Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  The transformation of the networks into Gonzagas and Medicis of the air waves was easily and cheaply accomplished. The pressure groups were offered free slots (of which there were plenty) and there was a move to engender new and serious programmes, unsponsored. This lay the foundation for what is known as The Golden Age of Radio. It was a part of Welles’s extraordinary good fortune that he appeared on the radio scene at exactly the moment when it was ready to develop into a major expressive medium. William S. Paley, who had recently bought and revitalised CBS, had 77 per cent of unused air space; this he deployed in the creation of a number of so-called ‘sustaining’ programmes of which Irving Reis’s Columbia Workshop was the supreme example: unsponsored, cheap ($400 a programme), but with creative carte blanche. These slots were mostly those impossible to sell to advertisers because the competition – Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, for example – was just too powerful. Absence of advertisers meant that there was no need to pitch the programme at any specific group, which need more than any other factor dictated the nature of the programmes on the mainstream frequencies. Thus Paley accrued great prestige for his network, and created great opportunities for the artists and technicians, and all for a song – to the chagrin of NBC who were loaded with money, but devoid of kudos. Their kudos was acquired later, in the very expensive form of Toscanini.

  Lewis offered Welles a total budget of $50,000 for nine programmes, out of which he had to pay for everything but the orchestra. For someone who had been earning as much as $1,000 a week for the previous three years, this was small beer, but a glorious opportunity. Lewis’s approach to Welles was characteristically bold, though it was not exactly a reckless gamble.

  He was scarcely entrusting the new series to a tyro. Les Misérables had placed Welles among the leaders of quality radio; a small group, and not widely known, but a formidable one. The exploration of the medium’s possibilities had been recent and remarkably quick, and had already thrown up two or three brilliant producers. Welles was the only actor-director among them; his peers were Reis of the Columbia Workshop, the highly original Arch Oboler, master of bizarre suspense stories, William Robson (who had produced a re-creation of the San Quentin prison break as it happened) and Max Wylie. Welles had worked as an actor with most of these men, as well as on The March of Time, no mean innovator itself, and was fully aware of the technical possibilities of the moment. He had arrived in radio when it was starting to grow, to develop: the vocabulary was in flux, the scope of expression seemingly limitless.

  His show was announced, in The New York Times, with predictable flourish: ‘Orson Welles, the twenty-three-year-old actor-director who has introduced several innovations in the technique of the legitimate theatre, has been invited with the Mercury Theatre to produce nine one-hour weekly broadcast dramas over WABC’s network, beginning July 11, 1938.’3 Welles was quoted as saying: ‘we plan to bring to radio the experimental techniques which have proved so successful in another medium, and to treat radio with the intelligence and respect such a beautiful and powerful medium deserves,’ rather cheekily suggesting that no one had thought of this before. He wanted to make it very clear that there was no question of simply transferring the Mercury’s repertory to the radio. ‘I think it is time that radio came to realise the fact that no matter how wonderful a play may be for the stage, it cannot be as wonderful for the air.’ In saying this, he was declaring war on his predecessor in the same slot, Lux Radio Theatre, introduced by Cecil B. de Mille, and, even more directly, on First Nighter, billed as being broadcast from ‘The Little Theatre off Times Square’. The format of this programme had ‘Mr First Nighter’ being shown to his seat by an ‘usher’ just before curtain time. At intermission between acts, the usher would call out, ‘Smoking in the downstairs and outer lobby only, please!’ After the commercial a buzzer would sound and the usher would call out, ‘Curtain going up!’ Welles was having none of this. His brief was to innovate; that was his profile: The Innovator. Actually, in this medium, as in others, he was the Fulfiller: absorbing innovations, and applying them at high pressure.

  Welles strenuously insisted on the distinction between his theatre work and what he was attempting on radio. In an article for Radio Annual, he says ‘The less a radio drama resembles a play the better it is likely to be. This is not to indicate for one moment that radio drama is a lesser thing. It must be, however, drastically different. This is because the nature of the radio demands a form impossible to the stage. The images called up by a broadcast must be imagined, not seen. And so we find that radio drama is more akin to the form of the novel, to story telling, than to anything else of which it is convenient to think.’4 He pursues this theme in his unpublished Lecture Notes on Acting: ‘There is no place where ideas are as purely expressed as on the radio … it is a narrative rather than a dramatic form.’5 This emphasis on the narrative element was not unique to Welles; Eric Barnouw has identified ‘an explosion of interest in radio as a narrative device’. His most distinctive contribution – already evident in Les Misérables – was in giving the narrator an identity. He described this rather grandly, but not inappropriately, as ‘the revival from desuetude of Chorus, the fellow who used to come out between the acts and explain what was going to happen next and why. Radio’s particular amendment is the personalising of Chorus, of making him a character in the play rather instead of an outside character looking in.’ In fact, what he describes here, the notion behind the title First Person Singular, was a sparingly used device of limited application, even in the series of that name.

  A more remarkable innovation was the omnipresent narrator, often playing several roles within the piece. The effect is of direct contact between the narrator and the listener; he becomes not merely a neutral story teller, but the author himself, of whom the characters are simply projections. And this omnipresent, all-knowing figure was, of course, Welles. Reduced to a voice, relieved of the tedium of having to learn the script, get into costume and actually move around the stage, his personality was able to flourish untrammelled. He was able to establish with a numberless audience the gift of immediate intimacy of which he was such a master in life (though less so in the theatre). He acknowledged this, too, in his Radio Annual piece: ‘radio drama has done another thing. It has continued the process of bringing the actor near the audience, a development which has been detectable for about a hundred years. The actor’s problem of projection has ceased to be troublesome and the test of a good performance has come to be its honesty and integrity. The invention of the close-up has had a profound effect upon stage acting. The penetrating effect of radio performing, the last word in bringing the actor and audience face to face, has also had its effect on the stage.’ The historical analysis may be faulty (theatres had been getting larger and larger during the hundred years between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries) but he exactly identifies the genius of radio: it gets inside your head as no other medium can. The narrator has your ear. Newsweek told its readers that in the new programme ‘avoiding the cut-and-dried dramatic technique that introduces dialogue with routine announcements, Welles will serve as genial host to his radio audience. As narrator, he will build himself directly into the drama, drawing his listeners into the charmed circle. He reasons a radio audience is apt to be bored when it hears someone say “Once upon a time”. Not so if you say, “this happened to me.”’6

  The first show – true to his programme outlined above – would not be a play, but a story: Treasure Island. He had four weeks in which to prepare it. He had brought Houseman with him to the crucial meeting with Bill Lewis; now, without hesitation or indeed formal invitation, he turned to him to help him in the adaptation. ‘He seemed to assume I would be working with him,’7 wrote Houseman. ‘I reminded him that I knew nothing about radio. He said I’d better start learning in the morning.’ There is no phrase that better expresses the outrageous charm of Welles, compounded of trust and demand, confidence and challenge. It was, however casually entered into, a hu
ge new development in their relationship, as Houseman saw years later when he wrote his autobiography: ‘Throughout my theatrical association with Orson over the past three and a half years, much of the initiative had been mine – strategically and artistically. While I had never hesitated to acknowledge Orson’s creative leadership, I had managed, consciously and not without effort, to maintain the balance of power in a partnership which, for all our frequent and violent personal conflicts, had remained emotionally and professionally stable. With the coming of the radio show (though my contribution to its success was substantial) this delicate balance was disturbed and, finally, destroyed. The formula “produced, directed and performed by Orson Welles” was one that I approved and encouraged … but its effect on our association and on the future course of the Mercury was deep and irreversible. From being Orson’s partner, I had become his employee: the senior member, but still no more than a member of his staff.’

  For the time being, Houseman had to produce a script. He started to hack away at Treasure Island when, after three weeks, Welles suddenly changed his mind. They would do Dracula, one of many pseudo-gothic horror stories he loved, and to which Columbia had just acquired the rights. Now the heat was really on – just the way Welles liked it to be – and he and Houseman set to feverishly. Over several meals and without benefit of sleep, awash with bottles of wine, balloons of brandy and great pots of coffee in cyclical alternation, they gutted the book of its most striking moments, thrashed out a framework onto which they latched dialogue transcribed from the book, cobbled together narrative links (in this case using Stoker’s device of multiple narrations) and finally staggered away from the restaurant with a script. Their purpose was maximum effectiveness. They wished to avoid the form and structure of the stage play, and their radio dramaturgy – with its freedom of location, rapid succession of short scenes and liberal use of the narrator – celebrates the medium’s unique possibilities. None the less, their approach can only be described as theatrical. There is little here of the multi-layered use of sound that distinguishes the poetic tapestries of Norman Corwin, nor any of the riddling originality of Arch Oboler. ‘Welles’s specific contribution,’ said Barnouw, ‘was putting it over in bravura style – he could make anything work.’8 The Mercury Theatre of the Air was good, old-fashioned barnstorming: Henry Irving (a possible model for Dracula, as it happens) would have warmly approved.

  Welles found inspired collaborators. Bernard Herrmann, CBS’s head of music, was reluctantly assigned to the show (their Macbeth of two years before still smarting in both men’s minds), and found himself required to produce ever more music, sometimes, Houseman notes, as much as forty minutes out of a fifty-seven-minute show. Herrmann’s unusually catholic taste in music (he had a show of his own devoted to playing arcane and exotic scores; the music of Samuel Pepys was the subject of one) and his uncanny ability to reproduce the musical voice of his fellow composers made him invaluable. Sometimes his instrumentalists were responsible for the sound effects, while sound effects were used to create music – the wind, a whistle, a dog howling. He took advantage of the flexible composition of his orchestra – as he was later to do when writing for films – to introduce unusual instruments, or familiar instruments in unusual numbers. Dracula is full of curious orchestral touches, extensive use being made of disturbing harmonics. To his prodigious gifts was added a famously peppery personality, which complemented Welles’s in its fanatical perfectionism, allied to deep feeling for language; he knew as much about literature and its byways as he did about music.

  The technicians were generally delighted to be challenged by Welles’s quest for new and ever more real effects. He created a mood of restlessness and experiment which infected everyone. Paul Stewart recalled the technicians attempting to replicate the sound of leaves with a newspaper. ‘Orson in his usual way heard it and said, “That won’t do. Leaves don’t sound like that. It sounds exactly like a newspaper.” Actually, it didn’t sound like newspaper at all, but he always had to have his moment of bad behaviour, for his own personal satisfaction. “Go into Central Park,” he said, “find me real branches from a real bush.” “Orson,” said the effects man, “it’s February, the bushes have no leaves.” “You’re right,” said Orson. “Use the newspaper.”’ (By a nice irony, noted by Houseman, most radio sets were incapable of picking up ‘all those wonderful sound effects.’9 They are now clearly audible on cassette and compact disc.)

  Stewart, who had given Welles his first job on the radio, had been called in because he was vastly experienced both as actor and director, having been responsible for some years for Cavalcade of America, a pioneering history pageant programme, among many other shows. ‘At first Orson tried to produce the Mercury Theatre of the Air on his own, but he was incapable of doing so, being a very poorly organised man,’10 Stewart told François Thomas, ‘and Houseman, at least at the beginning, knew nothing about radio, and was of no use except in matters concerning the script – few people better understood rewriting, reshaping or reworking a script.’ Stewart gave structure to the rehearsals, held everything together; he was a crucial figure in getting the shows on. Almost immediately after Dracula, Welles established a pattern of work for the Mercury Theatre of the Air in which Stewart was the indispensable linchpin, a pattern which he maintained on all his shows over the next few years. The book, once chosen (generally not till the Monday of the week of transmission), would be turned over to Houseman and whoever else had been roped in to write it. On Wednesday the script would be rehearsed in the studio without Welles; a trial recording on shellac discs was made under Stewart’s supervision. Welles would listen to this and make script suggestions, which would then be incorporated. Only on the Sunday, the day of transmission itself, would he be physically involved.

  At noon, he arrived in the studio, and all hell broke loose. Richard Barr in his unpublished memoir describes the scene: ‘Orson did not direct his shows; he conducted them. Standing on a podium in front of a dynamic microphone (to diminish his sibilant “s”) he waved his arms, cued every music, sound and speech cue.’ A disc of the dress rehearsal of the Julius Caesar broadcast captures him in action, slipping in and out of character, now sonorous Brutus, now screaming and most unstatesman-like autocrat, demanding that the band play louder/faster/with more feeling, that the actors should be more animated or not so rushed, that the wind had to howl more. His impatience is given full voice at this dress rehearsal; the excitement leaps off the acetate. Stewart described to Thomas the aftermath of the final dress rehearsal: ‘There was absolute chaos – absolute chaos, every week. Welles is a very destructive man, he has to destroy everything, then put it back together again himself, and there were endless passionate discussions between him, Houseman and me. Then suddenly someone would say “We’re on air in two minutes.” The ground was strewn with paper. That we got on the air at all was a weekly miracle, because it was always like that.’11

  The very opening titles of this first programme set the tone: the swaggering first few bars of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, generating extrovert excitement, as two announcers in alternating phrases tell us that the Columbia Network takes pride in presenting Orson Welles in a unique new summer series. Breathless with excitement, they continue: ‘In a single year, the first in the life of the Mercury Theatre, Orson Welles has come to be the most famous name of our time in American drama.’ They quote Time magazine – ‘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 which his ambitions recognised’ – and finally, the United Press: ‘The meteorite rise of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre continues unabated.’ Tremulously noting its four hit shows in a season ‘unparalleled in Broadway history’, they reveal that ‘Mr Welles has long been working on a greater project, the Broadways of the entire United States.’ He is about, they promise, to bring to the air ‘those same qualities of vitality and imagination that have made him the most talked-of theatre director in America tod
ay.’ This is the project Columbia is bringing; the first time in its history, they claim, that radio has ever extended such an invitation to an entire theatrical institution. Finally, we get the great man himself: ‘Orson Welles – the director of the Mercury Theatre, the star and producer of these programmes: “Good evening,” Welles intones. “The Mercury Theatre faces tonight a challenge and an opportunity for which we are grateful.”’ They will, he says, present during the next nine weeks many different kinds of stories – ‘stories of romance and adventure. Biography, mystery, and human emotion. Stories by authors like: Robert Louis Stevenson, Emile Zoladostoievsky [as he invariably phrases it], Edgar Poe, P.G. Wodehouse.’ Then he introduces his cast and tells us what they have played at the Mercury then bids us good-bye ‘for a moment. I’ll see you in Transylvania.’ Finally there is the formal: ‘The Mercury Theatre on the air presents Orson Welles as Count Dracula in his own adaptation of Bram Stoker’s great novel.’ It is interesting to note that within the first three minutes of the programme, Welles’s name has been uttered nine times. It is something of a relief when he tells us: ‘The next time I speak to you I am Dr Arthur Seward.’

  The excitement and intensity of the transmission, as vivid fifty years later as it must have been at the time, is imbued with Welles’s personal quality. ‘The feeling, the atmosphere, all the Wellesian eccentricity, was there in the show,’ as Stewart says. There is, too – surprisingly, perhaps, in view of the circumstances but a vital part of the young Welles – a tremendous sense of fun. There is the odd private joke: in Dracula, one of the men overboard is called Balanchine, a jest for the personal amusement of the ballerina Vera Zorina who was at that moment being pursued with equal ardour by both Welles and the distinguished Russian choreographer. ‘Balanchine! Balanchine! Is Balanchine below?’ the sailors cry. ‘Balanchine’s gone! – Like the other! – Like all the others!’ For those who knew what the joke meant, he was delighted to boast, in this oblique fashion, of his conquest. All in all, radio suited him down to the ground. The immediacy of its impact, the flexibility of its language, above all, perhaps, the circumstances of its creation, were ideal for Welles: a whole world summoned up in a few days’ rehearsal, the cycle of theatrical creation speeded up to engender maximum adrenalin (read-through, rehearsal, dress rehearsal, first and last performance). Later he was to find the same cycle in movies, endlessly repeated for each shot. And here, in his first major outing on radio, he was already able to limit his involvement to the day of recording itself, arriving at the dress rehearsal the way Kean might have arrived in Dublin to give his Shylock, suddenly galvanising the unsuspecting local actors. Personality, in these circumstances, becomes everything.