by Simon Callow
(It’s worth noting, by way of a brief parenthesis, that Billy Rose was responsible for Jumbo, his own 1935 musical extravaganza, to which Around the World was sometimes compared. It starred Jimmy Durante, with Paul Whiteman and band, a Rodgers and Hart score, a Hecht and MacArthur book, bareback riders – one of whom was seventy-five years old – a troupe of acrobats all aged sixty-plus (among them Barbette), midgets, clowns, death-defying aerialists, jugglers, fire-eaters, tightrope specialists, lion tamers, and close on 500 live animals, including Big Rosie in the title role. The clown A. Robins kept pulling everything from chairs to endless bananas out of his pockets, while he changed costume with a flick of a handkerchief ‘and never for one moment lost a beat from the rhythm of cacophony he emits’. Beside this, Around the World and Orson Welles were rather small beer. Jumbo cost $340,000 and lost $160,000, so perhaps an encomium from its producer and creator was not the ideal endorsement.)
Welles obviously buttonholed John Chapman of the Daily News, who wrote in his piece that ‘Orson tells me that if necessary he will act Hamlet and do a roller-skating act if these would seem helpful.’22 Elsa Maxwell was wheeled in next: ‘I was thrilled, entranced, goggle-eyed, bewitched and bewildered by my trip Around the World,’23 she wrote in her influential column in the New York Post. ‘Mr Welles inadvertently dominates every part of the stage, scene and play whenever he appears … his magnetic, amazing, opulent rich personality makes out of a tiny insignificant part something so gigantic as completely to overwhelm and in fact wipe out the rest of the cast.’ She reports that Welles is making a curtain speech in which he reminds critics of the demise of Percy Hammond after Macbeth. ‘He does it in such a funny manner, with a Welles-ian tongue-in-cheek-ism, that is quite delightful and Mr (George Jean) Nathan and Mr Garland need not worry too much about their summer colds.’ None of it made any discernible difference at the box office.
In fact Welles had a splendid platform from which to promote himself and the show. Just before he had started rehearsals for Around the World, he had revived the Mercury Summer Theatre of the Air, which was transmitted on Friday nights (meaning that there could be no Friday performances of the stage show, another blow to the chances of financial recoupment: his suggestion that the show could be broadcast from the theatre during an extended intermission was scorned by the unions). On the first Friday of the run at the Adelphi, Around the World, naturally, was the chosen classic, and the broadcast is a potted version of what was happening on the stage every other night of the week. If the show was chaotic, the radio programme is bedlam. The narrative – a fairly simple one, after all – is virtually incomprehensible. Margetson soldiers valiantly on, giving a reasonably clear account of himself and the role; Welles roars around, indulging in the radiophonic equivalent of pulling faces (pulling voices, perhaps). ‘I’ll get your man, Inspector, if I ’ave to search the ’ole of London from Tooting Bec to Putney Green,’ he says as Dick Fix. ‘I’ll join you later, Chief. It’s time for me to go to church and write blasphemies all over the ’Oly books.’ The pallid songs, including ‘Snagtooth Gurtie’ and ‘Flow, music, flow’, make little impression, except for Elsa Maxwell’s favourite, which is moderately amusing in a sub-Cowardian manner:
Alas if you’d only been
Born on British land
Ruled by our gracious Queen
The more readily you’d understand
Wherever they fly the flag of old England
Wherever they wear the old school tie
Wherever a fox would never chase a fox-hound
Wherever a steak and kidney make a pie
Wherever they’re certain that
The Derby’s not a hat
Wherever to ice your drink is still a sin
Wherever the air is full
Of old John Bull
Whatever is not cricket can’t win.
Welles is breathless and charmless as narrator, a role in which he had never before failed. No doubt it was all done in a frantic rush, but it was a sad waste of an opportunity, firstly, to create a record of the show, and secondly, to sell tickets for it. (The comparison with the first, 1938, Mercury Theatre of the Air version is painful: in that Welles had played Fogg simultaneously clipped and suave, rather like his Lamont Cranston (The Shadow’s soigné alter ego), and none the worse for that; while the Mercury stalwarts – Ray Collins, Edgar Barrier and indeed Stefan Schnabel among them – gave masterclasses in radio acting.)
Continuing to promote the show in a slightly lower key, Welles used his other radio slot – the Commentary, still broadcast under the aegis of ABC on sustaining radio, and reaching a relatively small listenership – to muse on the show and its fate:
I think the theatre is suffering from a galloping lack of dignity. The theatre has never been so poor in my lifetime.24 But this is always true right after a war. Not that there aren’t many deserved hits on Broadway right now. Nor is Around the World the antidote. On the contrary, Around the World is made up of very old stuff – things that have enchanted me from the time I saw them under canvas, in a one-ring circus, in the theatre or a Carnival. It’s like hanging around the toy displays at a department store around Christmas time. Or going out and buying a whole store.
It is curious how frequently in moments of great enthusiasm this self-confessed hater of childhood refers to the delights of infancy: directing a film, famously, was ‘the best train set a boy ever had’. He lists the delights on display at the Adelphi: ‘There’s a train wreck, an attack by Indians, old-fashioned movies, low comedy and a score by Cole Porter. Actually I would go and see the show myself many times,’ he says, ‘perhaps once a week … if somebody else were putting it on.’ He continues in that vein of aggressive nostalgia to which he is prone in moments of depression, with the sense that there are no standards any more. ‘I haven’t liked a musical since the old Ziegfeld days when they had really funny men and lush women. Not that Around the World is a musical comedy – it’s an extravaganza. Musicals today are too smart, too chic.’ All alone at the microphone, he becomes unexpectedly emotional and personal. ‘Let me tell you something of what it’s like at a Broadway opening … any Broadway opening has much in common with a bull-fight … it’s a question of life or death. Kill or the bull kills you … and with a show it’s kill the people – or – or else the audience just walks away and leaves the show to die of loneliness.’ There is, for Welles, an unusually strong unarticulated emotion here; a real feeling of rejection. ‘Our show is getting ovations from its audiences. So,’ he claims, not entirely accurately, ‘we have been successful in building it into an authentic hit … in spite of the real killers of the theatre … the dramatic critics who deliver the swift justice of an oriental court. Because of the power they wield, the critics have retarded the theatre these past years.’ He rehearses complaints familiar to actors, directors and writers from time immemorial: ‘because they must see each new play that is presented they are too easily bored and too readily lose sight of the fact that the theatre is primarily intended to entertain’. This is scarcely the position Welles had occupied in his assaults on Hollywood, which he had ruthlessly attacked for its vacuousness, so at this point, perhaps wisely, he moves on to another topic. In any case, the argument with critics can never be won: a critic criticised suddenly becomes the champion of free speech, the aggrieved artist someone who ‘cannot take criticism’.
In the case of Around the World, it is clear that critics were, on the whole, broadly unsympathetic to what Welles was attempting, and that they felt, moreover, that he had failed in what he set out to do. To that there is no answer. A quick look at what was going on in the theatre that season suggests that Welles’s taste for extravaganza was not in tune with the times; nor was his acting likely to win the palm: Broadway had taken to its bosom Laurence Olivier (at his classical zenith) and the very young Marlon Brando, two actors of exceptional individuality, in their different ways both single-minded artists, next to whom Welles was bound to seem generalised and o
utmoded. In that year’s Variety poll, Olivier was elected Best Actor, Brando Best Supporting Actor and Most Promising Young Actor. As for the shows, the musicals were all book musicals with immensely strong scores: Call Me Mister, Three to Make Ready and Annie Get Your Gun, with Oklahoma!, Show Boat, Song of Norway and Carousel from the previous season still playing. There was a strong dramatic showing, apart from the Old Vic’s contribution: new plays included the Lunts in O Mistress Mine and Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, and from the year before Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie and State of the Union (the Lindsay and Crouse play about the search for a Republican candidate for President, the sort of thing Welles might profitably have turned his hand to); there was in addition a slew of ‘Negro problem’ plays. Nellie Bly – another tale about a trans-global traveller who sets out, in fact, to beat Fogg’s record – had opened and closed ignominiously in January at the Adelphi; not, perhaps, a great omen for Around the World.
In this context, from the perspective of ‘profile’, Welles’s show could only seem a bizarre anachronism. To be sure, there were those who loved it: Joshua Logan, director of that season’s hit, Annie Get Your Gun, wrote to Welles: ‘your production is fresh, witty, magical, exciting and all the other words I can’t think of now. I was thrilled to hear the audience response at the end and I’m sure you were.’25 He added some generous and practical observations about the excessive speed of the first scene and attendant narrative unclarity, ending: ‘at any rate your work is like oxygen to the theatre and I hope you keep at it forever’. There was in many quarters a nagging feeling expressed by a few sympathetic critics that Welles brought to the theatre something unique, rare and in danger of disappearance. ‘I have been to see the show three times and I might say I am enchanted with it,’26 wrote Oliver Smith. ‘I really felt it was the most exciting show of the year for me, and all I can say is – I love it. It really gives me a certain excitement about working in the theatre.’
And yet, against these expressions of admiration, it is worth remembering that a mere ten years earlier Welles had been not merely the object of a few connoisseurs’ enthusiasm, but the white hope of the theatre, and the Mercury – now a mere commercial producer – had seemed to contain the seeds of the longed-for National Theatre. The visit of the Old Vic, and the sense of continuity that it represented, had stirred up the slumbering idealism of the American profession. The visit had been sponsored by what Burns Mantle called ‘that … altruistically minded non-profit organisation, Theatre Incorporated’,27 which had also just presented Pygmalion with Gertrude Lawrence. Theatre Incorporated was a non-profit, tax-exempt corporation committed to ‘a sustained programme of great plays of the past and outstanding plays of the present’. Its income was devoted to ‘the continuation of such a programme on a permanent basis; to the encouragement of young playwrights, directors and actors through a subsidiary experimental theatre; to the utilisation of the stage as an educational force, to the ultimate development of a true people’s theatre’. Welles and Around the World must have seemed quite irrelevant to such a serious-minded policy, though it was almost exactly the Mercury’s programme and closely describes Welles’s declared aims. It appears to have been some kind of collective with no designated leader or artistic director; Welles, of course, could only have functioned at the head, and as the mascot, of any such organisation, but he had long ago abdicated that possibility.
