Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  The human material with which he had to work was varied in its abilities, but eager, enthusiastic, energetic, expressive and, especially en masse, emotional. There were no more than five professional actors in the company, which otherwise consisted of a group of voodoo drummers assembled by the Sierra Leonian Asadata Dafora Horton (who had not so long before scored a Broadway hit with his show Kyunokor based on the courtship rituals of his country) and over a hundred individuals with more or less glancing relationships to one or other of the performing arts. Welles sought to shape them into a highly drilled troupe. What he had in mind was almost choreographic – literally so in the case of the scene where Banquo’s ghost appears, which Welles had re-conceived as a sumptuous ball. Every scene was shaped and moved with dictatorial precision. Some of this work was handed over to an assistant, Tommy Anderson (‘I rehearsed them on a count of ONE move here, TWO move there’11) but for the most part it was Welles, exhorting, demonstrating, haranguing and generally risking his life. These Harlemites were not accustomed to being bossed around by preppy young whites (Brooks Atkinson described him at the period as being ‘a round-faced child prodigy who had almost reached voting age’12) and from time to time he had to be gently taken aside by his Lady Macbeth (‘Orson, don’t do that; these people will take your head off’13) or have his Macbeth read the riot act (‘So get back to work! You no-acting sons of bitches!’ a speech that nearly provoked the riot it was intended to head off). But he was shrewd enough – uncannily shrewd for a middle-class twenty-year-old who had almost no experience whatever of working with black people – to temper his autocracy with fun and charm and crate upon crate of beer. (Himself he fuelled with whiskey, until Virgil Thomson advised him that if you do that, ‘you fall’; whereupon he switched to white wine.) There was certainly no liberal crap in his dealings with the company; that might have been really offensive. He had the strength, wrote Houseman, ‘but also the kindness and loving patience – and a capacity for total concentration. He kept them going by the sheer force of his personality. His energy was at all times greater than theirs; he was even more mercurial and less predictable than they were.’

  With his principals, he rehearsed separately and more calmly. They were a powerful group: Edna Thomas as Lady Macbeth, Jack Carter, Macbeth; Banquo, Canada Lee, Maurice Ellis, Macduff; Eric Burroughs, RADA-trained, as Hecate, so often cut from the play altogether, now placed in a pivotal position: ‘the charm’s wound up!’ was in Welles’s version the final line of the text. ‘I don’t know what this guy’s up to,’14 said Burroughs, ‘but he’s a genius.’ Welles formed particularly close relations with Edna Thomas and Jack Carter. Thomas he treated with the deference due to a great lady of the theatre, and that is indeed how she was perceived by the company, though in truth this owed more to her manner than to her career. A discreet and rather statuesque lesbian, she stood apart from the company, but had great authority, with which she endorsed Welles, a crucial support. Jack Carter, his Macbeth, was an altogether different character, ‘the most furious man I have ever known’, wrote Houseman. He was six foot four inches tall, had bright blue eyes, and ‘a skin so light he could pass as white anywhere in the world, if he’d wanted to. He didn’t.’ His background was as swathed in myth as Orson’s – was he born in a French château, not knowing that he was a negro? Or did he really come from Harlem? Certainly he had a history of violence. Despite creating, to great acclaim, the role of Crown in Porgy and the eponymous Stevedore (one of the biggest hits of the Theatre Union) he didn’t work much as an actor, instead making a living through underworld connections in Harlem. Everybody, according to Houseman, was nervous about how he would behave in rehearsals. But: ‘From the moment at the first reading when Orson threw his arms around Jack, his eyes brimming with tears of gratitude and admiration, a close and passionate friendship had sprung up between these two giants.’ ‘I always seduce actors,’15 he told Barbara Leaming, ‘I make them fall in love with me.’ According to Houseman, ‘Orson spent a quarter of his radio earnings on loans and handouts to the company; a quarter on props etc; a quarter on meals; and a final quarter on Jack Carter.’

