Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  Meanwhile Welles was unpicking all of Edwards’s careful staging, discovering things and following his impulses. The first scene he did was with Keith Baxter; Edwards had staged it with Welles on one side of the stage and Baxter on the other. ‘I can’t play this scene like this,’ said Welles. ‘This is a scene where I’ve got to touch him and grab him.’ For all Welles’s elaborate courtesy, and his and Edwards’s genuine affection for each other, he had no intention of being confined by preconceived moves. ‘He redid everything that Hilton had tried to do,’ remembered Thelma Ruby, ‘he changed everything.’15 The company generally felt a great sense of liberation when he returned to the rehearsal room. ‘The real McCoy came from Orson,’ Kanner remarked.16 Not that his presence in the rehearsal room was by any means guaranteed, even after his return from Rome, though he did like to be present on Fridays when, according to Peter Bartlett, he would personally dispense the actors’ salaries from a large brown parcel bag, in true actor-managerial spirit.

  Early in February, Welles took a couple of days off for his appearance at the Oxford Union, where he had a whale of a time contesting the motion ‘that this House holds America responsible for spreading vulgarity in Western society’, moved by the noted humorist Stephen Potter, author of Potter on America, among other bestselling titles. This was exactly the sort of tonic on which Welles thrived: the Union was even more crowded for the occasion than it had been the previous term, for the appearance of the Prime Minister. Welles comfortably saw the motion off, by 485 votes to 306. ‘If Europe has lagged behind us in vulgarity,’ he said, ‘ – and I think you must at least acknowledge that you have – it is not by virtue of niceties of feeling, it is largely because of two World Wars in which we in America have played a mainly expeditionary role. Now you are catching up with us, and all Europe is drunk with the same poison.’17

  This was paradise for Welles – uncontested rhetorical flourishes in front of a thousand eagerly responsive people. After a very good dinner, he lingered at the Oxford and Cambridge boxing blues (being, he said, ‘a great lover of the fancy’) and seized the opportunity to offload into the eager ear of the Oxford Times some comments about the House Un-American Activities Committee: most of those sacked, he says, were in fact card-carrying communists. ‘Not that that justifies sacking them; in a free country a man should be able to express any opinion. The people who disgusted me were the big boys who named their comrades just to keep their swimming pools.’ He added more pithy observations about Hollywood, denouncing the ‘utter incompetents who have been directors for thirty years, surrounded with such wonderful craftsmen that you can’t go wrong, so long as you keep your mouth shut’. He didn’t much care for movies in general, it appeared: it was something to do with his hatred of all machinery. ‘It’s different in the theatre,’ he said. ‘There anything can happen; it probably won’t, but you believe it can. The actors remake it every night. At any moment they may take off, they may levitate.’ In this well-lubricated vein, he embarked on a discussion of The Third Man, briskly dismissing Graham Greene’s contribution to the film: ‘The whole story, setting, and conception were Korda’s. He just got Greene to write it – and I wrote my own part.’ As for Reed: ‘he is a real director, with a fine visual sense, though less sense of the architecture of a plot.’ Coming from the director of Mr Arkadin, this was perhaps less wounding than it might otherwise have been. As for Chimes at Midnight, it was, he said, ‘not the sort of thing a national theatre could do, but a maverick like me can get away with it’.

  The maverick returned to London with his batteries recharged, but instead of rehearsing, he frequently retired to his room at the Hyde Park Hotel, whence he issued a stream of thoughts on the production. On 10 February, less than a fortnight before the show was due to open in Belfast, Welles confronted the tiresome reality that the costumier, Nathan’s, had refused to supply the production with costumes or even go ahead with his own costume. His adrenalin was, as always, stirred by a crisis. He fired off a letter to Edwards with a radical proposal: what he called ‘the modern dress or un-dressed-up’ version of the production. ‘The feeling should be that of the rehearsal just before the dress rehearsal.’ To do it as the dress rehearsal itself – to dramatise it – would, he says, ‘seem like self-plagiarism’; that idea had worked well enough with Moby-Dick, but he had a new idea for Chimes at Midnight. He would open the show by walking onto the empty stage as himself and talk to the audience, ‘explaining our ideas and purposes, telling them about Shakespeare’s theatre etc, etc, and preparing their minds for the unavoidable anachronisms, such as the sword-fight, by references to the striking clock in Julius Caesar, etc, etc.’18

  We are back to First Person Singular territory. Back to Welles the conjuror, summoning up a production out of nothing – out of a basket, from which he would pluck a crown, noting that ‘there are some things that never change’. In this way he would prepare the public, he says, not only for the extraordinary sequence of the ‘crown on the pillow’ when the King lies dying, but also for the coronation, the climactic event of the play. ‘I also show, in a casual sort of a way, a couple of coronation robes; “This,” I say, “is the only place where we will actually dress up, because the actors must have dressed up for it in Shakespeare’s day, and people in real life dress up for it now. Nowadays, of course, they rent their robes – as we have – from Moss Brothers.”’ The idea was that the actors should wear the wardrobe ‘most nearly approximating the station and function of the various characters insofar as the personal wardrobe of a present day company of actors might be expected to make this possible.’ There was no reason to suppose, he said, that a character actor (playing, say, a Chief Justice) should not have striped trousers and a homburg hat in his personal wardrobe. This procedure, as he puts it, would become perfectly clear, if he explained it to the audience at the beginning. What he could not endure was the thought of actors pulling their costumes out of a skip, which was ‘stagey and even a bit self-conscious and works directly against the kind of super-honesty which should be the whole purpose of this sort of interpretation’.

  In the event, they never attempted these ideas – ideas that became commonplace in British theatre in the later 1960s and ’70s. If Welles had had the time and the will, it could have resulted in something radical and very striking. Or not. Not all of Welles’s notions were equally good: the pre-recorded dialogue he had so doggedly attempted to use on the films of The Magnificent Ambersons and Macbeth was a doomed idea. But when he really wanted to push an idea to its limits, the results could be extraordinary. This desperately underfunded and under-rehearsed production of Chimes at Midnight, however, was not a suitable occasion for experimentation. Instead, something very old-fashioned happened. Skips of old costumes from the well-loved television shows Ivanhoe and Robin Hood somehow arrived in the rehearsal room; the actors were invited to jump in and choose whatever they thought would work best for them. ‘Some of the costumes were appalling,’ recalled Aubrey Morris, ‘but the great man himself adored the situation – he was in there like the rest of us, probing and digging. He made and cut a wonderful hat for me, and cut my hair. The great Genesis had begun. We worked through the night dressing and undressing. This was the real theatre I imagine Orson had always desired, glory from chaos.’19

  And it was, too. They left the rehearsal room in London without ever once running the show; the actors had barely seen a glimpse of Welles’s performance. On the rare occasions when he was present, he read from the text, never once putting the book down. Indeed, on the boat on which they all travelled together from Holyhead to Dun Laoghaire, Welles was seen, ensconced in his first-class apartment with Mrs Rogers, going over and over the lines with her. The stage manager had gone ahead a few days in advance to supervise the building of the set, which had been roughed out by Welles only a week earlier: fortunately it was simple, consisting of a series of rostra, with no moving parts, and a large number of spears draped with heraldic flags. It was built a
t Louis Elliman’s Ardmore Film Studio in Dublin, which saved a welcome few quid, and was duly installed in the beautiful Opera House in Belfast – one of the greatest masterpieces of the greatest of the Edwardian theatre architects, Frank Matcham.

  The company assembled in the foyer the morning after they arrived for a pep talk from Welles, who warned them that it was going to be tricky, but that they’d get there in the end, rather alarmingly citing his 1938 production of Danton’s Death as an example of triumph over adversity: it had been the Mercury Theatre’s biggest flop, at which three actors fell down the stage lift during the dress rehearsal, badly injuring themselves. There were no such catastrophes in Belfast – there was no stage lift, apart from anything else – but the technical rehearsal was a Welles special, lasting for twenty-two hours, with Welles and Edwards roaring away at each other and the company, Welles on stage, Edwards with a megaphone in the circle of the very large theatre, as they made the show on the hoof; Welles constantly rewriting and rearranging the script, with Mrs Rogers forever racing in and out with newly typed pages, to the despair of the stage management. Welles had taken against the stage manager, Alistair James, mostly because he was the one who had to say no to him, but also because he kept prompting Welles, due to his still very unsteady grip on the text. ‘You cue me again and you’re fired,’ Welles roared at him on one occasion. ‘We’re all working up here and you just sit there doing nothing. Get up on the stage, Mr James, and get to work.’20 The burden of actually running the show fell on the youthful shoulders of the assistant stage manager, Martin Tickner, just eighteen years old, who, having successfully discharged the challenging task of transporting a company of multiply demanding actors across the Irish Sea, was now wrestling not only with an endlessly changing proliferation of sound and light cues, but with the recalcitrant screen that the Opera House management insisted had to come in at the interval to show commercials.

  Tickner had got a certain complex sequence wrong at least five or six times. He turned to Welles and said, ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry, Mr Welles, I’m so tired I just don’t know what I’m doing. I’ll get it right eventually but I cannot do it now.’ That, he said, seemed to spark off their relationship, ‘because in a curious little way he seemed to admire somebody for turning round and saying that and being absolutely honest’.21 The truth is, Welles was having a whale of a time and, with the exception of Alistair James and possibly Alexis Kanner, who was given to creating waves of negative energy whenever and in whatever manner he could, so was the rest of the company; this was not Othello in Newcastle. At two o’clock in the morning there was a break, and baskets of roast chickens and champagne were wheeled in. Micheál MacLiammóir, having just returned from America only to find himself immediately plunged into what he called ‘the Welles vortex’, had been sitting in the dark, brooding and observing, but now came down to mingle with everyone. Overhearing Edwards shouting at the actor playing Henry IV, poor deaf Reggie Jarman, and roaring ‘to the left, Reggie, to the left’, as Reggie resolutely marched to the right till someone yanked him in the correct direction, MacLiammóir murmured, in a voice audible on the other side of the River Lagan, ‘you’re the King of England, dear, not the fucking Wandering Jew’.22

  In the hiatuses that occur at even the best-regulated technical rehearsals, Welles, hugely padded, with – inevitably – lifts in his shoes and clothed in a tentative selection of the garments he had pulled together for Falstaff, would (half to himself and half for the amusement of the company) perform a little soft-shoe shuffle, singing a ditty that went:

  Everyone loves the fellow who is smiling

  He brightens the day and lightens the way

  For you.

  He’s always making other people happy

  Looking rosy when you’re awful blue.23

  The song had become a sort of mantra for him, especially when he was working with Edwards and MacLiammóir. He had first sung it at the Todd School at the age of eleven, in that year’s revue, Finesse the Queen; the words were his own. His time at Todd, his discovery of the theatre and the unconditional approval from Skipper that he found there, made it one of his personal Merrie Englands: a period of Edenic innocence and uncomplicated happiness. And that little soft-shoe shuffle is oddly reminiscent of a haunting memory of his childhood sojourns in Grand Detour: there was a country store in the little town that had above it a ballroom with an old dance floor with springs in it. ‘When I was little,’ Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, ‘nobody had danced up there for many years, but I used to sneak up at night and dance by moonlight with the dust rising from the floor . . .’24

  The dreamy mood was abruptly broken when the technical rehearsal resumed and Michael Lindsay-Hogg – sword in hand and giving vent to a blood-curdling ‘Aieeeee!’, as very precisely directed by Hilton Edwards – hurled himself towards Welles, who was smoking his cigar, script in hand, desperately trying to make the lines stick in his mind, and only narrowly missed being impaled. Welles’s voice roared out, ‘I don’t care if none of the music cues are working. I don’t care if the stage manager is sitting in the house, when he should be backstage, working on the music cues. I don’t care if some people are tired. This is the theatre. That’s what happens. But, when at three o’clock in the morning, in Belfast in the North of Ireland, Michael Lindsay-Hogg tries to kill me, I quit.’ Then he was gone, locked up in his dressing room. Lindsay-Hogg, who had felt that he and Welles had a special rapport, and who had begun to model his demeanour on Welles’s – wearing the same bow ties tucked under his collar, smoking the same cigars, which had as often as not been given to him by Welles – was mortified. Suddenly MacLiammóir appeared at Lindsay-Hogg’s side:

  ‘He’s such a monster sometimes. Oh, I could tell you some stories. But that’s for another, happier time. What occurred had nothing to do with you or anything you did. At times, when we’re depressed or tired, or hungry, we lash out and it’s usually at someone we care about. You might say he needed an ally to help him release his fear. Yes, fear; he knows he’s not really ready and he knows also that you’re resilient and wise and talented and that you’d see it for what it was. Imagine how crushed another young actor might have felt to get that thrown at him.’

  Not long after this act of mercy, MacLiammóir went to visit Welles in his dressing room, from which he emerged shortly afterwards to the sound of raised voices, slammed doors and broken china. Welles had tried to persuade MacLiammóir to take over the part of Henry IV; MacLiammóir had refused, and Welles had thrown the dread word ‘betrayal’ at him.25

  In due course, the technical rehearsal continued. Welles, refreshed by having consumed an entire roast chicken and drunk a bottle of good red wine sent over from his hotel at three in the morning, was sufficiently restored to allow himself a huge guffaw of laughter at the sight of Lindsay-Hogg, in costume and make-up for his next character, the willing recruit, Francis Feeble, the woman’s tailor. ‘His tired eyes creased and he laughed as though he were more entertained by my makeup and appearance than by anything ever before in his life. The other actors laughed also and I felt my place regained. I was loved again.’26 The rehearsal finally ended at eight in the morning. Because of the lateness of the hour, there was no chance of a run-through in the afternoon; besides, Thelma Ruby and Welles were due to go on television at 6 p.m. to publicise the opening. Welles pulled out of the interview and his place was taken by MacLiammóir, who may not have been deeply inclined to hymn the virtues of the man who had so recently denounced him as a traitor; it was, however, an Edmóir Production, so MacLiammóir managed a few honeyed words. Ruby went back to the theatre, and no sooner was she in costume than they were on. Anne Cunningham, dressed in something resembling academic uniform – mortar board and gown, with spectacles perched on her nose – briskly entered with a large tome purporting to be Holinshed’s Chronicles, from which she read selected passages. They were off.

  Like many a Welles first night, this one pass
ed in a blur of adrenalin, but for once it was all positive, once the cast were past the shock of Welles’s physical appearance. ‘We go out onto the stage before the curtain goes up,’ said Thelma Ruby, ‘and there’s this stranger on the stage, he had never got into costume or make-up, ever. He had put on a false nose, a wig, padding, he was enormous anyhow, and he’d made himself twice the size and there was a person there that we had never worked with, we’d never run through the show with, we didn’t recognise, he didn’t look anything like himself.’27 Even Alistair James, whom Welles had tormented, acknowledged that ‘it was marvellous when we opened in Belfast, absolutely marvellous but that was mainly because Orson didn’t know his lines very well and had to rely on absolutely everyone else in the company to get him through’.28 At the end the audience roared its approval, and Welles made a warmly received speech in which he confessed that he’d been told that Belfast was a theatrical death-trap. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if this is a theatrical death-trap, it is baited with the most delectable cheese.’