Me and Orson Welles

by Robert Kaplow

  “This scene is too faggy already. Lose it. Lucius! Faster.”

  I was leaping out of the trap. “ ‘Here, my good lord.’ ”

  “ ‘What, thou speak’st drowsily?’ ” Welles stared at me. “Where is thy ukulele, boy?”

  “I think some asshole doth stole it.”

  “Jesus Christ, this is some rehearsal,” said Welles. “Skip this scene. Cue the finale!”

  Anthony delivered his eulogy with the finale music rising behind him, the lights shooting straight up from the floor. “ ‘. . . His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him that Nature might stand up and say to all the world: This was a man.’ ”

  Finale music up. Curtain calls. I looked over to see Lloyd at the other end of the extras. He had my ukulele in his hand. I gave him the finger as we bowed.

  Then Muriel and Evelyn.

  Then all the conspirators.

  Then George Coulouris.

  Then Martin Gabel.

  Then, finally, the Mighty Orson.

  “Ninety-four minutes,” called out Ash.

  “Rough,” said Welles. “The big scenes are working pretty well—but we have to move them faster and watch the transitions; they’re endless. Jeannie Rosenthal, please stay; we need to redo all the early light cues. We’re using our best effects too early. George Coulouris, start the oration lower; you’ve got nowhere to go. Martin Gabel—tent scene—slow the hell down; we’re pushing the river. Let the scene carry the baggage. Joe Holland, when you play that last bit, ‘I am as constant as the Northern star.’ More. And step closer to the audience. They’ve really got to hate you. Evelyn Allen, you look beautiful, my angel, but I can’t hear one word you’re saying. I don’t know what else to tell you except that if you refuse to project on Thursday night, your theatrical career is over. And thunderdrum man? Much too loud; you’re fighting the actors. Other than that, boys and girls, we’re closing in on the son-of-a-bitch! Now, let’s take the whole goddamn thing from the top.”

  We performed the show early that evening to about fifty friends of the cast. It was getting better. There was still trouble with the one hundred and seventeen light cues; the funeral oration was sloppy: Coulouris had tried to start lower, but his change threw off the extras, and we lost the intensity of the crowd scene. I had stood in the wings as Coulouris finished his last big line: “ ‘Here was a Caesar! When comes such another!’ ” Then he stormed past me. “Down the toilet!” he said. “Whole scene down the toilet!”

  “I thought you were fine,” I said.

  “I was fine,” he said. “The audience was off!”

  I sat next to Welles, played my song about Orpheus and his lute, looked out at the house, and I thought: Wait ’til my friends see this: Caroline and Stefan and Skelly and Kate Rouilliard and Kristina Stakuna and every other good-looking girl in Westfield High School. I imagined them all. And my parents and my grandparents. Wait ’til they see this! I’m onstage with Orson Welles; I can feel the body heat from his shoulder.

  The cast lingered around the stage, and their friends all told them how wonderful they were. Muriel Brassler complained that her costume made her look too tall. Evelyn Allen sat looking lonely, holding her rust-colored book. Cotten was talking about how he was going to nail Evelyn before the week was out. “She’s putting out signals,” he explained. “Very explicit signals.”

  Then the back door opened, and Sonja and Houseman were coming down the aisle together, laughing. She was wearing a burgundy cashmere coat, dressed for going out somewhere nice.

  I felt foolish to have hoped she’d really wanted to see me after the show. To go dancing. Another daydream. The truth was, I told myself, that the Sonjas of the world didn’t end up with the Richards of the world. That’s just not the way the play was written. The beautiful people ended up with the beautiful people.

  Suddenly Welles was gathering everybody center stage. His manner had returned to that of an affectionate teacher. “Now, all right, everybody, front and center! I’m not done yet! Front and center, Uncle Orson’s got a little game for us all. It’s coming together, ladies and gentlemen, but we still don’t feel like a family.”

  “Good. I hate my family,” said Lloyd.

  “Come on now,” said Welles. “I’ve got a game I want us all to play.”

  “At this hour?”

  “I know what’s coming,” said Cotten.

  “I still think it’s a good idea, Joe,” said Welles. “Right now. Right this second, before you go home to your warm beds, every single person in this company is going to take somebody out for a drink. My treat. A coffee for you, Junior. Or whatever the hell it is you kids drink.” He laughed. “Anyway, my treat. Five dollars a couple. This is the advantage of radio; they pay you in cash.”

  “Do we have to do this?” groaned Coulouris. “I’m exhausted.”

  “You—especially—have to do this,” said Welles. “Anyone who refuses is fired on the spot. Aside from that, it’s strictly voluntary. Now, there aren’t enough women to go around, but we’re very open-minded in this company. And we’ll be choosing entirely at random.” Welles handed me a stack of numbered Caesar tickets from last week’s canceled opening. “Junior, give everybody one of these.”

  I began to distribute the tickets, and he continued his explanation. “Everybody takes a ticket,” he said, lighting a cigar. “Then you rip the ticket in half and throw one half in a hat. Now all we need is a goddamn hat. Cotten, where’s that stupid-looking chauffeur’s hat?”

  I handed out the tickets, and a beautiful idea was rising in my criminal heart. One to Cotten, one to Brassler, one to Gabel, one to Coulouris. Houseman and Sonja had walked to the apron of the stage. “You going to play?” I asked casually.

  “Everybody gets one!” said Welles. “Including me. And when you get your ticket, tear it in half.”

  I handed Sonja her ticket, and, as I smiled, I repeated her ticket number, R-173, silently to myself fifty times.

  “Where’s that goddamn hat?” said Welles.

  I tore offstage to find it—found a grease pencil on Welles’s makeup table and wrote Sonja’s number on my palm.

  I returned with the hat and collected all the tickets.

  “Now, I’ve got forty crisp five-dollar bills here,” said Welles, “that I’m determined to give away.”

  “I don’t see why we should be forced to—”

  I stood onstage holding the hat, and before I could say anything, Cotten had volunteered to go first.

  I thought: Don’t pick her. If there’s a benevolent God in the universe please intervene here.

  He shuffled the ripped tickets with his hand.

  Everybody was laughing.

  “I’ll go next,” I said.

  “If I get Lloyd, I quit,” said Cotten.

  “Can we start already?” said Coulouris.

  Cotten reached in, pulled out a number, and read it aloud: R-107.

  People studied their tickets.

  “That’s me!” called out Vakhtangov.

  Everybody applauded.

  “You make a lovely couple,” said Lloyd.

  “Can I pick again?” Cotten said.

  “O.K., who’s next?”

  “Me,” I said.

  “I am,” Muriel announced imperiously. She stuck her hand aggressively into the hat and picked a number. She read it out loud as if she were reciting poetry. “Number A-A-8!”

  “That seems to be my number,” said Houseman.

  People applauded.

  “Thank God. Somebody I can talk to,” said Muriel.

  “I better pick before all the women are gone,” said Welles, and he plunged his hand into the tickets.

  “Let me go,” I said. “I have to go home early because it’s a school night.”

  This got a laugh from everyone.

  “No alcohol now, Junior. I don’t want any calls from your mother.”

  Oh, I was all smiles.

  I reached for a ticket, picked one, and read the nu
mber loudly from the palm of my hand. “R-173!”

  It was gift night at the Rialto Theatre!

  There was a silence.

  No one acknowledged it.

  She doesn’t want to go out with me.

  I read it again.

  “R-173!”

  Then Sonja’s voice. “I think that’s me.”

  Scattered applause and a few wolf whistles.

  I dropped the ticket instantly back in the hat, then turned to Welles. “I probably should have held onto my ticket, right?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Junior.” He handed me a five-dollar bill.

  I hopped down from the stage.

  “This seems to be my lucky night,” I said to Sonja.

  “Luck, huh?” she said. “Let’s go somewhere we can get a good steak.” She did her impression of Welles. “I’m absolutely starving to death! Can we go to Farrish’s?”

  “. . . swell.”

  I quickly calculated that my entire life savings on earth amounted to the three dollars in my wallet plus the five bucks Welles had just given me.

