Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  The final run in the rehearsal room lasted three hours and forty-five minutes, with Welles leaping up to fill in for any absentees. He was clearly enjoying himself more than he had for some time – certainly more than on any movie set, where such romps can never happen. However, he must have got on the train for Boston with some anxiety: three and three-quarter hours is simply too long for any show, except perhaps King Lear or Eugene O’Neill, and even O’Neill is questionable. Around the World was, moreover, bound to get longer. When actors are first exposed to a set, a show invariably puts on time, at any rate until they get used to it and cuts can be instituted. And this set was a completely unknown quantity. The actors were due at the theatre for an 8 p.m. dress rehearsal. There were no costumes; no lights had yet been focused. Livestock ran loose backstage, pieces of set smashed into each other, actors concussed themselves on swinging bars. ‘We are the prey of drunken stage hands and drunken electricians,’22 Cole Porter wrote to a friend. ‘Even when they are sober most of them are ninety years old. They all hate the show because there are so many lights and scene changes. They are used to nice comfortable operas where there are two sets and no lighting changes whatsoever.’

  The predictable chaos ensued: expensive chaos. The run of Act One ended at nine o’clock the following morning; it had taken thirteen hours. The fifty-four stage hands and orchestra of more than thirty players were on double and finally triple pay. Eventually everyone was sent home to sleep. The opening performance, due that night, was cancelled while they attempted the dress rehearsal of Act Two. Again, they started at 8 p.m., this time finishing at 6 a.m., after which Welles and the circus continued to rehearse. Welles, who had very wisely declared from the beginning that he would not be appearing in the show, had impulsively decided that ‘honouring Boston’, as he put it, he would after all make an appearance, as Fu San, a Japanese conjuror, causing doves to materialise in an empty net, skewering a dancing girl with his rapier, producing aces of spades from unlikely ears. On those few occasions when he wasn’t needed at the dress rehearsal, he would slope across to Al and Jack’s bar across the street to practise the act, which he had never performed in public before. Perhaps it was a way – a highly unusual, entirely Wellesian way – of calming his nerves. Had he allowed himself a moment to contemplate the mayhem he had unleashed, he might simply have taken the next train back to New York.

  The world premiere of Around the World took place at the Boston Opera House on 27 April 1946, at 8.45 p.m., precisely twenty-four hours late. No single mechanical element of the show – the scenery, the turntable, the props or the lighting – worked as planned. The stagehands were as audible as they had been during the dress rehearsal the night before. ‘The prop eagle which was supposed to sweep me off the stage in a flash from its nest, on which I was perilously standing almost as high as the top of the proscenium,’ wrote Margetson, ‘came on late and very slowly; then receded and returned backwards to drag me offstage.’ The scene immediately following was supposed to be a backdrop obviously depicting London, and as an actress entered saying, ‘Is this London?’ practically all the drops for the entire show were lowered and raised alternately at lightning speed – all, that is, except the London one. The audience was, of course, enchanted. The final backdrop to fall showed a minor train-stop somewhere in the snow-clad Rocky Mountains. At this, an actor sticking doggedly to his script and looking at the scene, replied, ‘Yes, this is London, all right!’ By now the audience was in seventh heaven. The show ended at 11.45, ‘several scenes having been totally amputated’, according to Margetson, which at least had the advantage of reducing the running time.

  The Boston Daily Globe, drily observing that ‘the Orson Welles genius – if that is what it is – is expressed in many ways’,23 sensibly refrained from commenting on the ‘grandiose musical extravaganza’ until the stage was working better and at least forty-five minutes of the show had been cut. ‘Nonetheless,’ it continued, ‘it is easy to see that there is more production than show … the actors are pretty well lost in the forest of gadgets.’ Margetson came out of it well enough, as did Alan Reed (‘a marathon of quick changes and dialect comedy’). The reviewer, though admiring the circus interlude, was anxious about a spectacular slide done over the audience without a net: the performer, Ray Good, walked a tightrope from the stage to a second balcony box, then slid backwards onto the stage. In fact this last proved too much for the censor, who ordered it cut on the grounds that ‘the slider, though imperturbed, might fall and demolish some of the people in the seats below’. The veteran critic Eliot Norton was very taken by the Japanese circus, and particularly the eagle rescue (the bird was shot at and feathers fluttered down into the auditorium). But the general sense was of overkill. Production, the Globe acknowledged, is important to a show, but here it was emphasised ‘with a smothering ferocity’. The inevitable verdict was that Around the World needed a lot of work. Norton put it with precision: ‘A good theatrical plot has to be so devised that you are not only curious but also eager to see and hear what happens to the principal characters.24 In this show it is silly to guess at what is coming next. Mr Welles has crammed in everything which he liked in the theatre as a child.’

