Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  Welles was at his most jovially demonic in rehearsal, possessed by a spirit of almost unstoppable invention, regardless of life or limb. As well as the ex-vaudevillians and broken-down tragedians, he had surrounded himself with friends and contemporaries – Joe Cotten, Arlene Francis, Paula Laurence, Chubby Sherman – and with them any trace of inhibition he may once have had disappeared. Like a huge child, he romped gloriously through rehearsals, cheered on by the company. Welles’s ability to laugh at himself, at life, at almost anything at all – never deserted him; any of his collaborators or friends, before listing the torrents of rage or the storms of inspiration, will first cite laughter as the predominant memory of time spent with him – laughter which was often quite silly, and which could leave him (and you) helpless, with tears streaming down your faces. But there was hard, disciplined work, too. For things to appear to be going wrong, it was essential that they went absolutely right, and this required drilling, not only of the technical crew, but of the actors. ‘He fed them every line, every inflection. It was like Reinhardt mouthing Schiller,’6 said Edwin Denby.

  Welles was very sweet with the older actors, the ex-vaudevillians, the broken-down tragedians, the one-time showgirls. People who had been subjected to his whirlwind ways were astonished at the gentleness of his dealings with this senior citizenry of the theatre. For the younger actors, he delighted to give them ever more amusing and audacious business. ‘Everyone,’ said Paula Laurence, ‘had their own aria.’7 ‘Can you faint backwards?’ he asked her one day. ‘I said of course – so I did. I’d never done anything like it in my life before – but I just went straight back, and I was six inches from the floor before Joe Cotten caught me.’ The prop-maker and puppeteer Bill Baird had dropped by to deliver part of the eponymous horse just as Welles was trying to get Hiram Sherman to fall into the orchestra pit. ‘Hiram said he wouldn’t do it. So I went, “Whoop!” like that, and did a flop and landed on my back in the orchestra pit. Everybody applauded and Orson said, “Mr Baird, you’re hired.” I wasn’t on the Project. I didn’t get paid. I was just a stage-struck kid.’8

  There was only the mildest tension between the relief artists and – slightly more of them than the statutory 10 per cent – the non-relief players, those who had separate incomes. These included Joe Cotten and Arlene Francis. Francis, in her own words then ‘Queen of radio soap operas’, arrived for rehearsals one day wearing a suit with orchids; one of the reliefers wisecracked: ‘WPA orchids, I suppose.’ Despite the occasional touch of persiflage, Welles had bound his disparate company into a whole. The only sign of resistance came from Virginia Welles, who one day dared to say: ‘I don’t think this is right.’ ‘But I do,’ replied Orson, whereupon she threw a milk-shake at him. He would accept any suggestion from anyone; but to have a suggestion of his own refused (particularly by his own wife) was unacceptable, smacked of criticism. That was intolerable to him. Of course, Virginia’s outburst may not have been unconnected with the nights without number he spent away from their duplex, nights when he preferred to adapt plays, or rehearse, or carouse or simply disport himself elsewhere. And maybe she was struck from time to time by the irony of being cast as Myrtle, the hapless would-be bride of Freddy, humiliatingly condemned to trail round after her man, uncomprehending, as he pursues she knows not what.

  The only other serious check on Welles’s high spirits was Houseman. There is a photograph of the two of them standing together in the stalls of the Maxine Elliott: the black rage on Welles’s face is only matched for intensity by the look of miserable concentration on Houseman’s, all conversation having clearly come to a complete standstill. It was Houseman’s unhappy lot to point out the realities of the situation to Welles – any situation. He may have done so with more or less tact, but whatever he said would have enraged Welles who was only interested in possibilities, not in limitations. Houseman’s job, in Welles’s view – his function in Welles’s life – was to make things happen, not to prevent them from happening. Even a suggestion to the effect that he was going to be denied something was enough to awaken oceanic feelings of emptiness and impotence; the immediate outcome of which was rage. The tragic situation that Houseman had constructed for himself was that he had allied his destiny to someone who profoundly resented the only gift he could offer: his sense of what was practical. Houseman wanted something: he wanted to be a part of Welles’s work. This was intolerable to Welles. He gladly accepted the input of his collaborators; it was absorbed and integrated into the concept. But Houseman wanted partnership; shared credit. Welles’s sense of his own worth was insufficient to share any credit. He needed his achievement to be endorsed unequivocally; like Walt Whitman, his cry was ‘O if I am to have so much, let me have more!’

  With the rest of his team, by contrast, he was relaxed and happy, and they liked him. Denby told Aaron Copland that Welles was the ‘most talented man in town’;9 Paul Bowles, a man so unsensual (pretty well, according to Thomson, asexual) that it is hard to imagine him and Welles in the same room together, let alone in the rough and tumble of rehearsal, was first amazed by, and then impressed by, him: ‘Within ten minutes of our meeting, Orson shocked me by remarking coolly that he saw no hope of there being anything but fascism in Spain. How right he was!’10 Welles’s certainty in his theatrical instinct was beginning to be matched by a general assurance in worldly matters. For his startling young boss Bowles wrote, or rather assembled from existing scores (‘in that way one can have varieties and richnesses of texture almost never available in music run up rapidly’11 according to Thomson) a delectable series of ‘overtures, intermezzos, meditations, marches, even a song or two’; Nat Karson, goaded by Welles, produced as bold a visual language for Americanised Labiche as he had for Haitian Macbeth. Since the deconstructing scenery was to be the central theatrical event of the production, he was faced with a double challenge. It had to be beautiful; and it had to fall apart. He provided a gorgeous series of Paris backdrops and front cloths including rooftops, the Champs Elysées, Montmartre, la Pigalle, and that indispensable element of farce, doors, of which he had provided seven in a single flat, and a practical fountain; not to mention a plethora of brassy American vaudeville outfits. Karson was of course in charge of all the special exploding scenic effects which Bill Baird built; at one point, moreover, there are five two-dimensional cars onstage. The lighting was more straightforward; bright and sharp, as befits comedy. With Feder, of course, there could never be harmony. The screaming matches continued, to Welles’s delight and Feder’s inexpressible fury. It seems that Welles could never resist goading him. He was lucky not to have been hit; Feder had been banned by the union for a while after striking one of his subordinates. On the other hand, Edwin Denby, suddenly shouting at Feder one day, found that he crumpled completely. Whatever his personal crisis, however, he made his usual distinguished contribution to Welles’s tightly organised mayhem.

  The show had been announced in The New York Times under the headline WPA PREPARES A NOVELTY. Apart from informing its readers that the show was the newest variation on ‘the old Labiche–Michel French farce of 1850’, that Orson Welles and Edwin Denby had adapted it, that it had been placed ‘in the peg-top pants period’ and that ‘Mr Welles will also be leading man, playing his favorite role, an old gaffer’, the nature of the novelty was unexplained. The Times’s short paragraph is indicative of a certain confusion as to what to expect from this latest manifestation of the already bewilderingly diverse Federal Theatre Project; the first night was a leap in the dark for all concerned, actors and audience alike. The only clue offered by a glance at the programme was the scale of the enterprise; on that level, only the FTP could possibly have produced it.

  There were seventy-four actors on the bijou stage of the Maxine Elliott Theatre for that first night, including, in addition to the named characters, the world’s grandest countess, its most corrupt valet and an ageing cuckold with the gout; wedding guests, party guests, a bevy of Tillie’s girls (the Giggling Girls) and two
regiments of Zouaves; a maid on roller-skates. In the pit there were thirty-five musicians; an additional women’s orchestra played in the boxes during the interludes. The prop list requires, amongst other things seventy-two hat-boxes and five hundred pounds of rice; the show opened with a prologue (not in Labiche) in which the original equine crime is re-enacted: the horse eats the hat. Bill Baird had made the horse – body in brown plush; head papier mâché; roller skates attached to its hooves – and very splendid it is. A photograph on the first night shows it entering a taxi. Operating it were Edwin Denby ‘and Carol’. ‘If Macbeth had in Orson’s hands turned negroid and Wagnerian, this classical French vaudeville became a circus,’12 wrote Virgil Thomson. Marc Connelly saw the show a little way into the run. He describes that same Act One finale in vivid detail:

  The last scene13 of the first act was a ballroom in a Paris mansion. It was crowded with guests waltzing to the music of an improbably large band of zimbalon players, augmenting the conventional orchestra in the pit. The dancers floated around a fountain in the centre of the ballroom. (You must remember another object of the FTP was to provide jobs for technicians.) The fugitive hero of the piece, played by Joseph Cotten, whom we had seen being chased by half the population of Paris, dashed onto the stage pursued by gendarmes. The dancers and the music stopped as the hero leaped like a gymnast to the branches of a chandelier. As it swung back and forth, pistols were whipped out from full-dress coats and décolleté gowns. Everyone began firing at the young man on the chandelier. Simultaneously the fountain rose yet higher, drenching the fugitive until the chandelier, on an impulse of its own, rose like a balloon out of range. While the shooting kept up, 10 liveried footmen made their way through the crowd. As the curtain began to fall they announced to the audience with unruffled dignity: ‘Supper is served.’ At that moment the curtain shut off the scene –

  Which itself fell clean onto the floor, to be followed by the final descent of the house curtain. At that carefully planned and diligently rehearsed moment, Muriel Draper, inveterate collector of theatrical events, was heard to cry, according to Virgil Thomson, ‘It’s wonderful! They should keep this in the show!’ The evening was by no means over. Marc Connelly continues:

  a lady cornetist in a hussar’s uniform appeared in an upper box and offered a virtuoso demonstration of her skill –

  Houseman takes up the story:

  – a loud and brilliant solo of Paul Bowles’s variations on the Carnaval de Venise, with Hiawatha as an encore. Hardly had her well-merited applause begun to diminish when, in the upper stage box opposite, a mechanical piano broke furiously into Rosy O’Grady. The noise must have broken the sleep of a drunken guest, a member of the Countess’s ill-fated party, who now appeared, lost and leering, from behind the pianola, seemed to feel himself trapped up there and started to climb out over the edge of the box into the auditorium … with a great cry he slipped and fell and remained hanging, head down with one foot caught in a railing, swinging like an erratic pendulum over the heads of the audience while the mechanical piano switched to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 2.

  Marc Connelly met up with John Dos Passos at the interval. Tears of pleasure were running down their faces; they had been the only two people in the packed auditorium who had laughed at all. Returning for the second half, they sat together, and again screamed with laughter; again, they were the only people in the building to evince the slightest pleasure in the proceedings. Joseph Losey saw the production, too, and thought it ‘imaginative, vigorous and delightful, and I hadn’t expected it’.14 That’s real praise: from an enemy. ‘I was so impressed by this production that I went home and sent Welles a three-page wire … I thought it was the best theatre production I had ever seen in the United States. After this telegram I never heard from him.’ (Welles was convinced that Losey was pulling his leg.) Hallie Flanagan, though she had reservations about the ‘odd too physiological moment’, pronounced it ‘inspired lunacy’ and felt sorry for those who didn’t see it ‘and even sorrier for those who didn’t enjoy it’. Flanagan’s pleasure on the first night was redoubled by the sight of Harrison Grey Fiske (of the Saturday Evening Post’s ‘doom-boggling’ article) ‘rigid with horror making notes in a little book’. The (Hearst-owned) New York American was equally aghast: ‘dozens of young men and women are compelled by stress of circumstances to participate in this offensive play that represents a new low in the tide of drama. An outmoded farce has been garnered with sewage in an apparent attempt to appeal to devotees of filthy drama sufficiently to overcome the stupidity of plot and ineptness of production.’15

  For the most part the reviews expressed genial mystification at so much effort being expended to so little effect. ‘It looked as though somebody from Montclair High School had just been to a performance of the Swedish Ballet, just read a manifesto by Meyerhold on the idiocy of all idioms of the stage – and had just had a sore case of the colic, with acute caterwauls and all the other sounds of physical distress duly and direly indicated … I for one would say them hooray if they’d been sufficiently funny about it for anything like a single minute.’16 The Brooklyn Eagle sharply suggested that ‘this sort of calculated nonsense requires a much sharper calculation than they are equipped to give it. It asks for the expert and there is not a single expert on the premises.’17 (It is absolutely true that a variety artist of the past would have spent years honing a ten-minute routine; in Horse Eats Hat there was the equivalent of a hundred such routines.) Watts in the Herald Tribune was harsher yet, writing of ‘that dismal embarrassment which comes to one when actors are indulging in a grim determination to be high spirited and there is nothing to be high spirited about … I found it of surpassing interest that one of the adapters plays the rear section of the play’s highly engaging horse.’18

  When they wanted to be pleasant, like Lewis Nichols in the Times, they tried to be as whimsical as the production: ‘It is as though Gertrude Stein had dreamed a dream after a late supper of pickles and ice cream, the ensuing revelations being crisply acted by giants and midgets, caricatures, lunatics and a prop nag.’19 Nichols ends his review: ‘Half the audience was pretty indignant and the other half quite amused. It can be fought about at a top price of 55c.’ Which they did; the production was sold out, and its more fanatical devotees returned as many as twenty times during the course of the run.

  It is extraordinarily hard to assess the production of Horse Eats Hat. Some descriptions (even favourable ones) make it sound like an evening of unmitigated hell: an unrelenting series of visual gags piling up one on top of another while actors rush about dementedly, pulling faces, affecting funny voices and funny walks (Welles the worst offender). It may have been that worst of all possible things, a comedy in which the company shrieked with laughter during rehearsals. Laughter is a very serious business, a science. The important thing is to give the audience pleasure, not to have pleasure yourself. The sheer quantity of invention, the Abundance of it (as Thomson would say), is rather admirable, in the abstract, though no doubt exhausting to sit through, a sort of teenaged romp of genius. Put like that, it sounds more interesting. There is yet another way of thinking of it: as an entirely radical project, a dada deconstruction, a demonstration of the absurdity of bourgeois plays – of the notion of theatre itself. Jarry meets Labiche. In that case, laughter would hardly be the object of the exercise, simply exhilaration at watching the whole edifice of expectation blown up before one’s very eyes.

  Or perhaps it was just zany without being funny, Hellzapoppin four years ahead of time, without the talent or the script, a jeu d’esprit carried to insane lengths. Whichever of the above is true, or none, it’s an extraordinary phenomenon to have sprung out of the twenty-one-year-old brain of young Mr Welles; and there is no doubt that despite the Virgil Thomson influence, and the brilliant efforts of all his collaborators, it was his, and his alone. ‘What started as my idea,’ Houseman rather wistfully writes, ‘had turned into Orson’s private joke.’ It was all the more extraord
inary for coming immediately after the Voodoo Macbeth: eclecticism bordering on promiscuity. It is hard to grasp the nature of the brain that would produce both of these extravagant projects in such swift succession – except in their very extravagance, and in the degree to which the productions are mounted on top of the plays, rather than being realisations of them. In the discredited old formula: it is hard to know what Welles was trying to say with either of these productions, except (and this is not an insignificant proposition) that the theatre is a place where extraordinary things should happen, where the audience should be continuously assaulted and stimulated. Here he seems to overlap with Antonin Artaud (who, unbeknown of course to Welles, and purely coincidentally, had only the year before founded his Theatre of Cruelty). It is only an overlap, however, not an identity; the spiritual, apocalyptic dimension of Artaud is quite lacking from Welles. He simply wanted the theatre to be a temple of adrenalin, a place where the audience was electrified out of its mundane life. In this, surprisingly, he was a prophet, not so much of The Living Theatre, but of latter-day Broadway, where any cessation of movement, colour or noise is anathema, an obstacle to the evening’s goal: the standing ovation. His ancestors, theatrically speaking, are the nineteenth-century purveyors of melodrama, with its non-stop orchestration of tension and atmosphere. Thrills! Spills! When his approach and the play were in tune, he was among the most consummate practitioners of the century.