Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  CHAPTER TEN

  Horse Eats Hat/Doctor Faustus

  ONCE MACBETH was running, Houseman did some quick, hard thinking. The Negro Unit’s next play – partly the work of Gus Smith, one of Houseman’s associate directors, who also directed and starred in it – was Turpentine, a dramatisation of the plight of Negro workers in the Florida pine woods. Decent but dull, it ran for as long as Macbeth. By contrast, Zora Neale Hurston, one of the writers attached to the Project, produced a version of Lysistrata so inflammatory that it was impossible to stage. Bored by the one and frustrated by the other, Houseman began to reconsider his position. He acknowledged to himself that, however worthy the Negro Unit may have been, there was only one person with whom he wished to work, and that was Orson Welles. The excitement, however complicated by their separate expectations of each other, proved addictive. Welles gave Houseman the sense of creative exhilaration that he was unable – yet – to muster on his own. Without it he felt dull; felt the way he looked: solid, smooth, middle-aged. In the screenplay for The Cradle Will Rock, Welles describes him as follows: ‘Now in his early thirties he conveys an impression of greater age by virtue of a magisterial air, wholly natural and unforced, and already impressive.’ He must find an honourable way to extract himself from the Negro Project.

  There is something both admirable and appalling about the frankness with which Houseman analysed and then served his needs: ‘I must leave the Project on a note of triumph, abandon my position with the Negro Theatre (turning it over to those to whom it rightly belonged) and risk my whole future on a partnership with a 20-year-old boy, in whose talent I had unquestioning faith but with whom I must increasingly play the combined and tricky roles of producer, censor, adviser, impresario, father, older brother, and bosom friend!’1 It’s hard to admire his cavalier attitude to the Unit: he could have stayed on; could have found other producers who could have brought up standards, if he had really believed in it. For the negro profession, the Unit wasn’t a career move, or an excuse for getting away with amusingly outrageous productions: it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to break down social and artistic obstacles that destroyed the hope and dignity of many millions of Americans. He was fully aware of the shallowness of his attitude (as he was fully aware of every one of his shortcomings) and admits to it in one of the bleakest sentences in his autobiography. ‘At the last moment, I was filled with that sense of loss and sorrow and of guilt that I have felt with each of the many departures and desertions of which my life is the sum.’

  But there was no going back; he was led by a sort of compulsion towards Welles, addicted to the adrenalin Welles engendered, and impelled towards the great fame and theatrical excitement that he knew were beckoning. He was not, of course, unaware of the strangeness of this move in personal terms: ‘if I did subordinate myself, consciously and willingly, to a man twelve years younger than myself, it was the price I was willing to pay for my participation in acts of theatrical creation that were far more stimulating and satisfying than any I felt capable of conceiving or creating by myself … I must immediately supply those new theatrical opportunities of which he dreamed and find fresh scope for Orson’s terrible energy and boundless ambition, before someone else did and before he became wholly absorbed in the commercial success-mill which was beginning to grind for him.’ He was aware that to launch out into the commercial theatre of 1936 was an impossibility; somehow he must find a way of keeping within the bounds of the Federal Theatre Project which, for the time being, could provide them with everything they needed.

  Harking back to those sessions at the top of Sardi’s a year before, when Houseman had first been exhilarated by Welles’s approach to the classics, they conceived the notion of a Classical Unit within the FTP. It was not difficult to persuade Hallie Flanagan – herself immersed in the classics, especially the Elizabethan classics, which would inevitably form the cornerstone of the repertory – of the value of such a unit; ‘the Federal Theatre,’2 she wrote, ‘was committed to the belief that a people’s theatre could be occupied in no better way than by production of the classics.’ She had, moreover, exactly the right theatre on her hands, the Maxine Elliott on 39th Street, which the WPA had just rented from the Shuberts. So Houseman and Welles got exactly what they wanted, when they wanted it. It was a bold decision of Flanagan’s, since the Federal Theatre Project, having survived the early crisis of Ethiopia and to a large extent confounded the Cassandras who had predicted mediocrity and incompetence, was now, after a year of existence, coming under increasing fire from a right wing implacably opposed both to the perceived radical persuasion of most FTP shows and to the very notion of subsidy in the arts. Essentially the opposition to the FTP was a branch of opposition to the New Deal. As long as Roosevelt was strong, the Project had a chance of survival, though from this point on it was always under threat, from within and without. There had already been cuts in the budget, sufficient to provoke a one-day strike by FTP workers. The fall of 1936 was the run-up to the crucial December election, Roosevelt’s bid for a second term. His critics were on the attack, and the Federal Theatre Project, a minor but highly visible example of the New Deal in action, was a prime target.

