I took him to Macbeth. And he savored each ingenious violation of the straightforward, excepting only one: he did not understand the constant lighting changes. His classical theater mind found them distracting till he had seized their function in the spectacle as contributing to the climate of violence.
Cocteau found little resemblance between the “barbaric frenzies” of this black spectacle and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He referred to its “Wagnerian” climate and called its final scene “a gorgeous ballet of catastrophe and death.” He took no notice of Orson, failing to remember him when they met in Paris a decade later.
Virgil Thomson, who’d observed Orson as closely in this period as did his friend and protégé Houseman, managed a more emotionally distanced view of their collaboration. Of the creation of the Harlem theater and its Macbeth he wrote that:28
... due to Welles’s brilliant planning and to Houseman’s administrative tact. ... [ Macbeth] was Houseman’s dream but Orson’s child.... And in this Orson showed himself, still just eighteen, as imaginative, foresighted, patient, above all with a knack for making actors act.
* * * Caught between his drive to create and the need for money, Orson began a life-long habit of working several major projects at the same time. Rehearsals of Macbeth in Harlem ran from after midnight until 8 AM, during which time Orson would consume quantities of whiskey – until Virgil Thomson got him to switch to white wine. After rehearsals he'd hold a breakfast conference. He'd then rush downtown to begin a round of radio appearances that ran from 10 AM until midnight when it was time to get back to Harlem, somehow managing to squeeze in some time for carousing. Several days of this hard schedule brought him to the point of exhaustion. That happened one noon early that year when he arrived at the CBS studios just in time for his daily unrehearsed recitation on a 15-minute light-musicwith-poetry show called Musical Reveries. Handed an Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet, he was too befuddled to understand it. Rather than just fluff around, he chose to deliver the last lines in double-talk. Clever but costly, as the unsympathetic producer decided this was Orson's last day (at $50 per) on the show.29
25 Houseman (1972), 202-203; Brady (1989), 90.
26Jean Cocteau, Round the World Again in 80 Days (London: Taurus, 2000(as translated from the 1936 edition), 241.
27Thomson (1966), 263.
28Thomson (1966), 263.
29OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 280, 333; and verified in most details by Johnston & Smith (1940), III, 45.
Orson's verbal improvisation that day had been a radio first for double-talk, those lines spoken in an earnest and sincere voice but deliberately mixing real with nonsense words. Orson would have known from Robert-Houdin's autobiography that this deceptive manner of speaking had originated in the early 1800s among French conjurors. They called it amphigouri. It suited their patter because it gave a comic but meaningless explanation of magical methods, thereby keeping the secrets. However, by 1868 this type of comedic verbal hoax had become passé. Then, in 1936, with its freshly coined term “doubletalk", it enjoyed a revival among American magi and others, particularly after being introduced two years after Orson's inspiration, to a mass audience on a Jack Benny radio show when it triggered a major public fad.30
* * * By the summer of '36 Orson had become amazingly successful both in radio (where he was now earning $1,000 per week) and on stage (where he earned a big reputation but small money). He told Frank Case, the Algonquin's amused manager, that he no longer had those moments when he faced the possibility of having to sleep in Central Park but could now face the possibility of buying Central Park.31
To keep him with the Federal Theatre, its director gave him his own showplace. This was the elegant 900-seat Maxine Elliott's Theatre on West 39th Street just off lower Broadway. Orson thought of it as his “magic box".32
His first production there in September, Horse Eats Hat, was his slapstick version of a French sex farce. Nat Karson, skilled set designer and old friend of producer Houseman, was responsible for engineering Orson's “magic devices" whereby the entire set and props, “seized with a sudden life of their own, were seen to fly off suddenly in various directions."33 Bil Baird designed the break-apart furniture and there was even a seven-door set “in one” used for slapstick hide-and-seek.34 Orson's idea of having the whole set collapse around and over the players anticipated Andrew Lloyd Webber by 50 years.
These hi-jinks weren’t for everyone. Playwright Marc Connelly recalls attending a performance where:35 From the moment the curtain rose I found it hilarious. So did someone else seated some distance from me whom I couldn’t see. We were volcanic islets of mirth in a sea of silence. Hearing another man laughing as much as I kept me from being intimidated by the general apathy.