In fact, Around the World is an extraordinary episode in Welles’s career, though not without precedent. There is a clear line in Welles’s work from The Drunkard, his first semi-professional production when he was a teenager, at Woodstock, Illinois, to Horse Eats Hat at Project 891, through Too Much Johnson and on to his variety circuit tour of The Green Goddess, hommages all to the broad and flamboyant popular theatre of the mythical theatrical past, a passion that amounts almost to an obsession. None of it, though, had been remotely on the scale of Around the World, which is best understood as a last heroic attempt to re-create the theatre of his childhood, in order, perhaps, to do something for the father who introduced him to it, who believed that life should above all be fun, and towards whom he carried a heavy burden of guilt throughout his life, feeling that he had abandoned him to a lonely, squalid death. Welles had so often honoured the memory of his socially conscious mother in all the improving, avant-garde, politically progressive projects he had undertaken; Around the World was a counterbalance to all that worthiness. It is perhaps worth observing that someone innocent of Welles’s work outside his filmography would find it almost impossible to believe that Around the World was the work of the same man who created Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons or even The Stranger. It seems somehow so utterly devoid of the shadows that are so intrinsic to those films. The films all have clear, strong themes, even a pot-boiler like Journey into Fear, and common preoccupations. Around the World has no connection, however tenuous, with any of them. It is a jeu d’esprit, pure carnival, Welles’s subconscious on holiday, the bridge between his forays into radio comedy and the films. One is inevitably also struck by the extraordinary discrepancy between the expenditure of time, effort, ingenuity and money on the show and the amount of pleasure it engendered – modest, even in the eyes of its fans. Welles’s films (contrary to what was generally believed) went relatively little over budget. With Around the World he seemed to have no sense of budget whatsoever: he spent money on the show the way he spent his own money in real life. There is something fundamentally disproportionate about the whole venture that is utterly characteristic.
Meanwhile, there was the show to do. Arthur ‘Shirley’ Margetson shared a dressing room with Welles and his valet Shorty Chirello, who functioned as his dresser. The Japanese acrobats, Barbette and the other principals had been relegated to their own quarters at the Adelphi. The life of the dressing room was obviously very congenial to Welles. He had had a primitive show-relay system – unknown in Broadway theatres for at least another decade – rigged up so that he could listen to the parts of the show that he wasn’t in and make notes on them. He was inundated with letters from the public and liked to read them out to Margetson. (‘My husband has been anti-Christ all his life until he heard you read from the Bible on air the other Sunday,’ said one of the more memorable ones. ‘He has been going to church with me every Sunday since; but it isn’t doing him any good. Dear Mr Welles what shall I do about it?’) Margetson reports the nightly charade whereby the house manager Hugo Schaaf would slip $20 to Shorty, who would then slip it to Welles. One night Dick Wilson caught them at it; all denied it. Welles was thrilled with the deception. ‘He’d gotten away with something! Twenty dollars.’ Welles was in fact on the Equity minimum of $50.50 throughout the run.
Margetson reports Welles’s little naughtinesses: his delight in trying to make Mary Healy or Margetson dry up on stage; his late arrival at the theatre (he was seldom there before 8.45, with a first entrance at 8.50). Three minutes before going on as Fu San, he would call Shorty over to give him a shave. ‘You might think this was a pose of his – and who am I to say it wasn’t?’ Welles was clearly very fond of the old fusspot he called Shirley. Margetson reports some of his kindnesses: out of the blue one day, for example, he said, ‘Watch the papers next week.’ Margetson found that Welles had given him prominent billing: now the posters and the papers said: ‘Orson Welles and Arthur Margetson in Around the World’. He never failed to mention the older man in his nightly curtain speech. ‘Now that an air-conditioning machine has been installed via the Shuberts at great expense,’ he would say, ‘the very latest thing, mind you, not just. Mr Lee Shubert blowing through a block of ice – I do so hope, if you liked our little show, you’ll tell your friends – don’t wait until you bump into them, telegraph them. After all, it’s only the presence of an audience that distinguishes a theatre from an icebox – although you may find a ham in both.’ ‘Whereupon,’ Margetson writes, ‘he would look at me and say, “I am referring, of course, to Broadway’s newest star.”’ And of course Mar
getson was hopelessly in love with him for ever after.
Despite the steadily declining attendance figures – not helped by a particularly hot summer – Welles was clearly enjoying himself, and, using his dressing room as a base, he spread himself in ever more directions. Under the headline YOU COULDN’T KILL HIM WITH A CLUB,28 Daily News reporter Robert Sylvester described the movement order of a typical professional week. After detailing Operations A–E, he continues: