One of Orson’s inspirations was to convert the role of Hecate, queen of the witches, into a male character suitable for Eric Burroughs’s talents. The product of a New York high school, Burroughs had studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and the Kammerspiele Theatre School in Hamburg, performing Shakespeare in Berlin before Hitler’s rise to power. His natural magisterial aura would be bolstered by the twelve-foot bullwhip Orson gave Hecate for stage business. For the pivotal role of Macduff, Macbeth’s killer, the director saw many prospects before deciding on the versatile Maurice Ellis, a frequent radio performer who was already standing out in a comic role in rehearsals for Joseph Losey’s production of Conjur’ Man Dies. Last but not least, Orson saved the role of Banquo for Canada Lee, the former boxer who had saved him from an altercation with hooligans after the performance of Stevedore. Even as a ghost, the actor’s Banquo always brandished a cigar—Orson’s own favorite prop.
Of all the performers in Orson’s Voodoo Macbeth, these five were the only ones with significant professional experience. Most of the people who crowded onto the stage—more than a hundred in all—were performing before an audience for the first time. “Anyone who could read lines was taken on,” remembered Edna Thomas. As he’d done with the Todd boys, however, and with the Woodstock summer theater sign-ons—indeed, as he would do for much of his helter-skelter career—Orson worked with the clay at hand. That ability to find greatness in other people, often people on the margins, was an underrated element of his genius.
After the auditions, Orson had about twelve weeks before the play’s mid-April opening. Even as he confronted this uphill climb in Harlem, though, his radio career suddenly exploded. And he was as eager for the work as he was desperate for the money.
Orson had declined his Federal Theatre Project paycheck; he later claimed that he never cashed a government check, and research has yet to prove otherwise. After his years of pleading for bailouts and loans from Dr. Maurice Bernstein and Roger Hill, radio was fast emerging as the quickest way to supplement his income—to pay the grocery bills, as he liked to put it.
CBS offered him his first regular stint in mid-January 1936, just as Macbeth got under way. On Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, he recited poetry for fifteen minutes on WABC, alternating with songs by tenor Stuart Churchill and music by Ken Wood’s orchestra. Identified by name on the air for the first time, Orson also plugged a commercial sponsor’s product for the first time: Cornstarch. “I got fifty bucks each time,” he recalled, “and it was terribly nice money to have, because I just turned up five minutes ahead of time and read a poem and ran away with fifty dollars.”
The money was a godsend, and his knack for speaking intimately to housewives led to more of the same. Soon, another station—WEAF, the flagship of the NBC network—was booking him for similar poetry recitals on the Fleischmann Yeast Hour, Thursdays at 8 P.M. Then in March, WEAF cast him in a featured role in the popular serial Peter Absolute, broadcast nationally on Sunday afternoons.
More important, starting in the late fall of 1935, Orson began to appear with growing frequency on The March of Time, a half-hour dramatic re-creation of weekly news events whose “prestige and supremacy,” in the words of Radio Guide, were “unparalleled in the radio world.” The March of Time was aired nationally from the WABC-CBS headquarters every Friday at 9 P.M. Eastern time, and Orson relished the work. “Great fun,” Welles recalled. “Half an hour after something happened, we’d be acting it out with music and sound effects and actors. It was a super show—terribly entertaining.”
Orson was not yet part of the inner circle of March of Time regulars, however, and his status in the world of radio was still modest. He shuttled among studios almost daily, auditioning for each new part, and was paid humbly by comparison with the famous radio stars. But radio was a different type of challenge, and a more spontaneous source of fun. While many well-known theater people appeared on radio shows, the field was full of hardworking anonymous actors like Orson, and they formed their own clique.
One of the radio actors he met in 1936 was Everett Sloane, a journeyman performer who was part of this microphone clique. Orson liked a diminutive actor with a voice that could squeak or roar, and the versatile Sloane had been featured in radio soap operas and crime dramas since the late 1920s. Six years older than Orson, with a receding hairline and a long, angular face, Sloane had just made his Broadway debut in the frenetic comedy Boy Meets Girl, in a supporting role that would last for 669 performances. But he remained ubiquitous in radio, where a talented voice mattered more than a pretty face. “He liked me,” Sloane said of Orson, “I liked him. He was always making me laugh.”
Orson was an insatiable workhorse, but he was also a social animal, thriving on interaction with people whose company he enjoyed. As the quality of his radio jobs increased, the medium became more important to him, both as a creative outlet and as a place to make new friends.
Most rehearsals for Macbeth took place at night, sometimes stretching from midnight until dawn. Orson was always packing his date book with commitments—on Fridays, for example, the company had to wait all day while their director finished work on The March of Time—but his schedule wasn’t the only problem. The second Negro Unit production, Conjur’ Man Dies, was performed nightly at the Lafayette Theatre until April 1, and Orson’s Macbeth company had to wait until the curtain rang down before they could take the stage for their own rehearsals.
Still, from the earliest read-throughs of his Voodoo Macbeth—held in borrowed Harlem auditoriums, in church halls, even at Orson’s West Fourteenth Street apartment—he took charge decisively. One of the first things Orson did to consolidate his authority was banish the man who hired him. Although John Houseman had been crucial in assembling the backstage team and cast, Orson had no desire to be second-guessed by a director with Broadway credits. He shrewdly drew a line between creative and administrative authority that would define and limit his partnership with Houseman from the outset.
At first Orson asked Houseman to stay away for just “the first few weeks,” according to the producer’s later account. “Jack,” Orson cautioned Houseman, “if it is possible for you to be at the rehearsals from the day we start, all the way through every day, you are very welcome. But as an occasional visitor you represent an invasion of privacy, and you disturb everybody.” “Overwhelmed” by the managerial challenges of launching the Negro Unit, Houseman agreed to absent himself for the short term—but he never recovered the territory he had ceded.
Some members of the cast and crew would recall Houseman as a benign presence (“so good and nice to everybody,” said the actress Rosetta LeNoire), but to others he was a remote, almost fugitive figure. “Houseman never came to [Macbeth] rehearsals unless he had a group of people he wanted to impress,” Orson sniffed years later. “On more than one occasion, I asked them to leave.”
Macbeth was Orson’s mountain to scale, and it was going to be a steep climb. Some of the actors were capable of rising to the occasion, but the vast majority were being introduced not just to Shakespeare but to acting itself. “It was really ridiculous in a couple of instances,” conductor Leonard de Paur recalled. “There was no way possible that some of these souls were going to be able to read Shakespeare, but read they had to, because they were told to.”
Even as a young man, Orson had an array of strategies for directing and for coaxing performances from actors. He lavished charm and respect on leads, for example. “I seduce actors,” Welles boasted to Barbara Leaming, “make them fall in love with me.” He said much the same to Henry Jaglom: “I direct a movie by making love to everybody in it. I’m not running for office—I don’t want to be popular with the crew—but I make love to every actor. Then, when they’re no longer working for me, it’s like they’ve been abandoned, like I’ve betrayed them.”
With the ladylike Edna Thomas, Orson was a consummate gentleman, taking her out to fine restaurants, buying her dinner and murmuring in her
ear. He formed an equally ardent but decidedly more macho bond with Jack Carter. The two big men went roistering together after rehearsals, vanishing amid “the late-night spots and brothels of Harlem till it was time to rehearse again,” according to Houseman. (This sounds more like the exaggeration of a partner left behind: Orson was never much for gambling or whoring.) Orson liked Carter enormously, and the actor learned to trust his director.
Rehearsing the neophytes individually, Orson could be extraordinarily patient. “Let’s try that scene again,” he might say, “Try it like it is with your father this time . . . what would you do if you were having the same problem or same discussion? How would you talk to your father?” He’d flirt shamelessly with the first-time actresses. “He would say, ‘Listen, Sugar; hey, honeybun’—always started out with something to weaken you inside, warm and lovely,” recalled Rosetta LeNoire, who was playing one of the witches—her first job in show business. “Then he’d say, ‘Listen, hon, you know what you just said, and you know the way you said it. Were you angry? Well, that line, it’s not an angry line, is it? Well, would you say it that way if you were saying that from your heart to somebody that you loved?’ Or, ‘How would you say it to somebody you couldn’t stand?’ ”
Orson gave the newcomers to Shakespeare credit for “marvelous” instincts, as he told Leaming years later. “They preserved the poetry in a funny way,” Welles said, “because they found innately the rhythm of the iambic pentameter and observed it without any instruction.”
Sometimes, because of his mood, or because something was going badly onstage—or perhaps because he was stalling for time and inspiration—he unleashed outbursts of Vesuvian proportion. He fumed at people, hurling the script and anything else at hand, stomping around the stage. His reputation for tantrums began here, during the Voodoo Macbeth. “He knew what he wanted, and he was darn sure he was going to get it,” de Paur recalled. “He abused people. He yelled and screamed. I never saw him physically assault anybody, but he always seemed capable of it.”
Orson hated the idea of himself as a shouter. “When I shouted, it was theater,” he insisted to Leaming, still trying to repair his image decades later. “I never scream at actors,” he told Roger Hill plaintively, adding, “maybe at the crew sometimes.” De Paur again came to his defense, however, estimating that 90 percent of Orson’s tantrums were a “posture” designed to win him “the authority twenty-year-olds don’t generally have.”
When he wasn’t performing on radio or rehearsing the cast, Orson was beseiged by other responsibilities: he had to confer with Virgil Thomson about the music, Abe Feder about the lighting, Nat Karson about costumes, and Asadata Dafata Horton about the voodoo scenes and drumming. He relied on his wife and muse, Virginia, to catch what he missed, and on his assistant director, Tommy Anderson, to run the scenes when he was absent.
The tensions within the company were matched by strong headwinds from the black community. Among Harlem’s many left-wing activists and avowed communists, the prospect of an all-black Macbeth masterminded by a young white nobody was inherently objectionable. The New York Urban League was forced to issue a statement clarifying that its support for the Negro Unit was contingent on a long-term vision of a permanent Negro Theater. But the “prevalent” view among Harlemites, as the Amsterdam News reported, was that the Voodoo Macbeth was shaping up as “a blackface comedy or a satirical skit.” At the same time, the WPA and the Federal Theatre Project were being attacked constantly by right-wing congressmen in Washington, and the last thing the program’s leadership wanted was to be perceived as appeasing the left—in Harlem or anywhere else.
Orson’s Macbeth wasn’t the first WPA production to provoke discord in Washington. In January 1936, Federal Theatre Project officials had canceled Ethiopia, the first production of its Living Newspaper unit, after conservative voices complained that the play—dealing with Italy’s October 1935 invasion of Ethiopia—was too leftist. Elmer Rice resigned his New York branch leadership post in protest. Reeling from the Ethiopia controversy, Federal Theatre Project director Hallie Flanagan hoped that the Negro Unit’s Macbeth would turn out to be liberal—but not too liberal.
And the risks were not just political but financial. The Voodoo Macbeth was turning out to be more expensive and fraught with risk than any other federally funded production to date. Some officials thought the investment wasn’t worth the hazards. According to Federal Theatre Project historian Wendy Smith, officials believed that Orson’s production was consuming “a disproportionate percentage of the Negro Unit’s budget and staff time.” Houseman seemed overly deferential to the show’s young, white director; the producer himself recalled that project staffers called the show “my boyfriend’s folly” behind his back.
And there was one more source of stress: the first two productions of the Negro Unit had both met with trouble. Walk Together Chillun, the first of the three plays, was a disappointment to both audiences and reviewers; the second, the unpretentiously entertaining Conjur’ Man Dies, was pooh-poohed by critics like Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, who labeled it “a verbose and amateur charade.” If the Negro Unit were to survive, its third production would have to be all things to all people: popular yet artistic, politically meaningful yet beyond partisan reproach.
It was Houseman’s job to tamp down the fires, and he brought all his diplomatic skills to the task. Orson was called on to schmooze with worried souls from Harlem and Washington, D.C., and he was good at schmoozing. But he kept his head down as the pressures intensified—and when Conjur’ Man Dies sold out and extended its run, the Voodoo Macbeth bought some much-needed breathing room.
In April, the motley cast and crew of Orson’s Voodoo Macbeth finally took over the Lafayette. Nat Karson’s crew erected his sets—a lush tropical jungle, a majestic castle, a seaboard backdrop—and the actors donned their costumes and makeup, which were every bit as fantastical as the stage design. The witches were wrapped in gnarled, woolly hide; Macbeth’s officers wore gold-braid uniforms with epaulets and feathers on their caps. And the expressive lighting was gradually integrated into the rehearsals, with Orson and Abe Feder arguing venomously about filters and adjustments. “Orson was constantly on Feder’s back,” Edna Thomas recalled, “screaming away at him.”
To all this were added, for the first time, the hypnotic chanting and drumming of Assadata Dafora Horton’s African troupe onstage, with the full orchestra in the pit playing Virgil Thomson’s music, plus sound effects—crashes of thunder, bursts of lightning, jungle commotion.
All this ingenious stagecraft, designed to cast a spell on the audience, also colored the mood for the actors during final rehearsals, giving the novice players some cover for their inadequacies. The music and background noise were almost nonstop, with Orson carrying over from his radio experience the idea of “introducing music into a scene as a kind of emotional prelude to the scene ahead,” as Welles scholar Richard France has observed. The old-fashioned Lanner waltz heard during the coronation ball scene, for example, was gradually overtaken by voodoo drums rising in the background, as the setting shifted to the jungle and witches.
To casual visitors, the run-throughs sometimes seemed like sheer pandemonium, with Orson barking through a megaphone or angrily dictating notes to secretary Augusta Weissberger or his wife, Virginia. “Orson trusted my opinion and taste,” Virginia recalled, “because if I didn’t understand a thing, my reaction was fairly typical of the average audience.”
Sometimes Orson went too far with his explosive rants, insulting people’s dignity, and some friendly cast member would have to rescue him before he sparked a mutiny. Once, Orson was struggling with a few actors grouped on one side of the stage while Edna Thomas waited on a staircase leading up to the castle. “Orson began to get very abusive,” Thomas recalled, “until, finally, he said to me, ‘Darling, come down here. I’m not going to have you standing there all this time while these dumbbells aren’t catching on.’ When I came down, I told him, ‘
Orson, don’t do that; those people will take your head off.’ And they would have.”
Another time, Jack Carter stepped up to defend the director, deriding the complaining victims of Orson’s excesses as “no-acting sons of bitches.” Carter’s invective triggered a brawl onstage, according to John Houseman, resulting in some smashed scenery and injury to at least one cast member. Carter’s loyalty to Welles was a key factor in sustaining general morale throughout the production. “Not only was he [Carter] above reproach in his own behavior,” Houseman wrote later, “but he constituted himself Orson’s champion with the company, scornful of its fatigue, quick to detect signs of revolt and to crush movements of disaffection.”
As opening night neared, another factor entered the picture: Orson started drinking more heavily than anyone had ever noticed before. Virgil Thomson, insisting that Orson nipped on the job, boasted of having taught him “to drink white wine, not whiskey, at rehearsals.” Simon Callow wrote that Orson, like many athletes and entertainers at the time, chewed energy-inducing amphetamines “as if they were candy.”
Orson took pride in the notion that he could work all day and night, whizzing in taxis from the Lafayette to midtown radio studios “sometimes two or three times a day,” in Houseman’s words. But he frequently nodded off in cabs, and stole naps when he could. “The most sleepless period of my life,” Orson told Leaming. “We rehearsed from midnight till dawn. And after dawn would rise, I would walk through Central Park. Imagine what New York was like in those days: I’d walk through Harlem, through Central Park, and with that exercise under my belt, take a shower, and go to whatever studio I had to be at.”
The notes for the final weeks of rehearsal for the Voodoo Macbeth have survived, and they reflect the high stakes and frenzy, along with Orson’s impolitic wrath:
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 40