  In the circumstances, it seems little short of a miracle that the piece held the stage at all. But this was how Welles preferred to work in the theatre: making the show on the hoof. Even he, however, the veteran of the massive Five Kings – where he had tried to put Henry IV Parts One and Two on stage in one three-hour sweep – had never dealt with anything as vast and diffuse as this. The only strategy for this sort of epic mayhem is, paradoxically enough, to plan meticulously, down to the last tiny detail, but that was quite alien to Welles’s temperament and his habitual modus operandi. Film-making, particularly with films made by or in a studio, to a large extent provides a built-in planning framework; the work is by its nature tightly structured. Welles found this assumption suffocating and uncreative, and his whole drive during the rest of his film-making career was to combat it, restoring as much as he could the slap-dash, adrenalin-fuelled improvisatory abandon of earlier film-makers. At the pre-war Mercury Theatre, where he was able to call all the shots within a relatively small organisation, he could make it up as he went along, seeking inspiration in the materials before him. But here, in Boston, with fifty bewildered people backstage, and another fifty bewildered people on stage, and thirty people on triple time in the orchestra pit, he had no such luxury.

  He maintained the highest of spirits in the face of what would have caused a nervous breakdown in virtually anyone else. ‘Orson has been a tower of strength,’25 wrote Porter. ‘The whole company loves him and rightly so because he never loses his temper or his power to surmount almost impossible difficulties, so if the show flops, I shall at least have had a great experience with a wonderful guy.’ Porter had been enchanted to hear Welles say to a particularly burly stagehand, ‘please, sweetheart, get that scenery up’. The first chaotic performance had done nothing to dent Welles’s optimism. The following morning, reports Margetson, ‘there was Orson smilingly greeting us with “Rise and Shine – now we’ve opened and read the roasts, we can really go to work”’ – which they did. By the time of the performance that night, Margetson, who carried the weight of the show, and who had been more than a little shaken by the experience of the last three days, fell ill (and one may be sure that with an actor of Margetson’s generation and temperament, nothing short of total collapse would have kept him off the stage). There was of course no understudy, so – it goes without saying – Welles went on for him, ‘in a fashion typical of his past feats that won him the title of Boy Wonder of the American theatre’,26 as the Globe reported. ‘Welles not only ran through the long lead of the show letter perfect but also played the part of the magician which was his original role. And to make his one-man-gang performance complete, he sang two songs that he had hurriedly learned half an hour before curtain time.’ This was bliss for Welles. The tedious struggles of the past few yea
rs, wrestling with editors, both in print and in film, studios, sponsors, wives, lawyers, children, were all – however temporarily – dissolved in the sheer joy of the physical act of theatre, and he was able to rejoice in an image of himself with which he was entirely happy: actor-manager of the old school, a father-figure who is at the same time reckless and untrammelled, the Vincent Crummles of the Mid-West. On Around the World, he was both in charge of his company – and quite a fierce disciplinarian when he needed to be – and the chief reprobate, gloriously indulging himself, breaking up on stage, making his lines up as he went along.

  For the most part, the audience adored it. Margetson, seeing Welles’s triumph in his role, made a swift recovery, as may be imagined, but a few days later Larry Laurence, his tenorial tonsils in tatters, retired from the fray, so Welles went on for him. Throughout rehearsals and the opening, and even as Phileas Fogg, he had still worn his moustache from The Stranger, now, playing the juvenile, he shaved it off without a moment’s hesitation, struggled into something more or less appropriate from the wardrobe and positively bounced on stage. Naturally, he improvised the role, as, inevitably, did Margetson. ‘On one occasion I was forced to say, “Passepartout, you don’t know what you’re talking about”, whereupon Orson replied, “You never said a truer word” … whether he was good or not in either part, matters little. He was exciting and unpredictable at all times, both on the audience and the actors.’

  Despite all these high-jink enjoyments, he was constantly working on the show, and beginning to get somewhere, he felt. The Boston press monitored his progress. According to Eliot Norton, Welles tried to negotiate an extension with the management of the theatre, offering the incoming company, the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo (‘a miniature extravaganza,27 which requires for transportation a mere half dozen cars’), a large financial inducement to find another venue; Around the World was intricate scenically, so cumbersome and involved to operate that it would not work at all ‘until the stagehands have had a course of training equivalent to that which the army gives to P-38 pilots,’ wrote Norton. ‘He might well have taken over the ballet intact and made it part of his own show. A ballet of a hundred or so would have been easy to absorb. Where there’s a Welles there’s a way.’ Welles, he claims, was on the verge of hysteria at least once on the first night. (‘A less cautious observer went so far as to say he went off the deep end and over the verge, backstage.’) Noting Welles’s propensity for stepping into the roles of missing actors, Norton observes that ‘he did not take part in the nautch dancing nor did he conduct the orchestra, perhaps through an oversight’. Suddenly, the gentle mockery over, the schoolmaster’s hand is revealed. ‘If he wants to rescue the show in time for the New York opening, I suggest that he give up, for three or four weeks, the role of director. Bring in George Abbott, George S. Kaufman, or possibly Rouben Mamoulian to integrate, coordinate and speed up the show. Around the World needs the sure hand of such an expert and the fresh, objective point of view which such a one will bring to it.’ Of course Norton’s prescription would have been anathema to Welles: it may be a terrible show, he might have countered, but at least it’s mine. Equally, Norton is absolutely right, and Around the World would no doubt have been a triumph of a particularly delightful kind had his advice been followed. Interestingly, one member of the audience in Boston had no criticism of the show at all. ‘This is the greatest thing I have seen in American theatre,’28 he said when he went backstage. ‘This is wonderful. This is what theatre should be.’ It was Bertolt Brecht, and he was now more than ever delighted that Welles would be directing Galileo.

  New Haven was the next stop. Here the dress rehearsal was over in its entirety by 1 a.m. It was Welles’s thirty-first birthday, and he was persuaded to get off the wagon and have a drink or two with the actors, doing conjuring tricks for them till 3 a.m. Later that same day, the show opened at the Shubert Theatre. At the first performance the movie projector broke down almost immediately. Welles walked on stage to say, ‘With your kind indulgence,29 we will now begin the show again,’ which they did. The projector broke down again. Welles returned: ‘Cut the movies! – Ladies and gentlemen, I shall try to explain how this play – or whatever you want to call it – begins.’ The movies suddenly started up again. Welles left the stage. The movies broke down again. ‘It is obvious,’ Welles, returning, told the audience, ‘as most of us stage actors have always believed for some time now, that the movies are not here to stay.’ As if mechanical problems with the physical production were not enough, one of the actors began to be troublesome. Alan Reed, playing Detective Inspector Fix, complained that his role had been transformed into that of a villain; he wanted to be funny. Margetson reports Welles muttering at one show as he stood in the wings, gloomily watching Reed, ‘I’ve written the part wrongly – this is not a comedian’s role – it should be a heavy – he or the part or both must be changed.’ ‘You mean you’re thinking of replacing him in New York?’ ‘In New York? – nothing. He must be replaced tomorrow at the matinée … by me, until I can find someone else, and I hope that will be damned soon.’ Welles the serial pinch-hitter duly took over and was very funny, and hardly villainous at all. As Dynamite Gus, one of Fix’s aliases, he walked into a bar and demanded a drink of ‘straight formaldehyde with a black widow spider riding the olive’. He knocked it back, at which point his moustache fell off: ‘Mighty powerful stuff, that liquor.’ ‘Since he had just written the part for himself, it was rather difficult to know whether he was improvising or not,’ said Margetson. ‘But I assure you, it gave us a tremendous up-lift and drew much laughter from both sides of the footlights.’ This was the antic spirit that Welles so prized – though it is worth pointing out that the people he admired so much, the real vaudevillians, would never have indulged in it. Every giggle would have been carefully rehearsed. But nothing could show more clearly quite how much he longed to get up there on stage. How good, one wonders, was Alan Reed? Was it his carping that Welles took against? Or was Welles’s need to perform simply overwhelming? It is all a little murky and not entirely creditable.

  Meanwhile, the bandwagon rolled on. The Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia was the next and last stop, a place that held no very happy memories for Welles: here, eight years earlier, Five Kings had foundered, victim of the erratic electrical supply, which caused the turntable alternately to whizz and to crawl. Welles, expecting the worst, appeared before the curtain on the first night of Around the World to apologise in advance. Everything went perfectly, causing him to apologise retrospectively at the curtain call for the slur on Philadelphia. Despite this graciousness, the indulgent Boston and New Haven press was not duplicated in Pennsylvania. ‘Around the World bears the eccentric hallmark of its producer,’30 said the Daily News. ‘It is an off-the-beaten-path musical as musicals go. Our guess,’ the paper added, helpfully, ‘is that most playgoers will balk at what it has to offer. Personally we found much that was rewarding, plenty that was funny and even more that was downright stupefying.’ There was mystification that Welles – ‘“Orson the Amazing … one of the biggest masters of self-exploitation of our times’” – was not staying in the show. ‘Welles is one of the prime reasons for most of the customers flocking into the Shubert … they want to see him IN PERSON. Welles is very funny, whether he is making a curtain speech apologising for the lights and the defective sound system, playing the part of a comedy detective, or just doing a magician act and pulling ducks out of conductor Harry Levant’s dress shirt … whatever he does has his personal ingeniousness stamped on it, and is certainly in character.’ Cole Porter, well past the initial euphoria of his first encounter with Welles, was darkly suspicious that the more he worked on his new role, the more Welles cut the musical score. He had changed the character from Verne’s Detective Inspector Fix to Dick Fix, the detective’s nark, and this seems to have given him unlimited freedom to do pretty well whatever he wanted. The Record made an observation that would become the running gag of all subsequent revi
ews: ‘The show has about everything in it – except the proverbial kitchen sink.31 But when that is brought to Mr Welles’s attention, he will probably order one installed. And when he does it will be a large and handsome one with hot and cold running surprises.’

  No sooner had these reviews been printed than there was a newspaper strike, which meant that the Mercury’s marketing campaign went for nothing; and then, immediately after that, there was a train strike. They struggled on for the two weeks of the run to exiguous audiences, with tensions rising in the number-one dressing room, which Welles shared with Margetson, five other principals, three chorus boys, two circus clowns, three Japanese actresses and Barbette. Margetson describes the atmosphere in the dressing room, with Barbette ironing the white streamers used by the girls in the circus, while the rest of the company rushes in and out, screaming and demanding things. Barbette announces petulantly, expertly plying his iron: