From 1928 on, Welles was the ward of Dr. Maurice Bernstein, a Chicago physician, family friend, and patron of the opera. Dr. Bernstein had divorced his wife and married a soprano, but the resemblance to Charles Foster Kane stops there; purportedly an expert with gifted children, Bernstein had the wisdom to enroll Welles at the progressive Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois, a town the boy later described as “a Victorian posy under a bell of glass.” It was the happiest time of Welles’s youth, largely because of his mentor and friend Roger Hill, the peaceful surroundings, and the free rein he was given with his imagination. Among Welles’s accomplishments were a huge mural for the school and several dramatic productions that were virtually one-man shows; for example, he was Brutus and Cassius, Androcles and the lion in productions he also directed and designed.
Despite Welles’s obvious dramatic talent, first his father and then Dr. Bernstein tried to focus his attention on art. The father tried to make him a cartoonist, introducing him to Bud Fischer (the elder Welles’s acquaintances included not only creators of comic strips but also William Randolph Hearst himself), and Dr. Bernstein subsequently encouraged him to study at the Chicago Art Institute. Finally, using part of the inheritance Dick Welles had left, Bernstein sent the young man on a painting tour of Ireland; the Irish climate, for some unexplained reason, was supposed to be good for Welles’s chronic hay fever, and the landscape would give him a subject for his art. But the experiment did not work. Welles found his way to Dublin and the Gate Theatre, where he auditioned for Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir, claiming to be a veteran of the New York Theatre Guild. (He did not try the Abbey, which was better known in America, because there he would have to be an Irish citizen with at least a marginal proficiency in Gaelic.) No one really believed Welles’s lie about the Theatre Guild, but he was such a curious and demonic overactor that he was immediately given roles to play, and from his first performance as the villainous Duke in Jew Süss he was a small sensation. After his triumphant stay at the Gate, however, he found it difficult to get a work permit for the more famous theaters in England; more travel and some writing followed, and he finally returned, somewhat disillusioned, to the Midwest, where he occupied himself with a variety of activities. With William Vance he directed his first film, a silent expressionist farce called Hearts of Age, which Joseph McBride has described in detail. It is actually a short but elaborate home movie, with Welles and the other players nearly unrecognizable under layers of makeup. Welles appears in the role of Death, garbed as a stage Irishman, dancing about and leering around corners or through windows. The movie is virtually plotless and is filled with the camera trickery and heavy-handed symbolism of the avant-garde, all of it presented in the form of a crude parody.
At about this same time, when he was eighteen, Welles collaborated with Roger Hill on editing Everybody’s Shakespeare and writing a play about John Brown, titled Marching Song. He also wrote another play on his own, which he called Bright Lucifer. No one seems to have shown interest in either project, although as late as 1938 Welles spoke fondly of Bright Lucifer to an interviewer from the New Yorker and talked of having it produced. It happens that the manuscript of this play survives in the Arnold Weissberger Collection at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Theater Research, and while it is hardly the product of genius, it is valuable for its revelation of the young Welles’s personality—in fact, the title seems to me an apt description of his whole career in America. Like many of Welles’s best-known films, Bright Lucifer is a curious blend of philosophic argument and gothic fantasy, loaded with playful and sometimes troubling autobiographical references; it indirectly summarizes Welles’s childhood and adolescence, and it foreshadows much of his later work.
The three-act play is bound in a folder that looks almost like a child’s copybook. It is covered with handwritten revisions, and on the opening page is an impressive sketch by Welles of the play’s only setting—the main room of a sportsman’s cabin, sparsely furnished but darkened with atmospheric shadow. Three characters have gathered here on an island for a few days of fishing: a middle-age newspaperman named Bill Flynn, editor of a Sunday feature that is described at one point as an “inquirer”; Bill’s younger brother, Jack, a burned-out actor of Hollywood horror films; and Bill’s ward, Eldred Brand, a demonic adolescent who is the “bright Lucifer” of the title. Eldred is a precocious, sexually ambiguous, and quite insane child whom Jack calls a “busy little bitch boy.” In many respects he resembles the young Welles: he is an orphan, a victim of hay fever, a cigar smoker, and a devotee of Nietzsche; he also has more than a little in common with Shakespeare’s Edmund, the chief villain in King Lear, one of Welles’s favorite dramas. Indeed the play is so filled with situations drawn from the author’s experience that one cannot help wondering what Dr. Bernstein would have thought of the following exchange between Eldred and his foster father, Bill:
ELDRED: You never miss a chance, do you, to remind me that I’m an orphan—an adopted orphan?
BILL: Please, Eldred—
ELDRED: If it had just happened that you were my father instead of the man that beat you to it—
BILL: Please, Eldred—(pause) I’ve never denied that I loved your mother, but I loved your father, too.—And Sonny, I love you, but you’re getting past the age—
ELDRED: You’ve tried to be just like a father to me, haven’t you? All those years tucking me into bed. I have my mother’s eyes, haven’t I? I used to wear bangs and we went on little walks together and you taught me the alphabet. Yes, and Christ knows you’ve taught me that litany! All these years! . . . my adored old stepmother . . .
BILL: Listen, Sonny, your mother and I—
ELDRED: My mother? You mean Martha, that woman?
BILL: Eldred!
ELDRED: She hates me! She hates me, Bill! It’s true! She’s jealous of our love for each other. So’s [Jack]!
BILL: Eldred, my God!
ELDRED: I tell you I’ve seen it in his eyes all day, jealousy and hatred and craziness—
Naturally it is Eldred who is crazy, and one should hesitate before imputing a purely autobiographical motive to these lines. Even at eighteen, Welles had a highly developed sense of the Eldred-like roles his voice and body had destined him to play. He was too sophisticated a writer not to disguise his private life, and his emphasis on oedipal rivalry may be less a considered analysis than an attempt to be au courant. The passage does, however, prefigure a tendency in his later work, where he constructs fantasies loosely based on his own life, often projecting himself into the role of a possessed, pathologically troubled character whose behavior is the result of misplaced libidinal energy. The demonic, self-destructive urge for power in this character grows out of a Freudian conflict, and the fictional world Welles constructs belongs in a tradition somewhere between old-fashioned gothic melodrama and psychological “realism.”
Despite the setting, the play is dominated by themes of savagery and devil worship, symbols of Eldred’s troubled consciousness, and the staging suggests Welles’s later experiments in the “Voodoo Macbeth.” A group of Indians—probably based on the Menominee of northern Wisconsin—are encamped near the island, engaged in a burial ceremony for a squaw; the sound of their drums keeps entering from offstage, providing eerie background for the contest between Jack’s sanity and Eldred’s affection for the “dark gods.” Ultimately the monster actor is no match for the real thing. While Bill is momentarily away, Eldred takes advantage of a conversation about practical jokes in order to convince Jack that a trick can be played on the Indians: Jack will dress up in his Hollywood costume (which happens to have been brought along on the fishing trip) and appear at the ceremony outside. Jack agrees to this adolescent scheme, but he is carried away by his own performance; he kidnaps the squaw from the frightened Indians and spends most of the night running through the forest carrying a dead body. Eldred has somehow anticipated all of this and is trying to engineer Jack’s madness. When the actor returns to the cabin,
shaken and guilty, Eldred helps him conceal the facts from Bill and proposes that he put on the monster costume once more in order to give Bill a good laugh. Again—somewhat implausibly—Jack capitulates; and when Bill sees a horribly realistic “ghoul” standing in the cabin, he dies of a heart seizure. Eldred and Jack are left confronting each other in the lonely cabin, Eldred raving madly about the triumph of evil and offering to become Jack’s “manager” for any hauntings in the future. Jack seizes a revolver and shoots Eldred dead, but as he stands over the body, an apparition appears: a ghoul, looking exactly like Jack himself in the monster costume. Jack rushes out into the night, screaming Eldred’s name. The devil drums begin sounding outside, and Welles’s stage directions remark, “Something old and dark has got its way.”
This contrived story provides some basis for psychological speculation about Welles, who has put so much of his public self into the character of Eldred. As we shall see, a great deal of Welles’s work can be explained in terms of the conflicting demands of his humanism, personified in this case by Jack, and his romantic rebelliousness, represented by Eldred. It is as if characters like Eldred give him the opportunity to express an anger that the more rational side of his personality then corrects and criticizes. But clearly his imagination and passion were fired by the notion of the tragic outlaw; usually he makes such characters the victims of some kind of determinism, and in so doing he gives a certain humanity to their rebellion. They remain villains, but they also function as critics of bourgeois society and as scapegoats; after all, there is a little of Eldred in Jack—and, by extension, in everyone. In one sense, therefore, the Eldreds of the world have nearly the same perverse appeal for Welles as Milton’s Satan had for writers of the nineteenth century; they become symbols of the desire to reject one’s hated circumstances and gain control over destiny.
On a less speculative level, Bright Lucifer is interesting for the way it embodies Welles’s major themes. The mixture of Midwestern pastoral, grotesque terror, and “family drama” vaguely suggests both Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, and when the white man/red man conflict is added, we find ourselves at the veritable center of American literature. The spiritual tension of the play—the contest between a somewhat flawed humanist and a power-hungry maniac who models himself on the devil—will appear again and again in Welles’s later work, most obviously in stage productions of Faust, Julius Caesar, and Danton’s Death, and in films like Kane and Touch of Evil. On one side of this battle are liberal reason and good feeling; on the other are the demons of psychoanalysis and the supernatural. Whenever Welles depicts such a contest, he comes to the same potentially radical conclusions that are implicit in most gothic fiction: he shows that evil characters have both power and consistency, whereas liberals are either complacent, badly flawed, or swept up into the tyrant’s own madness. In his more obviously political dramas and films, he presents the conflict in terms of a social dilemma, his moral being somewhat pessimistic: evil always wins, the one consolation being that the tyrant’s hubris leads to his downfall.
For all of its interest, however, Bright Lucifer is only child’s play. At one point in the text, in a line Welles has lightly crossed out, the frustrated actor Jack remarks of his career, “I wanted to scare people on a big scale. . . . Not lousy movies. No, I mean artistically—a huge practical joke.” Relatively soon afterward Orson Welles would be able to fulfill this ambition; fascinated with trickery and hoaxes, he inadvertently pulled the biggest Halloween prank of them all.
II
Had Welles been able to get work in the English theater after his experience at the Gate, he might have remained an expatriate; luckily, he found his way back to America during one of the most interesting periods in the nation’s theatrical history. He soon landed a job with a road company headed by Katharine Cornell, met John Houseman, and began the association that led to the New York Federal Theatre and the Mercury group.
Welles entered the New York theater just at the high point of what Gerald Rabkin has called “committed” drama—the period 1934–36, when Theatre Union and New Theatre League had produced Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty and Irwin Shaw’s Bury the Dead. His major work, however, occurred in a period of relative quiet, when the New Deal had become the chief subsidizer of social plays and even the Communists had become moderate. By the middle of the decade the Popular Front had been established, creating an alliance between Marxists and antifascist writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Archibald MacLeish. (Welles’s first important American role was as a doomed capitalist, a sort of ur-Kane, in MacLeish’s political drama Panic.) Throughout this time Welles was in sympathy with the left, and like most intellectuals he regarded Roosevelt as a hero; he remained an outspoken, active supporter of Soviet-American friendship, an antagonist of racism and fascism, until late in the forties. His political consciousness was shaped by the Popular Front. At various times he called himself a Socialist, remaining strongly antifascist yet somehow within the “pragmatic” ethos of New Deal reformers. In fact the remarkable sense of inner tension and contradiction that can be seen in a film like Kane is in some ways a reflection of the subtle complexities and contradictions in Welles’s own political situation.
