Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  He did not intend to appear in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. He saw it as above all a vehicle for Chubby Sherman ‘of whose talent he was so fanatically convinced that he would not rest till he had proved it to the world’. Chubby was to play Poggio; casting and verse exercises were held in the basement on 14th Street which he shared with Whitford Kane. Miriam Batista and Alexander Scourby were to play the incestuous siblings. The role of ‘a venal courtier’21 was to be played by one Francis Carpenter, a friend of both Orson and Virginia, thought of by those who remember him as camp beyond the dreams of Quentin Crisp, someone who, at a time of rigid sexual typing, flaunted his outrageousness without inhibition. His audition, Houseman observes, was of ‘prodigious obscenity’. Both the Welleses were deeply fond of him; in Welles’s case there may have been more than simple friendly affection. William Alland, as close as anyone to Welles shortly after the period under discussion, avers that without question Welles and Carpenter had had a sexual relationship, and were publicly prone to furious rows and extravagant reconciliations. Whatever the truth of this, Carpenter remained part of Welles’s loose-knit theatrical family almost to the end, finally appearing in King Lear at the City Centre in 1956. During the Second World War he astonished his circle by performing acts of conspicuous gallantry on the battlefield, for which he was much decorated – a notion which amused him no end.

  He it was that had secured finance for the projected ’Tis Pity. An eccentric old lady of his acquaintance was prepared to underwrite the show. On the strength of this, Houseman and Welles hired the Bijou Theatre, a run-down six-hundred seater. When the $10,000 from Carpenter’s protectress finally came through, it did so with a stipulation that it must be spent on sand-blasting the façade of the theatre – and nothing else. They laughed; it seemed the funniest thing in the world to them. The production and the Bijou Theatre were abandoned in gales of good humour. ‘We parted friends – without promises or commitments, and with no particular reason to believe we would ever be associated again.’22 As if in direct contradiction of that last thought, he writes: ‘’Tis Pity served its function … through it we learned each other’s language and laid the foundation and set the form and tone for our future collaboration.’

  Orson and Virginia meanwhile went off to join Carpenter at his ‘palatial Long Island Estate’, which turned out to be a crumbling, run-down and foodless mansion, from which they retreated to New York, checking in at the Algonquin. The radio income had presumably not started in earnest, since Skipper Hill was importuned for money to settle the bill. Why they should think that they could afford an expensive hotel when they patently couldn’t is mysterious; can they really have thought that Roger Hill with his schoolmaster’s income was able to bail them out? The clue to this may be in Welles’s comment in The Cradle Will Rock screenplay: Virginia expected a better standard of living than he was yet able to provide. Or possibly it was just a mad, unthinking impulse, something they promised themselves as they shivered and starved in Carpenter’s ghastly country retreat, and to hell with the cost! Except that in the real world, someone has to pick up the tab: a concept with which Welles had great difficulty all his life.

  Not only was there no money, early that summer: there was no work. The Broadway season ended, as usual, on June 15; the new one wouldn’t commence till September. Welles’s inherent restlessness overcame him, and, as so often in the past, he looked to Skipper to satisfy it. He sent him Bright Lucifer, but Skipper wisely declined it. Welles next suggested a version of Tom Sawyer, himself in the title role; Skipper was equally reluctant. A national tour of the Todd Troupers under Whitford Kane? Impossible. Instead, he went back to Todd and staged an impromptu production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which he didn’t appear. He continued to return to Todd for reaffirmation until well beyond the time that he was an international celebrity; Roger Hill maintained that when the school was finally wound up in the 1960s, Welles, having lost his sanctuary, went into a deep depression, and thereafter never mentioned the place again. It was, obviously, home. Skipper, like any parent with a fractious child on his hands, desperately sought affordable diversions. His solution was to hire a cabin for Orson and Virginia at nearby Lake Geneva, just over the state border in Wisconsin. There Welles tinkered at Bright Lucifer, at an Irish travel book, and at a slightly premature volume entitled Now I Am Twenty-one. Finally, they motored back to New York in a car belonging to Skipper, driven by Virginia (Welles was not allowed to drive: ‘I’m one of those people,’ he said in an interview, ‘who are so terrified in a car that they put their foot down on the accelerator and never take it off’).