  “And then, maybe, the Casino?”

  “. . . swell.”

  “They have absolutely the best band there—I know the bartender; he’ll serve you. We can dance a little, my cavaliere? And later, if you like, I’ll show you Orson’s place. Unless you have to run right back to Jersey.”

  “Are you kidding? This is an early night for me.”

  Fourteen

  The steaks at Farrish’s were huge, bloodied and charcoal-seared, and we tore through them as only two people who might possibly go to bed with each other could. I imagined we looked like one of those couples I had always watched in the corners of restaurants: the girl animated, long-necked, the guy in his black shirt and polka dot tie, his sleeves rolled up, totally absorbed in each other’s presence. I couldn’t tell you what the restaurant looked like, but I could tell you exactly what Sonja’s earrings looked like: champagne-colored pearl drops on white gold posts collared with a tiny gold filigree. Her nail polish was pale peach. I could describe the shape of her small hands, that when she held her palm to mine, her fingers were an inch and a half shorter. I could describe her large, alert brown eyes, too, but for those I might need additional notebooks.

  Red meat roaring in our veins, we taxied to the Greenwich Village Casino. I was spending every cent I had, and I didn’t care. Let them carry me off in handcuffs. I just didn’t want the night to end. Sonja wore a blue turtleneck and her burgundy cashmere skirt, blue socks, soft black flats. Other than the pearl earrings, she didn’t wear one scrap of jewelry: no ring, no watch—just the statuary of her hands, and the beautiful planes of her neck and shoulders, and the soft way her hair fell behind her ears.

  I was hopelessly outclassed, but I went with the moment. I figured this wasn’t going to happen again in my lifetime.

  People were singing along with the songs as they danced, and I knew the words to practically all of them—including the really old ones.

  “You were born in the wrong generation,” she said. “I grew up pretty much in a house without music. But I love to dance. I love it ’cause you don’t have to think, you know? I’m so damn tired of thinking all the time.”

  “I just love popular songs,” I said. “I think they’re the great American art.”

  “Speaking of the great American art,” she said, “I gave that short story to my friend over at the New Yorker. She says don’t expect much. Was it written by your girlfriend?” She batted her eyelashes in mock coquettishness.

  “Which one?”

  “Dance, fool.”

  We had drunk white wine, and the whole earth didn’t feel quite big enough for me. We walked up 14th Street in that strange dreamlike night. The air was misty—every streetlight a constellation, every luminous sign a breathing presence—and the cars passed on quilts of fog. The lamps glittered back from the running gutters. A man walked his dog, and their shadows stretched out for thirty feet. A streetlight still wore a red, white, and blue sign: VOTE DEMOCRATIC! JEREMIAH T. MAHONEY FOR MAYOR.

  I had my arm around Sonja, around her cashmere coat with its huge lapels and cashmere belt.

  She sneezed. “I don’t understand why I feel so comfortable with you. I hardly know you.”

  “That’s the moonlight, I expect,” I said. “Moonlight is cruelly deceptive.”

  “There isn’t any moonlight.”

  “I know. It’s a line from Private Lives. I’ve been waiting seventeen years to say it. Can I kiss you?”

  “You’re going to get my cold.”

  “Screw your cold.”

  “Well, we’ll have to see about that.”

  She went up on her tiptoes, and we kissed. “How was that?” she asked.

  “Cruelly deceptive.”

  “Do it again?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  We kissed again, a little drunkenly, warmly.

  “Your hair smells like black licorice.”

  “I’m just a bouquet for the senses, aren’t I?” She giggled, and she looked up at me. “I’m a mess,” she said. “I’m telling you that right now, Richard. I’m a mess, and I’m the biggest malcontent you ever met. I want whatever I don’t have. I hate what I’ve got. I’m in analysis; John’s paying for it. I just started, really. The guy told me that my mother probably didn’t want a third child. I said, ‘What good does that do me now?’ I think what I really need is an entirely new head.”

  “I’ll take the old one.” I placed a hand on each side of her head.

  “You can keep it on the shelf.”

  “I could kiss it whenever I wanted to.”

  “You can have it; I hate it.”

  “Come on, Sonja. Strangers stare at you in the street.”

  “They’re staring in disbelief.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  “This is an old problem,” she said. “I’ve had it my whole life. I look in the mirror; all I see is what’s wrong.”

  “Let’s dance.”

  While a radio played somewhere through an open window, we danced in that empty street.

  I should have seen right through you,

  But the moon got in my eyes.

  Virginia and Orson Welles rented a small, nearly windowless basement apartment on West 14th Street. It was modest: scuffed wooden floors, plain white walls, white doors with polished black knobs, the oil burner in the closet. The furniture was old: a bamboo bookshelf, a lamp made out of a mason jar filled with seashells, a bird’s nest holding three blue eggs, a child’s tiny painted wooden house, a wooden pillbox carved with a flower, an old handbag. There was Virginia’s original art on the walls—oil paintings of farms and snowscapes. There were lots of books, plays mostly: Johnson, Webster, Sheridan, Wilde. And a small teddy bear sitting in a doll’s chair with l’ourson stitched across its red vest.

  Nailed flat to the dining room ceiling was an oil painting of stars as if they were being seen through the four panes of a window.

  “Economy skylight,” I said, pointing to it.

  “You know the nicest thing about this place?” she asked.

  “That it’s got no heat?”

  “That it’s got no telephone. It’s Orson’s illicit retreat.”

  “It’s freezing in here”

  “I’ll keep you warm.”

  She had opened the icebox and found a bottle of wine.

  A clock chimed one half-hour past midnight. We sat on the sofa. The only light in the apartment came from a tiny lamp near Sonja. The radio played softly, dance music.

  “Have some more wine,” she said. “Where do your folks think you are right now?”

  “When I phoned, I told my mother I was the one-millionth patron on the subway, and that my prize was a free night at the Plaza.”

  “Oh, brother.”

  “Even I don’t believe myself anymore.”

  “She believed you?”

  “She was so grateful I wasn’t lying dead somew
here, she was willing to suspend disbelief until tomorrow. Then tomorrow she can kill me. You know, I’m actually beginning to feel sorry for her. I’m such a lying son-of-a-bitch.”

  “So tell her the truth.”

  I shook my head. “The Mercury Theatre is not her dream.”

  “And what’s her dream?”

  “My mother’s dream?” I thought a moment. “Expect little . . . . Rake the leaves . . . . Make sure you get a regular check. Don’t tell anybody anything good because they’ll immediately take it away from you. It’s a kind of pogrom mentality, you know? That any minute the Cossacks are going to break down the front door and steal the dining-room set—in New Jersey, no less.”

  “I like your dream better,” she said. “Anyway, at least your mother cares about you.”

  “All mothers care. It’s in their contracts.”

  She tucked her knees beneath her. “That’s what I’m in analysis for,” she said. “Trying to deal with my rage toward my mother.” She took another swig from the wine bottle and handed it to me. “You know I dreamt last night that I hit her? That I struck my own mother. I felt sick when I woke up.” And suddenly she was crying—serious tears—wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her coat. “Look at me,” she said. “I’m an emotional mess.”

  Her hair had fallen into her eyes, and I brushed it away. She took my hand. “Don’t pay any attention to me, all right? Sometimes I have to cry.” Then she began crying all over again.

  “Is there a reason you’re angry at her?”

  “I’m goddamned angry at everything,” she said. She wiped her eyes again. “I have a lot of emotional problems, O.K.? I’m angry at myself; I’m angry at you; I’m—”

  “Hey, I haven’t done anything.”

  “You haven’t,” she said. “It’s me. I’m Lady Rage. That’s what my therapist calls me. ‘How’s Lady Rage today?’ ”

  “And how is Lady Rage today?”

  “She’s glad to be here with you.”

  “Then what else is there to worry about?”

  “Ah,” she said with mock drama. “And will you be the rock I hide myself behind? The mighty oak to protect me?”

  “The mighty twig sounds more like it.”