All his energy and abilities were trained now on the Gate.
Orson had other responsibilities besides acting. Edwards also hired him “to fill in the various [other] departments” formerly occupied by Charles Marford, including scene painter and publicity agent. His habitual sleeplessness was an asset. The Gate seemed busy twenty-four hours a day, and Orson had a knack for finding extra time for both moonlighting and pleasure.
Edwards saw the young American as a diamond in the rough. The director and star of Jew Süss, in his late twenties, was more down-to-earth than his older partner, MacLíammóir, although Edwards was perfectly capable of fiery displays of temper when the occasion warranted. A short, chubby fellow with small, bespectacled eyes and a prominent nose, he could have been mistaken for a bank clerk. With his common sense and good-heartedness, though, Edwards was the anchor of the company.
Jew Süss—the title is a reference to the main character, a historical figure, a court banker named Joseph Süss Oppenheimer—is set in the duchy of Württemberg in 1776. The story revolves around the enthroned Duke’s resentful dependence on the rich, cultured Jew. Duke Karl Alexander, Orson’s role, was a villainous rapist and murderer, “beyond any question the most difficult characterization in the entire play,” in Orson’s words. But whenever he tried to play the character to the hilt, Edwards reminded him of the virtues of restraint and of “absolute and unalloyed sincerity,” as Orson noted ruefully in his letters home.
“There are moments in the play,” Orson wrote, “when I feel I must make my voice ring and boom and make a gesture simple but studied and stagey, but even in the moments of the most intense comedy or tragedy I must be Karl Alexander without a single tassel or tinsel.” Orson sometimes balked at Edwards’s direction, but Edwards brought him to heel, giving him detailed instructions and asking him to follow them to the letter: Orson could reflect on the whys and wherefores later. It was a lesson Welles himself would later pass on to other actors.
The Gate mounted one new play every month, so time was short and the company was under constant pressure, with Jew Süss rehearsals going on “all day and every day,” in Orson’s words. It was hard work, but “lots of fun,” (another of his by now frequently recurring phrases). “Everyone has such a fine, keen, clean sense of humor and is so easy to work with.” Adding to the fun was the fact that the Duke was supposed to be in his fifties—giving the sixteen-year-old actor a perfect excuse to festoon himself with deep wrinkles, false hair, and stomach padding. His towering height and sonorous voice, lowered to bass baritone onstage, would complete the illusion of age.
Orson’s primary hurdle in this role, however, may have been learning to speak with an accent the native-born audience would accept (“in the most accent conscious city on the globe!”). “It’s wonderful diction training,” he wrote to Skipper. “I’m really learning the English language.”
Orson made strides during the nightly rehearsals, and by day he juggled his other duties—including publicity-mongering, already second nature for him; he easily dashed off reams of puffery of the sort he’d learned from the likes of Roger Hill, John Clayton, and the master newshounds of the Tavern Club. Best of all, writing publicity for the Gate gave him an excuse to tout himself—the exciting new discovery from America—inflating his age and reputation. Sometimes, as in a column he scribbled fitfully for a tabloid, he offered Gate hype under the pseudonym “Knowles Noel Shane,” an anagram of Welles, Kenosha, and, tellingly, “non.”
The lesser Irish newspapers gobbled up his breathless handouts, but so did the high-minded press. Even the New York Times, reviewing Jew Süss later, parroted his publicity handouts, describing “Orson Wells” as an eighteen-year-old who had “appeared occasionally” in Goodman Theatre plays and in “small parts” with the Theatre Guild in New York.
He had to make time for a little scene-painting for local groups of “Gaels,” “our deprecating term for the players who—monthly—edify Dublin with Irish plays in Irish,” in Orson’s words. The Gate provided the Gaelic troupes with made-to-order scenery as part of the bargain, and it fell to Orson to “dig out some stock flats” and “mottle” or “finish” them under strict instructions. This he “did with much care,” Orson reported to Dr. Bernstein, “being anxious to impress.” But he couldn’t resist improvising his own touches, and then felt “indescribable shame” when the stage manager complained about the results. (In his letter home, Orson illustrated this anecdote with a drawing of himself, glimpsed from behind, standing forlornly onstage with arrows pointing to mismatched scenery.) The Gaels “raged and ranted” until Charles Marford himself, “still in town, was hired to do the list over—per instructions!”
Micheál MacLíammóir hovered in the background as preparations for Jew Süss continued, keeping a wary eye on Orson and feeling much like a babysitter. When he wasn’t acting in the Gate’s current offering, the theater’s cofounder wrote poetry and original plays, and translated works of literature into Gaelic. (Though a champion of the Gaelic language movement, he was secretly an Englishman born and bred.) And he usually designed the sets—or supervised the design—and this was true of Jew Süss.
MacLíammóir was a stylish and expressive stage designer, who achieved tremendous effects on cost-conscious budgets with sets that were typically complemented by Hilton Edwards’s atmospheric lighting, both men drawing from whatever was au courant on the Continent. MacLíammóir valued imaginative set design as much as Edwards valued restraint and sincerity in acting.
Thirty-one when Orson arrived in town, MacLíammóir was tall, dark, and charismatically handsome, notwithstanding the feminine powder, thick eyeliner, and toupee he affected offstage. He was not an easy man, and he would not have an easy relationship with Welles, who was on his way to becoming more famous than MacLíammóir would ever be. At first he saw Orson as a dangerously charming upstart—talented, perhaps, but an upstart all the same.
But MacLíammóir was also gracious to Orson, taking him aside to reassure him that Marford had been given a little painting work merely to keep the poor chap from starving. Orson could redeem himself working on the sets for Jew Süss. And so he did. “I followed directions explicitly and much against my will,” Orson wrote home to Chicago. “I can see already that my artistic conscience is going to lead me into some disastrous and drastic differences of opinion.”
Came the momentous occasion: on the night of Tuesday, October 13, 1931, the Gate’s production of Jew Süss had its premiere. The opening was attended by Dublin first-nighters in their finest outfits, and by drama critics from the Irish and English press. Everyone in the packed theater had read Orson’s own publicity: the young American playing a lead in his Gate Theatre debut. “I stood in the wings—my nails digging into the palms of my hands, perspiration bubbling through the greasepaint,” Orson wrote to Dr. Bernstein, “and I said a prayer, a long and fervent one, to Tai Tsung, Ming Huang, the patron saint of actors. Never have I prayed like that, and never have I lived so many eons in a second.”
The voice of William Sherwood, the durable Gate actor who was portraying the character Councillor Weisensee, beckoned from onstage: “And here, I think, are our pair of highnesses . . .” That was Orson’s cue for the Duke’s first entrance. “For one awful moment I tasted of the exquisite torture of crucifixion,” Orson recalled in a letter home; “in another, I was at the door, gazing in to the teeth of what [Edwin] Booth so aptly termed ‘A crouching and invisible beast’—the audience. A first-night audience in the leading theater of a capital city—critics, celebrities, titles—an audience that spoke a different language than my own—my first audience!”
Nobly costumed, amply bewhiskered and bewigged, he marched out front and center and planted his feet, rumbling his lines. “When Orson came padding onto the stage with his lopsided grace, his laughter, his softly thunderous voice,” MacLíammóir recalled years later, “there was a flutter of astonishment and alarm, a hush, and a volley of applause.”
So far, s
o good. Now it was up to Orson to win over the audience and then lose himself in the performance, forgetting the spectators were there. The performing and the forgetting were equally important. “That wonderful something about a play picked me up in its arms and carried me far away to sixteenth century Württemberg,” Orson recalled. The Irish audience—reputed to be “the world’s most critical and most appreciative,” in Orson’s words—sat forward, watching intently.
As was traditional at the Gate, Edwards brought the newest member of the company out onstage during the intermission, introducing him to the Dublin theatergoers with warm and humorous remarks. “Orson swelled visibly,” remembered MacLíammóir. “I have heard of people swelling visibly before, but Orson is one of those who really do it.”
His big moment came in Act Four, when the Duke dies onstage of an apoplectic stroke, just after the exit of the pretty actress Betty Chancellor, who was playing the daughter of the Süss. Orson’s business, as the lecherous Karl Alexander, was to stare after Chancellor, chortle suggestively, and remark, “A bride fit for Solomon. He had a thousand wives, did he not?”
Just then, a voice rang out from the back of the theater: “That’s a dirty black Protestant lie!”
Orson was momentarily rattled. He was supposed to draw his sword, shouting his final line—“Ring the bells and fire all the cannons!”—before slumping lifelessly on the throne. But his sword stuck in his scabbard, and as he pulled on it helplessly, he garbled his line: “Ring the cannons and fire all the bells!” Finally in despair, he flung himself headfirst down a flight of steps, ending in a backflip. “It was the only thing I could think of,” Welles said years later. “I didn’t care whether it killed me or not. It almost did—but it also brought down the house.”
As he often said himself in later interviews, the sixteen-year-old had stolen the show. “There was much in that performance even now I can see was wrong—but it was my finest work till then,” Orson wrote to Dr. Bernstein exultantly. Taking his “first professional bow,” hearing his name shouted again and again, “truly, I wept for joy.”
The reviewers took notice. “There was a naturalness and ease about his acting, which, at once, caught the packed house on his first appearance,” wrote J. J. Hayes, the New York Times’ stringer in Dublin. While Jew Süss was a “somewhat unpleasant play,” Hayes noted, the Gate had mounted a “magnificently produced” drama, with an “amazingly fine” display by the Chicagoan. “When the last curtain fell,” Hayes wrote, “he had acquitted himself so well that he was given an ovation. Dublin is eager to see him in other roles.”
Dublin critics, while generally supportive of the Gate, could be fierce and prickly. Yet the majority of them also singled Orson out, praising him in review after review. “His impersonation was interesting at every moment,” rhapsodized “D. M.” in the Irish Press. “He built a complete and subtle character around his lines. Particularly remarkable was his skill when, silent and motionless, for long minutes in the fourth scene . . . he held the audience tense.” The American had lent humanity and simplicity to the Duke, capturing him “magnificently,” said the Irish Independent. The Irish Times agreed: the “new actor” was “excellent.”
The weeks to come would bring wild applause (six curtain calls on some nights, “with the gallery and the pit shouting and stamping and calling out my name,” Orson wrote to Hortense Hill), laudatory press notices, and sold-out performances—three weeks, instead of the Gate’s customary two-week run. As soon as the curtain rang down on that opening night, however, the company was in a mood to celebrate. They went out on the town in force, eating and drinking, brandishing cigars.
More than once, late in life, Welles would say half-jokingly that this was his only pure triumph, and the rest of his career was downhill.
His success in Jew Süss launched him as a star in Dublin. He became “a legend almost at once” there, recalled Lady Longford, the wife of the Earl of Longford—both Gate patrons and investors. “People began to talk about Orson,” agreed Micheál MacLíammóir.
The young sensation took a small flat within walking distance of Parnell Square, but he was rarely found at home. Orson spent most days doing publicity, painting scenery, and rehearsing; appeared onstage as the Duke six nights a week; and went out late after the performances. He was usually the last person to leave the public house, often reaching for the tab. On his rare nights off, he took in the wide range of dramatic offerings in Dublin: the revival at the Abbey of William Butler Yeats’s verse lament The Land of Heart’s Desire; the new musical revue at the Theatre Royal; and a garage production of Roar China!—Sergei Tretyakov’s attack on Western imperialism.
The Gate thrived on parties, and Orson was high on everyone’s guest list. “Orson was a great man at a party,” recalled Lord Longford. “When he thought a party had gone on long enough, he would say, ‘Take me out to Kilmahogue to see the fairies.’ ” Perhaps the celebrating got out of hand now and then. “Went to jail in Ireland for rowdyism,” Orson claimed, speaking to Henry Jaglom half a century later.
At pubs and parties, Orson crossed paths with more living legends—including Yeats himself and the cofounder of the Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory, just a year before her death. “Yeats makes me shiver,” Welles told Jaglom during one of their mealtime conversations, which Jaglom recorded. (Transcripts were edited by Peter Biskird and published in 2013 as My Lunches with Orson.) “He was at every party, and you could see him walking in the park,” along the pathways of St. Stephen’s Green.
The Irish were beguiled by Orson’s hilarious stories about his travels, from his Far East wanderings to his time riding Sheeog across the west of Ireland. (He freely embroidered his tales, adding in parts of the world he hadn’t visited.) And he was just as good a listener as he was a talker, most agree. Orson was “as nice and friendly as could be,” recalled Lady Longford.
When it came to one subject—the opposite sex—the sixteen-year-old acted his age. He was sweet on his colleague at the Gate, Betty Chancellor. “She was the sexiest thing that ever lived,” Welles told Barbara Leaming. “She was one of those absolutely black-haired girls, with skin as white as Carrara marble, you know, and eyelashes that you could trip on.” While she was only five years older than Orson, Chancellor had made her professional debut with the Gate soon after its inception and was firmly ensconced on the Dublin stage as a skilled comedienne and tragedienne. Chancellor was fond of young Orson and allowed him to flirt with her. But Orson was “highly immature in any kind of sexual discussion,” she told Welles biographer Frank Brady, and even onstage he could not cope with their big “love” scene in Jew Süss. This scene preceded the Duke’s “rape” of Suss’s daughter, which happened offstage. “His extraordinarily mature acting fell apart” during the scene, Chancellor recalled. “He was then obviously embarrassed and unsure and he tried to hide this by gripping me with such violence that I nearly lost my life, but certainly not my virtue.”
Orson wangled a few “dates” with the older, more established actress, but Chancellor did her best to cool his ardor. One time, disconsolate after she had stood him up, Orson inveigled another Gate actress, Eve Watkinson, to slip off with him to see the latest Laurel and Hardy comedy, Pardon Us. Slapstick foolishness always cheered him up, but after the movie he and Watkinson shared a late dinner, and Orson poured out his heartache over Chancellor.
Yet Chancellor never lost her affection for her young suitor. “With me, Orson was never either loud nor boastful,” she recalled in Peter Noble’s The Fabulous Orson Welles. “He used to talk a lot, but it was interesting. We had long suppers at revolting cafes in Dublin, for which dreadful repasts we usually clubbed together to pay the bill. Once we hadn’t enough and Orson had to pay the balance in stamps. When he had any money he was very generous and spent it right away.”
Nothing ever made Orson prouder than his breakthrough in Dublin, but after Jew Süss a few things happened that, when he was in a certain mood, could dim the glow of his warm memorie
s.
In November, after sitting out a production of Molière’s Scapin in Gaelic, Orson and the company mounted The Dead Rides Fast, an eerie thriller by the Dublin journalist David Sears. Once again Orson caked himself up, this time to play an elderly American millionaire traveling with his daughter in the west of Ireland. The travelers are forced by a storm into a gloomy mansion, which is haunted by a stranger from another world (played by Hilton Edwards). And once again Orson attracted good notices, reverting to his American accent on top of his customary “big gruff voice,” in the words of Dublin-born architect and theatrical connoisseur Joseph Holloway, who followed Welles’s rise at the Gate in his diaries. The Evening Herald praised the “delightful subtlety” of Orson’s performance—a notice that must have cheered Edwards.
In private, writing to Dr. Bernstein, Orson was upbeat about his role: “comedy relief in modern dress,” he said, “a pleasant change after the rigors of Jew Süss.” But he was scornful of the overall script, “a rather bad thriller . . . trying desperately at the expense of the thrills to do high-brow.” And he made the mistake of airing his scorn in public, speaking ill of the play’s bogus American dialogue to Hugh Curran, the Chicago Daily Tribune’s correspondent in Dublin: “It was of the pre-Abraham Lincoln period with a dash of gangster talkie thrown in.”
From childhood, Orson had always been encouraged to speak his mind, and his remarks about The Dead Rides Fast were an early instance of this persistent habit—and its pitfalls throughout his life. Criticizing the Gate’s own production, while it was still in front of audiences, piqued his sponsors at the Gate. MacLíammóir, especially, saw it as another sign of Orson’s immaturity. (Though Orson may have been right on the merits: The Dead Rides Fast ended its run after two weeks when it failed to fill sufficient seats.)
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 24