by Simon Callow
‘Hardly my job, but if I don’t do it who in the hell will, I’d like to know … some of these little bitches have the audacity to cut the ends off because they find them too unwieldy, I suppose – how do they know which streamer they’ll get back tomorrow night? There won’t be anything left of them at this rate … and furthermore that property man positively hates me and the whole circus. He ruined the girls’ trapeze act by using one of my ropes for Orson Welles’s bloody magic act. Mon Dieu! In Paris I was respected.’
‘Oh shut up!’
‘Taisez-vous yourself. Le style c’est l’homme même.’
‘Where were you born, Barbette?’
‘Texas, why?’
Finally the behemoth rumbled into New York. The financial situation was worse than ever, and again Welles went begging to Korda, who formalised the relationship by offering him another $30,000 for Around the World, effectively an inducement for the film deal that followed three months later, by the terms of which Welles was to get $75,000 per picture for a three-picture deal in which he would appear as ‘artist and/or director and/or producer’. It is possible to imagine worse penalties. Welles never seemed to take Korda’s proposals entirely seriously; not that he was focusing on anything much beyond the immediate all-consuming needs of the theatrical monster he had bred. The sympathetic left-wing magazine PM sent its reporter along to talk to him; Welles was uncommonly candid about its misfortunes, but mindful as ever of the particular audience he was addressing. ‘I never heard of a show which had so much bad luck.32 If all the money, time, effort and heartbreak we’ve put into it could be spent changing Truman’s anti-strike bill it might be worthwhile. The cast has gone through real misery. I’m mortgaged and bleeding. If the show does well, it will deserve it on its pain alone.’ He insists that he’s trying to get someone to replace him in the show, since he’s due in Hollywood on 7 June for what he calls a ‘film chore’ (an as-yet-unannounced film for Harry Cohn). His expectations of personal success are low: he’s never had a good notice in the New York theatre as an actor, he says (which was not entirely untrue). ‘The average newspaper writer always seems to think it’s time to take me down a peg. Why, I could show you eight floors with clippings that are nothing but wild roasts.’ He allows himself to show a little vulnerability. ‘I wouldn’t mind being taken down if they’d let me climb up once in a while. Actually I don’t like publicity. I don’t like to be interviewed or photographed. I’m afraid of being misquoted. I’m just a tired sort of male Katharine Hepburn,’ he added, coquettishly. In 1937, he says, wistfully, Time thought he was great. ‘I was the Laurence Olivier of that year.’
Olivier was much on Welles’s mind at that moment. The Old Vic Company, under the aegis of the Theatre Guild, was playing in New York and had just taken the town (or most of it) by storm, presenting the cream of their repertory from the legendary season that included Henry IV Parts One and Two, the audacious double bill of The Critic and Oedipus, and finally Richard III, in the title role of which Olivier had repeated and magnified the ecstatic response he had received in London. Olivier (and to a lesser extent the rest of the company, Ralph Richardson, Joyce Redman, George Relph among them) was used by the American critics as a stick with which to beat American classical acting, generally held to be far inferior to its British equivalent. Nothing could have been better calculated to upset Welles, who had very little enthusiasm for the sort of solid, somewhat fustian acting that, leading actors aside, the majority of the Old Vic Company of the time represented (‘anything but a noteworthy group’, opined George Jean Nathan). Moreover, and even more threateningly, Olivier’s film of Henry V had been attracting ecstatic encomia: another actor-director-producer – and in Shakespeare, too. Welles bit his lip on this occasion, but after describing the circumstances of Alan Reed’s dismissal in a nice fresh version specially minted for the interview – Welles played the part one night to show him how it should be done, and Reed replied, ‘You’re absolutely right, that’s the way it should be played. But I can’t do it that way’ – he adds, ‘maybe we can get Olivier to play it. He’ll be out of work in two weeks.’
The New York press was agog at the sheer scale of the promised entertainment about to open at the Adelphi Theatre. The venue, on 54th Street, was something of a théâtre maudit – or, to put it a little differently, ‘the dump of all dumps’,33 in William Craxton’s eloquent phrase – with its unprepossessing brownstone exterior, behind which the auditorium and stage-house were located in a large warehouse-like structure. ‘Finished in rough stucco and Tudor-inspired panelling around the proscenium, the auditorium might easily have been mistaken for a high-school assembly hall,’ according to Lost Theatres of Broadway; evidently the theatre was lost long before it stopped putting on plays. After opening its doors – as the Craig Theatre – flop had followed flop until the WPA took it over in the nineteen-thirties for the Federal Theatre Project; it was then occupied by an esoteric religious group until the Shuberts bought it. The first show under their ownership was On the Town, a triumph that almost immediately moved to a better theatre. The Adelphi was finally demolished in 1970 and is now the site of the New York Hilton. Dick Wilson had obviously secured a good cheap deal from the Shuberts, but being at the Adelphi was not something to crow about. It was a lively enough scene backstage, however, when the New York Times visited the technical rehearsals: HOW WELLES’S ‘WORLD’34 GOES ROUND, the piece was headed, and it was clearly a bit of a mystery that it went round at all. ‘Backstage at the Adelphi looks like Cain’s warehouse brought to life by a madman who added a circus and a barnyard … out front this is a musical extravaganza, backstage it is raucous bedlam in chiaroscuro, born of a Salvador Dali-Mack Sennett merger.’ (Favourable or unfavourable, Welles and his work always inspired – demanded – that journalists strut their stuff; it was almost a point of honour.) The reporter boggled over the forty-five tons of sets, the 1,600-pound mechanised elephant and the fifty-four stage hands (they obviously hadn’t managed to cut back on any). ‘Sets are dropped six deep; the stage director sets up his script and cue sheet – which look more imposing that the score for the Verdi Requiem. The lighting operator scrutinises six portable boards – twice the number for most musicals – which pull 2,300 amperes.’
Not only reporters were inspired to heights of prose-writing by Welles: the cartoonists went to town, too. The great Al Hirschfeld produced one of his small masterpieces, which suggested something of the impact of the movie screen in conjunction with the live action, turning the Indian rope trick into an odd, embryo-like profile of Welles. Don Freeman’s view of the backstage area in the New York Herald Tribune was even more vivid, with Welles as Dick Fix somewhere in amongst all the livestock, the elephant, the eagle, the nautch girls, the stagehands, the moon, the boat and the drums, with Margetson and Mary Healy high up on a platform, their backs to us, facing the audience. The cartoon appeared the day of the only two previews, matinée and evening. The press night, the next day, was Friday 31 May, Memorial Day. It was the last show of an exhausting season to open. That morning, Cole Porter took a plane to California. No such luxury was available to Welles. He had to sweat it out, quite literally: there was no air-conditioning in the Adelphi. ‘In hot weather,’35 Fanfare reported, the theatre was ‘an approximation of a Methodist Hell’. Despite the heat, the show went as well as it had ever gone, mechanically, musically, dramatically, comically; there were fourteen curtain calls. Holding his hands up for silence, Welles made a speech: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be asked to make a speech. Hitherto I’ve only had to make one to apologise for the performance.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Wellesafloppin’
AS SO OFTEN in the theatre, that first night was the best of it. The following day brought the sort of notices that, while not totally dismissive, nonetheless failed to make the theatre-goer, weary after a long season, reach for the telephone and make a booking. Welles had a following – there was a modest advance �
�� but the huge show required a capacity audience merely to break even; in these situations, it is the floating voter who needs to be persuaded, and nothing in the notices suggested that you would be unable to face your grandchildren if you missed it. While acknowledging this or that item of merit, an impression of enervating incoherence was conveyed. It was all, of course, very personal: it was Welles (and not his show) that was being judged, although, oddly enough, he was thought to be the best thing about it.
