by Simon Callow
He had always aspired to the theatre; it was his dream and his goal. Actually experiencing it had made it, as it does for so many people who make their lives in it, a focus and a release for all the many conflicting and sometimes intolerable aspects of his personality. It is both liberation and affirmation; one is no longer trapped inside one’s murky self, because one offers it to other people. The Gate was a particularly exhilarating experience for him because he had before him the example of theatre people who worked in every branch of the craft: Micheál as actor, writer, translator, designer, occasional director, Hilton actor, director, lighting designer. And how they worked! These homosexual aesthetes were unendingly engaged in the nuts and bolts of their job, Micheál actually applying the paint himself to the sets he had designed, Hilton wrestling with the lamps that he so inventively deployed. They staged a hundred plays in their first six years, every one designed by Mac Liammóir, many of them translated by him and three actually written by him. He and Hilton between them shared huge leading roles; Hilton took it upon himself to create acceptable standards of discipline in a country notoriously easygoing. In his own words: ‘in reaction against the conditions it found at its birth, the Gate Theatre was inclined to overstress the visual, the abstract, the international and the less naturalistic attitude to the stage. It tended also perhaps to over-discipline productions in contrast to the too-casual attitude that then prevailed.’59 This had a great influence on Welles; as did his deployment of light, and his belief in ‘the desirability of continuity, swift-moving scene changes, and the possible elimination of intervals’.
He learned a lot about design, too, from Micheál. Despite, in his own words, ‘the fatal influence of Beardsley and Bakst’ on his work, Mac Liammóir had integrated these elements with Celtic motifs to forge an original language. This was not something that Welles absorbed, nor should he have done. What he did take from his contact with Micheál was, first of all, the practical craftsmanship (reinforced by his experience in the paint shop as ‘assistant assistant scene-painter’, of which he drew a charming cartoon); but also of another influence on Micheál: the Berlin theatre of the day. Micheál and Hilton had just come back from Germany in the summer of the year in which Orson appeared at their stage door to pay his compliments to his chum Cathal Ó Ceallaigh. ‘It was Berlin with its Russian influences that taught me how unnecessary the British fetish of the customary masking-in was becoming, Berlin that broke my growing obsession with Playfair’s symmetry, that freed my brain from a thousand tyrannies of visual convention,’60 wrote Mac Liammóir. ‘Yet I began to wonder if the … splendour could not be achieved with a lighter and more suggestive method – a street scene … could be suggested by a sloping ramp, a solid wall, a lamp-post, and a black space; a woman’s room by a gigantic bed, a lustrous festoon of drapery, and a hanging lamp; a moonlit garden by darkness and a green stone fountain.’ That lighter, more suggestive method was what Welles took back home; that, and an experience of acting that stayed with him to the last.
It was not provided by Edwards, nor even by Mac Liammóir, whose romantic self-consciousness he admired but never sought to emulate. It was Anew McMaster who left the indelible impression on his imagination. He saw him whenever he could; McMaster stayed in his mind as the embodiment of what an actor might be. ‘Anew McMaster,’ wrote Bridges-Adams, ‘is an unashamed exponent of the heroic style in acting – without which, be it said, no heroic part can be fully played. We may trace his art back through Booth, Salvini and Barry Sullivan in his prime, back even to those superhuman performers who made melody of Dryden’s torrential verse at Drury Lane. It is an art which our stage must sooner or later discover if it is not to lose itself in subtleties and pettiness.’61 The Irish actor and writer Gabriel Fallon elaborated: ‘Anew McMaster convinces us that he knows more about ACTING Shakespeare than thousands of others who concern themselves merely with UNDERSTANDING him … he has the sound sense to read the simple and wonderful line not like an actor who would be a savant but like an actor who would merely be an actor. It is impossible that Kean did otherwise … he possesses that mesmeric quality which is one of the marks of a great actor, a quality which proceeds from the constant “forcing the soul” to the imagination’s bidding. Most of the other actors we have seen in our time are but puny whispers against him.’62 Where else but in Ireland could Welles have seen such a creature, out of time and out of place? Even in England, which produced in Donald Wolfit one of the century’s few tragedians, there was no genuinely heroic actor to be found. This was the line which Welles sought to join; inappropriately, as it happens, but whenever he wrote of his ideal actor, it was McMaster he described, whether he named him or not.
It is so easy to forget that Welles, complex, almost monstrous, though he sometimes might be, was also a sixteen-year-old boy who was perfectly capable of simple emotions such as homesickness. For him, home was Todd (‘which is just another way of spelling your names’, he touchingly wrote to the Skippers). Less convincingly, he had written to them on the wave of his great success in Jew Süss that he was only ‘crowing so loudly … to make more forceful my assurance that if ever you could find a place for me at Todd, I’d take the next boat!!!’ He was not hoping to lead the life of a schoolmaster; but evidently he missed the warmth and unstinting support of the Hills. He made jokes about keeping his accent, despite having learned proper English stage diction. His pretence, at the outset of his Dublin sojourn, to be enrolling at Trinity – he telegraphed Skipper: ‘have job at the gate theatre and courses in trinity college wire objections’ – was abandoned by stages. Clearly his destiny did not lie in Dublin, a city in which familiarity breeds, if not contempt, then at the very least scepticism. His legend, unsustained by further miracles, had dwindled into mild celebrity. He began to speak of his plans back in America: he told Joseph Holloway that he was returning to do King Lear. Holloway evinced no surprise. Admittedly, he thought that Welles (‘who drifted into Dublin a few months ago from world travelling … an American who left the States for adventure and to write a book thereon’63) was twenty but even that seems a little young to be attempting the ancient king. Holloway adds a queer little comment: ‘When Kernoff tried to see the stage behind Welles’s broad back, I said, “You can’t see through Welles; few can.” And Welles said, “That is very true …”’64
Dublin and the Gate remembered him affectionately: the Gate brochure (of 1934) gives him a little section to himself: ‘ORSON WELLES is a young American actor who paid a memorable visit to the Gate Theatre in its fifth season. He gave a magnificent performance as the Duke in JEW SÜSS, and in HAMLET was an impressive Ghost and a virile Fortinbras. In DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY he played an Italian Duke with mature dignity; and he was a poetic Persian king in MOGU. He is now playing in America.’ In the PHOTO by ROSS, he looks exactly, and only, sixteen years of age. Among the Gate actors he was a different sort of legend. Arriving a couple of years later, Geraldine Fitzgerald was told tales of this extraordinary young man ‘who could be thirty though he was only sixteen, had this stupendous voice and knew every dirty trick in the book and played them on Micheál – who we had proudly regarded as the past master of the dirty trick. Welles had no guilt; there was nothing furtive about it. He walked on the end of everybody’s lines and moved in front of them and things like that. All the younger actors were awed that someone as young as themselves dared to be so alarming to the brass.’65 All for glory. That was not to be had in Dublin. At the end of February 1932, he set out for home, by way of England.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hiatus/Everybody’s Shakespeare
IN THE absence of letters or other evidence, it is hard to determine just what Welles did during his London stay. He was now in a position to concentrate exclusively on executing the plan so exuberantly outlined on his way to Ireland: to visit ‘theatres!!!!!’ London was, as it still is, endowed with more of these than any other city in the world, and he could have seen a wide range of work, from Max Reinhardt’s Helen! starrin
g Evelyn Laye to a revival at the London Gate Theatre, (after which Edwards and Mac Liammóir had named theirs), of its greatest hit, Kaiser’s Morn to Midnight, the quintessence of theatrical Expressionism. In between these poles of high art and delirious froth was a range of agreeable work encompassing plays by Ben Travers and James Bridie, Edgar Wallace (The Green Back, starring Gerald du Maurier) and Clifford Bax (Rose without a Thorn, a Henry VIII play). The West End was at its most urbane with well-turned performances in well-made plays; no one of comparable audacity and originality had replaced the recently departed Charles Laughton. The theatrical waters were becalmed. Most pleasing, no doubt, to a Bard-struck young actor was the unusual amount of Shakespeare on offer, though again, to someone who had seen McMaster, not to mention having just acted opposite Mac Liammóir, the general level may have seemed somewhat sober. None the less, it was an opportunity available to him neither in Ireland nor America to see a large number of the canon in solid, well-spoken productions. At the Old Vic or Sadler’s Wells (plays and operas were still alternating in the two houses) he could have caught Twelfth Night with Edith Evans’s exquisite Viola, or either Robert Speaight or Robert Harris alternating in the title role of Hamlet. Had he made the journey to Stratford-upon-Avon, he could have seen the first productions in the new Art Deco Memorial Theatre, among them Bridges-Adams’s straightforward productions of Henry IV, both parts, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the play in which he had already announced himself, King Lear. This last was a startling production by Théodore Komisarjevsky; at last a taste of the theatrical revolution.
The West End itself fielded quite a number of productions of Shakespeare, with Sybil and Russell Thorndike in the midst of a big season at the Kingsway Theatre, which included, on successive nights, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet and finally, Hamlet. At the St James’s Theatre, he could have seen The Merchant of Venice again, with Ernest Milton as Shylock. Apart from the intrinsic interest of that famous performance, Welles may have derived some hope from the spectacle of a San Francisco-born actor accepted as among the most distinguished Shakespeareans of the English stage – because, needless to say, Welles was not in London simply to be a spectator. He presented himself, notices in hand, to the managers of the various theatres; but this was not Dublin. There was no dearth of eager, trained and talented young men just waiting to prove their worth without the inconvenience of having to get a work permit – always a difficult thing, but in the midst of recession (and, despite the apparently thriving theatre, the West End was having to fight to make ends meet) almost impossible.
At this point, it seems that Welles went to Paris, where he had never been before. (He had been in London in 1929, on his way to Bavaria for his walking holiday – ‘the beer! Oh baby!’ – and on his last visit had seen the Old Vic Company: ‘the best in the world’). Frank Brady maintains that he spent his time in Paris dining, drinking and attending parties. He had a knack of landing on his feet, and particularly of striking up friendships along his way, but his inability to speak French and his lack of any contact in the city would, one might imagine, have made an extensive social life unlikely. He presumably went to the theatre, despite the language barrier, but Brady’s claim that while he was in Paris he struck up a warm friendship with Brahim, the eldest son of the legendary Thami el-Glaoui, Pasha of Marrakesh, strains credibility. Returning to England, he is said by more than one of his biographers to have had an even grander encounter: with George Bernard Shaw, perhaps the most popular and certainly the most immediately recognisable author alive. Welles is said by Brady to have managed this by ‘enthusiasm and perseverance, combined with some letters of introduction’.1 From whom exactly he could have acquired letters of introduction that would gain him admission to Shaw’s presence is difficult to imagine. Welles himself was still talking about his meeting in the fifties, when he spoke to Peter Noble, but after that we hear little of it. This is what he says to Noble: ‘I recall the way in which he received me, listened to my idea on the Theatre, gossiped about Dublin and shared a joke with all the enthusiasm of a schoolboy. I remember his walking me down to his gate and talking to me with the greatest simplicity as if I were as grown up as he. Shaw was a great man – and like all great men essentially kind and simple.’2 This is suspiciously general; another, modest, variant on Christ among the Doctors: the sage of the Western World chats with an unknown seventeen-year-old American boy.
The source of all this, it may be suspected, is a revival of Heartbreak House, which opened at the Queen’s Theatre in April 1932, provoking a deal of press coverage in which Shaw enthusiastically participated. Edith Evans forsook the sea-coast of Illyria in order to play Lady Utterword (‘Magnificent, Superb, Stupendous, Surpassing, Masterly, Delightful, Overwhelming and Better-than-the-part. It saved us from shipwreck. In short, quite good,’ Shaw wrote to her) and Welles would surely have seen the production and read the newspapers with their interviews with Shaw. No doubt he felt as if he’d met him. Certainly when, six years later, he applied to Shaw for the rights, neither party alluded to any earlier meeting. In fact Shaw’s telegram on that occasion said: ‘Who are you?’.
Welles set off for America by ship, arriving in New York in June of 1932, ten months after he’d left. He stayed in the city for a while, again trying to capitalise on his Dublin experience, but if he found the London managements a tough nut to crack, New York’s were worse. The 1931–2 season just coming to an end had been a bad one, with five flops for every success. The turnover was fast and furious; there were always shows to replace the ones that had just closed, but of increasingly cheap quality. The big managements were taking no risks. Welles attempted to audition for the Shuberts’ September revival of the 1928 British spinechiller, Silent House (presumably for the role of the sinister Dr Chan-Fu; nothing else would have suited him, apart from the juvenile lead), but he failed to get beyond the outer office, where he was addressed as ‘Kiddie’, and told, in so many words, to push off. It can’t have been easy: a blow to his amour-propre. The Saturday Evening Post, in an article some years later, put it rather amusingly:
After being a celebrity at sixteen in Dublin and London, he had returned home expecting to be a Broadway celebrity. But he got to the Algonquin without being mobbed. He discovered people in the lobby not talking about him. In Times Square he found large groups of people not mentioning him. A celebrity has a negative or an inverted sense of hearing; he can hear his name not being mentioned at forty paces. Everywhere he went, nonmention of his name drummed on his ear. He was bewildered. Through all his years as a cosmic tot, people had sought out Orson. By rights, the Shuberts should have met him at the docks.3
He must have returned to Chicago, and then Woodstock, with his tail rather between his legs. He was plagued with hay-fever and asthma as usual in the summer, and in a moment of inspiration, Roger Hill suggested (‘to get him out of my hair’4) that he take a trip to Mercer in the cooler area up-state Wisconsin near the lakes, and try his hand at writing a play. Hill promised to start the play off. Orson happily agreed. They decided to take the controversial figure of John Brown, unilateral anti-slaver, as their theme; he was much in the air, the subject of two recent biographies, a play, and an epic poem: an emblem of muddle-headed, or perhaps pig-headed idealism that seemed to touch a chord in depression America. Orson made for the North. Once again he sent a generally exuberant set of letters which record his adventures, chronicle his observations of nature – and human nature – and blush for shame at asking – again! – for money. Their special interest is that they record his progress on the play, showing something of his developing grasp as a writer and editor. The letters are fun; he seems to have had a delightful time.
On the train he had the good fortune to bump into the Meigs, friends of the Hills; they had a summer home in the area of the Chippewa Indian reservation at Lac du Flambeau, and invited him to stay with them, at the bottom of their pine-grove. ‘
How delightfully unexpected everything turns out for me! In the seventeen kaleidoscopic years of my existence I have not once successfully predicted any one minute of my following future!’ He got some ‘squaws and a few antiques of the neuter gender’ to put up a wig-wam (‘or more correctly, a “wig-ii-wham”’) and settled in for the duration. Immediately his ‘tortured nasal passage and bespasmed bronchial tubes’ improved. He hadn’t entirely gone native – he ate with the Meigs and their ‘rosy-faced and multitudinous’ children – but he abandoned himself to the reservation’s picturesque charm: ‘A tuneful country, this … woodland sounds from the wild where the Chippewa hunt bear and deer, silver sounds from the lake and sunny insect-sounds at mid-day. A little sad, perhaps, the song the marsh-folk sing, and sadder yet the endless dirging of the wind in the fir-trees. At night there are stealthy little sounds, and always the unbelievable; ceaseless, in the air, the throbbing of medicine drums.’ Mac Liammóir wasn’t entirely right that Orson failed to give himself over to nature; but he wasn’t entirely wrong, either: his descriptions have the feeling of stage directions about them. Hardly surprising, since he was here to write a play, a matter to which – with occasional lapses – he applied himself very seriously.
Roger Hill sent him the first act immediately, nonchalantly claiming to have written it in a day; this galvanised Orson, and he boasts quite soon to his ‘beloved co-author’ that he is writing furiously to produce what he spells as a ‘first draught’ so that they can see the thing whole, like ‘a great uncut diamond’. He offers advice to Skipper on his first act: ‘it’s mighty damned good. Personally I think it’s great. Wonderful!! And with this opinion clearly understood may I offer the inevitable criticism?’ He finds that Thoreau is made too interesting: ‘if he remains as he is at this writing nothing on earth will persuade me away from him into playing John Brown!’ He tells Skipper that some of the speeches he’s written are too good. ‘We don’t want to be accused of bombast. I think neat lines are a fault of mine, too, we must both beware, for that way lies floweriness …’ Everything that he writes seems shrewd and practical.
