Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  The catastrophes continued to the last moment. After the final preview, as yet more adjustments were being made to the lighting plot, an electrician keeled over, having been at his switchboard for seven hours without relief. By now the postponements had become a matter for keen speculation. Events at the Mercury were being regularly and accurately reported; clearly a mole was at work. Even as the electrician was being put in a taxi, Sam Zolotow of The New York Times rang the theatre. ‘He said he was sorry to hear about the electrician and hoped it wasn’t serious,’18 reports Houseman. ‘I said no. He asked if this meant another postponement. I said no and goodnight.’ The informer, it turns out, was one of the extras – an interesting indicator of the lengths to which the press were prepared to go for their Mercury story. It had become hot news again – not because of what was happening onstage, but because imminent disaster seemed in the offing, an irresistibly attractive prospect for an editor. Nor had the left-wing pressure let up. The Daily Worker carried a minatory paragraph two weeks before the opening: ‘LEFT ON BROADWAY: DANTON’S DEATH SCARES PREVIEW AUDIENCE: Having been a Wellesian admirer so long entitles this column to a plea that the script be changed or the show dropped from the repertoire before the hue and cry raised throughout town begins to echo too harshly in the ears of the wonder boy of American theatre.’19 In fact the first night (on 2 November, only two days after The War of the Worlds broadcast) went reasonably well, despite Welles’s inability to remember much of his role. Bill Alland was in the wings, at the prompt desk. ‘Welles stumbled and stumbled. I threw a line at him, then another. He couldn’t take the prompt. Finally he came into the wings and spat at me saying “You sonofabitch, I didn’t ask you to do that.” Then he went back onstage.’20 All this went unnoticed by the press, who were transfixed with anxiety for the other actors, ‘living one hour and a little more in fear, expecting the actors to fall down into the cellar and break their necks. The stage gapes for them,’21 wrote Arthur Pollock in the Brooklyn Eagle. There were no broken necks. The evening rather hung fire, but this was no disaster.

  So the vultures were baulked of their prey. That did not stop them from conducting something in the nature of a collective postmortem. The reviews as a whole constitute an extended inquest into Welles, his methods and aims. Whither Welles? was the underlying theme of nearly every notice. The War of the Worlds had made him a figure of national importance. Not just Danton’s Death but the whole Mercury phenomenon was put in the dock; the majority verdict was not altogether favourable. There were enthusiastic notices; Atkinson in the Times proclaimed it ‘overwhelming and a worthy successor to the Caesar, and Shoemaker’s Holiday of last season.’22 But this and one or two others were rare exceptions. Even stalwart supporters were troubled by what they saw. Atkinson waggishly concluded his notice ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you have just been reading a review of a theatrical performance of Danton’s Death at the Mercury Theatre last evening. There is no occasion for alarm.’ This was not a view shared by all of Atkinson’s fellow critics.

  While generally speaking they acknowledged Welles’s skill and imagination, there was a widespread sense of a machine operating in a void. ‘It is too arty,’ wrote John Mason Brown, the Mercury’s first important champion, ‘too self-conscious for comfort. It is empty of everything except tricks. It is all technique and no drama; all switchboard and no soul; all fury and no sound. One tires of its lights, its actors running up and down stairs, and its overworked elevators. Except as a director’s holiday, it proves to be a bore.’23 Again and again, critics expressed distaste at the directorial dominance of the production. ‘Its only purpose,’24 wrote Sidney Whipple, ‘was to demonstrate the undeniable talent of one man rather than a group of men – including the original playwright.’ The play had been used as the merest excuse for theatrical experiment: ‘it may be electrically, mechanically, and scenically inventive,’ said George Jean Nathan, ‘but someone in the factory somehow neglected to do much about inventing the drama.’25

  The reviewers naturally assumed – what else could they assume? – that it was all effortless virtuosity, instead of having been achieved on the brink of the total collapse of nearly everyone involved – including Welles. John Mason Brown memorably expressed the overwhelming presence of the director’s personality: ‘You are forced to feel as if, having sailed on a boat filled with interesting passengers, you found that, in addition to having to sit at the captain’s table three times a day, you were permitted to talk to no one else except the captain in between meals.’ ORSON WELLES DOES BÜCHNER’S DANTON’S DEATH OVER INTO A LITTLE THING OF HIS OWN, ENJOYING LIFE AS A BOY PRODIGY,26 ran the aggressive headline in the Brooklyn Eagle-Examiner in which Arthur Pollock wrote, eerily prophetic, ‘at twenty-three a man’s future must appall him if he has begun where others at their peak left off. Is he good enough to get better throughout two-thirds of a lifetime? … he is treating the theatre as a plaything, giving himself a good time at his games.’

  Who but Welles has received school reports spread across the national press? Only an heir to the throne, perhaps. He was already in early manhood an exemplary case, the Icarus of the age. It was no longer possible simply to write about his productions; they were merely symptoms of his monstrous progress, which the press was keenly monitoring. Later in life Welles plaintively lamented that ‘nobody reviews my films; they review me.’ By the time he was twenty-three, the pattern was already set. The Welles Problem was definitively established with Danton’s Death. Despite the danger signals detected by most critics, there was none the less faith in his ability to solve it. Pollock concluded his piece with a reassurance: ‘Don’t worry. When Master Welles gets to be an old man of twenty-eight or -nine he will have given up the idea that the theatre is his own particular playroom and he’ll settle down to work. All this Danton business is just animal crackers. Boy prodigies do not always disappear altogether.’

  This perception of Welles’s failure actually to engage with the play in question dominated the notices to the exclusion of almost anything else. Atkinson pointed out the oddity of approaching a play bursting with ‘matters of contemporary pertinence’ as an exercise in style. The idiom that Welles was exploring was essentially filmic – soundtrack and all. He protested in The Director in the Theatre that ‘I have not arbitrarily taken Danton’s Death as a shooting script for elevators and lights’, but it is hard to detect any other motive. Pollock specifically noted the filmic nature of the production: ‘There are black holes to the left and to the right and in the middle. Light shoots from all directions, light smartly thought out, cleverly manipulated. Men stand alone on the stage and orate to unseen singing or shouting multitudes. Little groups appear out of the darkness and talk awhile about the French Revolution, what it is doing to them. We get Büchner’s play in short takes, a badly connected series of flashes.’

  It is interestingly paradoxical that, despite the constant use of the word virtuosity, many notices comment on the slowness of the production. ‘Every movement,’ wrote Richard Watts, another erstwhile admirer, ‘is made as if it were artistically precious, and it manages to achieve not a rhythm that seems appropriate to the French Revolution but rather one that indicates a belief on Mr Welles’s part that everything he is doing is pretty significant.’27 (It is noteworthy how personally vexed so many of the notices sound.) ‘It is done with great deliberation,’28 wrote Burns Mantle, ‘in what we probably will come to know as the Orson Welles manner.’

  This is odd. Hitherto his productions had been noted for their celerity. Danton seems to represent a thickening of Welles’s theatrical arteries; an impression confirmed by accounts of his own performance as St Just. ‘Mr Welles plays him behind a grave mask and a booming voice with some of the melodramatic solemnity of The Shadow,’ wrote Atkinson in the Times. ‘His eccentric phrasing of the last speech sacrifices meaning to apostolic sound.’ His voice and the uses to which he put it – hitherto his glory – now also came under heavy criticism. ‘Incoherent and handsomely fatuo
us,’29 wrote Stark Young of his delivery of the speech, ‘merely stylised exhibitionism, arbitrary and too hard to follow.’ In another peculiarly personal rumination, Brooks Atkinson (under the heading GOTHAM HOBGOBLIN) noted the uses to which Welles put his voice: ‘that baleful voice has already had a persistent career, ululating dooms for quite a spell … Mr Welles likes the roar that words like that can make, and the little Mercury Theatre trembles with his prophetic diapason as the shivering curtain comes down. No wonder innocent radio listeners thought the world was coming to an end a fortnight ago. Mr Welles’s voice is the cry of demons.’30 He was not being taken altogether seriously.

