Me and Orson Welles

by Robert Kaplow

  She sat directly in front of Mewling. I couldn’t believe it. She had never sat in the front row of any classroom, ever, in any class, in eleven years.

  I watched as she opened up her purple notebook and began writing in her enormous, looping script.

  I looked at the empty seat next to me. It was as if she couldn’t even see me, as if her eyes couldn’t even register my impression.

  I sighed, and I shut my eyes.

  “Mr. Samuels?” called out Dr. Mewling.

  I opened my eyes. It was pick-on-the-idiot-who-hasn’t-been-listening-and-humiliate-him-in-front-of- the-class time. The whole class turned to look at me (except, of course, for Kristina).

  “You don’t seem to be taking any notes today? You know all this material already, Mr. Samuels? Because if you do then perhaps you’d like to teach the class—you’re apparently so knowledgeable about the historical plays of William Shakespeare?”

  I looked up to challenge his gaze. He stared back at me with all the passion of a three-month-old corpse.

  Mistake.

  “Mr. Samuels seems to have his mind on other things this morning, ladies and gentlemen. We were discussing Shakespeare’s histories. Perhaps you’d care to offer us your thoughts on the histories, Mr. Samuels; you appear to find the taking of notes so completely superfluous?”

  Silence.

  I spoke as loudly as I could. “I believe the greatest of Shakespeare’s histories must be Julius Caesar.”

  “That’s what you believe.”

  “And I know we’re not starting it until next week, but I read it over the weekend for my own edification. Take, for instance, the brief but telling scene between Brutus—‘the noblest Roman of them all’—and his serving boy, Lucius. That tiny, almost insignificant scene serves to humanize the entire historical pageant of the play. And that beautiful lullaby Lucius sings. Interpolated, I believe, in most productions from Henry VIII, act three, scene one.”

  The bell rang.

  “See me after class,” said Mewling.

  Later that morning I sat in the back of Spanish class with Stefan. Señora Katz had spent the last twenty minutes trying to get the slide projector to work. She’d spent the first twenty minutes trying to get the screen to stand up.

  “I heard you put the moves on Caroline, Judas,” I said to Stefan.

  “I danced with her, all right? She begged me to. If I hear about this one more time—”

  “I thought you’re seeing Kate Rouilliard.”

  “I am, but Caroline kept grabbing my ass all night, all right?”

  “Drift, you can have any woman you want. You have to mess around with Caroline?”

  “I’m not messing around with her, all right? The Black Crow is loyal to its own.”

  The slide projector finally came alive. The slides were illustrations from Los de abajo, the novel we were supposed to be reading. Señora Katz read us the caption: “¡Qué hermosa es la Revolutión, aun en su misma barbarie! Can anybody translate that?”

  There was this girl sitting across the room from us who was wearing a loose-fitting dress, and she sat with one leg bent upwards and the other stretched out so that you could see all the way up her long legs to her black underwear. She raised her hand. “How beautiful is the revolution even in its very barbarism.”

  Stefan nudged me. “¡Qué hairmosa!”

  I was out roaming the halls with my bowling pin lavatory pass when I met Kate Rouilliard coming out of the first-floor bathroom. She raised her hand in protest before I could speak. “I heard already.”

  “It was just one dance.”

  “That he could do this to both of us is just so typical,” she said. She leaned against a locker. No socks. “You once told me I was too good for him. I should’ve listened to you.”

  I laughed. “Maybe we’d both be better off if we started dating each other.”

  “I wish I weren’t so supersensitive about him.”

  She looked right through me. The InvisibIe Man Returns. I willed her to say: Why am I hanging around with him anyway, Richard? It’s right in front of our eyes, isn’t it? Right in front of our eyes, and how come we’ve never seen it before? How could we be so goddamned blind? You’re the one I talk to; you’re the one who’s been my best friend—

  “Do you think he loves me, Richard?”

  “I’m certain of it, Kate.”

  “You’re one of the very few people I trust not to lie to me.”

  “Listen, Kate, could you do me a favor?” Unbutton your shirt.

