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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  When the unfortunate late-night reading ended, the partners convened “a brief, private meeting in [Orson’s] dressing room,” according to Houseman. “There was no argument. The Duchess of Malfi joined ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore in the locked cupboard of our discarded loves.”

  The Mercury players had been sent a clear signal: they fell short in Orson’s eyes. This hardly pleased his band of regulars, and the veteran actor Coulouris, for one, was incensed. Once promised a role, he now felt as if he’d failed an audition for which he’d never volunteered. “There was quite a hullabaloo about the reading and such a bad feeling was created in the company that it was the first and last rehearsal of the play,” Lloyd wrote.

  The “bad feeling” lingered, and the disgruntlement filtered into press updates about the Mercury. For two weeks, Welles and Houseman dissembled when asked about the future of The Duchess of Malfi. Then, out of nowhere, a letter that had been bouncing around from one wrong address to another finally arrived, from George Bernard Shaw. Orson placed a hasty transatlantic phone call to the playwright in England, who did not remember meeting him in 1932, and had not heard of the Mercury. But Shaw was willing to let the partners produce Heartbreak House if they met his financial terms and other stipulations.

  In the third week of March, The Duchess of Malfi was shelved. Heartbreak House was swiftly advertised for an April 29 opening, with Welles set to star and direct. Much to the chagrin of the Shoemaker’s Holiday ensemble, which included the camp of malcontents, the Thomas Dekker comedy would be shut down when Heartbreak House was ready, with only three actors moving on into the new production.

  Orson’s hours, personal and professional, were filled to overflowing. In just two years he had become a Broadway brand name, with multiple products. He bore writing, directing, or acting responsibilities for several ongoing Mercury productions. He was still performing on radio, although nowadays he could afford to be more discerning about his jobs. He relied on a chauffeur to keep him on schedule.

  Orson resisted any attempts to make him account for his time, by either his wife or his producing partner. Without letting Houseman know, Welles sneaked off to vaudeville shows, private magic clubs, and romantic assignations. More and more, he was turning up at awards ceremonies, emceeing dinners, gracing the daises at political or charitable events.

  In early March, Orson spent most of one day in front of a Senate subcommittee in Washington, D.C., testifying in support of the doomed Federal Theatre Project. (This was also the occasion of his “first adulterous weekend” with ballerina Tilly Losch in the nation’s capital.)

  Later the same month, egged on by a new friend, Burgess Meredith, Orson stood for a hotly contested Actors Equity election. He ran as one of six members of a “liberal slate” seeking to assume control of the New York branch of the performers’ union. Ultimately, the conservative, anti-CIO slate swept the vote, declaring a victory over “communism in Equity.” Orson also logged time on the Negro Cultural Committee, which mounted interracial programs at the Mecca Auditorium, and showed up dependably for Spanish Civil War causes. Along with Marc Blitzstein and Will Geer, he hosted an auction to raise funds for medical aid for the anti-Franco side.

  Houseman joined Orson on the platform at some civic events, but Orson was more in demand. He also addressed large groups like the National Council of Teachers of English, sometimes asking a fee; and he joined public roundtable discussions, such as a radio broadcast exploring the wellsprings of creative arts, with a panel that included a Columbia professor, a newspaper editor, a music critic, and artist Rockwell Kent.

  To help publicize the new touring production of Julius Caesar, he made arrangements to appear at its opening in Chicago on Monday, March 7—a date chosen largely so Orson could play the Shadow on Sunday night and fly out the next morning—but at the last minute, the crisis surrounding the cancellation of The Duchess of Malfi, and the complicated recording sessions for the Julius Caesar LP, forced him to postpone the trip. (He told Chicago reporters that the “impending birth” of his first child had hindered his travel plans.)

  When he finally reached Chicago, in the second week of the run, Orson made a flurry of public appearances. He spoke to hundreds of students and educators at a forum on “The Modern Approach to Shakespeare” at the Erlanger Theatre before Julius Caesar took the stage. He brought Tom Powers, the touring company’s Brutus, to a Cliff Dwellers luncheon, and toured the new Arts Club galleries in the Wrigley Building, which included an exhibit of still lifes and paintings by composer George Gershwin. He squeezed in dinner at Le Petit Gourmet with columnist Ashton Stevens, who had last glimpsed Orson during the summer of 1936. “He seemed to have developed half a century in the two years since I’d seen him,” Stevens wrote. “He was less excited and more exciting. His humor was leaner. He could laugh at himself with more conviction. Whether you agreed with him or not, his opinions were surer and saltier; because they sounded like his own rather than the last he had heard or read.

  “He has a magnificent ignorance of the requirements of a snob. He is a restlessly constructive fellow who just won’t leave the stage where he found it. I’m afraid he’s a genius; but mighty good company nevertheless.”

  Dr. Maurice Bernstein, still Orson’s guardian, was among the other “old intimates” at that dinner, in Stevens’s words. Drawing Dr. Bernstein aside, Orson pleaded impending fatherhood, and negotiated a small increase in his monthly allowance, as well as a personal loan of $1,000.

  Bernstein insisted that the loan be covered by a promissory note against Welles’s inheritance but the doctor was otherwise in unusually generous spirits. Hazel Moore, whom Orson had known since boyhood, had filed a $10,000 lawsuit alleging the wrongful death of her husband, whose heart attack in 1935 had been aggravated by a traffic accident en route to the hospital. After a settlement came through, “Dadda” and “Aunt Hazel” announced plans of their own for the summer of 1938: marriage.

  Returning by midnight plane to New York for the Sunday, March 20, final broadcast of The Shadow, Orson dashed into the studio, riffling through the script with only moments to spare. The following week, even as he initiated the “first reading” for Heartbreak House on the Mercury stage, according to newspaper accounts, a phone call came: Virginia was in labor at Presbyterian Hospital on 168th Street, with her mother at her side. Adjourning the read-through, Orson and the Mercury’s publicist Henry Senber jumped into a taxi and raced to the hospital. En route, according to Frank Brady, they reviewed the publicity outlook for Heartbreak House: Senber had a feeler from Time magazine about putting Welles on its cover to coincide with the opening.

  When he arrived at the hospital, Welles later confessed to Barbara Leaming, ballerinas were more on his mind than fatherhood. He could not keep himself from flirting with an attractive hospital nurse, whose lithe shapely figure he correctly identified as that of a former danseuse.

  Proudly but uncomfortably, Orson held his baby daughter in his arms. He always said that he’d christened his firstborn while she was still in her mother’s womb, and he’d been expecting a boy. That she was a girl did not matter: “Christopher” became her name.

  As a little girl, more than once, Orson’s daughter asked her famous father, “Daddy, why did you call me ‘Christopher’?”

  “I liked the sound of it—Christopher Welles. Your name has a marvelous ring to it, don’t you think?”

  “But I’m a girl, Daddy.”

  “So you are, and a very beautiful one, too.”

  “But Daddy, girls aren’t called Christopher.”

  “That’s right. You’re the only girl in the world who is, and that makes you unique as well as beautiful.”

  “What does unique mean?”

  “Different from everyone else.”

  “But Daddy, I don’t want to be different. The kids at school tease me about having a boy’s name.”

  “When you’re older, they’ll envy you. Wait and see, darling girl. The day will come when you’ll lo
ve your name and thank your old father.”

  At that point in the conversation, as Chris Welles Feder recalled in her candid memoir, In My Father’s Shadow, Orson usually paused to light a cigar, “his eyes twinkling at me through the cloud of horrible-smelling smoke,” in her words.

  “Do you know what I did right after you were born?”

  “No, what?”

  “I sent out telegrams to everyone we know. CHRISTOPHER, SHE IS HERE.”

  More than once, Orson told this anecdote of the wonderful telegram, “how in just four words, a marvel of economy, my father had said it all,” recalled Feder. As she grew older, however, she sometimes wondered whether the name “Christopher” wasn’t simply her father’s excuse for a clever telegram. In 1985, as her plane touched down in Los Angeles for his funeral, it occurred to her that she had never seen one of those legendary telegrams.

  George Bernard Shaw’s contract with the Mercury Theatre claimed a substantial portion of all the ticket revenue for Heartbreak House, starting at 5 percent of $250, with his share rising to 15 percent of all proceeds exceeding $1,500. “For a theater with less than 700 seats and ticket prices between $.55 and $2.20,” Andrea Janet Nouryeh wrote, “these royalty figures were astronomical,” and virtually guaranteed that the Mercury would never turn a profit on the production.

  Moreover, the agreement strictly prevented any deviation from the original script—and this stipulation also applied to the main set, which the script described in detail, including the common room of a country residence, with windows, doors, lockers, benches, bookshelves, and drawing tables of heavy timber resembling “an old-fashioned high-pooped ship.” The shiplike setting prompted “the first solid scenery we built,” grumbled John Houseman, which “cost us a fortune,” because Orson “insisted on genuine paneling indoors and real gravel cemented to the ground cloth for the exterior ‘so the footsteps will sound right.’ ” Ultimately, wrote Nouryeh, “critics universally admired the results” of the costly stage setting.

  This shiplike country home belongs to an eccentric retired seafarer, an octogenarian, Captain Shotover, whose “immense white beard,” in the words of the script, made the part a natural for Orson. Shaw makes the half-ship home a metaphor for complacent England, adrift amid the brewing storm of World War I. (Society needs a better navigator, someone like crusty Captain Shotover.) Though replete with sparks of brisk Shavian wit, the play is also didactic and pessimistic. Timely when it was written, it was timely again in 1938.

  The script featured ten speaking parts, but only a handful of supporting players were drawn from the active Mercury roster: George Coulouris as Boss Mangan; Vincent Price as Hector Hushabye, married to Shotover’s flamboyant eldest daughter Hesione; and John Hoysradt as Randall Utterword, married to another Shotover daughter, Ariadne. Again “determined to avoid the stigma of stock casting,” in Houseman’s words, the partners shopped for fresh faces.

  The part of Hesione, the play’s lead female character, had been designated for Aline MacMahon as part of her agreement covering The Duchess of Malfi. When that play fell through unpleasantly, however, MacMahon backed out of the Shaw production. Orson wanted Mady Christians as her replacement, but Houseman disagreed, believing that Christians, who had been born in Vienna, would be miscast as a free-spirited Englishwoman. Welles and Christians would prove him wrong, as Houseman later conceded.

  Orson picked an old acquaintance from his days with Katharine Cornell, Brenda Forbes, for Nurse Guinness; and the Australian actress Phyllis Joyce as the Captain’s less bohemian daughter, Ariadne (Lady Utterword). For Geraldine Fitzgerald he saved the role of Ellie, a rival of Hesione’s, who is engaged to marry the business tycoon Boss Mangan. Ellie was the play’s pivotal and most likable character.

  He asked Theatre Guild stalwart Erskine Sanford to play the seemingly mild-mannered Mazzini Dunn, the father of Ellie, who is actually running Boss Mangan’s empire. Sanford had played the same character in the original New York production of 1920, and Orson loved that kind of symmetry. Just as important, he remembered Sanford from the A. A. Milne comedy Mr. Pim Passes By, which he’d seen as a boy when it passed through Kenosha on tour. Heartbreak House brought Sanford permanently into Welles’s fold. He would portray the dethroned Inquirer editor in Citizen Kane and would be conspicuous in Orson’s radio shows, as well as The Magnificent Ambersons, Jane Eyre, The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, and Macbeth.

  Orson spent the month between that aborted first rehearsal on March 27, and the play’s opening night on April 29, coolly orchestrating the staging of Heartbreak House, which would take the place of The Shoemaker’s Holiday in the Mercury rotation. He and Coulouris ceded their roles in Julius Caesar to Tom Powers and Edmond O’Brien from the touring company.

  Heartbreak House was a wordy play, but Orson was comfortable with verbosity, and he always had loved Shaw’s wordplay. Still, as scholar Andrea Janet Nouryeh has pointed out, his production sneaked changes into the prescribed version. His staging accelerated the play’s pacing by discarding ordained exits and entrances, and it broke up and overlapped many passages of dialogue, while creating moments of “great stillness” to enhance its dramatic high points.

  The rehearsals were no more chaotic than usual, but time was short, and perhaps there was less team spirit with the new team. Vincent Price, for one, was never “very happy” in his assigned role, Welles recalled. (“He was particularly vexed that he was required to stand still and listen to other actors talking at great length, as actors do in Shaw.”) Coulouris clashed with Fitzgerald, patronizing the newcomer and undermining her confidence. They feuded. The other actors liked Fitzgerald, though, and even Price thought Welles directed her “with such affection and care that she stole almost every scene from him.”

  As much as critics admired the Mercury production, their praise was backhanded, with many feeling that Shaw had painted the typically bold Orson into a tight corner. “There is nothing experimental in the Mercury Theatre’s revival,” Richard Lockridge wrote in the Sun. “This time their experiment is merely the simple, and fine, one of putting on a provocative, stimulating play as straightforwardly and effectively as they know how.” John Anderson of the Evening Journal called it “an average stock company production, by no means up to the distinguished standard set by the Mercury.”

  Again the lead player as well as the director, Orson was as always a lightning rod for the reviewers. Wearing nose putty, a white wig, and a full beard and mustache, the transformation completed by liver spots on his hands, he anchored the production. His performance predictably disappointed some critics (“workmanlike,” sniffed the Times) while pleasing many others (“much better than I have ever seen him,” wrote Lockridge in the Sun). Even his fellow cast members were divided: Price thought Welles was “not very good in it because he never rehearsed with us,” while Forbes thought his performance “brilliant,” though she was disgusted by Orson’s “outrageous behavior at curtain time” (the first scene was sometimes held up until he had finished dinner in his dressing room).

  In any case, audiences flocked to Heartbreak House, and, like Julius Caesar, the show would entertain packed crowds until its run ended. And on May 6, his twenty-third birthday, Orson could celebrate by pointing to his photograph on the cover of Time magazine, where his unmistakably boyish eyes peered out of the caked, bearded visage of ancient Captain Shotover. “George Orson Welles,” read the May 9, 1939, headline: “Shadow to Shakespeare, Shoemaker to Shaw.”

  The five-page spread inside was a promoter’s dream. The article declared young Orson a “Marvelous Boy,” while reviewing, complete with errors and embellishments, his life story thus far: Kenosha, the Todd School, the Gate Theatre, the Federal Theatre Project, the Mercury. Orson admitted to being the “Caesar (not Brutus)” of the Mercury—that is, “pretty dictatorial” when it came to the stagecraft of Mercury productions. (“Houseman runs the business end,” the article noted.) The Mercury’s maiden season was only a springboard to the
future, said the profile’s anonymous author. “The sky is the only limit his ambitions recognize.”

  The cover story did not delve very deeply into Welles’s private life, describing his Sneden’s Landing residence as only modestly luxurious (“eight rooms and four nooks, $115 a month”) and his burgeoning family in three brief sentences: “Welles met his wife, dainty blonde Virginia Nicholson [sic] Welles, while both were acting in a summer drama festival in 1934, married her that fall. Last month their first child was born. A girl, she was christened Christopher.”

  The real picture was more complicated. Two weeks after the Time story, Tilly Losch took her passage to Europe—and Orson’s overlapping flirtations with Geraldine Fitzgerald and ballerina Vera Zorina heated up.

  Orson’s attitude toward affairs was elliptical, however. Charles Foster Kane does not necessarily make love to Susan Alexander before the scandal that ends his marriage and political career,30 and sex and love were often extraneous to the power-and-glory-obsessed characters Orson played most convincingly on stage and screen. (Playing a Nazi monster in The Stranger, he seems unaroused even by the lovely Loretta Young.) Whatever sexual activity Welles engaged in outside his marriage to Virginia, in those days before Citizen Kane it was less than rumored or boasted.

  One night during the run of Heartbreak House, Welles and Fitzgerald decided to elope—or so the actress told her son, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, many years later.

  “Elope?” her son asked. (The word was “an odd one,” Lindsay-Hogg wrote in his memoir, Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond, “since they were both married.”)

  “Let me tell you in my own way,” Fitzgerald said. “One Saturday night, after the show, we were going to elope. He’d hired a car and we were going to New Jersey to a motel, and then we kissed in the back seat of the car and I realized it was the kiss of a brother and not a lover and so the car turned around and we went back to the city and Orson came up to the room with me, where Eddy [her husband, Edward Lindsay-Hogg] was asleep, and Orson patted his foot over the blanket and said, ‘Everything’s all right, old fellow. Nothing to worry about.’ And then he left.”