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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  The deal Houseman had struck with the Theatre Guild gave the Mercury creative autonomy and a $30,000 investment from the Guild in what the producer had projected as the $40,000 budget needed for Five Kings. As Houseman conceded in his memoir, however, he had bluffed about the budget ceiling and, at the time of the deal, he had no idea of the production’s scope.

  “The two things they kept asking me were how long the performance would run—to which I had no answer—and how we expected to produce a hundred thousand dollar show for forty thousand dollars,” Houseman remembered. “Since my estimate was based on the wildest of guesses, I could only reply that the Mercury had its own way of doing things.”

  Moreover, the rehearsals began when the Mercury was “without a cent in the bank and still owing money on Danton,” according to Houseman. The Guild demanded a good faith deposit toward the Mercury’s $10,000 share of staging costs, and Houseman had to extract “several thousand dollars” from a loyal stockholder. Never a gifted fund-raiser, Houseman was now a weary one. Too long had he stood in Orson’s shadow. While the producer described his behind-the-scenes manipulation of funds as “ingenious and tricky,” this was the last money he managed to magic.

  The sets had to be constructed in available space, while Orson rehearsed his magnum opus in “various empty stages” the Guild rented on behalf of the Mercury, in Houseman’s words. The director ranted and raged over the accommodations. (“Not without reason,” recalled Houseman. “For if ever a play needed ideal physical conditions to rehearse in, this was it.”) Once the rehearsals were under way, and the carpenters went to work on the set, the clock started ticking. Everything had to go according to schedule because the money spigot was turned on for materials and salaries.

  Orson did not like being confined by schedules, and he always resisted being pinned down on his rounds. Fridays were inviolate—they belonged to the Campbell radio show—but he vanished at other times, forcing the company to wait for him before starting rehearsals, or to carry on under the direction of subordinates. In the second week of January, for example, Orson flew to Chicago for a Monday lecture at Orchestra Hall for Northwestern University, a lucrative engagement that would help defray the costs of Five Kings. He also appeared at several benefits for charities and liberal causes, emceeing at an auction of rare books to benefit writers and artists exiled from fascist nations (donating to the auction his director’s copy of the “War of the Worlds” script, inscribed with doodles of Martians). Houseman often was the last to know Orson’s whereabouts, and in his memoir the producer complains vociferously about Welles’s extracurricular activities but never mentions Orson’s busy schedule of public events in the first half of 1939.

  The Five Kings rehearsals, which again the producer attended only fitfully (“I was made to feel uneasy and unwelcome”), were “undisciplined and desultory from the start,” Houseman wrote decades later. He heard “increasingly disturbing” reports from people—“Houseman people”—about their progress.

  “Some came from the directors of the Theatre Guild,” Houseman remembered. “Orson had announced that he did not want them at rehearsal; when either of them defied this interdiction, a bottle of scotch, especially kept for that purpose, was produced and Orson would call a break and entertain the cast with jokes and anecdotes until he or she had withdrawn.”

  Orson did enjoy telling stories at the beginning of the rehearsals, or during a break, to enliven the company’s mood and establish his control over the proceedings. By Houseman’s account, he was such a “prolific raconteur” that he often delayed rehearsals with long whoppers about himself and his boyhood, and “fantasies that were invented on the spot out of sheer exuberance or to cover up some particularly outrageous piece of behavior.” One time, Houseman wrote, Welles arrived “more than two hours late” for a rehearsal, wearing an extravagant dinner jacket, and regaled everyone with the yarn of his hair’s-breadth escape from “a celebrated gangster” whose wife he had romanced in Harlem, before fleeing his lover with the gangster “and his torpedoes in hot pursuit.” Two of Orson’s “slaves” had to be deputized to guard the building, Houseman added.

  Houseman had begun to view Orson as a “Champagne Charley,” given to behavior of “growing wildness” and “conspicuous extravagance.” His every meal was “a feast,” Houseman remembered, “his consumption of alcohol between one and two bottles of whisky or brandy a night; for his new apartment, which had a living room the size of a skating rink, he acquired furniture so huge that it had to be hoisted by a crane through the double windows; his sexual prowess, which he was inclined to report in full statistical detail, was also, apparently, immense.”

  Houseman thought the challenge of Five Kings intimidated Welles. It presented the specter of “Danton all over again,” the Mercury producer wrote, “and with a lot more alcohol . . . he seemed unable to organize either his material or himself,” adding pointedly, “This time I was of little help to him.”

  With growing jealousy and resentment, Houseman had read Russell Maloney’s extensive profile of Welles in the October 8, 1938, issue of the New Yorker, part of the avalanche of publicity that preceded the opening of Danton’s Death. The Time cover story on Orson had referred politely to Houseman as running the “business end” of the Mercury; now the New Yorker described Orson as the “inspiration” behind the company. Houseman had his own artistic aspirations, and he was frustrated by this public portrait of Orson as the artistic wellspring and himself as the Mercury’s business mind—when he knew better than anyone else that the business side of the company was a mess.

  The New Yorker profile was one of the first lengthy features to dwell on Orson’s boyhood, with passages about his father, characterized as “one of the oddest souls ever to come out of the Middle West.” Full of rewritten publicity language and Dr. Bernstein’s hand-me-down tales (“[Dick Welles] invented one of the first automobiles in America, but never bothered about patents because the thing seemed impractical,” wrote Maloney), the profile depicted Orson as a boy in thrall to his father, “vicariously” sampling the “wine, women and song” of Europe, the Far East and “Dixon, Illinois,” where the article inaccurately located the Hotel Sheffield. The profile reinforced Houseman’s sense that Orson behaved so extravagantly because his father’s example haunted him, and that Orson was subconsciously compelled to imitate his father’s path to self-destruction.

  “Much of what he had accomplished so precociously had been done out of a furious need to prove himself in the eyes of a man who was no longer there to see it,” Houseman wrote years later. “Now that success had come, in quantities and of a kind that his father had never dreamed of, this conflict, far from being assuaged, seemed to grow more intense and consuming.” Simon Callow took this idea a step further, saying that it took “no trained psychologist to recognize the figure of Richard Head Welles” in the character Orson chose to play in Five Kings: Falstaff, famous as “a drunkard, a trickster, a braggart, a womanizer.” Charles Higham claimed that Orson’s womanizing was one key reason he “seemed to have lost control” during the rehearsals for Five Kings, his many affairs “further dissipating his energies.”

  In Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles, David Thomson praised Houseman for “concentrating on the radio shows so that Welles could do Five Kings,” and claimed that Welles “was going on memory of the plays alone. He had little notion of the dramatic properties of the text he had adapted himself.” And his absences didn’t help: according to Callow, Orson “simply stayed away for a great deal of the allocated five weeks” of rehearsal, employing one of his slaves, Richard Baer, as a stand-in while he sneaked away with Burgess Meredith, the two rascals “roaring their way through the night in various dives and various arms.” “There was no script,” wrote Callow. “There had been no read-through; no one had seen the complete adaptation, for the good reason that there wasn’t one.”

  If there was madness in Orson’s behavior, there was also method.

  There is
no end to the negatives in the accounts by Houseman, Callow, and others—and yet, somehow, despite Orson’s supposed dissipation, and the alleged lack of a workable script, the Five Kings company made it to the Colonial Theatre in Boston in February. All of Orson’s tall tales; his late-night carousing; and his bonding, like Falstaff, with his chosen Prince Hal—these may also have been clever bits of strategy, a kind of Method approach to directing.

  Once in Boston, Orson carried on with the rehearsals in lobbies and cellars while waiting for the crew to install the massive rotating scenery onstage: “towering” and “impressionistic rather than realistic,” in the words of one Boston correspondent, “built of plain, unpainted boards, roughly nailed together.” The complicated lighting had to be hung and tested (“perhaps the biggest power plant ever installed on a theatre stage,” reported the Boston Globe). The array of dangerous props included huge mortars, real gunpowder, and flaming arrows.

  With such ambitious staging came the inevitable problems. The rotating stage platform was supposed to move as the actors marched around the stage alongside it, revealing the next setting. But the platform was as troublesome as the huge elevator in Danton’s Death: it rotated ponderously, when it turned at all, and when they tried accelerating it, the apparatus had a nasty habit of throwing itself into reverse, hurling off chunks of scenery that landed in the orchestra pit. The front rows were blanketed with noxious smoke and gunpowder fumes during the fight scenes; the flaming arrows went astray, threatening to cause a blaze. After rehearsing for long, stressful hours with the actors, Orson sent them home to bed, then worked even later hours with the crew trying to solve one technical foul-up after another.

  When the cast joined the scenery onstage—with the actors still uncertain, and the sets and the props still misbehaving—the production seemed hopelessly unwieldy and chaotic. But a Boston Globe reporter who watched hours of the rehearsals came away with no doubt as to who would win the war of wills. “Orson Welles,” read the headline of the Sunday feature, “Is an Amazing Personality, with Limitless Energy, Startling Audacity, Bombast, Patience, and Humor.”

  After three days of nonstop rehearsals, however, Welles decided it was best to postpone the much-ballyhooed opening. “I explained to Orson, as I had frequently over the past month,” Houseman recalled, “that we were now involved in the commercial big time with the Theatre Guild subscription involving tens of thousands of people and specific theatre bookings.” Welles swore at Houseman (“in that moment I was his father and every other enemy he had ever known”), then tore a phone off a nearby wall and threw it at him. “Such scenes,” Houseman wrote later, “took place almost daily during the final agony of Five Kings.”

  While every scene had been rehearsed, the company still had yet to run through the entire script of Five Kings continuously from start to finish. (The Richards, originally intended to be produced simultaneously for a two-night show, had long since been deferred.) Several days before the scheduled February 27 premiere, Orson launched the first public preview. The stage platform groaned into action, then ground to a halt. Orson had to commandeer several dozen Harvard students, who had been invited to fill the preview seats, to rush “to the cellar and push the stage around by hand,” as Burgess Meredith recalled. Supplied with beer to keep them happy, the students did a sometimes too enthusiastic job, with the unfortunate effect that “the loudest voices in the house” were coming not from the stage, as Meredith remembered, but from the cellar, shouting “Push! Pull! Forward! Halt!” The run-through went on for several hours, with interruptions for mishaps and miscues and lighting and technical fixes. The same thing happened when Theresa Helburn, a Theatre Guild official, attended another Five Kings rehearsal before the premiere, smiling patiently through the “first few hours.” The set “was impressive,” Houseman wrote, “and the transitions looked as though it might work.” At 3 A.M., though, they had still not gotten to the closing lines.

  Orson loved impossibilities. He never lost hope. He counted on luck and genius—of all sorts. “How’d we get ourselves into this frigging nightmare?” Burgess Meredith asked his director on the night of the official Boston opening. “Don’t worry,” replied Welles, as he calmly donned his suit of rubber padding, gray wig, beard enhancements, greasy rags, and heeled boots to play the elderly man-mountain Sir John Falstaff. “There is a thing called theater magic—it’s here—wait and see! Now take this pill. It’s potent. It’s called Benzedrine.”

  The curtain ascended for Five Kings. Apart from being lowered twice for brief intermissions, it stayed aloft for four and a half hours—until thirty minutes past midnight. Props went amok; actors bumped into scenery while searching in vain for their spotlights. But little of what went wrong onstage mattered to “a crowded audience, representative of the city’s highest culture in play patronage,” as the Boston Globe reported, which “was present and followed with courteous, if not always rapt attention.” Led by actress Gertrude Lawrence and her troupe, on a night off from their Susan and God tour, the audience offered “tremendous” applause and a dozen ovations ending with Orson’s “brief speech of grateful acknowledgment.”

  The New York Times closely followed the out-of-town tryout, reporting a “mixed” reaction among Boston reviewers. The Times cited one prominent local critic who found the marathon Bard ponderous and dull. But the city’s two most important newspapers—the Globe and the Herald—championed Five Kings. “Stupendous,” “singularly novel,” “comprehensive and satisfying,” declared the Globe. “Most impressive and ambitious,” “long and spectacular,” “splendid,” and “brilliantly colored,” Elinor Hughes wrote in the Boston Herald, although she admitted that “the length of the play forced us to depart after the second intermission.”

  The huge revolving set was impressive if cumbersome. (“Like Ol’ Man River,” wrote John K. Hutchens in the Boston Evening Transcript, “it threatens to engulf the show as it ‘still keeps rolling along.’ ”) The battle scenes—with cannons firing, arrows flying, broadswords and chain mail clashing in hand-to-hand struggle—were believable to the point of being frightening. All of it was wondrously enhanced, as the Globe reviewer wrote, by the production’s “amazing” lighting canopy.

  Many cast members were singled out for commendation—including Welles, whose performance, as usual jelling at the eleventh hour, was hailed by the critics as the acting highlight of Five Kings. His meticulous makeup was “marvelously amusing and effective,” the Globe’s reviewer commented. “It seems incredible that so young a man could give so robust and mature a performance,” wrote the Herald. “He misses neither the slyness, the grossness, nor the good fellowship, yet in his downfall his unstressed pathos is most moving.”

  One of Shakespeare’s favorite characters—he appears in three plays—Falstaff was also one of Orson’s. Shakespeare describes Falstaff as fat, arrogant, and cowardly, but the character is also comic and wise. “He is almost entirely a good man,” Welles told British television interviewer Leslie Megahey several decades later. “He is a gloriously life-affirming good man.” Although he himself was only twenty-three, Orson foresaw the wreck of old age and good intentions gone wrong in such a gloriously life-affirming man. He played Falstaff’s key scene, after Prince Hal ascends the throne, for sublime tragedy. Falstaff intends to exploit their friendship for privileges, but Prince Hal, now King Henry, rebukes him in front of his friends with a long, humiliating recitation of his bad habits. “I know thee not, old man!” the King declares, before leaving Falstaff alone onstage with Shallow, Pistol, and Bardolph.

  In that moment, as Falstaff is forced to save face with lies, Orson turned toward the audience and stammered proudly through tears: “Well, he’s just saying that now . . .” Actor Martin Gabel, who attended the Boston premiere of Five Kings, said: “Not Henry Irving, not Beerbohm Tree, not anybody could have done this scene as effectively as Welles did it.” The same humiliation scene, in Welles’s later film Chimes at Midnight, is the highlight of that Shakespe
arean masterwork, and arguably also of Welles’s screen acting career.

  Yet even its staunchest admirers allowed that the marathon production needed cutting and refinement. And within days of the premiere, Boston newspapers were reporting that Welles had “materially shortened the performance and it now ends at a reasonable hour. Scenes that were not of vital importance to the continuity of this condensation of Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, parts one and two, and King Henry V, have been eliminated, and the changing of the amazing settings has been speeded up.”

  The changes would continue throughout the thronged two-week run in Boston, but neither Houseman nor the Theatre Guild team would be heartened by Welles’s public declaration, made to the Boston Herald and recycled in the New York Times, that it would take “at least a year” on the road before Five Kings could be presented on Broadway the way he wished to present it—with the Richards lagging far, far behind.

  During the Boston run, Virginia Welles visited the Colonial Theater for two nights. John Houseman called the trip “a strange, sad attempt to recapture the past,” adding that “on the third morning she left for New York, and in due course, for Reno.” But Virginia was in Boston partly to help firm up a plan for “Anna Stafford” and other Mercury players to take over the Bass Rocks Theatre in Gloucester for the summer, much as they had done at Stony Creek the year before. After Boston, moreover, Virginia headed to a getaway with her parents in Palm Beach, Florida, and she would turn up at Orson’s side repeatedly in the first half of 1939. His letters to her make it clear that he believed they had reached a truce in their marriage. Reno and divorce did lie ahead, but only after further dramatic developments, and not for another year.