It was one hundred voices at every streetcorner:
“That don’t cut no ice with me, buster.”
“Shuddup, ya lousy tart.”
“What’s the diff?”
It was kids on the corners hawking the Herald Tribune, Times, Daily News, Daily Mirror, Daily News, Sun, Post, Journal American, World Telegram . . . .
Sonja and I stood in Nedick’s eating hot dogs, the wet rolls drenched in steaming sauerkraut. Between us was the script for Caesar.
“You’ve got two real scenes,” she said. “Both short.” She was flipping through the script. “Brutus—Orson—is talking with Portia—Muriel Brassler—a bitch of the first water, but nobody can say anything because Orson is having an affair with her, right? Orson is married, you know.”
“Ah.”
“Absolutely ah. Little Virginia. Very dark, very pretty, very pregnant. They’ve got this tiny basement apartment over on 14th, but he keeps her pretty much locked away across the river at Sneden’s. And if you ever hear somebody yell ‘Anna Stafford!’ that’s code for Virginia; it means she’s shown up unexpectedly and Orson better hide the ballerina he’s trying to seduce.”
“The Mercury is sounding more interesting all the time.”
“And the least interesting part is Caesar. By the way, if anybody asks, you’re an Equity Junior Member. And you’re getting twenty-five dollars a week.”
“Swell!”
“No, you’re not getting twenty-five dollars a week. You’re not getting anything, except the opportunity to get sprayed on by Orson’s spit, but we’ve got enough Leftos in the company to start a demonstration if they find out you’re not being paid. So first there’s a knocking sound offstage. Portia exits. You enter.” She pointed to my line in the script, and swallowed the last bit of hotdog. “You’ve studied acting?”
“You’ve heard of Eva Le Gallienne?” I said.
She nodded.
“You’ve heard of the Group Theatre?”
She nodded.
“Well, I never worked for either of them.”
Six
Half an hour later I was sitting in an empty seat in the Mercury Theatre, and Norman Lloyd, who played the small role of Cinna the poet, was teaching me the chords to “Orpheus with His Lute,” the song I was supposed to sing. I was trying to banter my way through the fact that I had no idea how to play the ukulele. Lloyd looked barely older than I was; he was the curly-haired guy I’d last seen trying to play the drums outside the theatre, and for some reason he seemed to get a kick out of me. He was sitting now on a theatre seat, his long legs bent painfully in front of him. Other actors milled around the stage—waiting. According to Lloyd, waiting for Orson was the principal occupation of the Mercury Theatre company. Lloyd was filled with an almost uncontrollable nervous energy; one of his legs bobbed continuously.
He strummed a terrible-sounding chord and sang:Orpheus with his lute
Made trees and the mountaintops that freeze
Bend themselves when he did sing . . .
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think you better hope Orpheus is deaf.”
I turned around to see Sonja walking down the aisle balancing a coffee cup on a book.
Lloyd did an exaggerated double-take, and then played a stripper’s bump-and-grind drumbeat on the back of the chair. He imitated a burlesque emcee: “I say, there goes another big one!”
“She and I had dinner tonight,” I said.
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious.”
“You had dinner with the Ice Queen? Kid, every guy in this show’s trying to get into her pants. Even Joe Cotten hasn’t nailed her, and there’s not a broad in the Manhattan phone book he hasn’t—”
“Shhhh—”
She said, “Norman, could you verify that your bio is correct for the program? And initial it if it’s O.K.?” Up close I could see she was reading Gone with the Wind. “Richard, I’ll need your telephone number, too, if we need to reach you.”
“She never asked for my telephone number,” said Lloyd, not taking his eyes from the page proof. “How does this sound?” He read: “Norman Lloyd started acting in vaudeville at the tender age of six and remained there for six years. Does that sound like I remained at the age of six for six years?”
“If the shoe fits,” said Sonja, and she got up to talk to some other cast members.
Lloyd watched her. “Oh, sweet Jasper, I want to stick my head under her sweater! I swear to you, I dream about that sweater at night. I’d give ten bucks for just one good photograph of her. I tell you, one good picture with a few well-placed shadows would do wonders to ease my nocturnal burden. Sonja! Slake my urge!” He hobbled about between the seats, pretending to be bent double in sexual frustration.
“She’s your kind of girl?” I asked.
“If she said to me: ‘Norman, I’ll let you make love to me, and I’ll completely open myself up to you, and then when we’re done I’m going to shoot you in the head with a pistol,’ I’d say: ‘Here’s the pistol, baby—now let’s get started ’cause my hearse is double-parked. ’ ”
The doors at the back of the theatre slammed open, and Orson Welles entered carrying what appeared to be two enormous phonograph records. There was a dark, athletic-looking girl behind him. Then came some technicians, followed by Houseman, whose English accent was now sharpened with anger. “How dare you, Orson! We had discussed this.”
“The Mercury Theatre will open when I say it’s ready to open,” announced Welles.
“It’s not as simple as that anymore, Orson. This isn’t the Federal. There isn’t any front office. We’re the front office.”
A few feet from the stage, Welles turned on him icily. “You’re the front office, Jacko. And you’re starting to talk like a real bureaucrat, you know that? A small-minded, little copies-in-triplicate-and-please-God-don’t-disturb-my-lunch-hour bureaucrat. I left the Federal to escape people like you.”
“We left the Federal because they fired us, Orson. This is our show now. You can’t go around forever playing Peck’s Bad Boy and expect people will find it endearing. It isn’t endearing, it’s simply irresponsible.”
“You started out as grain merchant; you’ll always be a grain merchant.”
“And your telling John Mason Brown that the opening date is still tentative is irresponsible, childish—”
“And accurate.” Welles turned to two technicians who were carrying a large phonograph. “Set that up on stage.”
“Orson,” said Houseman, changing his tone. “I’m pleading with you. We have subscribers. We are trying to sell a season’s worth of tickets to a repertory company, and you can’t say to people who have made plans and arrangements, ‘The play opens whenever I feel it does.’ ”
“The play opens when I’m convinced it’s ready.”
“Orson, the play opens Thursday. We cannot delay it again.”
“This discussion is over.”
“It isn’t over. I don’t care if you have to rehearse for five days straight, we’re previewing Wednesday, and we’re opening Thursday. If we delay this opening one more time, we’re dead as a theatrical company.”
“I cannot rehearse with this man in the theatre,” announced Welles, clamping his hands over his ears. “Will someone tell me when he’s left the building?”
Houseman headed halfway up the aisle, then turned. “This is an infinitely rewarding partnership, Orson. You go around smashing everything, disenfranchising every friend, every supporter we have. And then I’m left desperately trying to clean up your mess. I’m the one who ends up making the apologies, making the corrections—making the ten thousand phone calls I don’t even tell you about.”
“And I’m out acting in The Shadow and The March of Time and every other goddamn-son-of-a-bitch piece-of-shit radio show in this city, just to pour my money—my personal money, a thousand dollars a week, into this goddamn-son-of-a-bitch theatre that you’re supposed to be running.”
“That I’m supposed to be running!” said Houseman, the veins in his neck and forehead protruding. “Single-handedly, I’m supposed to be running the Mercury Theatre! I’m killing myself trying to run it! What in the hell are you doing for the Mercury Theatre?”
“I am the Mercury Theatre!” thundered Welles.
“I resign!” said Houseman. “You’re on your own.” He headed up the aisle.
“Just let me rehearse in peace!” said Welles with his arms stretched out to the heavens.
At this slightly conciliatory tone, Houseman stopped to listen.
“No director in the history of the theatre would work under conditions like these,” declaimed Welles. “Sabotage. Jealousy. Every single member of this company deliberately attempting to destroy my work. But wait and see!” Welles had assumed a grandiose tone for the benefit of all of us. “I’ll mount a Caesar that will astound the eye and the ear. It will be Shakespeare as it’s not been seen since the time of Elizabeth herself—Shakespeare written in the language of tears and blood and beer—in the language of starlight and fireflies and the sun and moon! The only thing even near to it in the history of American theatre will be my own production of Macbeth last year. But this will be greater! Richer! Deeper!” He removed a rolled-up magazine from his jacket pocket. He was playing to the whole theatre now. “Did you see the cover of Time? Look at this. The goddamn-son-of-a-bitch Lunts! Well, let me tell you something—before this year is over I—we—will be on the cover of Time.” He gestured to the balconies. “This stage is where theatrical history is being written—with you and me and all of us as its principal players!”
“Orson—” began Houseman.
“Please! Let me rehearse in peace!” He held his ears again to stifle the imaginary clamor. “I will do the best I can for you. Exhausted as I am, I will attempt to rise above the arrogance and jealousy around me and get you your opening.” He dramatically climbed the stepladder to the stage. “. . . the small-mindedness around here,” he muttered to himself. “I’m suffocating!” Then he moved into a pool of light and gestured toward his female protégé. “Let it be said that here was a man who loved the Mercury not wisely but too well.”
“Thursday!” said Houseman.
“Anna Stafford!” somebody yelled from the back of the house.
“Oh, Christ,” said Welles, leaping from the stage.
Virginia Welles came walking down the aisle. She looked to be in her early twenties. She wore an oversized tweed coat, and you could see she was pregnant.
Meantime, Welles was hustling his female protégé into a seat in the fourth row. “You see, Betty, I believe it was Stanislavsky who said to Max Reinhardt—” He looked up, filled with surprise. “Ginny! What an unexpected and delightful surprise!”
Two steel fire doors opened from the alley onto the stage, and a dozen housepainters were led onstage by Sam Leve, the little man with the crewcut whom I had last seen installing the illuminated Mercury sign. Instantly, there were boxes of paint cans, splattered wooden ladders, rolls of dropcloths.
“Mr. Welles, what I had to do to find seventy gallons of red paint!” said Leve in his heavy Jewish accent. “But the paint is cheap; it’s got a binder of fish glue in it, so don’t blame me if it smells a little from fish. And I have something else to talk to you about.”
“We also need to paint the platforms gray,” said Welles. He gestured to the stage set, which consisted of three steps leading to a bare platform. From the backstage wall a ramp tilted up toward the main playing area. Four trap doors had been cut through the stage floor—two on each side—and smaller holes had been cut into the central playing area, each one covered with a strong wire grid. Below each grid was mounted a theatre light aiming directly up.
“Mit en drinnen I need gray paint? Mr. Welles, there’s a saying in Jewish: Mir kennet tanzen ahf svay chassenahs mit ain tuchis. You can’t dance at two weddings with the same rear end!” He removed a folded-up piece of paper from his pocket. “But I want to talk to you about the Playbill, the wording, the choice of words, there’s a mistake here—”
Welles waved it off without looking at it. “I’ve corrected it already.”
Leve pointed to a line. “It doesn’t represent my contribution.”
“You’re looking at the proof; it’s all been corrected. See Sonja.”
“Orson, we’re ready to test this.” The two technicians had by now installed the phonograph center stage.
“Coulouris!” shouted Welles, and his voice broke. “Vakhtangov, my pineapple juice!”
“Mr. Welles’s pineapple juice!” someone shouted.
Vakhtangov ran toward the stage with a bottle of juice. He tripped, the bottle went flying. Lloyd leaped up, caught it—tossed it to Welles.
“Coulouris! Front and center!” Welles gulped down half the contents of the bottle in a single swig. “Where’s that gloomy son-of-a-bitch? Vakhtangov! Find Coulouris and tell him to get his no-acting ass down here. Jesus Christ, who’s directing this show!”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” said Lloyd to me quietly, but Welles had heard him. He pointed a threatening finger out to the audience. “One more comment like that, Mr. Lloyd, and your precious Cinna-the-poet scene hits the cutting-room floor.”
“Are we ever going to actually rehearse my precious Cinna-the-poet scene, Orson?”
“Rehearse? I thought you were the great comic improviser, Lloyd. The Chaplin of the Federal! I see Cinna as a lofty, almost-Byronic figure. He’s Shakespeare’s indictment of the intelligentsia—his indictment of the ivory tower and—”
“I completely disagree,” said Lloyd in a tone that was surprisingly tough. “He’s a street poet without a cent for a cigarette. Unshaved. Poems sticking out of his shoes. The forgotten man. But the crowd’s so crazy for blood they’ll kill him anyway.”
“Absurd interpretation,” said Welles. “Completely unjustified by the text. A total violation of the spirit of the play, and yet, there may be something there I can use. Coulouris! Where is that—”
George Coulouris entered from stage left. He was a large man, and he wore a green military uniform with a black gun belt across the front. “I thought this was a dress rehearsal,” he said, rubbing lotion into his hands. He disdainfully surveyed the clutter of the stage, the dozen housepainters rolling rust-colored paint on the entire back wall of the theatre. “Of course, the way you continue to cut the text, my character might as well not be in the play at all.”
“Please! Antony’s funeral oration is the dramatic centerpiece of Caesar,” said Welles. “Every schoolboy in the world knows it. People in the audience will be whispering it with you.”
“If they’re still awake after those endless scenes between you and Gabel. Why every Cassius scene should be labored over—every precious, tedious exchange preserved—while the part of Marc Antony, a character universally acknowledged to be the pivotal role of the play, should be shorn down to forty lines is something I, of course, will never understand. But Gabel’s the director’s darling in this piece. Just as Olivier was when we studied together at Elsie Fogerty’s Central School for Speech and Drama in London.”
“We’re going to record your speech,” said Welles. “These two gentlemen are engineers from Mutual. Of course what’s crucial to ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ is not so much the speech itself, but its effect on your audience.” Welles was suddenly the professor. “You listen. You judge their reactions. You pause. You tune them to your ends.”
Coulouris looked at him. “Do you imagine, Orson, you’re telling me something I don’t know?”
Then somebody was screaming. A painter, stepping back to look at his work, had fallen backwards through one of the open traps. Luckily, there was a mattress down in the cellar.
“That’s it!” said Coulouris. “First, you cut my part to shreds; now you’re trying to kill us all. I’ve never in my life been associated with such a ragtag production. Modern dress! We can’t afford costumes. We can’t e
ven afford a stage that isn’t gaping with holes.”
“Stage traps are a tradition as old as Shakespeare,” said Welles, “and I would have thought that even Elsie Fogerty’s Central School for Speech and Drama in London might have told you that stage traps comprise one of the most basic tools in the—”
“Let’s go, Orson,” said a technician.
Welles was suddenly pointing at me. “No kids in this scene. It’s a vicious mob. I thought you were out somewhere, learning your lines.”
“I know my lines,” I said.
Welles fell instantly into his Brutus voice. “ ‘Go to the gate. Somebody knocks.’ ”
“ ‘Sir, ’tis your brother Cassius,’ ” I answered without hesitation. (I was beginning to learn the rules—whoever was the biggest son-of-a-bitch won.)
“ ‘Is he alone?’ ”
“ ‘No, sir, there are more with him.’ ”
“Not ‘more’ with him,” said Welles. “ ‘Moe’ with him. This is Shakespearean verse we’re speaking. Do you think you can arbitrarily change the words of the world’s greatest playwright because you’re not comfortable with them?”
“I meant—”
“Go home and learn your lines.”
“I know them.”
“And I say you need moe time. We’re in one tiny scene, Junior, but remember that tiny scene serves to humanize the entire historical pageant of the play.” Welles was back in the lecture room. “We cry for the death of Brutus because of that one scene. And that beautiful lullaby captures all his inexpressible sadness. A lullaby I interpolated, by the way, from Henry VIII, act three, scene one. Now go home and learn your lines. Have we given him the ukulele yet? Sonja! He needs the music for the song. Is there anyone here trying to—”
Welles screamed and disappeared down a hole in the stage.
I took the 10:07 Hudson Tube home to Newark, then transferred to the local. I sat in the near-empty car strumming my ukulele and softly singing, “Orpheus with his lute . . . .” My ears were ringing with Shakespeare.
Me and Orson Welles Page 4