  Harrison Grey Fiske led with a comprehensive assault in the Saturday Evening Post, in August 1936, under the punning title THE FEDERAL THEATRE DOOM-BOGGLE. At the bottom of the page is a cartoon showing a smiling Roosevelt waving a Promissory Note: ‘We, the undersigned, promise to pay the national Debt of $35,000,000,000.00 with interest. Signed: American parent, American youth.’ FDR leans on a MORTGAGE ON AMERICA. Fiske immediately discerns a conspiracy: first to kill the National Theatre (a bill to create such an institution had been passed by Congress days before the establishment of the Federal Theatre Project, after which the National Theatre was quietly dropped); second to destroy Broadway. He quotes Elmer Rice: ‘The finish of the commercial theatre predicted by me for two decades is now in sight and inevitable. The present system is archaic and its ability is the only test of a play’s worth.’ Then there were the freeloaders. ‘Scores of impostors made the pay rolls. These included amateurs, office workers, “singing waiters” from village joints, miscellaneous Harlem negroes, idle welfare workers and plumbers. An especially hospitable welcome was extended to communists and those of radical leanings, white and black.’

  Fiske detects subversion. The Living Newspaper comes under particularly savage attack: ‘And so, in this perfectly natural way that has been told, it happened that a play in which a member of the government is personated attacking the US Supreme Court, and the radical party in the audience is delighted with a tableau that represents the Communist International Program for this country – a work of playwrights employed by the government – was produced in a NY City theatre rented by the government, acted by actors hired and trained by the government, with an official government symbol on the door.’

  Even the Project’s triumphs are denounced: ‘On April 14th Macbeth at the Lafayette: floodlights, a big brass band and thousands of excited Harlemites gathered in the streets, blocked traffic and necessitated a detail of police to open a lane for visitors. Thus the initial Shakespearean foray under government auspices was ushered in.’ Welles and Houseman were in the line of direct fire: ‘It proved to be a shameless degradation of the cosmic tragedy, the scene of which was transferred to Haiti, and its profound metaphysical background was converted into a frenzied voodoo jamboree. Not a vestige of the power, beauty and meaning of the titanic work remained.’ How Welles and Houseman must have hugged themselves.

  Fiske then stops pussy-footing around: ‘the Federal Theatre’s hair is full of communists … they found inspiration in the fact that Mrs Flanagan cherished the ambition to Russianise our theatre, to transform it into “the true theatre which reflects the economic forces of modern life.”’ His triumphant conclusion reports that the Theatre Veterans’ League had accused Mrs Flanagan and her colleagues of using the FTP primarily ‘as a means of disseminating communistic propaganda �
� Helen Arthur, head of the Manhattan Theatre, has invited the cast to tea in the lobby, for the purpose of studying the Soviet Theatre and the theory of government back of it.’ Somehow, tea in the lobby is to Fiske as sinister as the Soviet system itself. When the Veterans’ protest was made public, Flanagan simply pointed to the track record.

