“Finally at the end of it all,” he wrote, lay Clifden, where he took a room at Joyce’s Hotel. At the town market he enlisted hotel proprietor P. K. Joyce as his auctioneer, selling Sheeog for ten pounds sterling—a fact Joyce boasted about in local newspapers after the “War of the Worlds” sensation of 1938.
Returning by bus to Galway, Orson scouted out the Taibhdhearc, Ireland’s first Gaelic-speaking theater, which the stage designer, writer, and actor Micheál MacLíammóir helped launch with his play Diarmuid agus Gráinne in 1928. But MacLíammóir had moved on to the Gate Theatre in Dublin, and there was no place at the Taibhdhearc for an American with meager Gaelic.
He decided on a trip to the Aran Islands. J. M. Synge, the Irish poet and author of The Playboy of the Western World, had lived for a while on the three islands off Galway, describing the harsh existence in a famous series of dispatches for Irish newspapers. Irish artist Seán Keating also had made the Arans his subject, painting portraits of their rugged people. Now Orson would see for himself these “three tiny piles of limestone off the West Coast,” as he put it in his letters. He hopped a boat to Inisheer, the smallest of the Arans, twenty-three miles west of Galway Bay, and at the end of the hour-long voyage he found himself in an ancient, inhospitable land of fishermen and farmers—“the most primitive spot in Europe,” he wrote to Dr. Bernstein, “as it has been for many centuries.”
Electing to stay in Inisheer, young Orson found “a wonderful little old thatched cottage by the sea” that he turned into a painting studio, and vowed to create “nothing but portraits now, simple sketches of men and women I have known here. . . . There is a quality in the Erin eye a thousand times more elusive than the blue in the Conemarra hills, a something in the clean, naïve smile that plays on the Aran mouth, a twinkle that dances in an Erin eye—an intelligent candour and something more . . .11
“To paint that is to paint God.”
Inisheer was a remote paradise—“a kind of lost Eden,” Orson wrote, invoking what was already becoming a signature phrase for him. His letters from Inisheer were timed for the weekly boat—“weather permitting—and it never does!”—that carried mail as well as passengers. Sometimes he wrote them at four in the morning “after a very full evening” at Patch Litman’s, “yarning and ‘talking fairies,’ ” followed by a “shindy,” fiddling and jigging at John Connelly’s. He waxed rhapsodic over these shindys, full of “fine Erin men in indigo homespun” with “smiling colleens in nice red skirts and sienna jackets, all whirling about in the intracasies [sic] of ‘the stalk of barley,’ and stamping their leathern slippers on the flaggings as the orchestra plays on.” It was all so wonderful. “I am really drinking too deeply of Ireland to write about it,” he said in a letter.
During his few weeks on Inisheer, Orson boasted, he became “really intimately” acquainted with all its inhabitants. Though most of them spoke Gaelic, a language of which he’d absorbed the merest smattering, he felt a great kinship with the islanders. “I have lived with these people, farmed, gathered kelp, fished, sang, drank, eaten and even wept with them,” he wrote, “when Mourteen’s three boys were beaten to death on the rocks almost at my doorstep.” His only disappointment was his own painting, which was still “something of a flop.” “At the end of three weeks,” Orson explained woefully, “I shall carry away with me perhaps a half dozen [portraits]. Some of them will be bad pictures and some fair . . . but as portrayals of that undefinable Erin spirit they will all be dismal failures.”
One day, after nearly a month on Inisheer, he woke up “desperately in need of money,” Orson wrote. “Yesterday—for the first time, I checked up thoroughly on all my accounts—0.” He was almost as helpless with money as his brother, he confessed. “The same blood that flows in Richard’s veins,” he wrote to Dr. Bernstein, “flows also in mine.”
The young American went shooting and fishing with the islanders, and hunted birds with a Catholic priest who made a regular circuit of the three islands. Orson claimed subsequently to have spent a little too much time with the local lasses, his dalliances catching the priest’s attention. “These great, marvelous girls in their white petticoats,” Welles later recalled, “they’d grab me. It was as close to male rape as you could imagine. And all with husbands out in their skin-covered canoes. All day, while I had nothing to do. Then the girls would go and confess it all to the priest.” As they tramped the island together, the gun-toting priest hinted unambiguously that young Orson might consider moving on in his Irish travels—and so he did.
Orson must have had a little money to spare, for after returning to Galway he embarked on a tour of the south and east, visiting Limerick, Kerry, Kilarney, Blarney, Tipperary, and Wicklow before returning to Limerick. There he purchased a bicycle—dubbing it “Ulysses,” a nod to Homer and Joyce—and met up by prearrangement with Michael Conroy from Galway to continue his travels. The two explored on their bikes and hitched a ride on beer barges floating up the Shannon. Orson used his journal to sketch people he met on the road, while chronicling his adventures with Conroy, whom he disguised in the journal as “O’Connor” portraying him as “a more sober counterpart to Orson’s madcap self,” as Simon Callow notes. “They seemed to have had a delightful time of it.”
By October, near the end of his cash, Orson found himself in Athlone, a town on the Shannon about halfway between Galway and Dublin. Roaming Battery Heights, he crested a hill and spied something amusing.
“I came upon three little boys, their bellies flat upon the grass,” Orson wrote to Roger Hill, “peeping furtively over the brink. I tiptoed up behind them to see what was the object of their attention and was amused to discover two young persons of the opposite sex reclining in the trench and making violent and enthusiastic love.
“But what delighted both performers and audience was the presence of a matronly lady—fat in a respectable kind of way and obviously the chaperone of the party—stretched out alongside of the delighted lovers, snoring lustily!
“Rather than disturb so happy a scene, I descended the hill on the side farthest from Romeo and his dark-eyed Juliet. This brought me quite near the slumbering chaperone. Imagine my astonishment when upon passing to discover that lady manufacturing the sounds of sleep with her twinkling eyes wide open! Thunder struck, I gazed down at her and as I turned away she closed one of those very Irish organs in an elaborate wink.” Next to this Orson drew a long-lashed lady’s eyes, one wide open, decorated with Z’s and exclamation marks. (This letter was meant for the worldly Skipper Hill alone—not for Dr. Bernstein, prim holder of Orson’s purse strings.)
A seventy-five-mile bus trip then took Orson to Dublin, where he was hoping for an infusion of cash from home. He was broke, but as blissful as he would ever be.
“I am riding into Dublin,” he jotted, drawing a bus with the sun shining overhead, “thinking glad thoughts about Ireland.”
The glad thoughts wouldn’t last. When he got to town, Orson rushed to American Express—only to be disappointed. There was no wire from Dr. Bernstein. Crestfallen, he shrieked “so loudly that traffic stopped on College Green,” he wrote later. As soon as he settled into his hotel, the electricity failed, preventing him from sitting down to write at length about “the anguish that was in my soul—and it was anguish—the despairing ready-for-the-river anguish one experiences when unknown and alone in a big city.”
He was down to only “a few shillings,” Orson recalled, which he decided to blow on “a good dinner.” And after the dinner he lit a quality cigar, having taken up cigars in Ireland on the theory that smoking them made him look older, like his father or Ashton Stevens.
From the start of his Irish travels, Orson strove—somewhat obviously—to make the adventures he described in his letters seem accidental, to lull Dr. Bernstein into believing all his blarney. But he had a strategy. He had jumped ship at Galway, where the Taibhdhearc was located, with its direct links to Micheál MacLíammóir, and the Gate Theatre. He had insinuated himself into the w
ell-known Ó Conaire family in Galway, where he also met Cathal Ó Ceallaigh, a folklorist and actor who happened to be performing a small role in the Gate’s current production. Now with his few remaining coins, Orson purchased a ticket to the evening’s program: a new drama by the Earl of Longford called The Melians: A Tragedy of Imperialism.
The Melians was an ambitious work that offered a nationalist spin on Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War, with Ireland standing in for the occupied island of Melos. MacLíammóir had the lead role—a privilege he customarily alternated with Hilton Edwards, the cofounder of the Gate, his partner in art and, quite openly, in life. (In later years they cheerfully dubbed themselves “The Stately Homos of Ireland.”)
The two had met in the mid-1920s as players in the Intimate Shakespearean Company, led by actor-manager Anew McMaster. McMaster’s troupe crisscrossed the island, playing country towns and church halls—what Orson called “the smalls of Ireland.” McMaster was MacLíammóir’s brother-in-law and (possibly) his onetime lover, and he was a mentor to both him and Edwards. Hilton Edwards had occasional affairs with women, MacLíammóir had flings with other men, but the two remained a couple throughout their lives.
Together, in honor of McMaster, they had founded the Gate Theatre in 1928. When Orson arrived the Gate was in its fourth season, presenting original and Irish-language plays from its own core group of dramatists and translators, along with Irish premieres of classical and West End plays. The Gate had recently vacated the Peacock Theatre, a small experimental stage annexed to the state-subsidized Abbey Theatre, in favor of a new four-hundred-seat theater carved out of the Rotunda building on Parnell Square.
The Melians failed to impress young Orson—he called it “stupid” in a letter to Skipper Hill—but he spotted his Galway friend Ó Ceallaigh onstage, and after the show Orson went behind the curtains to say hello. There he contrived to meet Edwards, who was immediately struck by the “very tall young man with a chubby face, full powerful lips and disconcerting Chinese eyes,” as MacLíammóir wrote in his autobiography, All for Hecuba. “His hands were enormous and beautifully shaped,” MacLíammóir continued. “The voice, with its brazen transatlantic sonority, was already that of a preacher, a leader, a man of power.”
Waving a cigar, the backstage visitor introduced himself—fudging his age—and babbled haughtily about his experience with the Goodman Theatre and the New York Theatre Guild.12 (In fact, Orson had performed onstage at the Goodman, and he had acted in a play originally produced by the Theatre Guild—albeit both occasions were Todd School affairs.) The Gate partners didn’t really care about vetting the young stranger’s résumé; they were too intrigued by his look and aura and “some ageless and superb inner confidence . . . that no one could blow out,” in MacLíammóir’s words. “It was unquenchable.
“That was his secret.”
The Gate men were “gracious and candid,” Orson recalled in a letter home, and Edwards said he might consider Orson for a small part in the Gate’s next production, Ashley Dukes’s dramatization of the Lion Feuchtwanger novel Jud Süss, or Jew Süss, as the Gate version was known, which was just then being cast. “You would have to work on amateur’s wages,” Edwards cautioned Orson, “which are but a gesture. If you care to stick and if we get along together, bigger parts might come and I might even persuade the committee to pay you an extra guinea.”
After a night of carousing with Ó Ceallaigh and a morning of quick study of Jew Süss, Orson returned to the Gate for his audition the next afternoon. He had focused on “two big parts,” both attractive. “One is the Süss, the George Arliss title role, which Matheson Lang made so famous in London last season—and which is dramatic by virtue of its negativeness,” he wrote to Skipper, “and the other is the half-Emil Jannings, half-Douglas Fairbanks contrast to the Jew: Karl Alexander, the Duke. It is really the fattest of the two parts—all positives and I prefer dealing in negatives—but meaty from first to fifth acts—it runs the gauntlet of fine temper scenes, drunks, darling seductions, rapine, murder, heart attacks, and death.” But he “scarcely dreamed of” playing Süss, a role earmarked for Edwards, and his real goal was to win the part of Duke Karl Alexander. He auditioned for a “committee” of repertory company officials and rotating directors, including Edwards and MacLíammóir.
In a 1946 account of the audition, MacLíammóir recalled young Orson arresting everyone’s attention by flinging a table, a chair, and some books around the stage and savaging a plum blossom floral display, stirring up “a violent cloud of dust, like a miniature sand-storm.” Orson described his performance differently in his contemporary correspondence. “Being as I was,” he wrote to Hill, “terribly nervous and anxious to impress them, I performed a kind of J. Worthington Ham Karl Alexander with all the tricks and all the golden resonance I could conjure up.” But his golden resonances proved “a bitter failure.” Edwards, for one, could barely control his mirth as Orson struggled to impress the committee.
MacLíammóir, however, saw potential. “An astonishing performance,” he recalled, “wrong from beginning to end, but with all the qualities of fine acting tearing their way through a chaos of inexperience. His diction was practically perfect, his personality, in spite of his fantastic circus antics, was real and varied; his sense of passion, of evil, of drunkenness, of tyranny, of a sort of demoniac authority was arresting; a preposterous energy pulsated through everything he did. One wanted to bellow with laughter, but the laughter died on one’s lips.”
The committee huddled. Edwards beckoned Orson to the stalls. In a letter home, Orson transcribed their conversation “practically word for word”:
“Terrible, wasn’t it?” asked Orson
“Listen old boy,” responded Edwards, “you’ve been playing Shakespeare and you’ve learned Shakespearean poise, manner, and resonance of voice. You’re very young and you’re one of the finest technicians I’ve ever watched. It’s an enigma . . .”
(“I glowed,” Orson wrote to Bernstein.)
“You have a greater accumulation of manner and technique, more tricks, more subtlety than the average professional first-rater picks up in a lifetime,” Edwards continued. “And you can’t be very old are you?”
(“I told him my age,” Orson wrote to Bernstein—though what age he said, exactly, is unclear.)
“God help you!” Edwards gasped.
Young Orson roared with laughter. It was one of his endearing qualities that he enjoyed nothing more than a good laugh at his own expense. And the laugh itself was unforgettable. Milton Berle, meeting Welles a few years later at a New York showing of Chaplin’s Modern Times, called it a “deep, guttural” explosion. Others, who knew his love of Shakespeare, sometimes described the laugh as Falstaffian. It was a gorgeous instrument, with many uses and meanings, not all of them sincere. As Mercury Theatre actor Everett Sloane later said, Orson was capable of laughing simply because he wanted something. “When Orson calls with a smile in his voice,” said Paul Stewart, another Mercury stalwart, “he’s already lying.” To playwright Tennessee Williams, Orson’s laugh was a wonderful thing, “forced and defensive, like mine.”
Backstage at the Gate, Hilton Edwards looked kindly on the young American. “It’s no laughing matter,” he told Orson. “You’re at the point a matinee idol arrives at when he has got on in years and people are writing plays around his little tricks and capers. But of course that won’t do—nobody’s going to write nonsense for you to show off in.
“I tell you frankly you have a gorgeous stage voice and a stage presence in a million and you’re the finest over actor I’ve seen in eons, but you couldn’t come in and say, ‘Milord, the carriage awaits’ as well as Art, our electrician; you could put more somersaults in Hamlet than John Barrymore and handle theatrical, very theatrical restraint with more delicacy than Matheson Lang, but you couldn’t say ‘how-do-you-do’ behind the footlights like a human being; you handle your voice like a singer but there isn’t a note of sincerity in it. You’re
all flash and finish.”
Edwards sent Orson away with valuable advice. “You go back to your hotel and practice acting like a man and not an actor,” he said. “You expend a great deal of energy on throwing weight and strength into characterization—forget it—despite your youth, you have all the strength you need. Drop affectation, over-studied grace. Try and make over what you’ve been doing all your life tonight—learn that art that conceals art—learn restraint and, above all, sincerity. It may take you years, but come around tomorrow and I’ll see how you’re coming along.”
Orson took the words to heart. What he didn’t know was that the part of Duke Karl Alexander was his to lose. The Gate’s most likely candidate, a member of the ensemble named Charles Marford, had just quit the company. Edwards himself was not only portraying Süss but also directing the play. The casting of Karl Alexander was an urgent matter to him.
In his hotel room, Orson practiced and practiced his lines, trying to muster every ounce of restraint and sincerity he could. When he returned, Edwards spent days putting him through “repeated auditions” and “endless consultations among the producing staff” before finally deciding to roll the dice and cast him in the role of Duke Karl Alexander—the first-billed role in the play.
“I am a professional!” Orson wrote to the headmaster, adding multiple exclamation points and underlining the word “professional” several times. “Forgive the somewhat salesman-like exuberance of this last. It was written immediately after my getting the job.”
In the meantime, Dr. Bernstein had finally sent him some money—including a check signed over to Trinity College, where he was expected to apply for admission. But Orson made only halfhearted gestures in that direction, and it was just too bad for Trinity and Dr. Bernstein.
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 23