Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  The piece itself is unusual in form; in content it is absolutely explicit, a call for unionisation. The story is set in Steeltown, USA, in the throes of a union drive. Moll, a prostitute, is arrested by Dick because she refuses to come over with free sex. She’s taken to the night court, where she meets Harry Druggist, once respectable but now a lush. In the same cell are the members of the anti-union Liberty Committee – all of whom, including Harry, are revealed in a series of flashbacks, to be in thrall to Mr Mister, the steel boss who controls Steeltown: ‘there is not one of these eminent, deserving citizens who isn’t just as guilty as Moll is,’ writes Blitzstein. The Rev Salvation was prevailed upon by Mrs Mister to preach peace or war, according to the needs of her husband’s business; Editor Daily has printed a phony exposé of Larry Foreman’s activities; Harry kept quiet when he knew a young worker was being framed; Yasha, the violinist, and Dauber, the painter, have been bought out by their rich patroness Mrs Mister; President Prexy of the college has supplied academics to support the National Guard; Dr Specialist has falsified medical reports on a steel-worker crushed by a machine. In the final scene, Mr Mister tries to bribe Larry Foreman to join the Liberty Committee; in the heroic finale he is mocked, and the triumph of Labour is hymned. The anonymous names were not present from the start; originally Blitzstein was going to call characters Morgan and Lewis, after industrialists of the day; at some point there was to be a pro-union farmer called Sickle who united with a worker called Hammer.

  Dedicated ‘to Bert Brecht: first because I think him the most admirable theatre-writer of our time; secondly because an extended conversation with him was pardy responsible for writing the piece’,7 it is not a work of great political complexity. Eric Gordon calls it a lehrstück in the manner, presumably, of Brecht–Weill pieces like The Exception and the Rule, in which the necessity of strict submission to the Party line is demonstrated; but it doesn’t actually have that form – no one learns, except perhaps the moll, no one is changed. And of course there is no Party. It’s more a simple cartoon, a rallying piece: a pro-syndicalist cantata, in fact. This dismal description is belied by the lyrics, succinct and vivid, and especially by the music. ‘I used whatever was indicated and at hand,’ Blitzstein wrote in The New York Times. ‘There are recitatives, arias, revue-patters, tap-dances, suites, chorals, silly symphony, continuous, incidental commentary music, lullaby music – all pitchforked into it. There are also silences treated musically, and music which is practically silent.’ Kurt Weill is the obvious reference (indeed, after the première of The Cradle Will Rock Weill went around saying, ‘Have you heard my latest musical?’), but the American popular influences that for Weill are exotic and ironic are here entirely idiomatic – there is real jazz, plus hymn tunes, à la Ives. Like Weill, Blitzstein sometimes has recourse to Bach. A lot of the score, in fact, is underscoring to spoken text; but the songs proper are varied and immediate in their appeal, from the austere ecstasy of the ‘Gus and Sadie Love Song’, to the chippy satire of ‘The Rich’ and the tango with riffs of ‘Ask Us Again’. ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ enables him to have fun with Beethoven’s Egmont; while the title song is appropriately punchy. The great number of the score is the one that was the starting point for the whole piece, ‘Nickel under Your Foot’, a real hit song, the ache in the music quite palpable, intensified by the square accompaniment under the soaring tune, the cleverly simple lyric richly fulfilled.

  MOLL

  Oh you can live like Hearts-and-Flowers,

  And every day is a wonderland tour.

  Oh you can dream and scheme

  And happily put and take, take and put …

  But first be sure

  The nickel’s under your foot.

  Go stand on someone’s neck while you’re talkin’;

  Cut into somebody’s throat as you put –

  For every dream and scheme’s

  Depending on whether, all through the storm

  You’ve kept it warm,

  The nickel under your foot.

  ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ with its staccato, surging energy and irresistible rhythm is electrifyingly reprised for the finale, ending with the words THE – CRADLE – WILL – ROCK – blasted out by the ensemble.

  LARRY FOREMAN

  That’s thunder, that’s lightning.

  And it’s going to surround you!

  No wonder those stormbirds

  Seem to circle around you –

  Well, you can climb down,

  And you can’t sit still!

  That’s a storm that’s going to last until

  The final wind blows –

  And when the wind blows –

  The cradle will rock!

  Thrilled as always by a new medium, Welles planned to stage the show on a grand scale. He designed huge glass wagons to create the different scenes; the scene plot reveals four parallel moving platforms, screens, a traveller for the moon, and one for hammocks. There were, too, a double-quarter revolve and an ingenious aperture curtain. There was a large cast of solo performers, forty-four members of chorus, black and white, and twenty-four musicians. From the middle of April, the orchestra rehearsed five days a week, five hours a day. The taut, gritty workers’ opera was being done to all intents and purposes like a Broadway musical, an odd paradox that troubled a number of people (Hallie Flanagan wrote: ‘I didn’t see why they needed any scenery’.) Welles produced a leaflet for the show (‘opening on June 1st’) which is oddly inappropriate; it looks as if it’s advertising a rather jolly university revue. The words The Cradle Will Rock are boldly written over music staves, with a dancing matchstick-man fiddler (Yasha, presumably), thunder and lightning in the bottom right-hand corner, and, looming above it all, an inexplicable figure with a mortar board and a pile of papers, bearing some resemblance facially to Welles. It is, to say the least, odd. But Welles was in the full flood of his driven youthful energy, increasingly so as the first night approached.

  ‘Even during those early years he was driven to being overbusy. When he was not busy, he was lonely and miserable,’8 wrote Lehman Engel, the conductor of The Cradle Will Rock, adding: ‘he was, always has been, and still is, a boy: a Peter Pan too heavy for flying … despite his youth Orson was in full charge of whatever he undertook. When he was inclined to lag, Jack [Houseman] sped him on his way. He was inventive, witty, alternately lazy and energetic, and knowledgeable. His thinking was bold and his work usually produced sensational results … he never tired of going over the smallest details a hundred times in order to have it precisely as he wished it. He would start at ten in the morning and not leave the theatre. He might dismiss his cast at four the next morning but when we would return at noon, we would find Orson sleeping in a theatre seat … Augusta’s mother Anna Weissberger … would rush down the aisle carrying chicken soup.’

  He maintained his usual pattern of pushing himself to extremes in order to engender what he considered to be the necessary levels of adrenalin. If not precisely like Peter Pan, he was certainly, in the white heat of rehearsal, flying like a kite. ‘Orson was in a regular fever heat of creativity,’9 recalled his stage manager, David Clarke. ‘And I remember him turning to me and saying, “Did you get that?” And I’d say, “Yes, I think so,” and he’d say, “Well, you’d better, you know,” because he couldn’t remember ten minutes later what he had done … he gave them so much stuff that they couldn’t possibly use it all, and still it was just rolling out of him.’

  Rehearsals were conducted with the usual substitute props and furniture, the changing positions of the moving trucks marked out on the floor with chalk or tape. It was nevertheless a shock when, at the technical rehearsals, the set arrived. Howard da Silva (Larry Foreman) recalled in an interview that ‘as actors, it diminished our size and feeling because the production of the thing just overwhelmed us’.10 Hiram Sherman says much the same; it is clear that the actors, not for the first time in the history of the theatre, loathed the set. They were already unhappy with the orchestra
tions, of which, said Sherman, Blitzstein was not yet a master; it had sounded so much better with the piano accompaniment. With the chorus in the basement, singing under the stage, and loudspeakers throughout the auditorium, while the illuminated glass blocks trundled back and forth, the effect may well have been overwhelming in quite the wrong way. Blitzstein’s tough little piece had turned into a monumental theatrical statement. David Clarke estimated that ‘the production would have cost at that time in the commercial theatre $150,000’ – the equivalent in today’s prices of $1,000,000.

  While all this was inexorably proceeding through a series of typically strenuous and explosive technical rehearsals towards the dress rehearsal and the first public performance, events both within the Federal Theatre Project and in the real world beyond were becoming critical. The economic situation was making it increasingly difficult for Roosevelt to sustain the public programmes which had characterised his earlier period of office. Already anticipating cuts, on 27 May there had been a one-day city-wide stoppage of all WPA work; 7,000 out of 9,000 came out. Hallie Flanagan, addressing a meeting of the American Theatre Council that day, had defended them: ‘Federal Theatre workers were striking for what was once described as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness … if we object to that method I feel that some word should come from this gathering as to a better method.’11 The blow fell on 10 June, just four days before The Cradle Will Rock was due to open: Mrs Flanagan was instructed to cut the Project by 30 per cent; in effect, as Goldstein points out, ‘to do so meant issuing pink slips to 1,701 workers’. This was accompanied by an instruction prohibiting ‘because of the cuts and the reorganisation’ any new play, musical performance or art exhibition to open before 1 July. There was no question in the minds of Welles, Houseman or Hallie Flanagan that this directive was specifically aimed at The Cradle Will Rock.

  Their assumption was that the show would be considered too touchy politically. Since the beginning of rehearsals, the labour situation had become explosive – specifically in the steel industry. In Chicago, communist-led industrial protest had been met with police gunfire; ten workers had been killed. Blitzstein’s show seemed transcribed directly from the daily headlines. Government uneasiness is understandable. Three years later, the Saturday Evening Post expressed this in its habitually trenchant fashion. ‘Before this date, the WPA chiefs had been fairly audacious in backing pink propaganda, but they became thoroughly frightened when congressmen and others began to murmur. The Blitzstein operetta was supposed to have all the dynamite of Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro, which was supposed to have touched off the French Revolution.’12 It is interesting to observe how distant the turbulent events of the period seemed by 1940; in June 1937 there remained a genuine expectation – as there had been since the great crash in 1929 – of revolution.

  Roosevelt was quite consciously playing two sets of extremists off against one another. Welles and Houseman had tried to secure themselves against government intervention by inviting Flanagan and the WPA bigwig Lawrence Morris to a run-through; ‘magnificent’, he had pronounced it. There was enormous interest in the show, mainly from leftist organisations; the theatre had already, a week before the start of public performances (an unusually large number of previews, thirty-one, had been scheduled) sold 18,000 tickets. Welles and Houseman were determined, directive or no directive, that The Cradle Will Rock must open. Had they not done so, it would inevitably have seemed that they were bowing to government pressure.

  Their first move was to arrange a public dress rehearsal, which duly took place on 14 June, in front of New York’s most fashionable and progressive elements. The show itself, plagued with technical problems, went somewhat flatly; the singers were still battling with the thirty-piece orchestra. None the less, the audience went wild at the end of it; a gesture of solidarity. Another dress rehearsal passed without incident. The following day, the 16th, was the scheduled first public performance. The house – 600 seats of it – had been sold to benefit the Downtown Music School where Blitzstein taught; everything was ready for the show to open. But, according to Houseman, ‘the customary telegram authorising the production never came’. Instead what he called the WPA’s ‘Cossacks’ were guarding the theatre with instructions to see that no government property was removed. ‘The theatre was sealed. Neither the audience, which had gathered outside, nor we, the performers, could enter it,’13 recalled Howard da Silva, Larry Foreman in the show. ‘I made a big fuss, threatened to storm the barrier single-handedly, principally because my new” toupee was in my dressing room and I loved it.’ Will Geer and Howard da Silva entertained the audience in front of the theatre, Geer singing mountain songs while da Silva, ‘continuing to rehearse’, gave them one of Larry’s speeches about the difference between closed and open shop.

  ‘And now,’ wrote Marc Blitzstein, ‘the irrepressible energy and lightning drive of Orson Welles revealed themselves. He called us all together … in the only green room we had. It was actually the ladies’ powder room downstairs. I remember an unexplained pink mannequin standing in the corner. Welles said to us, “We have a production ready; we have a fully paid audience outside. And,” said Welles, “we will have our première tonight.”’ For Blitzstein, Welles was the uncontested hero of the hour: ‘Welles proceeded to solve the problem with an ingenuity, a speed and a daring I can almost not believe as I tell it.’ Houseman’s account of events is more detailed (some details have been contested) and suggests that Welles was as much at the mercy of minute-by-minute developments as anyone else. The problems were twofold: the simple physical problem of how and where to perform the show; the second, how to do so legally. The musicians’ union had stated categorically that if the show were to be done in a commercial theatre, then its members must be paid at regular commercial rates; the actors’ union had insisted that the material belonged to the Federal Theatre Project and could only be performed under their auspices. The irony of a pro-union show being blocked by the unions of the people performing it was lost on no one. These objections were at any rate academic in the absence of a suitable theatre. The ‘Historical Background on The Cradle Will Rock’ prepared by Unit 891’s press office three days later details the search: ‘The Comedy and the 49th Street, it developed, were not union houses. The Empire was done up in mothballs. The seats at the Guild were torn up for a repainting job. The National was too expensive. During much frantic telephoning a smallish man in a dark hat had been trying to tell the boys something …’ Finally, when they had abandoned any hope of finding anywhere, ‘the little man in the dark hat spoke up. “Why not take my theatre?” he asked. He was the renting agent for the Venice.’ According to Blitzstein, Welles told the actors: ‘you may not appear onstage, but there is nothing to prevent you from buying your way into whatever theatre we find, and then why not get up from your seats, as first-class American citizens, and speak your piece when your cue comes.’ The actors then trooped down the several blocks to the old theatre in company with their excited audience (who had been regaled outside the sealed theatre with pamphlets saying YOUR FRIENDS HAVE BEEN DISMISSED! YOU MAY BE NEXT!). Along the way they picked up interested passers-by, while the technicians started to prepare the building for the show. Jeannie Rosenthal finally delivered the piano she had been driving around until the theatre was confirmed.

  The Venice (formerly Jolson’s 59th Street Theatre) was much larger than the Maxine Elliott: with its 1,700 seats and huge stage (eighty foot by forty-five foot), it had been home to many musicals (The Student Prince amongst them) but its history encompassed seasons with the great Shakespeareans Southern and Marlowe and the famous twelve-week visit of the Moscow Art Theatre who played The Cherry Orchard, The Three Sisters, and The Brothers Karamazov. Having somewhat fallen on hard times, the theatre was only used now by an Italian company at weekends; when the audience for The Cradle Will Rock finally entered the auditorium, they found the Italian flag draped over a box, an emblem of Mussolini’s state which was then swiftly torn down
to a huge roar of approval. The audience was now performing itself, everyone knowing beyond doubt that they were present at an event. Welles and Houseman too were elated by the drama of it all.