Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  At the City Center itself, not long before Welles was making these pronouncements about the dearth of Shakespeare in New York, major productions of Othello and King Henry IV, Part One had been seen and respectfully received. Welles’s main point, of course, was true: there was, neither in New York nor anywhere else in the United States of America, a company devoted to performing the classics. This, he said, was his current mission: ‘he believes’, reported Cue magazine, ‘Broadway has the greatest talent pool in the world. But this, he avers, is no substitute for doing a job steadily, and American actors do not steadily play the classics. With a repertory company, he would work nine months of the year, take three off to make the necessary big money to keep the company afloat.’10 Welles summed it up: ‘The great works of literature are not given as many performances nowadays as they deserve. I believe that if there is any useful contribution I can make, I should.’ The notion of this classical company under Welles’s leadership is a dizzying prospect, and could indeed have made a major contribution to the American theatre of the 1950s, though the words ‘doing a job steadily’ do not seem to describe any other project in which Welles had previously been involved.

  In all this blaze of publicity about King Lear, and in all of his utterances about the play and the part, Welles never actually explains what it is about either that interests him. He had indeed been thinking about the play for some time: on the back of his 1946 broadcast, the following year he had sketched out a scheme for a version of the play that was, according to the notes, ‘arranged for production as a play with music in continuous performance on a bare stage with a curtain’, which sounds like a nod to Brecht and the austere stagings of his Berliner Ensemble; Welles was, of course, to use the device of the curtain a few years later in the Othello at the St James Theatre in London. The 1947 version of King Lear covers sixty-six loosely typed pages in six sections, of which only the fifth is missing; each has an epigraph quoted from the play and a designated season: ‘PART THE FIRST: “The younger rises when the old doth fall.” Early summer. PART THE SECOND: “O let me not be mad, sweet heaven.” Early Fall’, and so on. The last line of this version is ‘O she’s dead.’11 Both concise and epic, it is a scheme for the play, rather than a version or even a view of it, but it has some sort of visionary Blakeian quality, underpinned by the changing seasons.

  It may be that this basic outline was in Welles’s mind as he contemplated staging the play in New York, but if so, he never shared it with anyone. He was notably unforthcoming about the play, the part, or his view of either. ‘Towering’ and ‘tremendous’ are words that recur when he talks about the play; while in his New York Times piece, ‘Tackling Lear’,12 he simply calls the character ‘the old thunderer’, the closest to a description of the mad old king he offers. ‘It strikes me, after almost a quarter of a century in theatre service,’ he wrote in his New York Times article, ‘as high time that I make my first attempt at the play and the role. If I don’t now, when – at least in America – will I be able to do it again?’ He admits that the chances of getting it right first time round are slender: ‘let those who will come to hear, see and judge this year’s essay remember that there are no tenors who would care to be remembered for their first season’s Tristan and few bassos whose Boris Godunov was born at full scale in the first opera house where it was attempted.’ He hopes, finally, that if his new Lear should be considered redundant, it would not discourage ‘the founding, as soon as may be, of a solid theatre establishment’. It is an uneasy, defensive piece, giving a potential theatregoer no clear impression of what he or she might be likely see, should they choose to buy a ticket; it seems, in fact, to be a plea for clemency addressed to the critics. It is also a little ungallant to Jean Dalrymple, the doughty and skilful director of the City Center. She it was, Welles says, who persuaded Messrs Margolis and Gabel ‘to forgo commercial considerations in the interests of a short season at the City Center, whose budget unhappily cannot be stretched to include Volpone’. In fact, when she saw the projected budget for King Lear alone, she demanded that it be halved. Even so, it cost twice as much as any other production in the City Center’s history. One thing that Welles’s production was definitely going to be about, it was clear from the beginning, was size – an exercise, like much of Welles’s work, in gigantism.

