Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  The impression he made on the rest of the company was not much more favourable: Brenda Forbes, the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, said later: ‘He was gauche and tiresome. He was always talking about plans for his own theatre, or else wanting to “take over” any group he joined.’28 He was, of course, frustrated. He felt awkward in Candida, loathed being in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and though clearly enjoying himself enormously in Romeo and Juliet, he was dead by the interval; there was another two hours to go, and McClintic absolutely refused to allow him to skip the curtain call. His prodigious energy was underused. He had no regard for the production, either, whose tastefulness seemed to him the opposite of the conception of the Elizabethan theatre that he and Skipper were evolving for Everybody’s Shakespeare, on which he continued to work during the tour. The final straw came early on, in February of 1934: Romeo and Juliet, for all its respectable notices, was failing to draw the crowd. This was partly because ‘on “Big Time,” so to speak, Shakespeare had been a box-office graveyard since Barrymore’s HAMLET and Jane Cowl’s JULIET twelve years before,’29 as McClintic put it (‘when we substituted The Barretts, the business leapt to capacity’) but also because there was something, he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, not right with the production. They would not, he decided, show it to New York, or certainly not this year; it would end at Cincinnati, where they donated the set, all $ll,000-worth of it, to the local Little Theatre. The tour continued, miserably for Welles, with Candida and The Barretts.

  ‘That cooks my Manhattan opening that had been held out to me,’ wrote Orson to Skipper from Detroit. It also seems to have scuppered another venture because ‘it alters all plans for Central City … [Katharine] Carrington has called off previous plans and she and [Robert Edmond] Jones will do (God dammit!) Othello with a whole milky way of Big Stars. That hurt for a while …” The tone of this letter is very different from that of the roustabout most often found standing sheepishly on Miss Cornell’s carpet. There is serious career consideration here, steely calculation. The tone is properly, even alarmingly, grown-up. ‘Now that I’ve begun to cool off, it seems to me that the free summer might be made to mean a great deal for us both. I have an idea.’ He pursued this idea with extraordinary vigour, and in the end pulled it off with real flair. It was, he told Skipper, ‘an old idea of yours jazzed up some, and improved and made practical, I think, by an addition’.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Woodstock/Romeo and Juliet Again

  ROGER HILL’s original notion which Welles was about to jazz up had been to hold a summer drama course at Todd. The school was often used for similar purposes; the drama course idea seemed to Hill an excellent way of achieving his perennial objectives: making money and keeping Welles busy. The addition which Welles proposed in his letter was a professional repertory company in residence at Todd: nothing short of an integrated school and company. It was to be ‘not simply another school, or a Summer Repertory Theatre in another barn, doing last season’s light comedy successes and sometimes trying out next season’s but (by High Heaven!) A Chicago Drama Festival, devoted to the production of representative classics, that majority of the very greatest that nobody’s done in living memory … and those new plays which are both too good and too exciting or courageous for anyone to dare to do anywhere else.’ Among these might be, he tentatively suggests, their very own Marching Song, despite – or because of – the flop of a recent Broadway play on the same theme. He suggests a tie-in with Ravinia, his old stamping-ground; but no, better to centre it on Todd’s nearby town of Woodstock with its quaint charms, its lovely old Opera House and adorable tree-shaded square.

  Once the idea had seized him, suggestions pour out: combined dinner-and-show tickets, for example, with meals whipped up by ‘some picturesque black chef’. As he plans the publicity campaign – ‘both intensive and extensive’ – he begins to write like a press release. ‘Theatre-goers will be urged to make pilgrimages to the charming old festival town of Woodstock, to dine al fresco on the campus of Todd, world-famous preparatory school for young boys.’ He instructs Roger Hill to get to work on the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce to secure their ‘delighted co-operation’. There will be, in the square, ‘a certain amount of festooning, some gala sort of illumination … and above all, in the bandstand, a rousing local band’. This goes on, he hopes, ‘merrily’, for a month, then, assuming the success of the professional productions (the student productions won’t be for public consumption) the whole thing transfers to Chicago for a fortnight.

