by Simon Callow
However, he was fond of the play (he often announced productions of it: as late as 1960 he was laying plans to do it in London) and may have derived some satisfaction from standing in front of an audience again: it had been eighteen months since his final performance in Dublin. The open-book setting, hand-painted by Welles, has some charm: the page turns to give a new scene, opening with the words A PLEASANT CONCEITED COMEDIE CALLED TWELFE NIGHT or WHAT YOU WILL, going on to ORSINO’S CASTLE (with distant sea), OLIVIA’S GARDEN (with cypress grove) and so on, with a pleasant, light use of stylised perspective. In the Toby Belch/Andrew Aguecheek scene, Maria and Malvolio, both in nightshirts, seem suspended in the air at the side of the book-leaves. The costumes are largely Elizabethan in feel, apart, perhaps, from Maria’s polka-dot nightshirt and semi-mediaeval head-gear. Welles had over half of the high school boys in the cast, typical of Skipper’s policy of pupil participation; Hascy Tarbox, now resident genius, played Aguecheek.
They won first prize – ‘at last’, in Roger Hill’s words. It is always better to win than to lose, but it can’t have meant very much to Welles, after the sort of dreams he’d been entertaining: Coriolanus and Othello in Dublin; King Lear on Broadway. His trophy may even have seemed to mock his ambitions: a schoolboy prize. Certainly by the time a few weeks later that he was moodily drinking cocktails at a party thrown by the salonnière and musician, Hazel Buchbinder – a Todd parent – he told one of the other guests that he was ‘a writer’. Perhaps he said that because his interlocutor was a writer himself: Thornton Wilder, Professor of Literature at the University of Chicago, author of a couple of admired novels, and some experimental plays though not as yet the ones by which he would become internationally famous. Welles and he had a rather flirtatious conversation around the piano – Wilder: ‘Do you play?’ Welles: ‘Yes, but not on the piano’ – which may be the basis of Welles’s later report to Barbara Leaming that his first reaction was to think ‘here’s another queen’. Wilder was gay, but scarcely a queen (in later life, Welles seems to have used the term synonymously with homosexual). ‘A mixture,’ according to Alexander Woollcott, ‘of poet, prophet, hummingbird and gadfly’.28 Wilder was that curious phenomenon, a shy party-goer.
‘By some surprising “jump of association” – I really had no idea who he was’29 he asked Welles ‘Are you the young American actor who made such an extraordinary success in Dublin?’ He had heard about him, not via The New York Times, but from his sister whose friend Lady Longford had written about him in a letter from Dublin. Welles admitted to being the very same young American actor, but poo-poohed his acting. Wilder poo-poohed his poo-poohing and tipped him off that his friend Katharine Cornell, for whom he had translated Lucrece, (one of her few flops), was looking for a young actor to play Marchbanks on her forthcoming tour. Wilder would introduce him to Alexander Woollcott, who would introduce him to Miss Cornell and her husband-director, Guthrie McClintic. ‘Get on a train tomorrow.’ He did; the train’s name was the Broadway Ltd, and on it he sped to his next date with destiny, the eighteen-month hiatus in his career suddenly terminated.
The letter of introduction Wilder wrote to Woollcott gives a new version of Welles’s Irish career: Welles, he reports, had been lending some friends a hand in painting the scenery for Jew Süss, heard about the desperate search for a Karl Alexander, presented himself and was cast. ‘The reviews were so astounding that he was kept on to play Othello and Hamlet’30 – which may have been what Welles said. Wilder describes Welles as round-faced with a lock of hair always falling into his eyes, and prone to affect an abstract pose. He did not affect it for long in Woollcott’s presence. No doubt he was trying out various personas for size: wisely, since he was about to enter the very big league of personality players. Woollcott, through his journalism, his radio work, but above all through his ceaseless social networking, was one of the key figures of pre-war civilised Manhattan. Fat and fruity, his personal legend reached its apogee in The Man who Came to Dinner, in which he was depicted as the imperious and infantile Sheridan Whiteside. (It had its apotheosis when he himself appeared in the role on stage.) Of indeterminate sexuality, friendship was his delight and his gospel. He took particular pleasure in advancing not only his and his friends’ reputations, but also in creating those of talented newcomers. Almost unheard of now, advancement through personal recommendation was one of the principal ways in which the theatre functioned: ‘who you knew’ was often the open sesame for young actors. Talent was not the ultimate criterion; a family connection or a chance introduction at a party would do it. Without influence, simply getting through to one of the big Broadway figures like Guthrie McClintic would be all but impossible; a young unknown from Chicago, Illinois wouldn’t even begin.
Welles instinctively grasped this. ‘You have given me a whole ring of keys to this city, and I’ve been busy all week excitedly fitting them into their locks and opening important doors,’31 he wrote to Thornton Wilder. ‘If I don’t cover myself with glory now you’ve opened up this New York to me, why then there’s nothing to cover.’ In introducing him to Woollcott, Wilder had put him in touch with the single most influential man in New York; Welles set about charming him with great dedication. Soon he was ‘my hulking prodigy’. Alexander King gives a glimpse of their relationship at the period: ‘I remember shortly after Orson Welles arrived in New York I was living in Woollcott’s apartment … Welles suddenly showed up looking terrible. Woollcott immediately dressed him from head to foot; he gave him all the clothes he could spare. Then he took him out and got him shoes, which were hard to find because his feet were so big. Then he introduced him to Katharine Cornell.’32 The chronology may be out, but the relationship is clear: Welles had found himself another daddy, as he was to do so often in his young manhood. He needed, and unerringly found, someone to look after him. If luck is defined as opportunity plus readiness, he was always ready; he knew how to make the most of the gifts destiny so generously threw his way. To put on someone else’s clothes is a very intimate thing to do, suggesting great trust and a certain degree of identification: if I can wear your clothes, I must be awfully like you. There was in him – and this was only intensified by his great bulk, the copious scale on which he was constructed – an ability to provoke protectiveness in others; Woollcott extended his protection in very practical ways. Things moved fast. Immediately after his first, highly successful, meeting with Welles he secured an interview for him with McClintic; later that night the exhilarated young man wrote to Roger Hill from the Algonquin Hotel:
Just a note on a night of triumph. I’ve signed the contract. I am to play Mercutio – Marchbanks and Octavius with Katharine Cornell.
Mr McClintic hasn’t even asked me to read! There may be a worry in that but Mrs Robert Edmond Jones formerly the great (she’s still great) Miss Corrington who made John Barrymore’s ‘Hamlet’ HAS heard me. Enthuses pretty much. Will coach me. – looks pretty much like the saga has begun. – All my love – Orson.
He was quite right; it had.
CHAPTER SIX
Wonder Boy of Acting/Romeo and Juliet
DADDA BERNSTEIN had finally been out-manoeuvred. All his efforts to steer Welles away from the theatre had failed. His resistance to Welles’s chosen career was not unreasonable; joining a hard-pressed, overcrowded, underemployed profession during the worst slump in America’s history would not normally be considered a shrewd move. As if he were writing at the specific behest of Bernstein, the distinguished New York critic Burns Mantle wrote, in the Chicago Tribune, that same year of 1933, ‘If I did not know how useless they are, I should start a campaign of discouragement directed at those young people who insist on a stage career. Now that the summer theatres are in full blast and considerable local talent is being employed, the urge to act is again sweeping the country and the requests for advice are piling in … for every six or eight letters I have from ambitious actors, there are at least two from various actor charities. Listen, for example, to this: “The emergency,
to some extent, continues … more than $94,000 has been given out to the needy in all branches of the theatre. More than 6,000 men, women and children have received help and about $700 a week is being distributed at this time.”’ But Welles was all right; he started, as he so often did, at the top.
His engagement to play Octavius Moulton-Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and Marchbanks in Candida, and, particularly, Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet is one of the most extraordinary breakthroughs in theatre history. His exuberant telegram to Maurice Bernstein (‘just signed contract with mcclintic to do mercutio marchbanks octavius with katharine Cornell stop biggest and best debut in america for me’) was no word of an exaggeration; but the cautionary note then sounded was also wise, in view of the enormity of the gamble: ‘dont rejoice too loudly i can be kicked out during rehearsals’. It is a great indication of Welles’s personal impact even at the age of seventeen that he got the job. It was only his personal impact that had secured it, since they had never seen him act, didn’t ask him to audition nor even to read. It is also an indication of McClintic’s considerable faith in his own judgement. A great deal was at stake in this season.
The production company that McClintic and his wife ran was Broadway’s flower; Welles was joining a team which epitomised the refined best of American theatre. Built round its star, this was none the less a company which aspired to an overall excellence at every level. Katharine Cornell was already, at the age of forty, a prime contender for the title of First Lady of the American Stage. There was no First Gentleman: the theatre of the early thirties was, as Brooks Atkinson liked to say, a matriarchy. Cornell’s fellow actress-managers Helen Hayes and the Australian-born Judith Anderson were her principal rivals, but she, in close partnership with McClintic, was a more adventurous manager than either. Her range as an actress was remarkably wide, encompassing flappers and dutiful daughters, killers and Candida, though not as yet any classical role. Taller than actresses were then supposed to be (five foot seven inches in her stockinged feet) she had a unique presence, ethereal and passionate, exotic and ordinary. Bernard Shaw had written at the time of her first Candida: ‘fancy my feelings on seeing the photograph of a gorgeous dark lady from the cradle of the human race. If you look like that it doesn’t matter a rap if you can act or not. Can you? – GBS’. She could; despite feelings of discomfort and sometimes actual physical pain when acting, she was entirely devoted to her craft. She and her husband had met in Jessie Bonstelle’s Detroit stock company; there they had learned excellent habits of work and a sense of responsibility to both the theatre itself and to the audience – especially the less wealthy section of it: ‘it is an old story that the balcony and the gallery are the true support of the theatre. They have done well by me throughout the years and I in turn feel an obligation to them,’1 McClintic wrote. Their partnership, a mariage blanc (he was homosexual), was one of fierce commitment in which their mutual and unquestioned support enabled them to challenge each other unceasingly. Their lives were their work; the theatre was their faith. It was very serious and it was great fun, within formal limits. Even fun had to be disciplined.
From Candida to The Green Hat, from The Letter to The Age of Innocence, Cornell’s work for other managers had been consistently striking and varied; when she and McClintic took the plunge into management, they had an enormous success with its first venture, The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Alien Corn which followed had been a comparable triumph. Typically, instead of looking for another vehicle, she was now taking on a challenge she had nervously avoided: Shakespeare. It was a challenge for McClintic too. He had proved himself a master craftsman in staging the well-made plays (frequently adaptations of novels) in which his wife triumphed. Candida was the nearest to a classical play that he had come; and that is a long way from the conventions and freedoms of Elizabethan theatre. When it came to Shakespeare they were both very unsure of themselves (though not of each other); they prepared very thoroughly, McClintic immersing himself in scholarly editions and critical literature, feeling obscurely inadequate in the face of what he saw as the ultimate challenge. Nervous of presenting their work to the New York critics, they planned for Romeo and Juliet a year-long tour of the United States, to give themselves a chance of getting it right.
He was particularly keen to surround himself with actors experienced in Shakespeare. When his friend Alexander Woollcott, that great pundit, on the recommendation of Professor Thornton Wilder, sent him a young man of imposing stature, startling self-confidence and an impressive knowledge of – not to say easy familiarity with – the Collected Works, McClintic must have jumped. He was not an easy man, and not easily impressed; but this was something he wanted in his company. ‘It was obvious to me that this extraordinary-looking young man with his beautiful voice and speech was a “natural” for a part in Romeo and Juliet, and it seemed at the moment he was the best to play Mercutio.’2 In addition, he asked him to play Chorus, speaking the first lines in the play. Katharine Cornell was equally impressed: ‘We were all struck by his beautiful voice and speech and always provocative acting methods. It was obvious from the time that he gave his first performance with us that he was a tremendously talented boy.’3
It remains remarkable that a key role in a huge new production of a play about which both Cornell and McClintic were anxious should be entrusted to a ‘boy’. It is no less surprising that McClintic should have cast him in the role of the quintessentially romantic young poet Marchbanks in Candida, ‘a strange, shy youth of eighteen, slight, effeminate, with a delicate childish voice, and a hunted tormented and shrinking expression that show the painful sensitiveness of very swift and acute apprehensiveness in youth’, according to Shaw’s stage directions. ‘He is so uncommon as to be almost unearthly.’ No one could accuse McClintic of type-casting. However, both Cornell and he knew the play intimately, and were prepared to take a risk. As for stammering, stuttering Occy in the revived Barretts of Wimpole Street, that again was at the very least imaginative casting, though not so extreme. It was a part for a young actor simply to be pleasant in. In fact, Welles tried to get out of playing it; he would rather do nothing than play such a minor part, according to the company manager, Gertrude Macy. The contract was conditional on his accepting all three roles, so he gave in. It would have been a wonderful break for any other young actor to be offered Octavius in such company. But Welles had the smell of glory in his nostrils.
Rehearsals were not without incident. McClintic was a painstaking, demanding director, innovatory in his methods. His staging was tasteful and skilful, essentially conventional; he surrounded himself with the best talents – for Romeo and Juliet he engaged Martha Graham to stage the dances, which she did without a whiff of innovation, simply exercising her considerable taste and skill. His work with the actors, however, was probing, designed to ensure freshness of response and freedom from hackneyed formulas. Using neither the Stanislavsky method nor any other theory, his was a very different approach to that of the block-it-and-run-it Broadway directors of his day. ‘He began,’ according to Mary Henderson, ‘by having his cast sit around a table and read the play over and over again for a week. He did this to allow the actors to get to know the script and each other, and to convey to them the kind of performance he wanted.’4 ‘Talkative, nervous, very witty,’ said Burgess Meredith of him. ‘He’d spend half the time during rehearsals telling you stories, to get you into the spirit of the theatre, of the play, of your part. Then he would get these flashes for the high points of the play, and act them out for you. He did it in a kind of broad caricature, so that you wouldn’t imitate him.’5 Meredith found McClintic ‘an extraordinarily effective director’. He was also volatile, passionate and intolerant of resistance. Stories of his towering rages are legendary.
It is evident that he and the seventeen-year-old Welles did not see eye to eye. The sort of elegance and psychological verisimilitude that McClintic was after were elusive to Welles, both by instinct and experience. The poetic theatricality
of Mac Liammóir and Edwards – their curious combination of an atavistic acting style with radical staging methods – and his own flamboyantly rhetorical manner were things that needed, according to McClintic, to be eradicated. ‘Orson at that time always played to the top row of the third balcony, both in make-up and projectivity,’6 according to a fellow actor, John Hoyt. McClintic disapproved of Welles’s ‘hammy ways’. And Welles, buzzing with the avant-garde influences and full-frontal theatrical assault he had known at the Gate, his mind still teeming with the ideas about staging he had been evolving in Everybody’s Shakespeare, can scarcely have been excited by McClintic’s sedate production, either. Nor were relations with his fellow actors of the best. Basil Rathbone, the English actor who had already played Morell to Cornell’s Candida in an earlier revival and was now her forty-two-year-old Romeo, vividly expresses the animus he felt against his young co-star in his autobiography In and Out of Character: ‘Orson Welles had come to our company via Dublin, Ireland, Thornton Wilder, and Alexander Woollcott and was supposed to be a boy wonder verging on the phenomenon of genius. With this type of advance publicity much should be forgiven him.’ It is understandable, if not altogether attractive, that the highly trained, brilliantly skilful older man should have resented the prominence accorded to the callow young Welles. Welles had no time at all for Rathbone. But he reined himself in. He knew which side his bread was buttered on. And McClintic and Cornell seemed to have sensed that, whatever the artistic disagreements, the buzz that he brought with him was in itself an asset.
His touch with the press had not deserted him. Shortly before the launch of the tour, his debut was announced, in some style, to the waiting world. YOUNG ACTOR TO PLAY MERCUTIO AND MARCHBANKS, said The New York Times. A photograph of Welles, noble and concerned, hand in pocket, dominates the theatre page. This is the sort of publicity coup that a young actor dreams of. The legend, exposed to the national press for the first time, was already evolving. The copy by Wilella Waldorf claims that Thornton Wilder saw Welles on stage in Dublin and wrote to Woollcott who wired Cornell. ‘She has agreed to the selection and Orson Welles is therefore enrolled as a leading member of her troupe.’7 The now standard story of his arrival at the Gate is duly retold, with an addition: ‘from the Gate he went on to the famous Abbey Theatre, where he had the distinction of becoming a featured performer – the first foreign player so honored. Ruth Draper was the second.’ This imaginative information can only have come from him; rather risky, one would have thought, since the Abbey were at that time touring America – about, indeed, to arrive in New York at any moment. He was nothing if not bold. Of course, nobody had heard of the Gate, and everybody had heard of the Abbey. ‘Returning to America about a year ago, young Mr Welles decided to become a writer. His play, Marching Song, will be produced in November at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.’ It had, in fact, been flatly turned down by them. At this early stage, it is evident that Welles had a great gift for providing good copy, a quality always endearing to the press. If what had actually happened was a little dull, he would obligingly spice it up; at a pinch, he would invent something altogether new. Of course, journalists will always simplify and italicise, but they had a wonderful collaborator in ‘young Mr Welles’.
