Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  It was a bold piece of showmanship, both enlivening and imaginative: the sort of thing that wakes an audience up rather than immersing them in emotion or atmosphere, preventing them from surrendering their critical intellects. During the performances, Welles was, as ever, constantly aware of the other actors’ work and, as he had done in London during the run of Moby-Dick, he communicated his desires to them as directly as possible, on stage. Speed was his main note. ‘Get the lead out of your ass, Epstein!’ he barked at his colleague one night;39 and when Sorrell Booke, as Albany, tried, just once, on the very last night, not to gabble his speeches at the end of the play, the dead body of King Lear roared profanities at him till he got up to speed.40 Clearly Welles by now was enjoying himself. One night earlier in the run, Maxtone-Graham became aware during the scene on the heath that amongst all the wild utterances pouring out of Lear and the Fool, Welles was screaming, ‘John! JOHN!! JOHN!!! SWITCH SIXTEEN IS NOT ON,’ which it wasn’t. This was Welles at full throttle in his playpen.41

  Finally, after just twenty-six performances, it was all over. Welles had a last drink with some of the actors on the deserted stage, before leaving City Center for ever. He had been ferried back and forth between the Sulgrave and the theatre each night in an extremely expensive Keefe & Keefe ambulance, paid for, once again, by long-suffering Jean Dalrymple, who had also provided him with a paid assistant to minimise his inconvenience. As he left the theatre that last night, Tom Clancy, who had been playing Curan, pushed him out onto the loading dock and helped him down to the pavement. Once there, Welles rose miraculously from his wheelchair, folded it up, hurled it into the back of the ambulance and walked unassisted and without difficulty to the front seat. ‘With a signature cigar jutting from his face,’ reported Maxtone-Graham, ‘he called out an obscene farewell to City Center and Jean Dalrymple and was driven off into the night.’42 It crossed the minds of more than one of the actors that the whole ankle thing had been a fraud, a cover up job. Welles was already moving on. Another failure: his dream of the New Mercury Theatre melted into air, into thin air; his hopes of a triumphant homecoming dashed. Tant pis! He would come back to King Lear in another medium, in another form. On, on.

  For the City Center, it was less easy to move on. Shortly after Lear closed, the New York Times reported on a City Center press conference at which there was an unusually frank admission that Welles’s production had brought the public arts body to its knees, as a result of excess expenditure: the set doubled its appointed budget, with an overall production cost twice that of any previous show (which is rather remarkable, considering the number of musicals and operas performed there). In addition, Welles’s ambulance had cost $1,000, to say nothing of the assistant; the twenty-six stagehands had further swollen the tally. The cancellation of the tour meant the income from that – had it happened, Margolis and Gabel would have paid $3,000 a week to City Center – had not materialised. Business had initially been good, but fell off after news of the broken/sprained ankles got out. The run had grossed $90,000 against a projected take of $150,000. Because of this failure, the ballet and opera seasons were curtailed respectively to four and three weeks. The City Center, the Times report concludes, was uncertain of how to survive.

  In the end the City of New York bailed it out, but it had been a scary, near-death experience for them.43 This terrible public drubbing, along with the reviews, pretty well put paid to whatever hopes Welles might have entertained of future work in the New York theatre; the detailed analysis of his over-spending only confirmed a disastrous reputation in that area. It was not a noble failure, just another manifestation of what Eric Bentley had called his gift and need for Being A Headliner. The publicity generated by the production and its attendant ills was indeed immense, especially after his accidents, but, as a slogan, ‘the Wheelchair Lear’ sold no tickets. It was publicity for publicity’s sake. The danger was that the story of Orson Welles was increasingly becoming a chapter, not in the history of the performing arts, but in that of publicity. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times returned to the fray two weeks later to worry again about the performance, concluding that, despite his gifts, Welles lacked ‘the perceptions of an artist’.44 George Jean Nathan (the original of All About Eve’s acidulous Addison de Witt), observing fondly that it was impossible to refrain from admiring Welles for ‘taking more chances than even a wealthy, amorous widow with delusions of desirability’, compared him to the great quick-change artist Leopoldo Fregoli: Welles, he says, ‘can emerge from behind a screen in rapid order as a stage, musical comedy, television, radio or movie actor, stage or film director, producer, writer, press-agent, vaudeville sleight-of-hand artist or apparently anything else, short, as of this moment, of a strip-tease artist’.45

