Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  As well as Seward he, of course, plays Dracula. Why, it may be asked, was it necessary for him to play more than one part in the programme? Why, indeed, was it necessary to act in the programme at all, rather than simply narrating? There are obvious reasons, of course (why should the others have all the fun?) and he was the star, after all. But beyond that, it seems to be part of his method – his magician’s method, one might say – to draw attention to what he’s doing: ‘and now, before your very ears, I shall become … Dracula!’ The transformation demands applause, admiration; but the essential element is that you never forget that it’s Welles doing it; you never believe that you’re listening to the character himself. His fellow actors – particularly Gabel and Coulouris (who had clearly swallowed his irritation sufficiently to participate in the new venture) – are all highly skilled and effective, all in full command of the microphone and its demands, but they lack the instant identifiability of Welles. That, of course, was their purpose; they create and inhabit their characters to the point that we forget that this actor or that is playing them. Gabel’s Viennese Van Helsing is a triumph. For him the accent is a liberation, giving him consistently interesting phrasing. Coulouris’s Harker is also strongly and convincingly realised; there are no inverted commas round his performance as there are in Welles’s.

  No matter what voice Welles assumes, it’s always unmistakably him: he doesn’t begin to rival Peter Ustinov, for example, in virtuosity of pitch, accent, rhythm, character. He often brilliantly catches a colour, a flavour, but he doesn’t submit to its character. He manipulates it, usually to sonorous effect. Above all he creates atmosphere; it is his presence that dominates the entire show. His Dracula voice sounds artificially manufactured, like the controlled belches by which the late Jack Hawkins was able to find a substitute voice when his vocal cords had been destroyed by cancer. Welles’s Dracula voice may have been slightly treated – it has an acoustic unlike the others’ – but it is really his own special resonance that creates the effect. The camera is said to love certain actors; the microphone positively adored Welles.

  The production itself is notable for its continuous web of sound. There is barely a moment unelaborated by some effect or another: doors creak, dogs howl, wolves snarl, horses neigh, carriage wheels turn, women scream, owls hoot, telegraph keys tap, one on top of another. Hitherto, sound effects had politely waited till the speaker was finished; with Welles they rudely break in before the end of the sentence, sweeping you on to the next location, the next emotion, sometimes overwhelming the dialogue: no bad thing in a penny dreadful.

  Strictly speaking, Dracula is of more literary merit than the average penny dreadful, but Welles wasn’t interested in it as literature, as a text. He was interested in it as a pretext, a springboard for his form of radio melodrama. As Eric Barnouw observed, content was of little importance to him: it wasn’t what he said, but the way that he said it. He revelled in being able with the simplest means to summon up in the listener’s mind dark and crumbling visions beyond the wildest ambition of screen or stage. He launched a passionate assault on radio, thrilled by its techniques, demanding more and more of them: not particularly in order to express anything, simply in order to set the pulse beating faster – his and the audience’s. (It is possible, however, to hear, through all the virtuoso texture, the often sounded note of the vampire’s pain in his frequent refrain ‘Flesh of my flesh, guilt of my guilt!’ Pity for monsters is a constant theme of Welles’s.)

  Dracula was greatly admired, though not hugely listened to: only a fraction of the audience that listened to The Shadow tuned in to the Mercury Theatre of the Air. But within the small world of quality radio, there was great excitement. For Welles and Houseman it was a tremendous infusion of confidence, enthusiasm and energy. Their hopelessness of only four weeks before had been turned to boundless optimism, and by some paradox, though they were heavily committed to producing their weekly programme, they were now suddenly able to contemplate a second season of stage work for the Mercury.

  Out of their bran-tub of potential projects, they pulled three hopefuls: the William Gillette farce Too Much Johnson, Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death, and the still unwritten Five Kings: a stimulating and diverse programme. Five Kings would be the Mercury’s definitive claim to creating a new American Shakespearean tradition (Welles’s gauntlet flung down, both to the McClintics and to the English upstart, Maurice Evans, who had recently had the audacity to tour the country as Richard II and Falstaff); Danton’s Death offered as many parallels to contemporary revolutionary politics as Caesar had to the European dictators; and Too Much Johnson seemed to have the combined potential of The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Horse Eats Hat, wild comedy built on verbal and physical high jinks. A close observer of Welles, however, might have felt that for all the co-directors’ newly surging energy, there was something untoward. At the end of June, Welles had given (to the National Council of Teachers of English) a widely reported speech about the future of the theatre – including the Mercury – in terms of such gloom that the journalists present were reduced to joking uneasily about it. ‘Mr Welles’s opening criticism, purred quietly into the microphone, issued from the loud-speakers with all the effect of a verbal knockout: The theatre is not worth your attention … Broadway provides only the dullest and stodgiest fare. In entertainment value it is vastly inferior to the movies … people come to the most incredible things in vast numbers. They come to see revivals of old plays at the Mercury Theatre in much greater numbers than they have any business to.’

  Wilella Waldorf in her report (WELLES PEERS THROUGH HIS BEARD AND SEES CHAOS ) has him ‘tottering up to the microphones and gasping out the news that the theatre is dead, through, finished … widely publicised as the outstanding Bright Boy of the American theatre, he is apparently tired out already, gloomy, disillusioned, cracking up … Orson Welles has been wearing so many false beards lately that he has grown old before his time. Recently turned twenty-three, he shows distressing signs of wear and tear … the director of the Mercury Theatre (which has just completed what is generally agreed to be a hysterically successful first season), he has developed the outlook of an embittered old gaffer suffering from gout, liver trouble and rheumatism.’12 Her bantering tone is shot through with hostility; the first manifestation of anything other than uncritical admiration that Welles had received as a public figure. ‘No wonder Welles is annoyed, for apparently the fool playgoing public simply won’t stay away, even from Heartbreak House … we can see him now staggering around backstage, all ready to shatter into a thousand pieces from the strain of producing plays that people insist upon coming to see even though the theatre is dead.’ Saddened by his plight – ‘the Makropolous secret behind a twenty-three-year-old face’ – she proposes to send him to a spa to recuperate. ‘And in the meantime, Mr Welles, cheer up if you can. All is not lost … you may yet achieve the Mercury ambition and produce a revival from which the public stays away. The People may turn out to be more discriminating than you think.’

  And so it proved. The world-weariness she and others detected in Welles is curious – was it a pose? Or had he really worn himself out, spiritually as much as physically? It’s a curious glimpse of him, ageing before one’s very eyes – a fast-forward of a life. There is a simpler explanation of his apocalyptic tone, however: at the time that he delivered the speech, the Mercury Theatre was in abeyance. There was no company and no plan for the future. The Mercury Theatre of the Air, on the other hand, was just coming into existence. Welles was becoming excited as only he could by the possibilities of unrestricted access to a new medium; psychologically he may have been preparing to devote himself entirely to radio. In the same speech delivered to the English Teachers, he had attributed the success of the Mercury – ‘in an attempt to revive older forms and find newer forms that will impress themselves upon our civilisation’ – to having concentrated on delivering lines with as much clarity and authentic inflection as possible. ‘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. People storm to see our plays because they can really understand what we are talking about.’ This was a curious claim from the director of what was surely the most overpoweringly visual theatre in the history of the American stage. It is something of a disappointment, too, if the new form that would ‘impress itself on civilisation’ turned out to be nothing more than speaking clearly. He may of course have been referring to the relative freedom from interpretation in the delivery of the text – if not in its cutting or in the design of the production. In fact, though, he seems to be staking a claim for the supremacy of words; and what medium depends more on words than radio?

  The theatre was also competing for his attention with the movies, which warrant a brief admiring mention in his speech to the conference. He had been approached by Warner Brothers the previous year but the financial offer was unenticing; going to Hollywood would have meant abandoning his freelance radio career. David Selznick made overtures; Welles screen-tested for Metro. None of these offers were sufficiently attractive. It was by no means, as he later liked to maintain, a thought that had never entered his mind. The power, influence and indeed glamour of the movies was very interesting to him. He was biding his time, waiting for the right terms. So, despite the new confidence that their radio work had engendered in them, the Mercury’s second season contained the seeds of disaster deep within it: Welles’s heart was no longer in it. The successes of the previous season had entirely depended on his unflagging will and energy. It was neither careful preparation, nor technical skill, nor interpretative genius that had created Caesar and The Shoemaker’s Holiday: it was adrenalin and the inspiration of the moment. Subtract these qualities and what was left would scarcely stand up to examination. The dull and routine Heartbreak House was a warning; what followed was far, far worse than could have been imagined. The season that looked so lively and challenging on paper turned into a disaster in three chapters: aberration (Too Much Johnson); nightmare (Danton’s Death); and farce (Five Kings).

  Too Much Johnson at least had the merit of playing out of town. Two of the Mercury’s apprentices ran a summer theatre at the pretty little resort of Stony Creek, near New Haven, Connecticut, close to the coast and the spattering of tiny islands called The Thimbles, some seventy-five miles out of New York. They offered the Mercury a slot, free of charge, starting 16 August 1938, even providing the designers. The James Morcom set and Leo van Witsen costumes would be held in reserve for the Mercury. It might have been a rather useful out-of-town try-out; nothing is more valuable for farce than constant repetition: the machine has to work perfectly, and until it does, nothing happens at all. The play itself is unexpectedly delightful, centring on a voyage to Havana, a marital mix-up, and a compulsive liar whose lies keep catching up with him. This central character, Billings, was the part which Gillette wrote for himself, and his dialogue is designed to show off his particular genius for staccato diction. ‘All come out of a little affair, you know – come over here – singular, isn’t it, how these little – detained in town one night over business dining at French table d’hote – one of the rear ones near Washington Square – she was charming, too – sweetest little – French, you know – and a flirt – great Scott!’13 It is an unexpected piece from the pen of the definitive American Sherlock Holmes, whose adaptation of the Conan Doyle stories he was still triumphantly playing onstage at the age of seventy-seven, broadcasting the role at the age of eighty. Gillette, a notorious eccentric, living alternately in a houseboat and a castle, surrounded by large numbers of cats and no one else, died the year before the Mercury revival, which is perhaps just as well. Despite Welles’s declared affection for the piece and for the American theatre of yesteryear, he decided to subject the play to an experiment. Finding the exposition of the plot boring, he proposed to replace it with a twenty-minute film in the manner of the Keystone Cops; the second and third acts would similarly be prefaced by celluloid interludes.

  He had had nothing to do with film since his satirical short, Hearts of Age, so to prepare himself he ran a number of Mack Sennett, Chaplin and Harold Lloyd films. Setting aside the question of whether the mixed-media approach is sensible for a play which, like most successful farces, is tightly and economically constructed to deliver its comic goods, it is to be wondered whether the great silent movie comedians provided the right model for a play, like Feydeau’s, set in the world of the wealthy bourgeoisie. Welles was clearly trying to make a certain kind of play become a play of a different sort altogether. Farces generally proceed by means of a steady acceleration from a measured, methodical start. Unless you really experience the set-up, the lunacy has no roots. In the case of Too Much Johnson the characters find themselves caught up in socially disastrous situations; it is a bourgeois nightmare. The early slapstick comedians, on the contrary, are heirs to the clowns and fools of another age, persecuted outsiders. Welles’s brief was simply to make the show funny; he didn’t believe that it could be funny on its own terms.

  The shooting of the film was a joyous lark, replete with all the delights of location filming. In addition to the cast (Arlene Francis, Joe Cotten, Edgar Barrier, the ex-vaudevillian Howard Smith – ‘would you prefer the slow sit or the fast sit, Mr Welles?’14 – Ruth Ford, George Duthie and Virginia Welles), Houseman, Herbert Drake the theatre columnist, and Marc Blitzstein were all roped in. Augusta Weissberger generously donated her bosoms to the film, since Arlene Francis’s were deemed insufficiendy rounded. To achieve the feeling of ‘little old New York’, Welles shot in those parts of the city which had a nineteenth-century look, the Fulton Fish Market, for example, and other downtown locations. They borrowed an excursion boat normally devoted to day trips to Bear Mountain, and filmed the on-board chase on it. Welles tried to keep shooting even though it had started raining; the rain quickly turned into a hurricane, which of course was grist to his mill. Edgar Barrier and Joe Cotten get caught up in a specially staged suffragette march; they join in, keeping time, and saluting the American flag. Chasing each other, they jump six foot out of windows onto passing wagons. Passers-by thought, pardonably, that Cotten was trying to kill himself. Finally the police moved them on for disturbing the peace. Welles’s delight in all this was unconfined. The element of risk was thrilling. He was working like the old-time silent movie directors, Abel Gance firing real pistols over the actors’ heads to spur them, or Rex Ingram filming The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, whip in hand. Trying to catch dangerous exciting life on the wing, he was greatly helped by having a cameraman who was a Pathé News operator and thus used to filming unpredictable events. The second sequence used a model set of a plantation in Cuba, swathed in dry ice, with a miniature boat. The camera, hand-held, panned round to give the impression of travelling up-coast, to give, in Brady’s phrase, ‘the boat’s Point of View’. The third sequence was shot in Haverstraw, New York, (near Welles’s home in Sneden’s Landing) on a set in broad daylight; Welles himself described a fourth section to Peter Bogdanovich: ‘a sequence in Cuba with a volcano erupting and Joe in a lovely white suit, carrying a big white umbrella and riding a big white horse. The horse had been Valentino’s in The Sheik, and this was Joe’s first experience as an equestrian. It was all quite dream-like …’15

  Rehearsals on the play were fitful. When they did take place, they were spent developing routines, sections of stage business, which Welles typically worked and worked, ignoring character, relationships, or the life of the play. Andrea Nouryeh describes a sequence in which three of the men enter from three different doors singing Swanee, exiting and entering with perfect rhythmic and harmonic co-ordination. This was gone over again and again and again, finally attaining the perfection Welles sought. The discipline is essential; but in farce, above all in farce, it’s not simply what is done, but who does it, and to whom, that creates the comedy. Welles never troubled himself with those considerations.

  Ap
art from the intensive drilling sessions, he was rarely seen at the theatre. He had discovered a new passion, one that lasted to his dying day, never losing its absolute fascination for him: editing. Having repaired to a suite at the St Regis, he had a Moviola installed, and – when not ‘on the air or with his paramour’, in Houseman’s words – he sat surrounded by thousands of feet of film and the young apprentices from the Mercury, ‘laughing at his own footage while the slaves hunted in vain for the bits of film that would enable him to put his chases together into some kind of intelligible sequence’.16 He had discovered the Frankenstein element of film-making. Sitting at the Steenbeck, it is really possible to assemble your own creature, and give life to it. The sense of power is intoxicating: a slow scene can be made fast, a funny one sad, a bad performance can be made good, and actors can be expunged from the film as if they had never been. To shoot is human; to edit, divine.