Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  MR ORSON WELLES SAYS IT WAS LIKE THIS by John K. Hutchens was The New York Times’s contribution: ‘If they are still complaining around The Lambs club that actors no longer look like actors, they should be willing to settle now for Orson Welles. Mr Welles looks very much like an actor, which, indeed, he is. No hat covers his longish hair, he gestures when he talks and he smokes a pipe.’36 The New York Post (ORSON WELLES, WHO PUTS SHAKESPEARE’S ROMANS IN FANCY DUDS, DISCUSSES RUFFIANS PAST AND PRESENT) was eager to describe his appearance, too: ‘Mr Welles looks the way musicians used to look. He has the shiny Byronic brow, the clover-sniffing head-tilt, the flowing mane that trade-marked musicians until Mr Jascha Heifetz got a haircut and placed the profession on a business basis. It wouldn’t surprise you if from a deep pocket of that cloak-like coat of his he produced a yellowed ivory and started piping a pastoral.’37 He was depicted in photographs as moody and intense; cartoons showed him bug-eyed and bizarre. His physiognomy was everywhere remarked on. Alfred Kazin wrote about it in Starting out in the Thirties: ‘Welles was so masterful that his face swelled and brooded over the empty stage like an inflated goblin’s … he was more the actor than anyone else we had ever seen, he was the fat, ugly crybaby face that was yet the ultimate in stage Svengalis.’38

  When the fascination with his physical shape and manner had been exhausted, reporters canvassed his views on life and art. He had this to say about Caesar: ‘I believe in the factual theatre. People should not be fooled. They should know they are in the theatre, and with that knowledge, they may be taken to any height of which the magic of words and light is capable of taking them. This is a return to the Elizabethan and the Greek theatre. To achieve that simplicity, that wholesomeness, to force the audience into giving the play the same creative attention that a mediaeval crowd gave a juggler on a box in a market, you have to enchant.’39 This is a very clear statement of an aesthetic position: very close, in some ways (the attention of the audience, the clarity and simplicity of the staging, the frankness of the theatricality), to that of Brecht, though naturally without the German’s political attitude. It seems however to bear little resemblance to the production of Julius Caesar that he had just directed, whose principal impact as described was in sheer theatrical power engendered by the manipulation of light and dark and sound: in atmospherics, to be precise.

  Whatever its philosophy, all eyes were now on the Mercury. At one level, there was fascination with the possibility of creating thrilling and visually breathtaking theatre at a fraction of the cost of a Broadway show. Fortuitously, Tallulah Bankhead and her then husband John Emery had just attempted to stage Antony and Cleopatra; it had opened only days before Julius Caesar to a shower of abuse verging on derision. It had cost $100,000 against the Mercury’s $6,000. The comparison was lost on no one. ‘Strange things are happening in the theatre,’40 wrote Robert Benchley in The New Yorker. ‘Old-line producers have been shaking their heads sadly at the way their expensive shows have been flopping right and left to the tune of a pretty penny … then along comes young Mr Orson Welles who opens up the old Comedy Theatre and puts on Julius Caesar in modern dress and on a bare stage with nothing but lighting to make you think you were in a theatre (and of course, some help from the text). What happens? They are playing to standing room.’

  They had, indeed, an enormous box office hit on their hands. This presented its own problems, or rather, temptations. The Mercury’s box office manager begged Houseman and Welles to hold off the next production (The Shoemaker’s Holiday) and extend the run of Caesar indefinitely (which current demand suggested was quite possible), or at least until they had accumulated a reasonable fund as a guarantee against failure. They stuck to their guns. As usual, Houseman is startlingly honest about his (and Welles’s) motives. ‘We thought of the Mercury as an instrument of artistic expression and a ladder to fame and power. We had gambled and won: intoxicated with success, we were moving much too fast, with our own special kind of reckless, whirling motion, to stop for any reason, good or bad. To Orson the prospect of coming to the theatre nightly for seven months to play the part of Brutus was abhorrent, just as it was impossible for me to think of myself sitting in my projection booth day after day with no other activity than to administer the stable and lucrative routine of a successful Broadway run.’ Instead of exploiting their hit, they announced a programme of expansions, ‘A NEW SORT OF ENTERTAINMENT – NON-STOP CLASSICAL AT THAT’ announced the Herald Tribune, only two weeks after the triumphant opening of Caesar. Houseman is quoted as saying: ‘We want to operate seven days a week, because Welles and I feel strongly that the theatre is a growing plant and, at the same time, a social unit. To regard a theatre simply as a piece of real estate into which you slap a hit if you happen to have one and show it eight times a week seems to us too low a view. The theatre will be a focus, we hope, for the literary, musical and theatrical life of a certain kind of audience in the city. We want the people to get in the habit of knowing that at the Mercury – no matter what night it happens to be – there will always be a good show at reasonable prices.’ The Mercury was setting the pace, not simply in terms of the show they were presenting, but the whole concept of what the theatre might be. And they were here to stay: ‘He also admires films and would like to direct for the screen,’41 Hutchens wrote in his profile of Welles. ‘But not for a while. You can count on him and Mr Houseman being Broadway managers for at least five years, because they have taken the Mercury Theatre on a four-walls basis for that length of time. “We’ll still be there,” he said, “even if we wind up giving a flea circus.”’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Shoemaker’s Holiday/Heartbreak House