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Orson Welles, Television Needs You

  AS IF deliberately tipping his hat at George Jean Nathan, Welles’s next engagement after King Lear closed was to perform a scene from the play (with cast) on the Ed Sullivan Show, alongside Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, a ventriloquist, the Four Ames Brothers, Rodgers and Hammerstein. As if that were not enough variety, the day following the Sullivan Show he went straight to Las Vegas, where for three weeks he filled the Riviera Hotel’s Clover Room with an ambitious act which was an unqualified success; unqualified successes came rarely in Welles’s life. The initial impulse was, inevitably, economic: though he had cost the City Center dearly, his own salary had been a token $85 a week; with a new daughter to maintain, he needed serious money – and quickly. Welles had been alerted to the fact that the Mafiosi who had turned the formerly staid desert resort into Sin City had begun to pay big bucks to big-name entertainers. This turned out to be no exaggeration: he was offered $45,000 for the three-week engagement, which was due to start on 25 February. According to Daily Variety, the Riviera Hotel’s new entertainment director (whose predecessor had been blown up in his car by a dynamite bomb placed there by his employers) had asked Welles what kind of an act he had in mind. ‘Don’t you worry, Mr Goffstein,’ Welles had replied. ‘It will be the most dramatic performance ever presented in Las Vegas’ – which strongly suggests he hadn’t thought about it yet.

  Needless to say, he was delighted to have the opportunity to present himself before the public as a magician – the favourite, he always claimed, of his many manifestations; over the half-decade since he had last performed a conjuring trick in public, he had religiously kept au fait with the latest developments. But he was not just offering magic – he had a killer card up his sleeve, which none of his rivals could provide: readings from Shakespeare. In short, it was An Evening with Orson Welles by another name. He was very relaxed about it. He got a nasty shock when he, Paola and Beatrice arrived in Las Vegas and he saw the Clover Room, which was to the average cabaret venue what the City Center was to a telephone box. It was vast – far too big for the modest array of mentalist tricks he’d planned. The show was due to open in three days: he moved quickly, and soon enough, through his extensive magic network, he found the help he needed. The Kirkhams, Kirk and Phyllis, performers and innovators themselves, supplied him with the big illusions he knew he required and were contracted to assist him on stage during the act. He selected three of their biggest illusions: the Broom Suspension, the Temple of Benares and the immortally named Duck Vanish, and, under Kirkham’s tutelage, he quickly mastered them.

  When Welles stumbled upon the Clover Room’s state-of-the-art revolving stage, he seized on the idea of using it to give a 360-degree demonstration of the magical apparatuses – something no one had ever done before. As in any other sphere in which he worked, he took control of all the elements, changing the orchestra’s repertory and arranging the supporting acts. And all the while, Kirk Kirkham told Bart Whaley, he was aware that Welles was ‘absolutely petrified’.1 Perhaps that accounts for his decision at the very last minute to replace Phyllis Kirkham with Paola in the Temple of Benares, an illusion that demanded complicated box-hopping. Paola was
deeply disinclined to do it, but Welles relentlessly urged her on and on, until finally she ripped her dress trying to get from one box to another; to calm her sobbing, he relieved her of the job, reverting to Phyllis Kirkham as rehearsed. Was he trying to punish Paola in some way? Or did he genuinely not understand how difficult and frightening a thing he was asking of her? Or was it simply a displacement activity to divert his anxiety away from the perform-ance he was about to give? Whichever it was – and it may have been a combination of all three – it is a striking instance of the curious lack of empathy that Welles sometimes manifested: a tendency to treat people as machines.