At the intermission , Connelly recalled: As the audience and I moved into the lobby I spotted a man wiping tears of pleasure from his eyes. It was my friend [novelist] John Dos Passos. For our own security, in case the second act proved as funny as the first, we sat in adjacent vacant seats we found in a rear row and for the rest of the evening screamed with laughter together. I was never able to understand the apathy of the rest of the audience.
30 Robert-Houdin (1868/1877 tr), 86-87; Annemann in Jinx (1937), 234, (1938), 270, 292.
31Case (1938),68.
32OW 16 Jul 84 interview in Leaming (1985), 112.
33Houseman (1972), 220, 221. Houseman credits Abe Feder but Richard France letter to BW, 11 Apr 92, identifies Karson rather than Feder as having engineered these effects.
34Thomson (1966), 264-265
35Connelly (1986), 230-231.
That one performance wasn’t a fluke – the play drew generally mixed comment. But lots of it. And that’s what mattered to Orson because it kept public attention on himself. Jo Cotten recalls Orson entering the theater waving a newspaper above his head and thundering gayly that local columnist “O. O. McIntyre mentioned me today." When Jo and the others dutifully shouted in unison “What did he say?", Orson roared laughingly, “He said I was a flash in the pan."36
The play ran ten weeks to generally full houses and many repeat customers. Bertha “Spivy” LeVoe, the outrageous lesbian singer-owner of Spivy’s Roof claims she saw it 30 times, sometimes bringing friends. Often after the show Orson would bring Virginia to Spivy’s club at 139 East 57th Street for drinks and the three became friendly. But Spivy noticed that the couple quarreled a lot at first. Later he began dropping in at Spivy’s with other people while Virginia would come separately, “squired by a handsome actor or writer.”37 The marriage was slipping.
* * * Horse Eats Hat marks Orson's first clear effort to break out of the conventional “frame" of illusion set by traditionalists in every artistic medium. The most treasured convention of classical EuroAmerican theater is that the audience is set apart physically and emotionally from the actors by the proscenium arch. Orson used Horse to pierce this veil. First, he introduced the Elizabethan “thrust stage," the first ever seen on Broadway.38 This let his actors occasionally intrude over the audience. He’d use this device again in his productions of Faust (1937), Five Kings (1939), and Native Son (1940). He also sent actors and action out into the aisles and audience. Another tradition separating the audience from the play is that the action stops during intermission. (Indeed two intermissions were usual then.) He broke that convention by having a brightly uniformed lady trumpeter sound off from one of the boxes and puppeteer-actor-acrobat Bil Baird pretend to pound out tunes on a player piano in another box. Ending his solo, Baird would “accidentally" tumble over the balcony and, catching a foot in the railing, become suspended upside-down over the audience. Late in the run Baird lost his foothold and fell, fracturing a leg in several places. Orson's directorial style of pushing his actors and crew to the limits of their technical and even physical ability was already evident.
In later years he would extend this frame-breaking – which is the essence of comedy, surrealism, and magic, indeed of all forms of deception as well as creativi
ty – to every medium in which he would work. Why? Precisely because he thought magically. Like a conjuring performance, the world is divided into two parts: out front where the audience sees the intended effect and backstage where the manipulator's strings are. (For those readers who recognize here the theatrically based jargon of the late great sociologist Irving Goffman I would point out that he had only independently stated a point of deception theory first proclaimed nine years earlier by magician Henry Hay.39)
36 Cotten (1987), 38.
37Spivy interview in Noble (1956), 202. Spivy’s real name is thought to have been Bertha LeVoe.
38On Orson's reintroduction of the thrust stage (a narrow extension of the stage beyond the proscenium into the orchestra and first row of the audience) see Houseman (1972), 230-231; France (1977), 91.
39Henry Hay, The Amateur Magician's Handbook (New York: Crowell, 1950), 36; Irving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Inew York: Doubleday, 1959); Irving Goffman, Frame Analysis (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1974).
In conjurors' jargon, the “effect" is what the audience is meant to perceive – coins or cards are plucked out of thin air, one solid metal ring links with another, the lady vanishes. The “method" is the secret means by which that effect is accomplished. In drama, opera, ballet, radio, TV, and cinema the audience knows the method and needs only suspend disbelief to enter into the illusion. In magic, however, the performer disguises the method so the audience perceives only the intended effect – the illusion – ideally and usually with no way to figure out how it had been accomplished. The reason this is possible, as one wise magician explains, is because “Magic is the only game that people pay someone to come and play with them to which they do not know the rules."40 Orson used these secret rules and induced most of those around him to play by them, just as he had those 4th grade school bullies in Madison, Wisconsin. Most persons expect to deal with a simple pair of alternatives – Orson had the magicians' talent to confront people with that ever-unexpected and surprising Third Option.
As if he didn't already have enough to do with his radio and stage work, Orson even played a New York burlesque house. He'd already played one in Utica, New York, on 21 May 1934; but that had been with the Cornell troupe when it rented the house for its legit plays.41 Now, or so he later claimed, he'd arranged with the management of Minsky's sleazy Republic Theatre burlecue on 42nd Street to appear there occasional afternoons between the stripteasers' acts by filling in as straight man to the vulgar house comedians.42 I suspect that this was how Orson found Augustus E. “Gus” Schilling, a 28-year-old veteran burlesque comic. In any case, two years later in February 1939 Orson recruited him as one of his Mercurians to appear in, most appropriately, "Burlesque", one of the Mercury's CBS radio plays. Schilling, famous for his "fairy"-prance exit at the Star in Brooklyn and at Minsky's Republic, was then married to top stripper Betty Rowland.43 Schilling would have minor parts in nine further Mercury productions over the next decade on stage, in radio, and on film.
It would have been a tidy coincidence if Orson's burlesque act had been caught by his future admirer, German refugee playwright Bertolt Brecht of whom a friend wrote "His big luxury and dissipation was a seat in the balcony at Minsky's Republic Theatre on 42nd Street. Brecht said it was the only honest Broadway theater in New York."44 But the timing was probably wrong, as Brecht's first visit to New York had been in fall 1935. By the time of his later visits (1943 and 1945) whatever shows he saw there were at best only bland shadows of the originals. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, disagreeing with Brecht's assessment of burlesque, had promised to stamp out the verbal and visual improprieties of burlesque in New York City and did so – effectively in mid-1937 and then absolutely in 1942.
THE MAGIC OF SOUND & THE SOUND OF MUSIC During this period Orson began working closely with several of the more talented young classical music composers in America: Virgil Thomson (in 1936 - 1938), Paul Bowles (1936-38), Aaron Copland (1937-39), Lehman Engel (1937-38), Marc Blitzstein (1937), Bernard Herrmann (1938). Later years found him working again with the previously mentioned plus Otto Luening & Vladimir Ussachevsky (1955-56). And in Europe with Jacques Ibert (1947-48), Angelo Francesco Lavagnino (1951, 1965, 1970), Jean-Michel Demase (1953), Paul Misraki (1955), Jean Ledrut (1962), and Michel Legrand (1975). All of them composed and, except for Copland, Ibert, Misraki, Demase, Ledrut, and Legrand also conducted the music for the plays, the opera, ballet, radio and TV dramas, and movies that Orson directed.
40 Jeff Busby interview, 19 Jul 84.
41Cornell (1939), 288.
42Leaming (1985), 166.
43Irving Zeidman, The American Burlesque Show (New York: Hawthorne, 1967), 158, 178, 193, 202.
44Hy Kraft, On My Way to the Theater (New York: Maclimman, 1971), 147.
He handled this array of expert musicians the same way he did his actors – by telling them precisely what he wanted. That none rebelled was no result of his childhood music lessons but of his profound talent for understanding how music can be used to enhance the theatrical effects he strove for, as well as how to manipulate these eleven highly individual personalities.
Thus Lehman Engel recalled:45 “In ordering the music from me, he practically dictated it just as he dictated the acting performances. He beat out rhythms to go with planned action and “walked off" space to indicate duration. He never miscalculated.”
Virgil Thomson, after initial doubts, concluded that:46 “He knew it [music] so well and so thoroughly that I, as an older musician with a certain amount of pride, would not write him original music. I would not humiliate myself to write so precisely on his demand. On the other hand, I respected his demands dramatically. So ... I gave him sound effects and ready-made music.”
This was rare praise from a man known as much for the lofty musical standards he set for others as for his own need to control all aspects of his musical and other works.
Aaron Copland reported that he took poet-dancer Edwin Denby's advice that the best way to handle Orson's odd ways was “show him you trust him and leave him alone."47 The superb but touchy “Benny" Herrmann rated Orson “a man of great musical culture" and said repeatedly that he was the only stage or film director from whom he had ever accepted professional advice. He dismissed all the others – he'd worked with 31 in four countries – as “just babes in the woods" when it came to music.48
Lavagnino, whom Orson called “extraordinarily talented", rejoiced in his director's deep understanding of music and flow of inspiration. When he asked what sparked these ideas, the best Orson managed was to say that he was like “one of those whores who is indifferent to a client built like Hercules but can get turned on by a simple nobody who arrives at the brothel at the right moment."49
Yet, as expert as these composers were, later ones didn’t quite meet Orson's standards. As he would bluntly explain to one biographer, “I tend more and more now to get music that isn't composed [for the occasion] – so that I can control it, so that I'm not at the mercy of what he turns up with, after he's already under contract."50
Just as his tastes and expertise in theater ran from Shakespeare to vaudeville, his appreciation and knowledge of music ranged from classical and opera to jazz. And he'd later work with pop composers Cole Porter and Henry Mancini and in his 60s come to appreciate some rock, even some heavy metal.
45 Engel (1974), 86.
46Thomson letter to Houseman in Houseman (1972), 192.
47 Copland & Perlis (1984), 262.
48Herrmann interview and 1977 lecture in Evan William Cameron (editor), Sound and the Cinema (Pleasantville, N.Y.: Redgrave, 1980), 121. The autobiographies and biographies of Blitzstein, Bowles, Copland, and Thomson all make passing references to Welles.
49Lavagnino interview in Higham (1985), 268-269.
50OW in Welles & Bogdanovich Tape 4 (1992), Side A.
Orson was introduced to jazz music sometime in the mid-1930s. This happened after his move to New York City in 1934 and certainly by early 1936
in connection with his production of the black “voodoo” Macbeth. His black cast members Jack Carter and Edna Thomas took him to Harlem niteries where, I presume, he was exposed to some jazz.
An early jazz hangout for Orson, perhaps his earliest, was Dickey Wells’s Shim Sham Club. He was drawn to it because it was only a block above his headquarters in the Lafayette Theater. And also because its name mimicked his father’s, Dick Welles.51 Dickey Wells (not to confused with the famous black jazz trombonist named William “Dicky” / “Dickie” Wells) was a Harlem impresario. He emerged soon after the Renaissance when in 1933 he opened his club in the premises of the famous Nest Club, which had closed in 1930. Located at 169 West 133rd Street, it stood in the heart of Harlem on “Jungle Alley”, the stretch of 133rd between Lenox and 7th Avenue that housed the main Harlem nightclubs. It had featured an inferior jazz band called Dickey Wells’ Shim Shammers and Billie Holiday had reportedly sung there in 1936; but, although Orson may have heard her at that time, they wouldn’t meet until later in Hollywood.
Macbeth itself included both black African music and performers and American Negro jazz music and musicians. Except for Virgil Thomson’s orchestrations and overall musical direction and some orchestrations, the music and musicians was all-black. Leonard De Paur, the play’s black choir director and a prominent musicologist, was particularly familiar with jazz.52 And except for the rhythms of the African drummers, the orchestral music had been composed by jazzmen James P. Johnson (stride pianist), Porter Grainger, and Joe Jordan. The orchestra was conducted by Jordan. Born in Cincinnati 54 years earlier, he was a pioneer ragtime and jazz performer, band leader, and composer (“Pekin Rag”, “That Teasin’ Rag”, “Dixie Land”, and “Lovie Joe”. That last, which he co-wrote, was the song that brought Fanny Brice instant fame in the 1910 Ziegfeld Follies. Its chorus was sensational:53
Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1 Page 9