Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  The question of Twelfth Night hung in the air. It was still theoretically slated to be the second play of the tour, on which the Home Counties would be the next stop, and then London; then on, on: to Europe, Australia, the world. Louis Elliman, proprietor of the Gaiety, who had to a large extent bankrolled the production on the basis of this tour, needed to be reassured about progress. So halfway through the run in Dublin, a read-through of Twelfth Night was announced with some flourish. Zinnia Charlton looked forward to it more than most, since she had been kicking her heels, first in Belfast and then in Dublin, waiting for her chance to shine as Olivia; Anne Cunningham, now weary of screaming and running about, also approached it with great enthusiasm, as did the whole company; Thelma Ruby was longing to give her Maria. Peter Bartlett was not after all cast as Sebastian; that honour fell to Alexis Kanner. Baxter was Orsino; Edwards, Sir Toby. Welles outlined his notion of setting the play among the idle young rich on the brink of the First World War – 1912, to be precise – and described his design concept, in which the different scenes would be revealed by turning the pages of a large picture book. He neglected to tell them that this was the exact design of the production of the play he had done for the Todd troupers in 1932, while kicking his heels in Chicago after returning from his first Dublin season. He himself had played Malvolio in that long-ago production, in swashbuckling, Italianate make-up; the Malvolio he revealed that morning in Dublin was very different: ‘It was’, Martin Tickner remembered, ‘most extraordinary. Sort of Cockney American. Cockney Orson.’ Halfway through the read-through, they broke for tea; Welles did not return. That was the end of Twelfth Night.46

  By now, Welles was restive. His concentration on the part was slipping; it took the presence in the audience of someone interesting for him fully to engage his faculties. Laurence Olivier’s visit in early March produced exactly that effect: the company were astonished and delighted at the return of the Falstaff that Welles was capable of giving, but that Falstaff departed again with Olivier. Welles was looking for a way out. That way out nearly happened by chance. One evening, Kanner (who had been doggedly ratcheting up his personal rivalry with Keith Baxter) pushed the fight scene between Hotspur and Hal to dangerous levels of recklessness, which resulted in Baxter falling down the steps that led out of the orchestra pit; he was momentarily concussed. Hilton Edwards rushed backstage at the interval, ready to cancel the show and offer the audience their money back. Welles was appalled. ‘Give them their money back??? I’ll go on and tell them jokes.’47 He was rather disappointed when Baxter recovered and insisted on going on for the second half. A plan started to form in Welles’s mind. Towards the end of the run it was suddenly announced (to the public, not to the company) that on certain selected evenings Chimes at Midnight would be cancelled; instead he would perform a show he called The Pleasure of Your Company – essentially, An Evening with Orson Welles without the conjuring tricks: there would be stories, readings and a question-and-answer session. At designated performances, the announcement read, the event would be filmed for ‘the first of Mr Welles’s new TV Shows for the BBC’, Orson Welles Interviews the Irish and Vice Versa.

  On these evenings, most of the company chose to head off out of town for a glimpse of the beauties of Galway: Keith Baxter was detained to assist Welles, particularly in the evening given over to Moby-Dick, when Baxter had to run in and out of the auditorium crying, ‘Hi there, the Pequod!’ and suchlike sea-faring ejaculations. Welles’s choice of items is testimony to the breadth of his reading: the Bible and James Thurber, Mark Twain and T.H. White – a substantial extract from The Once and Future King, which Leonard Fenton and Paddy Bedford were co-opted to read. But the real lure, it seems, was the question-and-answer sessions: not because the Dublin public had pressing queries for Welles, but because they were eager to appear on television. The stalls in the theatre had been boarded over so that the cameras could more easily be accommodated, and so that Martin Tickner could pass among them, handing them the microphone to speak into. But, Tickner reports, the cameras were only there for one night; at later performances the illusion was created by having a lot of bright lights. And he continued to pass the microphone around, even though it was not wired to anything.

  However cavalier he might have been about The Pleasure of Your Company, Welles was quite serious about Orson Welles Interviews the Irish, which was to be the first of a new series along the lines of Around the World with Orson Welles. He interviewed John Huston (then living in Ireland) and other noted Irish figures for this pilot, but ‘after the cameramen had been there about four or five days and they’d been brought over and had to drop everything in England,’ said Ann Rogers, ‘he gave me the dreadful job of telling them to disband and go back to England.’ Nothing was ever seen of this material.

  There was a distinct feeling in Dublin that, after a mere three weeks, Welles had outstayed his welcome. The first performance of The Pleasure of Your Company started twenty minutes late, reported the Irish Independent, and consisted of ‘monotony in part one and the feeling of uncertainty in part two’. Elsewhere there were criticisms of Welles’s observations on the state of the Irish theatre (‘biting the hand that has never fed him’, said one correspondent), and questions as to why, as a ‘self-appointed Irishman’, he had managed to include only one Irish actor, Paddy Bedford, in his company.48 Time, Welles must certainly have felt, to move on. By now, the company knew they would not be moving on with him. Chimes at Midnight was in its final lap: despite the splendid notices, there would be no London season, there would be no world tour.

  It had now been officially announced that Welles would be directing the British premiere of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at the Royal Court, with Olivier in the role that Jean-Louis Barrault had just so triumphantly created in Paris, which of course explained Olivier’s unexpected visit to the show in early March. Cynics in the company may have bitterly recollected Welles’s recent indignant statement to the press (actually delivered by Hilton Edwards) that rumours of his dissatisfaction with the Chimes at Midnight company were unfounded, and that the show would unquestionably be travelling to London. Had these same cynics known that Welles had been in negotiations over directing Rhinoceros with Oscar Lewenstein at the English Stage Company since October 1959, and that on 22 December of that year Welles had struck a deal with Lewenstein and Wolf Mankowitz whereby he, Welles, would put up one-third of the capitalisation for the production (the remaining two-thirds to be found by them), and that rehearsals would begin on 28 March, just two days after Chimes at Midnight closed,49 they might indeed have felt that a lot of his apparently odd behaviour was understandable. They might also have felt that, as Thelma Ruby realised, and as Welles later confessed to Keith Baxter, Chimes at Midnight on stage had simply been an elaborate workshop for a future film.50

  Had Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir known that, their rage might have turned murderous. As it was, they were reduced, as always, whenever they dealt with Welles, to begging him for the money he had promised them. Even before the season ended, Edwards had written to Welles, ‘I know that things have been very disappointing and in consequence your resources must be strained. This letter is therefore not a demand for cash so much as for information.’51 Where, he wanted to know, should he send the bills that had come in under Dublin Gate Productions, and when might they expect settlement? ‘As to my own affairs, I know that you will let me have cash when you can and I am content to leave it at that, just reminding you that I have never been able to build up any reserves and this is why I remain in weekly peril of being submerged . . .’ This familiar woeful lament would turn shriller over the ensuing months.

  But during the run, and despite the pointed absence of MacLiammóir from the social scene, there had been a great deal of conviviality around the show, for selected souls. Welles had taken to Baxter and Ruby in a big way, and young Lindsay-Hogg (returned from another failed attempt to take his preliminary exams at Oxford) was a regular vi
sitor at the nightly suppers that Welles and Paola gave at Alfredo’s restaurant, near the canal. On one of these post-show evenings at Alfredo’s, when Hilton Edwards happened to be present, there was a curious eruption. At a nearby table sat the company performing Sam Thompson’s radical play Over the Bridge, which had rocked the Ulster theatrical establishment, a play that dared to take on the full ugly truth of sectarianism in the dockyards. The play had been staged in defiance of the board of the theatre that had commissioned it, and a group of actors led by a firebrand player named James Ellis had broken away and triumphed with it. It was raw, harsh and of the minute and, there in Alfredo’s, Jimmy Ellis started attacking Edwards for producing something as passé and irrelevant as Chimes at Midnight. Two worlds of theatre confronted each other. And Welles, who at the age of twenty-one had exploded the theatrical norms of his day, now found himself, a quarter of a century later, being perceived as a representative of the theatrical old guard. On this occasion, in Dublin, it seemed to amuse him more than anything else. As the spat between Edwards and Ellis became more aggressive, Welles intervened, according to Aubrey Morris, ‘like the Prince in Romeo and Juliet, pressing his somewhat substantial belly at the rebels – pushing them quite powerfully to their respective seats and adoring every moment of it’.52

  Supper at Alfredo’s was not normally so explosive. It was Welles at his happiest: regaling the table with his incomparable conversation, teasing his fellow-guests, ordering more and more mountains of food and flagons of wine, mostly for his own personal consumption. Lindsay-Hogg sat there, longing for something he could not entirely understand from this man whom he so oddly resembled, mirror images of each other: large, fleshy men, smoking their cigars, their bow ties tucked under their collars, with only twenty-five years separating them.

  One night, Orson said to me, ‘It’s always a good idea to start where things are fresh and you can make your own way quickly without interference.’ I knew about the freedom he’d had when he made Citizen Kane, and how it never happened again. ‘Mongolia,’ he said. ‘Mongolia?’ I questioned. ‘Yes,’ Orson said emphatically. ‘I hear they’re starting up their own studio there. It’s a fascinating place.’ ‘You’ve been there?’ I asked. ‘Sure, when I was your age.’ I wondered if he were pulling my leg. I didn’t want to be caught out, but why would he tease me, knowing I was so eager. ‘Look into it,’ he said sympathetically.53

  Orson Welles was telling this young man, who longed above all other things to have Welles as his father, to go to Mongolia, during the run of the play he had fashioned into a story of fathers and sons, betrayal and abandonment. It could so easily have been. Welles and Lindsay-Hogg’s mother, Geraldine Fitzgerald, had been extraordinarily close at the time Welles had more or less abandoned his first wife to her own devices, at the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s, just when Michael was born. Rumours were rife in the Chimes at Midnight company. Welles betrayed nothing in his behaviour towards Lindsay-Hogg that might suggest any greater bond between them. Lindsay-Hogg didn’t know it, either, though he suspected it and hoped that it was so. Meanwhile, Welles put the boy under his spell. ‘His knowledge, wit, insight, originality of view and opinion, compassion, depth of experience, heady highs, and frustrating harsh lows’, writes Lindsay-Hogg in his deeply illuminating memoir, Luck and Circumstance, ‘left one never wanting to be away from him, not to be out of his company. Then dinner would be over and he and Paola would go back to the Shelbourne Hotel and it would be as though something desirable and sustaining had been taken away and you’d feel a little deflated.’

  The end of Chimes at Midnight was oddly marred by an absurd event. During the last week of the run, Anne Cunningham (her screaming and running about deemed dispensable) had been sent to an editing studio in Paris with the footage from Orson Welles Interviews the Irish and Vice Versa. She was about to return to Dublin when Mrs Rogers gave her Welles’s instructions that she should go straight to London from Paris and stay there. But she had her clothes in Dublin, and all her effects, and her watch was at the repairer’s. Besides, she didn’t want to miss the last performance, and the promised party afterwards. So she took the decision to come back to Dublin after all and headed straight for the theatre, where she bumped into Welles in the wings. The instant he caught sight of her, he became apoplectic with rage; she rapidly retreated and kept out of his way for the rest of the evening.

  The following day she made her way to the boat on which Welles and the company were ensconced, ready for departure to Holyhead. He spotted her at the bottom of the gangplank. What followed shocked everyone: Welles, at the top of the gangplank, with Paola and Beatrice and the Swiss nanny at his side, roared at her: ‘You have no discipline, you will never work in the theatre again if you can’t take a simple instruction like “Stay where you are.”’ Cunningham fought back her tears and then ran away, howling.54 Next he turned on Mrs Rogers, who happened to be wearing a hat, which, she said, was like a sort of squashed mushroom. ‘In spite of that hat,’ Welles said, ‘that makes serious conversation impossible,’ he gave her a terrible dressing-down. ‘You don’t know how to carry out my instructions,’ he bellowed. ‘I told you that she was not to come back and you allowed her to come back and now you have spoiled everything.’ Rogers had to go off, too, ‘otherwise I would have cried and I didn’t in front of anybody’.55

  And so Chimes at Midnight ended, awash with tears and rage – rage provoked, Anne Cunningham thought, by her having ‘disobeyed a ruling’. The man whose pathological dislike of authority had so often been his undoing would not allow his own authority to be questioned. Much later, as the boat chugged its way across the Irish Sea, Welles came on deck and stood by Keith Baxter at the rail of the boat. ‘That girl,’ he said. ‘I behaved badly.’ Then, says Baxter, he emitted a great sigh, almost a cry of pain. ‘When I’m angry. Never ask me why.’ And then he told Baxter that he would be making a film of the play, and that he would never make it without him as Hal.56

  So ended Welles’s long career as an actor on stage. And now he was about to embark on his final production as a theatre director. One night at supper at Alfredo’s he asked Michael Lindsay-Hogg if he would like to assist him on Rhinoceros. Lindsay-Hogg eagerly accepted. It was five years before he heard from Welles again.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  More Rhino Roars

  WELLES AND Ionesco had a little bit of history. In the summer of 1958, the London Observer published a pugnacious piece by its critic Kenneth Tynan, entitled ‘Ionesco: Man of Destiny?’, which challenged the French-Romanian dramatist’s growing pre-eminence.1 Tynan saw Ionesco as representing a dangerous departure from what he considered to be drama’s essential realism and, worse, of being guilty of the thought-crime of political pessimism. Only two years earlier Tynan had been the cheerleader for the revolution in the British theatre that was initiated by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, a play which had, at a stroke, smashed open the French windows and evacuated the drawing rooms of the typical West End drama, restoring the theatre to something resembling real life. It was, theatrically and in every other way, a period of upheaval in British life – prelude and harbinger to the profound transformations of the 1960s – and the English Stage Society at the Royal Court Theatre (where Look Back in Anger had first been performed) was instrumental in exploring the new freedoms suddenly opening up. It had wholeheartedly embraced Ionesco’s early plays, The Chairs and The Lesson, which were by turns whimsical, surreal and sinister, revelling in the inanities of language and the nightmarish potential of inanimate objects. Partly, perhaps, because of their proximity to the British nonsense tradition, these proved immensely popular, both with the public and with the theatrical intelligentsia.

  It was this popularity that troubled Tynan: the Royal Court seemed to be endorsing a cartoonish view of life that was far from progressive. ‘M. Ionesco’s theatre is pungent and exciting, but it remains a diversion. It is not on the main road.’ The Observer, sen
sing a major controversy, gave Ionesco room to reply, which he did with great eloquence, explicitly renouncing any kind of political agenda; rejecting politics, indeed, as relevant to human needs. ‘What separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics. That is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding . . . if I may be allowed to express myself paradoxically,’ he continued,

  I should say that the true society, the authentic human community, is extra-social – a wider, deeper society, that which is revealed by our common anxieties, our desires, our secret nostalgias. The whole history of the world has been governed by these nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly. No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute; it is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.2

  This was of course anathema to Tynan and anyone of a left-wing, or indeed a liberal, disposition; that decidedly included the management of the Royal Court Theatre: Oscar Lewenstein, for example, who had helped to found the English Stage Society and was on the board of the theatre, had been a member of the Communist Party until the Russian invasion of Hungary, just two years earlier.

  Ionesco’s statement, exactly as the always-mischievous playwright had intended, dumped the cat firmly among the pigeons, and various distinguished writers – John Berger, Philip Toynbee and others – weighed in on the side of art as a proactive agent for the improvement of mankind. Tynan again took up cudgels (the whole correspondence was given prominent coverage over an entire month of Sundays – those were the days), insisting that art and politics could not be divided: ‘every play worth serious consideration is a statement . . . M. Ionesco correctly says that no ideology has yet abolished fear, pain or sadness. Nor has any work of art. But both are in the business of trying. What other business is there?’ At this point, as Ionesco naughtily observed, ‘an imposing personality’ intervened: Orson Welles. ‘As one of Mr Ionesco’s enthusiasts,’ wrote Welles, ‘I felt that Mr Tynan rather overstated his case. A keen admirer is not a follower of a cult; and I did not like being told that to enjoy a play is necessarily to approve its message. When I applauded The Chairs, was I participating in a demonstration in favour of nihilism? This sounded far-fetched. After reading M. Ionesco’s rebuttal to Mr Tynan, I am not so sure.’ Welles continued with a spirited defence of the political significance of art: