by Simon Callow
The Cornell tour was anyway a major event for the press, even without his help. Starting in Buffalo, it was to end in Brooklyn, after covering 16,538 miles, having played 77 cities in 7 months: a total of 225 performances. This represented a tremendous act of faith in the idea of touring; an idea whose time, it was widely believed, had gone. The rise of radio and film had closed many of the regional theatres; the majority of the rest had been converted into movie houses. There were now no more than four or five companies a year on the road; the country simply didn’t get to see the big shows. ‘In the 1930’s Broadway began to assume its overwhelming importance to American theatre,’8 wrote the great lighting designer Jean Rosenthal. ‘The objective of all productions became the New York run.’ In Ethan Mordden’s striking phrase: ‘all the rest was just dead wire’.9 Cornell and McClintic boldly bucked the trend, and, treading where only third-rate touring companies like those of Fritz Leiber (a sort of Donald Wolfit manqué) and Percy Vivian dared to venture, they offered their highly wrought, richly costumed and strongly cast shows to an America starved of quality theatre.
Buffalo in New York State was where they chose to open the tour, not with Romeo and Juliet but with Candida. Cornell’s performance (of which John Mason Brown had earlier written that it ‘glows with the radiance which is so uniquely Miss Cornell’s own. Its pictorial qualities are at once arresting and unforgettable’) was again warmly received; Welles’s performance was the subject of some controversy. Rathbone was very clear about it: ‘[Miss Cornell] was so beautiful and so desirable that had she murdered Morell and married Marchbanks we would have forgiven her – or almost – because in this production Marchbanks was played by Orson Welles, whose performance was so fatuously unpleasant that Morell became, by contrast, a deeply sympathetic character.’10 Welles had his revenge years later when he told Leslie Megahey on BBC television: ‘Basil Rathbone … had to shake me as I said: “You shook me like a rat.” It’s pretty hard to be shaken by a rat – you know, Mrs Campbell said he was two profiles in search of a face … a very thin, slight figure and we did it behind a couch and I sort of crouched. And of course, it always came out as a terrible, terrible campy thing … one of the poorer moments in the American theatre.’
McClintic was terse about Welles’s performance: ‘His March-banks to my way of thinking was never right.’11 Even Roger Hill considered him hopelessly unsuitable in the part: ‘He could play Jew Süss but not a normal sixteen-year-old boy.’12 Enthusiasm for his performance came from a surprising quarter: Gertrude Macy, the company manager, whose life he made something of a trial: ‘He was flamboyant, exciting, hammy … he gave an excellent performance. He should have been slight & delicate; yet he was enormous and clumsy.’13 His appearance may have contributed to his strange impact: he had had his hair permed. ‘People gathered six-deep outside the beauty shops to sneer,’ according to Welles. Interestingly, Macy adds that ‘he appealed to the general run of audiences who weren’t tied to a preconceived concept of the role.’14 Marchbanks has always been a problem role; few actors since Granville Barker have been able to render Shaw’s poet convincingly; only Rupert Graves in recent times has succeeded. Despite Macy’s enthusiasm, it may be doubted if Welles’s performance really made sense; nor does it seem that he tried very hard. McClintic’s final verdict contains some of his irritation: ‘That he got by was by no means enough.’15
The Barretts of Wimpole Street was another triumph for Miss Cornell and another damp squib from Welles. Cornell’s performance was already legendary. ‘By the crescendo of her playing, by the wild sensitivity that lurks behind her ardent gestures and her piercing stares across the footlights she charges the drama with a meaning beyond the facts it records,’16 wrote Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times. ‘Her acting is quite as remarkable for the carefulness of its design as for the fire of her presence.’ Behind the evident tastefulness of her performances was both latent temperament and painstaking, sometimes painful, work. Everything was considered and refound night after night. The casualness of Welles’s performance as Octavius must have been deeply offensive to her. ‘He was just adequate, always reading his lines intelligently, but sloppy and careless as a member of that well-disciplined, strictly ordered family,’17 according to his defender, Gertrude Macy. He was unwilling to submit himself to the ensemble feeling that both Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic strove for. Where was the glory in that? ‘I personally believe that his sprained ankle on the day of our Los Angeles opening was contrived so that the audience would not have to see him in that very subordinate role.’18 (Macy again.) He played the part under sufferance, which is the most destructive possible attitude to bring, undermining the play, the other actors, and, ultimately, oneself. It is also short-sighted; there are, of course, no small parts, only small actors: when Burgess Meredith played the role in a revival of the same production, the New York American said of him ‘his performance begins to confirm the suspicion that he’s just about the most able and versatile of the younger actors’.19 By his own lights, however, Welles was right: he wanted to establish himself, immediately, as a leading actor. He was interested neither in developing his craft nor in exploring his range. He was sublimely confident of his right to hold the centre of the stage, and his readiness for it, and he was impatient to be allowed to get on with it. Not for him the profound need to lose himself in another person, nor the desire to expose himself in public, nor even the compulsion to dazzle and thrill.
It is a curious feature of Welles’s personality, this: it would be wrong to describe him as merely ambitious, or simply arrogant. He simply knew that he was formed by temperament and physique to be a leading actor, so he would do the job. This strange conviction lies behind the casualness of so much of his work as an actor. Neither in interpretation nor in execution did he push himself very hard; he made a good strong decision about the character, devised the appropriate make-up and performed. That was that. The physical impact was all. Tom Triffely, seeing The Barretts in New Orleans, was overwhelmed: ‘his entrance was so strange, so extraordinary, like a Martian. He towered like a Buddha with a wig on’20 – an unexpected description of Elizabeth Barrett’s tongue-tied little brother. After his barely adequate showings in the season’s two revivals, it is as well that he found his stride in Romeo and Juliet. In the role of Mercutio his odd charisma and the part he was playing came together.
The production over which McClintic had laboured so intensely was received with respect (‘it is admirable Shakespeare, offered with a lavish hand to the playgoers of a period that has been treating the noblest heritage of English-speaking drama with shocking neglect’21); Woodman Thompson’s solid design was admired for the way in which ‘he has created a glowing spectacle of the romantic period that serves as a background for Shakespeare’s greatest love story’; Cornell’s radiance was routinely praised, the ensemble acclaimed – ‘a marked improvement over the Shakespeare that the American stage gave its patrons in the much-lamented “good old days” … they were Shakespearean giants in those days but the aforesaid giants too often held sway over courts of pygmies.’ But it was Welles, particularly in his home town, who elicited the golden plaudits. ‘Passing over Basil Rathbone’s Romeo, already described as handsome but cold,’ said the Chicago Tribune, most gratifyingly, ‘attention focuses on Orson Welles’s Mercutio – a new treatment of the character, abundant in vitality … I had never seen him acted in a style that approached my conception until young Welles swaggered out to prove that the critics of Dublin who hailed him as a wonder-boy were not crazy. Welles is flamboyant, some will say – but so is Mercutio. Welles violates tradition by wearing a half-fledged beard – but it gives his boyish face a definite Tudor look. He reads the Queen Mab speech with merry flourishes, and he plunges into the duel scene with a fine fury of swordmanship.’
A photograph of Welles in the role suggests a robust, piratical figure, ear-ringed and bearded; more like the traditional image of Petruchio. It can well be imagined that Welles’s
size and force could have made for an original and startling Mercutio, quite unlike the jolly jester of Victorian tradition (‘that indestructibly happy part’, Stark Young called it, as late as 1923), or the neurotic ectomorph of current fashion. The contrast with Rathbone’s Romeo (‘which seemed to meet with McClintic’s and Cornell’s approval, as later it was to do with every critic throughout the country’,22 in his own modest phrase) must have been rather striking; Rathbone forty-one years old, Welles eighteen.
Chicago’s press, at any rate, was in no doubt that a star had been born. The Tribune followed up their enthusiastic notice with a feature on their theatre page, headed WONDER BOY OF ACTING. The page is dominated by a fine photographic portrait by Vandamm with Welles in mid-profile, a looming shadow on the wall, his right hand hanging expressively down. He looks fifteen at the most. ‘Orson Welles, who has scored a hit as Mercutio in Katharine Cornell’s production of ROMEO & JULIET,’23 reads the caption, ‘is a young Chicagoan of amazing precocity. A prep school lad, at the age of 18, he takes a leading role with the power and skill of a veteran.’ The allusions to his ‘preppy’ manner are confirmed by contemporaries; he was still recognisably a middle-class boy from the Middle West. The manner made the myth even more remarkable in the eyes of his early chroniclers. The romance of the Irish sojourn takes another leap forward; here he is ‘the David Garrick of the Irish Free State’. Reality has long been left behind. The more recent past, too, is endowed with a legendary touch: as he prepares for rehearsals with the famous drama coach Miss Dorothy Corrington, she hands him a copy of Hamlet. It is inscribed ‘John Barrymore’. She taught him, too. ‘It was a favourable omen.’ The essential elements of Welles’s public profile had now been established: precocity, direct succession to the great ones of the past, possession of special insights gained from foreign wanderings. His curriculum vitae thus presented bears a striking resemblance to that of Jesus Christ.
It is worth mentioning that Welles’s father and Roger Hill both had close contacts with Chicago’s journalistic fraternity; Ashton Stevens was Dick Welles’s best friend, and most of the other arts journalists took a lively interest in Todd School. Many of their children studied there. Welles would not have been given any attention had he lacked talent or news value; but chums in the press were very happy to fan a spark into flames.
Meanwhile there was the tour, with its twelve cities a month; three moves a week, all three plays in each city. The organisational effort required to make this happen was enormous, with large and elaborate realistic settings to be transported and installed, lighting facilities varying from house to house and having to be adjusted to, the actors (over thirty of them) to be accommodated and looked after. The Cornell management was famous for its generous treatment of the company and crew; Welles, though not exactly handsomely remunerated – his salary was described by the company manager as ‘small’, so it really must have been – stayed at excellent hotels throughout the tour. Discomfort was minimised; Cornell and McClintic were good if demanding parents of their ‘well-disciplined, strictly-ordered family’.24 This was not anything that Welles knew about, and sure enough, his role in the family rapidly became that of black sheep. Touring is traditionally an adventure playground for young actors and those who would remain young past their first youth; oats are sown, hell is raised, candles are burned at both ends. The twin excitements of a new town and an almost unbroken succession of first nights, every one a triumph of adrenalin over adversity, added to the curious sense of truancy involved in being away from home, create an emotional wildness that Orson Welles was the last person on earth to be able to resist. In a sense, he was living out his adolescence – for once, slightly later than most people. Though he had adventured way beyond his years, both mentally and geographically, he had done so as a loner. Until the Romeo and Juliet tour, he had been a stranger to the intoxicating company of his contemporaries. In fact, as John Hannah has sharply pointed out, he was living offstage the life of the Veronese youth that he and his companions in carousal (always excluding the tremendously proper Basil Rathbone, of course) were playing each night onstage.
Miss Cornell and Mr McClintic were not amused. ‘He was at all times during this long tour an arresting, stimulating and at moments exasperating member of the company,’25 said McClintic, and one can hear his teeth grind as he speaks. The theatre was not fun and games to Kit and Guthrie; it was life and death, not to mention bread and butter. They put their every penny and all their dreams into the work; they strove unceasingly, if not always blithely, to improve its quality and to enhance the status of the theatrical profession (a note in the programme for the tour says ‘to aid the Actors’ Fund of America, Miss Cornell makes a charge of 50c for her autographed photograph. The entire sum is given to the fund’). It was her public comportment as much as her professional prowess that earned her the title of First Lady (and, as Tynan wittily commented, Last Lady) of the American Theatre. She and McClintic had come about as far from roguery and vagabondage as it was possible for actors to come. Welles, by temperament and by conviction, as well as by sheer youth, embraced the contrary idea of the actor as a law unto himself, anarchic, antinomian, born for the exception, not the rule. Drinking and dining all day and all night, he was frequently in danger of failing to fulfil the actor’s absolute minimum obligation: turning up on stage in time for one’s entrance. Missing his last train for one touring date, he was obliged to charter a plane to make the show, which he did by the merest hair’s breadth; Miss Cornell was furious. Miss Cornell was often furious. When he and a chum wearing false beards and heavy cloaks, posing as foreign dignitaries, paraded round a restaurant in San Francisco in which she and some friends were dining, she was so furious that she ordered him to go to bed immediately. This is high spirits mixed up with teenage rebellion. McClintic and Cornell were very satisfactory authority figures against whom to hurl himself; better than any of the various alternately pliant or anxious adults, the Daddas and the Skippers, by whom he had been brought up and whose method was to nag, and then to indulge. There was small satisfaction in rebelling against them.
He wrote an interesting letter to Katharine Cornell after one of these misdemeanours:
About twice a year I wake up and find myself a sinner. Somebody slaps me in the face, and after the stars have cleared away and I’ve stopped blubbering, I am made aware of the discomforting realities. I see that my boots are roughshod and that I’ve been galloping in them over people’s sensibilities. – I see that I have been assertive and brutal and irreverent, and that the sins of deliberate commission are as nothing to these. – This of course is good for me, coming as I am, noisy and faltering out of the age of insolence – just as the discipline of the tour is good for me.26
This is the first of many, many such letters in his collected correspondence. ‘Sorry, I behaved badly – but I didn’t mean to’ is the burden of them all; ‘I’m just a kid, after all.’ And all these letters have something else in common: they are apologies which aren’t really apologetic at all. The transgression to which the above letter is a reply is not recorded, but there is one offence which is indicative of the gulf that separated their attitudes. He had had his hair permed for The Barretts of Wimpole Street, as he told a reporter, and he felt a fool in it. ‘I couldn’t bear it after a while, so I had my hair cut short – and nobody except Miss Cornell noticed.’ You bet she did. His casual destruction of a detail of the production carefully thought about and agreed upon must have been anathema to her, a slap in the face. Her work, and McClintic’s, depended entirely on an accumulation of detail. Lose any detail, and the whole show suffered; that was their credo. It could not have been further from Welles’s, neither then nor ever. The big gesture, the overpowering effect, the glorious surge of adrenalin: these were the ingredients of Welles’s bank-holiday approach to the theatre, gratifying for the performer, thrilling for the audience, however temporarily. For the McClintics it was a daily and painstaking re-creation of what had once been painfully
established, an exhausting but necessary uphill struggle, all too liable to fall short of excellence. Perpetual vigilance was the price of this approach. (Small wonder, when Edith Evans joined them for the New York revival of Romeo and Juliet, she felt so in sympathy with their attitude that she volunteered a cut in her salary.) Welles’s very existence was an offence to their values. ‘I found myself wondering skeptically,’ wrote Alexander Woollcott, ‘if Mr Wilder and I had done well by Miss Cornell.’27