  As always in these situations, once he was in front of the audience in his own persona, his incomparable rapport with them took over. The ducks got out of their box, the music cues were all over the place, and the volunteers from the audience took an eternity to get up on stage and go back to their seats, but, despite running for an astonishing seventy-five minutes, the show was a palpable hit. ‘A phantasmagoria of magico, mindreading, levitation and closing dramatic reading of Shakespeare’ was Variety’s verdict, noting nothing wrong with it that some judicious trimming and tightening would not put right. By the following night, Welles the master editor had cut it down to twenty-five minutes of pure gold. It opened with the Broom Suspension, ‘a sock start for the razzledazzle to follow’, then there was a sensational prediction of the answer to television’s $64,000 Question and then there were mind-reading stunts; the mental telepathy tricks, Variety magazine inimitably remarked, ‘also grabbed big kudosing’.

  But the climax of the show was not the magic at all: it was, improbably enough, the Shakespeare that really wowed the gamblers, the gangsters and their guests and the smattering of showbiz figures who constituted Welles’s audience. Mark Antony’s funeral oration from Julius Caesar was a warm-up for what an admiring Variety called ‘a solid piece of biz – makeup onstage and donning costume for the w.k. [well known] Shylock speech from Merchant of Venice’. It is to be wondered just how w.k. ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ was to Welles’s audience. Perhaps it came to them with the force of revelation. After it, he was brought back for many bows. The local reviewer, ‘Willard’, was deeply struck by this: ‘it would not be out of the realm of possibility whatsoever to foresee several shows in the three-frame booking dominated more and more by these.’ Moreover, he added, a full twenty-five minutes of Welles doing scenes from Shakespeare or readings from other classics, ‘or even the racing Form’, would be received with ‘tumultuous applause’. Welles had conquered Las Vegas, which impressed Willard: ‘it took Orson Welles plenty of courage to undertake the Las Vegas trek . . . actors, per se, have not fared too well in these parts.’2

  All in all, it is one of the more remarkable episodes in a life made up of extraordinary events. Coming hot on the footsteps of King Lear, it is almost bewildering, suggesting a range of sympathies and abilities that are virtually unprecedented. The fact that the Lear was a qualified failure, and the cabaret act an almost unqualified success, is neither here nor there; the fact that the director of Citizen Kane acquitted himself with distinction as a magician in a place where the greatest magicians regularly appeared is striking, but not deeply significant; what is truly mind-boggling is the fact that he performed Shakespeare in a nightclub on the Las Vegas strip, to ‘tumultuous applause’. Moreover, the manner in which he did it – setting the scene as he made himself up, only speaking in character when the make-up was complete – is a piece of meta-theatricality of real originality. He did the same thing later on television on the Dean Martin Show, this time as Falstaff, and it is a little piece of genius, utterly spell-binding, a histrionic conjuring trick – intellectual cabaret, ontological trompe l’oeil. As Bart Whaley, writing from the illuminating perspective of being an authority on magic, remarks, ‘he had broken with stage tradition and dared to expose, and thereby teach, a trick of the theatrical trade, the very mechanics of illusion’.3 It is not necessarily great acting, but as performance it is sublime – entirely external, but an exhilarating celebration of shape-shifting, and a piece of bravura that is somewhere close to the essence of theatrical gesture, seamlessly blending Shakespeare and showmanship; no wonder Brecht admired Welles so much.

  Flatteringly, he was asked to do two extra shows the night after he officially closed, so that the Clover Room could present some competition to two other acts opening that night: Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at the Sands and, by an exquisite irony, Eartha Kitt, with whom Welles had last performed in An Evening with Orson Welles on its European tour; she was opening, with great success, at El Rancho. And then in April Welles was off to Hollywood, after all these years, to play the John Barrymore part in a television remake of the Hecht–MacArthur stage hit Twentieth Century; he did this to earn his standard $100,000 (no mean sum in 1956: approximately $850,000 today), but mostly to put his foot back in the door. The sentimental association with his old chum Barrymore was no disincentive, either.

  Meanwhile, as a direct result of their reunion on the Ed Sullivan Show, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, suddenly major players in television with the shrewdly managed success of I Love Lucy, suggested that Welles should do something for their company, Desilu. Welles had always been a fan of Ball’s work: in 1940, he had proposed her for the lead in his adaptation of The Smiler with a Knife, one of the many doomed projects he fielded at RKO before at last hitting on Citizen Kane. RKO turned her down, but Welles had maintained a friendly relationship with her and Arnaz when they were both disgruntled contract players there. Ball had appeared several times on radio with Welles on CBS’s Orson Welles Almanac, doing the sort of simple skit Welles adored: once, playing his secretary, Miss Grimace, she says: ‘That’ll be all.’ ‘That’ll be all who?’ replies Welles, haughtily. ‘That’ll be all, Fatso.’ Very big laugh. Now she and Desi were in a position to help him, and when they met up again on the Sullivan Show, Arnaz asked Welles to come out to Desilu and do something with them. ‘They still had great faith and confidence that Orson was a great creator,’ Bernard Weitzman, Desilu’s head of business and legal affairs, told Ben Walters, ‘and a star, and a genius.’4 Arnaz, with his sharp eye on the future of television, had noted the success of anthology series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, launched just six months earlier, and proposed something similar for Welles, except with a different notion of the host’s relationship to the programme:

  If we could accomplish the effect of you, as the host, in front of the television set in the viewer’s living room, telling them what is happening or about to happen behind you, it would be much more intimate and we wouldn’t have to be in the same set all the time. What do you think?5

  This was music to Welles’s ears, of course, a further extension of the First Person Singular idea, building on his extraordinary personal charm and capacity for instant intimacy with the viewer: much preferable to acting, which he regarded as a chore, and one, moreover, that made him anxious. Being obediently ours was as easy for Welles as falling off a log; he readily agreed to shoot a pilot programme with this format. The idea he offered them was Volpone, an extension or perhaps a contraction of the version he had been planning with Marc Blitzstein for City Center, with the additional element that the actors would bring on elements of the set and then take them off again.

  The idea was greeted with little short of panic by his new partners: ‘You can’t do this script,’ Arnaz’s executives told Welles. ‘It’s outrageous. The networks would laugh you out of the business.’6 It was Weitzman who, after going through the lists of optioned short stories, came up with John Collier’s darkly humorous tale ‘Youth from Vienna’.7 Collier’s story features a young endocrinologist, Humphrey, who falls for a Broadway star, Carolyn Coates, to whom he becomes engaged; he spends a great deal of his time away from her, studying in Vienna with the world’s leading authority on glands. After three years’ absence, he comes back to find Carolyn in love with Alan, a glamorous young tennis player. They determine to marry
; Humphrey offers them what seems to be a generous wedding present: one of three phials of an elixir of youth, which he and his teacher have managed to formulate. But with it comes a warning: to be effective, the whole phial has to be consumed, which leaves the young couple with a dilemma – which of them is to take it? The plot is brilliantly worked out to create maximum mayhem in their lives, destroying their love; finally Carolyn returns to the endocrinologist, who reveals that the elixir was a fake all along.

  The story immediately tickled Welles’s fancy, perfectly reflecting his own taste for fatalistic fables in which human beings are caught, spider-like, in webs of their own weaving. The English-born but US-domiciled Collier had a particularly mordant world-view, expressed in an idiom that is both whimsical and needle-sharp, and verges on – and sometimes wholly embraces – the transgressive: his first book, His Monkey Wife, concerns the consummated relationship between a colonial administrator and a rather attractive primate named Emily. ‘Youth from Vienna’ is less shocking, but if anything more savage. Welles set to work on the pilot straight away, and produced a screenplay, entitled The Fountain of Youth, that is a masterpiece of adaptation, evidencing all of his editorial command. The story, already concise, is made yet more linear; wisely, Welles retains a great deal of Collier’s original text, sensibly deferring to mainstream American sensibilities: he refrains, for example, from quoting Collier’s account of the endocrinologist’s courtship of the star: