay-Hogg. The nanny could bring Christopher by train to join Orson in California. Orson saw Virginia off at the New York docks on July 15. The wire services carried a photograph of him, in suit, tie, and beard, kissing his smiling wife as she boarded the Aquitania. The caption read: “No Act.”

  He made the rounds of his New York friends, promising to bring Joseph Cotten to Hollywood and into motion pictures as soon as he had firmed things up. They joked about George “Shorty” Chirello, a talkative and diminutive driver they sometimes shared in New York. Who would inherit Shorty if they both moved to California? One of them would have to take Shorty with him. They playfully flipped a coin to decide the matter, with Orson winning.

  Two days after Virginia’s departure, the news broke in the New York Times. Orson Welles, “who for two years spurned” film offers, had “capitulated” to Hollywood. On July 17, he would leave for the West Coast with his “associate,” John Houseman. Welles would captain his own production unit at RKO, the item read. “The subject of the [first] film was not disclosed.” Although the press announcement, “approved formally by Houseman and Welles,” noted that Welles had rejected previous Hollywood offers because they might interfere with his “primary interest in the Mercury Theatre,” the announcement “made no mention of Five Kings,” the newspaper observed. Newsman Herbert Drake had resigned from the drama desk of the New York Herald Tribune to serve as Welles’s West Coast publicist. Mercury secretary Augusta Weissberger would stay behind in New York, to oversee the company’s East Coast business and bookkeeping.

  Orson made one final whirlwind stop in Chicago. Roger Hill met him at the Tavern Club, and brought along a lawyer friend whose specialty was tax avoidance; Orson was so taken with the man that he booked him on the flight to Hollywood. The headmaster viewed Hollywood as a golden opportunity. Dr. Maurice Bernstein, whom Orson also saw, was more conflicted about the sudden events; he loved New York: its art, music, theater. He had no feeling for California.

  Once Orson made an important decision, however, he didn’t waver. “When you don’t really want to go to Hollywood—at least this was true in the old days, the golden days of Hollywood—when you don’t honestly want to go, then the deals got better and better,” Welles reflected many years later. “In my case I didn’t want money; I wanted authority. So I asked the impossible,
hoping to be left alone; and at the end of a year’s negotiations, I got it, simply because there was no real vocation there—my love for films began only when we started work.”

  Joined by the tax lawyer, John Houseman, and Richard Baer—the youngest and best-educated of the “slaves”—Orson flew out of Chicago on July 18. RKO had booked the Welles contingent into the Town House, a large hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, which was adjacent to Lafayette Park in central Los Angeles. But they found the facility to be “an almost unbearable bit of Evanston,” in Orson’s words, and quickly the four of them moved into bungalows at the decidedly more raffish Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard.

  IV

  SEVENTY YEARS

  IN A MAN'S LIFE

  CHAPTER 17

  July–December 1939

  “The Greatest Railroad Train a Boy Ever Had”

  The week Orson arrived in Los Angeles, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called for a special emergency session of Congress to deal with the developing war crisis in Europe.