  Of course it is true that there were communists in the Federal Theatre Project, and it is certainly true that the work was broadly left wing. Harry Hopkins had roundly declared that they were ‘for labor, first last and all the time. WPA is labor – don’t forget that.’ And there is no question but that Mrs Flanagan had swallowed the vision of Soviet Russia as a nascent utopia, especially in matters theatrical. However, she was no more a Marxist than Roosevelt himself. They shared a belief in the mobilisation of labour, and sought to correct what they perceived as a flaw in the capitalist system. Neither desired to overthrow it, much less to replace it with a system absolutely alien, as both of them believed, to American history and the American way of life. Their critical view of the capitalist system was strongly in tune with the times, both in the population at large and within the artistic community. While Broadway ran ever further into the past, or cloud cuckoo land, the Federal Theatre Project insisted on relating everything to the present, regarding it with a challenging eye, believing that it was the job of the theatre not to anaesthetise, but to stimulate, the citizenry. It was naturally regarded as a threat, at many levels. Against this background, Hallie Flanagan must have greeted the notion of a Classical Unit with pleasure and relief.

  Confident that Welles and Houseman would turn out challenging work, she was none the less grateful that the plays they would choose could scarcely be accused of being left wing. As it happens, the first play that the Classical Unit chose to do was neither classical nor left wing; it almost defies categorisation, particularly as staged by Welles. In fact, it wasn’t even put on by the Classical Unit, because both Welles and Houseman hated the name. Receiving a government document formally initiating the unit, they were delighted to discover that their official designation was Project 891; that became the title of their organisation. The incongruity of their new home, the Maxine Elliott Theatre, delighted them too. Built for the mistress of the financier J.P. Morgan, it was a 900-seat jewel-box: ‘For eight years I have cherished consistently – though I am a woman,’3 Elliott wrote, ‘the dream of building a theatre that should be small and intimate; that should be beautiful and harmonious to the eye in every last detail; that should be comfortable for the spectators, and, behind the scenes, comfortable and humane for every last player.’ There was gold silk on the auditorium walls; English veined marble lined the lobby walls; the façade was of Dorset marble.

  Until recently it had been the home of Lillian Hellman’s long-running The Children’s Hour. It is a measure of the starkness of the times that the Shubert organisation had little faith in their ability to find a successor to it, preferring to lease out the theatre for an exiguous sum to the Federal Theatre Project. Miss Elliott (who had long ago retired but was still alive) might have been a little surprised to find her exquisite pink dressing room commandeered as Welles’s office, and even more surprised to see passing through its doors the procession of ‘ageing character actors, comics and eccentrics that delighted Orson’s heart … middle-aged, garrulous ladies with bright coloured hair whom nobody else seemed to want and a number of bright young ladies’4 all auditioning for a place in 891’s first production, Labiche and Marc-Michel’s vintage farce, An Italian Straw Hat. The play had been chosen specifically to mop up the pool of performers left without anything to do after the dissolution of their units. The vaudevillian faction was predominant, which tipped the balance in favour of opening with Labiche; at the same time they announced their second play, Doctor Faustus (with its own – more limited – opportunities for knockabout comedians). Shamelessly, they justified the inclusion of An Italian Straw Hat by claiming, no doubt accurately, that nineteenth-century French farce was a genre taught in schools – a fact which is none the less hardly a basis on which to construct the repertory of a classical company.

  Behind this show, influencing it in innumerable ways from the beginning, was Virgil Thomson. It had been his idea to do the play in the first place, and his was the inspired title of their version, Horse Eats Hat. Thomson suggested both the translator – the poet, dancer and librettist Edwin Denby, another American denizen of the Left Bank and habitué of Miss Stein’s salon – and the composer, Paul Bowles, not yet a writer (not yet, in fact, a composer, properly speaking, but he had Thomson’s imprimatur, and that was all that seemed to matter, on this project). When Denby and Welles went about adapting the translation – which they did in the manner that seemed best to suit Welles, writing all through the night, one taking it in turns to doze while the other wrote, then Welles reading it out loud – the end result was an extraordinary mixture of Paris and the Middle West: precisely the combination that made Virgil Thomson himself so striking. As far as the music was concerned, Thomson advised Bowles at every turn, and finally orchestrated what he wrote, since the younger man had no experience in that sphere. He was at very least a godparent to the show, and took properly godparental pride in it. His contribution was made for his own amusement, and out of affection for Houseman. Welles continued to irritate him, but he was fully aware of the size of his talent and the prodigiousness of his energy. He simply found him intellectually insubstantial, socially gauche and lacking in proper seriousness as an artist. Apart from that, he liked him a lot. ‘Working with him in his youth was ever a delight,’5 he wrote, ‘also a lesson that might be called Abundance in the Theatre.’ Notwithstanding, he took pleasure in pricking Orson’s bubble. He and Houseman made a point in conversing in French whenever he was around, which infuriated him, as it was meant to.

  This was a small tension in what were, by all accounts, wildly amusing rehearsals. Denby and Welles had taken the wonderful old play (which had been seen a decade before in a production by Richard Boleslavsky for American Laboratory Theatre, when it was greeted with bewilderment) and seized on its almost surreal progression from incident to incident to create something which owed a great deal to American vaudeville and almost nothing to the French genre of the same name. It became in their hands all form and no content: a delirious string of gags bearing only the most tenuous relationship to the basic situation, thus somewhat tampering with the nature of the original play.

  French farce is utterly unlike English farce, which is an extension of the nonsense tradition, also nightmarish but a child’s nightmare, nor does it bear much resemblance to American farce, which is usually a celebration of eccentricity and tends towards unbridled zaniness. French farces, especially those of Feydeau and Labiche, are rigidly rooted in a real world, and their plots have a grinding relentlessness that has been compared, not without justice, to those of Sophocles. They devolve without exception on sex – either the longing for it, or the illicit consummation of it. Real sex is entirely absent from both English and American farce.

  What Denby and Welles did to An Italian Straw Hat was to turn it into an American farce, a wild farrago of the incomprehensible in pursuit of the unbelievable. Maintaining the Parisian setting, Denby and Welles none the less make all the characters unmistakably Mid-Western: Fadinard is Freddy, Nonancourt his father-in-law to be is Mugglethorpe, Beauperthuis, the husband of the woman whose hat is eaten becomes Entwhistle, Trouillebert is called Little Berkowitz, ‘better known as Gumshoe Gus, of the pantry school’, and so on. The incongruity of these people apparently perfectly at ease as their carriages (or rather cars, since the piece had been updated to the Edwardian era) whizz past the Eiffel Tower only adds to the general barminess of the action. The text has been thoroughly Americanised: DAISY (the maid): ‘What’s the bride like?’ JOSEPH (the valet): ‘Oh … countrified … but plenty mazooma.’ Characters are given to Will Rogerisms like ‘What in Sam Hills is the matter with her?’ and ‘Creeping Jesus!’ (which got them into h
ot water with the censors). Sometimes the script becomes positively surreal, as when the guests for the party are announced:

  Dowager Lady Sucker

  Duchess O’Grady

  A large piece of pastrami

  A simple tick from Siam

  The three little pigs

  The teeth of Gloria Swanson

  This text, full of corny jokes, dadaist riffs and schoolboy double entendres (the second verse of Mugglethorpe’s song about his rubber plant went ‘And when of an evening your mother/Unbuttoned her blouse and began/She fed one and I fed the other/With the aid of my watering can’) was simply the pretext for a non-stop demonstration of physical theatre of a kind that can rarely have been attempted before or since. Only the resources of the Federal Theatre could have made it possible, and only someone given an absolute free rein could have carried it to the extremes to which Welles took it. His production was, in effect, an anti-production: everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, not for the characters – for the show. Labiche’s universe of treacherous conventions and devastating coincidence was replaced by treacherous scenery and terrifying mise-en-scène: collapsing proscenium arches, collapsing chandeliers (fifty years before Andrew Lloyd Webber attempted the same thing), and, particularly hair-raising, collapsing actors, occasionally hurtling to what seemed to be their deaths. Where Labiche’s characters are trapped in the remorselessness of the plot, Welles’s actors are overwhelmed by the physical production.