Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  Halfway through his sojourn, as autumn started to threaten with an east wind blowing up and a prolonged rainy season imminent, he moved across the lake, to share a lodge with a silent and solitary archer by the name of Larry to whom he paid a few cents for board. There he stayed till he returned. When Larry had done his bow and arrow work, he sat at his typewriter, Welles sat at his, and so the play got finished. Welles’s ability to team up with companions in this way – Mr O’Connor on the Shannon expedition is another instance – is interesting; interesting, too, that he was happier with his silent friend than in the bustle of the Meigs’ noisy hearth. He was, after all, to all intents and purposes an only child; solitude à deux may have suited him better than the competitive atmosphere of a big family.

  He succumbed to the charms of ‘the crystal lakes and timberlands and all that sort of thing, well-stocked, understand, with the leaping trout, the bounding deer, the scudding muskie and the grunting Indian, all rampant, so to speak and in great abundance’ and occasional trips to the movies with the Meigs (‘the movie tonight was distressingly adequate on the subject of skyscrapers … may the show business flounder until producers cry out in agony for the return of the moving drama (Drama) for the return of the good old lengthiness, the romance and the real melo-drama!’); mostly, though, he was plugging away at John Brown, and also at another play: The Dark Room. ‘It’s a natural, a positive honey! … every English-speaking repertory company on the globe will be doing that show, mark my words!’ It concerns a representative group of people – a gangster, a society-queen, a financial leader, a diamond-merchant, the mayor of the town and others – who assemble for a seance (an early appearance of the supernatural figures in Welles’s work). ‘And through all of this exciting, rapid-fire, sure-fire, melodrama, moves the sinister shadow of Dr Marvel! … then for the last time, the lights go out and The Voice speaks! The answer to that is a wow, a perfect wow … it could be produced for the price of a theatre rental, the set is in every scene dock in the world – a new coat of paint …’ From this description, it would not have been entirely out of place in the Gate’s repertory.

  He could hardly wait now to get back, with his two thrilling properties in his rucksack. He looks forward to returning to civilisation, ‘in the sunshine of your enthusiasm’, in less than a week. He expresses himself to Hill (‘Skip’) with absolutely direct affection, signing off ‘Love without end’. From time to time he worries in a letter that he hasn’t heard from him and fears that he might be in his bad books: ‘you aren’t angry, are you? Are you?’ Generally these anxieties concern his constant requests for money: but since ‘Doctor’, as he refers to his guardian, is so unforthcoming, what can he do? He signs off his last letter from Lac du Flambeau – ‘the merest word from Woodstock would send me into perfect triologies of delight’ – then throws in his joke of the moment, repeated in more than one letter: ‘I can ride a canoe, canoe?’ Skipper brought out the boy in him.

  Not another word is ever heard about The Dark Room; but the John Brown play – which they called Marching Song – filled them with excitement and hopes of a production. Once they’d rewritten it, Skipper sent it to an old acquaintance, Samuel Raphaelson, who wrote back ‘Stick with this boy! … Any three pages of this script sing. But any 20 pages fall apart. Tell your star pupil to either turn this into a novel or teach him that stage plays are tight little miniatures’5 – not a lesson that Orson Welles was ever going to learn, thank God. They decided that they needed to be on the spot if they were to place it; Hortense and Roger Hill and Orson travelled to New York in what they liked to call the ‘land-yacht’, the caravan bus in which the Todd Troupers toured, ‘complete with its chauffeur-cook’.6 Once in New York, they rented a suite at the Algonquin (not cheap at any time, least of all at its zenith in the early thirties) and approached as many producers as they could. They had scant success. Even Dwight Deere Wiman, an ex-Todd man, Skipper’s contemporary, and America’s most prolific producer, turned them down, as did the almost equally prolific William A. Brady. Depressed and out of pocket, the Hills returned to Woodstock; Welles moved into a cheap room on West 77th Street, off Riverside, and continued to peddle the play around town. Ben Boyars read it, and he was at least kind. ‘It’s a swell show,’ he told Welles. ‘It makes good reading. It would be a good book. I think maybe it’s even a good play. But that doesn’t matter. It won’t make money. It isn’t a commercial piece. At least that’s what I think.’7