  New York offered more lucrative radio work; his career in that medium – still anonymously – began to take off. But for him, as he freely confessed to an interviewer a little later, though ‘he admires radio as a medium, in his own case he calls it hack work, about which he is very casual’.23 A dangerous thing to say; an even more dangerous one to think. But it was the precise truth: the theatre, as always, was his overriding obsession. The question for him, as for Houseman, was where would he fit in? The New York theatre of 1935 was bewilderingly diverse and in a state of tumultuous ferment; but there seemed to be no obvious opening for his unusual gifts.

  The depression had shaken the theatre as roughly as it had every other aspect of American life, with similar results: a huge reduction in consumption and manufacture, and widespread politicisation. The twenties had been the theatre’s boom years: ‘more shows were produced in one city in a ten-year span than ever before or since in the history of the world’, wrote Sam Leiter in the Encyclopaedia of the New York Stage. ‘Two dozen Broadway theatres were created in the blink of an eye.’ In writing (especially new American writing) there had been almost an embarras de richesses. The Theatre Guild, having done proud by Eugene O’Neill, continued to promote new dramatists; the Little Theatres pursued experiment, especially in the visual sphere. The Community Theatres throve: the Yiddish Art Theatre, the Lafayette Players in Harlem. Nor was there any feeling of parochialism, or chauvinism. Germany, Russia and Ireland sent their companies, pioneers of intense realism and extreme stylisation, the epic theatre and the domestic. Harold Clurman and his fellow students watched wide-eyed. ‘We saw Reinhardt’s productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Danton’s Death and The Miracle. We not only studied these productions, we debated them with passion. We sought out exotic examples of theatre craft. We visited the Chinese theatre in the Bowery, and led our friends down to Grand St to see the Sicilian Giovanni Grasi, who exemplified a violent emotional acting that positively stunned us … all this was done with eagerness and deliberation … it never occurred to us to say: “This is our world and it bodes no good.”’24

  The Great Crash in 1929 changed all that. Art for Art’s Sake ceased to be a watchword; it was necessary to engage with life, and experiment must be harnessed to that engagement. For the commercial theatre it was a question of engaging with financial reality. The legendary managers (Belasco, Ziegfeld, Cohan, and Winthrop Ames) were dying out. Despite the arrival of new names like George Abbott, Billy Rose, and indeed Kit Cornell, in the 1930–31 season there were 190 productions, a drop of fifty compared with the previous season. Only three new theatres opened during the thirties, compared to thirty in the previous three decades. Paradoxically, the number of new productions picked up enormously as the decade wore on, due to the prodigious number of closures. There were the usual consequences, familiar in both London and New York today: with a couple of exceptions each season, shows became smaller. Sets were less and less spectacular; there was less use of stars; casts got smaller; there was a miraculous increase in the number of one-set plays offered for production; there were cheap revivals of recent successes. The Shuberts, hitherto the most prosperous of theatre owners, went into receivership; having negotiated a loan, they used it to import London hits and revived – ‘the usual last resort’, in Howard Taubmann’s words – The Student Prince and Blossom Time. The attempt to revive the touring circuit failed
; producers started to take advantage of summer stock for try-outs (the very thing against which Welles had pitted himself at Woodstock). These theatres became something like Off- and Off-off Broadway laboratories of later years.