  THE ARTISTIC directors’ reckless confidence transmitted itself to every level of the theatre. ‘George Zorn (the box office manager) grew resigned to the fact that he was working for a pair of madmen and made the best of it,’1 wrote Houseman. ‘In fact, this air of dedicated insanity came to permeate the entire organisation: from the stage to the boiler room morale was ridiculously high during those first few months of our operation.’ In addition to rehearsals for The Shoemaker’s Holiday, they created plans for their experimental Studio/Youth Theatre, ‘THE STUDIO OF THE MERCURY THEATRE. PURPOSE: To establish a permanent apprentice group to the Mercury Theatre. ORGANISATION: To furnish the theatre with new talent … to be composed of all the non-equity extras appearing in Mercury Theatre repertory. FEES: $150 for 6 months. SPONSORS: Antoinette Perry, Gertrude Lawrence, Katharine Cornell.’ Essentially, this was the framework for the Worklight Theatre described in their earliest announcements. Chubby Sherman was made head of the Acting Bureau, and a new play, David Howard’s Dear Abigail, announced as first offering. This enlightened scheme existed more on paper than in reality. There were fitful rehearsals resulting in an apprentice production of Julius Caesar; work was done on Lope de Vega’s The Well, and Abraham and Isaac from the York Mystery Circle. In its lack of proper training, organisation, or structure, and its exaction of fees for what was in effect extra work, it is strikingly reminiscent of the ‘training course’ accompanying the Woodstock Festival of three years earlier: a ruse, in fact. But even as a proposal, it was symptomatic of the brave new world of theatre that Houseman and Welles were conjuring up.

  The one official production of the Worklight Theatre (‘which is designed to give auditions to unusual pieces that are homeless’) was a revival of The Cradle Will Rock, the extraordinary commercial potential of which, in the wake of its sensational debut, had never been adequately tapped. (The press office made the most of this history, promoting it as THE SHOW THAT MADE THE FRONT PAGES.) Initially, after two Worklight Theatre performances, the show was scheduled for four Sunday performances (part of the new seven-day policy) starting on 5 December; but it proved to have more life in it than that, transferring on 3 January to the Windsor Theatre for a run of 108 performances (‘Suppressed by the government! Acclaimed by the critics! Demanded by the Public! Now on Broadway!’ screamed the handbills). Th
is was, of course, the first time that the piece had been formally reviewed; it was greeted with nearly unanimous enthusiasm. ‘It is the best thing militant labor has put into a theatre yet,’2 according to Brooks Atkinson of the Times. Richard Watts Junior, another conservative critic, was as enthused: ‘A savagely humorous social cartoon that hits hard and sardonically and must be set down as one of the most interesting dramatic events of the season.’3

  In fact, the show was a rather different one from the astonishing improvised evenings at the Venice Theatre the previous year. Those performances had little to do with Welles apart from his courage and showmanship in enabling them to happen. His design and with it his production had been scrapped; what happened onstage had simply happened, with fortuitous appropriateness. The attempt to preserve the form that had accidentally evolved at the famous first performance was not viewed with favour by the Musicians’ Union, which demanded that ten musicians be hired even if they didn’t play. This absurdity was calmly accepted by the pro-syndicalist composer, who even felt moved publicly to express his acquiescence in it. ‘I am in complete agreement with this ruling, and I resent any implication that by it or by our technique either the union or myself is overstepping the boundaries of our respective jurisdictions. Marc Blitzstein.’ That he preserved a flicker of irony, none the less, is revealed by his response when an official approached him on the composition of his phantom orchestra. He asked for four cornettists, three flute players, and three trombonists. ‘That’s not an orchestra,’ the official protested. ‘That’s the orchestra I want to have not play my opera,’ Blitzstein replied.

  For the revival, Welles had handed the show over to Blitzstein who formalised and structured what had happened that night. The result was neither as spontaneous – how could it be? – or as passionate as before. Alistair Cooke (an enthusiast of the piece) described the evening with masterly precision in an NBC broadcast: ‘I only wish that the present production did not bear the marks of its early martyrdom. In the beginning they put this on in a bleak way out of desperation. There is just a suggestion that now it goes on that way out of religious zeal … people who can overlook the slight strain of evangelism will recognise that in The Cradle Will Rock there is the constant echo of a clarion call, not only to American writing, but to American life.’4

  Mary McCarthy, not a friendly witness, had already, in no uncertain terms, taken against Blitzstein himself: ‘His acrid personality is, in fact, the whole show. He, as insolent and sardonic entrepreneur, sits downstage centre at the piano; the actors behind him are his marionettes. The timing and precision of the cast’s performances have the cold, military precision of the dance routines of the Radio City Rockettes. The Cradle Will Rock is a triumph of theatrical goose-stepping. The drama has become de-humanised; it has been made into a marvelous mechanical monster which begins to operate with great efficiency whenever Mr Blitzstein pulls the switch.’5 None the less, the show, and its presence on Broadway, further confirmed the image of the Mercury as the most dynamic outfit in town.

  Rehearsals for Shoemaker’s Holiday had started shortly after the opening of Julius Caesar. Welles lost interest in playing Brutus very early on. Virgil Thomson reports a telling incident during the early part of the run: seeking to persuade Welles to let him, rather than Blitzstein, write the music for the projected production of The Duchess of Malfi, he took Welles and Virginia to supper at Sardi’s before the show for ‘a blow-out’. Welles ate oysters and champagne, red meat and Burgundy, dessert and brandy, before he pulled himself into his canvas corset for playing Brutus. ‘It’s lucky I’m playing tragedy tonight, which needs no timing. Comedy would be difficult.’6 He had discovered that there were two points during the show when he had just enough time to go to Longchamps Diner down the alley behind the theatre and have a substantial snack, generally a triple-decker steak sandwich washed down with bourbon. The assistant stage managers Bill Alland and Richard Wilson were deputed to ensure that he returned on time, which he quite often did, arriving in the wings panting and sweating, somewhat incongruously for the noble figure he was trying to portray. Not surprisingly, his performance began to lose such vitality as it had originally had, to the point where one night someone in the audience had called out ‘Louder!’ Often he would lose his way during the longer speeches. He claimed humorously to have lost belief in the production after Mrs Patrick Campbell had come backstage and asked him ‘Why do you have everybody dressed up like chauffeurs?’7 ‘And it’s true!’ Welles told Peter Bogdanovich. ‘It spoiled it for me. Ever since then, it looked like a whole convention of Rolls-Royces.’

  There were the usual number of misfortunes during the run: the occasional unscheduled appearances onstage of people having wandered in from the alley; the accidental unleashing of the fire-sprinklers by a bored Arthur Anderson, fiddling with them backstage. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ said Welles, ‘there seems to be water on the stage.’ Anderson was fined $50, plus 50c a show for a permanent bodyguard. At one performance, possibly a little the worse for wear, Welles became overexcited during the assassination sequence and plunged the dagger that had so gratifyingly stuck in the floor deep into the flesh of Joseph Holland, playing Caesar. The actor, a professional to his fingertips, lay motionless while blood poured from his veins, crawling off at a convenient blackout and only then collapsing. He was in hospital for some months. All this was part of the fun (except perhaps for Holland). The mood in the company was one of triumphant exhilaration. Even rival groups admired the work. Clurman of the Group Theatre reluctantly admitted that ‘Caesar had a dash of originality, a boyish zip’ and Sandy Meisner, bumping into Norman Lloyd, told him: ‘I saw the production – very clever.’ Lloyd then ‘knew we were good. It felt great.’ The show was an enormous hit, the talk, not only of the town, but of the world. Its fame (more particularly that of its director) had even reached England, courtesy of the globe-trotting C.B. Cochran who tried to persuade the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford to take the production: ‘It is the best thing I have seen for a long time,’ The Daily Telegraph reported. ‘There is no fake about it. It is real theatre. Mr Welles starts where Reinhardt left off.’ He wanted to play the production at the Albert Hall. ‘I say this in all seriousness. Mr Welles seems to me to be the white hope of the English-speaking world.’8 Christmas of 1937 found him at one of the peaks of his young life, emotionally as well as professionally; his card that year reveals that Virginia was pregnant. He had it all: fame, money, respect, wife, incipient fatherhood – and mistresses, two of them, in fact, both ballerinas, to whom his impassioned attentions did not cease during (and indeed after) his wife’s pregnancy. It seems that it was important for his self-respect to be attached to lithe, glamorous beauty; his wife no longer fell into that category.

