by Simon Callow
Atkinson in the Times said: ‘the general hope in this neighborhood is that the Mercury will become a permanent part of our theatrical life, giving the classics a sturdy hearing and perhaps developing new playwrights in time.’ Noting that ‘more repertory theatres have been destroyed by a hit than you can shake a stick at’, he praises the Mercury’s remounting of Cradle Will Rock, and subsequent staging of The Shoemaker’s Holiday, and playing of it in repertory with Caesar. ‘Although theatregoers have learned to let imposing announcements slip into one ear and out the other, there is every reason to believe that Orson Welles and John Houseman not only mean what they say, but have the ability to do it.’ They were being taken terribly seriously; much was expected of them. ‘We’re all a little skittish now,’31 Chubby Sherman told the Times. ‘We know our luck can’t hold. We’re expecting the deluge any moment, and when it does come we’ll quietly withdraw to the country for a while and do some quiet work. All our plays so far have been in the manner of stunts, and some day we’ll be producing a real play in which an actor opens a door, a real door, walks in, sits down and begins to talk. And that’ll be the end of us!’ This was dangerously frank talk; his point about them being found out if they played a realistic play realistically may have had a grain of truth in it. The plays had been trimmed to their talents. ‘I don’t think I’d better say any more about the Mercury. Orson will rap my knuckles.’
There were now two enormous hits playing in tandem at the Mercury. Discipline was not always of the best: Welles received a report from Dick Wilson and Bill Alland that there was a total breakdown of it on Shoemaker’s Holiday; he duly went down to the theatre to crack the whip in his own original way. Standing in the wings with a one-fifth of Ballantine’s, he simply sprayed Scotch into the offenders’ faces. It seems not to have worked; mayhem continued to reign. In fact, the run of Shoemaker’s Holiday at the Mercury lasted no more than three and a half weeks; it and Caesar transferred to the much more capacious (and resonantly named) National Theatre two blocks up. Houseman wanted to exploit the commercial success of the shows by playing in a larger house, while maintaining their much-vaunted repertory policy. The move was fortunate, because he soon needed to find a new theatre for The Cradle Will Rock, which had been playing under a commercial management to only moderate business at non-Broadway prices at the Windsor Theatre. The producer, Sam Grisman, begged him to increase the prices. How could he? They were absolutely publicly committed to their cheap-ticket policy; the press were already on the look-out for any attempt to renege on it. ‘God keep them from all Broadway entanglements,’32 wrote Burns Mantle in the Daily News. ‘My only fear for the Mercury boys … is that they might make their productions collectors’ items if they kept the cost of them too high or gave with them something less than a fair evening’s entertainment … happily, the young experimenters have held to their popular-price schedule, despite their success.’
Unimpressed–he was losing money – Grisman broke his contract and pulled out, leaving Houseman with debts and a commitment to complete a thirteen-week run, which he hoped to honour by bringing the show home. He was, in fact, despite the triumphant success of the two shows at the National (nearly twice the size of the Mercury), in some financial difficulty; Welles had wildly overspent on the two classical productions, and the returns from the box office, at the specially low prices, were not sufficient to cover the expenses of what had quickly become a major classical company. A further money-making ploy was a five-month, nationwide tour of Julius Caesar from Providence to Toronto (in association with the perhaps unhappily named Alex Yokel). The entirely new company was headed by – as Brutus – Tom Powers (who had created the role of Charles Marsden in Strange Interlude) and Edmond O’Brien as Cassius. Welles flew out to Chicago several times to supervise the production, and it opened to great acclaim, though reading the reviews may have given him mixed pleasure. ‘Let it be said now and boldly,’ wrote the Pittsburgh Journal’s Florence Fisher Parry, ‘this Pittsburgh Julius Caesar far outranks the New York production … Orson Welles is the Mercury Theatre Brutus, and a bad one. He is a genius, but not in acting … Tom Powers has been vouchsafed the opportunity to reveal, as never before, his innate soundness of spirit.’ Her admiration of the production was unstinting, however. ‘It shows us in ten minutes the real meaning of rabble-rousing and why men who have that power rule over the world today. It writes the best editorial we have yet been given on WHY Mussolini, WHY Hitler, WHY Lenin and his unearthly post-mortem power.’
Despite the critical enthusiasm, specially arranged lectures, gramophone records of the show (the first in a series of The Mercury Shakespeare, with Welles as a plummy Cassius, and the relevant, slightly amended, volume from Everybody’s Shakespeare), and what Andrea Nouryeh calls ‘high-powered selling techniques’, business was unexceptional, and the Mercury’s half share of the profits never materialised, for the good reason that the show never went into profit. These financial set-backs, whose implications would eventually catch up with them in ways that could scarcely have been predicted, did nothing to daunt their high spirits. As Houseman later wrote: ‘during February and March, the Mercury Theatre had one hundred and twenty-four actors performing in four shows in three theatres. Our three New York shows were playing within two blocks of each other on West 41st Street. We renamed it Mercury Street, and without permission from the city, put up temporary signs to that effect on the corners of 6th and 7th Avenues and Broadway.’33 And they continued with their announced plans: the next show would be The Duchess of Malfi, and the one after that Five Kings, a two-part, two-evening amalgam of the two parts of Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, and Richard III: the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Wars of the Roses twenty-five years ahead of time.
Welles invited the brilliantly original painter and stage designer Pavel Tchelitchew (his work on the ballet Ode had been one of Diaghilev’s boldest experiments) to design The Duchess of Malfi; work was far advanced when a read-through of the play was announced. At a late-night session, eighty actors were present to read a play which has only eight roles of any length. Welles was late. Finally, when he arrived, ‘he’d had his hair just done’,34 according to Norman Lloyd. ‘I’ll never forget him fingering his gardenia and saying THIS WILL PLEASE A FEW CLOSE FRIENDS AND I.’ Sherman, Kane, and Lloyd were designated the roles of madmen; Aline MacMahon read the Duchess; Coulouris, Price, and Welles read the rest. At the end of the read-through, nothing was said. It was never rehearsed again, and immediately thereafter dropped without a word of explanation to either company or press.
It was obvious that there was trouble in the paradise that the Mercury had seemed to be. As they will in any group, half-formed suspicions, anxieties and grievances, invisible while momentum was being maintained, suddenly emerged, confirmed. The complicated manipulations of the repertory had seemed generally fruitful, if not always comprehensible. There had been no consultation; the actors were among those who had to learn, in Welles’s phrase, ‘to shut up’. An increasing uncertainty as to the future of the group began to be voiced, fuelled by the postponement, hard on the heels of the cancellation of The Duchess of Malfi, of Five Kings, and the suspension of company night rehearsals to prepare for it. It was decided that The Shoemaker’s Holiday should be dropped from the repertory at the National; those who were not in Caesar or the forthcoming Heartbreak House (announced to open in April as the last play of the season at the Mercury after the closure of The Cradle Will Rock) were discharged, with neither retainer nor the promise of employment in the second season. A further problem was the overwhelming emphasis placed on Welles himself, both in the press and in the Mercury’s own publicity. Few had failed to note the irony of one of the supreme exponents of theatrical caesarism working with such dictatorial fervour on a production subtitled Death of a Dictator:
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find oursel
ves dishonourable graves …
Now in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed
That he is grown so great?
It was scarcely possible to open a newspaper without reading further paeans of praise. The Time magazine profile, MARVELOUS BOY, appeared in May of 1938: ‘With a voice that booms like Big Ben’s but a laugh like a youngster’s giggle, Orson Welles plays lead off-stage as well as on. He loves the mounting Welles legend, but wants to keep the record straight. Stories of his recent affluence annoy him … as active as a malted-milk mixer, Welles is for all that very heavy-set, his adolescent moon face slowly beginning to resemble an American Emperor’s. Told he looks Roman, he asks, interestedly: “Do you mean sensual?” His own description of himself: “I look like the dog-faced boy.” Troubled by his asthma, untroubled by his flat feet, Welles gets a little exercise walking and fencing, most by directing and rehearsing. He starts off a Falstaffian meal with a dozen oysters, tops it off with a big black cigar … at the Mercury, Houseman runs the business end, Welles is Caesar (not Brutus) where stagecraft is concerned, and in his own opinion “pretty dictatorial.” Shadow to Shakespeare, Shoemaker to Shaw – all in one season – might be a whole career for most men, but for Welles it is only Springboard to Success … the brightest moon that has risen over Broadway in years, Welles should feel at home in the sky, for the sky is the only limit his ambitions recognize.’35 The Mercurians were beginning to feel that they were distantly accompanying a spotlit soloist in a concerto of his own composition.