  Maurice Bernstein wrote to him in New York: ‘I do hope you won’t continue to waste your youth aimlessly.’8 Then, in the absence of any reaction, sent a telegram: ‘leave play with agent and come home’. Which he did, after a final rebuff from yet another manager who read the play, declared it ‘unsuitable’ and then charged him $5 for the opinion. ‘Unsuitable’ for what, one may ask; but he was not wrong to reject it. Ben Boyars hits the nail on the head: ‘it makes good reading.’ It’s a good solid slog through some tangled history, but except for a few interesting moments of stagecraft is dramatically inert. It is in fact the stage directions which quicken the pulse, suggesting that the authors were not born dramatists but perhaps born directors; one of them, at any rate. The subject none the less has considerable resonance in Orson Welles’s life and even in some of his future work.

  The play takes the form of an inquiry into Brown, his motives and the value of his actions: was he self-motivated? A genuine idealist? A clever strategist? A megalomaniac? Or simply mad? The play starts and ends with journalists trying to answer some of these questions, questions posed in his lifetime, and still not satisfactorily resolved. The play’s subject is the paradox that whatever the answer to these questions, he became, especially after his death at the gallows, an emblem of the anti-slave movement, and a vital rallying point. ‘His soul,’ in the words of the great song he inspired, ‘goes marching on.’ On being told that abolitionists were planning to spring him from jail before his execution Brown responded ‘Let them hang me. I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose’ – a remark (not in the play) which reveals an acute sense of the value of publicity. It is this that fascinates Welles. Brown’s conduct at all times was highly theatrical, and reported on by a permanent phalanx of journalists. Even as he lay on the grass after being beaten unconscious with the hilt of a marine’s sword, he gave interviews. Q: What was your object? A: To free the slaves from bondage. His trial, during which he lay on a cot, was a magnificent piece of stage-management; a show-trial, in fact, but one in which the accused was putting on the show for his own benefit, and that of his cause.

  The press coverage was the first newspaper great campaign of modern times. The theme of Brown’s possible madness, coupled with that of the power of publicity obviously had considerable resonance for Welles; as did the additional theme of the vanity of the man who believes he is God’s vessel. Brown was certain enough of his own destiny to have ordered one of his men somehow to procure George Washington’s sword, with which he then proceeded to lead the battle. This hubris of his is given great weight in Marching Song, which is essentially a political piece; in no way does it resemble Stephen Vincent Benét’s great poem, ‘John Brown’s Body’, with its complex lament for a vanished culture.

  The canvas is enormous: its eleven scenes convey dense action; there is a cast of twenty-six, plus three children. Characterisation is clear and detailed closely following historical fact; the one character who has been somewhat extrapolated from recorded reality is John Brown’s son, John Junior, who suffered a nervous breakdown witnessing the Potawotomie Massacre – the event that precipitated his father’s commitment to the cause. Welles and Hill have made him ‘an idiot, with a loose, wet mouth and saucer eyes’.9 He laughs and giggles, until suddenly tormented by the imagined sound of marching; he identifies passionately with the suffering slaves. There is a Jacobean feel to his presence in the play; frequently he burbles on at the side of the action, apparently irrelevant. It is hard not to be reminded of the fact that We
lles’s brother Richard Junior was, as he was writing the play, still repining, hungry and unclothed, in Kanakee Mental Asylum.

  JOHN JUNIOR

  Inspiration! Inspiration! You don’t understand! You don’t know what inspiration means! … I’ve been inspired … I can tell you about it … inspiration don’t mean being crazy … not … not exactly … inspiration is a kind of happy song, it’s like a spring rain shower falling soft and sudden on young leaves … it’s like a ray of dawn sunshine smiling, and pointing at the mountain-tops … and mostly, mostly it’s like my dreams … the dreams I have I can’t tell you about … take that marching, now … the sound of that marching … believe me that sound isn’t crazy … it’s a fine wild kind of music … a Call … it ain’t insane, I tell you! It ain’t crazy! It’s the footsteps of a whole nation, marching in the chains they was born in! … you don’t have to be simple to hear that echoing and echoing in your heart, do you? … John Brown hears it and he knows what it means!!!

