Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  He confessed to Harold Stagg in the New Haven Ledger only a year after he had started the Mercury: ‘I’ve given myself terrific parts in my plays. I’ve built myself upon big roles, and I’ve imposed myself on the public as a star.’ Welles tried to make himself a great actor simply by playing leading parts one after another. That is not the way to do it; certainly not in the full glare of The New York Times. It is as if an amateur pianist, having a wide span and a nice touch, were simply to play all the towering masterpieces of the piano repertory one after another – not bothering to practise, not spending time studying the scores – all on instinct and enthusiasm. As Virgil Thomson observed, he never gave his mind, let alone his heart, to his work as an actor. Did he want to be one at all? He still seemed unsure forty years later. ‘I was obsessed in my hot youth,’ he said on Arena, ‘with the idea that I would not be a star. And I was in a position to promote myself as a star and I should have. I should have gone back to New York and played Hamlet and … as long as it was going I didn’t. I had this idea that I wanted to be known as a director and that was that.’ He seems to have been insecure about the idea of himself as a star, or even perhaps as a leading man. The idea of being a director – the big boss – somehow struck him as having more weight. Welles was constantly trying to give himself weight, solidity. He succeeded beyond his wildest ambitions, and not at all: always feeling small, despite girth and glory.

  The conflicting and highly emotional ingredients of his artistic agenda go some way towards explaining why, half-audacious modernist, half-archaic dreamer, reluctant totalitarian and self-doubting star, he created such an extraordinary impact in the world of the American theatre of the thirties. His agenda was often irrational, and always explosive. Now, with his new theatre, he was poised to put it into effect.

  He girded his loins and set about staging Julius Caesar in September of 1937. Just before starting work on it, and having polished off the last episodes of Les Misérables, he was asked by the same company, Mutual, to take over the leading part in the relaunch of their sensational success, The Shadow. Hitherto the mysterious law-enforcer had merely narrated; in the new version, his adventures were to be enacted. Moreover, he was now to have the supernatural gift of invisibility (hitherto he had merely lurked in, well, yes, the shadows). The final innovation was that he was to have a double identity. By night, the Shadow, who, ‘using sophisticated methods that may shortly be available to regular law-enforcement agencies’, fights an unceasing war on crime, aided only by his sidekick, the lovely Margot Lane; by day, Lamont Cranston, young man-about-town. The character was a prototype for those subsequent split personalities, Batman, Superman and Captain Marvel; Welles was the first Cranston, but the fourth Shadow. Curiously, the famous opening sequence, with the Shadow’s trademark, a bass chuckle (oddly sinister for a law-enforcer), and his endlessly imitated warning (under the sound of a whirlwind blended with Saint-Saëns’s welling theme from Le Rouet d’Omphale: ‘who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man? The Shadow knows … the weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay! The Shadow knows!’ was not his; Mutual preferred his predecessor’s rendition of it, so one of Welles’s most famous performances – as well known and as closely associated with him in its time as the Harry Lime theme would be twelve years later – was actually given by Frank Readick, Jr.

  Welles plays the wealthy young Cranston as rather leisurely and mild, with careless charm, in the more or less English accent then still synonymous with a private income; there is about the interpretation a suggestion of silk dressing gown and cigarette holder: this was his Noël Coward performance. All his love of melodrama informs his performance of Cranston’s later ego, the Shadow himself. In a curious resonance for Welles, this other self was the result of ‘a youthful trip to the Orient’, where Cranston had learned ‘a strange and mysterious secret … the hypnotic power to cloud men’s minds so they cannot see him’; the real him, in Welles’s case, perhaps. Jungians everywhere will raise a smile, perhaps a slightly serious smile, at the personification of one of the great analyst’s key concepts: the shadow is ‘that part of us we fail to know or see’ – which, if unacknowledged or denied, destroys us. Another resonance. Initially, the actor’s identity was kept secret – but nothing to do with Welles could remain a secret for very long. It added, over the couple of years in which he played the role, to an irresistibly growing fame. But meanwhile, there was Caesar to prepare for his new theatre.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Caesar

  PRESUMABLY IN the belief that his eccentricities were not excessive, his love of obscure theatrical elements was not inordinate, and that he would not be imposing his tastes and inhibitions on theatrical culture, Welles began his work on Julius Caesar, withdrawing to the country just as Stanislavsky had to prepare his production of The Seagull in the opening months of the Moscow Art Theatre. Once he had assembled his cast, he set off for New Hampshire to work both on Caesar and – a late addition to the repertory which Welles had realised would be a superb vehicle for the talents of his chum Chubby Sherman – The Shoemaker’s Holiday by Thomas Dekker. He returned two weeks later with edited texts, models and drawings for Julius Caesar which he presented to his creative team: Jean Rosenthal as lighting designer, Sam Leve as set designer, Marc Blitzstein, composer.

  His interpretation of the play was extremely clear, and, as we have seen, not particularly original. Not only had both Hallie Flanagan and Sidney Howard already separately suggested the idea of a modern dress, fascist Caesar to Welles and Houseman, but Arthur Schintzer, head of the Federal Theatre Project at Wilmington, Delaware, had actually done one earlier that year, ‘a not-too-complimentary satire on premier Benito Mussolini and fascist Italy’, said the Newark Post. Schintzer had been inspired not by political purposes, but by the familiar FTP problem: having a number of veteran (male) vaudevillians on his hands, he needed a play with a large, largely male, cast. Julius Caesar fitted the bill nicely. Realising that ‘these old boys would look silly in togas’, he decided to dress them in blackshirts and khaki. News of Delaware’s Caesar had not reached Manhattan, nor was Sidney Howard’s Collected Correspondence publicly available, so the idea seemed to have leaped fully fledged out of Welles’s brain. Questions of originality and authorship were to plague Welles throughout his career, largely because of his insistence on sole responsibility for his own work and his increasing need to appear as an original genius, a quite unnecessary and largely unsustainable claim. In media as miscegenated as the theatre and film, an original idea is the least of it: the realisation is all. The best idea in the world, poorly executed, is dead in the water; the real creator is the person who can liberate an idea’s potential. And by that criterion, Welles had few rivals.

  In the case of Julius Caesar, he served the idea absolutely, better, perhaps, than the play itself. His version of the text was heavily cut and rearranged: a performing version, and no mistake. During rehearsals, he continued cutting and rearranging; this process only stopped by Press Night. He had come a long way from his resounding affirmation in Everybody’s Shakespeare: ‘one of the very wisest ways to play Shakespeare is the way he wrote it … he wrote it that way not because he didn’t know better but because he knew best.’ He had changed his mind about a number of things since that precocious essay. ‘What’s in a Name?’ he had asked then. ‘Commentators say the play is mis-named: Brutus should be its title … I disagree,’ he wrote. ‘The personality of Caesar is the focal point of every line of the play.’ By 1937, though he didn’t go so far as to propose changing the title, he had come to the conclusion that Brutus was very much the central figure of the play. The Mercury, the weekly bulletin that was in effect Welles’s mouthpiece, stated: ‘As those familiar with the play are aware, Julius Caesar is really about Brutus.’1 Welles himself added: ‘Brutus is the classical picture of the eternal, impotent, ineffectual, fumbling liberal; the reformer who wants to do something about things but doesn’t know how and gets it in the neck in the e
nd. He’s dead right all the time, and dead at the final curtain. He’s Shakespeare’s favourite hero – the fellow who thinks the times are out of joint but who is really out of joint with his time. He’s the bourgeois intellectual who, under a modern dictatorship, would be the first to be put up against a wall and shot.’

  He had concluded that the play was ‘about’ the anguish of the liberal in an age of dictators. This emphasis meant that a great deal of the political complexity of the play was sacrificed in order to focus on one man’s dilemma. The version Welles fashioned by no means fulfilled Houseman’s claim for the production that ‘the stress will be on the social implications inherent in the history of Caesar and on the atmosphere of personal greed, fear and hysteria that surrounds a dictatorial regime’ or indeed Welles’s own claim at the same time that ‘it’s a timeless tragedy about Caesarism and the collapse of democracy under Caesarism.’ Lepidus was axed entirely; Octavius and Antony downgraded, and the mob, so graphically individualised by Shakespeare, relegated to a largely choric function – in the text, that is.

  Its function in the staging was heightened, streamlined; but it became a many-headed hydra, losing the dynamics of individuals in a crowd. ‘Here we have true fan psychology,’2 he told The New York Times. ‘This is the same mob that tears the buttons off the coat of Robert Taylor. It’s the same mob, too, that hangs and burns negroes in the South, the same mob that maltreats the Jews in Germany. It’s the Nazi mob anywhere.’ Significantly Welles’s version starts, not with the scene analysed by a million schoolchildren (‘Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!’) but with Caesar silencing the crowd. ‘Bid every noise be still!’ We are in the presence of the Great from the start; there is no context. Rome is its leaders; a distinctly bourgeois reading of history.

  Whatever the interpretation, the result was nothing if not effective; a great deal of the Mercury version, in fact, was devised for no other reason than to generate theatrical excitement. The text gives every appearance of having been shaped to accommodate the production, rather than the other way round. His adaptation is exactly comparable to those reviled eighteenth-century adaptors, Garrick and Cibber, his purposes exactly the same as theirs: to exploit the possibilities of their stage-craft and to fit the play to the temper of the times. ‘In drastically cutting the last twenty minutes of the play,’3 wrote Hank Senber in The Mercury, ‘Welles was working to clarify the personal aspects of the tragedy and to liberate the play from such concessions to Elizabethan tastes as drums, alarums and mock battles on stage.’ And of course, those things did look and sound ridiculous when the warriors in question were wearing long black leather overcoats and jackboots. Welles certainly wasn’t going to lose the stunning effectiveness of the uniforms because some of the play didn’t fit. Cut it! The lurid theatricality of the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler was an essential element in choosing the context for the play, and the physical look of the production was absolutely clear in Welles’s mind from the beginning. There seems, however, to have been some conceptual confusion. If the play – or at any rate the production – is a critique of Caesarism, what does Antony represent? He, surely, is the demagogue, not Caesar: he’s Hitler, he’s Mussolini. Is Caesar then Hindenburg? Somewhat defensively, Welles told The Mercury: ‘I produced the play in modern dress to sharpen contemporary interest rather than to point up or stunt up present-day detail. I’m trying to let Shakespeare’s lines do the job of making the play applicable to the tensions of our time.’ It was a general feeling of contemporaneity that he was after; not a blow-by-blow parallel.

  His absolute certainty about the physical realisation of the concept made his collaborators’ work quite cut and dried. Jeannie Rosenthal wrote: ‘Welles dictated very clearly and exactly the kind of look he wanted the production to have, a very simple look, based on the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg. The patterns implied in the Nuremberg “festivals” were in terms of platforms, which were the basis of the scenery, and light which went up or down. The uplight was really taken from the effect the Nazis achieved.’4 (And which Houseman had used before in Panic.) Welles described his concept of the physical production in The Director in the Theatre Today the following year: ‘I wanted to present Julius Caesar against a texture of brick, not of stone, and I wanted a color of red that had certain vibrations of blue. In front of this red brick wall I wanted levels and places to act: that was my conception of the production.’ Welles’s visual confidence is rare among directors. His own skills as a graphic artist, coupled with his experience in designing and building for the Todd Troupers and the Gate Theatre, made him a daunting prospect for a designer. Young Sam Leve, fresh from triumphs with the Federal Theatre Project and the Yiddish Art Theatre, in his own words ‘oozing imagination’, found that Welles was uninterested in his suggestions. In order to get them even considered, he had to convey them to Houseman, who might, if he liked them, pass them on, a ‘humiliating process’ for the young designer, in his own words. However, when Welles asked him for sketches, from the hundreds Leve would produce, on Leve’s admission he would unerringly choose the best, dismissing the less good ones: ‘Sam, you can do better than that.’ The two men were exactly the same age, but as usual Welles immediately and automatically assumed command.

  ‘At the Mercury,’ wrote Jean Rosenthal, ‘nobody else had any identity for him at all. You were production material. If he liked you, the association could be pleasant. If not, it was injurious. As a director, he approached other talents as he did his gargantuan meals – with a voracious appetite. Your contributions to his feast he either spat out or set aside untouched, or he ate them up, assimilated them, with a gusto which was extraordinarily flattering.’5 And fun: ‘the initial stages of anything with Orson were immensely entertaining, which carried everything along … he never counted the cost of anything to himself or to anyone else.’ Rosenthal, who became one of the crucial figures in the development of American theatre lighting before her early death in the sixties, was keenly aware of the growth of the power of directors, and identified Welles as one of the first to dominate every single aspect of a production. Rosenthal avoided confrontation with Welles, but he never doubted her strength, demanding much of her within a framework of respect. Her final judgement, though, on her work with him is a chilling one: ‘I do not think Orson made the utmost use of his collaborators’ talent, although he often inspired their achievements. He did make the utmost use of his talents at the beginning, but perhaps his lack of respect for others accounts in some measure for the ultimate dissipation of his multiple talents.’

  For the time being, the actors were not complaining. Few of them would have been aware of his philosophical baggage. What they saw was a man with very determined ideas putting them into practice with a disarming combination of ruthless drilling and amiable anecdotalising, plus a good deal of horseplay. Exuberant, in some ways still a very young man, almost a boy, he dictated the pace and regularity of work according to his personal mood. ‘When he felt like rehearsing, we rehearsed. When he felt like sleeping, we didn’t rehearse. If he felt like rehearsing from 11.00 at night to 6.00 in the morning, damn stage-hands’6 overtime, full speed ahead,’ according to his then stage manager Howard Teichmann. ‘He was a brilliant, inventive, imaginative, director … in a class all by himself. He would sit generally at a table in the centre aisle behind the table, and he would have a microphone on the table. And he would whisper his directions into the microphone. This table also served as his dining table. When he was hungry, he would send people out and they would bring in the steaks and the french fries and the ice cream and pots of coffee a foot and a half high, which he would consume with great relish. And when he was tired, he would say, “All right, children.” Now mind you, he was younger than most of the people but we were his children.’

  ‘There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Orson was the big star,’ said Teichmann. ‘He was a year or two older than I am, and he was slim, with a big head and round cheeks and very boyish. And “boy genius
” was a term if he didn’t create, he didn’t fight it off … You had to be a certain kind of a personality to work with Orson. You either had to worship him or you had to meet him on an equal level, or you had to crumble. And a great many people, you know, would end up with ulcers and he was a great one for giving them. He loved everybody, but, boy, he was tough. “Who me, tough? I’m a pussycat.” You know, that was his thing … he played people off against each other.’ His manner was calculated to be humorously high-handed, shouting out admonitions – ‘shame on you!’ a favourite – if the actor’s work wasn’t to his liking. He was not averse to having a whipping boy: young William Alland, later famous as the producer of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and known to movie buffs as the shadowy reporter in Citizen Kane, had, when the Mercury was being set up, more or less thrown himself at Welles’s feet, and that’s more or less where he stayed, as actor, stage manager, gofer and pimp. Welles would roar his name out, abusing and cajoling him. It was good-humoured, but only just: a throw away from bullying. If you weren’t on the receiving end, it could be fun; to Peg Lloyd it was cheap: ‘he seemed a prep school boy with the cheap humour that preppies have. A genius preppy, that’s what he was: the ringleader of the bullies on the corner.’7

  Rehearsals for Julius Caesar took place, initially, not in the theatre (the stage was still being reconstructed) but in an abandoned movie studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, ‘the place where the movie industry began’ in the words of Elliot Reid. Under a couple of worklights, while the incessant rain dripped into strategically placed buckets and the plaster tumbled from the roof, Welles arranged his cast on the platforms which Sam Leve had found in an old Shubert warehouse, and which were the essential element of the set that he and Welles had devised. There were four platforms: the first fourteen foot deep (the downstage playing area), the second a narrow high step, the third an eight foot deep plateau, the last a narrower platform rising to a total height of six and a half foot above stage level; there were two flagpoles on either side of the stage. Within this framework, Welles laboured to create the images that he had in his mind. Despite the great informality with which he worked, the stories and the atmosphere of wild, almost boyish fun that he engendered, he was always straining towards a specific and precise visual notion, what Norman Lloyd (playing Cinna the poet) described as ‘the shot’. ‘Every scene had to have a production idea. Is it a shot? Is there something interesting in it?’8 He improvised the physical action, constantly altering the moves to achieve the desired shape; the scene wasn’t worked out in advance, in the Reinhardt manner, every eyebrow, every sniffle planned. But the effect was much the same: there was no discussion of character or motivation, simply a dedication to discovering what Brecht had called the ‘gestus’, or the gesture, of the scene.