by Simon Callow
Meanwhile, Native Son opened to the press. The Broadway first night audience (the show was playing at the St James’s Theatre, slap in the heart of mainstream Broadway) was taken aback by the lack of an intermission, even more so by the decision not to issue programmes until the end of the show; Welles refused to allow the tight grip he had exercised over the play to be diffused by an audience rustling programmes and lighting matches to scan the cast list. The performance was remarkably successful; among many telegrams of congratulations was one from a man Welles knew had little regard for him personally or artistically, the ever-brittle Joe Losey: ‘saw your show tonight stop its the first theatre job since little foxes for which i have complete respect and admiration stop would like to have done it stop that may not mean much to you but it means plenty to me stop i envy you profoundly stop wish you the long run which it deserves my sincere congratulations joe losey’.22 Richard Wright, too, was delighted, even if his telegram was to both Houseman and Welles: ‘let me thank both of you for the energy talent speed and courage which both of you brought to the staging producing and directing of native son stop i have said time and again and i say now that i feel that native son has been in the hands of the two most gallant men in the theatrical world stop good luck always to both of you stop richard wright’.23 Canada Lee’s telegram promised nothing that it didn’t deliver: ‘thanks for my big chance orson stop i shall live up to your confidence in me stop i will be there punching till the curtain comes down canada lee’.24
The reviews the following day were full of stentorian acclaim for Welles, even if the venture as a whole provoked reservations. These came principally from two quarters: those who felt the book had not been well served, and those who felt that it had been too well served. Most critics, however, before entering reservations, took time to welcome back the prodigal son. It was his return, rather than the play itself, that was the news item. Sidney Whipple, an old scourge of Welles’s, led the huzzahs: ‘STARK DRAMA STAMPED WITH GENIUS: Native Son proves that Orson Welles, whether you like to admit it or not, is not a boy wonder but actually the greatest theatrical director of the modern stage.’25 Stark Young, who had also not been uncritical of Welles as both actor and director, was almost equally enthusiastic, observing that ‘it may at times be quite ham, but this is not too dreadful a fault in these soft days.’26
Brooks Atkinson of the Times, staunch supporter from the beginning, was just as glad to see him back: ‘It is as if the theatre had been shaken up and recharged with life.’27 Then came the reservation: ‘Mr Welles’s wide pulsating style of direction is not the only possible approach to Native Son. In fact, it may not be the best.’ This note was sounded elsewhere: ‘there is no way of telling how far this rushing and plentiful use of the theatre medium per se that he is capable of and practices here cuts down the pathos, or the tragic element, that might have been possible to Native Son and its performance,’ wrote Stark Young, who admitted to being ‘excited rather than moved’ by the play. No one denied the theatrical excitement engendered; the widely expressed doubt was whether it served the material. ‘Beyond a bit of theatre commotion, publicity, sitting in our seats through ten scenes without intermission, and running into waves of intermittent emotion, there is very little remaining with us when the evening is over, though the subject matter of the play concerned one of the most pressing issues in America.’ It was, of course, melodrama, Welles’s essential technique; but was that appropriate to his searing, epic subject?
The Daily Worker (by no means predictably, since Wright, as an ex-member of the Communist Party, had fallen foul of the Marxist establishment) had no doubts: ‘in comparison, all the productions of the current season seem dim and ancient chromos.’ This included The Grapes of Wrath and Watch on the Rhine, so this was no idle praise. ‘The theatre, that slumbering giant, tears off its chains in this production. From the theatrical point of view it is a technical masterpiece. As a political document it lives, with the fire of an angry message.’ The Catholic Commonweal, coming from the other end of the political spectrum, was outraged that a murderer should be glorified; and the Journal-American, not entirely surprisingly, since it was the flagship title of William Randolph Hearst, found that the play had more to do with Moscow than Harlem. This was the first hint of Hearst’s new tactic in the Kane war of attrition: vilifying Welles’s politics.
For Canada Lee, the praise was unanimous: ‘Mr Lee’s performance is, in fact, the best I have ever seen in New York from a Negro player,’ in Stark Young’s words; particularly so, he says, in view of the weakness in the writing. Rosamond Gilder made an important point in her review for Theatre Arts Monthly which transcends these stylistic cavills: ‘Canada Lee has added a figure of heroic dimensions and tremendous implications to the theatre’s gallery of great portraits.’28 How often had that happened in the history of black theatre? Atkinson called Lee ‘superb’ adding that ‘not all of the acting measures up to the play or the performance. Perhaps Mr Welles is not sufficiently interested in the minor parts.’ The truth may be that Welles lavished an enormous amount of time, patience and energy on working with Lee who, for the rest of his short life, was thereafter regarded as the finest black actor of his generation. Lee, ex-boxer, ex-violinist, ex-jockey and currently proprietor of the Chicken Coop Club on West 136th Street, had worked steadily as an actor since Macbeth in 1936, to mixed critical response; Big White Fog, his previous show (for the Negro Playwrights’ Company), had not gained him many plaudits. Despite this, and his universally noted sweetness of demeanour (an unlikely qualification for playing the unexploded bomb that is Bigger Thomas), Welles had had no hesitation in casting him in the role; his confidence was rewarded with one of the most celebrated performances of the American theatre of the period.
The production in general marked an enormous breakthrough in the depiction of a black person’s life and death; whatever its compromises in the interest of dramatic form, it was as unyielding as the novel itself in its confrontation of the baffled rage of Bigger Thomas. There is no concession. ‘To most people, as to this department, the hero is inhuman,’ wrote a chilled Atkinson. ‘Although the drama flames with violence, the authors give a cold, unyielding conclusion to the most biting drama ever written about a Negro in America … after more than two years in Hollywood, Mr Welles has dropped by to stage a hard-hitting play.’ He had not sold out. ‘The simple fact is that Mr Welles has come back to the theatre with all the originality and imagination he had when he was setting off fire-crackers in the Mercury two or three seasons ago,’ said Atkinson in the Times. ‘Mr Welles is a young man with a lot of flaring ideals and when he is standing on the director’s podium, he renews the youth of the theatre.’
Native Son represented two important things, not necessarily serving each other: Wright’s vision, and Welles’s talent. It was impossible to consider the piece itself, or its meaning, or the individual elements within it, except in terms of Welles himself. He was inescapable. Not for nothing did the marquee outside the theatre say simply
ORSON WELLES
NATIVE SON
Business was, to begin with, brisk. That was no mean achievement in a season as crammed with attractive delights as that of spring 1941 (Arsenic and Old Lace, Lady in the Dark, Johnny Belinda, Pal Joey, Panama Hattie, The Corn Is Green, and The Man Who Came to Dinner). The run was not untroubled, however. The theatre was picketed by both the Urban League, who thought its tragic ending, in Ethan Mordden’s words, ‘counterproductive to progressivism’ and the Communist Party, waging war on the apostate author, Wright. By the end of the run, business had slacked off sufficiently to provoke an unsigned document produced for the Mercury press office under the headline BLUEPRINT FOR AN EMERGENCY. It is a striking indication of the continuing difficulty in persuading black people into theatres in Central Manhattan (the Negro Playwrights’ Company had foundered on that rock), but also of the importance of the production.
1. Get support of Negro press. ANGLES: What Native Son means to the
negro people. They must see that the success or failure of the show will influence the type of Negro production on Broadway for many years to come. If the show fails, producers will be reluctant to present Negroes in anything but the old and highly undesirable formulas; as clowns, rapists or creatures just a little bit better than the apes … Native Son voices their aspirations, problems etc with clarity and conviction and now is the time to throw their complaint right back on their laps.29
For the second time in his short career Welles had spearheaded the hopes of the Negro profession. The author of the anonymous document (who might conceivably be Wright) suggests a Native Son rally to be held in Colonial Park in Harlem which should feature a broadcast from Hollywood by Welles and any famous people who have seen the show. ‘Orson is well thought of in Harlem and I can’t stress too highly the effect of such a personal touch on his part.’ They finally clocked up a highly respectable (though not especially profitable) 114 performances at the St James’s Theatre; the show was then toured, in simplified form, and brought back to New York, where it was again acclaimed. It was, by common consent, the most completely achieved of all Welles’s productions to date. As it happens, it was the last success he was ever to have in the theatre, though he continued to work there, intermittently and eccentrically, for another twenty years. He had returned from Hollywood with a new sense of purpose and concentration; his relationship with Houseman, though by now lacking in personal warmth, was one of complete professional trust. He would never again in the theatre have the framework that Houseman had provided. His schemes became wilder and wilder, and less and less considered. Houseman’s influence, in the case of Native Son, was crucial. Wright sent him a letter after the opening saying that ‘it was a little shameful that you could not have gotten public credit for your help.’30 Stabilising, grounding and rooting Welles was only half of Houseman’s contribution: he was a master of the forethought and manipulation (as his handling of Green amply demonstrates) upon which any collective enterprise must depend; Ulysses to Welles’s Achilles. Welles despised him for the very thing that was his greatest contribution. There was no reason why he should endure that; instead he forged a career for himself which, though it would never know the explosive excitement that accompanied everything Welles ever did, had at least as great an influence on his life and times, both artistically and politically, as Welles ever did.
A few months after the closure of Native Son, Houseman was appointed to a job that called on every talent he possessed, and for which all his varied experiences had uniquely prepared him. He was made head of what became The Voice of America, and thus, by an extraordinary irony, this English-educated, Rumanian-born, half Alsatian, half Welshman became responsible for the audible presence in the world of his adopted country. Now, at last, he was free of Welles, and the need of a Welles-figure. It is noteworthy that there is no mention in his memoir of his last meeting with Welles; they had simply died to each other. In March 1941, Welles was at the pinnacle of his career in the theatre, still the uncontested great white hope of the American theatre who came to nothing in the end. The disappointment of all those hopes, though not attributable to, is discernible in, the breakdown of his relations with Houseman.
For the meantime, Citizen Kane had to be released from its Bastille. Despite Schaefer’s impassioned words, RKO were once again wavering; the lawyers had delivered another verdict: Hearst could after all sue, and he could win. The phony war continued. Schaefer’s tactic was to show the film to as many influential people as he possibly could to build on the groundswell of informed opinion in favour of the film. Welles himself had shown it to studio executives in New York in February, at the beginning of rehearsals for Native Son; he made a speech about freedom and the threat of fascism which had been greeted with polite applause. Schaefer had had a showing in Los Angeles for Hollywood’s great and good. Reactions were almost universally favourable; an exception was Louis B. Mayer who claimed to have been so upset on behalf of Hearst that he wept. Weeping was something that came quite easily to the flint-hearted Mayer, but in this case, he backed up his tears by deputing Nick Schenck of MGM to extend an invitation to Schaefer to have the master of the film and all copies burnt: $805,000 was the figure proffered, which thoughtfully included a consideration for the wasted publicity budget. Schaefer heroically refused, wisely refraining from conveying the offer to his board. By April, the uneasy silence which was most unendurable of all to Welles had fallen again; had RKO done a deal behind his back? Suddenly the silence was rudely broken by Hearst. This time he miscalculated; and the shackles fell from Citizen Kane.
The occasion was His Honor the Mayor, an innocuous radio play by Welles, who had some months before joined a loose federation of authors, actors and directors calling themselves The Free Company. Of a broadly liberal persuasion (the group included Sherwood Anderson, William Saroyan, Stephen Vincent Benét, Paul Green, George M. Cohan and Burgess Meredith), their purpose in coming together was to affirm, in a time of impending war, the basic beliefs of democracy. James Boyd, convenor of the group, commissioned from each of the author-members of the company a short piece for radio; the idea was ‘to illustrate by a series of plays the meaning of freedom and particularly those basic civil rights which make that freedom possible’.31 The authors were, they proudly stated, ‘unpaid, uncensored and uncontrolled’. Each episode was prefaced with the lines:
For what avail, the plow or sail
Or land or life, if freedom fail?
The Columbia Broadcasting System, demonstrating its own commitment to democracy, broadcast the plays in the spring of 1941. His Honor the Mayor was transmitted on 6 April. The story is straightforward: Bill Knaggs, Mayor of Benton, has to decide whether to allow Colonel Egenhorn’s anti-labour, anti-Hispanic, anti-Semitic White Crusaders to hold a meeting in the town. Without a single supporter in the town – even the old communist, the Catholic priest and the local garage owner strongly advise him against it – he allows the meeting to be held.
Don’t start forbiddin’ anybody the right to assemble. Democracy’s a rare precious thing and once you start that – you’ve finished democracy! Democracy guarantees freedom of assembly unconditionally to the worst lice that wants it. If they don’t get it, they’ll go underground so we can’t see ’em. Let ’em thumb their noses at the Stars and Stripes, just so long as they don’t touch it. Let ’em jeer at everything we’re willing to die for. That’s anybody’s right – the right to be what’s called nowadays ‘un-American.’32
In insisting on the right of a right-wing group to assemble, Welles slyly makes his point about the freedom of left-wingers. The manner is homespun; Thornton Wilder seems to be the influence (‘Mrs Knaggs looks a little older than she ought to, because her life hasn’t been easy. But she wears the smartest clothes she can afford, which isn’t true of most of the other ladies in town; doesn’t especially enhance her popularity’ says Welles as narrator) though there is something of Marc Blitzstein’s deliberately unvarnished quality about it, too. And there is a charming autobiographical touch: throughout His Honor the Mayor, Knaggs eats. ‘Take my word for it, when responsibilities get to be almost unendurable, a man on a diet takes to his sugar and starches as an addict retreats to his opium pipe, or a drunkard to his bottle.’ The piece is mild in tone, but all the more telling for its absence of tub-thumping; Welles as narrator insists that ‘you can draw your own conclusions; I hope you do.’ He quietly and cunningly builds the dramatic tension (his special gift, as Houseman rightly observed) by maintaining the evenness of tone. ‘Thanks everybody,’ says Knaggs, having won the day. ‘If you don’t like what I’ve done, please wait till Election Day.’ Boyd, serving as announcer for all of the plays, underlines the message: ‘Like his honor the mayor, then, let us stand fast by the right of lawful assembly.’ Finally Welles signs off his gentle little lehrstück by introducing his cast: ‘of course, they’re Mercury people, all featured in Citizen Kane and Native Son … this is the cast which remains, with your pr
oducer – as always – obediently yours.’
No sooner had the play been transmitted than it was immediately and vehemently denounced as communist propaganda in the Hearst press. The American Legion (Hearst’s moral arm) took up cudgels against it, and held meetings to denounce it. The Herald Express offered as a headline on 17 April: ‘Thrasher Asserts Welles’s broadcasts Are Spearhead for Red Propaganda’, while the New York Journal and American in its turn asserted: ‘We must rid the country of every type of subversive propaganda. For years such elements have been edging towards key positions elsewhere, and now they are cropping up in radio.’ But the attacks backfired; Variety reported the following month that audiences for the programmes had doubled since the Hearst press attacks. They ceased. Other papers came to his rescue; yet again he was a cause célèbre: ‘If Orson Welles is a communist for preaching free speech, free radio, freedom of worship,’ wrote The New York Times, ‘then Paul Muni is a communist for being one of his associates; then too, is George M. Cohan, a leader in The Free Company, a communist.’ The Chicago Sunday Times said ‘if it weren’t sad, it would be silly. William Randolph Hearst is piqued with Orson Welles. The rest is camouflage.’ The Hearst attacks had one notable side effect: the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a file on Welles that they were not to close until the end of the fifties. Oblivious of this, Welles sued a Los Angeles gossip columnist who had accused him of being a Marxist; he won, and that particular untruth ceased to figure in press reports. He was moved to make a lengthy press statement, in which he stated ‘the Hearst papers have repeatedly described me as a communist. I am not a communist. I am grateful for our constitutional form of government, and I rejoice in our great American tradition of democracy. Needless to say, it is not necessarily unpatriotic to disagree with Mr Hearst. On the contrary, it is a privilege guaranteed me as an American citizen by the Bill of Rights … I want to say that I am proud of my American citizenship. As a citizen I cherish my rights, and I’m not fearful of uncertainty. I only ask,’ he concluded with a scarcely veiled reference to the still unseen product of his last two years, ‘that I am judged by what I am and what I do.’33
