Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1

by Barton Whaley

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  * * * Hoping to repair the initial flop of Too Much Johnson, Orson planned a revival. Paul Bowles, the composer for Horse Eats Hat and Faustus, was summoned back from the French Riviera to write the music. It was intended specifically for the slapstick silent movie inserts that Orson still hoped to finish editing. Back in Manhattan from late September to mid-October Bowles wrote the score, a madcap series of four sections matched to scenes in the movie. However, when Bowles took his music to Orson, he was astonished to be told that the Mercury had decided to defer Too Much Johnson in favor of a tragedy, Danton's Death. Orson referred him to Houseman, who handled the finances. Bowles found Houseman in his office, slumped unhappy in a chair, evidently forewarned of Bowles's anger. Seeing an angry, tearful Bowles standing before him, Houseman expressed his dismay and handed over a check for $100. Bowles took the check but, unmollified, stormed from the office. Orson's failure to give Bowles fair warning was irresponsible and inexcusable, but the composer's reaction was somewhat excessive. The $100 kill-fee for some three weeks labor was in fact generous, representing almost two months rent for Bowles's room at the Hotel Chelsea and more than the $23.86 per week he would now draw from the Federal Music Project unemployment fund.208 Nor did Bowles’ effort go to waste. His music, re-scored by him as a suite, Music for a Farce, would premier several weeks later to enthusiastic reviews.

  * * * Rehearsals were underway for Danton's Death one night when at 2 AM Orson said to Jack Berry, who'd been promoted his first assistant, "I need some chalk." When Berry replied, "I don't know where to get you chalk at two o'clock in the morning," Berry provoked the following scene:209

  He looked at me with that wonderful, noble, aristocratic hauteur. He said, "Why? Must you betray me too, booby?" I said, "I'll get you the chalk." I went down to the men's room of the Mercury Theatre, got the fire ax, broke the wall, and dug out some plaster and came back and said to him, "Here's the chalk." He said, "Thank you."

  This episode, I believe, typifies and explains the professional relationships that worked best for Orson. Always impatient, momentary frustrations evoked outbursts that, if promptly satisfied, he rewarded with thanks and promotions. Because this was behavior Houseman never understood, his relationship with Orson spiraled out of control.

  207 Pat Weaver, The Best Seat in the House (New York: Knopf, 1994), 39.

  208Sawyer-Lauçanno (1989), 203-204; Bowles (1972), 213. Houseman's autobio makes no mention of this incident.

  209Berry interview in McGilligan & Buhle (1997), 64.

  Danton's Death was scheduled to preview in October, just ten days later, when Marc Blitzstein, greatly agitated, came to Houseman with bad news. Blitzstein, who was writing the show's songs, was a new member of the American Communist Party (CPUSA), He'd appointed himself the Mercury's commissar for political correctness, Communist political correctness. And Blitzstein had been ordered to convey the Party's displeasure with Danton. The Party's cultural affairs boss, V. J. Jerome, had instructed Blitzstein that Danton's Death could be interpreted as a personal attack on the great Leader, Stalin himself. The portrayal of Danton as the hero of the French Revolution who had raised and commanded the armies of the young republic could be identified with Stalin's arch-enemy Trotsky. And the play's villain, Robespierre as Danton's prosecutor and executioner, could be identified with Stalin as the prosecutor and executioner of the alleged Trotskyite traitors in the ongoing treason trials in Moscow.

  Although Houseman wasn't strongly devoted to communism, he had to treat Jerome's concern most seriously. Since the previous year, with Julius Caesar and The Cradle Will Rock, the Party had been the Mercury's single most valuable economic supporter by its free advertising and dragooning attendance by Party members. So, over the next few days, Houseman met several times with Commissar Jerome. They compromised. Houseman agreed to remove the more blatant Trotsky-Stalin parallels; Jerome agreed not to boycott, merely withhold active Communist Party backing.210

  When Danton's Death premiered at the Mercury Theatre on November 2nd the critics gave it lukewarm reviews and it proved unpopular with the ticket-buying public. The prior withdrawal of lifesupport from the Communist Party guaranteed a quick death. It ran only 21 performances before folding. Shortly before Christmas the Mercury gave up their fine theater and moved its office back into its old “cubbyhole”, as Houseman called it, in the Empire Theater building. Until some new Mercury stage show could be mounted Orson had only his radio work.

  MINDREADERS EXTRAORDINARY Mindreading stunts of various kinds became a cheer-up party fad during the depressed 1930s. In the latter half of that decade Orson was a guest at parties in New York City where vaudeville, movie, and radio comedienne Fanny Brice had been entertaining with hypnotism since 1934. She soon added Contact Mindreading (also called Muscle Reading) and, reportedly, Non-Contact Mindreading as well. Writer and magic buff Ben Hecht describes a typical performance of the first type:211

  Fanny loved magic. At any gathering she wanted to show her powers. One of her favorites was to leave the room after telling someone, say me, to pick an object in the room, animate or inanimate, and concentrate on it.

  In a few minutes she would return and study me. I would feel as though I were being offered up for sacrifice. Then, walking toward me with her eyes always on my face, she would, as she later explained, will me to send out thought waves telling her which object I had chosen.

  Behind me now, she would place her hands on my shoulder, ordering me to walk slowly about the room. I would begin my tour. Slowly she would follow, hands on me. Then, when I was certain I had fooled her, she would dig her fingers into my back and announce the object of my choice.

  210 Houseman (1972), 384-385.

  211Norman Katkov, The Fabulous Fanny: The Story of Fanny Brice (New York: Knopf, 1953), 255. Miss Brice also did hypnotism and prediction tricks such as Orson would later do. See Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 389.

  When I would ask her how she did it, she would answer: “It's no secret, kid. It's my power." Orson added that Fanny could always find in a large filled bookcase the one volume that a guest had merely thought of. When he asked how she'd learned, she fobbed him off by saying, “Oh, I just do these things." Nevertheless, knowing he was a more serious magician than Hecht, she taught him some of her methods.212

  This seemingly miraculous effect of Muscle Reading or Contact Mindreading is based on an old Victorian parlor and children's game known variously as the Willing Game or Hide the Pin or, in the 1940s in one popular adult version that I recall, as Broom Over Whom. It was first adapted as a stage trick by John Randall Brown way back in 1872. This is the strange effect, described above in Miss Brice's version, where the performer is led by (or even leads) a volunteer by hand (or a handkerchief held between them) to a secret goal (for example, a hidden pin) known only to the volunteer and the audience. Around 1920 famous American mentalist C. A. George Newmann refined this technique into NonContact Mindreading, which is just that—the same startling effect being achieved without any physical contact between the volunteer and the performer. Although the results of both methods seem a totally convincing demonstration of telepathy, most performers and the few psychologists who have studied this phenomenon credit an above-average awareness of subtle physical and/or visual cues that indicate the correct direction to move—exactly the kind of keen perception that both Fanny and Orson shared.213

  * * * During his hectic five years in New York City Orson managed to pursue his interest in magic. Among the conjurors he saw there was the great Nate Leipzig. He never forgot that Swedish-American master's tiny but elegant Torn and Restored Cigarette Paper.214 It was also evidently in this period that Orson began his long friendship with Milbourne Christopher, an independently wealthy young local performer and magic collector whose strong interest in the history of magic matched his own.215

  Around this time Orson first met Max Malini, one of the world's most original close-up mag
icians. This Polish immigrant was then a highly paid performer on the East Coast at private parties for the very rich. After viewing one of these incredible performances Orson introduced himself and they talked at length. Malini, his son recalls, was “very impressed", finding Orson “very knowledgeable about magic and [even] knew a few tricks himself."216 And Orson was so delighted by Malini's ability to improvise magic effects with simple objects that he'd later enthusiastically describe these improvisations to fellow magicians.217

  212 Ricky Jay, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (New York: Warner Books, 1986), 193, quoting one of his conversations with Welles.

  213For Contact Mindreading (Muscle Reading) and Non-Contact Mindreading see Whaley (1989), 182, 466, 477. Admittedly, Newmann himself believed (as did performers Robert Nelson, Fred Marion, and Marvin Kaye) that there is at least an element of real telepathy in Contact-Mindreading and pure telepathy in the Non-Contact version. This is a specialty of The Amazing Kreskin, as he demonstrated superbly as recently as 4 Sep 1991 on the Regis Philbin show.

  214As he told Bruce Cervon three decades later. Cervon interview, 16 Feb 92.

  215Mrs. Milbourne Christopher letter to BW, 24 Feb 92.

  216Oziar Malini letter to BW, 2 Nov 94.

  217[Walter Gibson], "Luncheon Club Gets Under Way in New York", The Conjurors' Magazine, Vol.2, No.3 (May 1946), 12.

  Orson haunted the magic shops of Manhattan. A natural favorite was the Hornmann Magic Company at 304 West 34th Street (directly behind Macy's, the largest department store on Earth). It was then and until closing in 2001 remained the Western Hemisphere's oldest continuously operated magic store, going back through several owners to 1856. (The world's oldest is Mayette Magie Moderne in Paris, which traces from 1808.) Orson's fascination with this marvelous magical treasure house was enhanced by knowing that Houdini himself had briefly owned and occasionally demonstrated tricks to customers there until Frank Ducrot bought him out in 1920. And the genial and plump “Duke" Ducrot was just the sort of retired old vaudevillian that Orson would and did come to like.218

  Orson was a highly visible character in Manhattan in those days. That fall of 1938 two young stage actors, Montgomery Clift and Morgan James, stepped out onto Broadway after a midnight snack. James recalled the moment when:219

  suddenly Orson Welles hove into view and began marching down Broadway reciting Shakespeare at the top of his lungs. Half the Mercury Theater [sic] was with him—Marty Gabel, Hiram Sherman, and Joseph Cotten. It was something we never forgot—Welles's rich throbbing voice bouncing off a backdrop of garbage cans, and moving taxis, and dirty transient hotels.

  * * * Orson was preparing his next scheduled Mercury stage play, a monumental Shakespearean anthology he called Five Kings. He wanted Burgess Meredith, 29, to co-star as both Prince Hal and Henry V. Having known and worked with Meredith, including on two radio shows during the past two years, Orson had measured him as both actor (fine) and man (insecure and, after his second wife walked out, close to nervous collapse). A further problem was that Meredith had already promised Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill that he would act in their upcoming play. But Orson wanted Meredith for his play, so the Master Manipulator zeroed in on his friend's weak spots. For two days and two nights he hounded his quarry. The first night had been at Orson's Sneden's Landing country place where he thoughtfully provided his womanizing guest with, as Meredith put it, a “lovely French girl who made me forget my marital troubles." During the next day Orson, leading a five-piece Harlem jazz band to serenade Meredith, accompanied his prey to Manhattan where Meredith boarded the Île de France for a short European vacation. It was a day and night of partying aboard the elegant ocean liner, with the likes of saloonkeeper Toots Shor, theatrical producer Jed Harris, and columnist Walter Winchell popping in and out. At 1 AM Orson went ashore with the band and Meredith's signed contract.220

  Thanks to the publicity of War of the Worlds, the year wound toward a close with the promise of big money to come. Within a fortnight of the broadcast Orson had been fired as The Shadow but signed a new contract with Campbell Soups, which had suddenly decided to sponsor The Mercury Theatre on the Air, rename it The Campbell Playhouse, and move it to a more profitable time slot.

  Given a generous Campbell budget ($13,000 per show with $5,000 for himself),221 Orson could afford celebrity guest actors. Supplementing his repertory Mercurians he began meeting and working with a weekly stream of stage and movie luminaries. During its three-year run from December 1938 through October 1941, Orson’s Campbell show’s guest book added (in rough order of first appearance) Margaret Sullavan (twice), Beatrice Lillie, Gertrude Berg, George S, Kaufman, Ilka Chase, Madeleine Carroll (thrice), Laurence Olivier, Elisa Landi, Sam Levene, Helen Morgan, Gertrude Lawrence (twice), Ida Lupino, Cornelia Otis Skinner, Jane Wyatt, Katherine Hepburn, Paulette Goddard, Wendy Barrie, Walter Huston, Anna May Wong, Noah Beery, Mary Astor, Edna May Oliver, Fay Bainter, Sigrid Gurie, Marie Wilson, Lionel Barrymore, Loretta Young, Geraldine Fitzgerald, William Powell, Marjorie Rambeau, Hedda Hopper, Lucille Ball (twice), Joan Blondell, Frances Dee, Ann Harding, Jackie Cooper, and Jack Benny.

  218 Jack Flosso telephone interview, 19 Oct 92.

  219James interview in Patricia Bosworth, Montgomery Clift: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 62. Orson would be introduced to Clift by Lehman Engel over dinner in Philadelphia where Orson was directing Five Kings. Engel (1974), 108-109.

  220Meredith (1994), 98, 111-112; Houseman (1972), 418.

  221At inferred from a pencilled notation on the reverse of the final page of a 17 Feb 1939 script for the “Burlesque” episode that was offered on an E-bay auction in Nov 2004 .

  Helen Hayes, that grand dame of the stage, held the record with eight appearances. Moreover, she gives us a revealing snapshot of Orson’s ways. It occurred during her fifth appearance. The date was 22 Oct 1939. The location was the CBS studio in New York. And the occasion was the Playhouse’s presentation of Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom. Miss Hayes was concerned by Orson’s adaptation, which had moved the setting from Hungary to the American South:222

  During rehearsals, I got the impression we sounded like an Amos ’n’ Andy broadcast. I was moved to finally protest, but Orson, never in doubt, put me down firmly. “This is the way I want it and this is the way we’re going to do it!” That was the way we did it [for the regular early live local East Coast broadcast].

  When we returned to the studio for the 11 PM {repeat live] show to be aired in Los Angeles, Orson approached me laughing, with a telegram in hand. It ... said, “It’s a good thing Molnár is dead. This show would have killed him off.”

  A quality which endeared Orson to all was his ability to laugh at his mistakes.

  The Campbell contract meant that since early December ‘38 Orson was suddenly earning more than ever before. Depending on how much he had to pay out per broadcast for copyrights and actors, he was now personally pocketing between $1,000 and $1,500 of the soup company's money each week.223

  Orson was decades ahead of Andy Warholl in exploiting the Campbell logo.

  * * * With his new-found wealth Orson (with Virginia and baby daughter Christopher) immediately swapped rural vegetation and mud for metropolitan concrete and asphalt. He chose choice property, one of the finest he'd ever occupied and, after a rental period, the first that he'd bought. Located in mid-town Manhattan at 322 East 57th Street, it was an ultra-modern duplex (on the other side of which lived the Metropolitan Opera's star coloratura soprano, Lily Pons, and her conductor husband Andre Kostelanetz). Although the overall decor and furnishings were supplied by Gussie Weissberger’s interior decorator fiancé, Mortimer Yolken, Orson painted baroque-style sea-scape murals on the white walls of the large, high-ceilinged living room. John Houseman, exaggerating, recalled this room as being “the size of a skating rink". Orson also designed the Bauhaus-style chairs and couches made for him by a theater carpenter. This furniture was, Houseman remarked, “so huge that it had to be hoisted by a
crane through the double windows".224 It’s quite possible that the furniture would not fit through the narrow doors and hallways, built before the stringent building codes of today. The 57th Street fireplace appears in a photo held in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection and shows it to be a respectable size, but not huge – hardly an inspiration for the vast one in Kane’s Xanadu, as has been claimed.

  222 Hayes interview in Museum of Broadcasting (1988), 41.

  223Houseman (1972), 412-413.

  224Callow (1996b); Callow (1996), 431-432; Houseman (1972), 349, 415.

  * * *

  Early in the new year (1939), during breaks in rehearsals for Five Kings, John Houseman found the Great Raconteur more garrulous and inventive than usual, giving free rein to his imagination:225 His stories were of two kinds. There were the sagas of travel and adventure in distant places. These were vaguely based on truth and included encounters with Isadora Duncan in Paris [false—she'd died two years before Orson first visited that city], with fighting bulls in Spain [true] and with the Glaoui ... in his fortress-palace in the mountains of Morocco [probably true].

  There was also an Oriental cycle: a perilous caravan trip, which Orson led at the age of six across the Gobi Desert, and a case of silver leprosy diagnosed as fatal by the entire medical profession until a Japanese specialist in Tokyo (the world's leading leprosy expert) after staring at Orson's arm – the one that bore the mark of the dread disease – had finally scrubbed it with soap and water and removed the aluminum from a freshly painted radiator which Orson had leaned on in a whorehouse in Singapore.

  But Houseman, the cynic, gullibly swallowed some of Orson's stories. He could reject that cathouse in Singapore, a distant city where Orson had never been, only to be conned into believing that Orson and Jack Carter, while doing Macbeth, had been carousing the nearby brothels of Harlem when, on most plausible eyewitness lesbian testimony, their nights out had been spent in innocent intellectual dissipations.226 Houseman had a fevered imagination that Orson delighted to fuel. “I intended to torture him," Orson would admit, “but when I realized it was giving him a little pleasure, I dropped it."227