Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Most nights Orson was up past midnight, shuffling projects like playing cards: the Shakespeare guide for young people, his work on “Bright Lucifer,” the new idea for George Tyler, and the Caribbean Romeo and Juliet. He took breaks to write “punk and rambling” letters to Chicago and Woodstock. “Sleep with my asthma, which is pretty bad, is impossible,” he wrote to Skipper Hill.

  The days were also endurance tests; he waited endlessly for McClintic and hung out with fellow actors who were similarly treading water. “New York couldn’t be worse,” Orson complained. “It’s hotter and emptier and noisier than I’ve ever known it before.” He had dinner with Louise Prussing a few times, reminiscing about the summer. He spent idle time with Dick Ogden, another Woodstock alumnus who amused him, and palled around with George Macready, another veteran of Cornell’s ensembles, both still waiting for news about Romeo and Juliet.

  Orson refused to see himself as an unemployed actor. He had a job pending, and he was also a producer and a writer whose recent summer theater operation had been written up in the New York Times and Variety. One day, he grudgingly accompanied Macready on a circuit of casting offices—but “unofficially,” he wrote to Hill, as “just a friend.” Orson was pledged to writing. “I’m still sticking, rather futilely and pathetically, to my high horse.”

  One thing had changed: important people were no longer dodging him. He was treated like an up-and-comer. “I seem to have an excellent name here,” he reported to Skipper. “But no work. Of course I could go after things by sitting in the shoe-stringer’s offices, but I haven’t sunk to that. I will, though, the way it looks.”

  Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir blew into New York in mid-September, weary from sightseeing and eager to get back to Ireland. Their summer with Orson had recharged their creativity, and when they returned they mounted a new production of The Drunkard in the Gate’s very next season. “They fell under its spell,” reported the Irish Times, “obtained a copy of the script, and brought it home with them.” In time, they even tried Trilby at the Gate. Whatever friction they may have had, their time with Orson had left its mark.

  “Very doleful parting, indeed, with a bad little band playing on the practically empty deck of the same ship on which they arrived,” Orson wrote to Roger Hill. “It seemed to them that they had never really been to America, but I knew better.”

  These days, many of Orson’s letters went to a new confidante: Virginia Nicolson. The aspiring actress rebuffed Orson’s first attempts to coax her to New York, heading home to Wheaton after their summer fling. Her parents sniffed at her theatrical ambitions, at Orson, and at theater in general: her father, Leo Nicolson, a self-made man in industrial real estate, lumped theater people together with “blacks, Jews, Democrats, ‘pansies,’ ” according to his granddaughter Chris Welles Feder. The staid Nicolsons expected their beautiful, cultivated daughter to matriculate in college, or at the very least land a business-minded husband from among the eligible bachelors at the Wheaton Country Club.

  After about two weeks in Wheaton, buffeted by letters and phone calls from her boyfriend and constant badgering from her parents, Virginia surrendered to Orson’s enticements. He had found work for her assisting Francis Carpenter, helping with research on their upcoming Shakespeare production. (It might not have gone well when her parents learned their daughter was going to New York to work on a Caribbean Romeo and Juliet.)

  Arriving in mid-September, Virginia moved into Orson’s suite at the Algonquin, stealthily evading the maids and room-service waiters so he could still claim single occupancy. Her presence buoyed his spirits. Virginia communed with Carpenter, though without pay; more important, she became Orson’s muse, typist, and co-conspirator on the Big Ideas. She was game for anything. “She was the essence of innocent youth when she came to New York,” Welles told Barbara Leaming, “and it brought out a wonderful spirit of let’s go with whatever’s going in her.”

  When not dining extravagantly on meals they couldn’t afford, the young couple spent their remaining money on plays and films. Watching Small Miracle, the new Norman Krasna play staged by George Abbott, Orson was struck by the lead, the onetime opera tenor Joseph Spurin-Calleia, who was electrifying in the role of a homicidal fugitive. “I could never forget that performance” in Small Miracle, Welles told Peter Bogdanovich decades later. One day, Welles vowed to Virginia, he would work with Calleia—and so he did, casting Calleia as Menzies, his own character’s corrupt partner in Touch of Evil. It was one of the finest roles of Calleia’s career. “One of the best actors I’ve ever known,” Orson called him. “You play next to him and you just feel the thing that you do with a big actor—this dynamo going on.”

  The theater scene was dominated by left-wing plays, and Orson kept up with that movement as well as traditional show business. His politics were instinctually progressive, but he was also interested in the agitprop productions because they featured people whose careers he followed. Roman Bohnen, from the Goodman Theatre, had joined the Group Theatre, and Welles went out of his way to see Bohnen and other Goodman alumni perform in New York.

  One of the fall sensations was Stevedore, playwright Michael Blankfort’s call to action against racial prejudice, produced by the Theatre Union at the Civic Repertory off Union Square. Set in New Orleans, the drama involved labor unrest, a rape, a lynch mob, and a race riot. The play seemed almost as exciting off the stage, with firebrands in the audience jumping up to improvise their own speeches and plainclothes cops on the sidewalk taking down names of attendees.

  Several of the leads were African Americans. Orson was captivated by Jack Carter, who had been the original Crown for 367 performances in Porgy on Broadway; and by Edna Thomas, a star of the Lafayette Theatre’s stock company in Harlem. After the performance Orson attended, one of the supporting players, Canada Lee—a former jockey, musician, and boxer—stepped in front of him to prevent an altercation between Welles and young hoodlums spoiling for a fight outside the theater. Gratefully, Orson shook Lee’s hand. Orson would remember Jack Carter, Edna Thomas, and Canada Lee.

  Having Virginia with him in New York, of course, doubled Orson’s money problems. The couple didn’t stint on their nights out, and Orson raised eyebrows at the Algonquin when he ordered two of everything for breakfast and lunch. Dr. Bernstein insisted that his allowance must suffice, but Skipper was more sympathetic to the young lovers, and in mid-October he sent them $50: a godsend.

  Hill could do little to salve Orson’s wounds in late October, however, when McClintic phoned to say that the role of Mercutio in the Broadway retooling of Romeo and Juliet was going to another actor: Brian Aherne, an older, dapper veteran McClintic and Cornell also wanted for their revival of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, which was going to follow the Shakespeare play. (Aherne would play the same role—poet Robert Browning—that he had in the original 1931 Cornell production.) Adding insult to injury, McClintic was also going to cast a new Octavius: Burgess Meredith, whom Time magazine had hailed as “the most promising juvenile on the U.S. stage.”

  McClintic insisted that the decisions had nothing to do with Orson, per se. Meredith was a name, and Aherne, in his early thirties, better complemented the other leads of Romeo and Juliet (Cornell and Basil Rathbone, still Romeo, were in their early forties). “Orson’s extreme and obvious youth in such an important part” as Mercutio, McClintic told Peter Noble, “might make certain other members of the company appear older than they should.” McClintic had only the merest consolation prize to offer: Orson could play Tybalt, rival of Romeo, fiery cousin of Juliet.

  Orson had feared the worst, and now it had happened. Tybalt was a good role, but decidedly lesser than Mercutio. Saving face, he told people the casting switch was a joint choice on artistic grounds. “Tybalt seldom gets a notice,” Orson wrote to Dr. Bernstein in Chicago. “I want to see if Tybalt can be played so it can stand out.” But privately Orson was crushed, and he rationalized the situation endlessly to friends.

  V
irginia was his salvation. The two young people were very much in love, regardless of what Orson said later. Orson always stressed Virginia’s innocence when they met, but he was vulnerable too. “Your father was a virgin when he met me, whatever nonsense he tells his biographers these days,” Virginia told her daughter, Chris Welles Feder, years later.

  When the Algonquin management figured out that the unmarried, underage couple were cohabiting in the hotel, Orson and Virginia were told, essentially, to produce a marriage license or move out. The couple decided to wed, quickly and quietly, in a civil ceremony in Manhattan on November 17. Orson placed an eleventh-hour phone call summoning Roger and Hortense Hill from Woodstock to stand as their witnesses—Orson seemed “terrified” on the phone, the headmaster recalled—and the Hills brought gifts and cash.

  Dr. Bernstein wasn’t there, because he was busy comforting Hazel Moore after her husband Edward Moore, Orson’s beloved “Uncle Ned,” had died of a heart attack at the Highland Park train station, en route to Chicago to review a concert.

  To Barbara Leaming, Welles characterized his first marriage as whimsical. “We really got married in order to live together,” Welles told Leaming. “It wasn’t taken very seriously by either of us.” But Orson’s letters to Virginia, from love at first sight through five years of marriage, are full of earnest affection, and they belie his later disavowals.

  Virginia’s mother, Lillian Nicolson, raced to New York to confront the newlyweds. The young couple should submit to a proper traditional wedding, she declared, complete with a gown for the bride and a tuxedo for the groom, an official portrait, an officiating minister, and a guest list of family and friends. Virginia said yes—it would pacify her mother and please her too—and Orson, distracted by his comedown in Romeo and Juliet, made no objection. Although many knew the truth, Orson and Virginia agreed to pretend they were unmarried until the traditional ceremony. Within forty-eight hours, “rumors that the young couple were married” were squelched in the Chicago Tribune’s society column, and an item appeared in the New York Times announcing that the young actor debuting in Romeo and Juliet was to be married “after the premiere,” around Christmas.

  Guthrie McClintic had commissioned a new production design from the leading Broadway stage designer, Jo Mielziner: “In the manner of Giotto,” Cornell recalled, “and very beautiful.” Martha Graham refreshed the choreography. The stage director reinstated some of the text that had been excised from the stodgy road version of Romeo and Juliet, restoring some of the humor and romantic spirit of the original. And McClintic’s direction would quicken the pace.

  The first performance would occur in Detroit in less than a month.

  Orson was still despondent, but he tried to overcome his reservations. The McClintic-Cornell’s Romeo and Juliet would be safe, conventional, tasteful, everything he despised in theater—indeed, the opposite of what he and Francis Carpenter were trying to do with their own revisionist take on the same play. Stewing with frustration, he clashed with McClintic during rehearsals. At least once he hurled a teacup at a stage manager who dared to scold him for arriving late—“an ingrained personality defect of his,” wrote Simon Callow, referring to both the tardiness and the tantrums. Several times in the weeks ahead, McClintic would put Orson on notice; once, after Romeo and Juliet reached Broadway, the malcontent was even replaced by an understudy for two performances.

  Orson shook rival Brian Aherne’s hand, but his smiling face fooled no one. Though Orson was “friendly and good-natured about losing Mercutio” backstage, Aherne wrote later, his resentment came out in other ways. When Tybalt dueled Mercutio onstage, Aherne recalled, Orson “slashed at me with unnecessary venom and twice he broke my property sword off at the hilt.”

  The excitement over Romeo and Juliet, Cornell’s first Broadway appearance in a Shakespeare play, was so strong that the New York Times covered the play’s Detroit premiere on December 3. The revamped production was “colorful” and “fast-moving,” the Times reported, and Cornell made a charming, radiant Juliet. Welles was among the few cast members singled out by name as lending “distinction” to the tryout. Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Toronto also went well, although McClintic docked Orson’s salary at least once before the play made it to Broadway. On opening night, Orson sent Roger Hill a “terribly embarrassed” telegram, reporting that he could no longer afford his wedding ring, the “cutaway and garnishes,” or even the fee required for the minister. He begged for another emergency loan, which Hill could consider an advance of $100 on royalties for the Shakespeare book, now scheduled for imminent publication.

  UNLESS I CAN GET AT LEAST ONE HUNDRED EVERYTHING IN INDESCRIBABLE MESS STOP KNOW THIS IS A ROTTEN TIME TO IMPOSE ON YOU BUT IN PRETTY BAD STATE ABSOLUTELY SOLEMN PROMISE AND ON MY WORD WILL PAY YOU IN ONE WEEK REALLY PROMISE EVERY CENT REPAID IN WEEK.

  The New York premiere of Romeo and Juliet fell on December 20. It was a milestone in Orson’s career, the culmination of his years of yearning to conquer Broadway, but now the great moment felt anticlimactic. Orson had talked himself into a mood as fiery as the character he played, and his Tybalt was another performance that divided critics. John Mason Brown in the New York Post called the young newcomer’s acting only “passable.” (Aherne was ranked among the “best” Mercutios that Brown had ever seen.) But Percy Hammond in the New York Herald Tribune declared Orson’s Tybalt among the finest performances of the season, and others agreed. “He took an unimportant part,” wrote a reviewer for Collier’s, “got his teeth into it, and made it mean something.”

  On Sunday, December 23, 1934, the weekend of the Romeo and Juliet premiere, another anticlimax was staged for guests crowded into the home of Virginia Nicolson’s godmother in a gated community, Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey.

  Demonstrating Orson’s growing reputation, the guest list for his official wedding was sprinkled with celebrities. Among the attendees were Thornton Wilder, Alexander Woollcott, and Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic—proving that despite his transgressions Orson was a valued member of their company. Other guests included baritone Mario Chamlee, whose opera performances Orson had reviewed as a teenager, and who made the trip from Chicago along with Herbert Witherspoon, a former opera singer and artistic director of the Chicago Civic Opera, who had known Orson’s mother in her student days. Once again the Hills were present as witnesses, and this time Orson’s guardian, Dr. Maurice Bernstein—“Dadda”—served as his best man.

  Carrying a spray of white orchids, the bride was arrayed in a white satin gown with a tulle veil trimmed with seed pearls. The groom wore a formal dress coat tapering to a swallowtail. The presiding minister was the Reverend Vincent L. Burns of the secular Unity Church in Palisade, New Jersey. After the ceremony, Virginia Nicolson Welles sat down at a piano and played an “informal musicale” of her own compositions—including a piece called “Lengthening Shadows” that was vocalized by the versatile Dr. Bernstein.

  Even that was not enough for the Nicolsons. A few months later, they put Orson and Virginia through a private party and reception in suburban Wheaton at Cantigny, the vast estate of Joseph Medill and his grandson Colonel Robert R. McCormick, publishers of the Chicago Tribune. After their third marriage celebration, Orson and Virginia strolled around the five-hundred-acre estate hand in hand, taking in the mansion, golf course, and landscaped gardens. Orson had visited palatial residences in Ireland and Morocco, but this was his first American Xanadu.

  Brief items in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune reported that the newlyweds would honeymoon at Blind Brook Lodge in Rye, New York, before moving to a new address in Westchester, the suburban county directly north of Manhattan. Their honeymoon was over by Monday evening, however, when Orson returned to Broadway to play Tybalt. Most nights, after Tybalt was slain at the beginning of Act Three, Orson retreated to a third-floor nook of the Martin Beck Theatre, toiling away on “Bright Lucifer,” increasingly hoping to finish it so that Skipper could produce the play in Chicago in
the summer or fall of 1935.

  During the winter break, Roger Hill oversaw the first print run of Everybody’s Shakespeare at the Todd School; these copies were finished in time for him to bring them to Orson’s wedding in New Jersey and claim 1934 as the year of publication. The 156-page book was handsomely produced, with inside covers featuring a collage of historical posters heralding famous Shakespeareans such as Edwin Booth, Charles Kemble, Helen Modjeska, and David Garrick. The interior was ornamented by Orson’s scene sketches and illustrations, used as insets and marginalia. Two witty, thoughtful, and accessible introductions, one by the headmaster and Orson jointly, and one solely by Orson, opened windows onto the edited plays: The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, and Twelfth Night. (Orson gave his main introduction a jocular title: “Biography of William Shakespeare: No. 1,000,999.” Its opening line: “Well, one more will not seriously disturb his ashes . . .”)

  Orson’s favorite bookstore in Chicago, Kroch’s on Michigan Avenue, was persuaded to display Everybody’s Shakespeare in its front window, and the volume was also “fronted” by the well-regarded Boulevard Book Shop in the Diana Court building. But “[Marshall] Fields hide [the books] back in an uninhabited corner where they have now relegated all drama and they gather dust,” Hill reported unhappily to Orson in a letter of early 1935. The Chicago newspapers were slow to mention the book. “Sales too,” the headmaster added, “are quite lousy.”

  For Orson, the long-awaited publication day was yet another in his recent string of anticlimaxes. He couldn’t find a single store in New York that carried the book; clerks scratched their heads when he asked for a copy. The headmaster was slow to solicit the commercial trade, focusing instead on a mailing list of schools that might be interested in adopting the book for their classes. “Have not yet plugged the bookstores of the country—waiting for reviews (hollow laughter),” Hill responded in a letter, “but will do so in a few days.”