Me and Orson Welles

by Robert Kaplow

  “Here,” I said and pointed, “is a sick man that would speak with you.” I exited downstage in a haze. My feet tingling, chest hammering; I was sweating.

  One line and I almost blew it!

  The play went raging on.

  I sat down behind the thunderdrum. Focus! Focus! Calm down, you idiot!

  So Stefan and Skelly had shown up—the crazy sons-of-bitches!

  I laughed. You’re not going to mess up, Richard. I look in your eyes, and you know what I see? Images of magnificence! And if I was going to throw up with nervousness, then nervousness was part of the great chain of being! There is nothing lifeless in the universe, no chaos, no disorder, though this may not be immediately clear to us. Yeah!

  You actually heard a member of the audience cry out when the first knife came out of Sherman’s pocket.

  Then one by one they stabbed Caesar—all the music ended, the thunder ceased—just those banks of hard-white lights burning into the audience’s eyes, and Joe Holland tumbling down the line of assassins ’til at last he faced Welles. Half-dead, he gripped Welles’s coat. Welles met his eyes with a look of compassion—and you wondered for a second if he was actually going to stab him.

  “ ‘Et tu, Brute? Then fall Caesar,’ ” gasped Holland, and he fell against Welles’s knife in a dying embrace, the bladder bag of red dye staining his uniform.

  From that point the narrative drive of the play was unstoppable. The air was charged, racing along like some crazy Warner Brothers thriller.

  Welles did “Romans, countrymen, and lovers” at the foot of the downstage platform. I smelled hot oil, and I turned to see Ash pumping an atomizer on a smoke machine. As the smoke drifted out to the stage it caught the beams of light in stark, angular planes of shadow.

  “Swell effect!” I whispered to Ash. He was dressed in a black overcoat because he was also an extra in the Cinna scene.

  “Orson thought of it a half hour ago,” he whispered, shaking his head. “Did you ever try to find a smoke machine in half an hour?”

  A chung from the dimmer board and the lamps hidden under the stage shot their beams straight up into the smoke.

  The audience gasped. Some people in the balcony applauded. Then Coulouris was up on the velvet-covered pulpit, and around him rose the columns of light.

  Now the crowd of extras (including Ash) had rushed out and were jostling, shouting below him to hear Caesar’s will.

  Welles told me to continue pumping the atomizer to maintain the smoke effect.

  Coulouris was playing the crowd with everything he had. “ ‘Have patience, gentle friends, I must not read it . . . . It will inflame you. It will make you mad!’ ”

  Still they chanted and stomped: The will! Read us the will!

  Coulouris raised his gloved hand into the smoke-filled light. “ ‘You will compel me then to read the will?’ ”

  They pulled away as he descended from the pulpit, and then they joined him around the blanket-covered coffin of Caesar.

  Coulouris’s voice became tender and nostalgic. “ ‘You all do know this mantle . . . . I remember the first time ever Caesar put it on . . . .’ ”

  Then he yanked the blanket away, and they were screaming at the sight of his blood-smeared corpse.

  Lights poured sideways from the wings, and the figures in black ran among the beams shouting: Revenge! Revenge!

  Then, in one second, like a cut in a film, the stage turned cold and empty. The smoke dissipated, and just that solitary bulb burned at the top of the back wall.

  Welles had been right about that, too. The effect was the perfect evocation of a deserted alley.

  I wondered how somebody twenty-two years old could be so unerringly right. Maybe he was some kind of genius.

  And just when the audience thought all the tension and terror they could bear had been wrung out of them, Lloyd walked out alone into that deserted alley with a sheaf of poems in his hand.

  “I dreamt tonight that I did feast with Caesar,

  And things unluckily charge my fantasy . . .”

  Then from out of the street shadows came the men in the slouch hats—hands in their pockets, cruelty in their voices:

  “ ‘What is your name?’ ”

  “ ‘Whither are you going?’ ”

  “ ‘Where do you dwell?’ ”

  And Lloyd had his hands raised above his head, tripping over his legs, backing up to the brick wall, dropping his poems—shouting now: “ ‘I’m Cinna—Cinna the poet!’ ”

  Epstein hit the horror chord, and he opened the pedal as loud as it could go.

