by Simon Callow
Hill was in no doubt whatever that the success of the season (and the aversion of financial catastrophe for him personally) was entirely due to Clayton’s activities. At one remove, Welles’s umbilical relationship with publicity continued apace. As soon as the Cornell tour came to an end, he was able to contribute personally; there was no holding him back. ‘Orson Welles,’ burbled the Chicago Herald and Examiner, ‘says that the festival will be in spirit at least something of a combination of Bayreuth and a strawberry festival … a revival of great plays, rather than a try-out of new ones or a rehash of recent B’way successes, is planned.’4 So SOME NEW PLAYS had been dropped. ‘Most everyone knows Orson Welles’ history …’ Indeed. Meanwhile, the society pages were in full thrill: ‘Not to be taken in by anything that might not measure up to the social standard of the summer repertory companies at Newport, Southampton etc in the east, a great many of our sophisticates have been going a little slow … until they heard more about it. Now that they’re quite convinced it’s going to be one of the gayest things to do, to go to the Theatre Festival, there’s no end of talk about routes to Woodstock. And on July 12th it’ll be THE THING to drive out to the Op’ry House in the pretty sleepy little town.’ When the local paper reproduced this item, its headline ran: TRILBY WILL BE FIRST PRODUCTION AT OPERA HOUSE/TODD SCHOOL THEATRE FESTIVAL OPENS HERE FOR THE SUMMER ON JULY 12/JUST THE THING/WRITER IN CHICAGO PAPER SAYS FASHIONABLES FROM NORTH SHORES WILL DRIVE OUT, which Seems to contain an understandable note of apprehension. An invasion was under way.
First to arrive were the aspiring students. Skipper’s original Big Idea, the notion of a real intensive summer school of drama, had become a mere appendage to the Drama Festival; financially speaking, it was its foundation. ‘Anyone who had 500 big depression-time dollars also had a child with a talent we were anxious to develop,’5 wrote Roger Hill, despite the brochure’s claim that ‘enrollment is extremely limited and the remarkable attractiveness of this offer makes possible the strictest exclusiveness and the very highest standards of admission requirements.’ In fact, they had reduced the fee to $250, when it seemed that the higher figure would be prohibitive, finally selecting twenty ‘students’ – Roger Hill’s inverted commas – ‘a mixed bag including a professor of Drama at Iowa and a bevy of stage-struck high-school kids’. Welles took the auditions; among the successful candidates was Virginia Nicolson, a friend of the Hills girls, a pretty, sassy young woman, whose recitation of a large section of Henry IV, Part One, convinced Welles that she was steeped in the Complete Works – something which enhanced the attraction he felt for her. They began, as the phrase had it, ‘seeing each other’ shortly afterwards: his first acknowledged girlfriend.
The next invasion consisted of what Roger Hill called the Dublingate boys. This invasion may have amazed Woodstock considerably more than that of the visiting students. Their departure from Ireland had been noted in the New York press; the Chicago Tribune, once they had arrived, hailed them under the heading DUBLIN FLAVOR TO DRAMA FESTIVAL. ‘The work of Mac Liammóir and Edwards at the Gate Theatre has attracted international acclaim,’6 the writer averred, which was not exactly true yet, but would be. They arrived in New York on 25 June; Welles was there to greet the travellers at the quay – a rather different Welles from the one they had last seen two years before. ‘Orson began to swell again. Now he had added to the swelling a new habit of towering … a looming tree, dark and elaborate as a monkey-puzzle, reared above your head, an important, imperturbable smile shot down at you from afar.’7 His manly persona was beginning to take, ousting the boyish one they had known. This was a Welles in charge – his charm a necessary mask for his authority, an integral part of his public self. The gauche show-off of the Dublin days, alternately exasperating and endearing, had modulated into this new figure: the master of the press conference, both intimate and magisterial, his omniscience qualified by a carefully controlled vulnerability. This mask stood him in good stead for many years, until it began to crack under strain in middle age, resulting in curiously ugly outbursts. By the end of his life, however, something like serenity had returned.
