by Simon Callow
Rehearsals, it seems, were dominated by the never-ending feud between Coulouris and Welles. To this was added a new one, between Coulouris and Geraldine Fitzgerald, who proved able to give as good as she got, and better: at one point during the run, exasperated beyond endurance, she kicked him on the shins. The ever-crabby Mancunian no doubt resented the special treatment that he felt she was receiving. Welles’s charm was extended in its full golden warmth to her; at her audition Fitzgerald had first met Houseman, who had been sober and courteous, then when Welles arrived he said, with an irresistible smile (irresistible to Fitzgerald, that is; less so, perhaps, to Houseman): ‘Oh, don’t carry on Jack – you know we’re going to take her.’ She was struck, as so many had been, by his great height (he seemed taller, she said, as a young man), by the round baby face, the amazing eyes, his enormous beauty and charm, his ability to create intense intimacy on first contact. Maintaining it was more of a problem. ‘He actually “saw” you: seemed to be very pleased to see you.’ In a brilliant phrase, she compared his personality to that of a lighthouse: when you were caught in its beam, you were bathed in its illumination; when it moved on, you were plunged into darkness. Coulouris and Price were well out of the light by now, both exasperated by what they saw as Welles’s tricks of personality, and somewhat sceptical about his attitude to his own acting. Rehearsing Heartbreak House, he again used William Alland to read in his part; Price said that he never really learned it at any time during the run. A report in the World Telegram on 9 April suggested another reason for company frustration: Welles’s baby was born on 27 March: ‘she timed her entrance into this world so as to create the greatest conceivable commotion, arriving just five minutes before the first reading of our next production, Heartbreak House. Needless to say, the reading was called off, and the entire company, which had stayed in town all day for the occasion, felt that their day had been ruined.’41 Welles was at Virginia’s bedside shortly after the delivery of the child, whom they called, for no discernible reason, Christopher. The cavalier approach to naming her proved indicative of Welles’s relationship to her in general; the commotion that she allegedly created was not reproduced in Welles’s life. Ballerinas continued to be more interesting than either wife or child; Barbara Leaming even reports him flirting with the nurse on the maternity ward because she moved like a dancer. There is an awkward photograph of the young mother, father and child: Virginia looks strongly and almost defiantly at the camera while Welles stares down somewhat theatrically at the bundle of flesh in her mother’s arms. There is nothing remotely spontaneous about the pose.
Welles’s general distractedness at this period was reflected in his work on Heartbreak House. Clearly the atmosphere was very different from that on the two classical plays. Apart from the diversion of the newcomers, he seems not to have fully engaged with the play. Partly this stems from the restrictions imposed by the ever vigilant author and his representatives. Welles’s adrenalin was not made to flow at the prospect of interpreting a play on its own terms. It must be his, visually, physically, textually. This is the way of the conceptual director, who regards his relationship to the writer as an equal partnership, in which he has the casting vote; it is also, of course, the way of the film-maker, for whom a script is always only a point of departure. In this Heartbreak House, the settings were largely as the author prescribed, executed, to Welles’s very specific instructions, by John Koenig (‘a window-dresser’, the stage manager Walter Ash dismissively called him); the lighting was straightforward, though expert as usual. The only real scope for theatrical effect came with the bomb at the end, a startling moment in this production, created by the deepest notes of the Julius Caesar Hammond organ and the thunderdrum being sounded simultaneously. His frustrated creativity was largely channelled into his own make-up, of which several versions can be glimpsed in various production photographs. When he appeared at the dress rehearsal with the first version, Coulouris cried: ‘My God, the ceiling’s fallen in!’42 At first, the make-up took Welles three hours to apply; eventually he got it down to an hour and a half. It was a passion with him, which he indulged to the full, even if – to Houseman’s chagrin – it meant holding the curtain till he was ready, thus sending the show (at four hours’ running time) into overtime.
The reviews were distinctly mixed. The Mercury had taken an extreme gamble in staging a play directly on Broadway’s terms, without its own signature stamped oh it – a play which was anyway, as it always had been, and still is, highly problematic. Is it, as the author believed, his masterpiece, or an indulgent and misfired attempt at a homage to Chekhov (signalled on the title page, ‘A Fantasia in the Russian Manner’)? The critics reviewed the play (whose première had been, not in London, but in New York, eighteen years before) almost as much as the production: ‘one of Mr Shaw’s more interminable plays’,43 as Brooks Atkinson said. ‘He steps light but – oh lord! he steps long.’ Despite the occasional roar of approval for the production, the general tone was muted (Atkinson even using the dread word ‘workmanlike’); there was a feeling of quiet disappointment.
One or two critics rang alarm bells. John Mason Brown, who had been so crucial to the success of Julius Caesar, sternly wrote that ‘the truth is that the production is not up to the Mercury’s high standard. If it were not for the programme, one could swear that Shaw’s play were being performed by an over-ambitious stock company.’44 The acting, with the exception of Coulouris as Boss Mangan, was not greatly admired. Welles’s Shotover had its enthusiasts (Lockridge: ‘Mr Welles as Shotover plays much better than I have ever seen him’)45 but they were few. Mason Brown continued his mournfully disappointed review: ‘Mr Welles behind a great flow of whiskers wins his laughs as Capt Shotover. But, if I may say so, he seems to be winning them in spite of rather than because of himself. The part is almost surefire. Yet in performing it, Mr Welles lacks comic precision and muffs point after point which cries to be made.’
It is hard to see how it could be otherwise. For a twenty-two-year-old, however gifted, to attempt Shotover is an impossibility: an excellent thing to do in repertory, in the course of winning one’s spurs, but folly to attempt on Broadway. Of course, the Mercury wasn’t (quite) on Broadway, but to all practical intents and purposes it was. It had created an excitement and raised expectations that demanded that its work should be judged by the highest standards. Here it had seemingly set itself up simply to be shot down. The remarkable thing is that only one out of every two critics chose to do so. Their hearts were with the Mercury; the goodwill was enormous, and even the attacking notices came from a position of great affection. One notice, predictably, came from no such position. It is none the less the most penetrating and the most interesting, and it was written, of course, by Mary McCarthy: ‘The Mercury Theatre company act out Heartbreak House as if it were one of those weekend comedies by Rachel Crothers or Frederick Lonsdale.’46
In writing about Welles, she went, again, for the jugular. ‘Mr Welles as an actor has always seemed to secrete a kind of viscous holy oil with which he sprays the rough surfaces of his roles. The sentimentality of Mr Welles’s acting, the nervelessness of his direction, the bare, mechanical competence of the majority of his supporting cast combine to act as a steam-roller on Shaw’s Heartbreak House … Mr Welles’s production can only serve to remind the public that the original still exists in the library.’ Despite the gratuitous aggressiveness of the notice, she makes a telling point about Welles’s acting: his sentimental side is, as it were, the bank holiday of his rhetorical one. Both modes deny real feeling, seeking rather to impress the spectator than to reveal an inner truth. They are external applications, designed to mask an absence of emotion; they draw attention to the actor rather than to the character. Coulouris, for all his rebarbative and wilful traits, was able, presumably by having access to his own inner life, to create an authentic person: as McCarthy reports ‘his Boss Mangan was a genuinely strident, strangled, unhappy self-made man’.
McCarthy’s voice was u
nique in its insistence on Welles’s shallowness. The overwhelming view was that, even if they had bitten off more than they could chew with Heartbreak House, the Mercury’s first season was a dazzling and inspiring one. In a New York Times piece in July of 1938 entitled THE SUMMING UP47 Houseman and Welles (the piece was actually written by Houseman) looked back fairly frankly on their first season at the Mercury: their problems with the repertory system, both in building an audience and in cross-casting, and the need to terminate successes. ‘However,’ Houseman ended, with a justifiable flourish, ‘at the end of the first season we find we have played to over a quarter of a million people at an average price of slightly less than a dollar. Of this: 20 per cent = carriage trade; 40 per cent parties; 40 per cent doors. 120,000 student cards were distributed. l/3rd of audience comes from educational organisations.’ They were already an institution, the white hope of the theatre, both progressive and classical, audacious and serious, innovative and accomplished, polished and affordable, original without being elitist, and they had captured the most vital section of the theatre-going public.
The problems which Houseman had understandably chosen not to air in print – the collapse of company morale and their severe financial straits – now had to be addressed. No one could have imagined that after the exposure and the success they had had they could be in quite such a parlous financial condition. Heartbreak House had proved a calamity from that point of view: the solid realistic settings were immensely more expensive than Caesar’s platforms rescued from a deserted warehouse, or the orange crates and cocoa matting used in The Shoemaker’s Holiday. The six new cast members had added substantially to the wages bill, too; above all, they had to pay Shaw’s royalties. He had offered them terms that were what he called ‘not too unreasonable’: 15 per cent of the gross when the receipts exceeded $1,500 a performance, 10 per cent when they were between $500 and $1,500, 7.5 per cent when they were between $250 and $500. No doubt, by his stringent standards, the terms were not too unreasonable, but to a theatre that had never paid a penny in royalties by the simple expedient of only working with dead authors, it was a severe blow. None the less, it was a blow they could weather. Their investors remained loyal, despite the somewhat ungenerous attitude of Houseman and Welles: ‘Personally, we were grateful to our investors for the generosity that had made the birth of the Mercury Theatre possible. But as business associates, our feelings were as ambivalent towards them as those of adolescents towards their parents.’48 Their dealings were largely with Houseman, of course, and his formal manner and natural courtesy masked his ambivalence. With Welles, it was another matter. ‘While things were going well, he regarded them as parasites and exploiters, fattening on the success wrung from his creative energies. When they began to go badly, this hostility was aggravated by shame and guilt: anticipating their reproaches he developed a loathing for them such as one inevitably feels towards a benefactor whom one has disappointed or betrayed.’
Such was not yet the case with the investors. With the company, betrayal and disappointment was rife. The Heartbreak House company was particularly resentful of the unceasing emphasis on Welles: as Price later said, not to be paid a proper salary was one thing; to receive no credit either was intolerable. Uncertainty was rife. The only plans for the second season were vague: a revival of The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Five Kings (which so far existed only in Welles’s mind) and The Importance of Being Earnest, in which Chubby Sherman was to play Algernon, with Vincent Price as Jack. There were no dates, and no one, apart from those two actors, were allocated roles; the entire company was laid off. Geraldine Fitzgerald was advised to go to Hollywood, since they had nothing to offer her. To all intents and purposes, the acting group ceased to exist. Even me vaguely planned season collapsed completely when Chubby Sherman suddenly withdrew his commitment, effectively making it impossible to revive The Shoemaker’s Holiday, of which his Firk was the linchpin and making The Importance of Being Earnest, specifically planned to find him another starring role, pointless. Having repeatedly failed to get a date for the start of rehearsals, he accepted a part in the Broadway revue Sing out the News. His withdrawal from the company was a personal blow for Welles, which he took very badly, repairing to bed for several days. Sherman was as near as Welles came to having a friend. He had been the associate director on Julius Caesar, director of the Studio (such as it was), a stalwart colleague, and, as Houseman put it, in some odd way (as revealed in his indiscreet interview in The New York Times) ‘the conscience of the company’. Thirty years later he told Andrea Nouryeh that it wasn’t simply the uncertainty over dates that made him withdraw from the Mercury: it was the life-style. Welles expected him to carouse with him every night after the show, unfortunately neglecting to have any money with him (a regal habit which persisted to the end of his life), leaving Sherman to fork up, which he couldn’t afford to do: ‘the high-livers were killing me,’49 he said. His decision was surely encouraged by his partner, the undubbable Whitford Kane. So he and Welles parted company; they never worked together again. Houseman added a further reflection on Sherman’s departure. ‘The pace had become so wild, the mood so intense and violent as to be physically and mentally unendurable. Was Chubby, with his low threshold of fatigue and pain, merely the first of those who could not bear to stay around?’50
There seems to be little doubt that both Houseman and Welles were out of touch, in their different ways, with the company. It is good and necessary up to a point for the directors of a theatre to be somewhat aloof from the members of the company, who have to have the opportunity to gripe and criticise without it becoming an issue every time. The question is: were Houseman and Welles really thinking about the company’s interests? It came back to the fundamental question: what sort of a company was the Mercury to be? Was its objective simply to produce exciting shows as often as possible? If that was the case, the show was the thing, and the group must be reconstituted every time to serve the particular show. But that was not what had brought these particular actors together. The problem was partly one of too many fine words, both Houseman and Welles silver-tonguing their cohorts on a minute-by-minute basis, loosely invoking soul-stirring ideals to negotiate the crisis of the moment. They played with their colleagues’ dreams; a dangerous thing to do. Their plans seemed improvised from day to day, as did their views of what they were up to and who they were. They sank no roots. And now, despite their brilliant season and their golden reputation, they had nothing to build on. The very continuance of the Mercury seemed, unthinkably, in doubt. At this moment of peril, once again something quite unforeseen saved them, as it was with quite uncanny frequency to do, until, in the fullness of time, the luck ran out.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Theatre of the Air
HOUSEMAN DESCRIBES the moment at which he heard about the Mercury’s latest adventure. Having left Welles – still brooding over Chubby Sherman’s defection – in a stupor of rage and despair (‘limp and huge in a darkened room with his face to the wall’)1, Houseman sent Augusta Weissberger off on her honeymoon and himself on a brief holiday with his mother. For all he knew, the Mercury’s first season would also be its last. No sooner had he set out but ‘I saw an oversized black limousine coming up the hill at high speed. As it approached, it began to sound its horn and I became aware of Orson’s huge face sticking out of the window with its mouth wide open and of his gigantic voice echoing through the surrounding woods.’ His news was that the Columbia Broadcasting System had offered him (and the Mercury) nine weekly programmes to perform adaptations of famous books; the series would be known as First Person Singular, and Welles was to be featured as its quadruple-threat creator; ‘written, directed, produced and performed by Orson Welles’ was to be its epigraph.
This last notion was jointly conceived by Welles’s agent Schneider (‘you gotta do it all, Orson’) and William Lewis of CBS, who was happy to use it as the show’s formula. Lewis, the network’s chief executive, had acquired considerable respect as someone wit
h an eye for talent and a readiness to back it. ‘What can management do to encourage the superb craftsmanship that this business so desperately needs? Mainly it is in the wise and sympathetic handling of the creative people you have developed. Make them feel cherished and important; praise good work or extraordinary effort on the part of creative people – and – above all – see that they get credit for it.’2 Hence, for example, Norman Corwin’s Words without Music; hence Welles’s billing. The incentive that he fails to mention, of course, is money. He had very little to give. What he offered was freedom to experiment and prestige, which is also what he wanted – not for himself but for his network.
This was no form of philanthropy. Radio listenership was vast, but standards were pitifully low. There had been considerable legal pressure on the networks to counteract the overwhelming amount of mindless (and highly popular) banality being dispensed over the air waves under the sponsorship of commerce, for whom the programmes were the merest peg for their plugs. A coalition of liberals, academics, artists, leaders of labour, agriculture, religion, and, in the words of the historian Eric Barnouw, ‘the non-profit world’, formed a pressure group in the early days of the New Deal (when no problem seemed unsolvable) to denounce radio’s current output with some vehemence as ‘a pollution of the air’, ‘a cultural disaster’, ‘a huckstering orgy’, ‘a pawnshop’, and, conclusively, ‘a sickness in the national culture’. (More moderately, but perhaps even more witheringly, Norman Corwin, later one of the medium’s most distinguished practitioners, had written ‘There is about as much creative genius in radio today as there is in a convention of plasterers.’) The pressure group demanded the revocation of the networks’ licences, and a new allocation of frequencies ‘with one fourth going to educational, religious, agricultural, labor, co-operative and similar non-profit organisations’ (Barnouw). The measure was heard with some sympathy in Congress, galvanising the networks into trying to transform themselves (at least in Congressional eyes) into patrons of art. On the strength of their good intentions, the legal measure was abandoned, but it hovered, a perpetual threat.
