On July 24, the fourth Negro Unit play opened: Turpentine, “a routine play of protest, full of leftist clichés,” in Houseman’s words. By then Houseman already had pitched to Hallie Flanagan and Philip Barber, the new head of the New York branch of the Federal Theatre Project, the idea of an uptown theater venue for him and Welles, promising a range of classical works targeting the Broadway faithful. Thrilled with the success of the Voodoo Macbeth, the officials agreed.
Acting swiftly, the partners arranged for a temporary lease on the Shubert organization’s nine-hundred-seat Maxine Elliott Theatre on West Forty-Second Street, where Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour was just closing its run. Houseman took over the rose powder room as his administrative command post, while Orson moved into the master dressing room, which included a bedroom and bath. The Maxine Elliott was the first theater Orson could call his own—his personal “magic box,” as he liked to say.
In July, the partners took formal leave of the Lafayette. Orson made a “passionate” departure speech to the Harlemites. Houseman, a founder and leader of the unit, found it harder to bid the company farewell, he wrote later, filled as he was with “sorrow and loss and guilt.”
Scrambling to name their new venture, the partners rejected “repertory ensemble” (“inaccurate,” wrote Houseman) and “people’s theatre” (“pretentious”). When they noticed that the unit was designated as Works Progress Administration Project #891 on a government requisition form, that became the name: Project 891.
The partners talked over possible productions, but the final decision was always Orson’s. Eager to shift gears after the heavy solemnity of Macbeth, they decided to launch with Eugène Labiche’s Un Chapeau de Paille d’Italie (An Italian Straw Hat), a mid-nineteenth-century French farce full of slapstick and wicked double entendres—a brand of lighter fare for which Orson had a lifelong weakness. “No sooner would you open a Classical Theater than what public you might have would be sure that they were going to have a feast of Ibsen and Shakespeare,” Welles explained to the press. “That would provide you with a self-conscious theater full of self-conscious actors, impressed with revering the immortal bard. Damn—he’s only immortal only as long as people want to see him! That’s why we call it ‘891 Presents’ and are opening the season with a farce.”
Labiche’s farce had a reputation in Europe, but in the United States it was rarely presented. It had last been seen in New York ten years before, when the American Laboratory produced it as The Straw Hat. In 1926, filmmaker René Clair had adapted the farce as a silent picture, which Orson had seen and remembered fondly. The play didn’t exactly qualify as classical drama, a fact Project 891 tried gamely to finesse. “The WPA, in a throwaway leaflet, issues a sort of quitclaim,” explained the New York Times, “pointing out that the original ‘has been studied in schools.’ ”
The overlooked French farce was just the start. Welles and Houseman loved debating important and forgotten plays, and they were soon projecting an ambitious future schedule featuring Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, which Orson had considered producing for his summer theater; a modern-dress Julius Caesar, one of the plays Orson had adapted for Everybody’s Shakespeare; and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, one of those Elizabethan comedies Orson loved.
The Italian Straw Hat had a thinly stretched plot, rife with absurd complications. The story begins when a horse eats a lady’s straw hat, compromising two lovers who have been meeting secretly in a park. A frantic search is launched for an exact replica to replace the eaten hat. “It was the kind of action Welles adored,” noted Peter Conrad in Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life, “a chase or pursuit that races around in a circle.”
By transferring the original setting and dialogue to an American milieu, as he had adapted Macbeth for a Caribbean landscape, Orson could customize the play in his own way. His first order of business was finding a writer to create an updated vernacular translation of the nineteenth-century play, balancing the French flavor with an American sensibility.
One of the members of the Houseman-Thomson circle of modernist artists, musicians, and writers was the erudite dancer and poet Edwin Denby. An American citizen born in China in 1903, Denby was educated at Harvard and the University of Vienna. He had danced professionally in Europe and spoke fluent French. Returning to the United States after the rise of Hitler, Denby developed a budding reputation as a published poet and arts writer. (In time he would become America’s leading dance critic.) A witty, self-effacing ascetic, Denby lived with his companion, the Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt, on West Twenty-First Street, close to Orson’s flat.
Denby and Welles met to discuss Americanizing the farce, and they got along splendidly. Denby agreed to handle the basic translation, while Orson would guide the modernized and Americanized touches. “I would read a speech, and he would criticize it for the sound,” Denby recalled. “If it blurred, he would rephrase it in such a way that the actual spoken sound was very clear and plain and straight. We understood each other perfectly and worked with a good deal of pleasure.”
In fits and starts over the summer of 1936, their collaboration produced a script that followed the twisty French plot while Americanizing the dialogue and the characters’ names. To reflect the shift to a modern setting, certain trappings were updated—horse-drawn carriages were replaced with motorcars, for instance. Fadinard, the groom who leads the frantic hat search in the French farce, was renamed Freddy; Helene, the intended bride, became Myrtle Mugglethorpe; the aggrieved Lieutenant Tavernier became Lieutenant Grimshot. To top it off, Orson gave the adaptation a brisk, amusing American title: Horse Eats Hat.
As with the Voodoo Macbeth, Orson wanted made-to-order music for his new production. To compose the eclectic sound and special effects Welles had in mind, Virgil Thomson recommended the gifted Paul Bowles, another pedigreed friend from Houseman’s circle, though more of a free spirit than either Thomson or Houseman. A writer and poet as well as a musician, Bowles had studied under Aaron Copland; he’d also lived in footloose fashion in Paris and Morocco. Orson envisioned almost nonstop music and effects during the production, even through the intermissions; at first Bowles was somewhat daunted by the assignment, and Thomson agreed to walk him through stage conventions and take a credit for “arranging.”
But Orson did not intimidate Bowles personally. Like Welles, Bowles was a restless and fecund talent who enjoyed blurring the line between his art and his life, and the two were almost instantly simpatico. Bowles, too, had spent time in Spain, and they talked about the Spanish Civil War, ignited by a fascist coup that July. “Within ten minutes of our meeting,” Bowles remembered, “Orson shocked me by remarking coolly that he saw no hope of there being anything but fascism in Spain. How right he was!”
For the scenery, costumes, and lighting, Orson lured Abe Feder and Nat Karson away from the Negro Unit, giving them sketches and detailed instructions. To create the horse of the title, he found another imaginative collaborator in the puppeteer Bil Baird, whose shows he had seen at the 1934 Chicago world’s fair. Baird devised a creature made of two halves—a papier-mâché head and a velvety torso with roller-skate hooves—and agreed to play the standing half himself. (Welles had noticed Baird’s performing skills one day while trying to coax Chubby Sherman into taking a dangerous pratfall into the orchestra pit. “So I went, ‘Whoop!’ like that,” Baird recalled, “and did a flop and landed on my back in the orchestra pit. Everybody applauded and Orson said, ‘Mr. Baird, you’re hired.’ ”)
With the script still in progress—it wouldn’t be completed until late August—and Houseman off working on his plans for Hamlet with Leslie Howard, Orson planned his return to serious acting with a key role in Sidney Kingsley’s new play, Ten Million Ghosts.
Kingsley, a respected playwright, had approached Orson shortly after the opening of the Voodoo Macbeth. Kingsley had the golden touch: his socially conscious tenement drama Dead End had filled the Belasco Theatre for
nine months, and Hollywood had scooped up film rights. Now he was going to produce a season of three plays, featuring Ten Million Ghosts—his first new work since Dead End, and the only one of the three plays that he’d also direct.
Ten Million Ghosts was another message play, this time attacking post–World War I munitions merchants whose greed was destabilizing the world. All summer long, as Orson worked on Horse Eats Hat, Kingsley wrote furiously, crafting the part that Orson would play: a gallant French aviator who defies politically expedient orders and bombs a German munitions plant.
At first, Ten Million Ghosts was announced as the final production of Kingsley’s season, scheduled for the spring of 1937. But as difficulties arose with the other two plays in his lineup, Ghosts inched forward. Orson welcomed the opportunity. For an actor who was doomed to play heavies, figuratively and literally, for much of his career, Ten Million Ghosts afforded a rare chance to play the dashing lead—and at Equity wages, no small consideration for a hardworking young man still paying the grocery bills with small jobs.
Toward the same end—paying for groceries—in August Orson took another step up the ladder in radio, where he was still specializing in character parts. A deep-voiced comic actor named Jack Smart, a charter member of The March of Time since 1931, had been slated to host a new ten-week revue series sponsored by Wonder Bread that would be the first full-hour sponsored show on the Mutual Broadcasting System. A few weeks before the first broadcast, however, a Universal scout caught the portly Smart in The New Faces in 1936 on Broadway and lured him away from radio with a film contract. Smart recommended his comparably deep-voiced friend, Orson.
The money was good, the workload ideal: all Orson had to do was show up at WOR every Sunday at 8 P.M., when most New York theaters were dark, in time for the hour-long broadcast. Besides emceeing the show as the Great McCoy—“a jovial cross between P. T. Barnum and Sir Henry Irving,” as Orson wrote to Roger Hill—he would also star in the abridged Gay Nineties plays that had been preestablished as the show’s main feature. Although Arthur Pryor Jr. from The March of Time was producing the show, Orson had a hand in choosing each week’s mustache-twirling melodrama. The post–Civil War The Streets of New York was set for the premiere, to be followed by chestnuts such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (which Orson knew from the Todd School) and Around the World in Eighty Days (the Jules Verne story, which he’d seen at least once onstage at the Goodman Theatre). All the players would be fully costumed, and the episodes would be performed before live audiences; the sponsors were hoping the show could cross over to television, which everyone believed was just around the corner. The series was known as The Wonder Show, a title Orson would fondly cadge for his World War II military service revue.
The Mutual network (and the sponsors’ ad agency) had booked Carnegie Hall to launch The Wonder Show on the last Sunday of August. But Orson then had the idea of bringing the radio show to Chicago, taking over the 3,500-seat Opera House (“Mr. Insull’s dream palace,” as he described it in a letter to Skipper) for six Sundays in September and October. The two-month run would open with The Relief of Lucknow, set in 1870s Chicago, and the show would be broadcast locally by Mutual’s affiliate WGN, a Chicago Tribune subsidiary.
Alert the “press boys,” Orson wrote to Roger Hill; prepare the “strong bally.” Working with the show’s publicist, Orson arranged to have a Todd School stagecoach trucked into the Loop with local personalities in Victorian costumes stepping out of horse-drawn vehicles amid floodlights and photographers. The cast included the married couple John McIntire and Jeanette Nolan, who would show up in future Welles projects (Nolan was Orson’s Lady Macbeth in his 1948 film), and his friend Paul Stewart, who would appear in Welles films from Citizen Kane all the way through to “The Other Side of the Wind.”
But The Wonder Show alone couldn’t keep Orson and Virginia in groceries. Orson also took a small continuing part as “the cad” in a twice-daily fifteen-minute radio soap opera called Big Sister. “God, I loved it,” he told Henry Jaglom years later. “I had this girl in the rumble seat. And the suspense was, was I going to make her? And it went on for about three months. That’s the longest session in a rumble seat, you know.”
Between broadcasts of Big Sister and The Wonder Show—flying to Chicago every Sunday, flying back on Mondays—Orson also plunged into read-throughs for Horse Eats Hat. Then, at the end of August, Kingsley phoned with news: there were problems with the rest of his season and he was pushing Ten Million Ghosts ahead for an October opening.
In typical fashion, Orson decided he could do it all: prepare two new Broadway plays simultaneously, while keeping up his schedule of weekly radio gigs. For Orson, time and money were always elastic and ephemeral, hard work and enthusiasm ever-renewable from his deep well.
John Houseman was responsible for organizing the theater building, staff, and operating budget for Horse Eats Hat, but once again he maintained a distance from the creative side of the production, and he was absent at critical junctures. He disappeared for most of August, heading to Canada to apply for permanent resident status on foreign territory after his five-year work visa as a resident alien had expired.
While Houseman was away, Orson finalized the Horse Eats Hat script and casting. By the time Houseman returned, the launch date for his production of Hamlet with Leslie Howard—early November—was fast approaching. “Of all the shows Orson and I produced together, Horse Eats Hat is the one in which I was the least involved,” Houseman wrote later. But Orson hardly minded an absentee producer, and Horse Eats Hat would be pure Orson.
Squeezing in writing sessions between Orson’s radio appearances, Welles and Edwin Denby hurtled toward the finish line with the Horse Eats Hat script in late August. “We’d start about 1 A.M. and work all that night and the following day,” Denby recalled. “We wrote two acts at a stretch like that. By the time it got to be two or three the next morning, we were falling asleep alternately. He would say something. I’d write it down and fall asleep. Then, he’d take over and write something. I would wake up and go on from there, while he fell asleep for a moment. We finished at 9 A.M., and he went off to do a radio program.”
One attraction of Horse Eats Hat was the cute role Orson carved out for Virginia, whose career had been languishing while his soared. She would play the shy bride Myrtle, a small but crucial part in the farce—and Orson would be Mugglethorpe, Myrtle’s father, with a sly wink at the audience. Mugglethorpe was the kind of “old gaffer” role that delighted Orson, another chance to break out the greasepaint and padding; for fun, he even tossed in a bald dome.
Federal regulations required that no more than 10 percent of actors cast in Project 891 productions could be professionals who were drawing wages from elsewhere. For the leads, Orson relied on stage and radio friends who could afford the moonlighting. He lured his tall, handsome friend Joseph Cotten into playing dumb, charming Freddy, the play’s human motor—this was the first time Cotten would perform under Orson’s direction. As Bobbin, Mugglethorpe’s majordomo, he enlisted the effervescent Chubby Sherman, whom he liked almost as much as Cotten. To play the hat shop owner, he cast a pretty young actress, Arlene Francis, whom he’d worked with happily on The March of Time.
Orson also added a role that did not exist in the original play: Augustus, the grandson of the family patriarch, created expressly for his classmate Edgerton Paul, who had played in Todd School and Woodstock Summer Festival plays and The Hearts of Age. Although Paul was Orson’s physical opposite (“a diminutive actor, almost a midget,” in John Houseman’s words), he doubled as Orson’s stand-in during rehearsals and understudy for performances—joining a long line of doubles and understudies Orson relied on when he was overextended.
The smaller roles and chorus were parceled out to the jobless thespians who showed up for open auditions. Orson gravitated to “aging character actors, comics and eccentrics,” Houseman recalled, “middle-aged garrulous ladies with bright colored hair who nobody else seemed to want and a
number of bright young ladies.” As with Macbeth, the partners had planned the show for maximum employment, and in the end about seventy-four actors, thirty musicians in the pit orchestra, and several dozen crew hands were added to the rolls of the Federal Theatre Project.
Nat Karson designed the principal set as an out-of-control Rube Goldberg contraption, with trapdoors and pop-up pieces and breakaway sections. Aided by Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles contributed a score that consisted of “two long pieces of continuity, three overtures, the horse ballet and several songs,” in his words, mingled with strains of standard Americana. Fulfilling Orson’s vision, the music would be heard almost continuously throughout the performance, with a uniformed woman trumpeter performing Bowles’s “Carnaval de Venise” and Edgerton Paul plunking a mechanical piano to produce “The Song of Hiawatha” during the intervals. An enthusiastic if limited singer, Orson deployed his own baritone in the show’s only true song, Mugglethorpe’s “lyrical salute to his faithful rubber plant” (as Wilella Waldorf wrote in the New York Post), which capped Act One.
Orson insisted on pacing Horse Eats Hat like a vaudeville revue, with fast, skit-like scenes bursting with physical and risqué humor. The actors flew through the air, spilled across the apron, and raced up and down the aisles, shouting and laughing.
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 42