Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  ‘I had set my heart on directing this one,’ writes Houseman in Run-Through. ‘But I was anxious to end my theatrical association with Welles on a note of triumph and I felt that with the strong text of Wright’s book to support him, his direction of Native Son would be more dramatic than mine.’ Both of these latter points may have been true, but there was never, as Houseman’s letters to Wright make clear, any question of anyone but Welles directing it. With no opening scheduled, Citizen Kane was still in limbo as Schaefer and RKO continued to consult lawyers; Welles was in a state of impotent desperation. Native Son was the safety valve he needed. He hurled himself at it with ferocious intensity. The entire production, from supper in Los Angeles to opening night on Broadway, took seven weeks to achieve. The money was immediately raised from – in Houseman’s phrase – Welles’s Hollywood friends; a small group, but evidently well-heeled. Casting was rapidly accomplished: bringing Ray Collins, Paul Stewart and Everett Sloane with him from Hollywood, auditioning the younger white actors, he recruited most of the black actors in the company from the old Negro Project team, including in the make-or-break role of Bigger Thomas, his Harlem Banquo, Canada Lee. James Morcom (presumably recovered from the nightmare of Five Kings) was enlisted to interpret Welles’s ideas about design, Jean Rosenthal to execute them and create the lighting plot. Vakhtangov! was put in charge of sound; as always, Welles’s aim was to integrate the work of all these departments into an overwhelming statement. Taking his cue from the novel, he sought to create a swift-moving vision of urban hell.

  Chicago is the location, ‘the fabulous city in which Bigger lived, an indescribable city, huge, roaring, dirty, noisy, raw, stark, brutal; a city of extremes: torrid summers and sub-zero winters, white people and black people, scabby poverty and gaudy luxury, high idealism and hard cynicism! … a city whose black smoke clouds shut out the sunshine for seven months of the year; a city in which, on a fine balmy May morning one can sniff the stench of the stockyards; a city where people have grown so used to gangs and murders and graft that they have honestly forgotten that government can have a pretence of decency!’8 It was Welles’s city, too. ‘I want this show to be surrounded by brick,’9 he told Jean Rosenthal. ‘Yellow brick.’ Morcom gave him a proscenium of brick. Inside it, the set was made up of seven little wagon stages with brick facings and brick returns which would open out to join the brick of the frame, thus varying its width. A movable header (also, of course, brick) would be raised or lowered to alter the height of the opening. The width varied from twenty-five foot to fourteen foot; the height from seven and a half foot to twenty foot. The side walls were raked sharply to counter the serious sight-line problems created by this arrangement. Ceilings, writes Rosenthal, were ‘faked down in extreme perspective’. The depth of the stage was limited to a very shallow ten foot.

  ‘From the tiny, poverty-stricken interior of Bigger Thomas’s room, through the elevated “murder” bedroom, set four foot above the stage level on a raked platform and back-lit through chiffon curtains, to the low brick prison wall,’10 in Rosenthal’s words, ‘the Mercury scenery plays its sinister part.’ The varying aperture is as nakedly cinematic a device as can be imagined. The sets themselves (three of which were flown: the cellar, the warehouse and the prison) were filled with realistic detail; a new approach for Welles in the theatre. He was baulked in his desire for a practical furnace onstage by the New York Fire Department, but at least he was able to have real cornflakes and canned peaches with milk for the breakfast consumed by the cast every night. The lighting, clean and sculpted, was none the less used to serve realistic purposes: Andrea Nouryeh describes the crack of morning sunlight in the first scene; the street lights (shone through grillework in the theatre’s flies) to create the narrow back alleys of Chicago; eerie moonlight in Mary’s bedroom as she is smothered by Bigger.

  Sound, in Welles’s conception, was as important as any of the scenic elements. His purpose was to unify the ten scenes of the play with an almost continuous sound plot; more than in any of his previous theatre productions, he used in Native Son what he had learned from radio. Applying a musical technique of transformation, he would establish a sound at the end of a scene which, by the beginning of the next scene, had become something else. Nouryeh cites the chiming of the clock at the end of the first courtroom sequence: during the brief blackout and scene change it transforms into the ringing of an alarm clock; as the lights come up on the new scene, Bigger’s mother comes in and switches the alarm off. Here, as in many places, Welles takes his cue directly from the novel, whose very first word is BRRRRRIIIIIIIIIINNG! He also experimented (not altogether successfully, in the view of some critics) with the use of recurring sounds at moments of intensity, sonic leitmotivs, as it were. The sound of the furnace in which Bigger burns the body of Mary Dalton reappeared frequently. Welles’s ambitions for the use of sound were often somewhat in advance of the equipment at his disposal. In Julius Caesar, he had had to abandon his efforts completely; in Native Son, with the inspired collaboration of Bill Alland, he came close to what he had wanted. This was not achieved without intense work, as was the fluidity of the production, vital to his sense of the play. Like Caesar and The Shoemaker’s Holiday it was to be played without interval; unlike them, it was unremittingly sombre, and lasted nearly two hours. The speed of scene changes was crucial, achieved with the aid of no less than thirty-seven highly drilled stage-hands. The technical rehearsals continued, on one celebrated occasion, over thirty-six unbroken hours. Time was desperately short, Welles did not have the facilities or crew of a major studio at his disposal, and many of his company, including his leading actor, were relatively inexperienced. He drove them all, actors and technicians, to the very brink; but the results justified the suffering. Welles was able to go further and quicker than usual because he was not acting in the show himself.

  Andrea Nouryeh has reconstructed elements of the physical production to give a vivid sense of its overall feel. The scene in which Bigger desperately pulls a gun on the young Marxist, Jan Erlone, ends with a blackout; the sound of the furnace suddenly stops. The outline of the Prosecutor from the first courtroom scene is darkly visible for a second, lit from above. During the ensuing blackout, the audience hear a collage of sounds of wind, trains idling, pulling out and then stopping, finally a piece of tin banging on a roof. The lights come up on the abandoned warehouse where Bigger and his girlfriend Clara are hiding from the police. A neon sign blinks. Through a skylight, snow is seen to be falling. Sirens are heard. The neon light switches off; a beacon flashes through the skylight. The skylight suddenly crashes down. Shots are fired, in which Clara is killed. Policemen advance; Bigger scurries across a ramp over the orchestra pit, and fires into the audience. He screams his defiance, which is drowned by the sirens; the lights snap out. The lights come up again, and we’re in the courtroom. Like the Prologue (also set in the courtroom) this scene is played against a yellow brick front cloth ‘in one’ on the apron of the stage; stairs lead down into orchestra pit. The witnesses sit with their backs to the audience, who become the jury, and are addressed directly by the lawyers. In the final scene, after judgement has been delivered, Bigger is left alone with his lawyer. In the production’s final, somewhat controversial, image, he hurls himself at his cage, arms stretched out, as if crucified. The lighting, outlining his body, heightens the image. ‘I want the play to end,’11 Welles had written to Paul Green, ‘with Bigger Thomas behind the bars standing there with his arms reaching out and out, his hands clinging to the bars – yes, yes, the crucified one, crucified by the Jim Crow world in which he lived.’ Again, Welles takes a cue from Wright’s words in the novel: ‘He ran to the steel door and caught the bars in his hands and shook them, as though trying to tear the steel from its concrete moorings,’ though the martyr imagery of Welles’s stage picture is arguably alien to the more humanistic purport of Wright’s philosophical outlook; it is an eerie reminiscence of John Brown in Welles’s boyish Marching Song: ‘with a shock we
realise that the attitude is no longer that of triumph but of crucifixion!’ In working on the play, Welles’s habitual energy had a demonic quality to it, fuelled both by his deep and life-long loathing of racism and his impotent rage about what increasingly seemed to him to be the suppression of Citizen Kane.

  Houseman describes him during this period as ‘overbearing but exciting to work with’. They had occasional spats, but these were between manager and director, not between partners; there was no longer anything behind the rows, no struggle for power, no dream of mutual involvement. Houseman now knew better than to attempt to create a closeness that Welles refused. It was the last time he would say ‘we’ of the Mercury Theatre. Bill Alland describes Houseman and Welles, in yet another word that more usually belongs to marital relations, as ‘estranged’ – adding that in his memoir ‘Houseman doesn’t quite reveal how shat on he was.’12 It was an end of being shat on, and a return of dignity. Quietly, Houseman was becoming his own man. Before embarking on Native Son, he had directed a show for the Theatre Guild. It was a flop – a flop d’estime, but a flop none the less, more noticeably so since it was Phillip Barry’s first show since Philadelphia Story, the theatre hit of the decade. The show (Liberty Jones) folded during the first weeks of rehearsals for Native Son after twelve performances on Broadway. It was still a major production of some class and style; the fault was universally acknowledged to be in the play itself, not the production. Houseman held his head high, undaunted, as he would previously have been, by witnessing the white heat of Welles’s creativity in action so soon after a personal failure.

  Richard Wright was drawn by that white heat. More Houseman’s man than Welles’s, he nevertheless acknowledged his ‘profound admiration’ for him. ‘He is beyond doubt the most courageous, gallant, and talented director on the modern stage in the world today. He presents here something never before seen on the stage in America. The stamp of his hallmark has been vital in advancing the production of Native Son to this stage.’13 He noted, with approval, that ‘running through all of Welles’s directing is a high spirit of play and fun.’ Wright rather fell in love with the company, too. ‘Never in my life have I been associated with a more serious, young, spirited and talented theatrical group than that which comprises the Mercury Theatre.’ Initially Wright had been bemused by the process. ‘My first reaction naturally was one of confusion. Welles and Houseman … warned me to keep away from the theatre till some coherence and continuity had been reached through rehearsals.’ But his ‘old love of witnessing something new’ overcame him. ‘I ignored their advice and hung around anyway … that was precisely what I wanted to see: – the process whereby the repetition of single lines and passages were welded into a coherent dramatic pattern.’ His somewhat unloving biographer Margaret Walker believes that Wright, as co-author, felt that ‘he had a constant privilege and duty to interrupt and give advice on how he wanted to produce Native Son on the stage. Knowing Wright, there is no way he would have kept his hands off and let Houseman, Welles, Paul Green and Canada Lee take care of what he considered his business.’14 For this, there is no evidence whatever.

  His co-author, Paul Green, on the other hand, might have liked very much to interfere, but he had wisely been kept away from the theatre until the last moment. Turning up for a run-through, he stayed to the end of the play – which of course bore no resemblance to what he had written – then left without a word, returning the next day with his lawyer. Houseman calmly refused to restore to the play a single line of his text, while Green and his attorney unconvincingly threatened lawsuits; they scarcely had a leg to stand on here since only Wright’s words from the novel had been used. At a strategic moment, Houseman had Welles summoned from rehearsals. ‘Orson began to howl at him, Green got up and left, and I have never seen him again.’15 Work proceeded more or less according to plan, though the traditional Mercury postponements were observed (Houseman, in Run-Through, claims otherwise, but the delays were sufficient to be reported in The New York Times: ‘TWO POSTPONEMENTS IN A ROW’). Welles was unable to resist an ironic reference to his still imprisoned film; he placed a sled inscribed (invisibly to the audience, of course) ROSEBUD on a corner of the set, to the complete satisfaction of Richard Wright. ‘I had the honor recently of seeing a preview of Citizen Kane.’ Wright said in a contemporary interview. ‘Running through this great film is a rather poignant and symbolic sub-theme of a boy’s sled, called Rosebud. You can imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered that Orson Welles had taken the beautifully varnished sled of the white boy in Citizen Kane and thrown it into the first scene of Native Son.’

  Kane beat incessantly on Welles’s brain throughout the period of work on Native Son. Most terrifying was the silence from RKO. On 7 March – a third of the way into rehearsals – in some understandable distress, Welles sent a wild and impassioned telegram to Schaefer: ‘think about the impossible strain you have put in my faith in you stop i see a good many important people in the ordinary course of things in new york and a great many more now make a point of seeing me stop they all tell me what i refuse to believe and i tell everybody what i have no reason to believe beyond my belief in you stop as a matter of fact as regards kane im the only person i know who has any faith in you at all’.16 Turning rather swiftly from this dangerous tack, he darkly suggests that strings in Washington may be about to be pulled. Then he turns to his personal feelings. Principal among these, obviously, is humiliation: ‘my mail is one long accusation from the american public which truly believes i have sold out and the sympathy and good advice of my friends make their society intolerable stop my nights are sleepless and my days are a torture stop this is no exaggeration … dont tell me to get a good nights rest and keep my chin up stop dont bother to communicate if thats all you have to say stop theres no more rest for me until i know i have something concrete, and as for my chin ive been leading with it for more than a year and a half … i must know if i overrate our friendship … as ever, my fondest regards orson’.

  RKO’s silence was finally broken on 11 March – Native Son was in its final week of rehearsal – by an unexpectedly impassioned statement from the strictly non-political George Schaefer in Variety: ‘A free speech, a free press, and a screen free for expression tell the story of American democracy. They merit no criticism. They need no defence.’17 This was encouraging. Schaefer (a notoriously obstinate man) was digging his heels in. Then, just days before the opening of Native Son, Welles gained an important ally. Henry Luce, sometime investor in the Mercury Theatre, owner of Time and Life magazines, rival and opponent of Hearst, took up the cause of Kane. ‘He has ordered his staff to unleash their guns to get the film released,’ reported Variety. The first fruit of Luce’s commitment to Welles appeared in an article in Time on 17 March, a week before the opening of Native Son. ‘As in some grotesque fable, it appeared last week that Hollywood was about to turn on and destroy its greatest creation,’18 said Time. ‘The objection of Mr Hearst who founded a publishing empire on sensationalism is ironic. For to most of the several hundred people who have seen the film at private showings, Citizen Kane is the most sensational product of the US movie industry … it is as psychiatrically sound as a fine novel, but projected with far greater scope for instance than Aldous Huxley was inspired to bring to his novel on the same theme. It is a work of art created by grown people for grown people.’ The danger that Welles was now caught in the crosslines of a new war, that of the newspaper barons, was nothing to the exhilaration the public support brought. Newsweek, the same day, carried an even more complete encomium, from John O’Hara, already the sensational author of the novel Butterfield 8 and the musical show Pal Joey, currently running on Broadway: ‘It is with exceeding regret that your faithful bystander reports that he has just seen a picture which he thinks must be the best picture he ever saw. With no less regret he reports that he has just seen the best actor in the history of acting … reason for regret: you, my dear, may never see the picture.’19 He offers a pleasing s
ide swipe at the Hopper–Parsons axis: ‘a few obsequious and/or bulbous middle-aged ladies think the picture ought not to be shown,’ then launches into his blazing finale: ‘Citizen Kane is Late 1941. It lacks nothing … there never has been a better actor than Orson Welles. I just got finished saying there never has been a better actor than Orson Welles, and I don’t want any of your lip. Do yourself a favor. Go to your neighborhood exhibitor and ask him why he isn’t showing Citizen Kane. Then sue me.’ The still unshown Citizen Kane was rapidly becoming the Look Back in Anger of its day, polarising the progressives and the conservatives, the young and the old – except that no one ever tried to stop Look Back in Anger being seen. Kane was still on ice. Encouraged by the support, Welles took time out from the rehearsals for Native Son to call a press conference.

  He threatened to sue, first RKO, then Hearst, if the film was not released. ‘How can you copyright an enterprise, a profession? I must be free to film a story of a newspaper publisher. If I am restrained, it will force us all to go back and take our characters, say, from Greek mythology. And even then I suppose somebody would contend he was Zeus … I believe that the public is entitled to see Citizen Kane. For me to stand by while this picture was being suppressed would constitute a breach of faith with the public on my part as a producer.’20 He had, he said, sufficient financial backing to buy Kane from RKO and to release it himself, and the legal right both to demand that the picture be released and to bring legal action to force its release. ‘RKO must release Citizen Kane. If it does not do so immediately, I have instructed my attorney to commence proceedings.’ Roy Alexander Fowler, Welles’s first biographer, suggests that this threat of legal proceedings was a ruse agreed by Welles and Schaefer. It seems likely. RKO certainly had no intention of writing off the $800,000 it had cost, and Schaefer’s entire ‘new Prestige RKO’ depended on its release. His regime could scarcely have a worse start than the non-appearance of the most publicised film in the history of Hollywood. Herb Drake signed off the press conference in characteristically hard-boiled manner: ‘Welles will show the picture and show it in tents, if necessary. He will probably open it at Soldiers’21 Field and saw Dolores in half at each intermission.’