This was not entirely Welles’s fault. Like any theatre, the Mercury was always eager to sell itself to the press, and that meant pushing whatever was most newsworthy, and that meant Welles. He eagerly embraced this destiny, oblivious of, or at least indifferent to, the disaffection so easily provoked among fellow workers. There was even resentment at the disparity between his income and theirs (his radio career had never faltered for one moment). He defended his standard of living in the Time magazine profile, citing ‘the Big House at Sneden’s Landing, N.Y., the luxurious Lincoln town car and chauffeur’. The Big House, Welles insisted, wasn’t such a big house (‘eight rooms and four nooks, $115 a month’), the car was second hand, and the chauffeur existed because Welles himself didn’t drive. ‘I’m one of those fellows so frightened of driving that I go 80 miles an hour,’ he says, ‘and the more frightened I get, the faster I go.’ This has the ring of truth about it. But he was coy about the amount of his earnings, as Time reported. ‘How much money Welles is making he will not say. He is not even sure he knows …’ There is no reason to assume that he had fallen significantly below the figure of $1,000 a month, particularly since his assumption of the Shadow’s mantle. In modern equivalents, this means that he was earning half a million dollars a year, which might indeed have been a galling thought for his poverty-stricken colleagues, squeezing by on their $28.75 Per week. Of course many of them were also doing extensive radio work; and it is absolutely true that he had earned all this money entirely on his own merits. None the less, the him-and-us feeling was hard to counteract; in this same month of April, he received an award for outstanding theatrical achievement from the New York Drama Study Group. Welles, Welles and more Welles. Receiving the award, he seized the opportunity to announce major touring plans; he wanted, he said, to do as many performances on the road as in New York. The Mercury, he said, harking back to Todd and Skipper, was to become an independent film-making company, shooting productions for schools and colleges. There was no end to what he planned: ‘Nor does he want the Mercury to pin all its faith in the classics,’ continued the Time profile. ‘He pines to do a real mystery, a real farce, a British pantomime, a fast revue, a Mozart opera.’ All of this, which might once have thrilled his fellow Mercurians, may have seemed less enthralling now they realised that they were unlikely to be part of it.
Brooks Atkinson of the Times, who was among the Mercury’s staunchest and most concerned supporters, noted some of this in a piece entitled GOTHAM HOBGOBLIN: ‘He is an intuitive showman. His theatrical ideas are creative and inventive. And his theatrical imagination is so wide in its scope that he can give the theatre enormous fluency and power. Ingenious lighting, stylised grouping, strange sounds and bizarre show effects are the instruments he uses for playing his macabre theatrical tunes. Plays have to give way to his whims, and actors have to subordinate their art when he gets under way, for The Shadow is monarch of all he surveys. It is no secret that his wilfulness and impulsiveness may also wreck the Mercury Theatre, for he is a thorough egotist in the grand manner of the old-style tragedian.’36 This piece provoked a letter to the editor from ‘an ex-Mercury actress’: ‘1) I found Welles less insistent on his own point of view than most directors, more receptive to accepting the actors’37 alternative interpretation and extraordinarily generous in giving recognition to a good performance. 2) As to “wilfulness and impulsiveness” I encountered nothing of the sort … he didn’t do the usual shifting from day to day, but simply developed as the play unfolded itself under actual acting.’ Tellingly, she adds: ‘Welles as a director has faults. For one thing, he’s almost always late. For another, he himself wastes time and permits others to waste time in irrelevant discussions. And so on. But he’s far too brilliant a force in the theatre to permit an aura of discredit to grow up around him which in the specific respects generally mentioned is quite without basis.’ Not many presently employed, about to be ex-Mercury actors, would have felt inclined to append their signatures.
Feeling was so strong in the company that a meeting was called: something which had never before happened. The company expressed their fears and anxieties, particularly concerning the project of preparing a touring version of Five Kings as a try-out for its inclusion in the second season. Welles replied: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you may have heard some rumours that the tour is off and it’s true. Some of you may have thought that as a part of the Mercury Theatre, the Mercury Theatre owes some obligations. I want to state, here and now, I am the Mercury Theatre.’38 Hearing this regal pronouncement, Kevin O’Morrison, playing small parts in Caesar and The Shoemaker’s Holiday at the National, told Andrea Nouryeh, ‘most of us in our hearts just tore whatever loyalties we had’.39 Among the defectors was Aline MacMahon, who immediately turned down the role of Hesione Hushabye she had just been offered. It may be argued that the company’s success was largely due to Welles; certainly it would have been inconceivable without him, his flair, his courage, his talent, and, to a large measure, his personality, so impressive and intriguing to the press.
The sheer scope of his ambition for the Mercury is exhilarating and inspiring, even though it is inseparable from his ambition for himself: he told a reporter in New Haven at the start of the Julius Caesar tour ‘I wouldn’t be happy if I couldn’t convince myself that I will alter at least the cultural course of history in the theatre.’40 (The ‘at least’ is a characteristic touch.) What is disturbing is to find him, at the first bright dawn of his career (it is worth remembering that he was just about to celebrate his twenty-third birthday), quite so cavalier in his dealings with his fellow workers. The conclusion is inescapable that he had begun to believe his own publicity: that he had single-handedly and magisterially created the success, instead of forging it minute by minute, effect by effect, with a uniquely dedicated team. He had started to think that because they needed him more than he needed them, he could simply dispense with them and their views. Here are the seeds of self-destruction.
Meanwhile, there was Heartbreak House to be rehearsed. The play has a small cast; the company were dismayed to discover that even those few roles were being cast from outside its ranks. Welles, he said, wanted to avoid obvious casting. He himself was slated to play the ninety-year-old Shotover, which was a throwback to his days at Woodstock and in Dublin; Coulouris was Boss Mangan (their two roles in Caesar were taken over by Powers and O’Brien from the touring company). Vincent Price played the tiger-wrestling Hector
Hushabye, John Hoystradt the flute-playing Utterword. Otherwise the company was entirely new: not at all the nascent American National Theatre that Price and others in the company had hoped they were joining. It was close, in fact, to being a Broadway cast, with a heavy bias towards the English theatre. Erskine Sandford repeated his Mazzini Dunn from the last New York production; Eustace Wyatt, an English actor of episcopal demeanour and a fondness for the bottle, played the burglar; Brenda Forbes, also English, Welles’s old and none-too-loving colleague from Cornell days, was Nurse Guinness; Phyllis Joyce, an Australian actress with extensive experience in London, was Lady Utterword; and the Austrian Mady Christians, one of Reinhardt’s stars and already featured in several American films, was Hesione. Ellie Dunn was to be played by Geraldine Fitzgerald, a recent graduate of the Gate Theatre in Dublin and star of two British movies.
Welles may have been nervous of the play, for which he had a respect verging on reverence, and sought to back himself up with seasoned actors, experienced in the demands of modern realistic theatre. Perhaps this was the ‘real play’ that Chubby Sherman had been so nervous of ‘in which an actor opens a door, a real door, walks in, sits down and begins to talk’. Welles knew from his negotiations with the author that he would brook no cuts, no transpositions, and no divergence from the printed stage directions. There was no possibility of a concept here; they must simply perform the play as written, which is essentially what they did, though somewhat unwisely Welles cut up the longer speeches, interspersing them with lines from other actors, thus destroying the musical line on which Shaw placed such stress (‘it’s Mozart!’ the old gentleman would tell his actors).
