For his role in Five Kings thin Orson had to pad himself out as fat Falstaff. To do so he abandoned the traditional heavy cotton wadding for the newly invented foam rubber to become evidently the first actor to adopt this light-weight material. He also grew his first beard, a “great greasy" one.228
The new year (1939) found Five Kings in Manhattan floundering in rehearsals. Morale was low; tempers ran high. Late one night during a final run-through, Orson was on stage preparing one of his Falstaff scenes by calling for a tankard of mulled red wine, which the property master brought. Orson had wanted the wine truly mulled, that is steaming from a poke with a red-hot poker. Against Orson's wishes Houseman had authorized the substitution of dry ice in place of the fire marshal's heated poker. Houseman was monitoring the action from front seats when Orson suddenly stopped in the middle of a line. Assistant director Jack Berry, describes the ensuing scene:229
All of a sudden Orson threw this big number — "Aaggh!" — accusing Houseman of poisoning his drink. Total nonsense. Madness."
Berry had witnessed yet one more of those absurd Welles-Houseman shouting matches. High drama peaking when, according to Houseman, Orson realized:230
225 Houseman (1972), 419.
226Edna Thomas (Lady Macbeth) 1972 interview with Richard France (1977), 66-68, describes their post-rehearsals where Orson would "take Jack and me out to the night spots, and sit in the corner and recite poetry.
227OW 19 Jun 83 interview by Leaming (1985), 105.
228Meredith (1994), 115.
229Berry interview in McGilligan &Buhle (1997), 64.
that the steaming tankard from which he was noisily gulping was ice cold! With a fierce yell he summoned the prop man onto the stage. ... Then indicating the thin whisp of smoke, Orson demanded to know what caused it. "Dry ice," whispered the prop man, and as Orson moved upon him (all three hundred and forty pounds of him, including padding) he added quickly, "Mr. Houseman said ...."
That was all Orson needed. ... Then, staggering down to the edge of the stage, he singled me out in the darkness and pointed a long, pale finger at me.
"You've done it! You've killed me! For months you've wanted to destroy me — and now you've done it! You've poisoned me!" [And so on for another paragraph.]
Houseman’s account put Orson in "one hundred pounds of soaking padding" when, as we've just learned from Burgess Meredith, he was wearing only a few pounds of the new light sponge rubber. And, finally, Houseman undercuts his own story by ending his tale with the words that, "After that, still groaning piteously, he was helped off the stage and driven back to the Ritz-Carlton, having achieved his real objective, which was once again, to avoid rehearsing the second half of the play." I see no reason to let Houseman have it both ways at once: Orson-the-Paranoid and Orson-the-Irresponsible.
Five Kings was most notable for Orson's attempt to work the scene changes by a revolving stage. This was in the tradition of rotating stages of the 17th century Japanese Kabuki theater; Karl Lautenschläger who'd introduced it to Europe at the end of the 19th; Max Reinhardt who'd made it famous at the beginning of the 20th; set designer Rolo Wayne who'd presented 16 scenes at the 45th Street Royale for Mae West's The Constant Sinner (1931); Hassard Short who’d used it in two Broadway popular plays by George S. Kaufman, The Band Wagon {1931} and Dinner at Eight (1932); Billy Rose’s staging at Broadway’s Hippodrome of the Rogers & Hart musical Jumbo (1935), and The Great Ziegfeld (1936) movie, which won an Oscar for its spectacularly schmaltzy revolving-stage scene. For some (1936) movie, which won an Oscar for its spectacularly schmaltzy revolving-stage scene. For some foot diameter turntable. This daring but too complicated production failed to make it to Broadway.
Orson had designed his play as an elaborate and expensive production, one that needed money beyond what the Mercury had or could raise. Luckily the solid but staid Theatre Guild’s aging board of directors had decided that a “contact with youth” in the form of Orson Welles would enable the Guild to “become rejuvenated”. Afterwards, one older-but-wiser Guild board member commented that after Five Kings had played Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia, “our patience and money ran out, as did the audience, so The Five Kings came to an untimely” conclusion.231
During his final unsuccessful efforts to raise enough money to get Five Kings onto the New York stage, Orson had the added misfortune of meeting writer Dashiell Hammett in New York. Orson was producing and directing Howard Koch’s adaptation of Hammett’s early crime novel, The Glass Key, as the March 10th segment of his Campbell Playhouse radio series. Although Hammett was in local residence at The Plaza he begged off speaking on the show. That day, in a rather nasty mode, he wrote his lover Lillian Hellman blaming his decision on her ex-husband, Arthur Kober, who he said had advised him that the $200 fee wasn't enough.232 Later, meeting over drinks, Orson explained that Five Kings needed $15,000. Fortunately Hammett knew a rich Texan who was hoping to angel a Broadway show so, after many more drinks, he promised an introduction. He took Orson next morning to the Plaza Hotel to meet the Texan. Unfortunately Hammett, having recovered only half his wits from the previous evening’s drunk, blundered by greeting the outlander with the local catch-phrase made popular by the late famous Prohibition-era Manhattan nightclub manager-star, Texas Guinan. “Hello, sucker!” didn’t sit well with the millionaire who immediately balked. Orson later quipped, “Hammett’s greeting cost me seven thousand five hundred dollars a word.”233
230Houseman (1972), 422-423.
231Lawrence Langner, The Magic Curtain (New York: Dutton, 1951), 269-273. Next week Orson first met and worked with Laurence Olivier. The famed English actor, 32 and thus eight years Orson’s senior, had come to Hollywood to star as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights while his impassioned secret female lover, Vivien Leigh, captured Scarlett’s role in Gone With the Wind. Having finished his movie part and while Vivien was still busy making GWTW, Olivier moved to New York City to co-star in Katharine Cornell’s No Time for Comedy. On March 17th he took the opportunity to make his acting debut on American radio in Orson’s Campbell Playhouse. The play Orson had chosen to direct and star in that evening was Beau Geste. Orson played the title role. Olivier guest-starred (as Beau’s brother John Geste) in this tragic drama of honor in the French Foreign Legion, in which role Olivier had flopped on the London stage ten years earlier.234
In late March Five Kings had moved to the Chestnut Opera House in Philadelphia where it playing its final performances. Stage star Tallulah Bankhead caught a Thursday matinee performance. After the show she invited the entire cast to come to Manhattan that evening for big late-night party at her suite in the Elysee.235
THE VAUDEVILLIAN AND HIS UNHOLY FIVE Orson had lovingly embraced vaudeville ever since its heyday when his father had taken him as a child to shows in Chicago. As the summer of 1939 began he got his first crack at playing vaudevillian by touring an act on the RKO theater circuit. A Mercury publicity release at the time (probably drafted by Orson) claims that some friends persuaded him to drop his idea of doing a magic act in favor of something “dignified". So he chose The Green Goddess melodrama and, for the star role, kept (but neatly trimmed) the black beard he'd grown for Five Kings.236
Faced with yet another tradition-laden medium, Orson promptly broke through its frame by introducing his stage act with a movie. The 20-minute playlet opened with four minutes of film footage leading to an airplane crash in the Himalayas. After these brief establishing shots, the curtain rose on the nattily bearded Rajah of Rook (Orson) welcoming the survivors to his exotic country. The play's tour opened on 8 June 1939 in Chicago at the Palace Theatre where Orson had seen his much admired magician, Long Tack Sam, perform nine years before.
Wanting to slip into a different costume in mid-act without a long delay, he cleverly borrowed a technique from that allied art of magic called Quick Change. He first appears on stage wearing a turban, long Oriental robe, and boots. When it was time to switch costumes there would be a stage blackout and when the l
ights came up a moment later Orson is standing in the same spot but now wearing a Western dress suit. (The robe concealed the suit with rolled-up trousers, which an invisible assistant had only to roll down, slip a snap-on collar around Orson's neck, and dash off stage before the lights came up again.)237
232 Letters of 10 Mar 1939 to Mary Hammett and Lillian Hellman in Layman & Rivett (editors), Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett: 1921-1960 (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001), 149 and see also 147.
233William F. Nolan, Hammett: A Life at the Edge (New York: Congdon & Weed, 1983), 170-171; Noble (1956), 104..
234Wood (1990), 101-102; Museum of Broadcasting (1988), 54.
235Kennedy (1978), 69-70.
236The release is partly quoted in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 26.
After a week in Chicago, the Goddess jumped to Pittsburg, Steubenville, and one or two other cities. It flopped after a few weeks and the original eleven-and-a-half-week contract was cancelled.238 Orson had tempted ex-Mercury stage actor Jack Berry, 22, away from a profitable season's contract. In fact, Jack's role (at half the pay he'd been assured on the rejected job) turned out to be the minor one of a servant; and, of course, he became a casualty of the show's premature closing. But he not only didn't blame Orson but would twice again work for him. 239
Although Goddess was a box-office failure and panned by the critics, Orson had reveled in the grueling four and sometimes even six performances-a-day experience. "I had a lot of fun," he recalled. “It was great to be a vaudeville headliner even if there was nobody out front because it's real stardom in vaudeville. They had dressing rooms like you saw in the musicals about backstage—which don't exist on Broadway—you know, with three rooms and bathrooms and a grand piano. All the other acts always stand in the wings and watch you because you're the headliner, no matter how bad you are—I certainly was!"240
Augmenting his newly earned pro status in vaude, Orson became a life-long visitor at the Friars Club in New York (and later its Beverly Hills branch). Membership was open to all actors and agents but most members at that time were vaudevillians. Although Orson never formally joined, he came often as a guest, attracted by its relaxed and convivial atmosphere—the Friars had initiated the idea of the “roast", that annual celebration where the guest of honor is made the butt of not always tongue-in-cheek ridicule. And at the Friars he was also able to swap magic with amateur conjuror and famous comedian Milton Berle.241
Orson spent much time that year chumming around New York magic circles as a member of an informal group of distinguished local magi that others dubbed “The Unholy Five", probably in joking honor of Lon Chaney’s famous last film The Unholy Three (1930). In addition to Orson they were Irving Feldman (later “Eddie Fields"), John Scarne, Audley Walsh, and Orson's old friend Walter “The Shadow" Gibson.242 An unlikely bunch of pals, they ranged in age from 24 to 45 and from amateur magician, through semi-pro, to pro. Feldman, 24, was an ex-medicine oil pitchman, astrologer, magician, pro mindreader in night clubs and state fairs, and prize competition pool player. Scarne, 36, was a pro sleight-ofhand artist. Gibson, 41, was a veteran hack writer and skilled amateur conjuror and magic inventor. Walsh, 45, was an ex-vaudeville comic turned New Jersey policeman who lectured on the methods of gambling cheats. Orson, the youngest (by three months under Feldman), held his own in this motley crew by his conviviality and strong knowledge of magical methods and history.243
237 A 1939 publicity release as quoted in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 26.
238Brady (1989), 193-195; Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 25-26, 353; Wood (1990), 57.
239John Gardner telephone interview, 1 Mar 93, recalling conversations with his Brooklyn-born friend Berry who had become a Hollywood movie director.
240OW interview of 19 Jun 83 in Leaming (1985), 168. Actually the star dressing room backstage at the Maxine Elliott, which Orson occupied in 1936-37, wasn't too shabby. It had a bath and a small sitting room with a bed. See Houseman (1972), 211-212.
241Berle (1988), 130. According to Buddy Arnold (telephone message to BW, 10 Aug 92) OW never joined the Beverly Hills branch of The Friars. The club's New York office no longer has its early membership records (possibly given to the Lincoln Center) but old-timers doubt that Orson was ever a member.
242Minch (1992), 65.
The Unholy Five frequented Max Holden's popular establishment. Located on the 11th floor in the historic Candler Building at 220 West 42nd Street, The Max Holden Magic Shop wasn't the city's oldest but it was the best. The 55-year old proprietor was a great character in magic. Born in Boston of Scots ancestry, he'd toured his magic and hand-shadow act through the top vaudeville and variety circuits of America and Britain for a quarter century until leaving the stage to open his shop 10 years before Orson met him. It had soon become the place for such local celebrity amateur wand-wielders as Milton Berle (comedian), Richard Himber (big-band leader), Charlie Larson (multi-millionaire automobile distributor), and Eugene Homer (assessor), and such out-of-towners as Chester Morris (movie actor), Harold Lloyd (movie comedian-director), Ed Wynn (comedian), and Joe Laurie Jr. (comedian).244
One day at Holden's some young guy dropped in looking for an Al Baker mental Prediction Slate. When shown one he asked how it worked. To everybody's surprise Orson interrupted the salesman to demonstrate and explain this diabolical device in detail. The customer bought it.245
Irv Feldman had met Orson at Holden's. He and the other Unholy Five would often leave there and cross the street to the Dixie Hotel's restaurant where they'd do close-up tricks for each other and talk magic over cups of coffee. Feldman found Orson good at close-up (mostly with cards and coins). “Coming up the ladder," he recalls, “Not in the same category as the rest of us but he was getting there."246
One afternoon the Five left Holden's together, Walsh with a bagful of purchases. They piled into Walsh's automobile, and headed for New Jersey. Sitting in the seat behind the driver, Orson, curious, started pawing through Walsh's shopping bag. He removed a rubber hand and, after contemplating it awhile, taped a 50-cent piece between two of its fingers. As their car approached the George Washington Bridge ramp, Orson pulled his own hand up deep into his jacket sleeve and grasped the dummy. When Walsh stopped at the tollbooth Orson said he'd pay and handed the coin to the attendent. Driving off they all looked out the back window and were convulsed with laughter to see the shocked woman holding a severed hand.247
* * * Another day that year Orson wandered into the Nat Louis Magic Company at 1661 Broadway near 52nd Street. It was the strangest but most profitable magic shop in New York. Lou “Nat Louis" Tannen, 39, had the best business and sales sense of anyone in that narrowly specialized line. He'd deliberately set up in a noisy penny arcade whose wide doors were kept open to draw in the heavy sidewalk traffic. His concession to sell magic, novelties, and souvenirs consisted of a private back room and a row of crowded display cases along one entire wall of the arcade. In those depths of the Great Depression he made a small fortune selling to the daytime shoppers, evening theater goers, and tourists who crowded Broadway at both times. Having learned that magicians talk a lot and buy few tricks he didn't cater to them and instructed his small staff of young amateur magi that anyone who stayed an hour and spent less than $5 should be got rid of. Meanwhile Lou worked in the closed back room running his profitable mail-order magic business.
243 Fields telephone interview, 1 Nov 92; Minch (1992), 65.
244List of famous customers in Holden's Magic, Catalog No.8 (1941), 126.
245Fields telephone interview, 1 Nov 92.
246Fields telephone interview, 1 Nov 92.
247Fields in Minch (1992), 65-66.
One of Lou's young salesmen, George Sands, had just wasted an hour with a customer who'd bought nothing. When the next customer stepped to the counter, pointed to a trick, and asked “What's this?" George was sure he was in for a repeat and tried to brush the man off with the rude reply, “It's a magic trick." The big guy said “I'll take it." Pointing
to another trick, he repeated, “What's this?", at which George now condescended to give a quick description. This process continued until a big pile of tricks were on the counter. But George was getting worried because the stranger hadn't asked about prices. Picking up the counter intercom he asked the Boss to come out. So Orson introduced himself to the jovial proprietor who quickly sold him another batch of tricks. Orson then arranged to have the goodies sent to his mid-town hotel.248
When George—who'd never before heard of Orson Welles—delivered the packages to the Waldorf-Astoria he was surprised to find himself in a vast penthouse. After dropping off the goods he passed a secretary sitting at a desk with a tall stack of dollar bills that she was peeling off two at a time to tip the stream of delivery boys. Taking advantage of the maze of rooms and halls George managed to circle back and collect a second tip before leaving.249
Orson applied for membership in The Players, the world's most exclusive club for theatrical folk (men only until 1988). Located in Manhattan in a charming and charmed old building on Gramercy Park South, it had been founded by Lincoln assassin John Booth's older, gentler brother Edwin. Orson was appalled when he was blackballed at a meeting of the club's Board of Directors and vowed to never appear on the premises even as a guest.250
* * * Before leaving New York Orson invented one superb practical joke that would become a radio classic. Orson’s debut on the The Texaco Star Theatre was noteworthy for what the radio audience couldn't see but what the live audience did. It was a prestige Wednesday evening CBS variety and drama hour. The emcee for the closing half-hour drama portion, drama critic Burns Mantle, would introduce the guest star just before air time so the broadcast would open with the sound of applause. On this occasion he introduced Orson and then, as the orchestra composer-director, ex-Mercurian Lehman Engel, saw:251
Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1 Page 12