by Simon Callow
In the trailer put out a week before the programme was transmitted, a chain-smoking Alistair Cooke is almost tremulous as he announces Brook (‘brought over from London’) and Welles (‘in his first television appearance’). Brook, throwing out directions in his very pukka English accent – ‘No, no, d’you remember? We were going to do it quietly’ – puckishly supervises a rehearsal of a graphically-staged account of the gouging out of Gloucester’s eyes, after which the cast dissolve into merry laughter. ‘Could we see Mr Welles?’ asks Cooke, plaintively, ‘thirteen million people want to see Mr Welles.’ ‘Ah, you’re asking a lot,’ says Brook, ‘this is the scene just before Lear appears, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to go.’ Which he obediently does, with Welles still unglimpsed. During the last week of rehearsals, the room where they were working began to resemble a zoo. Lear’s hundred knights were to have falcons on their arms and great hunting dogs and Irish wolfhounds at their side; these canine and avian co-stars now appeared. The choosing of the right falcons became a major challenge, ‘so for three days of rehearsal there were about nine or ten of these great birds sitting in the dark’, their heads shrouded in black hoods; Welles himself brought on the body of a deer, a real, dead deer. Brook had opposed it, but Welles overruled him. At the dress rehearsal, a dog-handler appeared with a matching pair of immense, magnificent, pure-white Borzoi which had been contracted at considerable expense. ‘Mr Welles narrowed his eyes,’ recollected Robert Saudek. ‘“Get rid of those dogs,” he growled.’ The star had instantly detected an intolerable risk of being upstaged.22 To add to the circus atmosphere, a section of the rehearsal room was set apart for sponsors and clients who sat and watched all of this, awestruck.
Brook’s credit reads ‘staged by Peter Brook’; the official television director was Andrew McCullough, a young Omnibus staffer (later responsible for episodes of Lassie, The Fugitive and The Donna Reed Show). But earlier, in the rehearsal room, according to Robert MacCauley, playing sundry lords, Welles, seamlessly and with effortless authority, had taken over command of the camera plot, prescribing lenses, shots, moves.23 There was no confrontation, no loss of face, no comment; Welles simply did what Welles knew how to do better than anyone. And rehearsals continued. Welles’s fellow-actors were on the whole a very accomplished group, many of whom had distinguished pasts and some of whom would have successful futures. Cordelia was played by Natasha Parry; she was married to Peter Brook. Her sisters Goneril and Regan were played by, respectively, Beatrice Straight had and Margaret Phillips; Miss Straight had just come from the Broadway premiere of The Crucible for which she had won a Tony Award for her performance, while Miss Phillips had just been playing Portia at the City Center in New York. Arnold Moss was Albany; his finest hour was to come later, when he played Kodos the Executioner in Star Trek. David J. Stewart, playing the highly augmented role of Oswald, Regan’s servant (he is given the best of the excised role of Edmund), had just won the Clarence Derwent Award for creating the part of Baron de Charlus in Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, though, to his chagrin, he became most famous for his role in Murder, Inc. A large number of the cast were British in origin, among them Frederic Worlock as Gloucester (later the Judge in Perry Mason), and Bramwell Fletcher as Kent. Fletcher had starred, as long ago as 1931, opposite John Barrymore in the film of Svengali, which would certainly have endeared him to Welles. Scott Forbes’s strikingly handsome Cornwall was British, too, though he later became an American television star as the hero in The Adventures of Jim Bowie. The superb English actor Alan Badel, playing Lear’s Fool, was on the brink of an international stardom that never quite came: he had just played, to great acclaim, John the Baptist in William Dieterle’s Salome, in which the former Mrs Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, played the title role. Badel and Welles had only just been acting together in a mediocre Herbert Wilcox film called Three Cases of Murder, which may have accounted for his presence in Lear. The baffling role of Poor Tom – baffling, that is to say, when the character who is pretending to be Poor Tom, Edgar, has been excised from the play – falls to Welles’s old boss, colleague and sparring partner, Micheál MacLiammóir; it is to be presumed that his being cast was one of the ways in which Welles tried to remedy the penury into which MacLiammóir and Edwards had fallen as a result of their two-year adventure on Othello.
In the build-up to transmission, the mood in the rehearsal room was buoyant. On the whole, said a candid Omnibus employee immediately after the transmission, Welles behaved better than they had expected, except, he added, for demanding hand-made gloves ($75), a silk velvet costume, and real ocean-wet seaweed for his scene with Gloucester.24
The broadcast itself, however, was very nearly scuppered. Omnibus, uniquely among TV programmes, did not have sponsors: it had subscribers (in this case, Scott Paper Company, Greyhound Buses and AMF). Thanks to its generous endowment from the Ford Foundation, Omnibus was able to sell space for advertisements and place them where they chose. There Omnibus had the advantage over Welles’s later radio programmes, all of which were very much beholden to their sponsors (the Mercury King Lear is interrupted by a good deal of rhapsodising over Pabst’s Blue Ribbon beer). In the trailer for Lear, Cooke draws attention to the remarkable fact that the transmission is not going to be interrupted by any ‘messages’ from their subscribers. In fact, the subscribers had fully intended to have two commercial breaks, but Brook and Welles had point-blank refused; the subscribers likewise dug their heels in and were only convinced, at the last possible moment, by Brook’s canny argument that they would gain huge kudos if it were known that they had eschewed commercials to allow the flow of the great tragedy to proceed uninterrupted. He was right: it did. On the night, before the transmission proper began, Greyhound Buses had a nice leisurely opportunity to laud itself, without any reference to what the audience was about to see.
Presently, Cooke appeared and gave a highly intelligent introduction to the play, after which the play ran uninterrupted for its duration. The introduction drew attention to Shakespeare’s growing melancholy in the wake of his son’s death, with Cooke noting that the play was thought baffling for two centuries after it had been written, that the eighteenth century thought it disorderly and the nineteenth century found it morbid. He hoped that in the context of what he called the barbarities of the twentieth century, the audience would learn more from Shakespeare’s pessimism than from the optimism of lesser men. This was 1953, after all: the Cold War had just taken an alarming new turn with the US’s new emphasis on nuclear weaponry and McCarthy’s demented anti-communism was still rampant.
The introduction perhaps promises too much in terms of contemporary relevance. The production is a decently staged, very well-spoken (largely English-accented, in fact) account of what was left of the play after Brook’s cuts, by a group of on the whole very accomplished actors, in ‘period’ costumes; the sets are simple and effective, moving from the interiors of Lear’s court and his daughter’s castle to the exteriors – Lear, the Fool and Poor Tom meet in a kind of expressionistically painted windmill – ending up on the sea coast at Dover. The excision of the so-called subplot – the story concerning the two sons of the Earl of Gloucester, Edgar, legitimate, and Edmund, not – rips out a huge part of the play’s meaning and (especially once Lear has taken to the heath) a great deal of its narrative coherence. This was of course inevitable in reducing the play to transmittable length. In the trailer for the transmission, Brook impishly pretends to believe that it is an improvement. ‘The subplot is only there,’ he says, eyes twinkling, ‘because Elizabethan actors didn’t have intermissions, so they needed a rest.’ The cinematography on a large number of cameras is somewhat excitable, but the sangfroid of the operators (and, indeed, of the actors, led by Welles) on this lengthy and demanding live transmission is remarkable. The energy and danger is unmistakable. The television director, Andrew McCullough, was clearly on a high. ‘As I sat at the control panels,’ reports Brook of the transmission itsel
f, ‘I saw him intoxicated with the possibilities of the new medium, cutting wildly from one camera to another.’25 Things go wrong, speeches occasionally overlap, moustaches come adrift. TV drama, at this time and for some decades hence, was rehearsed exactly like a play, so the actors in Lear have a sense of the overall rhythm of the piece, are secure in their lines and work together as a team. It is, in fact, rather like a very good repertory performance, with some of the actors merely competent, while others are outstanding – Beatrice Straight, for example, Margaret Phillips, Bramwell Fletcher, and notably Badel and MacLiammóir, who both make strong impressions, even if Badel (who affects a sort of falsetto) is more or less incomprehensible and MacLiammóir, due to the cuts, utterly unfathomable (as well as being five years older than his own father in the play).
The show of course begins and ends – literally, in this version – with Lear. The word extraordinary barely begins to do justice to Welles’s work, which is on the most epic scale conceivable, physically and vocally, though not, perhaps, emotionally. It exists in a different world of expression from that of his colleagues, having a distinct feeling of the nineteenth century about it, though it is so stylised that it is sometimes closer to Kabuki or Noh. The make-up is sensational: in the first scene he is unrecognisable, his own button nose encased in a large, aquiline putty proboscis, his beard copiously covering a jaw which juts pugnaciously forward, his eyes monstrously made-up to enhance what the New York Times called his 3-D eyes. In addition, he wears a sort of balaclava, on top of which is a crown; the collar of his cloak sweeps up behind his head, framing it in white. This is his first look. In addition, he wore, as he had done in the London Othello, platform boots, making him more than ever a figure out of myth or fairy tale. In the next scene, he wears a long coat and a flat cap, lending him a somewhat Holbeinish appearance, à la Henry VIII. Later, he takes off the cap and just wears the balaclava, which he finally loses on the heath, liberating a fine head of hair, giving him a Mosaic look – early Charlton Heston – or, increasingly, a feeling of Captain Ahab before the mast, his eyes quite frighteningly protrusive. For the scene with Gloucester, his head is draped in that fresh seaweed; he looks like something from the Palace of Monsters in Bomarzo. Much mock was made by critics of his physical appearance – ‘facially’, said the New Yorker, ‘Mr Welles resembled a man who had been haled off a park bench and hastily pressed into service as a department-store Santa Claus.’26 Very few Lears use make-up at all, beyond a beard; most are concerned to pare down as much as possible, as Lear commences on his journey towards essence. Welles’s make-up inevitably and perhaps intentionally has a distancing effect.
Vocally, he is magnificent in terms of phrasing, diction and dynamic range: he can whisper or roar, and all points in between, and he is almost always audible, and always comprehensible. Line after famous line sings out with perfect clarity. What he lacks is a sense either of the lived life contained in the line, or of poetic feeling. Whenever rhetoric is called for he is supreme. The result, though, is that one is scarcely moved at all. Like many Lears, he gets better and better as he goes on, and his final scenes with Cordelia, both alive and dead, are most delicately played, though they remain stubbornly unmoving. Nonetheless, by the end one has a sense of a mighty force having shuffled off its mortal coil. It is an awesome spectacle, like the death of a bull or a dinosaur, but not a particularly human one. Welles again seems not to bring anything of himself to the role; it is hard to know why he is playing the part, other than that, as Edmund Hillary so memorably remarked of Mount Everest, it is there.
Once Lear is dead, we are returned to the studios, and some messages from ‘one of our patient subscribers’: ‘New Scotties with wet strength added!’ Presently Cooke congratulates a bestubbled Brook, who graciously thanks everyone and heads for his hotel, where, he later revealed, he slept for an entire day and night. Then the credits roll over Virgil Thomson’s threnodic postlude, with muted trumpets and pizzicato strings, and Alistair Cooke, getting into the theatrical spirit, bows silently.