  The theatre itself was (and is) massive. A cavernous former Mecca of the quasi-masonic Ancient Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, it had a capacity of 2,800; Welles set out to make it appear even bigger than usual, persuading Dalrymple – at considerable expense, involving riggers and carpenters on overtime – to remove the swagging that masked the top of the curtain so that, when it rose, it entirely disappeared behind the crown of the plaster proscenium, resulting in a monumentally tall and bare frame for the action. The stage was occupied by huge interlocking platforms, not unlike the ones he used in London for Othello, but sloping; these were pushed into place by soldiers and courtiers. Most of the action took place on these sloping platforms, isolated by lights, a vast number of which were required, including some of the City Center’s geriatric house-circuits. Everything, including the props and the furniture, was on a massive scale – swords were four times as large as usual; as in the television broadcast, when Lear came on he had a hooded falcon on his wrist, and when his men joined him, they lugged a large deer on with them. Behind the platforms was a great black velvet backcloth, the full depth and width of the soaring back wall of the stage, on which were painted, in colour, motifs from Piranesi’s celebrated etchings of prisons, the Carceri d’invenzione, cunningly underlit to offer darkly glowing visions of nameless horrors in the great black pit of the stage. These designs were essentially Welles’s work, though the settings were attributed to Theodore Cooper, an amiable and hard-working television designer; the costumes – in what is loosely known as the Ancient British style – were by City Center regular Robert Fletcher, likewise working from sketches by Welles. Liking Fletcher’s thoughts about the play, Welles took him aback by asking him to audition for the highly challenging role of Edgar, normally thought of as a stepping stone to the part of Hamlet. Fletcher had acted before, but nothing remotely as demanding as Edgar. Welles gave him the part. ‘He was no great shakes as an actor,’ drily noted the stage manager, John Maxtone-Graham, ‘though he was beautifully costumed.’ Fletcher had earlier designed the clothes for Othello and Henry IV, Part One at City Center; much later he was to gain immortality by designing the costumes for Star Wars.

  The remaining members of Welles’s creative team were musicians. Blitzstein wrote the score – ‘not Wagnerian heroic,’ Welles told him – and was joined by two of Blitzstein’s colleagues, Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, pioneers of musique concrète, who were already mildly notorious after demonstrating their work on television. Welles was looking for what he called ‘symbolic abstract effects’. Sceptical of it at first, he rapidly became enchanted with the possibilities of this new form, and would frequently leave rehearsals to slope off to Luening and Ussachevsky’s studio to engender ever more arcane sounds. The result, according to one of the baffled actors, was ‘like an airport runway with planes taking off and landing’.13 In addition Welles commissioned a special tape consisting only of sub-audio frequencies to induce discomfort in the audience during the mad scenes, making them perspire and feel agitated; in fact, in performance the carefully plotted cues often went for nothing, because Welles and the other actors varied the pace of their delivery. Working on the sound took an inordinate amount of Welles’s time, not least because, thanks to union regulations, he was not permitted to speak to the operators directly.

  Union regulations of one sort or another blighted Welles’s experience on King Lear, and contributed to his general feeling that the good old days of theatre were swiftly vanishing. He was conscious that in New York – unlike London, whose own, rather different revolution was nigh – there had been a radical change in the way actors saw themselves and their work. The Method
was in full swing: the free, unstructured expression of emotion was at a premium. Welles had no truck with this: it was the realism he so loathed all over again. ‘I prefer communication to mumbling, twitching, “realisation”, etc.,’ said Welles. ‘Communication is more related to Maurice Chevalier and the circus.’14 He pointed the finger, not at Lee Strasberg or the teachers of the Studio, but at Stanislavsky, who, he said, was ‘a genius – and an amateur. Most of his followers are merely amateurs.’ In particular he thought that in America the approach to Shakespeare had gone from the effete – as practised on the Broadway stage by the English-born actor Maurice Evans and his director, Margaret Webster, both of whom he cordially despised – to the internally overwrought, as recommended by Strasberg. In Welles’s view, classical acting was essentially extrovert: ‘The Shakespeare actor is closer to Ethel Merman and Bert Lahr than you think.’ His mission was to save Shakespeare for America.

  On the first day of rehearsals in Schumer’s Furniture Depository (a cut-price rehearsal room on 65th Street, with a noisy elevator that opened directly into the room, lousy acoustics and nothing to sit on but old aeroplane seats), Welles presented his edited version of the play, two hours and twenty minutes played without intermission, including a few interpolations from other plays, Twelfth Night among them. He lovingly addressed his cast of seventeen actors and twelve extras, telling them they were the nucleus of the company of classical actors he had so long dreamed of; that they were, indeed, the New Mercury Company. Many of them were, in fact, well versed in the classics: John Colicos, who was playing Edmund, had only months ago been playing the part of Lear himself, at the Old Vic in London, no less; the British actor Roy Dean, playing Kent, had appeared in no fewer than twenty-six Shakespeare plays from 1943 to 1947 (in addition to being British national hurdling champion in 1948). The Gloucester, young Lester Rawlins, had appeared in Othello and Henry IV, Part One at City Center earlier that season; as had the Cornwall, Thayer David, who had also done The Taming of the Shrew directed by the dreaded Margaret Webster. Sorrell Booke, later to be nationally famous as Boss Hogg in The Dukes of Hazzard, was a graduate of both Harvard and Yale and was immersed in Elizabethan literature; Alvin Epstein, as the Fool, a student of Martha Graham, had come from the famous Decroux School of Physical Mime, and had just played the Fool in Hebrew at the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv. Even Robert Fletcher, as Edgar, had appeared in Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Merchant of Venice; and Jack Aronson, walking on as this and that, had studied at the Old Vic School in London.

  The three women were scarcely less classically experienced: Welles’s Regan was Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ellie Dunn to his Captain Shotover at the Mercury before the war, and now a considerable film star; the Goneril was Sylvia Short, married to Fritz Weaver, who had just played Portia out of town; and Cordelia was the radiant Swedish film star Viveca Lindfors, fresh from a huge triumph in Anastasia on Broadway, and had earlier appeared in a show called Introducing Will Shakespeare. It was no mean company; there was still great excitement at the idea of working with Welles.

  How it all started to go wrong – and it did, horribly – is a familiar story. First of all, as usual, Welles rarely played Lear in rehearsal. He preferred to delegate the part to someone else. The someone else in this instance was an actor called Pernell Roberts (later famous in the television series Bonanza), another very experienced Shakespearean. He was not Welles’s understudy, but was in fact playing the Duke of Burgundy and had never been formally asked to depute for Welles. So one day when Welles said, ‘Here, Pernell, you take the book,’ Roberts refused, saying, ‘Why, if I don’t get extra pay? You want me to do this, you pay me for it.’15 Perhaps he was feeling cocky, having lately won a Drama Desk Award for an off-Broadway Macbeth. After lunch, he was dismissed in full view of the company.

  Shortly afterwards there was another bloodletting. The elderly stage manager tried to arrange an inaugural Equity meeting, which had to take place, according to Equity rules, during rehearsal hours. When Welles discovered this, he erupted in a black rage, ranting against bureaucracy: whenever he had to fill in official forms, he said, he made up numbers or lied or left things out. The Equity meeting went ahead, but the stage manager, shaken, handed in his notice and the very raw, young assistant stage manager, John Maxtone-Graham, took over – an important appointment, as it happens, because Welles had started absenting himself from the rehearsals and Maxtone-Graham was obliged to run scenes with the actors, who were not best pleased at being abandoned. On the rare occasions when Welles was in attendance, he sat at his desk, often looking bored, doodling all day long with a rapidograph pen someone had given him, evidently wishing himself elsewhere.

