Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  He assembled an immensely strong production team: Jo Mielziner and Martha Graham (both fresh from Romeo and Juliet), Abe Feder to light, Virgil Thomson to write music and control the choral speaking; the cast consisted of twenty-five principals and a chorus of twenty-three. The Imperial Theatre was hired. Understandably, Houseman withdrew from directing the play, since to mount a piece of this scale on a budget of $3,000 – two-thirds of which had come from the poet himself – demanded full-time cajoling, wheedling, charming, calling-in of favours and pledgings of eternal gratitude. Before handing over the actual staging to Martha Graham and James Light – a recruit from the Provincetown Players – Houseman, Mielziner, and Abe Feder (‘pale-faced, garrulous, exhaustingly eager and ambitious’) devised a setting of monumental simplicity, a sharply raked stage with a great trench just beyond the regular footlights which, filled with powerful lights, and supplemented with others from above, created a wall of light, an effect which later became almost synonymous with Welles’s productions at Project 891 and the Mercury Theatre. Rehearsals, scattered across the city, proceeded with great intensity, particularly the choral sections under the galvanising command of Martha Graham. The individual scenes – the ones which concerned Welles as McGafferty – were under the control of James Light, who proved to be somewhat frail under pressure. Welles, onstage almost continuously, became the solid foundation of the whole enterprise: contradicting his ‘hair-raising’ reputation, his conduct was ‘from first to last, perfect’. Patient with James Light, considerate with his fellow actors, ‘to his own part … he brought us, as a free gift, the strength, the keen intelligence, the arrogance and the prodigious energy of his nineteen and a half years.’10

  The production and Welles both received full marks for trying; Welles was held by the Times to be ‘excellent’ while the New York American remarked that ‘for such a young actor as Welles to play McGafferty as ruthlessly, as interestingly as he did was a genuine feat and puts him up as one of the most promising artists of our day.’11 One imagines his performance may have been rather like the middle-aged Kane; certainly some of his text could be Kane’s:

  The Revolution!12

  That kind!

  The sick souls

  Herding like hogs in the hang of the dark to be rid of the

  Man’s burden of living their forefathers won for them! –

  Rid of the liberty! – rid of the hard choice! –

  The free man’s choosing of the free man’s journey!

  Welles excelled from the earliest age at playing monolithic patriarchal figures, halfway turned to stone – Mount Rushmore on legs. His noble lower register, trombones doubled by cellos, would make sense of the vigorous, ugly verse if anyone could (as later, in MacLeish’s acclaimed radio play The Fall of the City he was to do with great success). He evidently took McGafferty on his journey from ascendancy to collapse and ultimately silence and suicide with complete conviction. For him, Panic was a triumph; as it was for most of the performers. The play itself was more controversial: greeted with respectful admiration by The New York Times (‘the work of our protean poet’),13 it was excoriated by the Evening Journal: as ‘a pretentious bore’.14 More kindly, Edith Isaacs believed that ‘the words of the play were packed too tight for the use of a theatre not used to the gaunt fullness of poetry’.15 The fledgling Phoenix Theatre deserved congratulations, Brooks Atkinson told the readers of The New York Times, for ‘reviving an impulse that our middle-aged stage has long been lacking’: the theatre of public debate.

  In truth, the opposite seems to be the case. Panic, as written, reads like the work of a middle-aged aesthete trying to rejuvenate himself by grafting the monkey-gland of political commitment onto his art; as performed, in contrast to the work of other radical groups of the time, its experiment seemed aesthetically motivated, its expressive devices not functional but decorative – imitatively decorative at that. With its vatic Blind man, its jagged stagecraft, and its powerfully obscure statements it is almost parodistically Toller-like. It is a little hard to determine, for example, what exactly is meant by the triumphantly shouted final line (‘Man’s fate is a drum!’). The truth, as Houseman swiftly realised, was that Panic was already vieux jeu both in its artistic gestures and in its preoccupations: America wanted to forget what Variety memorably described in its review as the ‘busto-crusto days of 1933’; there were new crises, other battles.

  Of public debate there was none – in the play, that is; in the auditorium there was a great deal, on the exciting third and final performance. The first performance, a preview, was a subscribers-only show, consisting, according to Herb Kline, of MacLeish’s rich friends, who were respectful. The second performance was the Press Night, with the usual awkward mix of the curious, the committed, and the critical. The third performance, however, sold for $1,000 to the New Theatre, was, as Houseman wrote, ‘swept by one of those groundswells of excitement that were characteristic of the period … the theatre became far more than entertainment or even artistic release’.16 The excitement was real; but it was also stage-managed by the American Communist Party. It was intended as a Marxist equivalent of a Gospel meeting; the climax would be the public conversion of ‘our protean poet’, MacLeish himself. The post-show ‘discussion’ was carefully marshalled towards this end. ‘To accomplish this, the heads of the party’s cultural apparatus assembled their strongest and subtlest forces on the stage of the Imperial Theatre for a ceremony which seemed to fall somewhere between an exorcism and a conversion, a kidnapping and an auto-da-fé.’ Houseman’s description, a masterpiece of comic writing, details the elephantine engagement of the party with aesthetics, precisely catching the ponderous theatricality of its procedures and the self-righteous pomposity of its tone, embodied in the Chestertonian person of Party Secretary, V.J. Jerome. ‘His face was pale, his eyes sorrowful, his voice gentle and cultivated with a faint trace of a Whitechapel accent. The hiss of the bourgeoisie is the applause of the proletariat! – Was it not Lenin who said “The bourgeoisie does not fall. The Proletariat drops it!”?’ He was a familiar part of the theatrical landscape of these immediately pre-war years.

  MacLeish, unsurprisingly, failed to succumb to Jerome’s Victorian rhetoric. Declaring himself, in carefully chosen words, for decent living conditions and for social justice, he eluded the Party’s net. Welles, reluctantly in attendance, was much amused by the proceedings, even indulging in a little good-natured barracking. The issues were not ones with which he had so far concerned himself. In time, he would come to be an eloquent spokesman for the liberal cause, especially in its anti-racist, anti-fascist manifestation; but his relationship with the Communist Party was always an uneasy one. Soon, however, both he and Houseman would be obliged to reach some sort of entente with the Forces of Progress: the times had forced the theatre out of its ivory tower and into direct engagement with events, and the Party was experiencing one of those rare periods when the national temper brought it into the mainstream of political consciousness. As a vocal and highly organised division of that loose-knit army, the Broad Left, it claimed and received serious attention. For the time being, however, Panic quietly died down, with MacLeish a free agent, the Phoenix Theatre, $35,000 in debt, immediately consigned to the flames again, and Welles and Houseman at loose ends.

  Welles had at the very least gained critical kudos, if nothing else. To go from a respected Tybalt to an acclaimed McGafferty was excellent progress for a nineteen-year-old. There was something else, too: an apparently insignificant side-effect of Panic which soon developed into a major thread of Welles’s life and work. Houseman – or more likely Nathan Zatkin, the tireless publicist half of the partnership – had arranged for an extract from the play to be recorded for a radio arts programme. Thus Welles had his first important introduction to a medium which he was soon to make peculiarly his own, and which might have been invented for him; from a practical point of view, it introduced him to the possibility of making a substantial income.