  How will it all be paid for? Welles will chip in a thousand dollars which he thinks he can save from his salary, they’ll charge the students for their tuition, of course, and ‘a little more money should be quite easy to get hold of by organising a company or something’. The question is not how, much less if: when? is all he wants to know. – Poor Roger Hill! His solid and practical idea transformed into a dream of megalomaniac speculation. But he couldn’t refuse. Welles was his favourite, almost as a Roman emperor or a Stuart monarch might have one. There was nothing Skipper could deny him. And indeed, few people could when he was in this vein. His passion for the idea, his inventiveness, his need all add up to an unstoppable impulse. There is something heartless about the way in which Woodstock, Skipper, the school, even the as-yet-unformed company, are all bent to his will – but then it’s so self-evidently for their own good! And for the good of the theatre! And indeed, it was, on the whole. It all came to pass, pretty well as he laid it out to Roger Hill in that first letter, with an important subtraction: the original idea.

  Meanwhile, he was planning, drawing more people into the net. His first approach was to Whitford Kane, under whose direction he mendaciously claimed in the Irish press to have acted. A distinguished Ulster actor who had played an important part in Chicago’s theatrical life, directing and acting at the Goodman, he had been the first actor to play O’Casey’s Captain Boyle in America. Welles and Roger Hill knew him from the Chicago Drama League; he and his protégé and lover Hiram ‘Chubby’ Sherman were on the panel which had singled out Welles for his performance in the dual roles of Cassius and Caesar, and had protested when he failed to win a prize. Welles wanted Kane to be the Director of Studies for the Summer School. In describing the set-up to him, Welles says that he’s hoping to get Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir to come over as the mainstay of the professional company; he hopes to do Doctor Faustus and an Arthur Schnitzler play. As for funding, he writes, shamelessly: ‘Roger is putting up most of the money. He figures the idea is a good publicity stunt for his school … he has a good many publicity connections. He has been in his time a tophole advertising man and I have every confidence he will be able to sell the idea to a large and desirable group of young people.’ He offers the job to Kane for 6 per cent of every tuition fee (about $300) and a salary – ‘here I blush a little’ – of $25 per week. It must have felt strange to be thus (in Welles’s own words) propositioned by someone who was as far as Kane was concerned only yesterday a schoolboy, but the tone of authority is compelling, the wooing direct and shameless. ‘The smart magazines are going to begin flaunting advertisements of the Todd Summer School of the Drama pretty soon and we want to be able to put “Under the direction of Whitford Kane.” Well, how about it?’ For good measure he throws in an offer to Sherman – ‘there’s a job for Chub’ – lest the thought of being separated from him might have stopped Kane from agreeing.

  Kane’s letter back is cautious: his Broadway play is doing well, but even if it closes, he fears he’s going to have to go to Hollywood to make some cash. He might spare a week or two to do one production. He’s due to teach a little at the University of Michigan, so this might fit in. He doubts whether Welles will be able to afford to bring over Hilton and Edwards, as he calls them. On the strength of this really rather uncertain commitment, Welles immediately had leaflets printed emblazoned with the promised phrase Under the direction of Whitford Kane; the paragraph detailing the members of the faculty co
ncludes: ‘This is too brief for the proper consideration of Whitford Kane. His epic career as player and producer on both sides of the Atlantic is an important chapter in the history of the stage and the outlines of his career need no rehearsal. Of all our blessings, perhaps the chiefest is the privilege of heading the constellation of the school faculty with that illustrious name.’

