Asked by Peter Bogdanovich which of the Mercury Theatre radio episodes he remembered as among the best, Orson replied quickly, “‘Dracula’ was a good one.”
The reviews were uniformly excellent. Newsweek pronounced it “adventurous” radio. “Luscious radio fare,” wrote syndicated radio columnist Richard Murray, with “Broadway’s boy wonder” and his Mercury cast “terrific. We think that Columbia deserves a whack on the back.”
On July 10, the day before the “Dracula” broadcast, the Mercury partners finally announced Orson’s choice for the new opening play of the fall season. Banishing the memory of Chubby Sherman, Orson replaced The Importance of Being Earnest with another turn-of-the-century French farce in the manner of Horse Eats Hat. His best friend in the company, Joseph Cotten, would perform the lead.
Originally, this farce, by Maurice Ordonneau, was called La Plantation Thomassin, but the actor-manager William Gillette had Americanized it, in 1894, into a breakneck comedy called Too Much Johnson. When Orson was a boy, Ashton Stevens had often regaled him with tales of Gillette, who was best known for touring in the role of Sherlock Holmes. (Gillette’s costume of deerstalker hat, cape, and curved pipe would forever fix the image of Holmes in the public imagination.) Gillette had died in 1937 near Stony Creek, Connecticut, where the Mercury company would mount an August tryout of his farce at the Stony Creek Playhouse, a summer stock theater. William Herz, who had served as Chubby Sherman’s casting assistant for the Mercury, had taken over management of the venerable playhouse, and several of the Mercury players had signed on for the summer.
Among them was Orson’s wife. At this juncture in their strained marriage, Virginia Welles adopted a stage name: “Anna Stafford.” Orson fooled himself into believing the couple had a mature “understanding” for the summer. Indeed, Virginia appears to have been carrying on her own side romances. In his unproduced script about The Cradle Will Rock, the ORSON character is tortured by the unwelcome presence in his life of an Irish sculptor, Kevan Kildare, a summer stock actor with aspirations. “A sexy young man,” VIRGINIA calls KILDARE; the script describes him as “startlingly beautiful,” with “something of an early Brando” in his persona. The man of the household suspects KILDARE, who is moonlighting as an ice sculptor at his Sneden’s Landing parties, of pursuing VIRGINIA.
Too Much Johnson was a similar pinwheel of furtive lovemaking and mistaken identity. The plot follows a philandering New York lawyer (Joseph Cotten’s role) who is chased to Cuba by his mistress’s vengeful husband. The philanderer, who adopts the name “Johnson”—its phallic innuendo is part of the running joke—is beguiled by a fresh beauty on the island, and finds his fate intertwined with another “Johnson.”
For his production of the farce, Orson came up with another of his Big Ideas: he would turn Too Much Johnson into a half-film, half-play. To introduce each of the three acts, Orson would direct a set of three filmed slapstick sequences featuring the same actors in the play; projected onto a screen, accompanied by live sound effects and music, the filmed sequences would entertain theatergoers until the live actors burst onstage and picked up the story as though they’d leaped out of the screen.
Moving swiftly, Orson had a pile of editing equipment hauled into his St. Regis suite and threw himself into the hybrid production. Everything always seemed to happen simultaneously with Orson: the script, casting, the first rehearsals, the plans for filming. He offered his wife the plum part of the pretty mail-order bride in Cuba, while drawing most of the rest of the cast from Mercury regulars and friends. Besides the devil-may-care Cotten, who had been so light and charming in Horse Eats Hat, as “Johnson,” Arlene Francis, also from Hat, would play the unfaithful wife caught in flagrante. The capable Broadway veteran Edgar Barrier, already on the Stony Creek roster, was hired to play the outraged cuckold. Erskine Sanford from Heartbreak House also took a supporting role. There were smaller parts for Orson’s “slave” Richard Wilson and for Mercury actresses Ruth Ford and Mary Wickes; Wickes was also persuaded to put a little of her family money into the production. Orson sprinkled the cast with old-time vaudevillians like pratfall specialist Howard Smith, who amused him endlessly. (When Orson told Smith to sit down in a scene, Smith asked whether he wanted the “Fast Sit” or the “Slow Sit.”)
Pulling together a team that included technical director Jean Rosenthal and production manager Walter Ash from the Mercury staff, Orson commandeered a midtown screening room and invited people to watch Mack Sennett comedies such as Love, Honor and Behave and The Lion and the Girl, along with Chaplin’s The Kid. Orson and his creative team trooped over to the Paramount-Strand to watch Harold Lloyd’s new release, Professor Beware. Welles adored Lloyd and his masterwork, Safety Last, celebrated for the image of Lloyd dangling from a clock on a skyscraper. Orson considered it “one of the greatest, simplest films ever made.” Lloyd, another amateur magician, was passing through New York at the time, promoting his new picture, and Orson contrived to meet him at a private magicians’ club.
All this homework bolstered Orson’s ambition to shoot the film sections of Too Much Johnson as an homage to golden age comedy, with its daring physical stunts and intricate gags. He loved arguing about the relative merits of the great silent comedians—Lloyd, Chaplin, and Buster Keaton—but always insisted that Lloyd was “the greatest gagman in the history of the movies,” and disliked the vein of sentimentality in Chaplin’s work. He admired Keaton’s film The General, calling it “almost the greatest movie ever made,” and “the most poetic movie I’ve ever seen.”
To simulate the look of classic silent film, Welles needed a capable photographer, and in Harry Dunham he found a remarkable successor to William Vance, who had been the cameraman on Hearts of Age—and a precursor to Gregg Toland, who would be the cameraman on Citizen Kane. Paul Bowles, who was writing the music for Too Much Johnson, recommended Dunham. “A bit of a wild man,” in Bowles’s words, Dunham was born into affluence in Ohio and in 1931 graduated from Princeton, where he had appeared in drag in college theatricals. Later he briefly tried ballet in New York, where he befriended Bowles, pouring his inheritance into Bowles’s career. No one was ever quite sure if they were friends or lovers. (Both genders were attracted to the dashing Dunham.) Together Bowles and Dunham traveled through Morocco and lived in Paris, where they were part of the circle including André Gide, Man Ray, and Gertrude Stein. (Dunham even had a stint as Stein’s dog washer.)
Dunham eventually abandoned dance for photography—contributing to Life—and then film, making several experimental ballet shorts scored by Bowles and shooting an ethnographic documentary, Bride of Samoa, spotlighting native dancers, that played in New York on a bill with the French film Fantômas. Two years before Too Much Johnson, Dunham had returned from the communist strongholds of China with footage of Mao Tse-Tung and the Red Army, which the left-wing Frontier Films documentary collective turned into the seminal China Strikes Back. Dunham then joined the Communist Party, creating campaign films for its American presidential candidate, Earl Browder.
Dunham was not only a young master of verisimilitude who could work on the cheap; he was a reckless personality, eager to dangle from rooftops and cliffs alongside the actors. He gleefully accepted Orson’s edict to re-create the old-fashioned derring-do of golden age comedies, with their pristine black-and-white imagery and sometimes jerky, exaggerated action. Orson planned old-fashioned film sequences linked by intertitles; heavy, old-fashioned makeup for the actors; and Gay Nineties–style costumes and props, including Keystone Kop uniforms for the wild chases.
With a furiously scribbled script that left much in the scenes open to improvisation, Orson was ready to begin shooting by the latter half of July. Small crowds gathered to watch the initial filming in New York, and not all the curious onlookers realized they were witnessing the famous Mercury Theatre at work. Nor did they realize that they were eyewitnesses to film history: Orson Welles was directing his first professional motion picture, the first outside the co
nfines of his Todd School experiments: the stagebound Twelfth Night, the send-up The Hearts of Age, the assorted other home movies.
Press interest in the project was high—several reporters, including Herbert Drake of the New York Herald Tribune, volunteered for cameos—and news items confirm that the first shots filmed for Too Much Johnson involved Orson exhorting Cotten to take dangerous risks for Dunham’s camera, while hanging from the top of a five-story building on Albany Street.
The first of the three filmed segments would begin with Edgar Barrier interrupting Cotten’s tryst with Arlene Francis. Frantic, Cotten dives down a fire escape and flees madly across rooftops before hoofing it through busy New York streets. Mere steps ahead of his pursuer, Cotten arrives at the docks and leaps aboard a boat sailing for Cuba. Grabbing a railing, he clings to the ship as it sails out of the frame. This sequence was originally meant to last about twenty minutes before Act One of the live play began.
Welles incorporated dozens of extras from the crowd into the street scenes—including one amusing vignette that alluded to his father’s days as a male suffragist. Desperately trying to escape from the cuckolded husband, Cotten joins a right-to-vote parade, marching with the banner-carrying women while shifting places to keep ahead of Barrier, who is following close behind. At one point the two men stop to salute an American flag, before resuming the chase.
“[Welles] would bellow his instructions—no megaphone needed for him—from camera to set, urging his actors in the chase scenes through New York streets to more daring,” Frank Brady wrote. “At one moment Welles was behind the camera establishing a shot, and the next he was gathering his extras together and placing them where he wanted them. He also was marvelously patient with the actors, gentling and then cajoling them into a style that would look spontaneous.”
While in the city, Orson also staged the incident in the first filmed sequence in which Arlene Francis is startled by the arrival of her husband (Barrier) and must stuff a photograph of her lover (Cotten) down the décolletage of her black corset. In an often retold story, Orson requested a revealing closeup of Francis’s bosom, only to be disappointed by her modest proportions. He then entreated the Mercury’s Augusta Weissberger to step forward, “amidst the catcalls of the cast and crew,” according to Brady, and offer her more ample charms to the lens.
Orson expropriated an empty lot in Yonkers for this scene; following standard silent-era procedure, cameraman Dunham shot it as an interior within a three-walled set, leaving the room open to natural sunlight. Future Hollywood director John Berry, still a cog in the Mercury machine, stayed up all night with a small crew erecting the “indoor” set to have it ready for the morning call. (Berry also did some utility work onscreen, for example, driving the cabbage wagon into which Cotten leaps from a rooftop.) “We got the sets built,” Berry recalled years later, “the limousines with the cast started to arrive, it was maybe eight-thirty or nine A.M. Then the wind came up and blew them down. Orson said, ‘What are we going to do?’ I said, ‘We’ll get them up, Orson.’ So I organized the crew, and we sat there and held the sets up, sitting in this vacant lot, one of us in the corner of each piece of the set.
“Lunchtime—twelve, one o’clock,” Berry continued. “We’d been there all night. We’d been holding the sets up all morning. A caterer drove up and a long table was set up. Everybody was fed but the poor fuckers holding up the sets. Finally I said, ‘That’s it, guys.’ We all stood up, and the sets fell down. Orson said, ‘What’s going on, John?’ I said, ‘We’re going to eat, Orson, because we’ve been here all night.’ He had this enormously shocked and aggrieved look across his face. He said, ‘You haven’t been fed? You must take my seat. Sit!’ He got up. I said, ‘I don’t want your seat.’ He said, ‘You must!’ Of course we all went back and continued to hold up the fucking sets. Orson did that all the time—operate, manipulate, function . . .
“But it was great fun and excitement.”
Later in the day, summoned by straitlaced neighbors alarmed by the sight of a beautiful actress prancing around in undergarments, a gaggle of real city policemen appeared and demanded to see the crew’s permits. Orson had not bothered with any official paperwork (or the attendant fees), so they swiftly dismantled the set and fled the location, laughing. It was all a lark; no one gave a thought to posterity.
The second film sequence would incorporate the miniatures that were being crafted to Orson’s specifications on the Mercury stage. The resourceful art director James Morcom was busy constructing a mock Cuba, complete with a papier-mâché volcano that would be encircled by a water tank on which floated a model steamship. “The first image on the screen” for this second filmed portion for Too Much Johnson, according to Brady, whose account is based on his interviews with Welles, would be that “of the boat sailing the Caribbean. There was then a dissolve as the hand-held camera moved around . . . to the coast of the island where, from the boat’s perspective, one could see the jungle. . . . The camera continued moving slowly along the coast . . . until from a distance, through mist, appeared an imposing Georgian plantation house.”
Orson handed out bit parts to any and all comers. Some claim that a plucky receptionist in the Mercury’s theater party sales department, a blond teenager named Judith Tuvim, can be seen in the footage; years later she would change her name and become famous as Judy Holliday. Marc Blitzstein appeared recurrently, trying for a French flair in his mustache and turtleneck. “The most energetic of the extras,” reported Stage, “he appears practically all the time.” Houseman and Welles themselves donned costumes for turns as, among other things, Keystone Kops.
The third filmed sequence, set on the faux Cuba, involved the volcano exploding, and Cotten galloping off on a white horse, chased by whooping islanders. For these island sequences, the cast, crew, and director adjourned to the countryside near Sneden’s Landing, where, in a rock quarry outside Haverstraw, Orson created a Cuban-style backdrop for the horseback footage. The jungle atmosphere was deliberately phony: a wooden sign, “Santiago de Cuba,” established the setting, and crew members waved palm fronds to simulate tropical breezes. The foolishness was a joke meant to be shared with the audience. Orson’s producing partner was on hand to fill any demand: “Lying on the ground, holding a palm in one hand and the sign [for Cuba] in the other, is the dignified, scholarly co-director of the Mercury, Mr. John Houseman,” the Stage observer reported.
Although Houseman did not see it clearly at the time, by now his relationship with Welles had changed permanently. First with the radio show, now during the filming of Too Much Johnson, the “dignified, scholarly” Houseman found himself subordinated to his young partner, prone on the ground, holding up props. Too Much Johnson was almost entirely Orson’s baby. (“It was not my favorite piece,” Houseman sniffed in Run-Through.) Preoccupied with the scripts and planning for the radio series, now more than ever he ceded all the creative impetus to his partner.
Houseman’s main job for Too Much Johnson was raising money. The Mercury had started the summer with very little cash, and the situation never improved. This was Orson’s first real experience with professional-grade film stock, which was one of the primary expenses for any motion picture during that era. Shooting like crazy for ten days, Orson had accumulated roughly 25,000 feet of film, according to Frank Brady. When the bills for the film and lab work began to stack up ominously, however, he had to halt the filming without completing all the planned shots. The Mercury couldn’t even afford to process all the footage it had; Orson had the available reels delivered in relays to his suite at the St. Regis, where they formed wobbly piles, with the rolls uncurling like snakes. The Stony Creek preview of Too Much Johnson had already been announced for August 15; he would have to scramble like mad to edit what he had into a workable final product.
The editing process did not intimidate him. For one thing, according to Frank Brady, Orson had absorbed V. I. Pudovkin’s recent Film Technique and Acting, still today a bible of editing theo
ry and practice. And he had been watching and absorbing the best and most popular motion pictures, U.S. and foreign, since boyhood. As always, the real problem was time: he had just two weeks to assemble his first professional film, or half-film, while polishing the script for the live play and holding rehearsals.
Welles’s unpaid “slaves” filled his suite. “Vakhtangov” Alland raced in and out, running errands as Orson shouted at him. John Berry hovered nearby, eager to learn how editing worked. Houseman popped in and out for high-level consultations. They all waited on Orson, hoping the mastermind would make sense of the snips and piles of footage.
“On nights when he was not on the air or with his paramour,” as Houseman wrote in his memoir (never ceasing to hint more than he knew about Orson’s love life), “Orson would sit for hours at the Moviola, laughing at his own footage, while the slaves hunted vainly for the bits of film that would enable him to put his chases together into some kind of intelligible sequence.”
More than once that summer, the off-camera goings-on—the actors chased by police off the set in Yonkers; Orson’s “paramour” racing down the back stairs as his wife rode the elevator up to his suite—mirrored the farcical nature of Too Much Johnson. “To reach the bed [in Orson’s suite], the slaves, when they arrived to rouse Orson for rehearsal or for the radio show, had to wade knee-deep through a crackling sea of inflammable film,” Houseman wrote in his memoir.
Inflammable it was: the film stock of the time was manufactured with a volatile nitrate base. “One time the film caught fire,” Berry recalled. “What I remember, most remarkably, is me running with the projector in my hand, burning, trying to get out of the door and into the goddam hallway, and Houseman racing for the door at the same time—so we had one of those comic who-gets-out-first moments. . . . While Orson, with absolutely no concern whatsoever, was back inside, standing and looking at some piece of film in his hand, smoking his pipe.”
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 56