  Carter needed a lot of help with his performance. His great gift was for living as dangerously on stage as in life. He was weak vocally and without technical skills. Welles worked unceasingly and tenderly on his performance, which brought them even closer together. The frustration that Welles must have suppressed during this work is evident in the notes (CORRECTIONS, it says at the top of the page) that he dictated to Virginia on 3 April (the first night was 14 April).

  Jack’s turn before cross to steps should be fixed up.16

  First half of ‘If it were done’ speech needs fixing.

  Cripples entrance cue must be settled on.

  Cut ‘ughs’ of cripples

  ‘Hath been’ lost

  Edna should have a look over shoulder as she crosses ramp.

  Jack’s turn on ‘He has asked for me’ wrong.

  Too long a pause before ‘When Duncan is asleep.’

  Pick up ‘Would it not be received’ and ‘who dare receive it’ more

  Work on ‘I am settled.’

  Fix Canada’s turn.

  Jack should look more into air.

  JACK, FOR GOD’S SAKE LEARN YOUR LINES, AND TAKE THE WEARINESS OUT OF YOUR BODY WHEN YOU GO UP STAIRS.

  JESUS CHRIST.

  PACE, pace

  pace

  pace

  pace …

  Christ – first half of scene needs ENORMOUS amount of work.

  Jack too casual.

  ‘Stay there till we call’ – get that move right, for Christ’s sake.

  Jack not audible enough in ‘tomorrow and tomorrow’.

  Phil –

  Jesus Christ

  God

  damn

  it.

  Though he no doubt modified some of his comments in delivering them, these notes, hissed out in the stalls in the dark, give, to judge from other reports, a fairly good impression of Welles’s directing style. The precision of his staging is very clearly revealed. He rarely dealt with ideas in his work with actors; what he loved was to engender adrenalin, then embody it in the physical life of the scene. This skill – also one of the supreme gifts of Reinhardt, though Reinhardt was more interested in psychology than Welles – was one of his greatest natural endowments as a director.

  Rehearsals – which went on for a staggering four months in, Welles told a reporter, ‘this theatre, auditoriums, hallways, fire escapes, paper bags, coal scuttles, trash barrels and my apartment’ – started late and generally went through the night, to the fascination and sometimes consternation of the neighbourhood, as the voodoo drums pounded through to dawn. This impossible schedule partially accounts for the heightened levels of emotion flying around the rehearsal room. The eccentric hours were mostly to accommodate Welles’s radio schedule, which would have been hard to fulfil even without Macbeth. ‘For several days running he was never out of his clothes, but this ended with his breakdown at a radio recital of a poem of Browning’s,’17 a contemporary profile reported. ‘He got not only every word wrong but every syllable wrong and the station cut in with an organ recital. Welles always tries to top everybody; on this occasion he succeeded in adding obscurity to Browning.’ Houseman computed that he was working twenty out of the twenty-four hours. The remaining four were spent with his Macbeth, not, as we may presume, giving him notes. According to Houseman, they hit the Harlem clubs and brothels.

  One is immediately struck again by Welles’s fearlessness, and his sense of adventure. These forays could actually have been quite dangerous, although Carter with his underworld connections was as good a protector as anyone could have been. Welles needed to hurl himself into the heart of danger; to associate himself with risk and recklessness. This middle-class boy, steeped in literature (dramatic literature, at any rate), music and art, needed to earn the respect of tough guys. He was not macho himself – everyone speaks of his gentlen
ess, despite the occasional rage which was impressive but passed quickly – yet he was drawn to hell-raising. There seems to have been a need to keep high: the essential motivation of compulsive behaviour. Anything – for the alcoholic, the drug addict, the glutton, the satyriasist – not to lose the adrenalin. Here, with Jack Carter, he seems to have indulged in all of those stimulants, alcohol, food, drink and sex. It is from this period that his real intemperateness dates. There is little record of it before; hereafter he maintains a constant level of indulgence. Despite his asthma – which always threatened to return – he had a massively strong constitution and pushed his body beyond any normal limits. When nothing else worked, he took pills. Throughout the thirties, he chewed amphetamines as if they were candy.

  His relationship with Carter seems even more complex than most of his relationships. It is hardly possible that they saw themselves as a couple of likely lads, this lumbering but brilliant white boy and the raging, physically magnificent actor-criminal who were, in the rehearsal room, teacher and pupil: the boy teacher of the man. And here in the fleshpots of Harlem? Were the positions reversed? In some ways they seem to be classic buddies: whatever they did with the women, the real relationship was between the men. Male companionship in this rather simple form was rare with Welles. His instinct to seduce precluded it. Perhaps with Jack Carter he underwent the masculine rites of passage that seem somehow hitherto to have eluded him. ‘I never really knew how much of all this was director’s strategy,’ wrote Houseman, ‘or how much it reflected a true and urgent affinity between these two troubled and dangerous men. (I used to wonder, sometimes, seeing Orson return from these nocturnal forays, if they did not perhaps evoke some echo of those other long, wild nights he had spent as a boy, with his father in the red-light districts of the Mediterranean, Hong Kong and Singapore.)’ Houseman writes about all of this with a sense of doleful exclusion, like a dog left at home when his master goes out. He has the manner of a perpetual gooseberry, forever doomed to be dropped when things hot up. His own relationship with Welles was confined to making it possible for him to continue working as he wished to, and to prevent him ‘from being murdered in spite of their admiration for him’. He was not admitted into the rehearsal room, Welles claiming it would make him self-conscious.

  While Welles worked his secret magic with his actors, Houseman had been vigorously establishing the unit. The Lafayette, ‘a sordid, icy cavern when we moved in … was transformed in a month by the zeal of black technicians who had had nowhere to work, and who were denied the right of unionising themselves.’ This was to be his experience at every level: finally allowed to function, black theatre-workers excelled themselves. Houseman fought an important battle early on: the white stage-hands’ union tried to apply the Jim Crow principle at the Lafayette. Houseman said, ‘I’d be delighted to hire union stagehands if you’ll furnish me with black ones, or allow my black ones to join your union.’ They said, ‘No we can’t do that, but you are going to hire union stagehands; otherwise we’ll picket this theatre.’ He said, ‘If you seriously think you can picket a Negro theatre in Harlem for hiring Negroes, just come and try it.’ There was no picket. His skills in manoeuvring were highly developed; he was, said Mrs Flanagan, ‘our most original and imaginative mind’.18

  While Macbeth rehearsed, the Negro Theatre Project was suddenly thrust into the limelight. For fear of offending the Italian government, Washington had enforced the cancellation of the FTP’s first production, which was also to be the first Living Newspaper: the anti-Mussolini show Ethiopia. Elmer Rice, the director of the New York Theatre Project, resigned (thus nearly closing down the whole operation) and Houseman’s first show was rushed forward to become the very first show staged under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project: Walk Together Chillun! by Frank Wilson (the original Porgy), no masterpiece, but a play by a black, for blacks, with blacks. It was a modest success; the refurbishment of the Lafayette Theatre was admired, as were the technical innovations, and the band. The second play, Conjur’ Man Dies, written by a Harlem physician and novelist and directed by Joseph Losey, was fun and a smash hit, locally, though snootily received by the press. The FTP was still on probation. No one could doubt their productivity or their range. In a breathless three weeks they managed to stage with respectable success Everyman, Chalk Dust, Conjur’ Man Dies, Triple-A Plowed Under, and the American première of Murder in the Cathedral, reaching entirely new audiences; Hallie Flanagan maintains that many people went to the last-named play ‘thinking they were going to see a murder mystery’.

  Nobody quite knew what they were going to see when they bought tickets for Macbeth. Universally known in advance as The Voodoo Macbeth, it had generated a great deal of controversy, which as far as Houseman and Welles were concerned was splendid. In smart circles it was patronised, in Harlem it was whispered that it was ‘a campaign to burlesque negroes’. Even within the Negro Unit, it was controversial: rumoured never to open, it was believed, said Houseman, that ‘so much of the project’s money had been spent by me on my boyfriend’s folly that all future productions of the negro unit had been cancelled’. The casts of other plays at the Lafayette watched with envy and resentment as they glimpsed the splendid costumes being assembled in the wardrobe, and they cursed when they were obliged to shift their own sets forward to make room for Macbeth’s. Welles had been working as intensely with his collaborators as with the company. He revealed, according to Houseman, a ‘surprising capacity for collaboration. For all the mass of his own ego, he was able to apprehend other people’s weakness and strength, and to make creative use of them.’ Nat Karson, the Project’s head of design, had devised a very simple, unchanging setting for the play: a castle laid in a jungle. The exotic plants and trees were to be created in a series of backcloths of great boldness: this, Houseman says, is essentially what Welles had modelled in Plasticine on top of his ironing board at West 14th Street when he first described the idea of the production to him. Welles had very strong instincts, both visually and structurally. He had, after all, designed, painted and built his own and other people’s sets since he was ten. Any designer who worked with him could expect to be realising Welles’s concept, to a large extent. Costume was an area in which he had less expertise, but equally strong opinions. That is not to say that his designers were mere executants; realising Welles’s ideas was by no means always simple.

  Nat Karson wrote an interesting little essay about his work on this production which suggests their general approach: their basic question was ‘what would the negro interpretation do to Shakespeare? Would the characters in the accepted version of Macbeth remain the same with a negro cast or would the characterisations take on a different form and alter the basic rhythmic patterns of the play?’19 Their decision, in Karson’s words, was to create ‘a series of pictures in a chromatic ascension of color, each picture with its own series of climaxes, but essentially a part of an integral whole’. They stared off ‘in an extremely low key in the first scene, in muddy reds and blues … and as one would draw a chart or graph the colors in the following scenes mount in intensity and brilliance till we come to the ball which is the mathematical centre of the play … from that point we descend in key until we reach the sleep-walking scene … this is played in a misty haze of light … in the last act, I intensified this misty haze.’ He and Welles were attempting an exceptionally ambitious integration of all the production elements to create an emotional progression that, we can assume, may not have been present in the performances of the untrained company. They took the question of how best to serve the pigmentation of their actors extremely seriously; this affected every area of the work. ‘This necessitated a scene painting that would absorb the type of lighting, rather than reflect.’ There was, he says, the same problem with costumes: ‘I found that a touch of light color at the wrist line and the collar did a great deal to offset the particular person’s coloring … I resorted to painting various fabrics … the period was simple. However, the danger was to a
void it looking like a musical comedy and for this reason I exaggerated only the costumes of the people appearing in ensembles … I hope that I arrived at an almost architectural form, the shoulders of the men representing the capital of a Greek column with its attendant decoration and tapering to the waistline.’ He became convinced that because of the predominance of the voodoo scenes in this version, ‘the actual scenery should at all times have an eerie, luminescent quality’. Clearly a great deal of the effect he and Welles intended was dependent on light, and they had in their collaborator Abe Feder an extraordinary innovator; he was also a uniquely prickly personality.

  Feder was one of the first of the full-time lighting designers. Theatre lighting as an art was in its infancy; hitherto, it had been the province of the designer, the stage manager or the director. Feder started work in the theatre at a time technical developments were transforming the possibilities and demanding special skills. He was one of the earliest lighting designers to have access to high-wattage incandescent lamps, enabling him for the first time really to direct and focus the light; the subsequent arrival of remote control consoles worked by single operators made possible the development of complex lighting plots. He had tubular bulbs, whose beam could be projected in any direction; spotlight bulbs (birdies, perfected by Clarence Birdseye, the frozen food man), smaller in size, and much more flexible; fluorescent light, still then difficult to control; a range of up to seventy-five colours in the recently improved gelatins; and dimmers, newly developed in movie houses, which used them front of house ‘with all the fancy coloured light trimmings in the theatre proper’.