Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  Mankowitz and Lewenstein were tyro producers with very little money. They soon shelved the more ambitious idea of a repertory season, settling for Moby-Dick alone. Welles suggested they team up with two American producers he knew, Henry M. Margolis, a theatre-loving industrialist and restaurant owner, and Martin Gabel, actor and producer, Cassius to Welles’s Brutus at the Mercury Theatre nearly twenty years earlier; together Gabel and Margolis had had substantial successes on Broadway with Tiger at the Gates and Reclining Figure. Moby-Dick was costed at a modest £3,000, and they stumped up the entire sum, for which they also got the film and television rights; Welles had agreed to put in £1,000, but that never materialised.

  The Duke of York’s Theatre was free for the limited four weeks of the run; it suited Welles perfectly, with its capacity of 650 and a distinguished history, including the world premiere of Peter Pan and the production of David Belasco’s Madama Butterfly that Puccini happened to see when he was looking for a new subject. If the production was successful, announced the publicity release, then later in the year a new repertory company headed by Orson Welles under the management of Wolf Mankowitz and Oscar Lewenstein would be created. ‘Welles believes’, the release continued, ‘that by doing the plays with as little scenery as possible and actors doubling parts, it will be economically possible to produce more plays and not rely on the smash-hit.’ In this he was a decade or two ahead of his time.4

  Despite all this fanfare, Welles, ever resistant to being tied down, declined to sign his contract; Lewenstein refused to commit to the Duke of York’s unless he did: ‘[Welles] said this showed no faith in him and I had to confess that I didn’t have total faith.’ Welles angrily made to sign the contract without reading it. Lewenstein insisted that he must; with bitter reluctance, Welles acceded. This strange and typical rite of passage over, casting went forward. Lewenstein knew the theatrical scene intimately and secured a remarkable group of actors for Welles, the cream of young British talent, all of whom went on to national (and in some cases international) fame: Patrick McGoohan, Gordon Jackson, Kenneth Williams, Wensley Pithey, Peter Sallis and – the only woman in the cast – Joan Plowright.

  Welles had seen Plowright for the part of Bianca in Othello in 1951: ‘When I’d finished,’ she wrote to her parents, ‘he walked slowly towards the stage and stopped and looked at me and said in a deep voice which shook the theatre, “Who are you, you’re very good, who are you, what have you done?” Honestly, he did!’5 Plowright was too young for Bianca, he said, but he promised to remember her; and, four years later, he did. In Moby-Dick she was cast as Miss Jenkins, the actress playing Cordelia who, in the play-within-the-play, takes the part of Pip, the Pequod’s black cabin boy – ‘and if you could also play the harmonium,’ Welles said to her, ‘that would be helpful’ – warning her that it would be like nothing she had ever done, or seen, before.6

  Not everyone had such an agreeable experience. McGoohan, fresh from his acclaimed performance in the West End in Serious Charge at the Garrick Theatre, entered the auditorium:

  All lights were on the stage; the rest of the theatre was a black abyss with Welles out there, listening. I started to read and then I heard two voices, Welles and somebody next to him discussing production costs. So I stopped and Welles immediately boomed out ‘Why did you stop?’ I said ‘I thought you might want to listen to me.’ Welles snapped, ‘I can listen and talk at the same time. Keep reading.’ It happened again. ‘Mr Welles,’ shouted McGoohan, throwing down his script, ‘you can stuff Moby-Dick.’ ‘Mr McGoohan,’ shouted back Welles, ‘Will you play Starbuck?’

  He had chosen his cast, as McGoohan said, ‘from repertory and character actors. There were no “names” among us. We worked as a team, and Orson drove us to find the exact force of the play much as Captain Ahab drove his crew to find the white whale which had taken off his leg.’7

  For his exercise in total theatre, Welles was surrounded by a gifted support team – a music director (Anthony Collins, famous for his score for Tom Brown’s Schooldays, who had also, rather less brilliantly, composed the music for Trent’s Last Case); a choreographer (William Chappell, the noted dancer, designer and director); and a lighting adviser – none other than Hilton Edwards, who performed his task for £75, yet more reparation for the Othello deficit. Welles himself was on £8 a week, plus £100 a day expenses, a staggering amount in 1955. This was doled out to him in cash by a hapless youth snatched from obscurity on the switchboard of the King’s Theatre, Hammersmith, where rehearsals were being conducted. This young chap, Gareth Bogarde (Dirk’s younger brother, as it happens), was quietly manning his phones when a roaring Welles strode into the theatre, demanded to be moved from his present hotel and then strode off. Immediate hubbub. Where should they put him?

