Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  The reaction to the play was overwhelmingly affirmative: 940 people admired it; 143 preferred not to comment and only twenty were negative about it. It is clear that the Federal Theatre Project had tapped a new, responsive, eager audience. Small wonder that Paula Laurence and her fellow actors felt that ‘we should have had a national theatre and Orson Welles should have been the head of it’.60 This was a notion frequently mooted, in one form or another, during the next couple of years. The idea was beginning to be formed that Orson Welles was going to be the saviour of the American theatre. His failure to fulfil that expectation was a hard blow for many people.

  Welles himself had no intention of forming any national theatre, which is, to put it mildly, a full-time job, allowing of few extra-curricular activities. With the success of Faustus, his appetite for work, any work, seemed redoubled. Not only did the run of the play fail to hinder his ever-increasing involvement with radio, the performance itself wasn’t allowed to interfere with it. Barely pausing in his headlong rush from one studio to another, Welles arrived at the theatre as Chorus was starting to speak the opening lines of the play, during which he would throw his costume on, arriving on stage just in time for ‘Che sarà, sarà!’ There was another radio show to do at 8.30 p.m., so as soon as his first scene with Mephostophilis was over he would climb – in costume and substantial make-up – into an ambulance specially hired for the occasion and speed through the streets of New York, bells ringing, to the studio, for twenty minutes giving his all to the radio audience, thereupon returning to the theatre, to watch Christ’s blood stream through the firmament. Clearly Welles was of the ‘just get up and do it’ school of actors. Any notion that some preparation might be useful for what is, though not the longest, by no means the least demanding of roles in the classical repertory, was alien to him.

  Actors differ wildly from each other on the question of what is most helpful to them before they actually stand on the stage, some needing silence and sleep, others chat and companionship. Some must eat, while others insist on starving. Yet others need a stiff drink, though their closest colleagues won’t let a drop pass their lips till the curtain falls. Welles, unsurprisingly, did not belong to the latter group. In the screenplay of The Cradle Will Rock, he sweeps into the theatre and calls out to Augusta Weissberger:

  Tell your mother God sees everything she does and writes it down in a book, and make me three very double martinis. Two of which are for Mr Blitzstein.

  There is no point in piety about alcohol in the theatre; for some it is a useful warm-up, for others disaster. It can bring freedom, but also, often, a loss of objective judgement. Its most likely immediate effect is to induce slowness of pace. In the case of Welles, this would not be an advantage. Already prone to measured utterance, he was liable to fall into impassioned (and sometimes inaudible) monotony. His capacity for alcohol was large, as large as his consumption. There were no crude outward effects of intoxication; he did not slur, or fall down. But alcohol cannot possibly increase the actor’s responsiveness to impulse or his agility of thought or word, and the emotional freedom produced is likely to result in feeling that is generalised and self-referential. It is a chain of association familiar to all alcoholics: the consumption of a drink leads to a sensation of ease and effectiveness, so is forever after associated with those conditions. For Welles, there was the ever-present longing to produce and sustain adrenalin. If the ambulances and the panic of unprepared performance couldn’t do it, perhaps alcohol would.

  It helped him overcome his boredom, which set in very early on. The loss of excitement is the beginning of professionalism. The thrill of standing on a stage, of receiving the audience’s attention and admiration, the release of becoming someone other than yourself: all these stimuli are transient and superficial. They must be replaced by something much more deeply rooted which takes as its starting point the audience’s experience rather than your own. It is to be doubted whether Welles ever reached this point. His lack of proper preparation, either in rehearsal or before the performance, condemned him to insecurity and made it impossible for his work to grow, thus denying himself the real satisfaction of the job. His restlessness as an actor was observed by Norman Lloyd, an admirer of the production of Faustus: ‘Orson was very well aware of his physical presence and his great voice. I never thought he was a good actor in the theatre … he was trying to be Herbert Marshall one night, John Barrymore the next.’61 Chubby Sherman reports that one night Welles wanted to see a movie after the show, so he urged his fellow actors to ‘play it for the record books’. His relationship to acting was paradoxical: he was immersed in its lore and unusually well equipped, physically, to practise it, but he never allowed himself to discover its deep rewards. Like someone who confines himself to casual uninvolved sex and never experiences a real act of love, Welles’s acting was statistically impressive, but deeply fulfilling neither for himself nor his audience. Once the immediate sensual thrill was over, nothing was left for either partner. His lack of communion both with himself and with the character he was playing made this inevitable. His idea of acting was purely cerebral; when that is the case, the god can never enter in.

  His restlessness was not confined to performances; the Federal Theatre itself began to frustrate him, with its proprietorial behaviour. For them, he was both the jewel in their crown and a thorn in their flesh. He broke every rule of the organisation, and when challenged, pointed to the fact that he was in effect affording them relief: he put a great part of his $1,000 weekly income into the shows, as he had done with Macbeth. He thus felt above criticism. Moreover, he was acquiring friends in high places. Harry Hopkins, ultimate boss of all the relief organisations, had met Welles backstage, and had invited him to Washington, where he had introduced him to Mr and Mrs Roosevelt. Restraints imposed by Hallie Flanagan and her henchman Houseman (as Welles saw him) were violently resented. Like a schoolboy whose father’s best friend is the Chairman of the Board of Governors, he felt that he had a right of appeal above all their heads. In fact, as he was to discover, this was scarcely true, but it contributed greatly to his increasingly intemperate attitude. He was, of course, completely unable to understand that the Federal Theatre as idea and organisation was something that needed careful cultivation – that his fireworks might, unless carefully contained, set fire to the whole damn thing. There were difficulties within the Federal Theatre Project: for one unit to be perceived as ahead of all the others was very bad for general morale. The input of Welles’s personal money (whether known of or not) made for problems of jealousy with other units struggling along on a cough and a spit.

  There were even internal problems on 891, with all the other actors having actually to survive on $2.86 per week, while Welles lived the life of a young lord. He and Virginia had left their duplex on 14th Street which they occasionally shared with chums like Paula Laurence and Francis Carpenter (‘Hello, this is the maid, Francis’) and taken a house at Sneden’s Landing, up the Hudson, twenty miles away from Times Square, where his neighbours were such swells as Katharine Cornell and Dorothy Thompson. Coming into town, he would take a motor boat across the water, where he would be greeted by a chauffeur-driven Rolls. Lunch would be at Jack and Charlie’s ‘21’ (which might have been named for him, since he at twenty-one was the twenty-one-year-old to end all twenty-one-year-olds). Shaved by a barber at the club, and manicured – his elegantly tapered nails are prominent in a famous contemporary photograph – he adopted the manner of a soigné leading man, an Alfred Lunt or a Bob Hope. ‘I see myself in those old stills, and I see somebody that could very easily be thought of as a faggot,’62 he told Barbara Leaming. ‘It was wild camp.’ What he seems to be saying is that he had a phase of behaving like a Broadway star actor, something rather different from the combination of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen and a Burbage de nos jours that had hitherto been his image. He was a compulsive chameleon. Who shall I be? he seemed to be asking. Of course he was only twenty-one. But the process of self-invention was a li
fe-long habit with him, preferably in public, into a journalist’s tape recorder. He kept trying things on for size, convinced people of his new skin, then felt uncomfortable in it – ontologically itchy.

  The fact that every penny that had led to the current transformation was personally earned would not have counteracted the impression of private wealth being used for personal satisfaction. The workers in Project 891 shared the general anxiety that relief programmes were in danger of being suspended. Roosevelt’s landslide at the end of 1936 on a national as opposed to a purely Democratic ticket had the opposite effect to the expected one: relief programmes were cut by 20 per cent. With the depression apparently receding, there was intense pressure on the government to abandon them altogether. The left, anticipating cuts, rallied, denouncing Roosevelt. In this atmosphere, Hallie Flanagan took personal charge of the highly visible New York arm of the Federal Theatre Project, trying to contain and secure its work. Her strategy was both to limit unnecessary expenditure and to prevent undue provocation: a delicate line to tread, requiring the utmost co-operation from her colleagues at every level of the Project. Her dealings with Unit 891 arose from this strategy, which Welles resented.

  The brunt of his resentment was borne, naturally, by Houseman. Added to his habitually hare-like impatience with tortoise Houseman, he now perceived him as an ally of the establishment. That establishment was in fact an embattled anti-establishment, under threat from powerfully organised right-wing forces; but to Welles, it came to seem a bureaucratic conspiracy against freedom of artistic expression – his artistic expression, to be precise – and he began to look elsewhere for his creative outlets. Poor Houseman, believing himself to have found a perfect partner – Welles giving him what he hadn’t got, and needing him for what he had – while all along, Orson was looking for an out, looking for the opportunity to betray him with someone else. They had desultory conversations about what they should do next. Ben Jonson’s The Silent Woman was mooted, in a half-hearted sort of way (just as well, perhaps, that they didn’t attempt it, in view of the dauntingly difficult text); other proposals were The Duchess of Malfi and, more seriously, Julius Caesar in modern dress.

  There are many claims for the authorship of this notion. It hardly matters whose it was – the idea was clearly in the air – but it is worth noting that the playwright Sidney Howard (author of They Knew What They Wanted) wrote to Houseman in February of 1937 shortly after the opening of Doctor Faustus to say that ‘Marlowe is pretty exciting to begin with, and you have made him beautiful and lively … I could wish that you and Welles would turn your attention to Julius Caesar in modern dress (I have such fine ideas on that if you want them). Not the modern drama, I admit, but I have always believed that the best way to stimulate the writing of good modern plays is to keep the classics part of what goes on.’ The letter is a testimonial to the perceived importance of Project 891 in feeding the needs of the theatre at large. As it happens, Welles and Houseman agreed that neither Caesar nor Malfi could be cast from within the Project; and it is true that their first two shows had been unusually amenable to casting from a large pool of miscellaneously talented people. Nothing much for jugglers, puppeteers or vaudevillians in Julius Caesar.

  The Project drifted. Workers on it continued to feel threatened as Welles and Houseman seem to have lost energy and purpose. The situation was suddenly transformed by the arrival on their laps of Marc Blitzstein’s ‘workers’ opera’ The Cradle Will Rock. Welles had met Blitzstein after a performance of Horse Eats Hat; Blitzstein had immediately fallen for him, and impulsively offered him his new work to direct. ‘When I played The Cradle Will Rock for Orson Welles, he was just twenty-one, but already an extravagantly brilliant and magnetic theatre man. He fell in love with it straight off and made me promise that no matter who should produce it, he would do the staging, and I was glad to agree.’63 Just as Virgil Thomson had resisted Orson’s combination of girlish vulnerability and masculine exuberance, so Blitzstein fell for it absolutely; Welles took to the composer with equal enthusiasm. They decided to stage the piece for the Actors’ Repertory Company. Scenting something new and dangerous, Welles was immediately recharged.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Cradle Will Rock

  MARC BLITZSTEIN, author of the piece that had so ignited Welles, is a curious figure in American musical life; a curious figure altogether, one of whom Welles was deeply fond. There are innumerable testimonials to his charm and integrity from people as different as Leonard Bernstein and Virgil Thomson, but none of them are able to bring these personal qualities to life. Even his biographer, the admirably thorough Eric Gordon, fails to convey his much proclaimed attractiveness. From this distance he seems merely cold, intellectually ruthless and blinkered. Born in Philadelphia, the son of a banker, he was a child prodigy as both pianist and composer. He studied at the Curtis Institute under Scalero and Siloti (Tchaikovsky’s friend and editor, perpetrator of the barbarically cut version of the Second Piano Concerto). In 1926 he took what was the well-beaten path for an American musician of the period to Nadia Boulanger’s door. She found him to be a ‘born musician’ who ‘gives the greatest reasons to believe he is to become a true great artist’. More daringly he then proceeded to Berlin, and Schoenberg. Loathing the twelve-tone system, he nevertheless found of his teacher that ‘as an opposing force to test one’s own quality against, he is superb’. Schoenberg finally gave up trying to convert Blitzstein to dodecaphonia with the gracious words: ‘Very well, compose your Franco-Russian pretty-pretty music – but stay in the class. You play the piano so well.’

  In Berlin he absorbed all that the Weimar Republic at its pluralistic height had to offer, sexually and musically. His sexual orientation was homosexual with occasional heterosexual lapses; musically he was drawn to Hindemith’s gebrauchsmusik (utility music) and gemeinschaftsmusik (amateur music for community binding), about as far from Franco-Russian pretty-pretty music as can be imagined. It chimed very well, however, with his new-found Marxist affiliations. He returned to America, where he taught, then came back to Europe; in 1933, he married the Marxist critic and novelist Eva Goldbeck. They adjourned to Majorca, where he composed string quartets admired by his fellow composers, but heard by few others. Rebelling against the loneliness and, as he came increasingly to see it, the elitism of the life of an Art Composer, he turned his attention to ‘that most resistant of all musical media – the musical stage’,1 as Aaron Copland put it. ‘His purpose was not merely to write the words and music of effective theatre pieces; he wanted to shape each piece for his own ends, to shape it for human needs. He took a certain pleasure in needling his audiences; in telling unpleasant truths straight to their faces.’

  It is this needling quality that seems most characteristic; obviously to those contemporaries who valued him so highly, it betokened a moral position that was impressively uncompromising. Welles wrote of Blitzstein, in his unproduced screenplay The Cradle Will Rock, that he ‘could be described as fine-tuned rather than highly strung. His is the attentive stillness of some birds – one of the predators – a gyrfal-con. Serious rather than solemn, he brightens a room when he enters it.’ The conductor, Lehman Engel, wrote strikingly of him: ‘He was nervous, full of laughs, somehow “tight”, impatient, and – it was always my feeling – bent on self-destruction or failure … often his music was almost brilliant, but when it became too promising, Marc seemed to need to prevent its successful conclusion: he would do just about anything to frustrate a desirable resolution.’2 His emotional life was kept hermetically separate from his professional and social lives; after his wife’s death (from self-induced starvation) he was exclusively gay, but he never formed a full sexual-emotional relationship with a man, knowing only one-night stands, preferably with rough trade, until his death in 1964 at the hands of three merchant seamen in Martinique.

  The Cradle Will Rock, Blitzstein’s best-known work, had followed immediately on the death of his wife in 1936. Now a member of the Composers’ Collec
tive, his works up to this point included a Piano Sonata and a Piano Concerto and two operas: The Condemned (concerning the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti), and The Harpies. Meeting Brecht, he had played him his song ‘Nickel Under Foot’, written for a workers’ revue. Brecht, impressed, urged him to expand it into a full-length piece about the varieties of prostitution – ‘the press, the church, the courts, the arts, the whole system’. Suddenly galvanised by the death of his wife, he set to work furiously on The Cradle Will Rock, putting some of his grief into writing it. The result is taut and fierce, but buoyant and funny, too, the work of an absolutely individual voice. Copland, ever generous to his fellow musicians, wrote that ‘he was the first American composer to invent a vernacular musical idiom that sounded convincing when heard on the lips of the man-in-the-street. The taxi driver, the panhandler, the corner druggist, were given voice for the first time in the context of serious drama.’3

  It thrilled Welles. ‘Orson was excited by the challenge of this, his first contact with musical theatre,’4 wrote Houseman. ‘I remember listening jealously, with an ill-concealed sense of rejection, to Orson’s enthusiastic comments about the piece (which I had not heard) and to his ideas for casting and staging it, which he elaborated for my annoyance.’ As usual, Houseman is quite frank about his feelings. When, to his quiet satisfaction, the American Repertory Company folded, Houseman, taking his time, eventually suggested that if they’d play the piece to him, he might find it suitable for Unit 891. They did; and he did. The next step was to play it to Hallie Flanagan. ‘Marc Blitzstein sat down at the piano and played, sang and acted,’5 she wrote, ‘with the hard hypnotic drive which came to be familiar to audiences, his new opera. It took no wizardry to see that this was not a play set to music, nor music illustrated by actors, but music + play equalling something new and better than either.’ Blitzstein exuberantly reported this in a letter on 3 March: ‘Hallie Flanagan … is crazy for it, says it’s the biggest best etc – and is also terrified about it for the Project. She’ll take no responsibility, but is having us – Orson, Houseman and me – fly down to Washington … I’ve apparently turned out a firebrand that nobody wants to touch.’6 It is a measure of the newly charged political situation that it was deemed necessary for producers and directors to clear their choices of work with the central government. Houseman was convinced that though Hallie Flanagan was fully aware of the dangers of programming such a potentially explosive piece, ‘she was determined to fly into the eye of the storm’. As for himself and Welles, the more controversial the better, of course. The distinguished Welles scholar Richard France maintains that Welles and Houseman were eager to escape from the Federal Theatre’s confining embrace, into that of the organised left, where they perceived their audience to be. They deliberately chose the show, he believes, because they knew it would be provocative – too provocative for the Federal Theatre Project. If so, they miscalculated, because they had support within the Project from the highest level from the beginning.