Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (43 page)

The decision had little to do with Orson, but he was devastated to learn that his appointment with Broadway had been postponed. Defeat and disappointment often galvanized him, and he speedily contacted the scenic designer Robert Edmond Jones and his wife, Margaret Carrington, who were busy staging an
Othello
starring Carrington’s brother, Walter Huston, for the annual summer drama festival in Central City, Colorado. The couple had mused about bringing their
Othello
to Broadway afterward. Now that
Romeo and Juliet
looked doubtful, Orson asked, was there a part for him in their show? Jones and Carrington liked him, but they shied away from promises. “That hurt for a while,” Orson wrote to Skipper.

For five minutes, perhaps, but not much longer. By now, Orson’s dreams of launching his own repertory company were already urging him in an independent direction. With the summer yawning ahead, the last thing Orson wanted to do was return to his lonely Rush Street writing studio, or, worse, to Dr. Maurice Bernstein’s stifling supervision in Highland Park. But there was another potential base of operations, a natural sanctuary where he was bound to prosper: the Todd School. After all, hadn’t he been a virtual actor-manager there, even as a student?

Knowing time was short, he sent silver-tongued letters to Roger Hill, hoping to head off the headmaster’s usual summer at Camp Tosebo. Together, Orson proposed, they could organize a serious summer theater operation, using school facilities that were vacant in the off-season. They could hire professionals for the leads, supplementing the core company with Todd boys and young apprentices—charging their parents a fee that would help pay for the professionals. They could rent the Woodstock Opera House on the town square, and even use Big Bertha to chauffeur the major drama critics in from Chicago, supplying them with typewriters and “some picturesque black chef,” in Orson’s words, on board to whip up meals for the scribes.

Orson had managed to put aside a little savings on the tour, and he volunteered $1,000 of his own as the seed money. True, the headmaster and Todd School would be taking the greater financial risk, but they could pay the professionals something like (“here I blush a little”) $25 weekly while extracting $300 to $500 per Todd boy from the boys’ affluent parents.

Hill was enthusiastic about Orson’s latest Big Idea, his wife a little less so. Orson and the headmaster talked it over by letter and phone, agreeing that the “luminous” (Orson’s word) Whitford Kane, revered in Chicago for his tenure with the Goodman Theatre, would be a perfect figurehead for the summer theater festival. Orson wrote Kane a coaxing letter, even promising “a job for Chub!”—Kane’s protégé Hiram “Chubby” Sherman, one of the Goodman’s best comedic actors. Kane tentatively agreed to sign on as “director-in-chief,” a scoop that was given to Charles Collins for the
Tribune.

Still touring the South, Orson stayed up late after the curtain calls writing drafts of the first press material. By early April, as the company arrived in Nashville, booked for several days at the Ryman Auditorium, the Big Summer Theater Idea had begun to take more definite shape.

One of Orson’s brainstorms was inviting two of the actor-managers who had inspired him—Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir—to come and join his dream, spending the summer in leading roles for his new theater company in the heart of America. “I am trying my hand at production,” he told the pair, promising “a kind of holiday and lots of fun.” Edwards could direct one or more shows, and both men could be involved in the production designs.

When Edwards and MacLíammóir replied, asking for particulars, Orson sat down in his room at the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Nashville and gave the evolving update on hotel stationery. By their presence alone, the two statesmen of Irish theater would “inspire a professional company of quality, and a school full of eager amateurs of quantity.” The Dubliners could count on “a pretty superlative company,” among them Whitford Kane (an Irish stage luminary whose name was well known to the Gate’s cofounders), Chubby Sherman, Florence Stevens (Mrs. Ashton Stevens), Brenda Forbes, “a couple of more really top-notch stars,” and “let us pray, Hilton Edwards and the inimitable Michael . . . quite enough to antidote the effect of Orson Welles in any theater.”

The selection of plays, according to Orson’s letter of April 12, 1934, was “a question upon which we should like to hear from you.” But he listed some tempting possibilities, demonstrating his breadth and sophistication: Christopher Marlowe’s
The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus
; Arthur Schnitzler’s
Living Hours
; Charles Dickens’s
Bleak House
; and, from Dostoyevsky, stage versions of either
The Idiot
or
The Brothers Karamazov.
While Orson could offer Edwards and MacLíammóir only “very literally pin money,” he vowed to cover their round-trip travel from Dublin to Woodstock, as well as “all your expenses during your stay,” including “very comfortable rooms” and hearty meals (“by an excellent chef”—from the Todd School staff, that is). They would have the run of the school, with its “submarine-lit swimming pool, its riding stables, its machine and print shops, cottages and dormitories, private experimental theater, luxurious land yacht for transportation, and its fifty acres of American woodlands.” And the Dubliners were promised “as much free time and freedom as you want” to explore Chicago and the ongoing world’s fair there.

The Chicago press corps was already champing at the bit to “boost” the homegrown enterprise, Orson assured the two men, even “three months before its first day of rehearsal.” Indeed, even before they accepted Orson’s offer, Charles Collins announced “the summer school of the theater” in the April 22 issue of the
Tribune.
Collins identified Whitford Kane as the director of the summer theater, with the Gate Theatre founders “Edwards and MacLinnoir” (not yet famous enough in Chicago for correct spelling) lending the program “a distinctly Irish flavor.” The Dubliners did not officially join the operation until a week after that item appeared in print, when their cable of acceptance reached Orson at the Washington Duke Hotel in Durham, North Carolina. It was a closer call than it appeared: Hilton Edwards was wary of the idea, and they had dithered over the prospect of spending their summer at work in the American Midwest instead of sportively in Europe. But MacLíammóir talked his partner into it.

Orson was “overjoyed,” promising to bring the Dubliners to New York in plenty of time “to get thoroughly dizzied in that raucous and remarkable metropolis.” Orson would greet the two at dockside as they left the ship, enlisting the help of the Cornell tour publicist to arrange press coverage of their arrival. The tour was winding up, presenting
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
in Newark and Brooklyn, at the end of the third week of June. “About the 26th or 27th we will all rush together to Woodstock and begin rehearsals,” Orson wrote to Edwards and MacLíammóir.

Disembarking with Edwards in New York, MacLíammóir immediately noticed a difference in the young American he had last seen more than two years before. “Now he had added to the [chest] swelling a new habit of towering,” MacLíammóir wrote later. “It was not only the jungle that yawned and laughed: a looming tree, dark and elaborate as a monkey puzzle, reared above the head, an important, imperturbable smile shot down on you from afar.”

While Orson tended to the plays and players, Roger Hill busily laid the financial groundwork and beat the drums, feeding publicity about the festival to eager arts and society columnists. Hill dealt with the budget, ticket sales, advertising, and promotional plans; he organized the Todd School for cast and crew residency, readied the Opera House for occupation, and prepared Woodstock for the onslaught of people. The reliable Charles Collins dropped frequent mentions of the “brilliant young Chicago actor” Orson Welles and his new summer theater colony.

On paper, Whitford Kane was still “chief director” of the upcoming festival. When Ashton Stevens telephoned Orson on the Cornell tour in mid-June to ask about Kane, Orson told him that Kane was “very enthusiastic about Woodstock. Nothing short of Hollywood can keep him from joining us.” The day after he returned from New York with Edwards and MacLíammóir in tow, he was still invoking Kane’s magic name. But in reality Kane was always a shaky piece of the plan, and Hollywood had already come calling for the Irish-born actor. By mid-June Kane had a better offer—and Orson knew it, although he was keeping it close to the vest. Kane was heading west to make his screen debut in
Hide-Out
, an MGM gangster film.

All of Orson’s tub-thumping about Kane may have been sincere, but it was also classic misdirection. With Skipper’s blessing, Orson gladly stepped into the breach, letting only a day or two pass after his return from New York before telling the press that he himself would direct the festival’s first production. The travel-weary Dubliners accepted the revelation with mild surprise and pique. (Edwards found the idea “preposterous,” wrote Barbara Leaming. “Orson Welles
direct
a play?”)

With only two weeks to go before opening night, Orson still hadn’t decided on the first play. Swiftly now he settled on
Trilby
, one of those hoary melodramas for which he never lost his affection. Based on George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, it is set in nineteenth-century bohemian Paris and revolves around the rogue musician and hypnotist Svengali, who transforms Trilby, a tone-deaf artist’s model, into a diva. Besides directing, Orson announced that he himself would play the lead: Svengali.

After a ten-day run, from July 12 to 22,
Trilby
would be followed by two weeks of
Hamlet
, with Edwards directing and MacLíammóir playing the lead. Within a few frantic days, what was first promoted as only “A Third Play” was narrowed down to
Tsar Paul
, Dmitri Merezhkovsky’s play about the assassination of the emperor of Russia, which would be presented from August 9 to 19. The Opera House curtain would rise at 8:30
P
.
M
., Thursdays through Sundays.

Hamlet
and
Tsar Paul
were both Gate Theatre staples, as Orson well knew, and those choices pacified the Dubliners.
Trilby
, in contrast, they considered inferior, and it bothered them that Orson had arranged for both to make their American debuts in decidedly lesser roles: MacLíammóir as the artist Little Billee, Svengali’s rival; and Edwards as Taffy, one of several suitors drawn to Trilby. But it was customary in repertory or summer stock for important actors to take an easy assignment for one play. Orson reminded them that they’d need time to orient themselves, and he emphasized the opportunities ahead: for MacLíammóir, a chance to re-create his famous Hamlet; for Edwards, a turn as Tsar Paul, and the chance to direct both shows. Each of the three actors would star in one play. Ruffled feathers were smoothed.

The stock of the Dubliners rose even higher as it became clearer and clearer that Orson’s original dream cast was just that—a pipe dream. Whitford Kane had melted away, and so did Chubby Sherman, Florence Stevens, Brenda Forbes, and every other established professional Orson had envisioned. Another player who turned Orson down was his friend John Hoysradt, who recalled, “I wanted to go to Europe and felt the Woodstock thing was just harum scarum.”

The moment required the confidence of a leader, and here Orson drew on the example set by his parents—especially his mother, a superb organizer and network builder, but his father too, with his persuasive smile and hidden steel. Much as he had for Todd School productions, Orson scrambled to assemble a first-rate summer company drawn from his store of friends, relatives, acquaintances, and professional contacts, and no small measure of instinct and chance.

The summer theater needed a reputable leading lady, and Orson was both shrewd and fortunate to find Louise Prussing just when he needed her. On the stage since 1917, the reed-thin, vivacious Prussing had appeared in several silent films opposite matinee idol Eugene O’Brien. In London, in the late 1920s, she had appeared with distinction in notable plays including Leslie Howard’s production of
Berkeley Square
, which she toured in America. The granddaughter of Dr. Fernand Henrotin, a founder of Chicago’s Henrotin Memorial Hospital, and daughter of Lilian Edgerton Prussing, a onetime society editor for the
Chicago Examiner
, Prussing was living in Chicago for the summer, and welcomed the chance to star in plays in nearby Woodstock. Her London credentials pleased the Dubliners, while her Chicago background made her appeal to local columnists. Prussing was engaged to play Trilby, the Queen in
Hamlet
, and the Princess in
Tsar Paul.

Orson got a two-for-one deal when he sent Roger Hill as his messenger over to
The Drunkard
, which was being mounted by Charles “Blackie” O’Neal’s troupe of traveling players at a Clark Street hall in Chicago.
¹⁸
Constance Herron was a pretty and fetching ingenue in the troupe, but O’Neal was the real find. Even though he was only five feet nine and 160 pounds, he had been a three-year letterman on the winning University of Iowa football team that upset Notre Dame and Red Grange’s University of Illinois team in 1925. O’Neal could recite Shakespeare backward and forward, and Orson had a lifelong affinity for footballers with Shakespeare in their veins. Orson had seen
The Drunkard
in Los Angeles, where it was still pulling in crowds after a six-month run when the Cornell tour arrived in January. Backstage, he had met O’Neal—who would be the father of future film star Ryan O’Neal—and they had stayed in touch as the capable actor-manager barnstormed the show across America, crisscrossing with the Cornell company. O’Neal served as director and master of ceremonies of
The Drunkard
while also playing the weak hero’s brother, and spicing up the interludes with offbeat songs. He signed on as Orson’s chief lieutenant—playing supporting roles including the trusted Horatio in
Hamlet
—while assisting Orson in casting and rehearsals. He brought Herron with him to portray Ophelia in
Hamlet
and the Empress Elizabeth in
Tsar Paul.