Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  This electrified response to a performance that had passed largely unremarked by either critics or audience came from a man who was quite as complex and needful as Welles himself. His life, though without the dramatic contrast and colourful incident of the younger man’s, had taken him through a startling variety of experiences and incarnations and was based, like Welles’s, on an early emotional background both conflicting and confusing. Born in Bucharest, as a child Houseman spoke French, German, English, and Rumanian. His early life was erratic and peripatetic; his parents distant, glamorous figures who handed him over to a succession of governesses. At six he was in Istanbul, where his father was stationed. At seven he was sent to Clifton College in England; while there, his father died. He was perceived to be ‘a fat French boy named fat Jack … a spoiled only child who arrived from Paris with a beautiful mama’. His fellow students set about knocking all delusions of self-respect out of him, along with any traces of foreignness, all of which delighted his Anglo-Welsh mother, who also urged him to convert to the Church of England. This confused and upset him: he felt that he was betraying his Jewish father, and himself. His mother saw no conflict, actively urging a policy of dual consciousness at every level: ‘she believed that by combining the healthy austerity of my life in England with the glamour of her own cosmopolitan world, she was giving me the best of all possible lives. It didn’t work out that way … divided between my two worlds, I belonged to neither.’

  Having won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, he took a year off to work on a farm in Argentina; while there he discovered his mother’s desperate financial straits, and, in a spirit of guilt-induced self-sacrifice, forwent the campus for the high pampas. There he made enough money to put her affairs on a more secure footing. Returning to England, he anglicised his name, but the basic duality of his existence continued, as he reviewed books for The New Statesman by night while selling grain in the exchanges by day. His firm sent him to America; after two years of listlessness in the job, he suddenly discovered ‘some inherited, long-buried Alsatian trader’s instinct’ and overnight became a brilliant success as a businessman – whereupon he gave up the job and, by now married to an actress, devoted himself to his dream of being an artist. He co-wrote a play (which was performed), collaborated on a series of translations and adaptations (which were sold), had a brief period as one of a team of writers on a Hollywood movie (which was made) then, dissatisfied with his own efforts, drifted back to New York where he became part of that city’s thriving salon society. At one gathering, he met Virgil Thomson who, taking a shine to him, invited him to direct the world première of his chef d’oeuvre, the Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts. This production of all the talents (Ashton choreography, Florine Stettheimer designs, Lee Miller photography) was a huge success, admirably co-ordinated by Houseman; after it, the toast of Hartford and later Broadway, he was unable to repeat his success, nor even find his niche. Feeling less confident with every fresh attempt, he emerged ‘with an almost total lack of faith in my own creative ability’. No existing group seemed to have a place for him, with his inflated reputation and diminished sense of identity. What he needed was a sense of purpose and a channel for his own unrealised gifts. He had reached an absolute impasse – a writer lacking the courage to write, a director terrified of entering the rehearsal room (‘my shame and fear were almost unbearable, my ineptitude so glaring that I could conceal it from nobody – least of all myself’). He needed a solution to his life.

  For no reason he could articulate, he knew that this electrifying Tybalt contained the answer. A first-night guest of the Mielziners, he went backstage to congratulate them. ‘I looked around in vain for a glimpse of the red and black costume. I left without seeing him; yet in the days that followed, he was seldom out of my mind. My agitation grew and I did nothing about it – in much the same way as a man nurtures his sense of excited anticipation over a woman the sight of whom has deeply disturbed him and of whom he feels quite certain that there will one day be something between them. He postpones the meeting until it can no longer be delayed.’ The nakedness of the language, which is repeated throughout Houseman’s account of his relationship with Welles, makes it quite clear that he knows the nature of his feelings for Orson: he experienced a submission of his whole being to another. In this there is certainly a sexual component, but its objective and conclusion is not sex. The emotion is the classic one described by Plato’s Diotima: the longing for something in another which one feels oneself to lack, mingled aspiration and abnegation, hope predicated on hopelessness; the desire for completion by one whom one perceives already to be complete.

  No two men on the face of the earth could have been less alike, and yet they might have been made for each other. They formed one of the classic working partnerships of the modern theatre; even its bust-up was classic. Both partnership and bust-up are brilliantly documented in a work which is itself a classic, though of necessity, since its author was one-half of the partnership, a somewhat biased one. Conceived on the Rousseau model, John Houseman’s three-volume memoir is a confessional and critical self-portrait, frank – sometimes blush-makingly so – detailed (he drew on his extensive personal archives, diaries, letters and documents) and stylish. He observes with a novelist’s eye, he dramatises with a playwright’s skill, and analyses with a psychologist’s precision, sparing neither himself nor anyone else. The first and best volume of the memoir, Run-Through, is dominated by Houseman’s account of his relationship with Orson Welles, a relationship which ended in recrimination, and, on one memorably reported occasion, violence. It is enthralling and convincing; but it is his version of events.

  Welles, of course, left no autobiography. Thus Houseman, to Welles’s immeasurable rage, won the war of words. His book must be quoted with caution, but its often unlovely portrait of Houseman himself lends it the stamp of truth. Welles used Barbara Leaming to pass on to posterity his side of the story. Chivalrously taking up cudgels on his behalf, she seems to think that she’s found Houseman out; but he knew exactly what he was saying, and how he was saying it. Self-knowledge is above all else what differentiates him from Welles. On the other hand, spontaneity is not his chief quality. He observes, others and himself, with hawk-like eye; but it is almost impossible for him to surrender to impulse without pre-meditation. In Sartre’s famous phrase about Baudelaire, he is a man without immediacy: like a child, as Sartre says, who plays in front of adults. Behind this lies fear. Of himself he says: ‘to anyone as frightened of life as I was …’ Orson Welles must have seemed absolutely unafraid of life, or any aspect of it. Talking to Peter Bogdanovich, who had gingerly opened up the subject, Welles said: ‘Let’s not talk about Houseman; I want to enjoy the afternoon, and he’s one of the few subjects that depresses me so deeply, it really spoils my day to think of him.’2 That was in 1965. Twenty-five years later, Houseman, who generally expressed himself on the subject of Welles in terms of ironic bafflement, declared, literally on his deathbed, that ‘meeting Welles was the most important event of my life’.3 From the first, he makes no attempt to conceal the violence of his attraction. ‘Orson Welles’s initial impact – if one was sensitive or allergic to it – was overwhelming and unforgettable.’4

  He continues the description of their first meeting in Run-Through: ‘The period of my waiting, during which the conditions of my meeting with Orson Welles were ineluctably shaping themselves, was about three weeks, but the event which finally brought us together had been germinating for months.’ Happily for Houseman, he had a project at hand with which to engineer an encounter and then, perhaps, a collaboration. Panic, Archibald MacLeish’s apocalyptic verse play about the death of a capitalist, had been doing the rounds, but nobody would touch it. Conceived as an unequivocally left-wing response to criticisms of his contentious first play, Frescoes for Mr Rockefeller’s City, it was a bold attempt to create a demotic – and specifically American – poetic language, an attempt which condemned its author to find favour
with neither realists nor classicists. This neither-one-thing-nor-the-otherness immediately commended it to Houseman, feeling himself to be in exactly the same boat. Ignoring the small detail that he had never met MacLeish, or had any communication with him on the subject, he announced in the press that he would be producing the play; this audacity led to a meeting, and finally to his securing, for a very modest sum, the rights to the play. Joined by his roguish partner, the publicist Nathan Zatkin, he determined to set up a new producing organisation: the Phoenix Theatre. With $500 in the kitty they opened offices over a burlesque house on 42nd Street and proceeded to generate excitement over their new property, inhibited in their efforts only by their inability to cast the huge leading role of McGafferty, the prototypical man of Capital. Their offer of the part to Paul Muni had been greeted with silence. It was then that Houseman saw Romeo and Juliet, and various strands of his life began to come together.