  Even gangsters couldn’t be sure to make money out of the Broadway theatre; the well-known bootlegger who payrolled Strike Me Pink (which was neither agitprop nor gay, but a frothy revue starring Jimmy Durante) lost his entire investment. Hollywood became for a while a major investor in shows, buying rights for future use, but after a dispute with the Writers’ Union, this involvement slacked off. In fact, Hollywood’s principal impact on Broadway was the negative one of creating a drain of both writers and actors to Los Angeles. Sound in movies had created an urgent demand for actors with trained voices; financially the theatre could not compete. Apart from stars absolute who could, with royalties, make up to $3,000 a week, according to the indispensable Sam Leiter, the theatre was poorly paid: at the other end of the scale, the minimum for actors with less than two years’ experience (that would include Welles) was $25; for more experienced actors, the minimum was $40. An average actor of repute could expect from $75–$125; while a minor star might manage between 200 and 500 dollars. All these actors were, of course, the lucky ones; in the profession at large there was despair. The Stage Relief Fund was founded to raise money to pay out-of-work actors’ bills; at the Actors’ Dinner Club you could get a meal for $1, if you could afford it. If not it was free. One winter 150,000 meals were served, according to Howard Taubmann, and 120,000 of them were free.

  Welles had good reason to thank his lucky stars for his involvement in radio; he could eat, copiously and well; he was comfortable. But his hunger for work in the theatre gnawed angrily at him. Broadway seemed unpromising. He had not enjoyed his stint with the McClintics; Panic had been a sojourn with the sort of Art Theatre to which he was not drawn. He hadn’t, despite a reasonable amount of exposure, made a name for himself yet, was not even ‘a minor star’. Besides, he was erupting with energy and ideas; a long run in a supporting role on Broadway was not really what he had in mind, even if it were possible. He was young, but not a juvenile; he was powerful and imposing, but not a leading man. It is hard to know where he would have fitted in the Broadway of 1935. On the other hand, the alternative seemed even less possible for him. The period, theatrically speaking, has been dubbed, not inappropriately, The Decade of Revolt; it was dominated by its response to political and social circumstances.

  Immersed as he was in dreams of a theatrical golden age when actors were really actors, filled with visions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre in all its harsh and lovely vigour, and almost equally obsessed by the magical possibilities of modern stagecraft, he found very little in the current scene towards which to aspire. He abominated Broadway. The political theatre, amateur or professional, had no hold on him, despite its astonishing new-found vitality. The outburst of agitprop, generally playing to workers’ union meetings, inventing a shorthand language of theatre to make points as stirringly and economically as possible, passed him by. Mainstream theatre people made their way to these performances to admire their ‘beauty’. Welles was unimpressed by the level of excitement at these performances, feeling, in Ethan Mordden’s words, that ‘there was excitement because the communion of stage and house was perfect; but it was perfect because everybody agreed’.25 Nor was he impassioned to help create a viable theatre for working-class audiences, which was the Theatre Union’s platform. He was not hostile to these things; they were simply out of his sphere, not to his taste. He would certainly have described himself as belonging to ‘the left’: a term, as John Gassner pointed out, ‘attached to anything critical of war or fascism and favouring social reform – no Marxist or other specific political platform implied. Marxist theory was just one more piece of driftwood afloat in the current of fashionable intellectualism, along with amateur Freudianism and hazy bourgeois romanticism.’26 Certainly no Marxist, and abhorring Freudianism, both amateur and professional, Welles’s world-view at that time might best be described as ebulliently tragic, marinaded in the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy and bearing some family connection with the great American writers, Melville and Hawthorne, whose theme of expiation chimed well with Welles’s sense of personal guilt; this view he sought to express in grand theatrical forms. He would scarcely have responded to what Goldstein describes as ‘the overriding dramatic topic of the decade: the individual’s problem of maintaining dignity and self-esteem without harming others’.27

  That topic, of course, was the special province of another of the dominant theatrical forces of the day, the Group Theatre, from whom, both in theory and in practice, he also felt himself distant. Like the Playwrights’ Company, a breakaway from the Theatre Guild, their equal commitment to socially aware scripts and to the theories of Stanislavsky, made them highly unattractive to Welles. Quite apart from his dislike of method of any sort, Stanislavsky’s insistence that the actor search his own experience for his performance was entirely unacceptable; Lee Strasberg’s elevation of an early stage of Stanislavsky’s work, with its belief that emotion is the beginning, middle and end of acting, into the Group’s central tenet made it positively repugnant. Another of the founding members of the Group, Harold Clurman – Danton to Strasberg’s Robespierre, or perhaps Lenin to his Stalin – expressed a further aspect of their credo which would have held no charms for Welles: moral fervour. This was the influence of Copeau. ‘We expected,’ wrote Clurman, ‘to bring the actor much closer to the content of the play, to link the actor as an individual with the creative purpose of the playwright … in our belief, unless the actor in some way shared the playwright’s impulse, the result on the stage always remained somewhat mechanical … our interest in the life of our times must lead us to the discovery of those methods that would most truly convey this life through the theatre … since we were theatre people, the proper action for us was to establish a theatre in which our philosophy of life might be translated into a philosophy of the theatre … there were to be no stars in our theatre … the writer himself was to be no star, either … the director was the leader of the theatrical group, unifying its various efforts, enunciating its basic aims, tied to it not as a master to his slave but as a head to a body. In a sense, the group produced its own director, just as the director in turn helped form and guide the group.’28

  It is impossible not to be moved by Clurman’s passion and his idealism, while acknowledging the serious difficulties inherent in his approach. The position of the director, in particular, needs to be articulated much more clearly than Clurman is prepared to do. As expressed above, it sounds suspiciously like the old revolutionary notion that the leader somehow embodies the will of the people; and we know to our bitter cost what that unfortunate principle leads to. Welles was in no doubt as to who was going to be the star, in whatever capacity; nor what the powers and function of the director were going to be: absolute. As it happens, perhaps the most violent of the many arguments that shook the Group throughout its brief life concerned the position of the director. It was an argument that was much in the air in the early thirties in America, and it related to a development in the American theatre that helps to explain something of Orson Welles’s sensational impact on it in what was to be the very near future.

  The leader of the revolt in the Group was the actor and director Robert Lewis. He prepared and read a paper on what he considered to be its limitations: ‘I say that Group productions lack music, colour, rhythm, movement – all those other things in the theatre besides psychology, and all the things which in theatrical form clarify and make important one’s psychology – not that colour, movement, rhythm etc are not present one by one on our stage – they are, but they are not fused into a single style which in each production is peculiar to the expression of the talent of the particular author.’29 There were limits, evidently, to what could be achieved democratically. In a piece in Theatre Arts Monthly on the rise of the director, Edith Isaacs, one of
the clearest-headed theatrical analysts of the day wrote: ‘twenty years ago, the director was an apologetic person whose business it was to evoke a harmony between an egotistic actor and a stubborn playwright. Tact and patience and humility were his chief requisites for success. Today he is the guiding, unfolding, unifying spirit in the theatre. The greatest men in the theatre today are all directors.’ She was speaking of the European theatre. In a lengthier analysis of the American scene, John Mason Brown summed up (in 1930) the current crop of directors: ‘the painstaking love of detail and the infinite patience of Mr Belasco’s work … the less certain but far more imaginative contribution of such a man as Mr Hopkins … skillful but unobtrusive practitioners such as Guthrie McClintic, Gilbert Miller, Dudley Digges; uncanny showmen: the three Georges: Abbott, Cohan, Kaufmann. Jed Harris’s jubilant toughness; Mamoulian’s gift in handling crowds’.30 Despite all this talent, something, he feels, is missing. ‘The touch of our directors is varied, even if their virtuosity is small. It is in the scope of their ambitions rather than the limits of their power that our American directors differ from their European contemporaries. Their talents are of a lesser kind, and their originality is less marked. Unlike the directors who dominate the stage of the continent they feel that their first duty is the intention of the author rather than the interpretation they may bring to it.’