  As for the rest of the cast, Vladimir Sokoloff was also gently (and sometimes not so gently) mocked: Robert Benchley reported that ‘he had trouble with the English language, being strongly opposed to pipple in welwet gowns.’31 Gabel was accused of giving a lazy performance as Danton, and several times of having the wrong face for the part (‘so genially constructed that sometimes he seemed to utter his most dismal sentiments with a beaming smile’) and hardly anyone else was mentioned at all.

  Business was not good. The War of the Worlds’ publicity helped the box office not one whit. The apparent political confusion of the production lost the Mercury its committed audience. Theatre parties cancelled their bookings, while ticket agents ignored the production. Danton’s Death was a flop – the Mercury’s first, and, as it turned out, its last. In an interesting comment on The War of the Worlds, Houseman wrote that ‘Welles is at heart a magician whose particular talent lies not so much in his creative imagination (which is considerable) as in his proven ability to stretch the familiar elements of theatrical effect far beyond the normal point of tension. For this reason his productions require more elaborate preparation and more perfect execution than most. At that – like all complicated magical tricks – they remain, until the last minute, in a state of precarious balance. When they come off, they give – by virtue of their unusually high intensity – an impression of great brilliance and power; when they fail – when something in their balance goes wrong or the original structure proves to have been unsound – they provoke among their audience a particularly violent reaction of unease and revulsion. Welles’s flops are louder than other men’s.’32

  The crucial factor in the débâcle of Danton’s Death was the lack of preparation, the absence of forward planning, the failure to think through. Welles began to believe that he could make anything happen as long as the pressure was enough. Buoyed up by alcohol, amphetamines, food, sex, while almost totally deprived of sleep, he drove himself and everyone on to destinations of which he had only the vaguest sense. Improvising and experimenting, he had ceased to explore. Any interesting results of the Danton’s Death production were accidental, randomly achieved. That he kept going at all was something of a miracle. During the play’s run, he was still working on the weekly radio show (The Pickwick Papers, of all things, A Passenger to Bali, and, fittingly, Heart of Darkness) and making public pronouncements of ever darker purport. Continuing the public inquest into the Welles Problem, Brooks Atkinson noted in his ‘Gotham Hobgoblin’ piece that Welles’s Voice had been ‘ringing the tocsin lately. It solemnly forecast the death of the theatre before the stunned National Council of Teachers of English last summer … “we do not know if we will be alive to go to the World’s Fair next year,” the voice of The Shadow bellowed, for Mr Welles’s voice is an organ that has an independent existence, divorced from mind and purged of sense of humor. When he starts laying tunes on it, dynasties rumble, civilisations start falling apart and radio listeners fly into the streets.’ Atkinson had accurately identified the tone which informs most of Welles’s public utterances of this period: frustration, weariness, impatience (a crabbiness which would seem more appropriate to a fifty-year-old) and doom. He starts more and more to appear in the role of Cassandra, or the theatre’s own Savonarola, seemingly impelled to make general statements of some pomposity about art and life. There is a sense, behind all this rather jejune Spenglerian despair, mixed in with awkward after-dinner humour (‘there are a few actors in England, but they’re coming’) and some ringing if unproven contentions, that he is impatient at having to keep proving himself over and over. He seems to be defending himself, but against what or whom? He has had nothing but praise and admiration.

  That was of course in itself a large part of the problem. Expectations were running ridiculously high. ‘If Danton’s Death does not seem very important it is, after all, simply because Orson Welles did it,’ wrote Pollock in the Brooklyn Eagle. ‘He suffers by comparison with himself. Done by anyone else this Danton’s Death would have looked like an American miracle. Done by anyone else it would not seem quite so precious.’ In an astonishingly short space of time and at a startlingly early age, he had placed himself at the centre of the American Theatre. He was no longer a private citizen. His flops were not a personal grief, but a betrayal of the future of the American stage. ‘What chiefly worries me is the mannered quality that has got into his production,’ wrote John Mason Brown, ‘and I think he should be spoken to about it before it is too late, for he is one of the valuable men of the theatre and we need him.’ Atkinson had done a little research into The Problem. ‘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,’ he wrote. ‘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.’

