Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  He had a strong personal response to the material: its theme of absolution was close to his heart, from the beginning of his career to its end. If you’ve worked out your punishment, are you absolved? Society says no, to Jean Valjean at any rate. ‘No man had ever touched him but to bruise him.’ Welles’s growing political awareness informed both production and adaptation with intense compassion for injustice (he prefaces the series with the novel’s epigraph ‘So long as these problems are not solved, so long as ignorance and poverty remain on earth, these words cannot be useless’). But beyond this, he demonstrated in his production three qualities indispensable in radio: ingenuity, intelligence and flair.

  He had an instinctive feel for the medium; he had been aware, from as early as his own plays, Marching Song with its military tattoos and Bright Lucifer, throbbing with Indian drums, of the power of sound in the theatre, having a highly musical sense of its effect on the action and its capacity for heightening dialogue; whole stretches of the Harlem Macbeth had been saved from monotony in this way. The medium of radio, moreover, perfectly suited his temperament, both as actor and director.

  It is a medium of technical solutions for technical problems: how do you suggest this aspect of the character, how do you evoke that landscape, how do you get from here to there? He was prepared to experiment with anything; in Les Misérables, in order to create life-like sewers, he dragged his crew into the men’s room, where Ray Collins and Everett Sloane played their scene over a urinal. For both the actor and the director, the medium has less to do with feeling than with thinking. For the actors, clarity of phrasing and diction evoke emotion in the audience far more than if they had deeply felt those emotions; the task of the radio actor is to make the audience see what he’s talking about. As long as the story and the images are clearly in the actors’ minds, their work is then uniquely available to improvement by externally induced intensity. Even in live broadcasting, there comes a point in the curiously unreal, hermetically sealed world of the studio when everyone engaged on the programme, standing around the microphone in their suits and spectacles, has to be galvanised into a sense of the urgency of the characters and situations.

  No one in the history of the medium has ever unleashed such tidal waves of adrenalin as Welles. Les Misérables is electric from start to finish his own gruff and very credibly aged Valjean leading the excellent group of actors (Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Martin Gabel, Everett Sloane, Chubby Sherman). His narration is afflicted with the solemn tremble with which he liked to indicate sincerity, and makes no attempt to create anything like the tone of Hugo’s own narration, but it is personal and passionate, far from the manner of the studio linkman who would normally have filled in the plot. Years later, Welles was under the impression that he had experimented with first-person narration in this production; he didn’t. The narrator is not a character, he is simply the voice of the author. The important thing is that everything in the programme has Welles’s stamp on it. Already in Les Misérables Welles’s omnicompetence was being sold: ‘The distinguished young author, director and actor Orson Welles presents the story,’ says the introducer. No one else is credited – neither actor nor technician. This solipsism is as unrealistic on radio as in the theatre; more so, perhaps: the technicians alone, especially before the development of the higher technology, were brilliantly skilful and resourceful. But there is no question, in this first of his major radio productions, of who is in charge. Within the small world of art radio, his name became one to take note of.

  Hollywood, too, began to take note. Welles was approached by Warner Brothers with the offer of a contract to develop scripts for them – but the offer didn’t promise enough money, enough power, or enough freedom. In any case, it was not his world. The world he had always craved, the world of the theatre, should have been at his feet. But it was not. Having been invited by the progressive impresario Arthur Hopkins to direct and star in King Lear, with designs by Pavel Tchelitchew (‘the Russian pederast’ whom Welles had insisted must leave the audience of Doctor Faustus before he would consent to appear onstage), he called a premature press conference, unilaterally announcing the production. Hopkins huffily withdrew, an unusual case of Welles’s instinct for publicity backfiring on him. He was again at a loose end, theatrically. Houseman was at a loose end, too, and was grateful, and rather flattered, to be asked by Hallie Flanagan to take over her job at Vassar College for Women for a year. Dropping in on the Welleses at their place at Sneden’s Landing, Houseman reported this unusual appointment to them. Virginia, he says, screamed with laughter – a deep, complicated laugh, it would appear. By now she was bewildered by the way in which the thrilling boy she had married had turned into a driven megalomaniac, and angered by the small amount of himself that he was prepared to allow her – mostly on those occasions when at the end of a hard day of eating, being shaved, having manicures, acting on stage and radio, being driven from job to job by ambulance, drinking, directing, camping it up with the boys and fornicating, he would go home, driven by the chauffeur, then ferried by the boatman, to her, and she would walk barefooted down his naked back to relax him. Still in love with him, but humiliated and lonely, she felt jealous of anyone who shared what appeared to be his real life, the part of it that did not concern her; in Houseman she observed someone who was equally dependent on him, and equally denied his full attention. Houseman’s news about his job at Vassar obviously suggested to her – though she can scarcely have seen him as a rival to her in physical terms – there was something not altogether masculine in Houseman’s dependency on Welles.

  That the dependency was not all on Houseman’s side is clear though from Welles’s moody question to him as he walked him back to his car: ‘Why don’t we start a theatre of our own?’ Houseman’s reply – ‘Why don’t we?’ – is equally downbeat; a curious start to a brave new venture, like lovers who have decided to give their relationship another chance simply because they haven’t been able to find anyone else.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Mercury

  IF THE inital impulse towards their new theatre was somewhat desultory, the reunited partners rapidly threw off any complicated feelings they may have had in a burst of brilliant energy, organising and publicising as only they knew how. As usual, Houseman expresses himself in the language of infatuation: ‘I did not go home that night or the next day or the day after that.’ The new venture’s name – so perfectly apt – was casually assumed after their first planning meal when their eyes idly lit on a two-year-old copy of the bracingly radical magazine edited by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, American Mercury; their winged feet barely hit the ground thereafter. Houseman and Welles announced their PLANS FOR A NEW THEATRE in The New York Times on 29 August 1937, only a few days after that first meeting. They staked their claim to the FTP audience in unequivocal terms: ‘When it opens its doors … the Mercury will expect to play to the same audiences that during the last two seasons stood to see Doctor Faustus, the Negro Macbeth and Murder in the Cathedral … people on a voyage of discovery in the theatre … people who either had never been to the theatre at all or who, for one reason or another, had ignored it for many seasons.’

  Quoting from the FTP questionnaires they noted that the overwhelming majority of the requests was for ‘more classical plays’, and ‘great plays of the past produced in a modern way’, so that is what they would do: ‘preferably those which seem to have some emotional or factual bearing on contemporary life’. Forestalling criticism from conservatives, they insist that ‘there will be no substitution of social consciousness for drama’; equally aware of the demands of radicals, they promised to produce new plays. To encourage this they announced the foundation of the Worklight Theatre to play on Sunday nights. New works would be performed for two or three performances, ‘fully rehearsed with music, etc, with everything but the physical side of the production’. It is an almost ideal prescription for a theatre company, the sort of thing that was triumphantly successful for brief per
iods in the English theatre at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre under Peter Hall, for example, or the Royal Court under George Devine, a mixture of classical and new writing, with an experimental studio to whose productions ‘none of the traditional inhibitions or hesitations will apply’. No such integrated theatre had ever existed in America. As so often, Welles and Houseman anticipated the development of theatrical history; or rather, their manifestos did.

  Ever mindful of the need to create an audience, they addressed themselves, a few weeks later, to the readership of the Daily Worker, appropriately modifying their pitch: ‘AGAIN – A PEOPLE’S THEATRE; THE MERCURY TAKES A BOW:1 When the Mercury Theatre opens its doors early in November, we believe another step will have been taken towards a real People’s Theatre in America.’ The objective of the Mercury, they claimed, was ‘to widen the cultural and social base of the people’s theatre’. Praising the WPA and the new audience that it had found, they make an interesting point about their own approach. ‘Aesthetically, this new fresh public, entering the theatre as on a voyage of discovery, succeeded in re-establishing the audience as an organic part of the theatre. And again, as in all the great theatrical periods, the audience is becoming a live, participating force to be taken into account by playwright, actor and director.’ The abolition of the fourth wall was certainly a crucial element in their aesthetic. They thoroughly rejected the notion of a play as something comfortably ensconced behind the proscenium arch, to be admired and applauded; they expected their audience to be critically engaged participants.

  The repertory they announced was bold. It was bold then; it would be bold now. The list consisted of Julius Caesar, Heartbreak House (with Aline MacMahon), The Duchess of Malfi (‘one of the great horror plays of all time’), William Gillette’s nineteenth-century classic of American farce, Too Much Johnson, and Ben Jonson’s The Silent Woman, (which proved, as it turned out, to be too much Jonson; they never did it). The plan was to play in repertory with no more than two plays a week. Top price was $2; there were four hundred good seats at 50c, 75c and $1 every performance. By comparison, standard Broadway prices were $3.30, $4.40. In the Daily Worker, Julius Caesar was announced by itself ‘in a modern production by Orson Welles. This tragedy (which might well be subtitled Death of a Dictator) is the most contemporary of all Elizabethan plays. In our production the stress will be on the social implications inherent in the history of Caesar and on the atmosphere of personal greed, fear and hysteria that surround a dictatorial regime. The modern parallel is obvious. For those who saw his Doctor Faustus and the Negro Macbeth, there should be no question as to the violence and immediacy which Orson Welles will give to the present-day production of Julius Caesar and Marc Blitzstein (author of that storm-centre The Cradle Will Rock) has written the music for it;’ (just in case there were the slightest doubts about their left-wing credentials.) The publicity blitz was well received; Commonweal, comparing the Mercury’s philosophy to that of the Old Vic, declared that ‘it is the duty of all who love the theatre to rally back of them’.2 Brooks Atkinson in the Times confirmed their continuity with the Federal Theatre, which, he observed, ‘has already given Mr Welles and Mr Houseman an opportunity to revise a good many professional shibboleths about the theatre’.3

  They had the press on their side from the start. What they didn’t have was any concrete financial basis for their bold announcement. The purpose of the publicity was above all to attract investors; it was a typical ploy of Houseman’s to announce a thing in order to make it happen, a ploy he had last used when he announced Panic without having even secured the rights. For the first time since then, Houseman was faced with raising money by his own efforts; this time he was not blessed with a living author who also happened to be a millionaire. They had no money themselves: Welles, typically, had spent the large sums he earned as soon as he had got it; Houseman was struggling on his small salary as Hallie Flanagan’s understudy. The sum they needed was small (barely more than $10,000) but without it, they couldn’t even begin. If the gamble failed, they would simply have to swallow all their brave words. Houseman’s first move was to secure a theatre (the Comedy, very cheap) and install a telephone. It never stopped ringing, but not with investors, only theatre-workers wanting work, and theatre-goers wanting theatre. This was, in its way, encouraging (they were filling a definite need) but no basis for creating a new company. Houseman began to despair; finally, out of the blue, a perfect stranger, George Hexter, called offering to put up $4,500 of the $10,500 they needed, and the ball started rolling. With Hexter’s sum on the table, the remainder was quickly found; without it, they would simply have had to give up. The Mercury came into existence by the skin of its teeth, and it remained in existence on the same basis. Houseman quickly assembled his team from friends, old FTP hands and newcomers; from the beginning there was a shrewd emphasis on selling: in addition to the usual technical team (stage manager and company manager) there was a press and public relations officer (Henry Senber), a special promotions division (Sylvia Regan) and a special department devoted to student subscriptions. They knew from the start that they must build a loyal Mercury audience. The Theatre Guild had its subscribers, plump and middle-class; the Mercury would have to be more streetwise. Having identified their constituency, they immediately set about reaching it. All this is very modern, a strong indication of Houseman’s organisational flair, and an essential part of the enormous impact that the Mercury made.

  Under the masterful control of that steel waif Jean Rosenthal as technical director, the theatre was swiftly converted to their purposes. As well as commanding her own troops, she used her particular elfin qualities to enlist support: she ‘inveigled some wonderful night watchman into feeding us heat from a bank across the street when we couldn’t pay our heating bills’.4 The transformation of the Comedy was more radical than the one they had wrought on the Maxine Elliott, only a block away. While that boudoir of a theatre had somehow retained its dainty character through the alternately magical and surreal proceedings unleashed onto its stage by Welles, the Comedy was, in Houseman’s phrase, ‘made functional’. The stage and its needs were favoured over those of the 623-seat auditorium, which was rather left to fend for itself – as it had been doing for some years. Once the home of the Washington Square players and scene of Ruth Draper’s debut, it had become the centre of a scandal with the steamy drama, Maya: the theatre was closed down for immorality and padlocked; the actors, held responsible for the content of their roles, were threatened with legal action. The resulting outcry forced a revision of the censorship law; this turned out to be the high point of the Comedy’s career. Thereafter, it led a twilit existence, with occasional visits from amateur companies from Newark. Now it was rudely awakened from its slumbers by the Mercury’s army of labourers knocking it into shape; Houseman watched the transformation through a peep-hole in his office, the old projection booth left over from the Comedy’s brief and unsuccessful spell as a movie-house. Once the job was done and the conversion complete, there was a moment of jubilation as the company gathered to watch the old COMEDY sign being taken down, and the new neon MERCURY erected in its place.

  The work was done with remarkable speed, as was the entire creation of the Mercury. Houseman remarks in Run-Through, that the same process would now require ‘a million, months of discussion, major real estate operations, City, State, Federal participation and that of two or more gigantic foundations’; and he was writing twenty-five years ago. Welles meanwhile was assembling his company of thirty-four – another unimaginable statistic in the present age, when only the very largest subsidised theatres can think of casts of even double figures. No longer obliged to absorb the assorted vaudevillians and superannuated tragedians that formed the FTP’s standing army, but equally unable to afford a standard Broadway company (they offered $40 per week, with $25 for junior members, on no binding contract; anyone was free to leave at two weeks’ notice), Welles made a statement of intent which was seen as a sort of clarion cry to the non-est
ablished profession: ‘We are enlisting the co-operation of those actors and musicians who, whether they have had theatrical experience or not, seem to us best suited to work in the theatre. We hope to develop a company of actors who will be prepared to revitalise the classics and be able to turn from them more keenly attuned and aware, to handling great plays of the contemporary scene.’

  Over the course of the season, more than 3,000 people auditioned for the thirty or forty available jobs. Welles never ceased insisting that the actor was the central unit of his theatre, and the dream of a company in the European manner, such as America had scarcely known, each actor being nurtured and challenged not at the expense of but to the greater glory of the whole group, exercising itself on a repertory of the world’s masterpieces, was one of the most potent parts of the Mercury’s appeal within the profession. Welles had seen the great companies with his own eyes on their own territory; he knew what he was talking about. But did he know how to create a company? The ambition alone, the mere vision, were remarkable enough in a twenty-two-year-old. If he could actually lay down the foundations of a genuine ensemble, then he would be not merely prodigious, but a master.

  Welles’s actors were drawn from pretty well the same pool as Houseman’s: the Federal Theatre Project, chums and new recruits, plus a number of people he had encountered in radio studios. These last included Elliott Reid, at seventeen years already, like Welles, a veteran of The March of Time, Martin Gabel (whose ‘gravid voice had made him, in his early twenties, one of the country’s most successful and sexy radio actors’ according to Houseman), and the fifteen-year-old Arthur Anderson, star of a show in which Welles also appeared as The Big Ham, a wandering actor-manager, veddy British and querulous unless he has his kettle and teapot. The presence of these radio actors in the Mercury company was not accidental: Welles placed enormous and, even in 1937, old-fashioned stress on the importance of the voice. ‘Emphasis has been placed on infusing language with as much beauty as the actors can lend through voice and expression. Language never lives until it is spoken aloud,’5 he said in an interview early in 1938. He favoured actors with classical experience, including two actors from the London Old Vic, George Coulouris (who was English) and the Austrian actor Stefan Schnabel (son of Artur); a RADA-trained American actor, Joseph Holland (who had a photograph of Irving on the wall of his tiny one-room apartment); and John Hoystradt, who had toured with Welles in Romeo and Juliet.