  “Oh, dear. Sometimes I think the only reason people are friendly to me is because I work in the attendance office.”

  “I have to get out of here by noon. You’ve got to get my name on the absence list.”

  “I can get your name on the list, but if they call home to check, you’re screwed.”

  “They’re not going to call home for me. I’ve never cut once. I have credit in my account. Will you do it?”

  Ten

  Even the New Jersey swamps seemed worth studying that afternoon as my train clanked along toward New York. Has there ever been a more delicious feeling than being suddenly set free from school?

  ¡Qué hermosa!

  The morning sang in possibilities: all the time in the world! And my vision suddenly felt sharper, richer, unoccluded.

  I sat on a bench in Bryant Park and read the theatre page in the Times, my ukulele next to me. I felt like a true denizen of show business, and I breathed in Times Square like perfume. A cup of hot chocolate steamed in my hand. Producer Jed Harris arrives today on the Normandie with plans for his fall season. It can be said now that these plans include Thornton Wilder’s latest play ‘Our Town.’ Next Monday night Ed Wynn will open the Philadelphia tryout of ‘Hooray for What!’ a new musical satire with songs by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg.

  Church bells were ringing somewhere.

  Previewing next Saturday afternoon at Labor Stage, ‘Pins and Needles’—a satirical revue by Marc Blitzstein, Arthur Arent, Harold J. Rome, and Emanual Eisenberg.

  I picked up my ukulele and my script for Caesar, and, walking down the steps of the park, I felt in direct contact with a fantastically lucky universe, felt it hard under my feet. And, yes, I knew people were still desperate to find work, and people were still bombing each other in Shanghai, and the world could be dark and terrible—but not that afternoon. Not for that second. That second it was sunshine rising beyond the clouds. It was Orson Welles and the taste of hot chocolate and the smell of the Times ink and the face of every extraordinary woman passing on Sixth Avenue.

  Taped to the box office window of the Mercury was the Hirschfeld cartoon that had run in Sunday’s paper. The drawing showed a brooding, hooded-eyed Welles in black jacket and black tie staring at the sprawled body of Joe Holland. Caricatures of Gabel and Coulouris stood nearby. In the background, a circle of silhouettes stood shoulder to shoulder, and the caption read: The death of Caesar as they will start doing it Thursday at the newly christened Mercury Theatre.

  About ten men and women waited in line outside the box office.

  I pushed up the brim of my hat, and as slowly as I could, entered the main doors of the theatre. A woman turned to look at me.

  There was shouting—Welles and Houseman arguing in the lobby.

  “I’m sorry,” said Welles, holding up his hands. “I have a commitment to Joe Ainley. He moved the whole goddamned radio show to New York just for me. It will not take more than an hour.”

  “Your primary commitment is to the Mercury!” said Houseman.

  “You’ll get your Thursday opening.”

  “Do you have any idea how much we have riding on this, Orson?”

  Welles put his arm around my shoulder. “Don’t go, Junior. We’ll rehearse in the cab.”

  Now Welles, Houseman, and I were all walking out the front door of the theatre. A few people on line recognized Welles.

  “Orson, for the last time, we need you here now. We need every bit of
your energy directed toward the Mercury.”

  A cab stood waiting in front of the theatre.

  “Get in, Junior,” said Welles. Then he turned to Houseman. “One hour. Have Ash run through the whole show while I’m gone.”

  “Don’t do this to me, Orson.”

  “This is network, John. If the whole goddamn country knows who Orson Welles is, then that can’t be bad for the Mercury, can it? 485 Madison Avenue!”

  We headed uptown.

  “I’m absolutely starving to death.” He lit his cigar. “Well, Junior, it’s Monday, and we haven’t had the Bad Luck Thing yet. I’m a little worried.”

  “The Bad Luck Thing?”

  “An old theatrical superstition. You need to have the Bad Luck Thing before you open. If you don’t, then opening night becomes the Bad Luck Thing.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I’ve seen it,” said Welles darkly. “And this time it’s making me afraid. It’s the one hurdle we haven’t passed.”

  “People have fallen down the—”

  “No. Deeper than that. More sinister. It’s a malevolent spirit that must be exorcised. But you pray it happens before the opening. If it doesn’t . . . .”

  “How will you know?”

  “You’ll know. Everybody will . . . .” He looked at me. “So tell me about you, Junior. What’s the story of your life?”

  “Well—” I began.

  “Do you know Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons?” Welles unsnapped his briefcase and removed a well-thumbed hardback copy of the book. “Tarkington was a friend of my father. Based the character of Eugene, the inventor, on my father. My father died when I was fifteen.” He puffed on his cigar. “Ambersons is about how everything gets taken away from you.” He opened the book, which was inked with crossed-out pages. “I’ve been adapting it for radio. Did you hear my Les Misérables in August? Sensational reviews and the worst goddamn Crosleys in radio history!” He laughed, and I realized, once again, I was a totally irrelevant element in the conversation. But still he was riveting. “Listen to this. Pure American poetry.” He pointed to an illustration in the novel: two well-dressed men holding canes and gloves were speaking to each other in a train station. A large valise lay on the ground behind them. In the upper right-hand corner you could make out departure times for the trains.

  Welles began to read in his deepest and most resonant voice—even the taxi driver turned around to look; you could feel his voice shake your bones—and instantly he had transformed himself into someone else. His accent was Midwest; his rhythm slangy, whimsical, wistful.

  “ ‘I may not see you again, Georgie,’ ” said Welles to me as if we had acted this scene hundreds of times. “ ‘It’s quite probable that from this time on we’ll only know each other by letter. Well, it’s an odd way to be saying goodbye: one wouldn’t have thought it, even a few years ago . . . .

  “ ‘We can’t ever tell what will happen at all, can we? Once I stood where we’re standing now, to say goodbye to a pretty girl . . . I was wild about her . . . . In fact, we decided we couldn’t live without each other, and we were to be married. But she had to go abroad first with her father, and when we came to say goodbye we knew we wouldn’t see each other for almost a year. I thought I couldn’t live through it. And she stood here crying.’ ”

  Welles’s voice had grown quiet.

  “ ‘Well, I don’t even know where she lives now, or if she is living—and I only happen to think of her sometimes when I’m here at the station waiting for a train. If she ever thinks of me at all she probably imagines I’m still dancing in the ballroom at the Amberson Mansion . . . . Life and money both behave like quicksilver in a nest of cracks. And when they’re gone we can’t tell where—or what the devil we did with ’em.’ ”

  We’d pulled in front of 485 Madison Avenue. “Come on up with me,” said Welles. “You can learn everything there is to know about radio in an hour.”

  He stopped to buy a newspaper in the lobby, and now we were striding toward the elevators, Welles in that dark blue suit, looking brash, handsome, successful, talented—everything I believed I wanted to be.

  “Excuse me,” said a young man stepping from behind a column. He was wearing a black sweater and black trousers. “But aren’t you Orson Welles?”

  Welles glanced up warily.

  “I saw you as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet last year.”

  Welles nodded graciously, whispered “Thank you.” He turned to the elevator operator. “Twenty-two, please.”

  “One minute of your time is all I need, Mr. Welles,” said the young man, getting into the elevator with us. “One minute.”

  “The sad truth is that I don’t have one minute.”

  “And the sad truth is that I’m trying to get work as an actor.”

  “I appreciate your dilemma, but I’m not in a position to—”

  “Just hear what I have to say for one minute.”

  “On what floor do you have business?” the elevator operator asked the young man.

  “I’m talking to Mr. Welles.”

  “Look,” said Welles. “Drop off a photo and a résumé at my office. That’s all I can do for you. Twenty-two, please.”

  “Please step outside,” said the elevator operator.

  “All I want—”

  He forced the young man out and closed the sliding metal doors in front of him. The young man was now shouting: “ ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen! Lend me your—’ ”

  The door closed.

  Welles shook his head. “Everywhere I go they start reciting. In restaurants, bathrooms. Christ, the guy who shines my shoes starts auditioning!”

  We walked down a corridor and through an open door that said COLUMBIA BROADCASTING STUDIO ONE.

