Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  ‘Like partners in a vaudeville team, Orson and I made our entrance together from the wings onto the stage.’14 Houseman’s brief speech expressed his gratitude to Hallie Flanagan and the Federal Theatre Project for backing a show that no one else would but insisted that the show had to open. Then, according to Lehman Engel (who had stuffed Blitzstein’s score down his trousers to smuggle it past the guards at the Maxine Elliott Theatre), Welles ‘made a too-long speech to explain the situation, the scenes, the deficiencies of this kind of presentation’.15 He insisted that they were making an artistic protest, not a political one, and, having described the production as it would have been, he finally announced: ‘We have the honour to present – with the composer at the piano – The Cradle Will Rock!’ At that moment, Welles handed the show back to Blitzstein; it now belonged entirely to him. Feder’s spotlight swung round to pick him out, sitting in shirt sleeves and suspenders at the piano, its back removed for increased volume, chewing peanuts as he continued to do throughout the show. He started to play and then to sing his score ‘as I had done so often for prospective producers – we used to call it my Essex House run’. After a line or two Olive Stanton (the Moll) from her place in the stalls joined her voice to the composer’s, giving courage to all the others who, one by one, joined in. Eventually, the actors got up, stood in the aisles, even danced a little. Then the chorus, sitting behind Lehman Engel, started to sing. The only instrumentalist who turned up, the accordionist, Rudy, joined in whenever appropriate.

  ‘At the end of the first act,’ wrote Blitzstein, ‘the poet Archibald MacLeish sprinted backstage to say “a new day had dawned in the theatre, the stagnant and supine audience had been killed forever” and he had to make a speech about it. And so he did, after the final curtain.’ That final curtain (there was of course no curtain as such at all) had provoked a storm of applause. ‘Even that moment had its particular theatrical flair. MacLeish wore a Palm Beach suit, and when Welles held up his hand and finally stopped the roaring pandemonium that greeted us, saying, “We will all now sit down, and the one man left standing will be Mr Archibald MacLeish,’ there stood the white suit gleaming conspicuously, and we were told we had witnessed a historical event.’ It is hard not to share Blitzstein’s sense of the comedy of the liberal poet. ‘The chief accomplishment of the Federal Theatre Project,’ said MacLeish, ‘has been to return the arts to the artists and to the people who love them and to bring artists and their audiences together. Mr Blitzstein was perhaps as good a composer two years ago as he is now but two years ago he could not have found a relationship with an audience which he has tonight and of which you have had a part.’ For MacLeish it was the dawn of a new golden age – the rebirth of that very Greek figure, the public artist, performing his own work. For Blitzstein, it was the opening salvo in a revolutionary war.

  Elsewhere in the city that night, there were other demonstrations of defiance against the impending threat to the Project: after a performance of The Case of Philip Lawrence, and, somehow bizarrely, after an all-Brahms chamber concert, there were sit-down strikes; later there was a night-long sit-down strike for the WPA Music Project. Events at the Maxine Elliott Theatre had been reported in The New York Times the following morning.

  STEEL STRIKE OPERA IS PUT OFF BY WPA:16 Persons who heard the opera’s score and extracts last night carried away no very clear impression except that its theme was the steel workers should join a union. There was a song (uncomplimentary) about military training in colleges, one about Honolulu, and one about ‘the freedom of the press,’ the purport of which was that there isn’t any … when the opera ended after about two hours, Mr Welles made another speech saying the performance was ‘not a political protest but an artistic one’. Archibald MacLeish made a speech in which he praised the ‘vitality’ of the FTP.

  There was no show the following day while everyone tried to deal with the consequences of that heady first performance. Hallie Flanagan had asked Blitzstein and Welles to go with her to Washington to speak to Hopkins, to try to retrieve the situation, but Orson had decided to go unilaterally, which he did that day, the 17th. Barry Witham has uncovered the transcripts of the meeting that took place; they give a vivid impression of the gap between the two sides. Welles’s position was simple: the show was ready to open. It was bad for morale, and bad for the show not to do so. The WPA position was equally clear: all units within the project had to pull together. They were all under threat; if they co-ordinated their efforts in conjunction with the WPA itself, the damage might be contained. Welles was indifferent to this line of argument. He was sorry, but he had a show which was ready to open, and for which he had already sold a large number of tickets. His interlocutors – David Niles and Ellen Woodward, both people, as Witham makes clear, of impeccable New Deal credentials, fighters for school meals and public health facilities, and passionate supporters of Mrs Flanagan – were genuinely hurt by his lack of esprit de corps: ‘I cannot get out of my consciousness the fact that if we do have any trouble, I will never be able to forget the fact that the people whom we counted on to make our troubles a little easier dropped this additional burden upon us,’17 said Niles.

  It is impossible to see how there could have been any compromise between the two sides. It was essential for the WPA that if an order were made, it should be obeyed by all the many troubled sections of the Project; for one unit to break ranks would have threatened the entire delicate structure. From Welles’s and Houseman’s point of view, failing to open for another two weeks would have brought them obloquy from the left (from which most of their audience was drawn) and restlessness from within the Unit. The ease, however, with which Welles proposed that they take the play away from the Unit and present it commercially (and despite his insistence that he would be happy to see the show open at the Maxine Elliott) suggests that he had no great attachment to the Federal Theatre Project. It presented him with nothing but constraints; its ideals were not his ideals.

  Hallie Flanagan gave her view ten years later in a letter to Marc Blitzstein: ‘Important as the issue raised by The Cradle Will Rock was, it was not the only issue facing us. The thing that people on the New York Project never cared about, never understood, and never took the trouble to find out, is that this is a big country. The Federal Theatre Project was bigger than any project in it. It included not only The Cradle Will Rock but the theatre for the children of coal miners in Gary, Indiana, the enterprise for vaudevillians in Portland, Oregon, the negro theatre in Chicago, the research being done in Oklahoma.’18 What did Welles care for any of these? He had a show ready to open. The meeting in Washington ended with Ellen Woodward saying: ‘if you decide to go ahead with a commercial production of the play, I see no reason for Mrs Flanagan not to drop this thing.’19 Witham and Richard France before him quite correctly point out that there was never any discussion at this meeting of political censorship, no suggestion on the part of the government representatives that the subject matter of the piece is regrettable, nor any attribution to them by Welles of that motive. Nor does Welles complain of the sealing of the theatre, of the presence of the so-called ‘Cossacks’. The political theme came later; the immediate issue was one of discipline within the Project.

  As soon as Welles (who had been alone, accompanied neither by Houseman nor by MacLeish, as some reports suggest) returned to New York, he and his partners swung into action; they released the piece for commercial presentation, and gained two weeks’ leave for WPA members, all of whom now joined Equity, as did Blitzstein. Helen Deutsch, normally press agent for the Theatre Guild, chipped in $1,250 towards the $2,305 needed to put up the Equity bond and pay back dues. It was decided to play a fortnight at the Venice, under exactly the circumstances fortuitously evolved at the first preview; the ticket scale was to be from 35c to a dollar; by error, a roll of 25c tickets was purchased, so WPA members were admitted for 25c. Business was slow to begin with, due to a bad notice (of the dress rehearsal, set and all) in the Daily Worker, and an absence of noti
ces anywhere else. The box office at the Maxine Elliott was busy denying its existence. Eventually, however, after coverage in several magazines including Time (where Lillian Hellman said of it ‘There is good contemptuous laughter behind The Cradle Will Rock and that laughter gives the play its vigor’)20 and the denunciation of the CIO, America’s Communist Party, by the head of Little Steel, there was standing room only. They then went on tour, principally to steel towns, where business and reactions were variable.

  Meanwhile, the WPA in order to prevent any use of FTP property in the commercial staging of the play, had sent its officers into the Maxine Elliott and smashed up the set. Johnston and Smith described it three years later in their most vivid Saturday Evening Post-ese: ‘The formerly audacious left-wingers of the WPA turned out to be a lot of stuffed shirts under the skin. In their zeal to save America from the WPA theatre, the WPA sent an ax brigade to chop and smash their own settings in their own padlocked playhouse. Big glass pillars full of neon lights and the other expensive equipment of The Cradle Will Rock were destroyed in a Carrie Nation raid.’21 Welles resigned from the Project; Houseman was dismissed under a rule forbidding non-American citizens to be employed by the Works Progress Administration. Unit 891 folded overnight. It had, after all, been created entirely to provide an outlet for Welles’s creative needs, and was now redundant.

  The whole incident is a curious one. Welles and Houseman having set out to create a company dedicated to classical theatre, inaugurated their first season with a mid-nineteenth-century French farce transposed into a surreal Mid-Western romp, then, having proceeded to what was their legitimate business, an Elizabethan masterpiece, they lurched suddenly into a straightforward piece of agitprop, which, instead of simply taking its place alongside all the many other more or less controversial offerings of the FTP became, due to a series of unforeseen circumstances – crisis within the project, crisis in the steel industry – a cause célèbre, which ended in Houseman and Welles defying the Project, and breaking away on their own. The journey from their original starting point was rapid and complete. But The Cradle Will Rock is entirely uncharacteristic of their work, together or apart. In particular, what appeared on the stage of the Venice Theatre owed nothing to Welles. It was to evolve still further; further and further from the original conception. It is probable that had the production gone ahead as Welles planned it, it would have had nothing like the success it achieved. Lehman Engel wrote in This Bright Day: ‘Orson – serendipity at work – was never to be debited with this nightmare production.’ What happened instead was that his name was more than ever linked with notoriety, never a bad thing, as far as Welles was concerned.

  It may have winded him a little, privately, to realise that all that ingenuity, all that energy, all that inspiration was dispensable: the show worked anyway. Better, in fact. There is a strange sense of Welles withdrawing, of no longer being needed. The great director withdrew in the face of the primitive relationship between author and audience. He was, in fact, saved by the bell – as, perhaps, was Blitzstein, who said, speaking to the Daily Worker, ‘I can’t regard this work purely from the viewpoint of the artist – I believe firmly in what the play stands for and an audience of steelworkers represents a new public, wide-awake and extremely critical,’ a perfectly Brechtian point of view. Welles’s approach, as expressed in his production, had it seen the light of day, was the opposite. It sought to overwhelm the audience with theatrical effect. Happy Blitzstein, saved from his director! In fact, Blitzstein had been delighted at every turn with Welles’s work (he was fond enough of him to dedicate the next piece – his radio play I’ve Got the Tune! – to him), but The Cradle Will Rock is too slight a piece to have survived all the genius Welles was eager to lavish upon it.

  Oddly enough, and with that insatiability for new projects that is characteristic of Welles at this period, he had begun rehearsing another piece of musical theatre at the same time as The Cradle Will Rock. Planned on a much more modest scale, and premièred three months before it, the staging and presentation had almost presaged the final form of Blitzstein’s piece. This was Aaron Copland’s children’s opera, The Second Hurricane, libretto by Welles’s Horse Eats Hat collaborator, Edwin Denby: ‘Once in a while something happens, something exceptional. Have you ever had an adventure? Have you been a hero?’ The opera’s theme is the building of character among a group of youngsters who have volunteered their services in flood crisis. Finding themselves marooned on a scrap of land, they give way to terror, quarrel, fight and eat the food reserved for flood victims. As their innate heroism asserts itself, however, they sing jazzy and patriotic songs, laugh and joke and generally come through with flying colours. With its representative cast of leading characters – Gwen, Butch, Lowrie, Fat, Gip, Queenie, Jeff (who is black) – it’s a sunny version of the Lord of the Flies. ‘Denby and I,’22 wrote Copland, ‘had agreed from the start that all the stage business was to be simple and natural, and that we would keep before us at all times the premise that this opera was for American youngsters to relate to in their everyday lives and language. Orson’s ideas for staging were original. The two choruses were onstage, and the orchestra was placed on a platform at the rear with the conductor facing the audience.’ In fact, once rehearsals for The Cradle Will Rock hit their stride, Welles handed the work over to Chubby Sherman who conscientiously executed his ideas.

  The reviews were largely favourable. Some detected levels of theatrical sophistication that may or may not have been present: ‘The fact that the orchestra in every-day dress sat behind the performance and that no scenery was employed smacked strongly of the Chinese theatre, as did the occasional use of simple props with practically all else left to the imagination …’23 More extravagantly, the World Telegram proclaimed that ‘there is here the suggestion of the Fokine staging of Coq d’Or’.24 It is somewhat surprising that it didn’t cross Welles’s mind, as he slaved over his epic production The Cradle Will Rock, that there might be a simpler, more striking way, but it took a fight with the government to point that way to him.

  From the wider perspective of the Federal Theatre Project itself, the débâcle over The Cradle Will Rock marked, as Houseman said, ‘the end of the honeymoon for the New Deal and the theatre’. Hallie Flanagan herself wrote that ‘it was more than a case of censorship. It marked a changing point of view in Washington.’ The Project’s magazine, which was often more drastically critical of FTP productions than outside critics, and though it was virtually self-supporting, was dropped, and its abandonment was a harbinger of a larger dismantlement. ‘Gradually the real reasons began to come out, not all in one conversation, but a little at a time. Was it true that the magazine was on sale in workers’25 bookshops? Wasn’t the editor … a communist? … Wasn’t there too much emphasis on poor audiences, too many pictures of squatters in Oklahoma and shirt-sleeved crowds in city parks – was this the kind of audience we wanted? We wanted our plays to be good enough for any kinds of an audience, but our chief obligation was to people who weren’t able to afford other theatre-going. Wasn’t that still the idea? Or was it?’ This chilling account of the subtle turning away from the original ideals is Hallie Flanagan’s. The Project’s short, sensational life was nearly at an end. Within two years, in disturbing circumstances, it was on the scrap-heap of noble dreams.

  As for Welles and Houseman: ‘we had little to say to each other. Our immediate emotional response to the success of The Cradle Will Rock was the usual need, on both our parts, to prove that each of us could exist without the other.’26 Welles was some leagues ahead of Houseman in independence; his radio work had made him entirely secure financially, and it had given him another artistic life, quite separate from Houseman. Radio ceased to be merely a source of income and had begun to fascinate him with its possibilities as a medium. His radio work took a number of important strides forward in 1936 and 1937. From being an anonymous and much disguised voice for hire, he was cast in a regular role which made that voice nationally famous; an
d he started directing for the medium. He had already, in the autumn of 1936, adapted, performed and directed a thirty-minute version of Hamlet (is there a character in the whole of dramatic literature for which he was less suited?). Under the aegis of Irving Reis’s Columbia Workshop, he then turned to Macbeth, which introduced him to one of his most significant collaborators, the composer Bernard Herrmann, although the collaboration on this occasion was less than happy. Welles insisted on bringing into the studio a Highland bagpipe (Haiti having been left far behind), leaving Herrmann fuming at his podium in front of a redundant studio orchestra; the production as a whole was further vitiated by such musical cues as Herrmann was able to add to the all-pervading drone of the bagpipes being one behind throughout the programme. This chaos was, of course, transmitted live. But Welles was beginning to turn his mind to the challenge of radio; shortly he would apply himself to it with his usual all-consuming intensity, and the results were appropriately startling.

  His opportunity came from Mutual, a company hitherto best known for its Lone Ranger series. Despite the disaster of his radio Macbeth, they asked him to adapt Les Misérables as a seven-part series, which he embarked on immediately after the heroic events surrounding The Cradle Will Rock. In terms of adaptation alone, the huge complex sprawl of Hugo’s novel is reduced to three and a half hours of air time with great cogency and fierce narrative grip, simplified, but denied none of its resonance. Purely as a professional achievement, this is breathtaking, more impressive than many of his more highly publicised feats. To take a thousand pages of text and effectively to convey its essence in brief episodes – to do so, moreover, using the medium at full stretch – is a skill that often eludes radio adaptors of many years’ experience; on what was virtually his first outing as a radio director, Welles at twenty-two produced a show that could rival any by the most seasoned practitioner.