  Clumsy though it is as writing, it has real feeling; the idealism, the hysterical identification with the oppressed, is unmistakable. Throughout, despite the reckless proliferation of exclamation marks, elevated states of emotion are powerfully conveyed. Belief is a central question, and the issue of Brown’s prophetic inspiration is not dodged:

  JOHN BROWN

  THE SWORD OF THE LORD AND OF GIDEON!

  (Suddenly a great unearthly light falls full upon him. He is transfigured … his arms have been stretched sideways in triumph and now a strange thing happens to them, they are momentarily paralysed … with a shock we realise that the attitude is no longer that of triumph but of crucifixion!) O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it. (Kagi and Anderson sink to their knees, awed and prayerful.)

  In a Victorian sort of way, it is all quite powerful; the Christ image boldly undertaken. There are reminiscences of The Servant in the House (also about a man who would be king). No irony seems to be intended, nor is it told from Brown’s point of view. The moment of transfiguration simply happens, tout court. In the penultimate scene, the journalists discuss Brown outside his cell, where he’s giving interviews and writing pamphlets. Is he mad? Or what? A soldier passes by, producing an article by Abraham Lincoln condemning Brown. The soldier gives his name: Booth – John Wilkes Booth, who was, indeed, there.

  The final scene shows Brown ascending the hill to the gallows (a theatrical and symbolic transposition; the reality was a wooden structure in the middle of the square at Charlestown, Virginia). He hears, alternately, the marching we’ve heard throughout the play and the mad laughter of John Junior. He makes his famous speech from the top of the Hill. Then: ‘the sound of marching feet grows louder, louder, louder. But the note is gradually changing. The chains are gone and a martial ring has taken their place. The drum and bugle insinuate themselves. The tempo has quickened and the cadence is now that of a great army of free men – marching. Marching – Marching – Indomitable … now the bugle sound has melted into a vaster harmony, the full chords of a song … and as the play ends the whole theatre is filled with the song. JOHN BROWN’S BODY LIES A’MOULDERING IN THE GRAVE, BUT HIS SOUL GOES MARCHING ON.’ This is the overlap of play and production.

  Welles’s use of sound is everywhere in evidence, from the beginning, played with voices off for nearly the whole of the scene, through the constant marching, to a number of felicitous touches – offstage choruses, Schubert’s Serenade playing underneath a scene and so on. Welles’s setting, of which he draws an exuberant sketch, shows the essentially straightforward four-walled set divided two ways – by a full curtain which functions as a front cloth (he calls it THE GRAND DRAPE ‘in the grand manner. Note cut-out tassels!’) and by traverse curtains, clearly made from something light and loose, white cotton or silk. These curtains are drawn between scenes, and serve as a screen for projections of kaleidoscopic images ‘depicting newspaper headlines and views of immediate surroundings’ from an implement called a stereopticon. Elsewhere he refers to the stereopticon as a magic lantern, which suggests he may be attempting a form of Victorian theatre – a form contemporary with the events depicted. It is also of course a version of techniques being developed in Berlin by Piscator.

  It is all very ambitious. Welles never saw it staged, though in the 1970s, by an irony that both of them will not have failed to appreciate, his arch-enemy Hascy Tarbox, then teaching at Todd, designed and directed a trimmed-down version in the Opera House at Woodstock. It was a modest success. The only reason that it was staged was, of course, because of Orson’s co-authorship, though from that point of view it must have proved a disappointment for anyone looking for traces of his hand. With the exception of those few elements noted, it is essentially impersonal, a public play depicting public events. The newspaper headlines, and indeed the presence in the play of investigative journalists, inevitably seem to pre-echo Citizen Kane, but the structure of the play owes little to them; they convey information neatly and confirm the emblematic value of Brown. The mystery, the void at the centre of Kane, is nowhere to be found. But in the marshalling of the material and the increasing mastery of the narrative, he had learned an enormous amount. The very fact that he had risen to the challenge that he set himself was no mean achievement.