  “Mr. Welles?” A young woman was waiting for us. She was stylishly dressed in a man’s houndstooth sport jacket and white shirt. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask your friend to wait out here during the recording; Mr. Ainley’s very strict—”

  “He’s my biographer,” said Welles, putting his arm around my shoulder. “I’ve already cleared it with Joe. Let’s get started—your name is?”

  “Lorelei Lathrop.”

  We were heading swiftly down a corridor lined with electrical cables taped to the floor.

  “That may very well be the most musically perfect name I’ve ever heard.”

  She smiled and pulled open a door that read TALENT ONLY in large black lettering.

  “Something so graceful in the way you move, too,” said Welles. “You’re a dancer, aren’t you?”

  “I studied ballet.”

  “You’ve seen Jack Holland and June Hart at the Ritz-Carlton?”

  “No—”

  “My God, if you love dance you must see them. Will you let me take you tonight?”

  Pounce, Brutus.

  In the studio the small orchestra was running through its cues. The principal actors and actresses stood before two floor microphones. Three men in front of a sound-effects table were trying out buzzers.

  I was told to sit quietly on a metal folding chair near the control room door. Lorelei Lathrop handed me a copy of the script. It was the first radio script I had ever actually held in my hands—twenty-three multigraphed pages. The First Nighter—program #377—“A Late Edition for Love” by Anthony Wayne. Sponsor: Campana Cosmetics.

  A voice came over the overhead speaker: “Let’s run it through, ladies and gentlemen, and keep it fast and light. Eric, watch the timing. We’ll be cutting an acetate to hear what we’ve got. Orson, you want to run through your scenes first? We’ve been rehearsing without you.”

  “Not necessary,” said Welles. He lit a fresh cigar. “What do you want for Van Doren? Gruff and abrasive? Sort of Front Page?”

  “With a little heart in it,” said the director.

  “Naturally,” said Welles.

  And so without any more rehearsing than that, somebody was counting down—three, two, one—and su
ddenly the Eric Sagerquist Orchestra was playing “Neapolitan Nights,” the theme song I’d heard a hundred times, but now I wasn’t sitting in my bedroom on a Friday night; I was sitting in a studio on the 22nd floor of the CBS building, and it was happening in front of my eyes and ears—the music and these wonderful voices coming out of tired-looking people who smoked cigarettes and wore ordinary clothing.

  A sound-effects man played a recording of crowd noise, which was augmented by live ad-libs in the studio. The announcer leaned forward and read urgently: “All of Broadway can feel the electricity tonight”—there was that voice!—“as we eagerly await the opening night of what promises to be another hit at the Little Theatre off Times Square. Already outside the theatre, a crowd of autograph-seekers and onlookers has gathered, hoping for a glimpse of some of the celebrities in attendance tonight.”

  Another man leaned into the microphone. “Have your tickets ready, please! Have your tickets ready! Good evening, Mr. First Nighter! Let’s see: fourth row, center. Very good. The usher will show you to your seat for tonight’s show, Miss Barbara Luddy and Mr. Les Tremayne in Anthony Wayne’s romantic comedy about life at a great metropolitan newspaper: ‘A Late Edition for Love’—featuring a special guest appearance by Broadway’s newest star, Mr. Orson Welles!”

  The orchestra went into an “overture” and the crowd noise subsided a little.

  “Curtain! Curtain! Seats please, ladies and gentlemen,” said the woman playing the usher.

  The announcer leaned forward: “Act One of ‘A Late Edition for Love’ after this brief word from Campana Lip Balm.”

  The red light went off in the studio, and from some isolated booth came the voice of an announcer reading a commercial.

  There they were: Les Tremayne and Barbara Luddy, looking short and dumpy and way too old.

  Then the orchestra was playing “big city” music, and one of the sound-effects men was clacking away at a typewriter while the other made sounds of ringing phones by pressing what looked like a panel of doorbells.

  “ ‘Did you give it to him! Did you give it to him!’ ” said the actor who had played the ticket seller. Now he was a reporter.