Women have been known to speak coyly about their out-of-wedlock lovers—yet Zorina confessed openly to other such entanglements, writing candidly about her involvement, at age eighteen, in a London ménage à trois with choreographer Léonide Massine and his wife, Eugenia Delarova. Her platonic relationship with Orson was deeply gratifying, Zorina wrote in her memoir, but within months of their “breakup,” on the day before Christmas 1938, she married her choreographer, George Balanchine.
Meanwhile, Orson still promoted his wife’s professional acting career. “Anna Stafford” had performed credibly in Too Much Johnson and other plays at Stony Creek. Now Orson cast Virginia in another small but noticeable role, as Julie, Danton’s wife, in Danton’s Death, the Mercury’s fall opener. Orson no longer needed a hotel suite for his asthma, or for editing the footage of Too Much Johnson, so when Virginia found a spacious apartment on West Fifty-Ninth Street, close to the Mercury, Orson moved back in with her and five-month-old Christopher, giving family life another try as he prepared Danton’s Death.
The Mercury radio series had soared to impressive heights during its first season, but the Mercury Theatre’s stage operation was plummeting toward insolvency. After months of expenditures with no substantial return, the partners had to start from scratch in raising money for their second Broadway season. Fund-raising was neither man’s forte. Welles wanted as little as possible to do with the money side of the Mercury, except for spending as he desired, and Houseman, by his own account, was forced to rely on emergency infusions from his upper-crust friends, or from surprise investors blowing in without warning.
For both men, outward gratitude toward their deep-pocketed benefactors conflicted with underlying resentment. Both felt like children reliant on stern parents, and for Orson “those emotions were so intense as to make it virtually impossible for him to be civil to [investors] on the rare occasions when he encountered them,” according to Houseman.
Budgeting for the Mercury still fell to Houseman, and it was his most important job. Wary of returning to their few original stockholders, he planned to raise funds from fresh investors for the 1938–1939 season with a scheme that spread the risks over the company’s three envisioned productions, promising a share of 50 percent of the overall profits to the participants. He estimated that Danton’s Death and Too Much Johnson would cost $10,000 each, with another $10,000 required for the Mercury’s share of the entire cost of the more expensive Five Kings, which Houseman had leveraged as a Theatre Guild coproduction.
Preoccupied with radio scripts, Houseman, by his own admission, neglected fund-raising. By the summer’s end he had amassed only several thousand dollars, including $2,000 pried out of “a bootlegger’s son from Brooklyn” on a promise that he could work on the Mercury radio series. But “for all our triumphs,” Houseman recalled, the Mercury “remained an ‘art theatre’—poison to the smart money and the regular Broadway angels.” By chance, in September, the Mercury bank account was suddenly boosted by $10,000 from “the most hardboiled outfit in show business,” a producing syndicate run by Marcus Hyman and Max Gordon that put a little money into various shows. “I never quite understood why they did it,” said Houseman.
Seventeen thousand dollars was all the Mercury had, starting out its second season. Before salvaging Too Much Johnson, it had to mount Danton’s Death, its biggest, most difficult, perhaps least commercially attractive production yet. The theater building would have to stay dark until the premiere, optimistically announced for late September, as the partners poured out money to pay for sets, costumes, lighting, and the salaries of the returning staff and actors. Low on cash and without any revenue stream, they had to work fast and cheap and hope to succeed wildly.
Notoriously complicated—for both stage companies and audiences—Georg Büchner’s 1835 play was set during a lull in the French Revolution and revolved around events leading up to the guillotining of Danton, a disillusioned advocate of the death-dealing revolutionary Tribunal. It had found its way onto the schedule, according to Mercury lore, when actor Martin Gabel brought a volume of Büchner’s collected plays to a July radio rehearsal, urging Orson to read Danton’s Death and consider it as a vehicle for Gabel in the title role.
But Orson was already familiar with Danton’s Death for a number of reasons. His paramour Tilly Losch had choreographed a famous German-language production of Dantons Tod for Max Reinhardt in New York in 1927. The celebrated and hugely influential Reinhardt, whose plays Orson had seen as a boy on his first trip to Europe, was a recurrent topic of conversation with both Losch and Vera Zorina, who also had danced for Reinhardt. Although he never mentioned it in any of his interviews, Orson may well have seen the New York production of Dantons Tod, which occurred during the period when he regularly visited the city with his father.
After agreeing to Danton’s Death, Houseman was taken aback to learn that Orson was going to let Gabel play the larger-than-life Danton. Houseman was convinced that the character’s “heroism, magnanimity, lethargy, and great personal magnetism” were better suited for Orson (who was also the bigger marquee name). At least that’s how Houseman told the story; Welles told Henry Jaglom that it was Houseman who preferred Gabel as Danton. “Houseman kept saying, ‘These plays are not vehicles for you. Remember, we’re an ensemble company, not the Orson Welles Players,’ ” he claimed. Either way, the partners argued about the casting, as they often did, with Orson ultimately prevailing, as was usually the case, after pointing out (“not unreasonably,” in Houseman’s words) that he couldn’t very well play Danton, and later in the season alternate as Falstaff in Five Kings, while directing both of the plays and also guiding the radio series.
They agreed to an “unsatisfactory compromise,” with Orson accepting the “brief but flashy” role of Saint-Just, a ruthless ally of Robespierre—they were both champions of the guillotine—in which role Welles could be “replaced without damage when the Five Kings rehearsals began or,” as Houseman liked to add, sneaking in another mention, “whenever the ballerina summoned him.”
Gabel was thrilled, George Coulouris not so much. It was bad enough that Gabel had been anointed as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar. Now Gabel (whom Coulouris considered his inferior) was being placed on an even higher pedestal as the titular lead of the Mercury’s second season opener. Coulouris resented the snub—and the likely pay cut. When Houseman instead offered him the role of Robespierre, Coulouris “took it coolly,” and a few days later turned the role down as “monolithic and the play turgid.” Houseman angrily told him to go to hell, and Coulouris left the stage company indefinitely. To replace him, Orson contacted the Russian-born Vladimir Sokoloff, who had been Reinhardt’s Robespierre in the earlier German-language production, and Sokoloff agreed to return to New York to re-create his role.
Coulouris was a major defection, but a few stalwarts from the original Mercury ensemble helped preserve continuity. Besides Virginia Welles (still billed as “Anna Stafford” in the program), the cast of Danton’s Death included trustworthy Joseph Cotten as the politician Barrère and Arlene Francis as Danton’s friend Marion, a prostitute. (Francis and Martin Gabel would fall in love during the long rehearsals, and they later married.) Featured parts went to Erskine Sanford, Edgar Barrier, Eustace Wyatt, Guy Kingsley, Ruth Ford, and Mary Wickes, all from the summer tryout of Too Much Johnson. Also back in the troupe were former Todd boys William Mowry Jr. and Edgerton Paul, and three “slaves”—William “Vakhtangov” Alland, Richard Wilson, and Richard Baer.
Marc Blitzstein also returned to compose an imaginative score for “voices, clarinet, trumpet, percussion and piano/harpsichord,” according to his biographer Howard Pollack. The music included arrangements of three famous revolutionary-era tunes (“Ah! ça ira,” “La Carmagnole” and “La Marseillaise”) and two original songs, including a “folkish number,” sung by Cotten and Wickes, with lyrics adapted from Büchner. Another familiar behind-the-scenes contributor was technical director Jean Rosenthal, who would overse
e the design and lighting by Stephen Jan Tichacek, a veteran of the Federal Theatre Project.
Danton’s Death called for hundreds of extras, but Orson proposed a budget-minded alternative: a background cyclorama of masks that would evoke the faces of the bloodthirsty mob of the revolution. Rosenthal purchased a slew of buckram masks—accounts put the number anywhere from 1,700 to 5,000—and had them colored by hand and glued to a curved wall of canvas enveloping the back of the stage. As Orson’s brainstorms often did, the hydra-headed wall caused headaches in other departments, requiring the creation of an elaborate lighting scheme that would allow the faces to be illuminated when needed, but hidden from view when the mob was not supposed to be present. Individually controlled lights were scattered throughout the auditorium, each numbered and with a dimmer, shining onto the stage from the front balcony, the boxes, the ceiling, the pipes behind the proscenium, and along and behind the cyclorama covering the back wall. Speaking with Peter Bogdanovich decades later, Welles readily admitted that his lighting schemes for Mercury productions were “tremendously complicated,” with Danton’s Death the most, or worst, complicated—“over 350 cues.”
No less troublesome was a huge elevator contraption Orson sketched out to occupy the center of the stage, which would rise to several levels during the drama, as high as twelve feet above the stage floor. The elevator could hold half a dozen people, and in the course of the play would become a rostrum, a prison cell, a bourgeois salon, and finally, at the climax, the dread guillotine. Orson conceived of the device as a way to change scenes swiftly without using a curtain, but Rosenthal and Tichacek struggled with the contraption, which creaked and groaned alarmingly; and it was surrounded by Orson’s beloved, treacherous trap holes, from which actors and lighting would spring.
Under the circumstances, Orson did less rewriting initially than usual, basing his script closely on the English translation of Danton’s Death from the edition Gabel had handed to him, which had been published to coincide with Reinhardt’s 1927 production. During rehearsals, though, he indulged in his usual tinkering, “endlessly shifting the order of scenes and the sequence of speeches,” Houseman recalled. The solemn play certainly seemed long, but Orson’s editing brought it down to ninety minutes.
The costs mounted, regardless of Orson’s cost-cutting ideas, and neither the rickety set nor the underrehearsed actors were ready by late September. The Mercury partners were forced to make the first in a series of highly publicized, increasingly anticlimactic postponements.
Perhaps miscast, Martin Gabel struggled to capture the Danton of Orson’s imagination. “In Caesar, there had been mutual understanding and faith” between Gabel and Welles, Houseman wrote accusingly. “None of that was evident now. Gabel was aggressive in his insecurity: he knew that he was not ideally cast and that Orson should have been playing Danton. This suspicion hung between them, unspoken and corrosive, all through rehearsal.”
Sokoloff was a consolation, onstage and off; Orson reveled in the older man’s anecdotes about Max Reinhardt and the glory days of Berliner theater—now, with Hitler in power, gone forever. The whole company stood in awe of Sokoloff’s reputation, and Orson left his Robespierre virtually alone—too much so, because Sokoloff had a thick, nearly impenetrable accent. To Houseman, Welles seemed to be going through the motions. “The show was prepared in an anxious mood that fluctuated between uneasy inertia and almost unbearable tension,” the producer wrote.
Orson did drive the actors mercilessly at times, and when he lost his temper Virginia sometimes took the brunt of it. “He was very beastly to her anyway,” recalled actor Guy Kingsley. “He shouted at her, and I suppose it’s all right, because they [were] married, but I don’t think any other actress probably would have put up with the treatment that he gave her, which was rather severe and excessive.”
There were still obvious tensions in their marriage, and the couple did not always go home together. Pushing himself to the limit, Orson moved a bed into an aisle of the theater in October, a step that was turned, like much of what he did, into advantageous publicity. “Actors Often ‘Live in Theater,’ but This Actor Actually Does,” read the headline in the New York Herald Tribune. (“For six days and nights recently he never stepped outside of the Mercury Theater,” the article claimed.) After the actors left for their homes, Orson drove the technical rehearsals relentlessly, until the crew could no longer keep their eyes open. Only when they finally crashed did Orson dismiss them and follow suit.
By now John Berry was billed as an actor, but he was also Orson’s first assistant and “green man” (“That means I was in charge of the plants—the prop man and set builder”). Often he was the last man to leave before Orson let them all go. One late, late night Orson stood onstage demanding chalk. Berry told him he didn’t know where to find chalk at two in the morning. “He looked at me with that wonderful, noble, aristocratic hauteur,” recalled Berry. “He said, ‘Why? Must you betray me too, booby?’ Berry grabbed the fire ax, went downstairs to the men’s room of the theater, broke the wall, dug out some plaster, and came back and handed it to him. “Thank you,” said Orson.
Orson counted on strong soldiers like Berry, and on the eleventh-hour inspiration and good luck and serendipity that had blessed his career ever since he and Houseman had teamed up in 1936. But none of their previous productions were dogged by the extraordinary missteps and irredeemable crises that afflicted Danton’s Death.
In prospect, Orson had viewed the political and historical context of the play—the quandary of revolutionary violence, as represented by the gulf between Danton and Robespierre—as comparable to Julius Caesar in its contemporary immediacy. But left-wing ideologues might see the play differently, Marc Blitzstein pointed out. The composer brought the partners’ attention to an October 20, 1938, article in The Daily Worker, describing Danton’s Death as a distortion of the revolutionary impulse, a play that loomed about as radical as the glossy Marie Antoinette, the new MGM picture covering much the same terrain. The communist newspaper demanded that the planned Mercury script “be changed or the show dropped from the repertoire.”
Blitzstein himself agreed with this jaundiced take on the play. Danton, he explained patiently to Welles and Houseman, could be viewed as a stand-in for Stalin’s enemy Trotsky, who by 1938 was exiled to Mexico City. Stalin, in this analogy, was the tyrannical Robespierre, while Danton’s demise could be taken as a reflection of the dictator’s ongoing “purge” trials of purportedly subversive government officials and creative artists in the Soviet Union. New York’s left-wing and labor groups had supported the Mercury Theatre since its inception. Now Blitzstein warned that Danton’s Death could be perceived as political backsliding.
Blitzstein arranged emergency parleys between Houseman and V. J. Jerome, the commissar of the cultural wing of the U.S. Communist Party, whom both Welles and Houseman had first crossed swords with when the New York left publicly dissected Panic. Politely, over tea, Houseman and Jerome debated the play’s symbolism, which Jerome felt was fraught with reactionary implications. The men agreed to disagree, but Houseman consented to remove “a few of the more obvious Trotsky-Stalin parallels” from the script. “In exchange, the Party agreed not to boycott us.”
Blitzstein wasn’t Welles’s only associate who was close to the Communist Party. Although he was progressive politically, Orson was complex ideologically in his stage and screen work, consistently displaying the human side of monsters and tyrants, for example. In this period, however, he was also careful to avoid making an enemy of the communists. He made the changes to mollify the New York leadership of their party, and at the same time he moved a key speech by his character, Saint-Just, to the very end of the play. The speech could be interpreted as validating the revolution: “Mankind shall emerge from this blood-bath like earth from the waters of the deluge—with new giant’s strength, with limbs born for the first time.” Its ambiguity would “please the Party,” as Richard France wrote, and “in fact Orson was d
elighted to have a chance to bring down the curtain [himself].” A press release assured Mercury’s left-wing base that “it is a characteristic of Danton’s own personality and not a characteristic of revolution or revolutionaries which brings him to his decadence and fall.”
Even apart from the Communist Party input, the script was ever-changing, and never more than a day or two ahead of rehearsals. At one point Welles declared he was going to revise it sweepingly and conclusively from start to finish. He sent the cast home before midnight with a call for late morning. After pulling an all-nighter, Orson decided he needed another twenty-four hours, and the cast enjoyed a rare extended break before gathering at noon on the third day. Arriving late, according to Houseman, Orson vanished into his dressing room, then rushed out with a howl moments later, having discovered he had left the newly revised script in a taxi. After “an hour” spent phoning the police and trying in vain “to trace the missing cab,” Houseman said, “rehearsal resumed exactly where it had left off thirty-nine hours before”—with the previous version.
Troubles with the actors, the sets, the lighting, and New York communists kept stalling the premiere. Originally scheduled for September 24, the first previews of Danton’s Death were reannounced for October 24, with advertisements running in New York papers on October 16. One hour after the first public preview was due to begin, however, Welles refused to raise the curtain. He and Houseman argued ferociously, but Houseman was forced to step out front and announce that the show was canceled, meekly sending ticket holders home with a vow to honor their stubs during the future run. The producer remembered the disappointed theatergoers as “a friendly middle-class group that had seen all our shows and would forgive our imperfections,” but the previews had been sold for weeks in advance as benefits for antifascist groups aiding victims of Nazi oppression, and for Manhattan physician Bella V. Dodd’s campaign for a seat in the assembly on the trade unionist American Labor Party ticket.
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 58