Welles also had come to prominence during a period of collective consciousness, when the major theatrical achievements were the result of group activity. Even the clearly non-Marxist dramatists like Sherwood Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, and Robert Sherwood had formed a loose alliance in the Playwrights’ Company, and New York was bustling with small theater collectives. (It was toward the end of this period that Welles and Houseman dissolved their partnership; according to Houseman, their egos had begun to conflict—a foreshadowing of the loss of collective spirit in the arts generally.) Of all the groups in those days, easily the largest was the Federal Theatre Project, which brought employment to actors and drama to people on a scale that has never been duplicated; in New York alone there were four major Federal Theatre companies, so Welles and Houseman accounted for only a small part of the total. Quite naturally, the project was attacked by conservatives, particularly by the Hearst press, which called it “an adjunct of the New York Leftist literary junta.” Although only about 10 percent of the productions had an overt political content, the very existence of such a theater was troubling to Republicans. At first Hallie Flanagan, the executive in charge, resisted censorship of the plays, but political pressure from the right mounted steadily. This no doubt contributed to the trouble Welles and Houseman encountered when they tried to stage Marc Blitzstein’s “labor opera,” The Cradle Will Rock, their only venture into truly proletarian theater, which was summarily closed by government agents and forced into a stunning improvised performance down the street in the aisles of the Venice Theatre. Welles immediately resigned his job with the New Deal, and Houseman was fired.
But if they had departed the government officially, Welles and Houseman retained their New Deal approach to theater. They formed a repertory company with an investment of $10,500, lifting the name “Mercury” from a copy of Mercury magazine lying in a corner of an empty fireplace at Welles’s home. The company eventually had thirty-four members and took over the old Comedy Theatre on Forty-first and Broadway, announcing four productions for its first year of operation. With the blessing of Brooks Atkinson, the Mercury’s foundation was headlined in the Sunday drama section of the New York Times, where Welles and Houseman alluded to their previous Federal Theatre projects as a way of explaining what the new undertaking would be like. (Welles had already declared himself an enemy of government-controlled theater, but his opinions about this matter tended to vacillate; a short while later he appeared in Washington to testify on behalf of the Coffee-Pepper Bill, hoping to establish a Federal Bureau of Fine Arts.)
Although the Mercury was to be dominated by Welles’s personality and by publicity about him, it presented itself as a group project trying to entertain and inform a mass public. The “Mercury Manifesto,” written by Hou
seman, declared that the group would play to the same audience that saw the Works Progress Administration (WPA) productions of Dr. Faustus and Macbeth: “this was not the regular Broadway crowd taking in the hits of the moment. . . . Here were people on a voyage of discovery in the theatre.” The Mercury also promised plays that would have an “emotional or factual bearing on contemporary life,” observing that social consciousness would not substitute for “good drama,” but that a “socially unconscious theatre would be intolerable.” Welles even spoke of establishing a Mercury Laboratory for Sunday nights, in which young playwrights could experiment—an idea that the WPA itself had once tried unsuccessfully on a small scale. True to most of their words, the Mercury kept their idealistic plan going for a remarkable length of time, maintaining a repertory schedule, pausing in the midst of financially successful productions like Julius Caesar in order to make way for different plays and other actors, all the while keeping the Caesar actors on the payroll.
But even though the Mercury was fostered and nurtured by the political ethos of the thirties, in many other respects Welles was out of step with the times. Partly because he had been steeped in classical theater since childhood, partly because he had developed his style and temperament in the “provincial” Midwest and in Dublin repertory, his productions often drew from the spirit of the twenties as much as from the thirties. The “new” theater was didactic in tone and Brechtian in style, whereas most of Welles’s work harked back to a decade-old tradition of expressionism; the Gate had once been a center of such activity, and during the same period America saw Theatre Guild productions of Eric Kaiser and Karel Čapek, John Howard Lawson’s Roger Bloomer, and Elmer Rice’s Adding Machine—to say nothing of German expressionist cinema and Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. Welles’s work, which was inspired by this older style, consisted mainly of revivals or adaptations of classics, plays mounted in starkly dramatic fashion with visual effects that prefigure the look of his later films. Here, for example, is Houseman’s description of the set Welles designed for the modern-dress Julius Caesar:
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 4