  Welles had meanwhile got in touch with Mac Liammóir and Edwards who had been somewhat amazed to receive an urgent telegram: ‘Would you both join me for summer season at campus in Woodstock, Illinois? 3 plays running for a fortnight each stop HAMLET for Micheál, TSAR PAUL for Hilton, something for me so far undecided stop I am trying my hand at production stop lovely school to live in and small Victorian theatre stop can pay your expenses of course and whatever is going stop now do say yes it will be a kind of a holiday and lots of fun stop love Orson.’ Their plaintive request for particulars was met with a torrent of enthusiastic persuasion: ‘With the idea of founding in America a Festival theatre in the European spirit and tradition, Woodstock, fifty miles from Chicago by easy motor drive, is to become the scene of a good deal of theatrical hysteria during the months of July and August … each production will have careful, painstaking and leisurely consideration, so that by the time the critics get at them they won’t need either the apology of the summer repertory theatre, or the older apology of the first night.’ Rehearsals were to start on 1 July; the first play to open 12 July. So it was not exactly the Moscow Art Theatre. In his mind – or in his publicity, which often amounted to the same thing – the season was a fulfilment of the wildest dreams of the most inspired visionaries the theatre has ever known. He then supplies Micheál and Hilton a list of the company which includes Kane, Sherman, Brenda Forbes (the Nurse from Cornell’s Romeo and Juliet) and others, not one of whom actually appeared. His list of plays includes, in addition to Hamlet and Tsar Paul, Doctor Faustus, Schnitzler’s Living Hours, Bleak House, The Idiot, Brothers Karamazov – and ‘SOME NEW PLAYS.’ The enterprising list reflects the reading of nineteen-year-old Welles: a typical late adolescent’s discovery of the great, dark classics, all meaning a great deal of work for the Dubliners, already exhausted by a long season. Surprisingly, however, they said yes. Hilton had been against it, but Micheál was swayed by an encounter with a mystical American acquaintance: ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit!’1 she said. ‘I wanted to tell you you’re a Navajo Indian. Yes! Isn’t that splendid. Now, here’s what I’ve just had revealed. It’s the loveliest thrill; you’re going to America.’ Bludgeoned by Orson’s exuberance, and cornered by the clairvoyant, they seem to have set out with few artistic expectations, in a mood of resignation rather than anticipation.

  Welles immediately cabled them for pictures: ‘Our publicity man is particularly partial to Sex Appeal (note the capital letters) and costume. You and Micheál together, apart and under every sort of lighting and wig.’ Hilton and Micheál too may have been somewhat astonished at receiving such urgent and authoritative instructions from the cumbersome and boyishly brash lad who had hurled himself so prodigiously across their tiny stage two years ago for a few months. If they had remembered the amount of publicity he had engendered during that brief stay, they might not have been so surprised. Here, from hotels across America (the Cornell tour still rumbling inexorably on) Welles masterminded The Selling of Woodstock, Summer of ’34. His instructions to Skipper were clear and detailed. He started with the folder: ‘this folder should have a good deal about me in it,’ he decreed, magnanimously adding ‘as well as the others and stuff about Woodstock and the Opera House and the Festival idea.’

  The first formal announcement spoke of Roger Hill conducting the summer school of the theatre with Whitford Kane as its director. Then there was a list of plays, some of which he had mentioned to his various collaborators, others of which had obviously been thrown in on the spur of the moment. Reciting lists of plays is a favourite activity of artistic directors; it was a sport at which Welles excelled throughout his career. Spring Awakening, The Constant Nymph and Strindberg’s The Father made their first, and last, appearances here, as did ‘one of the Beaumont & Fletcher comedies’. The mailing list received this: ‘Here is the most important dramatic news of the decade for the Chicago territory – the founding in the middle-west of an American Festival Theatre of genuine distinction. Probably no finer acting company will be assembled on the continent during the summer than the acting group headed by Orson Welles, Louise Prussing, Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir.’ The billing is interesting. Under Hamlet, Mac Liammóir’s ‘first appearance on this continent in his phenomenally successful interpretation’ is welcomed. ‘Mr Welles is doubling for the first time in the history of the play, as the Ghost and his brother the King.’ The third play is to be either Dmitri Merejkovsky’s Tsar Paul or a first production of The Master of the Revels, Don Marquis’s four-act comedy written that year and set in Tudor times.

  Inside is Welles’s account of himself: ‘Chicagoans have read for years of the acclaim accorded their own Orson Welles both abroad and throughout the wide reaches of the continent. Now for the first time they will have the opportunity to see him at home. The return of the only foreign artist to be starred in the Irish Abbey; the only actor of recent times to be cast simultaneously in such divergent parts as Marchbanks and Mercutio, is a genuinely important event. Within recent months every important critic has lavished praise on this young actor’s portrayal of leading roles opposite Katharine Cornell.’ There are equal extravagances for Louise Prussing (‘another Chicagoan who journeyed far from home to meet honor and rich reward. After 4 glamorous years in London where she was leading lady for such luminous names as Gerald du Maurier, Arthur Bourchier, Leslie Faber, she came back to New York’), for Mac Liammóir and for Edwards, and including the odd grammatical howler: ‘Todd School, one of the most unique educational institutions in the world. Vacant in the summer months, Mr Roger Hill, its headmaster …’ There was no danger of Roger Hill being vacant this summer.