  Blackness and military drums—and the audience got a chance to breathe just a little during the quiet tent scene between Welles and Gabel.

  I stood in the wings and checked the tuning of the uke. The trumpet player watched me. “Nervous?” he asked.

  “Only if people ask me if I’m nervous.”

  “Nervous?”

  Brutus and Cassius were apologizing to each other before the battle that would kill them both.

  They shook hands. “ ‘O my dear brother,’ ” said Gabel. “ ‘This was an ill beginning of the night. Never come such division ’tween our souls. Let it not, Brutus.’ ”

  Three lines and I’m on.

  Three lines and I’m singing in front of Joseph Wood Krutch and Stark Young—can’t think of it—

  “ ‘Lucius!’ ” Welles called.

  Oh, Jesus.

  “ ‘Here, my good Lord.’ ”

  Voice didn’t crack.

  “ ‘What, thou speak’st drowsily? Poor knave, I blame thee not, thou art o’erwatched.’ ”

  Then came a cannon-blast coughing from the audience, and barely hidden in the hacking phlegm was a voice nearly shouting out: “Black Crow!”

  Oh, shut up, I prayed. Please, God, shut up!

  “ ‘Lucius,’ ” said Welles. “ ‘Here’s the book I sought for so.’ ”

  “ ‘I was sure your lordship did not give it me.’ ”

  Now a wild, cartoon-like sneeze from the audience, and somewhere in that sneeze I heard: “Black Crow!”

  At this point I didn’t even know what I was speaking. I was just pronouncing syllables.

  Don’t laugh, Richard. Just don’t laugh.

  “ ‘I should not urge thy duty past thy might,’ ” said Welles. Then his voice softened. “ ‘I know young bloods look for a time of rest.’ ”

  I looked into Welles’s brown eyes, and I was really listening to him.

  And my voice grew more tender. “ ‘I have slept, my lord, already,’ ” I said, and I smiled at Welles as one might smile at his father.

  Welles looked at me for a second, then tousled my hair affectionately. It was a complete surprise—a gesture he had never done before. “ ‘It was well done,’ ” he smiled, “ ‘and thou shalt sleep again. I will not hold thee long. If I do live, I will be good to thee . . . .’ ” His voice broke in sadness.

  I sat on the stage and sang my song. I fixed my eyes on a lamp attached to the first balcony, and I emptied my head of everything else.

  Orpheus with his lute,

  Made trees and the mountaintops that freeze,

  Bow themselves when he did sing . . .

  Then the lights faded to absolute blackness, and my part in Julius Caesar was over.

  Twenty

  The lights streamed upward from the floor; it was the last line of the play. Coulouris stood over the body of Welles. “ ‘His life was gentle,’ ” Coulouris said, “ ‘and the elements so mixed in him that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, This was a man!’ ”

  The military music rose as the soldiers stood there without moving.

  Then total blackness.

  Silence.

  Then they didn’t applaud; they roared.

  The noise broke over every side; it rolled to the stage from the first balcony, from the second balcony, and it didn’t stop.

  The place was thundering. It was a hurricane of sound.

 
“My God,” said Epstein.

  Jeannie Rosenthal stood by the lightboard, arms folded, face flushed with pleasure.

  You could feel it in the floorboards. The torrent of noise rising until your eyes watered in gratitude. And, even at that moment, I knew it was the tidal wave of approval that you heard just once in your life.

  Welles, breathless, soaked, took a gulp of pineapple juice. He wiped his forehead. “Start the curtain-call music,” he ordered. He looked around at Coulouris, then at me. He hugged me. “We did it!” Across the stage I could see Gabel embracing Joe Holland; Lloyd was punching Cotten, grinning. Welles gulped another mouthful of pineapple juice, then began laughing, almost spitting it out. “How the hell do I top this!”

  The applause didn’t stop for three curtain calls. Finally Welles came on alone, and the entire audience stood up. Even the cast members and the technicians came out and applauded him. He bowed five times—each time more deeply and more slowly. “He’s worse than Jack Barrymore,” Coulouris said.

  Flowers arrived, and Houseman was beaming, face rose-colored, shaking hands, and the audience wasn’t leaving. There were telegrams, and more flowers, and there was Sonja suddenly in a green velvet strapless evening gown, an orchid in her hair. She stood in the wings laughing and hugging everybody. When I hugged her she said, “You were brilliant, Richard.”

  There were flashbulbs, and the stage streamed with people. Abdul, in his African headdress, strode up the aisle. “Beeg heet!” he cried out to Houseman.

  Two of Orson’s old theatre buddies from Ireland introduced themselves to me. They were extravagantly effeminate, and had their hands all over me as they talked. “I think this boy would make a priceless Hamlet, don’t you, Hill?”

  “With us behind him . . . .”

  Then somebody was shouting: “Black Crow! Black Crow!” and those two drunken lunatics Skelly and Stefan, in their jackets and ties, were pumping my hand. “You stunk,” said Stefan, “but that girl in the tight dress? You could see her nipples.”

  “Thanks for coming, you crazy assholes.”

  “Is she not wearing a bra or something?”

  Skelly said, “Wait ’til the broads at school find out you’re in a Broadway show. You’ll be slamming before Saturday!”

  “You need a ride home? We got Drift’s old man’s Chevy.”

  “I’m going to the cast party.”

  “Can we come? Is that girl going to be there?”

  Lloyd was walking around shaking hands. “I was magnificent, wasn’t I?” he kept repeating. “Wasn’t I something else? Did you ever see an audience react like that?”

  Cotten had about ten girls around him, giggling, flirting.

  Coulouris was leaning against the brick wall holding forth to a group of friends. He sipped from a glass of champagne. “I knew the show was destined for greatness from the first rehearsal,” he recalled. “I remember seeing with a startling clarity that the role of Marc Antony was the psychological centerpiece of the play. And that’s when it all came together.”

  “I’ve never heard the funeral oration performed like that,” said one of his friends.

  Coulouris nodded. “My staging as well.”

  “Brilliant.”

  Epstein was playing “Lullaby of Broadway” on the organ. The horn player was trying to improvise around him.

  Evelyn Allen, in her purple gown, stood talking to some guy with a big gut and black mustache. She held a bouquet of roses. She saw me approaching and her voice got soft.

  “Evelyn,” I said. “You were wonderful.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Lovely, sensitive—”

  “Oh, don’t embarrass me,” she said.

  The guy with the gut was watching me suspiciously now. “You will excuse me,” he said. He had a fairly thick German accent. “But do I know you?”

  “He’s in the play, Christoph.”

  “Oh, yes. I’m so sorry. So pleased to meet you,” he said. He extended his hand.

  Evelyn lowered her voice. “Richard, this is my husband.”

  He shook my hand as if his entire manhood depended upon it.

  “Swell to meet you,” I said. “Evelyn, I’ll talk to you later, O.K.?”

  Ahhhh! Get me outta here!

  I practically ran right into Muriel, who had changed into a scarlet gown with a matching hat. She was wearing fresh lipstick, and she was flirting with some roly-poly guy who looked about sixty. “Orson and I are so simpatico, I guess,” she explained. “I suppose I just like working with men, you know? I could never do a play like The Women—forty characters, all women. My God, I’d go out of my mind. No, I need to be around men.”

  The little guy nodded appreciatively.

  The band was playing, and some people were trying to dance, but there wasn’t any room. Most people were heading out for the party.

  Sam Leve came up to me with the Playbill and shook his head. “Tomorrow I get my credit,” he said. “But tomorrow the critics don’t come.”

  “Everybody here knows all the work you did,” I said.

  “Yeah, but everybody here don’t count.”

  I hit the dressing room stairs at a run to change into my street clothes, but Cotten stopped me on the second-floor landing. He was looking glum. There was an open window, and I could hear a light rain dripping on the fire escape.