  ‘Gareth,’ the company manager said, ‘get him into an American hotel, he’s an American.’ So I got a taxi to Harry Meadow’s Club where he was staying. I went there and I said, ‘I’ve come to move Mr. Orson Welles’s belongings.’ And he said, ‘It’s about fucking time you did!’ And he said, ‘Are you paying?’ And I said ‘I don’t know anything about money or bills or anything but I simply have to pack his clothes.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, well you’ll find a lot to pack, sonny.’ And then I was shown upstairs and he had got two suites and he used to move from one to another throughout the night. He couldn’t sleep in one bed for very long so he’d then get up and walk about and then go into the other suite, which had a big adjoining doorway. And he’d lie all over the bed in there for a bit. And there were crumpled old underpants and socks and bits and pieces. And his passport was there. Everything was there. A huge trunk that was full of old ‘Penguins’ and penny dreadfuls. His life was there.8

  Bogarde dutifully packed Welles’s bags and transferred them to the Butler, an American hotel. On the strength of this triumph, he was appointed Welles’s gopher. ‘You’ll have to look after this man,’ Oscar Lewenstein said. ‘He needs somebody to run errands. And he needs somebody to get him here to the theatre and get all the actors and artists and everybody together and he needs somebody to take him to bed and put him away at night because he gets out of hand. Do you want to do that?’ And Bogarde said, ‘Yeah, it sounds great!’ Bogarde was soon disabused of that notion, on being instantly plunged into the chaos that was Welles’s life. ‘What should I get you, Mr Welles?’ To which Welles would reply, ‘Don’t ask stupid questions, Mr Bogarde, Sir.’ On discovering that he was Dirk’s brother, Welles invariably referred to him as ‘Mr Bogarde, Sir’.

  His first task was to move Welles into a new hotel, where – Welles’s reputation evidently preceding him – he was asked for a deposit. Bogarde approached Welles:

  I had to go to him in his room, and I was terrified of him. He was a very frightening man. And I said, ‘The management wants some money, Mr. Welles, and I know you have what I gave you this morning . . . uh do you have any left?’ And he said, ‘No I don’t have any money. You know I don’t have any money.’ He was very cross. And then he said, ‘Take them my watch and find my things in my trunk. There’s money in my trunk.’ And so we went through all of his trunks and there was about five hundred quid from French banks and some German money and stuff. And I took handfuls of this foreign currency and went down to management and tightened my tie. ‘I have some money from Mr. Welles,’ I said. ‘Take this in good faith.’ I gave him the money and the watch. And they thought it was very strange. Obviously they were aware. Anyway, we moved him in and then he sent down for another bed. He broke the bed – the first night the bed was bust and I remember spending hours on the phone to The Dorchester and they eventually did a deal, and they sent him over a king-sized bed.9

  Then there was the time Welles asked Bogarde to get him a flat, with one end of the apartment higher than the other to create a sort of stage. Bogarde went to Harrods and said, ‘Mr Welles is looking for a flat.’ And they said, ‘We’re very sorry, but we don’t do business with Mr Orson Welles
.’ He hadn’t paid any bills. On another occasion, the head waiter at the Caprice restaurant in St James’s rang up and asked whether somebody could go up to Montpellier Place (where Welles and Paola had been staying the year before) and collect all the silver that belonged to the Caprice. Could Bogarde organise something like that? Welles had been ill, it transpired, and all his meals had been sent over on huge silver platters from the Caprice every day – lunch and dinner. Bogarde duly returned all the engraved silver platters. ‘There was an enormous collection of them. The maître d’ came out and said, “We’ve been waiting for these for months!”’

  Most often Bogarde got it wrong. When Paola’s mother came to stay, Welles told him to find a bigger room for him, and to get his mother-in-law a room in the hotel as well. ‘And I said, “Well, I’ll try and get you all on the same floor.” And he looked absolutely enraged. “I don’t want her anywhere near me! My God, don’t put her on the same floor! Put her on the roof for Christ’s sake!”’ But Bogarde did finally get something right: Welles said, ‘Marlene Dietrich is coming to London, Mr Bogarde, Sir, so you will send her flowers – roses.’ Without hesitation, Bogarde went across to a flower shop and asked them, ‘How many red roses do you have in this shop?’

  And the woman said, ‘Enough, I’m sure.’ And I said, ‘Will you please send all of them to Miss Marlene Dietrich at the Dorchester Hotel.’ So 80 dozen roses went and he was thrilled with that. He said, ‘The roses were sensational, Mr Bogarde, Sir. You did a good job.’ Which was the only bit of praise I ever got.

  By now the play was about to open, and Bogarde’s job was over. He never got paid. His salary was supposed to have come from Welles’s daily £150, but that had always mysteriously disappeared by the end of the day. All through his time with Welles, Bogarde contrived to sit in on rehearsals and was constantly astounded at his tormentor’s energy and brilliance with the actors. ‘And it would go on and on and on. And he was wonderful – he was a wonderful director! That was entirely different. That’s why he was worth working for.’

  Rehearsals were long, arduous and chaotic. ‘Some days,’ wrote Joan Plowright, ‘Orson would be in a thundering bad temper, changing scenes and dialogue all the time and working the actors into the night. Other days he would be chuckling and wreathed in cherubic smiles as some kind of order began to emerge. On yet other days he would suddenly abandon us altogether, being forced to dodge the attempts of exasperated creditors to have their writs served upon him.’10 On one of these occasions, Mankowitz donned Welles’s unmistakable black overcoat and fedora hat and led a process-server off the scent while Welles escaped out of the back door.11 But sometimes he was absent just in order to be absent: ‘he would be away doing something or other, you never knew quite what,’ said Oscar Lewenstein. ‘He’s a very mysterious person and he intended to make a mystery of everything. He never told any one person everything that he was doing so you always had a feeling there were a whole number of other things going on . . . he seemed to have built up a great array of secret arrangements to highlight very little. You always had a terrible feeling that he was going to need to be in Barcelona the day we were opening and very often he was.’12

  After each of these mysterious absences, Plowright says, Welles would be back, recharged, with huge hampers of food from Fortnum & Mason, ‘chomp his way through two chickens, pâté de foie gras, quails’ eggs and succulent pastries, and down a bottle or two of Chablis without a care in the world’.13 The Daily Mail came to rehearsals one day and found a more abstemious Welles:

  Mr Welles was obviously going through a creative phase: he had run out of cigars (I counted nine stubs on his ashtray) and he was drinking endless supplies of black coffee from a green beaker. He hacked out stabs of dialogue and passed new lines round the players like slices of cake. All day he had been sending relays of new dialogue to a typing bureau. As I came away he had his scouts out looking for an actor who could climb ropes and play the mouth-organ.14

  Morale was good during rehearsals: when he was in the vein, Welles could break the company up. When Gordon Jackson spoke his opening line on the stage for the first time – ‘Call me Ishmael!’ – Welles shouted back from the stalls, ‘And if a man answers, hang up!’ In his autobiography Kenneth Williams, a brilliant, bitter actor of sublime comic gifts, spoke warmly of working with Welles, who for his part said he couldn’t rehearse with Williams because he made him laugh too much; finally they hired an extra rehearsal room so that the two of them could work together alone.15 But in his posthumously published Diaries, Williams expressed himself with rancour: ‘I wish to God I had never seen this rotten play, and Orson Welles and the whole filthy tribe of sycophantic bastards connected with this bogus rubbish . . . Orson Welles may be a brilliant “personality”, but he knows nothing about producing a play. His lack of ability is bitterly apparent.’

  He resents the entire team: ‘The latest madness from the Welles–Chappell–Edwards trio is rocking the cast. We have to play all the scenes staggering at regular intervals to suggest the motion of a ship. The result is an effective impression of inebriation. Hours and hours are wasted on this kind of nonsense. Everyone is embarrassed by such stupidity.’16 This of what was universally agreed to be the most effective moment in the production. As the saying goes: there’s one in every company.

  Until they left the King’s Theatre in Hammersmith and started work at the Duke of York’s, most rehearsals were conducted by Hilton Edwards and Billy Chappell, and involved the elaborate choreography simulating the movement of the boat that Kenneth Williams had so derided. The cast found this tedious to rehearse, although when they eventually discovered the effect it had on the audience, they were glad enough of the hard, painstaking slog they had put into mastering it. But when Welles was present, it was a different story. Surrounded by his young team, he clearly felt much more at ease than he had done with the rather starrier, West Endish cast of Othello, and without the unsettling figure of Laurence Olivier hovering in the wings. With his Moby-Dick gang there was never any doubt about who was in charge, but though he had a dozen different creative ideas a minute, recollected McGoohan, ‘he wanted ours too. Anyone could make a suggestion, from the electrician to the leading actor. “Good! That’s a better idea than mine. Come on, let’s try it.”’

  When Welles was convinced of the rightness of a sequence, he would stop at nothing to make it work. One three-line sequence defeated them. They had begun rehearsals at ten that morning. By quarter to ten at night even Welles’s devoted crew were near mutiny. They looked at each other and, by common unspoken consent, they all went across the road to the pub. Within minutes Welles was there, ordering drinks for them, ‘and turning on such a force of personality that, actors as we were,’ said McGoohan, ‘we became a captive audience, helpless with laughter at his anecdotes and stories’. Then, without a word, he led them back ‘like lambs’ to the theatre, where they stayed till 5 a.m., working on the same three-line sequence.17 This was the spirit of the Mercury reborn in St Martin’s Lane. And Welles was really beginning to enjoy himself. Just before the opening, he told the London Daily Telegraph that he intended to make his headquarters in England and work, for the main part, in the theatre. With bigger and bigger screens, he says, the actor in films is dwarfed: he cannot compete with the Rocky Mountains. ‘I feel that the day of the actor is returning. What I want more than anything is to run a repertory theatre.’18

  As was his usual practice, Welles never played the part of Ahab during rehearsals, handing it over to his understudy; he only acted with the company in the opening sequence, in which he appeared as the Guv’nor, and for Father Mapple’s speech, which he evidently enjoyed doing – and which he knew, which was not necessarily the case with Ahab’s text, as became evident during the technical rehearsals. These rose to great heights of chaos, as Welles made the production on the hoof, enormously elaborating the supposedly simple ropes and blocks that the text called for, and demanding ever more, an
d ever more complex, lights, which Mankowitz had to comb London to find. In the end, all of this cost as much as (if not more than) a conventional realistic design might have done. In addition, Welles kept rearranging the sequence of scenes until no one knew what was going on, so that by the time of the first performance (no previews in 1955, of course) the adrenalin was positively nuclear, not least Welles’s own.

  A dauntingly brilliant audience was expected – among them Marlene Dietrich and the brilliant comedienne Judy Holliday, once the Mercury Theatre’s switchboard operator. On that first night the company had rehearsed from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.; it had a short break; then rehearsed again till six, with Welles constantly fine-tuning and indeed changing things; the curtain went up at seven. All his efforts were nearly undone by the cheery informality of working practices in the London theatre of the period. Just before the curtain went up, he received a brief visit from the theatre’s follow-spot operator. That afternoon Welles had called a special rehearsal to take the man through the dozens of carefully orchestrated cues, each one laboriously repeated until he could fade out or bump up the light promptly and on cue. The man now dropped into the dressing room, shook Welles by the hand and said, ‘Pleasure to have met you, Mr Welles. Tata for now. Not to worry – my mate Alf’ll be on the light tonight.’19