  At the same time as he was writing this public play, and the shamelessly commercial Dark Room, he was writing, during this remarkably productive summer, a third play which is among the most curious and personal documents of his that we have: Bright Lucifer. Set on an Indian reservation, full of the local colour mentioned in his letters from Lac du Flambeau, it contains as malign a self-portrait as can ever have been written. The play is in three acts, in a single simple setting: a holiday cabin on the reservation in the North Woods. There are three characters: Morgan Flynn, addressed as Jack, a star of horror movies; Bill Flynn, his elder brother, editor of the National Weekly; and Eldred Brand, Bill’s ward, who is on the reservation because of his hay-fever. Bill has come up to the North Woods for a break (‘Haven’t had fish like that in four years, and AIR. They breathe gas in Hollywood’10). The air is heavy with the throbbing of the drums, the drums. Bill frets that the furniture is meagre: an army cot doesn’t seem right for a movie star. Jack: Are you calling your brother a sissy? They laugh, then discuss Jack’s broken romance: his girl ran off with a cameraman. Took dope, too. They also discuss Eldred. Is Bill, Jack wants to know, as fond of him as ever? Suddenly he asks why Eldred hates him; Bill poo-poos the idea. They bicker. The drums insist. Somebody must be dead or dying, says Bill; the drums are supposed to scare away the DEVILS. Jack laughs; surely Bill can’t believe in Devil drums?

  As he says this, Eldred comes in. He stands there, silent, unseen. Jack and Bill discuss devils and whether they exist. The atmosphere is uneasy. Bill, seeing Eldred, asks him what he believes. I don’t believe in anything, says Eldred. I only believe in myself. To break this impasse Jack heartily asks Eldred what his preferences are, to which he replies: I like them high-breasted and virgin. I like them in wet silk dresses licking my galoshes. Understandably, there is, says the stage direction, a silence. The subject goes back to ghosts. Jack describes a seance he attended at which he played a spirit … ‘like a magician discovering that the beautiful lady in the box is really cut in half’. Jack says that he has always wanted to scare people on a big scale: a huge practical joke. Eldred quibbles about something; Bill asks him why he always gets everything wrong? Somebody’s got to, says Eldred, since you’re always right. Bill throws his head back and laughs. His big, wonderful laugh, the stage direction tells us. He goes to bed. Eldred eggs Jack on to describe the practical joke he had in mind, to scare the fishermen. Jack’s idea, it transpires, is to dress up in a black robe, sitting in the back of a boat with a muffled motor, then to ask the fisherman the time: not the hour – the year. Eldred shrieks with shrill hard laughter. Then abruptly he stops. Eldred suggests that it might be fun to try it on the Indians. He knows that Jack has his make-up with him;
why not use it? Jack demurs; he’s played too many monsters. ‘And you’ve got to get it out of you,’ says Eldred. ‘Not run away from it.’ By God! says Jack, I’ll show you! He laughs: forced and just a trifle frenzied, then leaves. Eldred laughs, then, again, stops suddenly. ‘By God?’ he asks, blowing out the lantern. Enter Bill, who tells him, forgivably, that he’s crazy. You’ve said that once! says Eldred. They fight about Jack. Don’t be silly, says Bill. Eldred screams back: WILL YOU STOP INSULTING ME?

  Then ensues an extraordinary scene in which Eldred accuses Bill of loving Jack more than him. He’s my brother, says Bill, to which Eldred replies: ‘you never miss a chance, do you, to remind me that I’m an orphan, an adopted orphan? … if it had just happened that you were my father instead of the man that beat you to it … you’ve tried to be just like a father to me, haven’t you? All those years tucking me into bed. I have my mother’s eyes, haven’t I? I used to wear bangs and we went on little walks together and you taught me the alphabet.’ Bill weakly protests that Eldred has no right to – at which Eldred again screams: ‘I have no right! I have no right to anything; money, friends, anything. I haven’t the right to breathe, have I, my adored old stepmother?’ He calls his guardian his stepmother, which is exactly what Dadda with his fussy loving must have felt like. Eldred continues, of Bill’s wife Martha: ‘She hates me! … she’s jealous of our love for each other. So’s Jack.’ Bill sternly tells him that they have to cheer Jack up, and goes. There is a gust of wind; drums; the click of a latch; the door opens slowly. it’s The Ghoul. The thing is dark and hairy, the head like a great crazy, cracking egg, punctured with two blind eyes. The nose a greedy claw, grabbing the hungry mouth that grins under it, full of red, dripping teeth. Eldred screams; Bill runs in. Eldred has cut his own hand to justify the scream. Where’s Jack? asks Bill. I thought it was Jack coming out. Eldred: GOD, BILL, I HOPE IT WAS. Act One Curtain.