Here, now, in Woodstock in 1934, the ‘important, imperturbable smile’ was brilliantly effective, especially when accompanied by that irresistibly self-humorous dent of the eyebrows that spoke of fathomless frailty. Mac Liammóir and Edwards were disconcerted by the new Welles, and even more disconcerted to find themselves in the midst of what was in effect an American summer camp with a theatrical theme; disconcerted to find themselves the centre of so much ill-informed enthusiasm; disconcerted, most of all, to find their former junior company member displaying them to his public – the massed press of Woodstock and environs – with an unattractive mixture of exaggerated awe and inappropriate mockery. ‘Micheál Mac Liammóir talked the least of the actors’8 – a sure sign of something being not quite right – ‘seeing him sitting at his head of the table, so handsome in his dinner clothes, it was easy to believe that he was the last actor ever invited to speak at a certain girls’ boarding school. “Devastating fellow,” reported Mr Welles.’ To add to the homely feel of this little fireside chat of Welles, his cousin, Mrs Dudley Crafts Watson, chipped in with ‘You were play-acting when you were scarcely able to talk, Orson. And you’re still making those funny faces.’
Mac Liammóir and Edwards must have felt that they had strayed into a suburban nightmare. They may not, either, have been best pleased to realise that the Woodstock Summer Festival was in reality a celebration of the life and work of Orson Welles. ‘A great-grandson of Gideon Welles, the black-eyed young director is the star alumnus of Todd School … Orson Welles, the boy actor from Racine, Wisconsin.’9 A convincing report states that ‘he relieved everyone at his end of the table of the responsibility of talking’. His frame of reference could hardly have been grander; Woodstock was already, in his mind, an event of international significance. ‘As in the Salzburg drama festival and the musical festival in Beirut, the performers live in the town and become a part of it during the festival.’ It was Orson, Orson everywhere, organising, giving interviews, a whirlwind of promotion: self-promotion, particularly, but the effervescence of it all is contagious. It’s brilliant, breathtaking, delightful: one of the greatest one-man publicity machines ever created. Did he have any real vision, though, or did he simply say whatever would go over best?
‘Young Mr Welles has brought forth another idea for this dramatic festival,’10 reported a slightly exhausted Ashton Stevens. ‘He now thinks that now is the time to revive Romance in the form it took when Woodstock’s op’ry house was young. He now believes that there are comparatively recent classics or near-classics that need only spirited reproduction to attest their worth.’ Welles thereupon, without pausing for breath, dashed off a list of those plays: Trilby, The Only Way, Under the Red Robe, In Mizzoura, The Girl of the Golden West, The Rose of the Rancho, The Third Degree, Arizona, The Great Divide, If I Were King, The Thief, The Copperhead, Raffles, Romance, and Davy Crockett. So much for the scheme to do the great masterpieces of the past, not to mention new plays too new or courageous to be attempted by a commercial management. But of course, the season no more consisted of a systematic examination of Victorian and Edwardian American melodrama than it did of Beaumont and Fletcher or intractable modern plays. Welles instinctively knew what would appeal to the journalist to whom he was speaking. In the event, he was, inevitably and rightly, governed by practical considerations. Out of that list, produced like hankies from a conjuror’s hat, he selected one play, Trilby, with which to start the season. It seems that it was originally included in the programme to lure Whitford Kane into appearing in a play as well as directing the students. When Kane finally decided that Hollywood and its pay cheques were more attractive than a summer in Woodstock, Welles took over, as both director and star.
There can have been little reluctance on his part. Melodrama was always close to his heart, with its opportunities for extravagant displays of acting not too closely linked to
intimate emotions, its limitless opportunities for theatrical effects, and its stark opposition of good and evil. The role of Svengali, moreover, offered limitless opportunities for another of his enthusiasms: make-up. ‘He will do Svengali in a long black beard and with his own thick black hair marcelled,’ one of his many interviewers was thrilled to report. Mac Liammóir and Edwards were a little less thrilled at the choice of opening play, though it was not without sentimental resonance for them; they played the same parts – Little Billee and Taffy – that they were unwillingly about to play for Welles when they had first met as members of the Anew McMaster company. Rehearsals in that sweltering summer of 1934 were conducted al fresco and en déshabillé: swimming costumes all round (Micheál’s of unexampled brevity), which must have made the experience even less like any form of professional theatre in which they had ever been involved before. Welles told Mrs Leaming that Micheál and Hilton spent the entire time in Woodstock hating him. If this was the case, it was presumably because of their changed status in relation to him. He further alleged to her that Hilton refused to help him with his debut production itself, maintaining that the very idea of Welles as a director was absurd. ‘It was a real vendetta against me,’11 Welles claimed. Even Roger Hill, normally reliable, says ‘They were really, I think, rather mean to Orson.’12 Meanness was not something of which they were incapable, but if things were so wretched between them, it is mysterious that until Mrs Leaming’s biography, Welles had seized every opportunity to praise them and their work to the high heavens, to work with them again, to send them letters and even, during the war, food parcels. Whatever the truth of this, their attitude can hardly have figured largely in his consciousness. He was acting, directing, designing, scene-painting, prop-making, furniture-borrowing, costume-fitting, and having an affair with Virginia Nicolson – not to mention masterminding The Selling of Woodstock.
Woodstock was in two minds about Orson’s view of it. ‘Like a wax flower under a bell of glass, in the paisley and gingham County of McHenry is Woodstock, grand capital of Victorianism in the Mid-West. Towering over a Square full of Civil War monuments, a bandstand and a spring house is the edifice in the picture. This very rustic and rusticated thing is a municipal office building, a public library, a fire department and, what is more to our purpose, an honest-to-horsehair Opera House.’ This celebration of quaintness (purportedly written by Thornton Wilder, who was in residence that summer, but bearing the unmistakable stylistic fingerprints of the young Welles) was far from what the people of Woodstock wanted to hear: they saw themselves as citizens of a small and rapidly expanding city, proud of their typewriter factory and Alemeite plant. Mac Liammóir saw the place in yet another light: ‘To us it looked like any short screen comedy, new and glistening with white wooden houses and open lawns and barbecues and druggists and a procession of ice-men and plumbers who always seemed to be on the brink of calamitous comedy.’13 That is certainly the impression that the town makes today. Welles’s version was another triumph of publicity over truth.
The excitement was building. DRAMA IN HINTERLAND, said Charles Collins in the Tribune, no doubt to the further displeasure of Woodstock. ‘It represents, chiefly, the conjurations of a 20-year-old lad who appears to be a striking specimen of adolescent genius of the drama. His name is Orson Welles, and his story has often been told …’14 The opening night of the festival was stage-managed as carefully as anything that happened on the boards. India Moffett of the Tribune painted the scene for Chicago stay-at-homes: ‘It is a gala occasion, perhaps the most exciting the little town of Woodstock ever has had and certainly the most thrilling it has had in many a day. The whole town was out to watch the guests assemble in front of the theatre and the square in front of the theatre was as gay and crowded as it is on Saturday night.’15
That it was not a strictly dramatic occasion is made clear by Miss Moffett’s last paragraph. ‘It is delightful to sit and be thrilled by Orson Welles’s Svengali and be reached by Louise Prussing’s helplessness and loveliness as Trilby and every now and then to glance out through the windows and see the green leaves moving gently in the last glow of the twilight.’ The auditorium, sweltering in the absence of air-conditioning, was a-flutter with the swish of fans thoughtfully provided by the management and printed with details of the remainder of the season. Small children ran around; dowagers ate ice creams. All this was grist to Welles’s mill: ‘altho he disclaims a “purpose” in his artistic venture, feeling that “the instant a ‘purpose’ is introduced to art, it becomes propagandistic and the true spirit of art disappears,” young Mr Welles wants, he says, to help recapture the fun which should accompany our going to the theatre. “What I should like is for them to come joyously as schoolchildren going to a fair. Theatre is the only social art left which brings all sorts of people together.”’
The marketing had triumphed. Woodstock remained suspicious. Lloyd Lewis told his readers in the News: ‘the natives sat, early on the opening evening of the festival, watching the reputedly great folk from Chicago arriving in limousines to pay the incredible price of $2 a ticket. Among these sceptics it was being enviously whispered that the jailbreak of Woodstock convicts last Sunday was inspired by the prisoners’16 fear that some kind-hearted warden intended to make them see the show. But I am confident that the citizens will in time find the town’s dramatic prominence as did the reputedly “great folk” from the big, wicked city.’