The reviews were on the whole very favourable, especially for Welles, though not necessarily in the terms he would have liked: ‘Orson Welles, a great ham of an actor, undertook the role of King Lear, a great ham of a part, and was I thought, enormously impressive,’ said the Herald Tribune. ‘No other part is big enough for Welles, who suffers from gigantism of manner and mind.’27 Elsewhere, though, he was praised for his ‘power, heart and sheer artistry’. His arrival on the television screen was warmly welcomed. Comparing him to a confidently patient boxer who lets his opponent flail away for eight or nine rounds and then calmly steps in to finish the fight with one blow, the same reviewer said: ‘Orson Welles burst into television a couple of Sundays ago, and knocked everything for a loop . . . establishing a new high for the medium.’28 Brook’s production and the other actors were generally admired. It was the play that got it in the neck: ‘Welles’s achievement is even more remarkable when you consider that Lear is, in many ways, a ridiculous play.’29 As if they were young Victorian ladies, the critics were outraged by one incident in particular: ‘the gouging out of the eyes is the most ghoulish and revolting bit of business ever seen on any stage or screen . . . bad taste is bad taste, and a Shakespearean wrapping makes it no less reprehensible.’30 But Welles triumphed: ‘Altogether it was a memorable hour and a half and I hope Mr Welles proposes to tarry in this country long enough to do a few more plays on television.’31 That was not to be: he had a film to start in Europe. But Omnibus reported one of its ‘major mail pulls’ for King Lear, and it was hoped, they said, that he might ‘become identified’ with future Omnibus performances, on Steinbeck, perhaps, or Hemingway. That, too, was not to be. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men,’ as Brutus remarks in Julius Caesar,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
This was surely such a moment in Welles’s life. And it passed. Television got on very well without him, and he returned to his consuming obsession, the thing he thought his proper work: making movies.
‘The chief justification for the production’, Richard Watts Jr, of the New York Post ended his review, ‘was Orson Welles’s performance. It is quite possible that he is the King Lear the theatre has been waiting for.’32 That, too, was not to be. He did indeed play King Lear in New York, but it was very much not the King Lear the theatre had been waiting for. It was a King Lear which they ransacked the critical thesaurus to denounce. But meanwhile, the Omnibus Lear was one of Welles’s rare critical honeymoons.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Scorpion and the Frog
1954 BEGAN promisingly, with Welles back in harness, directing the film briefly called Masquerade, now known again as Mr Arkadin. Despite the existence of Filmorsa, the company Welles and Dolivet had set up, the financial underpinning of the new film was as precarious as Othello’s. Welles managed to find a Spanish co-producer for a three-picture deal, but before long this man fell out; he found a replacement, Producciones Hispano Film, who were, however, only prepared to back Mr Arkadin, and only if it were mostly shot in Spain instead of Italy, as in the screenplay. Welles accordingly relocated much of the film to Spain, a country he knew and loved; the masked-ball scene, instead of being (like Beistegui’s ball) Venetian, became Goya-themed.
Filming started in late January; editing began immediately, with two British technicians, Bill Morton and Derek Parsons, working day and night so that Welles could have access to them at all times – an extraordinary extravagance, perhaps designed to avoid the perpetual need for reshooting that had characterised Othello: if he could identify what he needed immediately, he could shoot it before moving location. This was especially important since many of his larg
e and distinguished cast were hired only for a day or two; if reshooting were necessary it was vital to do it before they disappeared. In fact Welles could congratulate himself that he was already ahead of the game, having seized the opportunity of a break in shooting on L’Uomo, la bestia e la virtù the year before to persuade the producers – with whom he was still then on talking terms – to let him have the use of the crew for a few days in lieu of his salary; the method he had evolved on Othello of assembling his film shard by shard was now second nature to him. With a junior assistant director on the Pirandello film, a wiry, ruthlessly efficient young man named Sergio Leone, Welles filmed a scene in which a thief runs away from the police by dashing in front of a speeding train. He had asked Leone to find him an extra ‘with the most terrifying thief’s face imaginable’. The man he found was a dead ringer for Mussolini, which delighted Welles – ‘the world’s biggest thief!’ he cried.1 They shot for three days, with Welles urging the man to run ever closer to the front of the train. The shot made its way into the film.