  The leaflet discloses the names of the distinguished COMMITTEE OF FRIENDS OF THE FESTIVAL: the CHICAGO PROMOTION includes Lorado Taft, Mr & Mrs Dudley Crafts Watson; more significantly, the PROFESSIONAL ADVISORY panel includes Charles Collins, Ashton Stevens, Lloyd Lewis – the three most influential critics in Chicago, with all of whom Welles was on first-name terms. He shrewdly made sure they were on the festival’s side telling Hill to invite ‘Ashton, Charlie or all the critics’ to sign a circular letter advertising the season. But he had a much more ambitious proposal for harnessing their power: ‘they to decide on the plays and launch the whole festival as their peculiar pet and beloved creature, it being first impressed on them that after the launching they are to sit back and be as cold-bloodedly critical as critics can be … I therefore propose you give a great dinner for them all in the Tavern, bringing with you photographs, your winning way and the proposition. Are they willing to be organised as a jury, will they give their very hearty approval to something that will really mean something to the Middle West? If a company of really fine actors are placed at their bidding it should be worth their bid. They are offered the entirely unique opportunity of genuinely representing the public by planning the plays they’re to see and giving a fine project their personal blessing. If the performance and execution of the plays are not to their liking they are under no responsibility or obligation.’ A likely story. There is something a little chilling about Welles’s determination to make this thing work by whatever means. ‘I expect you to shine brightly at that great dinner,’ he says to Skipper, ominously.

  Skipper, in fact, was beginning to feel very frightened by what he had unleashed. Welles’s cavalier attitude to money bordered on the callous, considering it wasn’t his own that was at risk. The school had been hit by the continuing depression and attendances were down; Skipper was committed to bringing Mac Liammóir and Edwards over from Dublin; the only way ends could possibly meet would be if the season was 100 per cent sold out. As a casual aside
in his first letter to Whitford Kane, Welles had written: ‘The only person that can possibly lose is Roger, and he is ready for that.’ To Skipper himself he wrote: ‘I don’t blame you for feeling a little worried about money, particularly if the school isn’t filling up as it ought to and no money is coming in by way of enrolments. Perhaps,’ he helpfully adds, ‘you’d better look for some outside money from somewhere.’ Then: ‘I’ve spent over $300.’ Skipper’s anxiety turned to real panic when he consulted John Clayton, social director of the faltering Chicago magnate Samuel Insull, on how best to shift the seats. Clayton was a communications wizard whose income had suffered badly during the depression; his children were at Todd on scholarships. ‘My God, Roger, do you realise what you’re up against?’2 he said. ‘There’s a World Fair out there on the lake front with a million dollars’ worth of ballyhoo and a dozen publicity men to feed stories to papers all summer.’

  Chicago had made an almighty effort, in the midst of economic despair – and Chicago’s depression was among the worst in the country – to put a brave face on things. ‘It exhibits the spirit that enabled Chicago to overcome all obstacles,’ said a local politician. ‘It is typical of Chicago for it was achieved in the face of great obstacles. In Chicago there is no backward step.’ It looked to Roger Hill as if he himself were about to take a giant one. But Clayton was resourceful: ‘There’s one way we might pull it off … the society gals. They all owe me favours.’ He persuaded Skipper to spend yet another $1,000 on a party to launch the Festival; together they drew up a list of intellectually respectable patrons and made sure that they had invited le tout Chicago. Clayton addressed them: ‘Roger and Hortense Hill will lose their shirts unless you give them a big send-off.’ Roger Hill wrote in his memoirs: ‘The party had cost a fortune by depression standards and seemed to us only a moderate success. Then came the Sunday papers!! We read them in utter disbelief. It was our first lesson in the phoneyness of “society” as portrayed in the press. Anyway we were gloriously launched; a flaming rocket in the sky. The glow lasted all summer. Marshall Field ran a full-page ad on what to wear at our final opening night.’3