  He also had – equally necessary for him – a new production, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, for which rehearsals were now well in hand. The cast were, to put it mildly, working at full stretch: most of them (including of course Welles) were putting in regular appearances on radio, doing eight performances a week of Caesar, and then – starting at ten thirty at night and often working through till three or four in the morning – rehearsing The Shoemaker’s Holiday. The core company of Caesar was supplemented by some newcomers; a couple departed (the two women, most notably). After the success of the first production, the flood of applications from actors had become a tidal wave. Chubby Sherman (who was increasingly becoming a crucial Mercurian), already cast as the clown, Firk, was appointed casting director. Welles was not to appear in the play; in the part that he would normally have considered his (Simon Eyre, the shoemaker who becomes Lord Mayor of London) he and Chubby cast Whitford Kane, Chubby’s lover. At fifty-seven, he was a very different person from the elderly gents who had graced certain of Welles’s productions; though not exactly a star, he was a powerful leading man, a famous Volpone, Falstaff, Bottom and held by some to be a definitive Captain Boyle in Juno and the Paycock.

  Another newcomer trailing glory wa
s Vincent Price, only twenty-six, but with highly successful runs in the West End and on Broadway in Victoria Regina, in which he had created the role of Prince Albert opposite Helen Hayes. A student of art history who had drifted into the theatre, he had gone instantly almost to the very top of the tree. He knew, however, after his subsequent Broadway run in The Lady Has a Heart (for which he received, in Sam Leiter’s words, ‘several stinging notices for comically ponderously playing’) that he needed experience, a thorough grounding in his craft. Seeing Julius Caesar convinced him that the Mercury was the place to get it: the only place. In order to do so, he was prepared to take a drop in salary from $1,000 on Broadway to $125 at the Mercury, signing a seven-play contract. ‘We were all very serious actors, desperately looking for our identification with the classics.’9 Though an enthusiastic Anglophile and connoisseur of English acting (he had seen John Gielgud’s Hamlet twelve times) he was, like so many of his contemporaries, frustrated that ‘90 per cent of the American classical theatre was English actors who were very jealous of American actors invading the American theatre’. The Mercury seemed a way of creating an independent and vital American classical theatre that owed little to the British example.

  In The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Price was cast as the predatory Master Hammond; his then wife, Edith Barrett, was Rose. She was one of the prodigiously high number of actresses who applied for the usual miserably small number of female parts. Both she and Ruth Ford (Jane) had begged to be cast against type, and so they were. The amply constructed Marian Warring-Manley, on the other hand, was cast triumphantly in character as Simon Eyre’s forthright wife, Margery (‘but let that pass’). Coulouris was the King, Joe Cotten a young gentleman, Norman Lloyd and Elliott Reid Firk’s fellow apprentices. There were rich pickings for everyone, despite Welles’s trimming of the text to a running time of just over an hour. This is astonishingly bold; slightly less than half of the text is left intact. Perhaps even more astonishing is the decision to do the play at all. Virtually unknown on the American stage, even in England only occasionally played in student productions at Oxford or Cambridge, it was, Welles claimed, part of his reading while he was the guest of the Glaoui in the Atlas mountains. In an interview whose title is itself like an undiscovered play by Dekker – Everything Old Was Once New – he told the interviewer, Helen Ormsbee, that besides The Shoemaker’s Holiday, he had read The Roaring Girl and If This Be Not a Good Play, The Evil Is in It. ‘How do you like that for a title?’10 Then there were The Humorous Lieutenant, Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, and Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness and If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody. He seems to be naming the plays simply because he likes the titles.