  He had alr
eady been hired by Paul Stewart to appear on School of the Air of the Americas, where he had met the twenty-nine-year-old Joseph Cotten. With them it was laugh at first sight; coming upon a line, in a programme about colonial administration, which referred to ‘barrels and barrels of pith’, it had been almost impossible for them to get through the show without collapsing. A different Welles was glimpsed by Dwight Weist, one of the most versatile and hence most in-demand of radio actors of the period. He was there when Welles came to record the extract from Panic. ‘I saw this very strange guy dressed in a strange ill-fitting suit and he walked very funny. He never moved his shoulders, arms hanging limply by his side and sort of getting off in a corner by himself. And he was a strange-looking man. He looked like a Eurasian with a head that seemed to be too big for his shoulders, a mouth almost too small for his face which was sort of round, rosy cheeks. And I thought “What is this guy going to sound like when he gets in front of the microphone?” Then all of a sudden he gets in front of the microphone and you get the famous Orson Welles voice, and I thought, “Oh, OK.”’17 The ‘surprising vibration’ that Houseman had noted during their first meeting was superbly apt for the microphone, allowing its owner to create an uncanny intimacy with the listener. Compared to this facility, his other gifts – his command of phrasing, his latent power – were unimportant. From the beginning, he was able to use his voice in a way that flattered and stimulated. The smile in his voice is positively audible, as is the arched eyebrow. Welles has also been praised for his versatility, but compared to a Dwight Weist, this was low down on his list of accomplishments. His command of accents was general, and though he could vary the pitch of his voice, its timbre gave him away every time. ‘He impressed them with his voice really – he was a reasonably good actor – I don’t think anyone has said he was a great actor – but he was a personality,’ thought Weist. ‘From the very beginning when he was starting out there was never any question in Orson’s mind that not only was he a great personality but he was going to get there and he never had any doubts about himself and his ability.’ The story goes that while Panic was being recorded at an adjacent studio, Time magazine’s highly successful programme The March of Time which specialised in dramatic reconstructions of the day’s big news stories was doing a feature on the quintuplets just born to a Mr and Mrs Dionne. Needing somebody to impersonate the babies, they roped Welles in, and he did all five.

  He began very soon to be part of what the Saturday Evening Post described as ‘a select group of anonymous radio artists who shuttle about from station to station taking part in many programmes every day’.18 The radio boom was at its height, commercially speaking, still holding its own against the fledgling talking-picture industry (a mere eight years in existence in 1935). Welles was very happy to dash from studio to studio, making a great deal of money. Within six months he was earning an average of $1,000 a week, a sensational sum for almost anyone in depression America; for a twenty-year-old tyro actor, it was prodigious. The motive for working quite so hard was more than simply financial. Dwight Weist was on one occasion part of a pool of actors who were, along with Welles, vying for roles. ‘The director was auditioning people for Shadow Play – I don’t think anyone had heard Noël Coward – and Orson said “I AM Noël Coward!” and he stepped up and in his very loud voice proceeded to do something which didn’t sound anything like Noël Coward at all but which was Orson Welles doing his idea of an English accent and he got the part. Why? His showmanship. He had this thing in him which got the part … it was very important to him … we didn’t get any more money if we played one part or a dozen parts. For the abdication edition of The March of Time Orson was not chosen to play Edward – it bugged him – not that he didn’t get the part but that he wasn’t the best.’ Not to be the best was always intolerable to Welles; the never entirely silent voice of Beatrice Welles, sounding deep in his cranium, forbade it.

  Welles’s radio career built up steadily over the months following the recording of the Panic extract. Meanwhile, he and Houseman consolidated their relationship. For Houseman, it was a heady time, and there is no reason to doubt that the same was true, in different degree, for Welles. Encountering what appears to be a kindred spirit is always exhilarating, perhaps especially so when sexual consummation is not a part of it. In this instance, Houseman’s unqualified admiration for Welles, and the openness of his enthusiasm, powerfully endeared him to Welles, who throve on approval, and was lost without it. He ensured that he made himself entirely available to the older man. When Houseman first visited him at his duplex (‘a curious one-room residence’)19 he was still in his bath, ‘his huge, dead-white body appeared swollen to gigantic proportions. When he got up, I discovered his bulk owed nothing to refraction.’ The bath, with a plank on top, doubled as the marriage bed. Mrs Leaming characteristically assumes from Houseman’s description of Welles’s physique, above, that he was phallically fixated on him; but what, one wonders, does she think Welles was up to by meeting Houseman in his bath? Trying to impress him? To dominate? Or perhaps simply to wrongfoot him – to discombobulate and disorientate him.

  If he thought that Houseman was possibly bisexual, and sensing how intensely the older man was drawn to him, he may have wanted to put it to the test. Or perhaps, more innocently, he was simply proud of his physique and wanted to show it off. The only clues we have to any of this come from Welles’s divulgences to Barbara Leaming. In her openly hostile account of Houseman and his relationship with Welles, she seems to blame Houseman for being attracted to him. Her implication is that Houseman was erotically and psychically obsessed with him, and that the seeds of his later destructiveness (her word and Welles’s) was present from the start. On the other hand, she admits that Welles saw how useful Houseman could be, and shamelessly seduced him. The crucial difference is that she seems to think that perfectly reasonable: Houseman deserved it, in some unnamed way (for being a repressed homosexual? for being a manager and not an artist?). Or perhaps she simply thinks – as, obviously, does Welles – that it was the duty of everyone he came across to advance his career and expect nothing in return. Houseman’s crime is that he wanted to be, not an ancillary, but a partner.

  Perhaps wisely, they rarely met in each other’s houses, instead spending hours ‘drinking coffee in odd places’. This period has the same place in their relationship as the legendary meeting of Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky at the Slansky Bazaar. Houseman and Welles became so excited by their shared dreams that they repaired to a suite at the top of Sardi’s (the key furnished by Nathan Zatkin) to continue their fevered exchanges in the office of the Mendelssohn Society of America. Under the bronze and surely disapproving gaze of that very proper composer, they spent hours ‘talking, dreaming, laughing and vaguely developing schemes for making bricks without straws. Each was an improvisation, an inspiration or an escape: our response to an emotional impulse rather than the considered execution of a plan … we were seized with a sudden, compulsive urge to produce a play together.’ The play they chose was ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (with Doctor Faustus as a possible alternative). ‘Orson’s dominant drive, at this moment, was a desire to expose the anaemic elegance of Guthrie McClintic’s Romeo and Juliet through an Elizabethan production of such energy and violence as New York had never seen.’ He produced a design which he demonstrated ‘on and in the bath’ at the Riverside Drive duplex. It showed a complex Italian street scene, ‘a theatrical crossroads where the physical and emotional crises of the tragedy converged’.

  Houseman’s admiration for Welles was coming dangerously close to hero-worship; Houseman was thirty-four, his hero nineteen. ‘I watched him, with growing wonder, take as mannered and decadent a work as John Ford’s tragedy, bend it to his will and recreate it, on the stage of his imagination, in the vivid dramatic light of his own imagination.’ It is again Welles’s extraordinary fearlessness that thrills Houseman – in this case in the face of The Classics. During these fevered and passionate weeks, he was exposed in
its purest form to the strange combination in Welles of seductively submissive, rather female charm with other, very masculine attributes: mastery, bending to his will, recreating, re-shaping. ‘To me those weeks together were a revelation … in my working relationship with this astonishing boy whose theatrical experience was so much greater than mine, it was I who was the pupil, he the teacher … what amazed and awed me in Orson was his astounding and, apparently, innate dramatic instinct. Listening to him, day after day, with rising fascination, I had the sense of hearing a man initiated, at birth, into the most secret rites of a mystery – the theatre – of which he felt himself, at all times, the rightful and undisputed master.’ Welles had a similar certainty in the area of verse-speaking: unemployed young actors would drop round on their way to or from auditions; in addition to tea and biscuits ‘we set them – for their benefit and ours – to reading Elizabethan verse’. Welles, veteran of a grand total of two professional productions of classical plays, offered spontaneous tutorials on the delivery of iambic pentameters. How different from poor Katharine Cornell’s dread of verse, and Guthrie McClintic’s dogged determination to master its rules. Welles regarded it as his natural inheritance. An unfriendly observer at the time spotted him in a restaurant: ‘He would, by voice and presence, make everybody ask “Who is this man?” Saying “Shakespeare and I.”’20