Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (59 page)

Orson also took what sometimes seemed an inordinate amount of time with his own performance. He relied heavily on stand-ins during rehearsals, and was slow even to memorize his dialogue. Fumbling his lines during
Faustus
rehearsals, Frank Brady wrote, Orson would mutter, “Latin, Latin, Latin, down to line twenty-eight.”

Early in January, the lighting run-throughs began. Orson had demanded a complex lighting scheme, with hundreds of setups and cues, and it was a nightmare to organize. When the actors went home around 2
A
.
M
., Welles, Houseman, Feder, and the stage managers stayed behind, along with “a few insanely devoted volunteers (usually including Jack Carter) and a handful of girlfriends and wives (led by Virginia Welles),” according to Houseman, “taking turns dozing and ‘standing in’ for the actors—moving back and forth, up and down on the bare, perforated stage while Orson, Feder and I yelled at them and each other.” Around four in the morning they sent out for hamburgers, milk shakes, and brandy from Times Square, finally packing it in after sunrise so that Orson could race off to a radio appointment.

The black velvet stage and deep trap holes posed genuine dangers for the actors. Orson himself was injured during one rehearsal, plummeting several feet through the stage. Some of the trap holes were modified thereafter, although Welles always thought that an injury incurred onstage was as honorable as a soldier’s battle wound.

Hallie Flanagan came to one dress rehearsal and left with nothing but praise for the work in progress. Not every visit was so harmonious: when Houseman arrived unexpectedly with a trio of influential friends—designer Pavel Tchelitchew, the poet and novelist Charles Henri Ford, and a Russian princess—Orson refused to raise the curtain, shouting at Houseman about “Russian pederasts and international whores” until the producer beat a hasty retreat. Sometimes, these pitched battles between producer and director seemed contrived for public entertainment. Usually, Houseman was the loser.

Some members of the cast and crew found Orson’s Big Ideas as mystifying as his methodology of crafting his shows in disconnected bits and pieces. His premieres could be as suspenseful for the actors as for audiences. “Welles’s dress rehearsals and previews were nearly always catastrophic,” Houseman wrote later, “especially if he was performing. I think he enjoyed these near disasters; they gave him a pleasing sense, later, of having brought order out of chaos and of having, singlehanded, plucked victory from defeat.” Charles Higham said that as a filmmaker, Orson carried this attitude over into a “fear of completion.” Film scholar Joseph McBride has called this “the ‘air of frenzy’ school of Welles mythology, initiated by Houseman.” Yet Houseman never wrote, directed, designed, and starred in a play or film, and his observations later in life were undoubtedly influenced by the eventual rift in their friendship.

As
Faustus
approached its January 8, 1937, premiere, Broadway observers wondered anew whether the genius would fizzle. Posters for the latest Project 891 promised “The Magic of
Macbeth
” with “The Humor of
Horse Eats Hat.”
Most nights, the theater announced, the curtain would be delayed until 9
P
.
M
. to accommodate Orson’s numerous radio engagements.

But what a magical show
Faustus
turned out to be! A puff of smoke introduced Orson as Faustus, in a shoulder-length beard and a medieval costume, looking, as David Thomson wrote, “somewhere between Christ and Rasputin.” His performance as Faustus—“ravenous, sweating and human,” in Houseman’s words—did not jell until the premiere. On opening night, however, Welles took possession of the stage in a way New York had not witnessed before. And it wasn’t just Orson: ensemble and effects, darkness and lighting—all came together on cue.

Brooks Atkinson in the
New York Times
described this
Faustus
as “brilliantly original.” “Arresting originality,” wrote Richard Lockridge in the
New York Sun.
“Often startling,” said Douglas Gilbert in the
New York World-Telegram
; “ingeniously done.” There was plenty of reflected glory to go around: featured players like Jack Carter, character actors like Harry McKee, and even lighting designer Abe Feder were praised by critics. But the lion’s share of praise went to the director and star, now acclaimed in both categories. Atkinson applauded Welles as a robust and commanding actor, who spoke the verse “with a deliberation that clarifies the meaning and invigorates the sound of words.” Orson supplied “a forthright Faustus, having care for the diction while pacing well his successive emotion,” Gilbert wrote in the
World-Telegram.
Richard Watts Jr. in the
New York Herald Tribune
said Welles cut “a striking and eloquent figure in the title role.”

The reviews were never unanimous, and the anti-Orson camp was hardening too. Some of the naysayers found Welles a vainglorious actor; others were skeptical of him as an overreaching director. The conservative
New York Daily News
and, the Hearst publications had developed a Pavlovian reaction to the mere mention of his name. Some in the press were suspicious of anything produced under Federal Theatre Project auspices. Gilbert W. Gabriel in Heart’s
New York American
called the Marlowe adaptation empty, pretentious, and unexciting. Wilella Waldorf in the
New York Post
found the speeches “pedestrian,” with Welles so in love with his own part that he “strangles it to death.”

Was it genuine Marlowe? Authentically Elizabethan? Detractors would always split hairs over Welles and his classical adaptations. But with
Faustus
, most critics agreed, Welles had discovered a corpse in the library, a classical drama rarely produced on the U.S. stage, and exhumed it vividly for popular consumption.

Audiences were less divided. According to Federal Theatre Project records,
Faustus
ran for 128 performances, with 80,000 ticket holders and 3,600 standees over a three-month run. And the audiences seemed unusually attentive, as more than one columnist noted: few arrived late for the curtain, and fewer still rushed off without joining the standing ovations at the end.

Faustus
was Welles and Houseman’s third extraordinary success in a row. The play’s director and star could no longer be dismissed as a flash in the pan. The press clamored for interviews. Dinner party invitations surged. Job offers streamed Orson’s way.

“The world was treating me so well that I was like somebody at his own birthday party!” Welles told Barbara Leaming.

Orson was never happier than when he was overextended, dashing from his radio gigs in a taxi—or, soon, a hired ambulance—in time to don his costume and makeup before taking the stage. But Virginia was exhausted by the work and trials of the past year and demanded a getaway.

In the second half of March, she left on a Caribbean cruise, with her ultimate destination Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname. The couple vowed not to worry about communicating over the distances, but Orson missed Virginia the moment she was gone. He tried to phone the steamship as it passed through Trinidad. Writing “in the icy, strained light of a late winter’s early morning,” Orson said he was lonesome and feeling a “big aching vacancy” in his heart. Their dog Bridget—nicknamed Budget as a reminder of hard times—sends “her dearest love with a resounding lick.”

Orson assured his wife that he was taking all his meals alone, and doing almost nothing that wasn’t related to work. He had dragooned Chubby Sherman into accompanying him to one cocktail party, he reported, but it was “a dolorous little function,” from which they escaped after ten minutes. With CBS Radio conductor Lehman Engel, he had just started to “look over talent” for Aaron Copland’s
The Second Hurricane
, which he had agreed to stage at New York’s Settlement House. But his collaborator on
Horse Eats Hat
, Edwin Denby, had managed to insert a ballet into the script. “A most unfortunate and self-conscious little addition,” Orson wrote. “
If it stays, I don’t.

“Absolutely no more news of me,” Orson added sweetly in his letter. “Enough to say I am desperately, wildly, despairingly lonely for my beautiful and wonderful wife.”

His letters to Virginia say nothing of his older brother, Richard, who turned up in New York for a brief visit sometime during the long run of
Faustus.
Richard, now thirty-one, was “tattered and incoherent,” according to Frank Brady’s book
Citizen Welles
, and “the two men barely got on, Orson feeling that his brother, at best, an intrusion, was not to be trusted. Richard was confused as to wanting to become involved in the circle of his now famous younger brother, while simultaneously wanting to asperse, out of jealousy, that same reputation.” Augusta Weissberger told Peter Noble that she met Richard around this time. “He was pleasant and slight and rather quiet,” Weissberger recalled. After New York, Richard moved on to Washington, D.C.; he claimed brief involvement in Federal Theatre Project productions there—although, as always with Richard, the facts were elusive.

The microphone jobs were coming more easily now, rising in both number and prestige—and Orson channeled a portion of his earnings into Project 891. “I was probably the only person in American history who ever personally subsidized a government agency,” he joked later.

One of his most important broadcasts to date came on April 11, 1937, just before Virginia’s return from South America. Orson and Archibald MacLeish were still crossing paths, finding themselves side by side at parties, civic occasions, and political benefits, more and more these days for the anti-Franco Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. MacLeish had written another “verse play” especially for radio—for the sophisticated
Columbia Workshop
series. Now he offered Orson the lead role.

The play, “Fall of the City,” was a parable of encroaching totalitarianism, the story of a modern metropolis whose citizens gather to hail an approaching conqueror as their savior—topical material for an audience transfixed by the specter of fascism in Europe.

CBS producer-director Irving Reis arranged to broadcast the program from the Seventh Regiment Armory, with hundreds of college students making crowd noises in the cavernous space. Isolated in a soundproof booth, Orson played a radio announcer narrating the disquieting spectacle from his safe perch high atop a tower above a central square in the city. Working alongside Welles for the first time was actor Burgess Meredith, playing the pacifist Orator. Bernard Herrmann was again on hand to conduct the score—four trumpets, four trombones, and eight drums—enhancing the “brilliantly orchestrated cacophony,” in the words of Herrmann’s biographer Steven C. Smith.

MacLeish’s work was followed closely by the New York and national press, and millions of Americans were expected to tune in for “Fall of the City,” despite the fact that its Sunday night slot pitted it against Jack Benny’s popular radio program. MacLeish had wanted Orson this time not for his booming voice, but for his ability to summon a matter-of-fact tone that would rise to wonder as the drama unfolded. Orson had inherited his mother’s gift for recital, and a knack for striking just the right note in performance, often with very little rehearsal.

Orson’s narration of the action would guide “Fall of the City” to its solemn climax, the armored conqueror marching into the central square and opening his visor to reveal his face:

There is no one.

No one at all.

No one.

The helmet is hollow.

The metal is empty.

The armor is empty.

I tell you there is no

One at all there.

Welles, hailed now by
Time
magazine as “one of the country’s ablest classical actors,” lent prestige to the broadcast, one in which radio itself seemed “artistically [to] come of age.” One of America’s leading cultural critics, Gilbert Seldes, wrote in
Scribner’s
that Welles gave his role “the breathless excitement of actuality,” and said that the broadcast itself was “so important, in so many different ways, as to make everything else in the field comparatively negligible.” The success of “Fall of the City” helped usher in a number of original radio plays commissioned by the
Workshop
from authors such as Maxwell Anderson, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Vincent Benét.

After the success of these two radio dramas—the two-part adaptation of
Hamlet
, followed by “Fall of the City”—the
Workshop
gave Welles a third important opportunity, inviting him to fashion an abridged version of
Macbeth
for radio, this time taking the title role himself. The radio
Macbeth
was scheduled to be broadcast on two consecutive Sundays in early May, coinciding with Orson’s twenty-second birthday.

Again, it was Irving Reis, not Orson, who directed. Once more, Bernard Herrmann was in charge of the music. This was the third time Orson worked closely with Herrmann, and each time occasioned a building block in their relationship. Orson arrived late with his
Macbeth
script, the pages twice as long as the time slot. By the time he and the cast had wrestled the pages into readiness, so much had changed that Herrmann had to jettison much of his score.

No problem. “No music!” Orson told Herrmann. “No music at all!” Instead, he summoned into the studio an elderly man sporting a kilt and toting a bagpipe. Standing at the microphone on a podium in the center of the room (“as he always did,” wrote Houseman, making it “impossible for anyone to communicate with him on equal terms”), Orson instructed the piper, “Every time I raise this hand, you come in and play!’ He turned to the trumpets and drums. “Every time I lift this hand, you play a fanfare!’ ”

Standing stiffly before his newly marginalized orchestra, Herrmann could barely control his rage. “Trust me, Benny!” Orson coaxed the conductor. “That’s how we went on the air,” recalled Herrmann. “Every time Orson raised either hand, which he did frequently in the role of Macbeth, trumpets, drums and bagpipe came in fortissimo . . . and so did a whole lot of sound cues, including wind machines and thunder sheets.”