It was a brilliant operation, brilliantly mounted; and there was more. A note at the bottom of the programme said: ‘A buffet supper with the cast will be served on the campus of the Todd School after the performance. Reservations are necessary.’ Hortense Hill presided at these events (‘she was a harried gal that summer’) which would go on for hours, while the cast performed for specially invited celebrity guests, including Hedda Hopper and other figures from Chicago’s beau monde. The society angle was doggedly maintained; Marshall Fields ran full-page advertisements featuring gowns for Woodstock opening nights. And though society had ensured the house full notices on which avoidance of bankruptcy depended, there was an equally important – for Welles’s purposes, more important – section of the community that needed to be considered: the critics. Skipper arranged for the school bus, his ‘land yacht’, to pick the critics up in Chicago. ‘A man of impeccable social standing was aboard to serve drinks en route,’17 wrote Hill, still evidently bewildered by the manipulatory ploys in which he found himself conniving. ‘On the way back he provided them with typewriters for their fables.’
Their fables were, on the whole, (surprise surprise), favourable, though not without an element of persiflage. ‘I could only quail and shiver as Mr Welles, striding the antique stage of the opry house added a horrendous Dracula touch to his performance. Svengali has made enormous hams out of some of the best veteran actors in stage repertory … so there is plenty of excuse for Mr Welles who is only 19,’18 said Lewis of the News. Mrs Henry Field of the Herald and Examiner held that ‘he played the villain last night with great success … his acting has great bravado, and his voice booms,’19 an equivocal sort of a compliment. His make-up was much commented on: ‘Welles’ friends and fellow alumni of the Todd school, where his career started, would fail to recognise him. He has a striking gift for make-up and the tricks that go with the trade of character acting. Too much Franco-Yiddish accent and too hurried diction were minor flaws in his performance.’ Claudia Cassidy, later Chicago’s most powerful critic, confided to her diary: ‘Orson’s Svengali was a cadaver after Du Maurier, with an operatic flair out of the music master in The Barber of Seville and Dr Miracle in Tales of Hoffmann. He could trick you into thinking his chubby youth the shell of weakness.’
The role is so extravagant, so exotic and fantastical, that it is hard to imagine what a young actor could do with it but cover himself in make-up and run his personal gamut of effects. ‘Wunderschon!’20 cries Svengali, on first hearing Trilby sing. ‘It comes straight from the ’eart; it has its roots in the stomach
– pardon, mademoiselle, will you permit that I look into your mouth? Ach Himmel! Wunderbar! Mon dieu, the roof of your mouth is much like the dome of the Pantheon. The entrance to your throat is like the middle porch of Saint Sulpice when all the doors are open on All Saints’ Day.’ Only a Laughton might have taken the part seriously and discovered its broken heart, rendering the charismatic monster a part of the human race. Welles was not in the job of reclamation; adrenalin was the name of his game. The thing that he brought to the part was size: not just his height and bulk, but the physical impact (that booming voice). ‘Even his fakes were on a Titanic scale. His Svengali lacked grace and humour, he was a lowering barbarian,’21 wrote Mac Liammóir, who had vivid memories of Beerbohm Tree in the role.
As for the production: ‘Due obviously to this youth’s fervour for the eccentric, the whole revival of this 45-year old melodrama is so bizarre as to become more mystery-farce than Victorian museum piece. Weird lights playing upon Svengali’s staring eye, savour not so much of old-time atmosphere as of hokum murder movie technic. As played … the melodrama is all Svengali … the other characters were puppets moved around so that the occult impresario might have effective moments.’22 Mac Liammóir – who might not have been best pleased by this last detail – wrote that ‘the production was disappointingly vague and indefinite, but that was because he could know nothing at that period of love, of intimacy, of Paris.’23 Mac Liammóir is surely right: the play hinges on tenderness and youthful romanticism to which the monstrous Svengali is a counterpoise. It seems likely that Welles was simply trying to pull out all the stops for his first show – as much to impress Hilton and Micheál as anyone. His curtain speech at the last performance gracefully drew attention to his guests’ main contribution: Hamlet. ‘Joseph Jefferson made a curtain speech here, 65 years ago. Since then the speeches have been of lesser and lesser importance. But I can say without any maidenly blushing, that our next play will be really good.’