  Just occasionally he was moved to get up and demonstrate, and then it could be electrifying. One day he suggested that Thayer David should play the Earl of Cornwall ‘like a terrifying Nazi official with life-or-death powers’16 and got up to show him how to do it, brilliantly. He carefully orchestrated group scenes and reactions as he had so cleverly done at the Mercury, the old Saxe-Meiningen methods of disciplined teamwork, which he had been practising since he was a fourteen-year-old martinet at Todd School for Boys; the results were often astonishing. It must have been on one of these days that the piercingly intelligent and brutally tough critic of the New Republic magazine, Eric Bentley, sat in on rehearsals. Bentley had written about Welles savagely enough in the past, so it is surprising that Welles even allowed him into his rehearsal room. But what Bentley – who, as we have seen, described the London Moby-Dick as ‘toiling amateurism brought to a pitch of frenzy’ – saw at Schumer’s impressed him: ‘I saw nothing of the Welles of popular mythology, undisciplined, perverse or just plain drunken . . . neither grandiose nor feverish, he spoke the language of common-sense, and gave the actors tips based on a veteran’s know-how and a theatre-poet’s inspirations.’17 He admired the way Welles absorbed the inspiration of the minute, not sticking to a preconceived staging, but integrating what he had imagined with what he saw before him. Why, then, Bentley asked himself, were the end results not better? ‘Mr Welles has always been tempted to turn the theatre into a Notion and Novelty store . . . this is the cheap and childish side of Mr Welles. His real talent is not even in that direction, but, as I have hinted, starting from sound and sober craftsmanship, culminates in effects which, while they are audacious, can also be dignified and grand. There was a grandeur in the best moments of his King Lear far surpassing anything in Guthrie’s Tamburlaine.’ But most importantly, said Bentley, Welles should never both act in a play and direct it.

  It is extraordinary how Welles never came to terms with this simple and self-evident proposition. He never really gave himself a chance in the theatre. It was still common for the leading actor to direct the play – Gielgud and Olivier both did it. But they at least made sure that they were in absolute command of their texts, and they were always available to the other actors. It is a matter of deep regret that Welles never worked on a play with, say, Peter Brook, with whom he had such a warm relationship and with whom he had had a rare happy professional experience. The reason he avoided acting with his fellow-actors during rehearsals was the same reason, that, in his films, he shot as many of his own scenes as he could after the other actors had departed: he was, he admitted to the cameraman Edmond Richard, deeply shy of submitting his performance to their appraising eyes. In the theatre, he was eventually bound to act with his fellow-company members, but he deferred the moment for as long as humanly possible. For the same reason, he did not wish to expose himself to the probing attention of a director over the weeks of rehearsal. In movies, his practice was to learn the lines, show up and, with a minimum of interchange with the director, do his scene or scenes in as few takes as possible. Welles was fundamentally insecure as an actor, which makes his persistent returns to the theatre either foolhardy or very brave.

  All actors to some extent feel insecure; their salvation lies, generally, in the script, a constant source of informati
on and inspiration, and in their fellow-actors. A certain esprit de corps almost always prevails because, like the members of a human pyramid, everyone depends on everyone else. And a problem shared is a problem halved. Welles denied himself both these comforts, first because his relationship to his own lines was so tenuous – it was the last call on his attention – and second because he put off engaging with his fellow-players. And in the King Lear company he had no chums, no peers; there was no one he admired, nobody to raise the adrenalin levels for him. His occasional efforts at communication failed, as when, for example, he would join the cast for lunch, but never offered to chip in. He found himself, as so often, alone.

  His old colleague Emerson Crocker, appointed assistant director, walked out early on, when it became apparent that Welles wanted to use him as his whipping boy, someone he could shout at and punish; as Crocker left the room, Welles shouted at his departing back: ‘you should never argue with a man with a microphone.’18 Welles was warm enough with Geraldine Fitzgerald, and even shared an interpretative note with her: ‘nature,’ he said to her, ‘abhors a vacuum, and Lear, when he gives everything away to his daughters, had created a political vacuum. And into that vacuum, in his experience, always steps the spear.’ So after the court had dispersed, after Lear had divided the kingdom among his daughters, and the sisters had met and parted, Welles left the stage totally empty: