“It was stressed that I am not to move very emphatically in any direction without consulting him. After some final and very valuable advice about reading Marchbanks, I was dismissed again.”
Another of Wilder’s letters introduced him to Edward “Ned” Sheldon, the playwright from Chicago, whose career Orson had followed avidly. Crippling rheumatoid arthritis had ended Sheldon’s active writing and kept him bedridden. But he was an informal dramaturg for New York show people, and Sheldon would be a sounding board for many of Orson’s projects in the years ahead.
Orson flew through his first week, ushered into the presence of Broadway royalty thanks to Wilder’s name. “All of these great people,” he wrote to Wilder, tend “to geld me into brain prostrations and hideous impotencies of speech—And what shall I say to them? Always, it seems, the wrong thing. But they are very kind and if I don’t cover myself with glory now you’ve opened up this New York to me—why then there’s nothing to cover.”
One exception to the overwhelmingly positive reception was director Guthrie McClintic, the husband of Katharine Cornell. When Orson was informed that McClintic wouldn’t be able to see him for at least a month—because Tallulah Bankhead, the intended star of his new play, Jezebel, had fallen ill, throwing him into a tizzy—Woollcott “executed a hearty sniff and straightaway got on the phone,” Orson reported to Wilder. “Read out letter by you to him (Mr. Woollcott), about me, to Mr. McClintic, and won me a presentation at Beekman Place that night.” (Woollcott seemed to enjoy waving his magic wand for Orson. “ ‘And anybody else?’ he offered the next morning.”)
Orson was instructed to phone McClintic after 11:30 P.M., when Jezebel rehearsals had wrapped for the night. The night he called, he was told to hurry over to the director’s East Side address. He jumped into a taxi. “The great producer himself met me at the door, work-worn, but very cordial and pleasantly folksy in flannel slacks and a Hollywood sport-shirt widely opened to a chest proud with an incredible harvest of black hair,” Orson wrote to Wilder afterward. “He waved me up to what is now visible of his apartment—it’s shrouded in cellophane for the summer—and offered me drinks and then confidences, one after the other, before I could as much as unleash your letter. It was breathtaking but friendly.
“The confidences concerned many things—his liver, his hopes, his fears; Miss Bankhead’s liver, which is keeping her in bed, and the rehearsals in a hospital, and her hopes and fears; you and Nazis, the Nazis and Mr. McClintic; Mr. McClintic and Shakespeare; Shakespeare and the public; the use of mirrors on the stage; the trouble with scene designers; the troubles with the theatre; Mr. McClintic’s troubles.—
“And all of this, for some reasons, put me at my ease.”
McClintic found himself at ease too, “indeed, so much so I’m afraid I may have overstayed my welcome,” Orson recounted. Like Woollcott, McClintic was struck by “this extraordinary-looking young man with his beautiful voice and speech,” as McClintic himself later recalled. After a while, Orson told Wilder, McClintic “got his feet under him and we started on me.”
McClintic talked about the upcoming tour and “the Mercutio-Marchbanks problems,” increasingly implying that Orson’s casting was a fait accompli. The director fell to discussing the third show in the rotation, Rudolf Besier’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street, another of Cornell’s Broadway triumphs. He mentioned the role Orson might play, that of shy, stuttering Octavius, the brother of Cornell’s character, the poet Elizabeth Barrett. Finally he asked Orson, rather casually, if he wanted the job. “Of course I did and we discussed that at some pleasant length.” McClintic said he would phone Orson the next week. “He would wire Miss Cornell and ask her what she thought about a Marchbanks that was six feet one. I went home eventually—very thrilled.”
He used the intervening time to jump back into the Shakespeare book project, and to dash off grateful letters to Thornton Wilder, Roger Hill, and Dr. Maurice Bernstein. When writing to Wilder, Orson made abject apologies for his weak spelling. And it was writing to Wilder, not typing, because Orson recalled Wilder proclaiming his preference for longhand during their all-night gabfest in Chicago. “I can only say that I am busy thanking my Gods for you,” Orson wrote to Wilder. “For the wonderful things you’ve done for me and more for our friendship—whose growth is my prayer, but which I can illumine only by a very deep devotion.”
His thanks to Roger Hill were even more fervent. “My god Skipper, I owe you my life!” As a congratulatory gift, Hill mailed Orson a copy of On Reading Shakespeare, a new book by the noted critic Logan Pearsall Smith. Orson said he “gobbled” up the book “the minute I got it,” though it “should have been relished, sniffed, savoured and delayed like Hortense’s fruit-cake.” The gift refreshed Orson’s enthusiasm for their own Shakespeare book, which was intended for young people performing—not reading—the Bard. Smith, “bless his whimsical heart,” was persuasive on the merits of reading Shakespeare, but couldn’t fathom the value of acting the plays.
“Only an actor can read a play for all it’s worth,” Orson told Skipper with born-again actor’s fervor. “Acting is fun. Good theatre means entertainment. Our answer to the voice raised in objection is simply, as you’ve always said, why not begin Shakespeare by having a good time?”
He had dozens of sketches left to finish for their Shakespeare book, and while waiting for word from McClintic he worked straight through several nights in a row in order to catch up, asking Hill to send more of his favorite charcoal paper from his favorite Chicago art store.
At last, McClintic phoned to tell him that Cornell had tentatively approved him to play Mercutio, Marchbanks, and Octavius Barrett. Suddenly, his days were filled with appointments. The book deadline would have to be pushed back, Orson wrote to Hill apologetically. “Please don’t look for any [more] productivity on my part until things settle down a little more.”
First, however, Cornell wanted him to undergo voice training with Margaret Carrington. Mrs. Carrington, the older sister of actor Walter Huston, had been an accomplished singer and spoken-word recitalist before becoming the most sought-after voice expert in New York’s stage community. She had famously guided a nervous John Barrymore through his first Shakespeare performances on Broadway, his triumphant Richard III in 1919, and later his landmark Hamlet.
Inviting the young Chicago actor to her Park Avenue apartment, Mrs. Carrington thrilled Orson by brandishing the same copy of the script of Hamlet she had used when coaching Barrymore—complete with surviving notes in the actor’s hand. Carrington, who projected “physical vitality, psychic intensity and an imperturbable air of authority,” in the words of scholar Michael A. Morrison, listened as Orson recited passages from Hamlet that he’d long known by heart. “Enthuses pretty much,” Orson wrote to Skipper. “Will coach me.”
Three weeks after arriving in New York, Orson was officially invited to join Katharine Cornell’s repertory ensemble. “Mr. McClintic hasn’t even asked me to read!” an amazed Orson scribbled to Skipper on “a night of triumph” after signing the contract. “Biggest and best debut in America for me!” he wired to his guardian.
McClintic ordered up a portrait sitting with Florence Vandamm, the top Broadway photographer, and Orson’s casting was announced in the New York Times on September 25, 1933. On the same day, Charles Collins devoted a longer article to Orson in the Chicago Tribune, touting the young man’s forthcoming Shakespeare book, the play “Marching Song” (“which the Gate Theatre has accepted”), and the equally baseless claim (courtesy of Dr. Bernstein) that the eighteen-year-old theatrical “prodigy” was “the grandson of Gideon Welles, secretary of the Navy during the Civil War.”
An overjoyed Orson wrote to Hill: “Looks rather like the saga has begun.”
The national tour featuring the legendary Katharine Cornell’s Shakespearean debut was a big event in the New York theater world. As the New York Times noted, “the ghosts of past magnificence” hovered over Romeo and Juliet. Could Cornell, now entering
her forties, her hair silvering, capture the youthful spirit of a Juliet that had been defined by Julia Marlowe, Helena Modjeska, Mary Anderson, Adelaide Neilson, and other great actresses, in performances some living theatergoers had actually witnessed?
Cornell never had performed in repertory—let alone in a repertory troupe under her own leadership; neither had she made a “grand tour of the country,” an increasingly rare undertaking for stage companies. The planned itinerary would cover seventeen thousand miles and seventy-five cities and towns over six and a half months. Many of the stops along the way would be one-night stands in places where Cornell had never appeared, with the surefire Barretts of Wimpole Street dominating the schedule. The experiment was going to culminate with Romeo and Juliet opening on Broadway in the late spring of 1934.
The tour would be a kind of apogee for the marriage of McClintic and Cornell. McClintic was homosexual, as was Cornell, and both traveled with lovers; but their marriage was one of Broadway’s most successful partnerships. Tall, slender, with dark eyes and dark wavy hair, always parted in the middle, Cornell was a regal presence. She saved her emotions for the stage and left the shouting to the hot-tempered McClintic.
The distinguished Basil Rathbone, an actor steeped in Shakespeare, was slated to play Romeo to Cornell’s Juliet. Rathbone would also portray clergyman James Morell, married to Cornell’s character in Candida, and poet Robert Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Brenda Forbes, unforgettable as the quirky maid in The Barretts on Broadway, would re-create her role for the tour and play Prossy, secretly in love with Morell and jealous of Candida, in Candida. The new sets for Romeo and Juliet would be designed by veteran Woodman Thompson, with road versions of Jo Mielziner’s original Broadway scenery for Candida and The Barretts. More than sixty performers and crew members were engaged for the duration of the tour—many of them bringing spouses, children, even pets with them on the company train.
Late October was a month of intensive rehearsals. McClintic concentrated on Romeo and Juliet, the only production new to Cornell and the most anticipated of the three plays. The tour would open with Shakespeare, leaving Candida until the troupe reached the West Coast. After the delayed premiere of Jezebel in New York, McClintic would fly to Duluth, Minnesota, to catch up with the company as it boarded a train for Seattle, where the Shaw play starring Cornell would have its first performance beyond Broadway.
Shaw himself once called Cornell the ideal Candida of his imagination. Her turn as the clergyman’s wife was “one of the great performances by an actress that I have ever seen,” Rathbone rhapsodized in his memoirs. The third play—in some ways the loss leader—was The Barretts of Wimpole Street, but it would be almost a brush-up for Cornell, who had played Elizabeth Barrett for 541 performances on Broadway in 1924–1925.
Orson’s voice had mesmerized McClintic at their first meeting, and the director had decided on the spot to award the young actor the honor of speaking Romeo and Juliet’s first lines, parting the curtain with a mask held to his face and intoning the prologue: “Two households, both alike in dignity . . .” At the very first rehearsal, Orson later told his guardian, he found a way to stand out among the cast with a bit of mischief: after the first phrase he stopped, pretending to have gone up in his lines. McClintic stared helplessly and everyone else looked embarrassed until they all finally got the joke—the first of many to come—and the theater erupted with laughter. The company was won over.
After conquering an early bout of nerves, Orson performed well during rehearsals, and McClintic was pleased with his Mercutio. Orson was still short of money, however, and wrote to borrow some more from Roger Hill, promising to start paying it back with his first paycheck, while profusely apologizing for the fact that, for the moment at least, he would have to abandon all work on the Shakespeare book. In a touching response, Skipper Hill told Orson—once his prize pupil, now increasingly his friend—to stop worrying. “In the simple acceptance of each other per se lies the beauty of our relationship,” Hill replied. “Let’s never spoil it with too many words. Or with too little realization. There are some things too solid, too genuine to be made articulate. Lord! Life is so full of explaining ourselves and justifying ourselves and masquerading ourselves before folks. Thank god we each have a friend for whom we need apply no makeup.”
The tour was set to premiere on Wednesday, November 29, in Cornell’s adopted hometown, Buffalo. (The actress was born in Berlin but raised in Buffalo, where she first fell in love with theater.) Droves of reporters and photographers saw the company off at Grand Central Terminal, and more awaited their arrival in Buffalo. The choreographer Martha Graham traveled with the troupe, directing the dances; Graham was “a tower of strength,” Cornell recalled, “equal to any emergency,” including last-minute touches for the costumes. After opening with Romeo and Juliet, playing it for three nights and a matinee, the company would dish up The Barretts of Wimpole Street on Saturday night.
As he would for most of Orson’s stage appearances in the 1930s, Orson’s guardian made the trip for opening night. Arriving by train from Chicago, Dr. Maurice Bernstein hurried to the Statler Hotel, where Orson was staying. When he discovered that Orson wasn’t in his suite, Dr. Bernstein asked to be admitted to the room, only to be taken aback by what he found there: “the remains of two breakfasts and a napkin with rouge,” evidence of his ward’s first love affair.
The prudish physician quickly returned the room key to the front desk. “I walked out into the street a disturbed man, thinking,” Dr. Bernstein remembered: “ ‘What did she look like? Was she dark, was she a blonde, tall or short?’ But what difference did this make? I thought to myself. After all he is not a child, and it is no concern of mine.” When Orson materialized later, he relieved Bernstein’s anxiety with an explanation: needing fuel for his performance, Orson said, he had eaten for two, and the rouge on the napkins was merely a vestige of his own stage makeup. He raved to Bernstein about the ensemble and Cornell in particular—“a most cheerful person”—but lamented that “the sets were not to his liking,” stodgy and old-fashioned.
At the premiere in the Erlanger Theatre, Dr. Bernstein sat in the fifteenth row, but had trouble hearing some of the actors, and wondered whether the acoustics were poor. After the performance, he noticed McClintic in a box seat, looking glum. “As Orson passed him, he turned to Orson and asked him how he thought the performance went,” recalled Bernstein. “I was rather surprised since Orson was a newcomer to the company and was its youngest member.” To his “horror,” Bernstein continued, Orson “opened up, starting first of all with the [voice] projection of scenes and second, criticizing, the balcony scene. ‘The balcony on the backdrop looks like a glorified cigar box.’ ” McClintic shook his head wearily, as though Orson had gone too far, then “called the actors back on the stage,” and, echoing Orson, “told them that the audience had hardly heard them, that they must speak up.”
The company’s next stops were in Wisconsin—not Kenosha, Orson’s birthplace, but Milwaukee and Madison, where Cornell had never appeared. Playing these two cities had the added benefit of giving the company an excuse to avoid Chicago and its often ferocious critics. The company did not bypass Chicago entirely, however, stopping there by train long enough for Cornell to have lunch with Ashton Stevens, who spoke fondly of Orson. Many of the Chicago reviewers simply traveled to Milwaukee, anyway, Cornell recalled, and “most [of them] were displeased” by her Romeo and Juliet. Charles Collins in the Tribune found the middle-aged Cornell deficient as Juliet, but the other players—including Orson, whom he had known since he was in short pants—were “brilliant.” (“In his duel with Tybalt and his death scene,” Collins wrote, “this Mercutio is a complete realization of Shakespeare’s bravest blade.”) The Wisconsin critics were even more affirmative, with the Milwaukee Journal finding the production “superlative,” and the Sentinel calling it “superb.”
The tour had its first one-night stand at the 1,300-seat Parkway Theatre on Madis
on’s Capitol Square, performing the reliably entertaining The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Orson recalled Madison and the Parkway from boyhood, and he was touched when his old friend Stanley Custer from Washington School came backstage to congratulate him. “I didn’t think anyone would remember me!” Orson exclaimed.
Next the Cornell company swung north for five days in Minneapolis, then on to Saint Paul and Duluth for shorter stints, arriving at Duluth the week before Christmas. Guthrie McClintic joined the company in time to give Candida its last licks of preparation. “We had been rehearsing all the way along with me directing,” recalled Cornell, “very badly.” McClintic almost instantly regretted casting Orson as the sensitive aesthete Marchbanks, leveling a brusque critique of his introverted performance. Orson would have to improve on the road, and in the next months he did: Cornell would remember him as a “tremendously interesting” Marchbanks, his performance “always provocative.”
In two Pullman cars with two baggage cars, the company embarked on the long train trip to Seattle, where The Barretts of Wimpole Street was to open in the evening on Christmas Day. The company left during a heavy snowfall, and somewhere around Montana the train ran into tracks that were washed out from steady rain and heavy flooding. With the engines overheating, the train slowed to a crawl, and the actors were informed they might miss their Seattle opening. Making the best of it, the troupe donned happy faces and poured punch over a Christmas Eve roast chicken feast. Orson and the younger players passed out gifts they’d purchased at a ten-cent store in Duluth, and everyone joined in lusty Christmas caroling. All night and the next day the train inched forward, with emergency crews laying trestles and tracks ahead, until it finally limped into Seattle’s King Street Station shortly after 11 P.M.—more than two hours past the scheduled curtain time.
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 31