  The idea that the nineteen-year old Welles, who had struck Houseman as a ‘monstrous boy … with his pale, shiny child’s face’, would be able convincingly to play the sixty-year-old, all-powerful McGafferty in Archibald MacLeish’s Panic was, to put it mildly, a long shot, but Houseman became convinced of its rightness. Thus it was that the ‘feared and eagerly awaited moment … with its predictable consequences’ arrived. Houseman, relishing every deliciously romantic moment, paid a ‘secret visit’ to Welles during a performance of Romeo and Juliet. He found Tybalt (by now dead) half in and half out of costume and character, beardless and naked to the waist, but still covered in greasepaint, still falsely nosed. Houseman noted the discarded costume, ‘stiff with sweat’, the extraordinarily beautiful hands ‘with enormous white palms and incredibly long, tapering fingers that seemed to have a life of their own’, the play ‘about the Devil’ that Welles was working on. They agreed to meet at a bar across the road. When Welles arrived, Houseman was amazed by his boyish appearance; it was his ‘shuffling, flat-footed gait’ that identified him as Cornell’s Tybalt. His physical features indelibly impressed themselves on Houseman; he writes of them, not necessarily with admiration, but with startling precision. He was obviously hypnotised. He describes ‘his pale pudding face with the violent black eyes, the button nose with the wen to one side of it and the deep runnel meeting the well-shaped mouth over the astonishingly small teeth’; he is struck again by those mobile, expressive hands; above all, he is stirred – as so many had been before, and so many, many would be again – by the beauty of the voice ‘that made people turn at the neighbouring tables’. As Houseman acutely observes, it was not the volume of the voice that made them turn, but its ‘surprising vibration’. The power of the speaking voice is widely underestimated. Welles’s was an instrument like that of Steiner’s Hitler, a siren voice to which Houseman succumbed completely.

  During the three delicious weeks of waiting, Houseman had ‘eagerly absorbed’ the already considerable legend surrounding Welles: from it he would have expected to meet a dazzlingly precocious, multi-talented budding actor-manager of genius, a teenaged combination of Leonardo da Vinci and John Barrymore. Instinctively recognising the successor to Dadda Bernstein and Skipper Hill, Welles presented himself quite differently to Houseman. Coming on as the Boy Wonder of the Western World would not have created the emotional commitment that he required of those who provided him with the supportive context without which he could not function. He needed to create intimacy. So, applying his usual strategy, he offered himself with a mixture of deference and demand, to which Houseman immediately responded. He was both flattered and appealed to, wooed and honoured, swept off his feet and placed on a pedestal. His first impression of Welles’s power was thus tempered by a desire to protect and nurture the rare spirit who had revealed himself so completely and sweetly. Houseman gave him a copy of Panic, and arranged a meeting with MacLeish. ‘After he had gone, I was left not so much with the impression of his force and brilliance as with a sense of extreme youth and charm and of a courtesy that came very close to tenderness.’ ‘At first,’ Welles plaintively told Barbara Leaming, ‘he fell in love with me.’5 He says nothing about his own emotions, as ever. He had always to present himself as the passive and innocent recipient of love or hate, just as it was important for him to believe that his career had simply happened to him, a series of happy accidents. But in these crucial relationships, he was a very active partner, and their trajectories are often identical to those of intense love affairs.

  Interestingly, this particular relationship was opposed from the beginning by the woman who, the day after the opening night of Romeo and Juliet, became (at a glamorous candle-lit ceremony in Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, attended among others by Katharine Cornell, Guthrie McClintic and Thornton Wilder), the first Mrs Orson Welles – Virginia Nicolson, friend of Skipper’s daughters, apprentice actress at Woodstock, and Orson’s first girlfriend. In fact, in order to satisfy the stuffy landlord of the boarding-house in which they were living together, they had already been married in a secret ceremony some six weeks before. The match was opposed by Virginia’s wealthy father Leo (who, faced with the inevitable, tried to persuade Orson to join the Stock Exchange as a broker; a somewhat surreal notion) and actively encouraged by Hortense and Roger Hill, anxious that he should find a legitimate channel for his burgeoning sexuality. (They acted as witnesses at the first wedding; as a consolation prize, Maurice Bernstein was best man at the official ceremony.) All this cloak-and-dagger business, the real wedding and the false wedding, was greatly to the taste of the bride and groom, to whom getting married was essentially something of a lark. There was no suggestion of high romance. In his screenplay for The Cradle Will Rock, written in the 1980s, Welles has given himself the following speech: ‘you know what she said to the Minister? Practically on the steps of that cheesy little altar? “Reverend –” she said, “because of our youth we’re being forced to do this in New Jersey, and it’s all rather irregular, isn’t it? What I want to know is – will there be any trouble if we want to get divorced?”’ And elsewhere in the same screenplay he says: ‘the only reason she married me was to get away from home … I was the first train out of town.’ As usual, he says nothing about his own motives or feelings, but there is no reason to assume they were anything other than those of a lively and highly sexed young man. Fun was the basis of their early relationship. Even at this stage, they were scarcely equals professionally; in fact it might be said that the considerable newspaper coverage received by their marriage (the official one, of course) was the first and last time she ever stole the headlines from Orson: VIRGINIA NICOLSON BECOMES A BRIDE The New York Times, 24 December. They had no money, which might have been a problem: ‘I promised her the Great White Way, and glamour – and, you know – the whole megillah. And instead, when she got here we were splitting up Horn and Hardat’s 25c daily blue plate special, half and half, and filling up with water and free bread.’ They had found a tiny little duplex on 14th Street which was considerably more modest than any home either of them had lived in before. But they were together and in New York when New York really was New York and everything seemed possible.

  Unusually, when Welles went with Houseman to meet MacLeish, Virginia came along too. ‘A delicious child with blond, reddish hair and ivory skin’, Houseman found her to be. MacLeish was more concerned with Welles, also, to all outward appearances, a child. How could he possibly do justice to that Lear of Wall Street, McGafferty? The poet – still, according to Herbert Kline, ‘slim and graceful of movement, as he had been in his days as an Ivy League football star halfback, holding himself ramrod straight from his military service as a World War One hero’6 – expressed impatience. Then Welles read. ‘Hearing that voice for the first time in its full and astonishing range, MacLeish stared incredulously. It was an instrument of pathos and terror, of infinite delicacy and brutally devastating power.’7 In a daze of mutual excitement, Houseman beaming with nearly parental pride in his discovery – his protégé – it was agreed that Welles would play the role.
He was very happy to give two weeks’ notice to the Cornell company. In the event, it was unnecessary. Despite those glittering notices, Romeo and Juliet had not sold out, and McClintic terminated the run after nine weeks, replacing it, again, with The Barretts of Wimpole Street, which, with Brian Aherne as an unlikely but popular Robert Browning, played to capacity houses. Thus ended Orson’s involvement with establishment Shakespeare. With Panic he came in contact for the first time with the radical political theatre of his day.

  MacLeish’s conversion to the left was something of a sensation in its time. He had had a reasonable claim to being the foremost American poet from his early twenties, when, under the influence of T.S. Eliot, he had articulated ‘the voice of the hopeless individual in a chaotic postwar world’,8 in, among other works, his verse drama, Nobodaddy. Returning from Europe, he opened himself to American influence and heritage, finally, with the depression, becoming actively politicised. This development was the more surprising in view of his parallel career as an editor of Fortune magazine, and author of The Young Men of Wall Street, an admiring account of the Stock Exchange. Neither a Marxist nor even, formally, a socialist, by the time of Panic, he had become convinced of ‘the symbolic death of capitalism’. His shift was hailed in an article for New Theatre Magazine: HOW ARCHIBALD MACLEISH JOINED THE NEW THEATRE MOVEMENT, which then went on to publish scenes from Panic. Neither the play nor MacLeish were greeted with unalloyed enthusiasm by the serious left-wing theatre. His statement, being largely apocalyptic, lacked both diagnosis and prognosis, and his artistic method was ambitious to the point of elitism. But for Houseman, unable, as he felt, to function within the patterns of the existent commercial, social or art-theatre set-ups, ‘it had become necessary for me to create the image of a man who would undertake what no one else would venture. Panic was the perfect vehicle for such a demonstration.’9 Houseman was wryly able to identify with the crash of a capitalist; but he doesn’t try to conceal the fact that the whole venture had more to do with his personal ambition than any political impulse.