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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Vera Zorina was the second ballerina Virginia identified to Frank Brady as a mistress of her husband’s. Born in Berlin, raised in Norway, with intense blue eyes and blond hair cascading to her shoulders, Zorina was even younger than Orson—only twenty-one in 1938.

  Her reputation as a dancer had been established in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, where she became the lover of choreographer Léonide Massine, who was married at the time to another member of the troupe. Zorina had starred in the London production of Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes and also in George Balanchine’s Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, a ballet scored by Rodgers and Hart. Samuel Goldwyn brought her to Hollywood in 1937 for the filming of The Goldwyn Follies, in which Balanchine staged her American debut in the “water nymph ballet,” rising up from a pool of water in gold lamé. Living in New York since late 1937, Zorina danced with Balanchine’s troupe, and was attached to Balanchine himself as his lover.

  Captivated by Orson after seeing him onstage in Julius Caesar, Zorina gravitated to him at parties and found she liked him even better in person. They started meeting surreptitiously, sharing heart-to-hearts late at night. Welles was still in his Alfred Lunt phase: “a romantic-looking man” as Zorina recalled in her memoir, “somewhat Byronic, with one quizzical eyebrow slightly raised, and often laughing in a special throaty way. I think we would call him ‘sexy’ today.”

  Yet, again, there were obstacles to actual lovemaking: not Balanchine, who was “used” to Orson chasing after his ballerinas (as Welles told Leaming), but the dancer’s mother, who still traveled with her. Anxious to conceal their “passionate courtship” from the mother, who was on Balanchine’s side, the two had to avoid any public displays of affection. “Mama wouldn’t have allowed it,” Welles explained to Leaming. Orson himself later said that he found such obstacles “a big help” to him, a stimulating test: “It was all very difficult, which was the ideal situation for me because I—thank God—matured before the sexual revolution. I like to be hard to get at!” And Balanchine was not his only competition: also vying for Zorina’s affections was “a very famous European actress who liked to fill the ballerina’s room with flowers.”

  Too often, Welles and Zorina were reduced to “steaming up various hired cars around New York,” in his words, or meeting in out-of-the-way places. In early April, even before Tilly Losch had left for Europe, Orson desperately tried to arrange a rendezvous with Zorina at a hotel in New Haven, where her Broadway debut, the Rodgers-Hart musical I Married an Angel, was being road-tested. Orson devised an elaborate disguise for himself—mustache, thick glasses, raincoat—but the rendezvous went awry when he stepped into the hotel elevator, only to find himself standing next to Balanchine, who was choreographing Zorina’s dances in the play. “Hello, Orson, I didn’t know you were here!” Balanchine chirped.

  Orson relished his dalliance with Zorina, even if Balanchine was her more regular partner. Years later, in his chats with Roger Hill, Welles recalled Zorina confiding in him that Balanchine “was going to a doctor on Fifth Avenue who was lengthening his penis.”

  “Surgically?” Hill asked Welles.

  “No, by pulling it somehow,” Welles replied. “That diminished my fortitude because I thought, if this guy has the moxie to have his prick enlarged, I really don’t deserve her, he does.”

  The one time Orson and Zorina managed to escape from prying eyes was later in the month, when Austrian-born character actor Walter Slezak, who was costarring with Zorina in I Married an Angel, offered them the use of his country house on a back road near Mount Kisco, New York. Orson and Zorina were looking forward to a “weekend of pleasure”—but their hopes were dashed when their solitude was interrupted, repeatedly, by a series of loud alarms from hidden locations. Slezak had concealed a slew of alarm clocks in crannies around the house, setting them to go off at random intervals as an elaborate practical joke. “Viennese malice,” Welles told Leaming.

  Their relationship was fraught with such missed chances. Complicating their romance further, the East Coast tryouts of I Married an Angel went so well that on May 11 the musical was rushed into Broadway’s Shubert Theatre, where overnight it became a smash hit. Now the two illicit lovers were both starring in Broadway shows, with Zorina committed six nights a week along with Wednesday and Saturday matinees.

  In June, after Heartbreak House and Julius Caesar ended their successful runs, the fault lines within the Mercury Theatre began to shift ominously.

  In his memoir, John Houseman was precise about the dramatic series of events. Late that month, he wrote, he was vacationing at a friend’s home in the Berkshires when his peaceful breakfast was ruined by an urgent phone call from Augusta Weissberger: the New York Times was reporting that Chubby Sherman had quit the Mercury Theatre to join a topical revue that producer Max Gordon was preparing for Broadway that fall. “I accepted this grim news as true the moment I heard it,” Houseman wrote, “I did not, then or later, call Sherman to verify it or to try and persuade him to change his mind.” Houseman sped to Sneden’s Landing, where Orson, Virginia, and baby Christopher were spending “an uneasy summer,” in his words.

  Orson lay “limp and huge in a darkened room with his face to the wall” and cursed Sherman as a Judas, or an Iago. “To him, Sherman’s action was quite simply one of personal, malignant treachery,” Houseman wrote. “Coming, as it did, at a turning point in Welles’s personal life, Sherman’s perfidy hit him with exaggerated force. For the Mercury, it marked the great divide between our halcyon days and the hurricane weather that followed.”

  After a couple of days in New York tidying up Mercury business, Houseman said, he drove north again, intending to spend a holiday with his mother, who lived in Rockland County, not far from Sneden’s Landing. As his Ford reached a steep hill outside the Palisades, he spied a familiar limousine coming from the other direction, with “Orson’s huge face sticking out of the window with its mouth wide open, his gigantic voice echoing through the surrounding woods.” The two cars pulled over, Orson yanked Houseman into his limousine, and Orson’s car continued on to New York City for an appointment with Columbia Broadcasting System officials. Orson “was about to receive a phenomenal offer—an hour’s dramatic radio show once a week for ten weeks on which he could do anything he pleased,” Houseman recalled.

  Orson, in Houseman’s telling, was decked out in his costume as Brutus to make the best possible impression. The officials explained what Houseman referred to as “the network’s formula,” implying that CBS had conceived the new show. The producer admitted having trouble following the radio lingo (“all of which was Greek to me”), but he sat up straight when he heard that the show would premiere on July 11, “in less than two weeks’ time!” (“This didn’t seem to bother Orson,” Houseman wrote, who “said it would be a tight squeeze but we could make it.”)

  Orson was revitalized by this deus ex machina, which wiped away Sherman’s betrayal. In relating the story, Houseman filled in every detail—settings, costumes, and dialogue—giving it all color, intensity, and an electric pace. Numerous later books would recycle the story.

  Unfortunately, Houseman’s treasured anecdote was a tall tale. In fact, Orson’s new radio series was announced in the New York Times a full month before the first broadcast—on Sunday, June 12, the day after the last performance of Heartbreak House. After several weeks of negotiations with the network, Orson had agreed to host “First Person Singular,” a summer replacement program of nine one-hour dramas for the CBS network. Besides writing, casting, and producing the shows, Orson would narrate each episode and play the “protagonist.” “The entire Mercury Theatre company will be at his disposal,” according to the Times, “and he is to be at liberty to select his own material and technique.”

  The Time magazine cover had spurred the CBS executives into action. The network needed a summer substitute for Cecil B. DeMille’s popular Monday night series Lux Radio Theatre, which featured dramatic re-creations of motion picture stories, and CBS wanted
Orson to take over the time slot for the summer. The network had been sending work his way since 1935, starting him in anonymous, low-paying roles, but nurturing his rise with a series of increasingly important parts in various CBS radio shows and special broadcasts including his breakout opportunities in the Columbia Workshop series. Mutual had stolen him away with Les Misérables and The Shadow, but now CBS wanted him back, promising Orson that the summer series could lead to a permanent engagement in the fall.

  It was Welles who brainstormed the concept as an alternative to DeMille’s program and a more commercial variation on the Columbia Workshop. His series would feature adaptations of literature, and it would be aimed at intelligent adults. To keep costs down, the series would draw largely on stories from familiar or classic works in the public domain. Welles would introduce himself at the start of each broadcast and narrate the show, while also playing multiple characters, as he had done with the summer adaptation of Les Misérables. It was this emphasis on his starring and hosting that earned the summer series its initial title “First Person Singular,” although within weeks everyone was calling it “The Mercury Theatre on the Air.”

  The contract, negotiated by Arnold Weissberger, gave Orson unusual creative latitude and supervisory control over the program. The series would have a moderate budget, appropriate for a summer program, but the network would pay for the star, for his Mercury actors and associates, and for all agreed-on production costs. CBS staff artists and officials—including Bernard Herrmann, the network’s most accomplished arranger and conductor, who had agreed to supervise the music—would be available to assist Orson behind the scenes.

  Moreover, “First Person Singular” would be a “sustaining program,” broadcast without commercial sponsorship or interruptions—a privileged status afforded to only a few network programs, such as the Columbia Workshop series. Everything about Orson’s contract was golden, right down to the broadcasting facility at WABC: the famous Studio One, the biggest and best-equipped in the CBS building.

  At a press conference to promote the series, Orson told reporters that, while he would bring to radio the same “experimental techniques” he favored in the theater, he would not be drawing on the “stage repertoire” of the Mercury Theatre. “The less a radio drama resembles a play the better it is likely to be,” he proclaimed. As he spoke, the scheduled July 11 premiere of “First Person Singular” was still one month away; Sherman’s startling resignation from the Mercury was nearly two weeks in the future.

  One thing that certainly rings true in Houseman’s account is that he himself went through the first CBS meetings in a daze. Houseman knew “almost nothing about radio,” he admitted later, “and did not listen regularly except to news.” As Orson spoke, his partner merely nodded, “trying to look knowledgeable but understanding little of what was said.” The deal with CBS, for all intents and purposes, was a deal with Orson Welles. He was its instigator, and he would have the primary responsibility for its creative fulfillment. And, at the time, there was no one else in radio quite like him: a “first person,” a prime mover, writing and producing and starring in a major network series. Orson generously framed “First Person Singular” as a Mercury Theatre venture, but as the deal took shape, Houseman abruptly saw a shift in their partnership. He became Orson’s subordinate. “He was working for me,” Welles boasted to Leaming.

  The two men had launched their collaboration, with the Federal Theatre Project and the Mercury Theatre, as equals; newspapers and magazines routinely referred to Houseman as the brains behind the operation, Welles as the artistic mastermind. More recent articles revised that description, calling Houseman merely the “business brains.” By the time Newsweek carried its report of the Mercury’s summer radio series, the transition was complete: the name John Houseman was never mentioned. The article was all about Orson Welles.

  On the day the series was announced, the Sunday after the final performance of Heartbreak House, the partners revisited their earlier declaration of principles with a longer piece in the New York Times, called “The Summing Up.” Welles and Houseman compared “our aim with our accomplishment,” and declared that they had met most of their original goals. Except for a couple of instances when they’d fudged the “strict observance of orthodox repertory practice” by running two different plays in separate theaters—The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Julius Caesar for a few weeks in January; Heartbreak House and Julius Caesar for part of May—they had adhered to their original vision of a repertory company alternating classical plays. Claiming they did not “believe that the New York public, accustomed as it is to a specialized system of casting, is willing to accept the sort of company atmosphere that inevitably results from the unquestioned use of the same actors in every play,” they noted that they’d picked the “best available actors for each part, even if in special cases we had to go outside” the Mercury company to find them.

  They estimated, combining the totals of its Broadway and touring companies, that the Mercury Theatre had played to more than a quarter of a million people, who had paid an average ticket price of slightly less than $1. Only 20 percent of those people came from the “carriage trade.” Forty percent were organized theater parties, and another 40 percent had bought lower-priced seats. One third of the tickets had been sold to educational groups. Repertory, the partners had learned, was “an enormously expensive business.” The tour of Julius Caesar was expensive and lost money. Staff salaries and production costs were crippling. Still, after their first season, Welles and Houseman counted themselves lucky and “a few dollars ahead of the game.”

  “To sum up,” they concluded, “we’ve played to a lot of people; we’ve produced a lot of plays; we’ve enjoyed it. We’ve made plans, some definite, some still to be worked out for next season, and—we will reopen the Mercury next September.”

  Even as they issued this proclamation, however, the tension between the two men was growing behind the scenes, as Orson’s star eclipsed Houseman’s. And, with uncertainty in the air, some of the company’s best-known players were on the verge of quitting it.

  Norman Lloyd was one. Lloyd had made an indelible mark in his first Mercury role as Cinna the poet in Julius Caesar. But now the up-and-coming actor met with Welles and Houseman and told them he had decided not to rejoin the Mercury in the fall. “I had made up my mind,” the actor recollected, “partly to get out from under Orson’s fantastic personal success, which had resulted in the theatre’s total identification with him.”

  Vincent Price was also disgruntled with Orson’s rehearsal and directorial style. After running into Burgess Meredith on the street one day, and learning that Orson had just offered Meredith the part of Prince Hal/Henry V in the ever-postponed Five Kings, Price promptly accepted a telegraphed offer from Universal Pictures and left for Hollywood.

  John Hoysradt, trying his luck at cabaret, took an engagement at the Rainbow Room.

  The Mercury lost three of the players most closely identified with its first season—not quite an exodus, but a blow. The original company had become factionalized. There was a split among the established players: key performers like Joseph Cotten who served as ballast, shrugged off disputes good-naturedly; but there was a less contented group, including Lloyd and Price, who were preoccupied with their own careers. The imbroglio over The Duchess of Malfi still rankled some, as did the continued casting of outsiders.

  Casting outsiders tore at the actors’ delicate egos; compensation was a related issue. The few elite cast members who nabbed the lead roles also drew higher salaries than their colleagues. “We have consistently carried in our company a number of actors receiving full pay but playing only three or four performances a week,” the partners noted in “The Summing Up.” For most of the Mercury players, however, “full pay” meant Equity minimum, while actors playing concurrent leads in Julius Caesar and The Shoemaker’s Holiday, for example, received double pay—some even received raises—and the top names scored a percentage of the box offic
e. That was one reason George Coulouris, a steady grumbler, hung around: he was assured of leading roles and wages to match. Some weeks, he was paid more than Welles.

  The disaffected players blamed the inequities on Welles and Houseman equally: Houseman because he was penurious and dismissive; Orson because he seemed to live high on the hog while others scraped by. Orson’s standard of living was, by now, inseparable from his image—he traveled by limousine, dined luxuriously, checked into ritzy hotels—and when his face appeared on the cover of Time, the magazine was compelled to ask him about his lifestyle. “Stories of his recent affluence,” reported Time, “annoy him. First of all, Welles insists, this has nothing to do with his Mercury triumphs; for years he has had these things by virtue of his radio earnings,” which the magazine estimated to be in the range of $1,000 weekly. (“Last summer for two or three weeks he hit a high of $1,700.”) When pressed on the matter, Welles insisted that his radio earnings were what enabled the Mercury Theatre to exist.

  Such publicity annoyed members of the company. In interviews later in his life, Orson said he felt guilty about friends like Joseph Cotten, who struggled to get his career going independent of the Mercury. “That was a difficult period for me, as a friend,” Welles told Henry Jaglom, “because suddenly I was making a fortune. Jo was still making those smaller salaries, and I was big stuff.” Cotten always supported Orson, but their friendship was strained.

  When The Shoemaker’s Holiday was closed and replaced by Heartbreak House, a number of the Mercury players demanded a meeting to air their grievances. Welles stood his ground. “Some of you may have thought that . . . the Mercury Theatre owes [you] some obligations,” he reportedly declared. “I want to state, here and now, I am the Mercury Theatre.” His point was hard to argue—he was the company’s undisputed mastermind; the Mercury would hardly have existed without him. But it was a difficult pill to swallow, especially when the much-publicized mastermind rarely mentioned anyone else in his interviews. “How could you feel part of a collaborative effort when Orson took the credit for everything?” Chubby Sherman complained in an interview a quarter century later. “You were supposed to surrender yourself, bask in his reflected glory and be satisfied.”