Me and Orson Welles

by Robert Kaplow

  She took another swig from the wine bottle. “You should drink more, mighty twig. It might loosen you up a little.”

  “I have to stay strong to shield you from the wild, wicked world. I think there’s an idea for a really bad song here: ‘I’ll Be Your Orson Welles, You’ll Be My . . . .’ I don’t know, who’s he in love with?”

  “Orson Welles? A Narcissist’s Love Song. There’s a new idea.”

  “You and the Night and the Mirror.”

  “I like it,” she said, and she rested her head against my arm. “I like you.”

  “Sleep if you want to, Lady Rage.”

  “Don’t call me that, O.K.?”

  “O.K.”

  I moved my fingers through her hair, caressed her right temple—a tiny freckle northeast of her ear.

  “I’m trying to lose Lady Rage; trying to annihilate her in my work, in my life. But I tell you, she’s a tough son-of-a-bitch to kill.”

  I did my Ronald Colman. “Togethuh we will slay huh.”

  “Good luck, Ronald. She’s a cagey customer. So wary of being hurt, she’s been known to strike first.”

  “What’s she wary of?”

  “Abandonment, my therapist says. In all its symbolic implications. I have no father, you know.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “Probably.” She pushed herself more deeply into my arm and shoulder. “I’m like Orson that way. Another orphan of the Mercury. I don’t hear you talk much about your father either.”

  “I suppose I don’t. I understand Orson doesn’t have a father or a mother living.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Therein lies the difference. My mother still walks the earth.”

  “Do you talk with her much?”

  “We try. It’s usually disastrous. She’s probably a bigger emotional mess than I am.”

  “Well, mothers and daughters: that’s always a disaster, isn’t it?”

  “She’s clinically depressed. Clinically an alcoholic. It’s just one great scene of domestic bliss there. She and her unemployed boyfriend, Tex.”

  “Tex!”

  “Yes, another strong male figure in my life. Another rock in the storm. Another emblem of enduring passion.” She opened her eyes. “You know, I see the way my professor at Vassar loves her little boy—he’s four months old; she brings him to class. I helped change him the other morning, and, oh, you’ve never seen such adoration from one human being to another. All she says is ‘Who’s the wonderful baby?’ and ‘Who’s the special boy?’ and ‘Who’s the best baby in the world?’—just cooing and joy and the expectation of pure wonderfulness for this tiny thing with its big staring eyes. And everything the baby does is absolutely fine, you know? If the baby soils itself, that’s fine. The baby is kissed, its feet are rubbed—and I’m standing there helping her change him, watching her pour out this love, and part of it is absolutely wonderful, and part of it my heart is just breaking because I know I’ve never felt anything like that ever. I don’t think I even can feel anything like that. That pure and that passionate. And I want to. Just once in my life I want to feel something that isn’t me; that isn’t me watching me. That isn’t me furious at the world because it isn’t noticing me. Richard, I’m so afraid that if I ever had a baby that’s all I could give it—just this anxiety inside me and this insane need to keep proving how terrific I am.” Tears were flowing. She wiped them away; it made no difference. “I can’t even talk to my mother on the phone for one minute now without fighting.”

  “I’m sure she loves you, Sonja. I’m sure that in her own complicated way she loves you.”

  “I dreamed I hit her . . . you know, I want to accomplish so much; to be so much—and I feel her pulling me down—and I hear her self-righteousness and her defensiveness and her terror—it doesn’t stop; whatever I do—and I want so much to get past her—to get past who I was as this scared, needy kid—and at the same time I need her approval so much. It feels like on some level she resents my success. Resents that I got away.” Her face was distorted with tears. “We’re still these needy, pathetic children, aren’t we? Do we ever get beyond that?”

  “Probably not.”

  She wiped her eyes. “I’m not looking for an answer; I just need to cry. Look, I’m wrecking this coat. I’m going to wash up and find a nightgown. When I cry I feel so weak. I feel as if somebody was bleeding me. There’s pajamas, I think, around here, too, if you want to stay.”

  “Am I spending the night?”

