Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1
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1Cotten (1987), 29-31.
2Joanne Tarbox interview, 30 Sep 93; Hascy Tarbox, Mar 1983 interview in Leaming (1985), 96. Houseman and Orson would work together to their mutual advantage for the next six years, with Orson as the visionary creator and Houseman as the astute business manager who helped make it possible. But, early on, Virginia predicted with insight worthy of The Swami himself that Houseman would someday become Orson's Iago, betraying him out of jealous hatred.4
Houseman's autobiography devotes over 300 pages to his extraordinary portrait of Orson. Although by all accounts (including his own) Houseman's behavior was strictly heterosexual, Barbara Leaming virtually proves that his book implicitly but clearly and repeatedly reveals himself caught up with Orson in a fantasy with a homoerotic component. One that Orson recognized, manipulated, and exploited.5 I believe she’s right. For me the proof is in Housesman’s extraordinarily bitter comments on their final break where he writes of:6
... soul-destroying months I spent there [in Hollywood] as Orson Welles’s castrated, ineffectual partner while our five years’ personal and professional partnership withered and died in the blast of his sudden fame.
This reaction reeks of a lover’s jealousy that, when finally jilted, turns to hate. However, I believe the dynamic of their relationship was also driven by Houseman’s need to be acknowledged as the power behind Orson’s successes, the Great Producer as it were. Having failed to get that recognition from Orson, he preached those 300 pages to make sure that at least everyone else would give him more credit than deserved. And largely succeeded – just as he had to some degree with Virgil Thomson and would later with Herman Mankiewicz. Throughout his career Houseman consistently played the role of the chief of staff, the expediter, the producer, the power behind the throne.7
Whatever the psycho dynamics, Orson's stage career would climb throughout next year (1935) under the guidance of Houseman. At this time Houseman was involved in producing the first play at the newly formed Phoenix Theatre. Produced by Houseman, Orson became the central character in Panic, a new play by Pulitzer Prize-winner writer-poet Archibald MacLeish. This blank-verse drama about the Stock Market Crash of ’29 featured Orson as a middle-aged market manipulator.
The play's central character was McGafferty, a formidable industrial and financial leader caught in the Stock Market Crash of '29. How did Orson get cast in this giant's role? Neither Alfred Lunt nor Edward G. Robinson were available. Neither were John or Lionel Barrymore. Houseman was unable to recruit Paul Muni. At this point, remembering boy Orson's current portrayal of mature Tybalt in Cornell's Romeo and Juliet, Houseman secretly approached Orson backstage and invited him to join him at a nearby bar. There, over two rounds of old fashioneds, persuaded Orson to agree to audition for the role of McGafferty. Two days later Orson did so:8
3 Thomson (1966), 253.
4Leaming (1985), 87, evidently based on correspondence or interviews with OW.
5Houseman (1972), 167, etc; Leaming (1985), 81-87.
6Houseman, Front and Center (1979), 107.
7On Houseman’s relationship with Thompson see particularly Thomson (1966); and Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thomson (New York: Norton, 1997), 240-243, 555. Note also the fact that his mentor and roommate in at least five apartments during the years 1935-37 and again in 1943 and 1945 was Virgil Thomson, a very active if publically secret homosexual. And that his last years were as mentor to gay TV and movie director James Bridges. However I interpret Houseman’s social and professional motives as being about control rather than sex.
I saw MacLeish's eyes narrow in exasperation as a tall nineteen-year-old boy in gray pants and a loose tweed jacket ... entered our bare, one-room office over the Burlesque house to read for the role of the aging tycoon, McGafferty. I gave him the hardest part first; the last despairing phase when McGafferty, harried and weakened with fear, becomes convinced. through the suicide of his last trusted associate, that his own end has come.
Sitting stiffly in that small grimy office ..., hearing that voice for the first time in its full and astonishing range, MacLeish stared incredulously. It was an instrument of pathos and terror, of infinite delicacy and brutally devastating power.
When Panic opened March 15th, it played its two scheduled performances (plus an add-on show for Communist Party supporters) to lackluster reviews. The general public wasn't much interested in the author's take on a seven-year old economic catastrophe. And the Communist Party leaders only grudgingly backed MacLeish's sympathetic portrayal of a distressed and disgraced capitalist pushed to the brink of suicide.
One performance of Panic was seen by Paul Stewart, a 26-year-old radio actor. Consequently, on Stewart’s recommendation to CBS, Orson auditioned for and won a permanent spot on The March of Time, a daily (later weekly) late-evening dramatized news show.9 Beginning March 22nd (reading a scene from Panic), for the next four years he impersonated such newsworthy figures as New York Mayor La Guardia, Sigmund Freud, Charles Laughton, Sir Basil Zaharoff, and even the Dionne Quintuplets. He mimicked each voice (except the Quints) after listening to newsreels or phonograph records, taking care to capture each person's dialect, accent, tone, tempo, phrasing, and other distinctive vocal characteristics.10 So radio would remain Orson's bread and butter as well as stretch his developing talents.
He had achieved a modest level of celebrity. A tiny brochure issued that year by Keen's English Chop House, the famous beef and ale restaurant in Lower Manhattan, took care to mention Orson's membership in the establishment's exclusive "Pipe Register", which assured his personal clay pipe on the wall, there to await his call to the Pipe Warden following dinner.11
With a steady income from radio but furiously busy, Orson had put off shopping for Virginia's Christmas present until late on Christmas Eve 1935 when he entered Saks Fifth Avenue. He eased himself through the battling mob by commandeering a wheelchair to which the suddenly courteous shoppers yielded the right of way. Arriving just at closing in the fur department, he picked a mink stole. Annoyed by the price, he appealed to the clerk from his wheelchair by explaining that the piece was about to go on post-season sale anyway and pleading “Otherwise I have nothing for my wife." He got the fur on his terms. Toward the end of his life Orson recalled:12
I never did anything remotely that intelligent again. It was a flash of Christmas sentiment on their part. But I always regarded it as great shrewdness on mine. 8 Houseman (1972), 151.
9Noble (1956), 86.
10The most detailed account of Orson's mimicry technique is Brady (1989), 70-71, 75-78.
11David Jay, Tobacco Smoke and Taverns (New York: Keen's, 1935), 9.
12OW 23 Dec 83 interview in Leaming (1985), 93.
HARLEM NIGHTS AND STAGE VOODOO Early in the new year (1936) Houseman got himself and Orson signed on with the WPA's Federal Theatre Project and Orson was made stage director of the Harlem-based New York unit, the largest of its 18 nationwide black theatrical groups. Already an amateur theater producer, dramatist, set designer, and director, Orson was about to become an instant pro in all these later categories, as well as expand his range as an actor. And so, for the next 18 weeks, from early February through June, Orson virtually lived in Harlem with only time out downtown for sleeping and his regular radio jobs.
Headquarters for Orson and Houseman and their Negro Theatre Project was the famous Lafayette Theatre. Leased by the WPA, the Lafayette was an ideal choice. Located at 2235 7th Avenue in the heart of Harlem gave maximum accessibility. Opened in 1912 as a variety theater, it had featured such top jazz orchestras as Fletcher Henderson’s and Duke Ellington’s. It would become the first local night spot to desegregate. Then in 1935 it became a movie house. Its 1,500-seat auditorium was the largest Harlem theater with a full stage and backstage. The ample basement had from 1932 until recently housed the Hoofer’s Club, the informal jazz hangout of Harlem’s leading dancers (Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Honi Coles, etc). The building was still in good condition when occupied by the Negro Thea
tre Project.
It was off-beat timing when Orson and Harlem discovered each other. The sparkling “Harlem Renaissance” had run from 1920 through the early Prohibition years until it fizzled out after the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Radical writer Langston Hughes summed it up:13
That ... was the end of the Harlem Renaissance. We were no longer in vogue, we Negroes. Sophisticated New Yorkers turned to Noel Coward. Colored actors began to go hungry, publishers politely rejected new manuscripts, and patrons found other uses for their money.
Orson arrived in the depths of the Great Depression. The vibrant Harlem ghetto had become an impoverished slum where more people were in bread lines than theater ticket lines. Unemployment ran fives times that in the rest of New York. The black-white honeymoon had ended definitively on the evening of 19 March 1935 when some ten thousand angry locals marched down Lenox Avenue destroying all white-owned businesses. The riot, sparked by white store clerks having roughed up a Puerto Rican boy for shop-lifting a knife, left three dead, 30 hospitalized, and over 100 arrested.14
Orson’s first job for the Federal Theatre Project was to direct an astounding version of Macbeth. To take full advantage of the all-black cast, Orson's bride, Virginia, brightly suggested that Shakespeare's Scottish setting be reset in Haiti during the historical time of rising against a black tyrant of the early 1800s. Henceforward the production was unofficially known as the “Voodoo" Macbeth. It introduced many of the elements that would mark all of Orson’s future stage creations and carry over into his radio, movie, and TV work. As drama historian Richard France recognized, Orson already:15
was possessed of an imagination and sense of originality altogether unbounded by any theoretical restraints. Ideas came to him ... catch-as-catch-can, with everything and anything being integrated into his production schemes. His theatrical vocabulary was at once the highest and the lowest and readily lent itself to those violent effects of contrast which were his signature. He was the sideshow barker wallowing in the high excitement and derring-do of the circus or variety theatre on the one hand, while simultaneously exercising austerity and disciplined understatement on the other.
13 Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Knopf, 1940), 334.
14See Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of Afro-American Culture, 1920-1930 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995); David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Knopf, 1981).
15France (1977), 55.
But his inventions were never merely those self-indulgent expressions of artists or critics who presume that “new" equals “creative". Orson understood that novelty must fit into a wider dramatic scheme to earn the word creative. And even then he always mistrusted that overworked word.
In “Voodoo" Macbeth we first discern Orson's “delight in sharing not only illusion but the mechanics of illusion with his audience."16 He would soon repeat this lesson on radio (War of the Worlds) and then in film after film. And with his friends.
The play ends with the death and decapitation of Macbeth, his severed head hurled from the ramparts by the victorious Macduff to the three witches who then display it impaled upon a staff. Orson had an interesting Third Option for presenting this beheading effect. As a magician, he would have known how to do it convincingly in full view of the audience by using a truncated variation of the old Palingenesia method he'd seen Houdini revive on stage ten years before. However he chose to present the audience with a done deed,17 probably, as Richard France suggests, because “it was the [sudden and unexpected] sight of the severed head, not the process of beheading that was paramount for Welles."18 Orson left it to Roman Polanski to use the Palingenesia method in his film version of Macbeth (1971).
Orson's Macbeth posed a casting problem that needed disguise. The show advertised an allNegro cast and it was. But the two leads, blue-eyed giant Jack Carter as Macbeth and Edna Thomas as Lady Macbeth were so light-skinned that it was feared audiences would mistake them for whites. The solution was that both Carter and Thomas played in black face, “making down" or “blackening up” as Negro jargon of those days realistically called dark makeup.
Orson was intrigued by the company's troupe of African Gold Coast drummers and worked closely with them. This group of dancers, singers, and drummers had been formed three years earlier by Asadata Dafora Horton, an Oxford-accented native of the West African British colony of Sierra Leone (and, briefly during his return there in 1963, as Minister of Culture). Dafora, a choreographer and one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, was already recognized as the "preeminent purveyor of African dance and culture in America". His group comprised Afro-American women dancers (including the famous Ollie Burgoyne) and African male drummers, including an authentic (or perhaps only stage) witch doctor named Abdul Assen, a silver-bangled Nigerian Moslem dwarf whose gold teeth had diamond insets.19 Their first act upon being hired as musicians and dancers for Macbeth was, or so it was said, to formally requisition several black goats that they ritually sacrificed late one night in the theater to provide the skins for their resonant drums. Whatever the truth of that story Orson made their awesome drumming a recurring theme in the play's music and sound effects.20
16 France (1977), 55, paraphrasing Pauline Kael (1971/1984), 61-62: "I think what makes Welles' directorial style so satisfying in this movie [Kane] is that we are constantly aware of the mechanics – that the pleasure Kane gives doesn't come from illusion but comes from our enjoyment of the dexterity of the illusionist and the working of the machinery."
17 The stage directions as reprinted in France (1990), 96, specify "He falls dead, his body hidden behind the battlements at the top of the tower."
1818.France letter to BW, 11 Apr 92. As later in Orson's film version of Macbeth where the beheading is also done off-stage during a brief cutaway shot to the witches' symbolic decapitation of a figurine and the already severed head then first seen by the movie audience.
19A whole chapter on the remarkable Asadata Dafora and his troupe is in Perpener (2001), 101-127. See also Thomson (1966), 262.
The extent and depth of Orson’s control of the sounds, including the music, in his productions has never been fully appreciated or credited. This omission, like his magic, is an important gap because, as we’ll discover, he consciously tried to edit each part of all his movies to a “rhythm” that would build to an overall “musical” structure.21 This important subject will be analyzed in detail later, but its role in his Voodoo Macbeth is worth notice here because it was the first of his astonishing stream of creative and usually successful experiments in sound. Because Virgil Thomson was the composer-arranger and musical director for Macbeth, he automatically tends to get full credit. But Thomson himself, for all his immodesty, modifies the record by properly crediting Orson for the following key “device”, which his autobiography called “really Welles’s.”22 In addition to the “sizable pit orchestra” there was a backstage percussion group comprised of the great “thunder drum”, a standard thunder sheet, bass drums, kettledrums, and a wind machine. These served two purposes. First as mere sound effects, specifically to simulate a storm. But also, as explained by Thomson, “played by musicians and conducted, for accompanying some of the grander speeches. In this way, on a pretext of rough weather, I could support an actor’s voice and even build it to twice life size.”
This large orchestral and sound-effects group required precise musical control because, Thomson points out, with all their percussion noise, the backstage musicians couldn’t “hear lines but must depend on light-cues; nor can an actor so accompanied change his reading much from one night to another.”23
Orson imposed his wishes on and involved himself in all aspects of this production. But he was wise enough even at this early stage in his career as director to avoid miring himself and the whole production by micro-managing all the fine details. As Thomson testified:24
He knew exactly the effect he wanted. He never told you how to produce it. You leave those things to people who have the technique.
This would become Orson’s lifetime practice, although admittedly he sometimes would let himself get caught-up in details to the detriment of the overall product. Dafora was disturbed when he read a scathing opening night review of Macbeth, which appeared two days later in the Republican New York Herald-Tribune. Percy Hammond, the dean of New York drama critics, had written that “The Negro Theatre, an offshoot of the Federal Government and one of your Uncle Sam's benevolent experimental philanthropies, gave us, last night, an exhibition of deluxe boondoggling." Dafora brought his voodoo troupe to Orson and Houseman and showed them a clip of Hammond's review. He then asked only two questions: “The work of an enemy?" and “He is a bad man?" When Houseman and Welles agreed on both points, Horton translated to his colleagues who nodded and silently withdrew. Next day the theater manager reported that the drummers had spent the night in the building chanting with more than their usual fervor and Orson and Houseman exchanged glances because they had just read the afternoon newspaper report that Percy Hammond had been suddenly taken ill with pneumonia. Forty-eight hours later he was dead. Houseman's account not only portrayed the sophisticated Dafora as a stereotypical jungle darkie speaking funny English but played up the supernatural and claimed that Orson was “ridiculously superstitious”. Orson's account was matter-of-fact flatly contradicting Houseman, in saying “Hard to believe, but it is circumstantially true."25
20 Thomson (1966), 262; Houseman (1972), 190-193.
21Wood (1990), 176-179, 182-185, summarizes OW’s more ambitious music projects, all unrealized.
22Thomson (1966), 263.
23Thomson (1966), 263.
24Thomson 1972 interview in France (1977), 69.
French avant-garde poet and film-maker Jean Cocteau, whom Orson had recently parodied in Hearts of Age, was in New York on June 9th. He was flitting through on the last stopover on his personal Eighty Days Around the World tour with his current lover playing the role of Passepartout.26 Cocteau’s old friend from Paris days, Virgil Thomson, recalled escorting him that Sunday evening to Harlem:27