Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  The directors of the Gate had taken an enormous gamble in hiring him for such a pivotal role. Welles seems to have had no doubts of his ability to play the part, but then he was being kept very busy in the paint shop and the press department as well as in the rehearsal room, so can barely have had time for doubt – Micheál pictures him at the time: ‘He had indeed that unwavering energy of those that are born for the stage, and after rehearsing the Duke all day and raging round the town from show to show, from Jimmy O’Dea at the Olympia to some earnest young group of Left players reciting Roar China in a gaslit garage, he would gobble supper in Noonan’s or the Kitchen or harangue a group of Trinity students or Gaelic Leaguers or the like until the small hours, when he would return, if we gave him the permission and the keys, to paint flats for us at the Gate until somebody fished him up from a bucket or down from a ladder or gave him breakfast.’15 Whatever misgivings Micheál and Hilton may have had there was no going back: on 10 October 1931, the play was announced, including the following: ‘A newcomer to the large cast will be Orson Wells [sic] who served his apprenticeship to the stage at the Goodman Memorial Theatre in Chicago under the direction of Whitford Kane, formerly of the Ulster Literary Theatre.’ Perhaps he found he could sustain a story about the Goodman better than one about the Theatre Guild – he had after all acted on its stage, though not as part of its company, and never under Kane’s direction. The mention of an Irish name was a smart move. In his long letter to Roger Hill (with a mock formal frontispiece saying A SERIES OF PARAGRAPHS DEALING SOLELY WITH MYSELF) he writes on the last page: ‘Tonight is the first dress rehearsal and the day after tomorrow night I make my professional debut (ahem!) – in a foreign country – and in the most accent-conscious city on the globe!’ At the top of the page is a sketch of his periwigged head; above it, in a bubble, the words OH! YEAH!

  OH! YEAH! indeed. ‘In all the striving years since my debut, I have never achieved such an ovation,’16 Orson said, and for once, this may be the unvarnished truth. The first night of Jew Süss was Orson’s night, one of those occasions – theatrical and operatic history is full of them – when a newcomer creates an excitement verging on hysteria that the greatest artists at their height cannot create, and that they themselves can never duplicate. The effect is perhaps even more startling in a small city (Dublin’s population was a fraction of London’s, and it had perhaps a tenth the number of theatres) and in a small theatre. The Gate held just over four hundred people. For this occasion, it was packed: the Abbey was away on tour, and, more importantly, the company had, for the first time since moving to its new premises, established a regular audience that it could rely on. They were rooting for the show, which was anyway quite a hot property, a London hit of only four years before, never seen in Dublin. It was a Big Night and no mistake.

  Previews were a thing of the future: in Dublin, in 1931, the First Night was the first night. Hilton’s technical rehearsals were legendarily long-winded affairs, sometimes going over two days. He was something of a pioneer in lighting, an absolute innovator in the Irish theatre, but a restless experimenter by any standards. There is every chance that there had never been a full run-through of the play until that first performance. Adrenalin must have been running at dangerously high levels. Orson often claimed that he had never known stage fright until that night, but his appetite for the fray surely converted such nerves as he had into raw energy. An audience never fails to respond to that appetite, that need, which has a kind of innocence, naked in its lust to perform. He uttered a prayer to Ming Huang, the Chinese patron saint of actors, and entered the stage, as he later said, ‘in the bliss of ignorance, like a baby on a trapeze’.17 His first sight of the audience, he said, confirmed Edwin Booth’s description of it as a ‘crouching and invisible beast’. Then he began, scattering his oafish insults and libidinous glances, ‘a full-blooded soldierly figure in field-marshal’s uniform’,18 fully thirty-five years younger than the character he was playing.

  MANAGER

  I beg you to respect his highness’s privacy.

  KARL ALEXANDER

  Privacy – trash! We live in a royal window, and the rabble are welcome to rub their greasy nose on the glass … we are used to be stared at, as a soldier is used to fire and a pretty woman to kisses … they have seen me before, for my picture hangs in all their kitchens to be smoked between a pair of hams.

  ‘When Orson came padding onto the stage with his lopsided grace, his laughter, his softly thunderous voice, there was a flutter of astonishment and alarm, a hush, and a volley of applause,’19 Mac Liammóir wrote. Hilton, as was still the custom, brought Orson forth at the first short interval, then again at the second. ‘Hilton said some words of praise and introduction. Orson swelled visibly. I have heard of people swelling visibly before, but Orson is one of those who really do it.’ The play resumed. Orson was by now very high indeed. Betty Chancellor as Naomi had her big scene with him; a love scene. ‘His extraordinarily mature acting fell apart. He was then obviously embarrassed and unsure and he tried to hide this by gripping me with such violence that I nearly lost my life but certainly not my virtue.’20 During the second act, he murmured the phrase ‘A bride fit for Solomon. He had a thousand wives, did he not?’ and was so fazed by a cry from the audience of ‘that’s a black Protestant lie!’ that he mangled his next line: ‘Ring the canons and fire the bells!’ Before anyone could interrupt, he hurled himself down the steps, and was greeted by an even greater ovation than he had received before. ‘Dubliners, besides being very keen critics, are also generous with their praise, and I don’t suppose that anything like that frenzied back-flip had been seen on the shores of the Liffey before.’21

  He took his final curtain call to a roar of acclaim. At the back of the theatre, or perhaps lurking in the wings, all unknown to Orson, was Micheál Mac Liammóir (who had designed the play but was not in it), observing and judging.

  Orson bows slowly, sedately; that they should realise him like this merits a bow, so slow and sedate the head goes down and quickly up again, up higher than ever, for maybe this is all a dream, and if the eyes are on the boots, blood rushing to the ears, who knows that sight and sound may not double-cross and vanish like a flame blown out, and Orson be back at school again, hungry, unsatisfied, not ready yet for the world? No, the people are still there, still applauding, more and more and more, and back goes the big head, and the laugh breaks out like a fire in a jungle, a white lightning slits open across the chubby sweating cheeks, the brows knit in perplexity like a coolie’s, the hands shoot widely out to either side, one to the right at Hilton, the other to the left at Betty, for you don’t mean to say that all this racket is for Orson? What about Hilton and Betty? And anyway there’s Ashley Dukes, and there’s a man called Feuchtwanger, isn’t there? But whoever it’s all about it goes on and on, then trickles back a little like a sea slowly receding, receding, curling away like a fire burning out, fading inexorably, emptying itself hollow; and God damn that stage manager anyway. Couldn’t he easily steal a couple more of them before the thing dies down? Take that curtain up again, you silly son of a bitch; to taste the last, to drain it dry, no meat left clinging to the bone: no, no! listen! three pairs of hands keep on, then two, then six, then sixty, and then – ah! – then the whole house again, and up goes the curtain once more and the light shoots like a rainbow through the eyes and the unappeasable head rears up round as a cannon ball: no bowing now, no boot-licking booby tricks, let them have me as I am and so. And so. And the jaws snap, crunch, and then the foolish curtain closes down. For the last time. The last time.

  The violence of this passage leaps off the pages of All for Hecuba with disturbing savagery. Clearly Mac Liammóir was angry at the eclipse of Hilton and Betty Chancellor: ‘Hilton’s beautiful performance of Süss with its suffering pallor, its agonised repression, the slow-mounting horror of its martyrdom and pain was approved and taken for granted, and so was Betty’s exquisite Naomi, all amber and carved ivory.’ But there’s more,
something darker and deeper than that in this account, written, or at any rate published, some fifteen years after the event. There’s a real loathing, if not of Orson, then of an aspect of him: his crude lust for applause, ruthlessly vainglorious. It’s not the only time in All for Hecuba that Micheál, avowedly a friend, turns a remorselessly harsh light on the boy (still, let us not forget, sixteen years old, and in his first professional job). Was there a sense in which Micheál envied what he saw in Orson – a sort of hugeness of appetite for public approval, a capacity for fame on a scale that Micheál had explicitly renounced by establishing himself in Dublin, an obscure corner of the English-speaking theatre? Did he (by no means oblivious to acclaim) see himself unattractively mirrored in Orson’s shameless stimulation of the audience? The note that seems to underlie the raillery is one of disappointment; a feeling that Orson had somehow betrayed himself, and perhaps betrayed Micheál too.

  The complexity of the relationship between Micheál, Hilton and Orson needs to be considered for a moment, though nothing definitive can be said on the subject. Orson in later life – after their deaths – spoke very differently of the two of them, seeking to derogate Micheál, and to endorse Hilton. Micheál was, in this late view, a shrieking, screaming queen, ridiculous in his make-up, insatiable in his desires and full of malice. Hilton was a terrific chap, trusting, warm, good-natured, who should really have been heterosexual. (‘He just fell under the spell of Micheál, you know, who ruled him like the Queen of the Night,’ he told Leslie Megahey on BBC television.) Preposterously, he told Barbara Leaming that Micheál felt threatened by Orson’s friendship with Hilton – ‘the friendship of two men with no sexual overtones’22 – fearing that Hilton might be restored to heterosexuality, a laughable insistence by Welles that his heterosexual orientation was so powerful as actually to be contagious. In fact, Betty Chancellor noted that Orson at that age was abnormally immature in any kind of sexual discussion ‘or even in playing a part that called for a romantic side’;23 scarcely a good role model for Hilton’s wavering orientation. What seems more likely is that Orson was drawn to Hilton as a father-figure – not the first time this had happened – and that he had used his uniquely seductive charms to gain Hilton’s affections.

  If Hilton had betrayed so much as a flicker of interest in the boy – whether emotional or sexual – Micheál would certainly have moved in on him with the speed and the venom of a black mamba.24 Micheál may even have known what Orson was attempting before Orson himself did. There was something witch-like about him, as he freely admitted, with his intuitive, thought-reading faculties. Talking about Micheál’s alleged absence from his first six weeks in Dublin, Orson cited as proof that ‘Micheál would have seen through it, you see, and Micheál didn’t like the fact that Hilton had that kind of gullibility. Micheál hated the fact that I had put over anything on them.’ It may even be that Orson had tried to charm Micheál. Hortense Hill had written to Orson: ‘The only thing that might happen is that you might meet a brilliant person that was fascinating company that – ’ ‘What dire threat were you about to make and what sinister power stayed your hand??????’ wrote back Orson. ‘Seriously, my purse and my virtue are intact and will remain so long as I confine myself to my present company.’ If he did try to charm Micheál, he was taking on more than he could handle. Micheál was passionate and elusive, emotional and unwavering, skittish and savage. He was all of these things by turn, sometimes all at once, and he knew it; knew himself with awful familiarity, and he was able to bring all these things to his acting, though he was just as capable of substituting for it a much inferior high-flown manner. His writing – the very account of Orson’s first night – was, for all its beguiling wit and fantasy, sometimes possessed of a startling ugly honesty. Perhaps he saw, and deplored, to what extent Welles was substituting energy and exuberance for his real self: a self, despite Orson’s denials (‘I am like Hilton; I believe anything anyone tells me’25), not entirely dissimilar to Micheál’s.

  None of these complexities could have clouded Welles’s delight in his notices for Jew Süss and his continuing acclaim in the role of Karl Alexander. ‘Tonight,’ he wrote to Hortense Hill, ‘I took 6 curtain calls alone – with the gallery and the pit shouting and stamping and calling out my name. This sounds like an appalling boast, and so it is.’ Understandable, and forgivable: every single notice praised him, in detailed terms. Dublin Opinion reported that ‘the young American actor received nothing short of a personal triumph’, The Herald pronounced his impersonation ‘interesting at every moment’, while The Independent found ‘a touch of humanity and simplicity in his swinishness which in less expert hands might have been lost … Orson Welles captured it magnificently.’26 Everywhere the performance was held to be ‘a notable success’ and ‘excellent’. That shrewd, spinsterish self-appointed commissar of the Dublin theatre, Joseph Holloway, confided to his diary that Welles ‘looked the uncouth, hard-drinking, loud-voiced brute the author intended him to be and made quite an impression by a clever character study. He was blustering and sensual and repellent.’27

  The Dublin critics did not, none the less, abandon all sense of proportion. The Irish Times struck a cautionary note that was repeated elsewhere: ‘It will be necessary to see him in other parts before it can be said that he is the accomplished actor that he seemed last night in a part that might have been especially made for him.’28 ‘Whether it is that there has never till now been a character like Karl Alexander portrayed at the Gate,’ wrote ‘N’ in the Weekly Times, ‘or whether Welles is really a brilliant actor, remains to be seen.’

  No such reservations were made in what was for Welles the most important of these notices. J.J. Hayes, the New York Times’s man in Dublin, nailed his colours to the mast in his report: ‘the Duke is played by a young American actor, 18 years old, whose performance is astonishingly fine.’29 Hayes then offered a brief synopsis of Welles’s Irish expedition, dangerously recycling a legend to which some of his American readers would have been able to give the lie: ‘Welles, who had appeared occasionally at the Goodman Theatre Chicago and in small parts with the Theatre Guild in New York …’ Reporting the first night triumph, Hayes outlined the prodigy’s future plans: ‘Dublin is eager to see him in other roles … his coming will probably lead to the production of Coriolanus, which was shelved … because a suitable man could not be found for the title part … 35 years since it was done in Ireland by Sir Frank Benson.’

  Now this really is publicity of a kind indispensable at the start of a career. How fortunate that he should have had a tremendous admirer in the Gate’s press office: one Orson Welles. There is no question that Welles made a smash at the beginning of his time in Dublin, but the continuing waves that his name created owe not a little to the fact that he was in constant contact with the press, and able to feed them stories whenever things were a bit slack. The Coriolanus story is a real novelty; actually not such a bad idea: Aufidius’s scornful ‘boy’ would have had a peculiar resonance. Nothing came of it, probably because it had just entered his mind at that moment, and went out of it a moment later.

  ‘People began to talk about Orson,’30 wrote Mac Liammóir. ‘ “Young Welles” they called him, with that curious bantering sense of self-congratulation the public feels when its new idol has not reached the age of twenty; and many Dublin matrons had a proprietary look in their eyes when they praised him as though they had given him birth and were vaguely responsible for the wayward and unexpected qualities of his talent.’ He became the toast of Dublin, when, that is, he was not painting flats, catching midnight matinees, and rehearsing for the next play. ‘It will delight you,’ he wrote to Hortense Hill, ‘who so long have lamented my social delinquencies, to know that I am now found in the society of young femininity and that I blossom in starched shirt front once or twice a week, to the edification of various Dublin “sets”!’ He made the acquaintance of the Gate’s principal supporters, later arch rivals, the Earl and Countess of Longford, Edward – the Ear
l – revealing that ‘his favourite words were virile, pronounced virral and futile, pronounced footle. “Life is footle, Lord LongFORD,” he used to say; “life is footle.” He was a great man at a party. When he thought a party had gone on long enough, he would say, “Take me out to Kilmashogue to see the fairies!” I don’t know that anyone ever did.’31 His sheer Americanness fascinated everyone: Denis Johnston wrote in his diary about ‘the new American boy Orson Welles playing what he calls “The Dook”.’32 Lady Longford, wit and novelist, was given the full guided tour: Orson Welles, The Early Years: ‘The extraordinary thing about Orson was that he became a legend almost at once. Everyone started talking about him … that he had walked round the Great Wall of China; that he had played in Greek plays in Greece and had Turkish baths in Turkey. He was said to be eighteen at first, and later seventeen. But one thing was certain – he could act. There was no doubt about that. And another thing was, he was as nice and friendly as could be.’33

  Quite apart from the cocktail circuit, Dublin in 1931 was an extraordinary place to be. The Irish Free State, newly established, was conducting its affairs with some panache. The terrible beauty born in 1916 had transformed itself into the forms and structures of regular government: Denis Johnston recalled the lavish viceregal hospitality of the period, remembering 1931 as being ‘a time of balls and parties’.34 The city’s life was a curious blend of the stately and old-fashioned with the politically historic. V.S. Pritchett, just a few years before, noted that ‘people had tea parties. They lived on cake. One was back in Mrs Gaskell’s country world; and at the same time was thrown forward into the first conflict of colonialism.’35 The heroic figures of the recent past were very much present: as recently as 1929, Maud Gonne MacBride had been arrested. ‘British or Irish Free State seems to make no difference. She is still evidently considered a stormy petrel,’36 wrote Joseph Holloway. Pritchett was alarmed, taking tea with Yeats, to see him go to the window and ‘swoosh the tea leaves into Merrion Square, for all I knew on the heads of Gogarty, AE, Lady Gregory, James Stephens – who might have popped over from the library or the Museum.’ Yeats remained a commanding figure in the community. The theatre – despite the temporary absence of the Abbey – was still a central event in its existence, whether the plays were actually attended or not. The debates over O’Casey were still raging: was his picture of Irish history and the Irish character acceptable? It was a mere two years since The Silver Tassie had been turned down. St Stephen’s Green was daily agog with the events of the previous night on stage, a sort of living newspaper; the various factions were regulars in the soap opera that was Dublin’s daily life. So the arrival of a very young American actor at the still controversial, the still radical and daring, Gate Theatre, was an event.