Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  These defensive intellectualisations, which can have meant nothing to any but an exceptionally alert audience, are unconvincing as an approach to staging the play. The only effect the scenery of Danton’s Death could have had on the playing was in creating a literal terror within the company – which it did. Had the actors rehearsed on it for six months, and had they become so familiar with it that it became an expressive means for them, then perhaps something extraordinary could have come out of it. But this too presupposes that Welles was able, or willing, to work on their acting itself, to help them to find a style with which to realise the play. There is total absence in Welles’s utterances on either acting or directing of any suggestion of the nature of the work the actors need to do: the exploration of the play’s style or of themselves. The director will look after all that, he believes. In The Director in the Theatre, he says ‘If the director is an actor he can think up wonderful pieces of business.’ That was his notion of the job.

  In Danton’s Death, he hardly had time for that: he was obsessed by the physical problems of the play, and left the actors to fend for themselves. He and Gabel had fallen out badly, and were, as Houseman put it, at a stand-off. As for Sokoloff, who was deeply anxious about his accent and worked hard but unavailingly on it, Welles ‘had that awed and child-like respect which he showed for theatrical figures whom he admired’.26 He didn’t direct him at all. ‘Orson let him play his speeches exactly as he had played them for Reinhardt … the company used to applaud at each rehearsal.’ That was at the beginning, when tempers were even. The applause soon died. Rehearsals went on to two, three or four in the morning, after which everyone was called for ten, when they would work with Marc Blitzstein on his score incorporating Ça ira, the Carmagnole and the original version of the Marseillaise which he had discovered in the Lincoln Center. He had written a deal of spinet music and two original songs, an Ode to Reason and Christina, sung by Mary Wickes and Joe Cotten, with its lyric that must have come very easily to Blitzstein:

  Mister Soldier, handsome soldier27

  Mister handsome, handsome soldier

  Play me mild, or play me rough

  I just can’t get enough

  He and Kevin O’Morrison also worked with the actors on the sound score Welles had requested: in effect a live soundtrack. Standing in the wings, they would imitate crickets, the crying of babies, all the sounds of everyday life: an interesting idea, much in evidence in avant-garde work of the sixties, but in the circumstances of this production another bewilderment. The actors, totally exhausted and under-rehearsed, became resentful: there was no overtime, so all their extra work was unrecompensed. Often the work they had done was pointless, since Welles changed the script minute by minute and entire elaborately rehearsed sequences would be cut.

  The pressure to change the text was not merely aesthetic; it was political, too. No doubt, as Houseman says, Danton’s Death had struck them as a promisingly political play; they could do a Caesar on it. Unfortunately, as they were soon to discover, the game of political analogy is one that has to be played very carefully, especially in times of ferment. In this case, they only just got away with it. They were political amateurs, and had not thought through the explosive implications of the parallel with the revolutionary power struggle of their own times. Danton, Robespierre, St Just seemed unmistakable emblems of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, in one permutation or another. The interesting resonance that this set up (and it is to be remembered that Danton’s Death, unlike Julius Caesar, was being played in period costume, and came with no explanatory subtitle like Caesar’s ‘Death of a Dictator’) was regarded by the left as a slap in the face; and in its present financial circumstances, the Mercury couldn’t ignore the solid audience base that the left-wing organisations had provided for it. With Blitzstein as their negotiator, these organisations applied massive pressure on Welles and Houseman to dispel what they described as the ‘reactionary implications of the text’: a bad press for Revolution.

  The Party openly boasted of its success in the Daily Worker: ‘backstage at the Mercury Theatre … a three-cornered discussion is in progress … Orson Welles, Marc Blitzstein and John Houseman, all concerned with the production of Danton’s Death. “If it isn’t changed, I’ll pull out the music.” “If it’s that bad politically, I’ll pull out the show,” replied Welles. Houseman agreed. So it appears that at the very time we were offering our critical suggestions in last Wednesday’s paper the need for correcting the reactionary implications of the play also suggested themselves to the producers.’28 Trying to overcome the apparently insuperable physical problems of the production, not to mention getting the weekly radio show on the air, Welles and Houseman simply gave in to the (to them) obscure demands of the various parties and organisations with axes to grind. At the same time, Henry Senber issued a bullish press release: ‘The Welles production will make it clear that it is a characteristic of Danton’s own personality and not a characteristic of revolution or revolutionaries which brings him to his decadence and fall … Robespierre will not be a snivelling fanatic but take on his true stature of social revolutionary as opposed to the bourgeois reformism of Danton … the author does not take sides.’ This is scarcely the usual language of press releases. It would be interesting to know who was dictating it. As a compromise, Houseman and Welles agreed to send out ‘one of their more philosophical actors’ to inform the audience that the play is ‘a recital of certain true events, that as in every good historical play certain historical parallels were more or less sure to be drawn, but that the play is not to be construed as sponsoring any political philosophy or theory … what Welles and Houseman are up to is producing a show, not operating, as they had occasion to remark before, a cause.’ The organisation which had so fearlessly resisted government pressure when it was staging its labour musical, was obliged, in order to keep its financial base, to justify and to some extent censor its work on ideological grounds, something the FTP had never required. Things were getting very sticky indeed.

  Finally, Welles acknowledged that the script had been subject to so many changes, for so many different reasons, that it was necessary for him to deliver a definitive version. He cancelled rehearsals, and withdrew for thirty-six hours, finally calling the company together to read the new text, as they waited patiently, there was a howl offstage: he had left it in the taxi. Search parties were despatched to recover it, without success. Rehearsals grimly resumed, using the old text, as the unending labour of hanging and re-hanging lights, rigging and re-rigging the elevator continued, Welles moved a cot into the stalls, lest he lose a single precious minute. In between manoeuvres, he would fall into a deep sleep. ACTORS OFTEN ‘LIVE IN THEATRE’29 – THIS ONE ACTUALLY DOES was the headline of Helen Ormsbee’s report: ‘“You have to run as hard as this to stay in the same place,” the Red Queen told Alice. “If you want to get to the next square, you must go a lot faster.” That is about the way Orson Welles regards the preparations for Danton’s Death. “We’re compelled to work under pressure here at the Mercury. That is because we must make up in intensity of effort what we lack in money. We can’t afford to take a show out on the road to whip it into shape; if we could, I’d be glad of it … for me as the director it means going without sleep and forgetting to eat.”’ In the light of the relays of triple steak sandwiches and bottles of brandy coming from Longchamps, the company may have found the last part of that sentence rather funny, though it is to be suspected that their laughter had by now a hollow ring to it.

  ‘Once you start a production the momentum pushes everybody,’ he continued. ‘An actor can let himself be pushed by that momentum, but the director’s case is different. He has got to keep ahead of his routine … still, high pressure has its advantages. A play, taken out of script and acted, is a living impulse. It has to reach the audience with all the freshness that is in the minds of the cast and the technicians, and you can’t bottle up that freshness too long.’ More hollow laughter. ‘Compared with pictures, work in the t
heatre is volatile. Picture directing is an exact science; stage directing is not. You can take two years to make a film and the portions of it that are finished and recorded won’t deteriorate while the rest is being done. But the theatre is different; here a play is a living organism … that is why rehearsals can’t lag along indefinitely. The Moscow Art Theatre spends six or eight months getting ready for a play, but Stanislavsky had to devise his system to sustain that method.’ The Mercury actors, stranded on bits of unstable scenery, bleary eyed with sleep when they weren’t dazzled by the lights, barely knowing which scene followed which, much less why, may have longed for the continuity and steady discovery of a Moscow Art Theatre rehearsal. The alternative, the path of adrenalin, adrenalin and then more adrenalin, seemed to be leading nowhere. But then Welles didn’t seem to have much enthusiasm for his actors’ work: ‘I haven’t great regard for present artistic standards in the theatre. I’m sure our success only goes to show that the public don’t expect too much. But I’m convinced there are wonderful opportunities among present actors and one day we shall see really wonderful acting.’ How this might come about was never explained.