  “What’s eating you, Fertilizer?” I asked. I took a swig from my root beer bottle. “Jeez, I thought I was going to forget the whole lyric. You know, until I actually sang the words, until they actually came from my mouth, I had no idea I still remembered them. You taking a cab to the party? Maybe we can share. How was I? Brilliant, wasn’t I? That’s what I am. A brilliant young man. I’m thinking of forming my own theatrical company with me as the director and the star. You want to be in it? You can take some of the smaller roles.” I did my Gabriel Heatter impersonation: “There’s good news tonight!”

  “Not so good news. You don’t know yet?”

  “What?”

  “Orson hasn’t told you yet?”

  “Told me what?”

  “You’re fired, Richard.”

  I stood staring at him. “I’m what?”

  I could still hear the rain falling on the fire escape.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you. Orson’s not only a son-of-a-bitch, he’s a coward.”

  “Joe, you’re kidding—”

  “He never forgave you; he just wanted his opening night.”

  The root beer bottle slipped from my hand and spilled on the floor. “Tell me you’re kidding me, Joe. Because this isn’t funny.”

  “Sonja told me. Did you see that blond kid hanging around the stage tonight?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and I felt something large and sad rising in my throat. I tried to mop up the soda with my shoe.

  “He’s your replacement.”

  “What’s the gag?”

  “He’s been hired already.”

  “Joe, stop kidding me.”

  “Sonja wanted me to break the news to you, to tell you how absolutely terrible she feels. Though not absolutely terrible enough to tell you herself.”

  Down below, the band was still playing.

  “Joe, this can’t be happening. The show’s a hit. I’m a hit.”

  “Orson apparently gave the kid the script, told him to learn his lines by tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? Joe—he can’t learn the part by tomorrow.”

  “Richard, I’m sorry. Orson’s going to give you all this crap that it’s Actor’s Equity, and that the kid’s an Equity Junior Member, which he is—but that’s horseshit—it’s not about Equity. . . . Orson is a sick man in many ways; a dark, sick man. I tried to talk to him. He won’t even listen to me. No. Made up his mind. Can’t be budged.”

  “It is not going to end like this, all right? I refuse to allow that possibility. I’m fighting this. I mean, what the hell did I do wrong? I didn’t do one thing. I’ve been to every rehearsal. The show’s a hi
t—I’m—”

  “Don’t you get it? Orson can’t be wrong.”

  “I said one thing, Joe. I said Sonja was my lov—my girlfriend. I fought for her—just like you told me to!”

  “Maybe that was lousy advice.”

  “I said that he should back off. That’s all I said.”

  “You told him that?”

  “Yeah, well, I started to—right before he tore my head off, but he apologized to me, Joe—he said—”

  Cotten shook his head. “And you took Leve’s side when Orson pulled his credit?”

  “What was I supposed to do? Let him call that man a credit-stealing Jew and not say one word? Is that what everybody does around here? Jesus Christ!” I kicked the wall. “O.K., what do I do, Joe? Tell me what I have to do. Am I supposed to apologize to him? ’Cause if that’s what it takes to get my part back, I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever—”

  “I don’t think it’ll help. I’m sorry.”

  “He gave me this.” From my pocket I took out the small white card with two hearts drawn on it. “Doesn’t this mean anything?”

  Cotten shook his head, reached into his shirt pocket, and pulled out the same card. “He gave everybody the same bullshit.”

  “Well, I don’t care what it means, ’cause I refuse to accept that this is over. It’s not over—O.K.? I refuse to accept that he can make some five-second decision because he’s in a shitty mood, and that’s it—that my career in the Mercury Theatre is over. Is he here? I’m talking to him right now!” I moved down the stairs. “I’m not accepting this.”

  Cotten grabbed me. “He never wanted to bring you back, Richard; don’t you get it? He wanted his opening night.”

  “So I stand up once, and that’s it? That’s the end of my job here? That’s not fair, Joe. It was one time.”

  “Richard, my heart goes out to you—you’ve been treated like shit. I don’t know what to tell you. I’m going to the party; I’ll try to talk to him. But don’t expect any—”

  “No, I’m going to the party.”

  I ran down the stairs—furious—ready to argue my part back with Welles. The words I’d say were flying through my head. This is not fair, and there is not one person in this company who would agree with—