  Little did the analysts of the Mercury’s malady know that only ten days after delivering their diagnoses, they would be writing its obituary. ‘After twenty-one performances,’ wrote Houseman, ‘we threw in the sponge – not just for Danton’s Death but for the Mercury Theatre.’33 They had had enough. ‘The truth is – we were no longer interested. In the grandiose and reckless scheme of our lives, the Mercury had fulfilled its purpose. It had brought us success and fame; it had put Welles on the cover of Time and our radio show on the front page of every newspaper in the country. Inevitably, any day now, the offers from Hollywood would start arriving. It was too late to turn back and we did not really want to.’ Any suggestion that the Mercury Theatre might have been one of the great idealistic theatrical experiments of the century is conclusively dispelled by Houseman’s candid if unattractive admission that the purpose of the organisation had been to provide its directors with fame and success, not perhaps an admission that Stanislavsky or Nemirovich-Danchenko would have made, nor Micheál Mac Liammóir or Hilton Edwards, for all of whom the glory was incidental. Their dreams of art demanded a commitment to something bigger than themselves that neither Welles nor Houseman (at this stage of their lives) could pretend to.

  Well, why should they? They had created many memorably gaudy hours on their tiny stage. It had been fun while it lasted. The only real casualties were a few actors who had for a moment thought that they were engaged in the remaking of the American Theatre; a few technicians who had been driven to the point of physical collapse getting Welles’s extravagant and heavily impractical visions onto the stage; and a new audience which had become excited by the possibilities of a young and radically imaginative theatre. To none of these groups did Welles and Houseman feel they had any particular loyalty. They had arrived with their box of fireworks and let them off to loud acclaim; then they produced a squib. At the first murmurs of disappointment, they departed, leaving nothing behind but the memory of brilliant cascades and thrilling explosions. What more can one ask? The critic of The New York Times had no quarrel with it. Identifying the Mercury as ‘Hobohemia in the theatre’ and a generous contributor to the gaiety of nations, he accepted its capriciousness as a lively virtue. Others were sterner. Sidney Whipple in the New York World Telegram devoted two aggrieved pieces to the Mercury’s demise, the result, he claimed, of an absence of a definitive programme and a refusal to accept that a successful venture in the theatre must be ‘co-operative in eve
ry sense of the word’.34

  Welles answered him by pretending that the theatre had closed because it had been denied the right to fail. ‘The Mercury has many faults, including its inability to produce an unbroken succession of smash hits, which is exactly and with absolutely no exaggeration essential to the maintenance of the permanent repertory company devoted to elaborate experimental productions under present Broadway circumstances.’ On the contrary, the Mercury had produced an unbroken succession of hits; with its first flop, it folded. A company that cannot withstand the impact of one failure is clearly built on unstable foundations, psychologically as well as financially. It was as if the Mercury depended for its life on the acclaim of the press. Sustained by that bright sun, it flowered; at the first cloud, it withered and died. Harold Clurman described the Mercury, with justice, as ‘an enterprise that the press was sincerely fond of. The press operation, shrewdly directed by Houseman, skilfully run by Hank Senber and incomparably fronted by Welles was without parallel in the modern American Theatre. A torrent of witty, informative press releases kept things bubbling along; no journalist was ever refused an interview with Welles, who always provided memorable if erratic copy. The critics (with the single uninfluential exception of Mary McCarthy) were on the Mercury’s side from the beginning, always ready to play down the minuses and to write up the pluses. This sort of relationship with the press is always – like any dependent relationship – fraught with danger. Who needs whom? The plug can be pulled at any moment; but it wasn’t. The critics had certainly turned on Danton’s Death, but not on the Mercury. And yet they had put up the shutters for good. It was puzzling.35