‘There is hardly a word to fit this musical fare,’1 said Vernon Rice of the Post. ‘It is mammoth, it is gigantic, it is lavish. It is also dull.’ Irving Cahn found it ‘as amorphous as a splash of mud and as pedestrian as its title … if Around the World in Eighty Days lasts that long, I’ll be surprised.’2 Robert Garland – ‘only eighty days? you ask yourself. Surely it must be more’3 – added: ‘Orson, disguised as a magician, makes ducks, geese and chicken disappear. He is good at this disappearing stuff, is Mr Welles. So good is he that, halfway through Around the World, he has made the plot disappear as well. No plot, no show!’ Time, which gave the show its most quotable quote – ‘Around the World is Orson Welles with his foot on the loud pedal which is roughly the equivalent of a lunatic asylum at the height of an electrical storm’4 – brutally observed that ‘there is something pretty empty and amateurish about the show. It falls down as burlesque, displaying far too little wit, far too much Welles.’ The problem, Time said, was that ‘unwisely Welles’s extravaganza pauses from time to time for identification as a musical comedy. But the love interest, the exotic dances and Cole Porter’s tired score merely check the pace without livening the party.’ Welles the leading actor seemed out of step, again, with Welles the director. The elements of his multiply-split personality stubbornly resisted integration. The Times made the same point: ‘When the guffawing Mr Welles goes off stage, the show goes with him … the production numbers have an inclination to take themselves seriously … miles removed from Mr Welles’s vast burlesque.’5
If Welles felt he had never had good reviews from the New York press, he could no longer maintain that, though admittedly his performance was praised only in order to denigrate the rest of the show. ‘Orson in casting himself temporarily as Mr Fix has made a grave error. For when he has to quit to report to Columbia, he is robbing the show of the only personality to support it. It is his tongue-in-cheek playing – his versatility – his vitality that set the pace and dominate the entire company. If once again he wanted to prove himself the Welles of Onlyness, he’s accomplished his purpose. For without him, Around the World will be the Welles of Loneliness.’6 It is probably unnecessary to identify the quote as coming from the trade paper, Variety. There were more amiable reviews that relished the quirkiness of the show, notably an appreciation by Wolcott Gibbs in the New Yorker, who, describing the show as ‘a fine musical cheese dream conceivably suggested to him by something once written by a man called Jules Verne’,7 hoped that ‘Mr Welles will be able to keep it open for the entertainment of other happy adolescents at least until another spring’. The childlike quality of the entertainment was identified by a number of reviewers: ‘Out of the same mould as the British pantomimes, traditional Christmas entertainments for children,’8 said William Hawkins of the World-Telegram, accurately identifying what was clearly an essential problem of the show: ‘The material is too often imitative of the period it is depicting … rather than being amusingly satirical.’ Welles was obviously dangerously torn between affection for the genre and the desire to send it up. ‘It’s all done in a let’s-put-on-a-play spirit … children will probably love this show. But the guns in your ears and feathers in your hair are not mature substitutions for a contagious sense of humour.’ Nichols of the Times, half admiring, half critical, wrote: ‘These products of showmanship are put forward with great gestures and an air that is half burlesque, half small boy. Mr Welles and his associates are enjoying themselves and make no secret of that fact …’9
John Chapman came to the rescue in the Daily News: ‘I, on the other hand, had a wonderful time. To me Around the World was grand, gorgeous and goofy’10 Obviously the evening was bursting with high spirits and goodwill. Equally obviously it was seriously lacking in the sort of skill that is not merely the sine qua non of vaudeville, but its raison d’être. ‘Mr Welles’s own magic act,’ said the sweetly benevolent Gibbs, ‘has an air of being a genial, off-hand parody of all such performances, and it must be somewhat irritating to professional workers in the field … not even Mr Welles is quite up to two-and-a-half hours of sustained comic improvisation.’ Lewis Nichols, returning to the show, pronounced it ‘the latest example of the good and bad qualities of Orson Welles the showman’. Falling into the tut-tut school of criticism that Welles so readily provoked, he said, like a caring but anxious schoolteacher, ‘[the show] needs discipline. It needs some higher editorial authority to say “no” loudly and frequently. Through carelessness, inertia or just the guardian angel’s being away for the moment, it slows down into failure.’11 He was not necessarily wrong. The one aspect of the show that was universally praised was the Japanese circus, staged by Barbette with iron discipline, no doubt: circus has no alternative; in its absence the result is death or disfigurement. ‘This fills the stage,’ said Nichols. ‘This is what the whole should be.’
The physical beauty of the circus scene – all pink and white – is clear from the production photographs, and owed much to Welles’s vivid appreciation of Japanese art. The physical production in general was clearly remarkable. ‘Mr Davison has been prodigal with his talents.’12 Cole Porter’s wife Linda claimed, no doubt rightly, that the sets were inspired by illustrations for a very rare first edition of the Verne, which she bought her husband when they were embarking on the project. Davison reproduced Victorian theatre techniques with some thoroughness, and the result was impressive in very much the way the eighteen-seventies production must have been; there can scarcely have been so much painted scenery on the American stage for fifty years. No doubt there was a danger of over-kill in the sheer profligacy of the design, but it was still a remarkable achievement. It was Alvin Colt’s conceit to have the girls wearing exaggerated bustles wherever they were, ‘and as the world tour progresses it is fun to wonder where those Victorian rears will pop out next’.13 John Chapman was one of the few reviewers to have anything good to say about the score: ‘Cole Porter’s tunes have a way of sneaking up on one … like Begin the Beguine which I and everyone else failed to notice when it first appeared.’14 But Wolcott Gibbs remarked, ‘if God will forgive me, Cole Porter’s music and lyrics are hardly memorable at all’.15 Chapman tried to suggest that Welles had created a new genre. ‘It is part musical show … part circus, part vaudeville, part Olsen and Johnson, part movies.’
Nobody thought the show was perfect, not even its greatest partisans; in the end, judgement came down to whether you were in sympathy with Welles’s underlying impulse in staging it. ‘The production at the Adelphi is shot through with the personality, imagination and drive of Mr Welles,’16 said Chapman, ‘and for my money he is … the ablest and most versatile in the American entertainment business.’ There was something, many people felt, that Welles had that no one else in the modern theatre did. Lewis Nichols, observing almost wearily that ‘the recent arrival of Around the World brings up the matter of Orson Welles again’,17 suggested that ‘the State legislature should pass a bill prohibiting Mr Welles from leaving the theatre … excitement is needed on Broadway and he is the one that can give it. Even in the case of a show as far removed from the superior as is Around the World, there are a good many original qualities. They are qualities only known to a showman and their appearance in the neighbourhood of Times Square is too rare.’
Alas, he did not also say: go and see the show. It was absolutely imperative and a matter of some urgency that tickets should be sold: the show had cost, according to Suskin in Show Tunes, $300,000 at a time when a big musical could be produced for $100,000. Kiss Me, Kate, two ye
ars later, cost $ 180,000. Even the critics were worried – Wolcott Gibbs said:
There are mischievous rumours that the thirty-four scene changes (requiring the presence and this time,18 it may even be, the actual services of fifty-five stagehands), the incredible profusion of mechanical devices, and the employment of a cast that must include every fascinating character that Mr Welles has ever met make the cost of Around the World literally prohibitive – the idea of conducting an enterprise that can’t possibly make money would, of course, have an almost irresistible charm for that rich, unusual mind.
Broadway was suddenly aware of the dangerously escalating cost of putting on shows; Burns Mantle, writing in that same season of 1946, laid the blame at the door of the unions: ‘Unless some means are found to check the mounting demands, which in the case of the stagehands’19 union have gone to the absurd limit of threatening action on plays with a single set of scenery unless extra hands are employed for a second imaginary set, the future may see an unavoidable, drastic curtailment of production.’ The gargantuan cost of Around the World was as much attributable to reckless planning and lack of forethought as it was to union demands, but simply to keep the show running on Broadway was a vast expense: the show needed to take a thumping $28,000 a week to break even.
To whip up business, Welles wheeled into action: his first stop was the all-powerful broadcaster and New York Daily Mirror columnist Walter Winchell. Welles sent him a telegram telling him that he had made a curtain speech quoting Winchell’s remark that they had everything in their show but the kitchen sink, and saying that they’d fixed that, bringing out a real kitchen sink for the bow. HATE TO KEEP HECKLING YOU BUT IT’S LIFE OR DEATH FOR ME.20 PRAY YOU CAN FIND A WORD ON YOUR AIR SHOW TONIGHT. I KNOW I HAVE NO RIGHT TO ASK YOU THIS, BUT HONESTLY SHOW DOESN’T DESERVE TO CLOSE, AND YOU’RE THE ONLY HOPE. Then Welles asked the great composer-producer Billy Rose, for whom he had tried and failed to mount the play Emily Brady two years earlier, to put in a word, and Rose duly wrote a column addressed to Welles, to whom he referred as ‘this wild-and-woolly wunderkind’.21 ‘Listen, Thunder-In-The-Mountains, isn’t it about time you made up your mind whether you’re Senator Pepper, D. W. Griffith, or Kupperman the quiz kid?’ Rose wants to reclaim Welles for the theatre. ‘I’d like to see you go back to being Just Plain Orson, the toy tornado, who tore the town apart a few seasons ago. You’ve been away too long, Doubledome. I knew it when I saw your show the other night. To this paying customer Around the World is the doodles – a small boy’s dream of show business come true.’ Again and again, the references are to toys and small boys. ‘When it comes to high-jinks – you’re Belasco shooting Roman candles! Anyone who’d like to be in a toyshop at midnight when the toys come to life will adore your show … this is your town … as far as I’m concerned you’ve got more rabbits in your hat than anybody who has hit the theatre since George M. Cohan.’