Orson was “overjoyed,” promising to bring the Dubliners to New York in plenty of time “to get thoroughly dizzied in that raucous and remarkable metropolis.” Orson would greet the two at dockside as they left the ship, enlisting the help of the Cornell tour publicist to arrange press coverage of their arrival. The tour was winding up, presenting The Barretts of Wimpole Street in Newark and Brooklyn, at the end of the third week of June. “About the 26th or 27th we will all rush together to Woodstock and begin rehearsals,” Orson wrote to Edwards and MacLíammóir.
Disembarking with Edwards in New York, MacLíammóir immediately noticed a difference in the young American he had last seen more than two years before. “Now he had added to the [chest] swelling a new habit of towering,” MacLíammóir wrote later. “It was not only the jungle that yawned and laughed: a looming tree, dark and elaborate as a monkey puzzle, reared above the head, an important, imperturbable smile shot down on you from afar.”
While Orson tended to the plays and players, Roger Hill busily laid the financial groundwork and beat the drums, feeding publicity about the festival to eager arts and society columnists. Hill dealt with the budget, ticket sales, advertising, and promotional plans; he organized the Todd School for cast and crew residency, readied the Opera House for occupation, and prepared Woodstock for the onslaught of people. The reliable Charles Collins dropped frequent mentions of the “brilliant young Chicago actor” Orson Welles and his new summer theater colony.
On paper, Whitford Kane was still “chief director” of the upcoming festival. When Ashton Stevens telephoned Orson on the Cornell tour in mid-June to ask about Kane, Orson told him that Kane was “very enthusiastic about Woodstock. Nothing short of Hollywood can keep him from joining us.” The day after he returned from New York with Edwards and MacLíammóir in tow, he was still invoking Kane’s magic name. But in reality Kane was always a shaky piece of the plan, and Hollywood had already come calling for the Irish-born actor. By mid-June Kane had a better offer—and Orson knew it, although he was keeping it close to the vest. Kane was heading west to make his screen debut in Hide-Out, an MGM gangster film.
All of Orson’s tub-thumping about Kane may have been sincere, but it was also classic misdirection. With Skipper’s blessing, Orson gladly stepped into the breach, letting only a day or two pass after his return from New York before telling the press that he himself would direct the festival’s first production. The travel-weary Dubliners accepted the revelation with mild surprise and pique. (Edwards found the idea “preposterous,” wrote Barbara Leaming. “Orson Welles direct a play?”)
With only two weeks to go before opening night, Orson still hadn’t decided on the first play. Swiftly now he settled on Trilby, one of those hoary melodramas for which he never lost his affection. Based on George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, it is set in nineteenth-century bohemian Paris and revolves around the rogue musician and hypnotist Svengali, who transforms Trilby, a tone-deaf artist’s model, into a diva. Besides directing, Orson announced that he himself would play the lead: Svengali.
After a ten-day run, from July 12 to 22, Trilby would be followed by two weeks of Hamlet, with Edwards directing and MacLíammóir playing the lead. Within a few frantic days, what was first promoted as only “A Third Play” was narrowed down to Tsar Paul, Dmitri Merezhkovsky’s play about the assassination of the emperor of Russia, which would be presented from August 9 to 19. The Opera House curtain would rise at 8:30 P.M., Thursdays through Sundays.
Hamlet and Tsar Paul were both Gate Theatre staples, as Orson well knew, and those choices pacified the Dubliners. Trilby, in contrast, they considered inferior, and it bothered them that Orson had arranged for both to make their American debuts in decidedly lesser roles: MacLíammóir as the artist Little Billee, Svengali’s rival; and Edwards as Taffy, one of several suitors drawn to Trilby. But it was customary in repertory or summer stock for important actors to take an easy assignment for one play. Orson reminded them that they’d need time to orient themselves, and he emphasized the opportunities ahead: for MacLíammóir, a chance to re-create his famous Hamlet; for Edwards, a turn as Tsar Paul, and the chance to direct both shows. Each of the three actors would star in one play. Ruffled feathers were smoothed.
The stock of the Dubliners rose even higher as it became clearer and clearer that Orson’s original dream cast was just that—a pipe dream. Whitford Kane had melted away, and so did Chubby Sherman, Florence Stevens, Brenda Forbes, and every other established professional Orson had envisioned. Another player who turned Orson down was his friend John Hoysradt, who recalled, “I wanted to go to Europe and felt the Woodstock thing was just harum scarum.”
The moment required the confidence of a leader, and here Orson drew on the example set by his parents—especially his mother, a superb organizer and network builder, but his father too, with his persuasive smile and hidden steel. Much as he had for Todd School productions, Orson scrambled to assemble a first-rate summer company drawn from his store of friends, relatives, acquaintances, and professional contacts, and no small measure of instinct and chance.
The summer theater needed a reputable leading lady, and Orson was both shrewd and fortunate to find Louise Prussing just when he needed her. On the stage since 1917, the reed-thin, vivacious Prussing had appeared in several silent films opposite matinee idol Eugene O’Brien. In London, in the late 1920s, she had appeared with distinction in notable plays including Leslie Howard’s production of Berkeley Square, which she toured in America. The granddaughter of Dr. Fernand Henrotin, a founder of Chicago’s Henrotin Memorial Hospital, and daughter of Lilian Edgerton Prussing, a onetime society editor for the Chicago Examiner, Prussing was living in Chicago for the summer, and welcomed the chance to star in plays in nearby Woodstock. Her London credentials pleased the Dubliners, while her Chicago background made her appeal to local columnists. Prussing was engaged to play Trilby, the Queen in Hamlet, and the Princess in Tsar Paul.
Orson got a two-for-one deal when he sent Roger Hill as his messenger over to The Drunkard, which was being mounted by Charles “Blackie” O’Neal’s troupe of traveling players at a Clark Street hall in Chicago.18 Constance Herron was a pretty and fetching ingenue in the troupe, but O’Neal was the real find. Even though he was only five feet nine and 160 pounds, he had been a three-year letterman on the winning University of Iowa football team that upset Notre Dame and Red Grange’s University of Illinois team in 1925. O’Neal could recite Shakespeare backward and forward, and Orson had a lifelong affinity for footballers with Shakespeare in their veins. Orson had seen The Drunkard in Los Angeles, where it was still pulling in crowds after a six-month run when the Cornell tour arrived in January. Backstage, he had met O’Neal—who would be the father of future film star Ryan O’Neal—and they had stayed in touch as the capable actor-manager barnstormed the show across America, crisscrossing with the Cornell company. O’Neal served as director and master of ceremonies of The Drunkard while also playing the weak hero’s brother, and spicing up the interludes with offbeat songs. He signed on as Orson’s chief lieutenant—playing supporting roles including the trusted Horatio in Hamlet—while assisting Orson in casting and rehearsals. He brought Herron with him to portray Ophelia in Hamlet and the Empress Elizabeth in Tsar Paul.
Orson cobbled the rest of the roster together from hither and yon. He knew the tall, dapper William Vance either from Evanston, where Vance had attended Northwestern, or from Dr. Sprague’s camp in northern Wisconsin, where Vance was a counselor the same year Orson wrote “Marching Song” nearby. Born in California the same year as Orson, Vance was raised in Freeport, Illinois. He had staged Shakespeare plays upstairs from a bank while still in high school, and made his own home movies of Robert Louis Stevenson stories including The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. One day, Orson had helped the Vance brothers shoot a short comedy featuring William putting up screens at his house in Evanston, and being bothered by a fly until he procures an old-fashioned pump-handle bug sprayer—and end
s up spraying himself in the face. The credits read, “Assistant Prop Man: Orson Welles.”
Orson and William Vance had great rapport, and the actor told Orson he’d bring his movie camera to Woodstock for the summer. Orson could rely on this kindred spirit as his understudy and stand-in, especially when he was directing the first production. And Vance would portray the characters Zou-Zou in Trilby, Fortinbras in Hamlet, and General Talyzin in Tsar Paul.
Other recruits were drawn from Orson’s family and travels. John Dunn Martin, an Iowa speech teacher in his late fifties whom Orson had met on the Cornell tour, was hired for the old-man parts. John D. Davies, a high school instructor, had approached Orson for advice about launching a community theater in Kenosha, and now he was engaged for supporting roles. Orson tapped another Kenosha connection, his talented cousin William Yule Jr., for the key parts of Laird in Trilby, the gravedigger in Hamlet, and the Baron in Tsar Paul.
He and Skipper had hoped to supplement their troupe with “a bevy of stage-struck high school kids,” in the headmaster’s words, who would hammer the sets and sew the costumes while paying for the privilege of basking in the glow of professionals. Orson and Hill convened auditions, “preliminary to extraction of payments from parents,” in Hill’s words, but managed to scrounge up only about twenty youngsters, even after adjusting the tuition of “five hundred big depression-time dollars” to as low as $250. Among them were former or current Todd boys such as the budding artist Hascy Tarbox, always an exceptional help behind the scenes, and Edgerton Paul, another old hand at Orson Welles productions. Handsome blond William Mowry Jr., from Orson’s years at Todd, was another Shakespeare-loving footballer, who was inveigled away from a boring summer in his hometown, Madison, Wisconsin.
Most of the apprentices came from privileged homes in Chicago and the suburbs. Among the sprinkling of girls was Virginia Nicolson, a petite, willowy, blond, blue-eyed eighteen-year-old from Wheaton who had just graduated from the University School for Girls on Lake Shore Drive.19 As brainy as she was delicate, she reeled off a snippet from Henry IV at her summer theater audition. Orson raised an eyebrow, and Virginia was “in”—though Hill later scoffed that Orson was more impressed by her “shape” than her Shakespeare.
One of Orson’s backstage finds was George Shealy, who had studied under Dudley Crafts Watson at the Art Institute of Chicago. Brought on to jump-start the stage design for Trilby, Shealy would replicate the period sets and costumes from du Maurier’s original sketches. (He went on to prominence as an advertising artist for Marshall Field’s before becoming a distinguished art history professor in North Carolina.) The reliable Carl Hendrickson would orchestrate the summer music.
By now, everything was happening at warp speed. As the apprentices and crew beavered away, Orson blocked the cast and rehearsed the staging, trying his best not to shout at the actors. Watching Hilton Edwards in Dublin, and Guthrie McClintic on the Cornell tour, Orson had stockpiled many directing strategies—including vamping and stalling when he was stuck.
At first, Edwards and MacLíammóir watched the novice director warily, unwilling to bail him out. MacLíammóir, for one, sniffed at Orson’s initial staging. “It was disappointingly vague and indefinite,” he told Peter Noble. “Orson had not yet found his true métier, which was a preoccupation with restless grandeur and intoxication, a view of life, wholly American and welling up from the soil of the huge territory which had given him birth.”
During breaks, Orson ushered the Dubliners and Louise Prussing around for publicity appearances at nearby schools and civic clubs, giving talks and interviews, shuttling between Woodstock and Chicago—pledging that “in spirit, at least,” the summer theater would be “a combination Bayreuth and a strawberry festival,” as Welles told the Woodstock News.
Here again, public relations wizard John Clayton proved a valuable ally. When Orson proposed “a great dinner” at the Tavern Club to charm Chicago society, Clayton stocked the guest list with newspaper columnists and well-married ladies with time and money to spare. Sculptor Lorado Taft, one of Chicago’s most prominent artists, was among the donors and patrons. Mr. and Mrs. Dudley Crafts Watson represented the Art Institute of Chicago, and the current heads of both the Goodman Theatre and Chicago’s Drama League also were in attendance. “You were play-acting when you were scarcely old enough to walk,” Mrs. Watson teased Orson as he arrived at the dinner. “And you’re still making those funny faces.”
The headliners came late: Welles, Edwards, MacLíammóir, and Prussing arriving with a flourish, dressed to the nines. “We had a [car] breakdown,” Orson explained to the crowd, many of whom he knew from his youth. He introduced MacLíammóir as the star of the summer theater—“devastating fellow”—then added with a wink, “We all had engagements to lecture at a girls’ school. Micheál went up the first week—did a thorough job. Immediately afterward the school cancelled the rest of the lectures. Three girls had run away, they said, to seek stage careers.”
“I expect you to shine brightly at that great dinner,” Orson had told Skipper, and now the young man’s biggest booster came through with a rousing sales pitch. Hill exhorted the society ladies to host dinner parties during the season, and then to lead their guests in a motor parade to Woodstock after dessert. Newspaper folk could travel courtesy of Big Bertha, and expect to be wined and dined en route. “All Roads Lead to Woodstock Opera,” the Chicago press trumpeted, and Charles Collins topped all previous pronouncements by declaring Orson, the chief conjurer of the summer theater, “a striking specimen of adolescent genius.” By the end of the evening, the Woodstock summer theater had effectively won the endorsement of Chicago’s artistic elite.
Thanks to Clayton, Orson even gave midwestern audiences an early taste of his future on the airwaves. During the week Trilby opened, broadcasting from the observation platform atop the west tower of the Sky Ride, seven hundred feet above the Century of Progress Exposition, WGN aired a live dramatic sketch with full orchestra backing, which promoted the summer theater. The sketch was written by Orson and performed by him, Edwards, MacLíammóir, and Prussing.
This was Orson Welles’s radio debut.
Bright pennants and ice cream vendors dotted the elm-shaded square on July 12, 1934. A red-coated brass band greeted the town cars arriving at sunset from Chicago, Elgin, Rockford, Lake Forest, Winnetka, Wheaton, and Lake Geneva. The festive crowd included Dr. Maurice Bernstein and the Edward Moores; and the John T. McCutcheons and Dudley Crafts Watsons were among the notables who sponsored caravans from their homes to Woodstock. (“Uncle” Dudley, ever supportive of his cousin Beatrice’s son, also arranged for Orson to flack for his summer theater by lecturing and drawing sketches in front of an Art Institute of Chicago class.) Outside, as darkness fell, Chicago critics and columnists mingled with patrons in their evening finery. The summer heat was intense.
“It is a gala occasion,” rhapsodized India Moffett, a society columnist for the Chicago Tribune, “perhaps the most exciting the little town of Woodstock has ever had.”
The atmosphere was matched by expectations inside the theater, where the more than four hundred seats, including the balcony, were filled as the curtain rose. The old-fashioned melodrama, with Orson as Svengali, delighted the crowd. The young star and director gave a barn-burning performance. “Ferocious, bewitching and altogether real,” proclaimed the Woodstock Sentinel.
The first-tier Chicago critics were more guarded. Charles Collins wrote in the Chicago Tribune that Orson mustered “sound stage direction,” but cautioned that his performance evinced “too much Franco-Yiddish accent and too hurried diction,” among other “minor flaws.” Lloyd Lewis flatly charged Orson (with whom he was on a first-name basis) with hamming it up, saying that his Svengali costume resembled “a composite photograph of a hoot owl, Abe Lincoln, Ben Hecht, and John Brown of Osawatomie.” Years later, when Peter Noble asked MacLíammóir for his own recollection, the actor was decidedly ungenerous. “His fakes were on the Titanic scale,”
the Dubliner told Noble. “His Svengali lacked grace and humor.”
Regardless, Orson was the man of the hour, and he stepped forward after the final curtain to hush the shouted cheers and applause. He had turned nineteen just two months before. Thanking the audience, Orson invoked one of America’s greatest actor-managers: “Joseph Jefferson made a curtain speech here sixty-five years ago. Since then the speeches have been of lesser and lesser importance. But I can say, without any maidenly blushing,” he finished, deferentially nodding to the Dubliners, “our next play is going to be really good.”
After more shouts and clapping, Roger Hill led the audience to a buffet hosted by his wife, Hortense, at the school’s poolside patio, strung with lights and bunting. Dr. Bernstein, the Moores, and the Watsons, who attended every opening that summer, mingled happily with other people who had known Orson’s parents, Dick and Beatrice Welles. Cast members brought out their favorite musical instruments and turned the occasion into an informal nightclub revue. Thornton Wilder, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was encouraged to stand and toast Orson as his discovery. The celebration ran late, especially for those driving back to Chicago. But it was a proud, proud night, its glow undimmed for Welles and Hill whenever the years ahead seemed less kind.
Not all the drama that summer took place onstage. In later years, Micheál MacLíammóir vented freely (and pettily) about Orson’s youthful inadequacies as a director and actor. Skipper later maintained that the Dubliners were “rather mean” to Orson at times, making cracks about the young actor-manager in front of other cast members, or rolling their eyes behind his back. “He revered them far too much to fight back,” the headmaster insisted in one interview. “He outwardly pretended that all was as it should be, but secretly he was miserable.”
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 33