  Meanwhile, back to the inferno. At the dress rehearsal, the young costume designer Leo van Witsen (originally hired for Too Much Johnson) was summarily dismissed; somewhat unfairly, it would seem, since he had never been given a line on what he was supposed to be doing. Costumes were being supplied by Brooks Costumes on the cheap, but they had provided the worst tailor on their staff to execute and alter them; as a result, nothing fitted. Millia Davenport took over, simplifying things; the only simplification that occurred on the entire production. There had never been such a complex lighting plot. There were (for the Mercury) an unprecedented number of eighty-five lights, each of which had a number and a name, and which had to be unplugged throughout the show. All the dimmers were operated manually, and separately. The huge task of co-ordinating this was achieved by a system of counts which were quite audible during performances, but which fortuitously abetted Welles’s notion of having the auditorium filled with cries, shouts and whispers coming from all parts of the theatre. Howard Teichmann was operating the board from the wings, and was unable to see the effect of what he was doing; Jean Rosenthal had no intercom facility, and could only keep in touch with him by telephone. The greatest difficulty was lighting the huge cyclorama which stretched two hundred foot against the back wall. Inspired by the play’s lines ‘You have built a system as Bajazet built his pyramids, out of human skulls’ and ‘You need loaves and they fling you heads’ Welles and his designer, Tichacek, had the notion of creating a sort of cranial panorama, a wall of skulls. Bill Alland suggested that they use hallowe’en masks; Dick Barr and other apprentices were sent out to scour the shops: ‘We pre-empted all the masks in New York that year. I never did find out what the kids substituted because there were literally no masks left in the shops.’30 They ended up with 5,000 unpainted, white masks, which had to be bent a quarter of an inch around, then glued on to the cyclorama and finally sprayed with a sort of purplish paint. The colour and angle of the light varied according to dramatic need: for Robespierre’s nocturnal meditations it turned ‘a steely-gray, vicious, as though the whole pile were about to fall on him and stone him to death … at the end of the play, as Danton goes to his execution, the whole wall of skulls split apart to reveal a narrow slit against a blue sky topped by glittering steel’31 (Richard France). For the final curtain, drums rolled, the guillotine knife flashed down, and there was a sudden blackout.

  The difficulty for Jean Rosenthal, designing the light, was to isolate the sections of the cyclorama and avoid spill, which would have ruined the concentrated effect. This feature of the design, which everyone who worked on the production recalls for its originality and boldness, is curiously little alluded to or described in the reviews; the truth is that it was impossible finally to make it work. ‘I kept saying, “it’s going to look like a lot of pebbles, Orson.” Well, I was wrong. It didn’t look like pebbles. It just looked like a purple cyke. They didn’t see it at all,’32 said Teichmann. No doubt with time, and a certain amount of calm a solution could have been found; but neither were available any more. Hysteria pitch was approaching. ‘Orson yelled out for some lights. Jeannie looked at me and bowed her head and pulled the main switches and went down. “You’re asking for lights from Horse Eats Hat. We’re not doing any more, we’re going home.” We pulled all the switches, and that was that. We were all so groggy.’33 The desperate struggle against machinery and time began to look unwinnable. No doubt many of Welles’s ideas were excellent, though he seemed to be making them up as he went along. Improvisation within a simple operation can work; to improvise at this level of technology is to put an impossible burden on everyone. Welles obviously began to think that anything could be done, if he shouted hard and long enough. But the human beings rebelled, realising, perhaps, that he was just thrashing around – in the dark, almost literally. The light at the first preview was improvised: a homicidal procedure on that particular set. Immediately after the preview, at nearly midnight, there was a further lighting rehearsal at which they managed to plot the first act (the entire show lasted no more than ninety minutes). The next preview was cancelled while lamps were hung, rehung and hung again. Miraculously, no serious accidents had occurred, though Kevin O’Morrison, making a rapid exit to the cellar with a large group of extras, reached for a crossbar that had been moved, lost his footing and fell twenty-five foot to a concrete floor below. He got up and walked away, unharmed.

  Then calamity struck, as it inevitably must in the presence of so much tension. The elevator (a cheap one, the only one they could afford) always operated fitfully; at a run-through, it juddered and suddenly collapsed. Erskine Sandford, sitting aristocratically at the tea table inside the elevator, was hurled to the floor and broke his leg; he was rushed to hospital, never appearing in the show. He was the lucky one. As the actors stood round, ashen-faced, Jeannie Rosenthal demanded three days to get it working, which she was given. It failed again, this time at a public preview, bringing the show to a halt. Welles and Gabel played scenes from Julius Caesar to divert the audience; finally Rosenthal gave up, and the show had to be cancelled, Houseman appearing onstage with a hurriedly snatched-up piece of paper on which he claimed was recorded the audience’s majority decision to come back to another performance instead of having their money back. It was at about this moment in the infernal proceedings that Howard Koch, only recently appointed to the writing team of the Mercury Theatre of the Air, was handed a copy of The War of the Worlds ‘with instructions from Houseman to dramatise it in the form of news bulletins’.34 Finding the book dull and dated, he tried to persuade them to switch to something else. The only alternative, he was told, was Lorna Doone, at which prospect he understandably blanched and agreed to attempt to liven up Wells, H.G.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  War of the Worlds/Danton’s Death

  HOWARD KOCH’S breakthrough with The War of the Worlds came when he decided to change the location of the novel from England to America, randomly selecting the New Jersey village of Grover’s Mill as the site of the invasion. From then on, realistic imperatives dictated the course of the script. He would use news bulletins, as Houseman had suggested, interrupting a programme to give the reports added urgency and credibility; a broadcast of music from a hotel seemed the most likely. ‘Radio was full at that time of remote programs from hotels,’1 said Eric Barnouw, ‘they were always filling in time by going to the Hotel Pennsylvania, and so forth.’ The adaptation he produced, though ingenious, reads fairly creakily, and the second half, in which the apparently lone survivor of the invasion, Professor Pierson of Princeton, meets an artilleryman living underground before stumbing towards the light at the end of the Holland Tunnel, is frankly dull, quite unlike the usual brilliant montages and swiftly succeeding scenes so characteristic of the Mercury Theatre of the Air.

  There was certainly no jubilation when the script was p
resented to Houseman and Welles. Snatching a few minutes from the nightmarish activities in the theatre, they picked at it in their usual way, pulling it about structurally and demanding more realism. In this they were stymied by the legal department of CBS, who demanded a number of changes in the names of real organisations, though they were able to retain the place names. As usual a mid-week recording of the material was made; again it met with little favour. Welles dismissed the script as ‘corny’, urging Koch to break it up more and more. Paul Stewart devised the sound effects and rehearsed them in careful detail; these might be spectacular enough to distract attention from the thinness of the piece. Even the technicians were unenthusiastic about the show; the secretaries denounced it as silly. Finally at noon on Sunday, tearing himself away from another Danton’s Death lighting rehearsal, Welles arrived at the studio direct from the theatre, and assaulted the unsatisfactory material. ‘All during rehearsals,’ wrote Dick Barr, ‘Orson railed at the text, cursing the writers, and at the whole idea of his presenting so silly a show.’2 He hardly changed the script. What he did was to play it for all it was worth, and then some more.

  Focusing on the device of an interrupted programme, he dared to attempt a verisimilitude that had rarely been essayed before. The apparent breakdowns in transmission, the desperate irruptions of dance music, the sadly tinkling piano were all held longer than would be thought possible. The actors too were galvanised into startlingly real and precisely observed performances. Frank Readick as Carl Phillips, the reporter on the spot who describes the invasion and then collapses dead at his mike, had listened over and over again to a recording of the report of the explosion of the Hindenburg air balloon from a year or two before and exactly imitated the original commentator’s graduation from comfortable report through growing disbelief to naked horror. Using skills honed on The March of Time, the show became, until about its halfway point, a brilliantly effective transposition of the original novel, sharp enough to make even the most sceptical listener wonder, however idly, how Americans might react to the unprecedented event of an invasion, not from Mars, of course, but from Europe – from Germany or perhaps even from England.