  She kissed my head.

  In that almost-dark apartment, I got dressed in Orson’s red pajamas; she put on Virginia’s white nightgown.

  “They don’t mind we’re doing this?” I asked. My heart was racing.

  “Well, I don’t plan on telling them, do you? We can leave the stuff in the hamper,” she said. “Somebody comes in once a week to clean.”

  “Beautiful night,” I said, pointing to the painting of the stars on the living room ceiling.

  She stood in front of me and looked up at the stars. I put my arms around her. Then she broke away and shut off the last remaining light.

  I could hear her walk into the bedroom.

  I stood in the living room.

  I was so scared I could actually feel the blood pulsing through my hands.

  “I guess I’ll sleep on the sofa,” I heard my voice saying.

  Her voice came from the dark bedroom. Four words.

  “Richard, come in here.”

  Wednesday, November 10 Fifteen

  I wore Orson’s robe; Sonja wore nothing at all, and we drank our coffees standing in that tiny kitchen with its yellow countertop. It was 7:30 in the morning. She was eating a piece of chocolate she’d found in the icebox. Then she filled her palm with water from the sink and drank from it as if it were a tiny cup. She smiled when she saw me watching. “Ha!” she said. She took another sip from her palm, smacked her lips heartily, her eyes full of sly charm. The radio played softly.

  She took another bite of chocolate and then kissed me.

  “You taste like chocolate,” I said.

  She kissed my white undershirt, leaving a perfectly formed print of her lips made out of chocolate.

  “Don’t wash it off,” she said. “Now you can’t forget me.”

  I looked at her eyes, her body, her bare feet, and I thought: How on earth could I ever forget you?

  I sneezed.

  She showered, got dressed, and was heading out the door. “I’ll see you over at the Mercury; I’ve got a million calls to make. And don’t worry I’ll call your school and tell them that you’re working with Orson Welles. I can be very persuasive.” She smiled and pointed to the chocolate kiss on my shirt. “That’ll be like me kissing you all day.”

  Quadruple space.

  I got dressed. She made a plateful of cinnamon toast, and we carried it up to the roof.

  Below you could hear the city waking; the rain had cleared; the sky was white-gray, shadowless.

  “Now you’re going to tell me you knew this was going to happen?” I asked, and I bit into my cinnamon toast triangle.

  “I was pret-ty sure.”

  “Regrets?”

  “None that a friend wouldn’t forgive,” she said in her best Ronald Colman.

  “Then I forgive you.”

  I wanted to ask: Did I do all right? But I was pret-ty sure I hadn’t. I mean, I hadn’t messed up entirely, but my amateur standing was grievously apparent. (And grievously hath Caesar answered it.) What was also apparent to me was that it wasn’t sex she really wanted anyway. I wasn’t sure what it was—maybe somebody to adore her; somebody she could hug; somebody she could fall apart in front of; somebody she didn’t have to bargain with.

  “It’s supposed to be in the mid-sixties today,” she said. “Isn’t that absolutely amazing?”

  “I’m starting to fall in love with you, Sonja.” I imitated her: “Isn’t that absolutely amazing?”

  She touched the back of my head. “I know. I’m feeling the sam
e thing.”

  “Are we going to do anything about it?”

  She thought a second: “We’re going to open Caesar.”

  “I was hoping you might say—”

  She held up a hand. “We’re pushing the river. Orson’s right about that, Richard. You can’t force anything.”

  “Of course, Orson’s right,” I said. “He’s right about everything. It’s infuriating.”

  “I think it’s kind of thrilling. Watching him turning into a star right in front of your eyes.”

  “You know what’s strange?” I said. “I’m in his show; I’m sleeping in his pajamas; I’m around him half the day. I feel as if, sometimes—I don’t know—as if I am him.”

  “That’s the pull of every great star, isn’t it? The feeling that you’re participating in their lives. It doesn’t make any sense, but there it is. That static charge on the back of your neck. John said he felt it the first second he saw Orson.”

