Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (52 page)

Orson Welles’s reputation as an actor may have been spreading, but as a stage director he was still an unknown quantity in New York. His only credits were a few prep school plays, a little-noticed program in Dublin, and one play for his own summer theater. But Orson lived by his own clock, which always ticked faster than everyone else’s. Whether it was a sprint or a marathon, he was always perched over the starting line, straining at the bit. To him, the three and a half years since he graduated from Todd School felt like an eternity. He was ready.

The Negro Unit was humming along by the time Welles’s involvement was announced. The first Harlem production, Frank Wilson’s
Walk Together Chillun
, directed by Wilson, a black actor who had appeared in
Porgy
on Broadway, was rehearsing in halls and churches pending the reopening of the refurbished Lafayette Theatre. The unit’s second play,
Conjur’ Man Dies
, also had a white director born in Wisconsin: Joseph Losey, whose New York theater credits dated back to 1933.
Chillun
and
Conjur’ Man
fulfilled the program’s mandate for Negro-oriented plays, while the third production,
Macbeth
, would be its first classical work.

Orson threw himself into the script, relocating Shakespeare’s play in a timeless “mythical place” that could be “anywhere in the West Indies,” he told the
New York Times
a few months later: Martinique, Haiti, or elsewhere. The adaptation itself must have come easily to him—after all, he had been tweaking Shakespeare since boyhood—but the finished product was an underrated accomplishment. He shortened some speeches, combined others, altered place names to fit the setting. (“Changing ‘blasted heath’ to ‘fetid jungle’ was not as ridiculous as you might think,” Welles told Peter Noble.) Shakespeare’s three sinister witches became voodoo priestesses, and the chorus was expanded to add as many black Harlemites as possible to the cast. He tinkered with the script throughout auditions and rehearsals, as would become his habit, tailoring scenes to his evolving needs.

At the same time, Orson started assembling a backstage team that would add luster to his Voodoo
Macbeth.
He began with a major figure in modern music, a composer who happened to be John Houseman’s roommate: Virgil Thomson. A driving force in contemporary music, Thomson had worked with Houseman on the all-black opera
Four Saints in Three Acts.
Although the job would pay a weekly wage of only $23.86—the same compensation allotted to everyone under WPA auspices—the composer agreed to score
Macbeth
on that modest basis.

Almost twenty years older than Orson, Thomson was educated at Harvard and Cambridge, and had sharpened his classical sensibility while living among cultural expatriates in Paris in the twenties. (Not a few people in Houseman’s circle wore their degrees from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton like sheriff’s badges.) Pale-faced, with a high forehead, Thomson spoke in a piercing voice; he was a charismatic presence and his opinions were always forceful.

Thomson knew Orson glancingly from
Panic
, but now Houseman brought the two men together for a dinner at their midtown apartment—the first time Houseman had opened his home to his young partner. Orson regaled Thomson with his ideas for the score: a backdrop of near-constant percussion, native chanting, and jungle sound effects that would envelop the stage in an otherworldly atmosphere. Thomson was unsure how to take the younger man’s formidable personality, and at first the two crossed swords, with Thomson trying “to beat him down because I felt he was full of bluff,” the composer recalled. “His verbalization of what he wanted to do in the theatre was not entirely convincing. I argued hard and not always fairly.” When the dueling grew heated, Houseman stepped in, whispering to Thomson to “stop it,” reassuring him that Orson was “a very, very good man in the theater.” Houseman’s endorsement quieted Thomson’s nerves, and sealed the composer’s involvement.

Welles and Thomson never grew close, but Orson courted the composer over a series of working dinners during the planning of
Macbeth.
Orson was very specific about the musical bridges and noise effects he needed for scenes, and Thomson later took pride in saying that he wrote very little original music for the Voodoo
Macbeth
. “I would not humiliate myself to write precisely on his demand,” the composer boasted. Instead, Thomson came up with “sound effects and ready-made music—trumpet call, battle scenes and percussive scenes when he wanted them—and of course, the waltzes for the party scene” after Macbeth has murdered Banquo.

“Orson Welles knew nothing about musical ideas,” Thomson insisted in later interviews. As the son of a musician, however, and a knowledgeable aficionado of classical and popular music, Orson certainly knew how to defer to prima donnas. “Instead of telling you in musical terms he’d say, ‘This is what I want to accomplish,’ ” recalled Leonard de Paur, who conducted the orchestra for
Macbeth.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time he was right.” Thomson warmed to Orson over time, and the two would collaborate on other projects. Years later, the composer conceded that he’d found the charismatic young man intimidating. “Orson was nearly always likeable,” Thomson said. “He was never hateful or brutal with me, though I was a little terrified of his firmness. He was extremely professional and knew exactly what he wanted.”

Houseman and Thomson belonged to the same circle, and from the beginning there was a distinction between “Houseman’s people” and “Orson’s people.” Houseman seemed to know everyone in high society and artist-bohemian circles, while Orson had spent his life so far piecing together his own network of show business contacts and artistic personalities.

To design the Voodoo
Macbeth
, the partners gathered a team of rising stars, many of them from Wisconsin or Chicago. Houseman recommended the Milwaukee-born lighting prodigy Abe Feder, another veteran of
Four Saints in Three Acts.
As a teenager, Feder had been starstruck by the Great Thurston, Orson’s early idol. He had designed lighting for the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and also styled the lighting for Yiddish theater in the Bronx and minor Broadway plays.

Costume and scenic designer Nat Karson also had Chicago credentials. A well-known caricaturist before turning to theater, Karson had created the mural for the Chicago’s Board of Education building; he too had worked at the Goodman Theatre, and more recently had teamed with Feder on the lighting and design of several New York plays. Together, the two designers were tasked with realizing Orson’s vision for Broadway-level costuming, scenery, and lighting—all on a thrift budget of less than $2,000.

Karson was an easygoing fellow, and he accepted both Orson’s plasticine model and his instructions to dress the set in lush, sinister colors. Feder was more opinionated, and he fell into many shouting matches with Orson, who believed he understood lighting as well as anyone. Orson enjoyed a good shouting match—especially when he was the director, and when he had Houseman, the ultimate boss, backing him up.

At the producer’s urging, Orson engaged an assistant director from Houseman’s coterie: Thomas Anderson, a black Harlemite who had acted in
Four Saints in Three Acts.
Another
Four Saints
veteran was Edward Perry, who was recruited as stage manager. Leonard de Paur, the music director of the Negro Unit, would orchestrate and conduct Thomson’s music.

One of Orson’s key conscripts was choreographer Asadata Dafora Horton, who led his own unique African performance troupe in New York. A native of Sierra Leone, Horton had studied and sung at La Scala, and launched a pioneering series of African music and dance concerts with the drumming overseen by the Haitian-born master Alphonse Cimber. Orson had seen Horton’s African opera
Kykunkor
at Carnegie Hall on the last leg of the Katharine Cornell tour, and the witch doctor’s incantations and tribal drumming hypnotized him.

Horton was just the man to organize the chanting and drumming for the Voodoo
Macbeth
—even though that meant ordering up “five” (according to Houseman) or “twelve” (Welles) live black goats to be sacrificed in order, according to supposed tribal custom, to furnish fresh drum skins. The resourceful secretary Houseman had hired for Negro Unit operations, Augusta Weissberger, managed to get the peculiar expense billed back to the Federal Theatre Project.

Project guidelines mandated that 90 percent of the cast and crew be unemployed black Harlem residents. In all, about 750 people were registered as active members of the Negro Unit; perhaps a fifth of these were “real professionals,” according to Federal Theatre Project historian Wendy Smith, but that proportion included seamstresses and elocutionists as well as stagehands and musicians. The small number of actors who had worked professionally had “scant résumés as extras or chorus dancers.”

Casting his leads from this undersized pool was arguably Orson’s greatest hurdle, but he had long ago learned how to scour a roomful of dubious casting choices and connect with “the one.” Sometimes he cast on sight, believing—as an actor with a distinct physical presence who incorporated “externals” in his own work—that the look of a person went a long way toward building the character and performance. At other times he cast decidedly against type and appearance.

At the beginning of their partnership, Welles and Houseman tried to agree about the casting of their plays, especially when it came to the lead roles. Many of the actors were drawn from either Orson’s or Houseman’s camp, but Houseman almost always deferred to his director, and if they disagreed about a casting choice, the decision—and risk—was Orson’s.

For the role of Macbeth, they needed an imposing actor. Auditioning candidates on the platform of a vast recreation hall that belonged to the Harlem Elks, Welles and Houseman considered Juano Hernandez, a strapping Puerto Rican actor, but Hernandez was so busy in theater and radio that they lost him to an actual paying job. Another promising entry was Cherokee Thornton, who had played a voodoo dancer in
Louisiana
on Broadway in 1933.

Orson eventually brought the casting around to Jack Carter, a giant of a man who rippled with muscles and flashed cold gray eyes. The caramel-skinned son of a black Harlem physician and a white Ziegfeld chorus girl, the handsome, strapping Carter was known, almost more than for his emoting and singing, as a “fashion plate and man about Harlem,” in the words of the
Amsterdam News.
Casting Carter was a gamble: the actor had notoriously been indicted for complicity in a murder during a drunken brawl in a Harlem speakeasy in 1933. Carter was accused of holding a gun on the proprietor while a local gangster stabbed a victim to death. Carter was acquitted, but the trial had dominated the front pages of Harlem newspapers.

A reliable stage presence since 1920, Carter had played a wide variety of roles in Harlem shows and on the road with the Lafayette Players, before the Lafayette core ensemble left New York for Los Angeles in 1928. He thrilled audiences as the brutal Crown in the original Theatre Guild cast of
Porgy.
It’s unclear whether Orson saw
Porgy
, but he definitely saw and remembered Carter’s lead role in
Stevedore
, as a union roustabout framed for an assault on a white woman. “He was beautiful!” Welles told Barbara Leaming. “A black Barrymore.”

Carter was a perpetually angry man, and his audition seethed with fury. Carter’s brand of “slightly derailed energy,” in Orson’s words, mirrored the director’s own. After the audition, “Orson threw his arms around Jack, his eyes brimming with tears of gratitude and admiration,” Houseman wrote. The part was his.

Another performer from
Porgy
was Rose McClendon, who had helped organize the Negro Unit. Early on, McClendon had been penciled in as Lady Macbeth, and she would have played the part if her cancer diagnosis hadn’t been complicated by pleurisy and pneumonia after the New Year. McClendon never recovered, and her lingering illness ended in her death in June 1936. Orson replaced her with Edna Thomas, an actress of elegance and gravitas who had appeared in both the 1929
Porgy
revival and
Stevedore
and was another veteran of the Lafayette Players.

One of Orson’s inspirations was to convert the role of Hecate, queen of the witches, into a male character suitable for Eric Burroughs’s talents. The product of a New York high school, Burroughs had studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and the Kammerspiele Theatre School in Hamburg, performing Shakespeare in Berlin before Hitler’s rise to power. His natural magisterial aura would be bolstered by the twelve-foot bullwhip Orson gave Hecate for stage business. For the pivotal role of Macduff, Macbeth’s killer, the director saw many prospects before deciding on the versatile Maurice Ellis, a frequent radio performer who was already standing out in a comic role in rehearsals for Joseph Losey’s production of
Conjur’ Man Dies.
Last but not least, Orson saved the role of Banquo for Canada Lee, the former boxer who had saved him from an altercation with hooligans after the performance of
Stevedore.
Even as a ghost, the actor’s Banquo always brandished a cigar—Orson’s own favorite prop.

Of all the performers in Orson’s Voodoo
Macbeth
, these five were the only ones with significant professional experience. Most of the people who crowded onto the stage—more than a hundred in all—were performing before an audience for the first time. “Anyone who could read lines was taken on,” remembered Edna Thomas. As he’d done with the Todd boys, however, and with the Woodstock summer theater sign-ons—indeed, as he would do for much of his helter-skelter career—Orson worked with the clay at hand. That ability to find greatness in other people, often people on the margins, was an underrated element of his genius.

After the auditions, Orson had about twelve weeks before the play’s mid-April opening. Even as he confronted this uphill climb in Harlem, though, his radio career suddenly exploded. And he was as eager for the work as he was desperate for the money.