  “For these past few days I’ve felt as if this whole city belonged to me, as if all of New York were this enormous stage set, and somebody said to me: Richard, it’s all yours to play with. I’m feeling so damn alive. Like I’m breathing some substance that didn’t even exist last week. All this, and I’m down to my last thirty-five cents.” I had pulled out my wallet to check on my exuberantly dwindling capital. I took out my driver’s license. “You know, there’s a place on the back here you’re supposed to send in if you make a mistake on your name and address? I’m thinking about mailing it, and telling them my middle name is Orson. I don’t think you need a lawyer to change your middle name, do you? Richard Orson Samuels. Do you like that? I think I really am going to change it. Richard Orson Samuels.”

  She left for the Mercury, but I stayed on the roof for a while. I breathed in the city: its warming wind, its noise. And I was one young man on a roof who had just spent the night with a beautiful woman. My skin smelled like Sonja, and my shirt collar smelled like Sonja, and the air around me smelled like Sonja, and the sunlight suggested winter and hard days to come, but we would all survive somehow, and the seasons were bigger than any of us anyway—and we were all tumbling along on the breeze of something enormous and eternal and gloriously busy.

  I thought maybe that’s what roofs were for: to pull you up high enough to feel the totality of it all, while the ambulance sirens sang below.

  Before I left the apartment, I swiped one of Orson’s cigars, and as I walked uptown I struck a few Orson-like poses in the shop windows. I was so impressed by my own reflection that two workmen nearly crushed me to death with a huge wooden crate they were carrying. “Goddamn-sons-of-bitches!” I shouted, waving my cigar, and I stalked off down the stage-set of a sidewalk.

  When I waited for the lights to change I asked myself: Which foot would Orson lead with? When I saw four men standing around waiting for a job agency to open, I thought: How would Orson stage this? How would he arrange the men? How would he light it? Were they friends or just four strangers outside a locked door? Which guy had the stammer? Which guy had the sense of humor? Which guy was hungry?

  All of New York felt like my paintbox. There was a sonnet in every high-heel, a full-length play in every face.

  On the sidewalk in front of the Mercury Theatre a placard read: PREVIEW TODAY: MAT. AND EVE. BARGAIN PRICES! It was really happening: two paid previews, and then we opened tomorrow night. It was one day away. The lobby posters read Production by Orson Welles, and it struck me for the first time how much pressure must be on Orson’s shoulders. He was twenty-two and opening a show to the most brutal audience on earth. You had to admire the pure nerve of it—that he could say, in the middle of a Depression: I’m opening my own theatre company, and I’m the star!

  There was a line of people waiting to buy tickets. I sang “The Moon Got in My Eyes” loudly, hoping for a few turned heads, then I walked with a studied nonchalance through the stage entrance. Take a good look, you jealous sons-of-bitches!

  “Ma! Yeah, I’m calling from the Mercury Theatre.”

  I was up in the projection room/office. Onstage below—ten minutes before the matinée audience was going to enter—Orson was still rehearsing.

  “What kind of a—”

  “Ma! I’ve got thirty seconds! Look, everything’s crazy here! We’ll be rehearsing all day and—”

  “What are you doing about school? I told your father—”

  “Orson Welles’s secretary is going to call the school this morning. I was just talking to her about it. She’s going to take care of everything.”

  “But how can she—”

  “One call from her, Ma, and everything is fixed.”

  “And your job?”

  “I’ve got Phil Stefan covering for me for a few days.”

  “Richard, I don’t under—”

  “Ma! I gotta get out of here! Ma! I’m a star! I’m gonna be on Broadway! Everybody’s waiting! I’ll explain everything tonight. I’m going to be home very late. But I’m going to school tomorrow. All day. Don’t worry. I’m going to hit those books like you never saw. Ma! You’re the greatest mother in the world!”

  I thought to myself: Is there even school tomorrow? It would be Armistice Day. I didn’t know anything anymore. All I knew was this theatre.

  Oh, we were hot! The place was packed—682 faces straining forward in their seats to catch every word.

  The big “secret” that nobody was supposed to know (and which everybody knew) was that John Mason Brown, of the New York Post, was in the audience. You could actually see him: stout, pink-pated, glasses glinting, third row on the left. Apparently he had to be out of town tomorrow, and, God knows, he didn’t want to miss an Orson Welles opening, so he had worked out a deal with Houseman to see it in preview so that he could still write his notice. And if ever any show in the history of the theatre was played entirely to one member of the house, it was the Wednesday matinée of Caesar. We practically hurled the show in his face. Even Orson stood four feet farther to the left than he ever had before.

  Gabel roared:Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world

  Like a Colossus, and we petty men

  Walk under his huge legs and peep about

  To find ourselves dishonorable graves.

  —and he practically grabbed John Mason Brown by his lapels and shouted in his face: For God’s sake, look at my performance, will ya? Am I a full-fledged, son-of-a-bitch star or what?

  And Orson, the confused liberal, sat listening in his dark blue suit. Quietly magnificent. The magician who had wrought this masterpiece.

  Oh, we had John Mason Brown right where we wanted him! And Orson had been right: the speed made all the difference. Even if you lost the thread of the poetry, there was something so relentless in the pull of the pure melodrama of the thing that you simply got caught up in it.

  Blackout. Thunder. The conspirators entered with their flashlights—and we strained our eyes from the wings to make out John Mason Brown writing furiously in his notebook.

  “He likes it,” whispered Lloyd. We were standing behind the thunderdrum. “He only writes when he likes something. He remembers the crap.” Lloyd rubbed his hands. “Wait ’til he sees Cinna! He’ll piss in his goddamn pants.”

  Muriel Brassler—butterfly shadow firmly under her nose—was a riot to watch. She’d pinned back her gown so tightly that her breasts were practically ripping through it. She’d altered the neck about two inches so that there was a lot of throat and chest visible. And she wore the silver earrings and the silver ring that Orson had forbidden.

  But she took her lousy two-and-a-half-page scene, and she made you remember her. She marched that body in front of you and said, “Look, even if you hate Shakespeare, you’ve got to admire my ass. Just think what I must be like in bed.”

  “I think Brown’s got a boner,” said Lloyd.

  “The audience hates it,” murmured Coulouris behind us. “They’re bored. I’m bored!”

  Jeannie Rosenthal messed up the cues on Cinna—
the whole scene was played in too much light, but the acting was so intense nobody seemed to notice. For the first time Lloyd did Cinna with just the slightest hint of a Jewish accent, and when Cotten and the others began to physically knock him down and pull the poems from his hand, it made you a little sick with the echo of the anti-Semitism.

  I was walking downstage with my ukulele/lute.

  “ ‘Lucius!’ ”

  “ ‘Here my good lord.’ ” My voice cracked with nervousness.

  “ ‘What, thou speak’st drowsily? Poor knave, I blame thee not; thou are o’er-watched. Look, Lucius, here’s the book I sought for so.’ ”

  “ ‘I was sure your lordship did not give it to me.’ ” I was terrified, and my voice showed it. Come on, shake it, Richard. There’s one critic here, and you’ve lost your concentration—what are you going to do tomorrow? Pretend these are your friends out there. Be yourself. To thine own self be true. Calm the hell down!

  I was sitting downstage, leaning against Orson’s right shoulder, singing:Orpheus with his lute

  Made trees and the mountaintops that freeze

  Bow themselves when he did sing…

  I thought: I just might get away with this.

  Blackout.

  I watched the last five minutes standing behind the thunderdrum: the marching stormtroopers, the black banners adorned with the crests of Caesar that looked suggestively like swastikas, the stately funeral music played on trumpet and French horn—then the lights shooting up from below like the grand finale of a fireworks display. Coulouris stood there, lights streaming around him, a figure of pure light. “ ‘This was the noblest Roman of them all.’ ”

  I smiled.

  Caesar was Orson’s love letter to himself.

  Crescendo music—and then the final blackout.

  One second’s silence.

  Then tame but decent applause. Something still felt a little off.

  Curtain calls. We extras bowed modestly.