I Love the Illusion: The Life and Career of Agnes Moorehead (9 page)

Miss Hayes’ son, actor James MacArthur, would recall that Agnes and
Hayes were “great friends when circumstances brought them together, but
otherwise they might go for long periods of time without having any
contact. We lived on the East Coast, Aggie lived in Los Angeles, so gettogethers usually occurred when one or the other was in town or they were
attending a common event . . . but while it was mostly a long distance
relationship, they were great pals whenever they saw each other, comfortable
as though they’d only seen each other the day before.”

One of the reasons Helen Hayes got along well with Agnes was her sense
of humor. “I remember one story my mother used to love to tell,” recalls
James MacArthur. “She and Aggie were in Pittsburgh together at some type
of lady’s luncheon, the DAR or something similar. Before it started, Aggie
got up and said, ‘Helen, this is what we are going to hear,’ and then she
proceeded to go through a hilariously funny and outlandish parody of the
speech they would hear. And, of course, you know what happened. It was
exactly as Aggie had predicted. And they were like churchgoers at a funeral
who couldn’t laugh. The voice, the gestures, the intonation were all dead-on.
Every time my mother would recount this story, she would roar with laughter,
tears streaming down her cheeks. My mother thought Agnes had a wickedly
wonderful sense of humor.”

So fond of Agnes and admiring of her talent was Hayes that around this
time she used her clout to arrange a screen test for her, in hopes that Agnes
might be launched in a new career in motion pictures. The man who Hayes
made the arrangement with was called out of town and, as Agnes would
recall, the man who was left in his place “eyed me very critically and the
first thing he said was, ’Did you ever have your nose broken?’” After that
the man delivered a caustic rundown of Agnes’ shortcomings and concluded
that a screen test would be a waste of money because she “couldn’t possibly
make it” in pictures.

Like
Mysteries of Paris
and
The Gumps, The New Penny
lasted only a
season, but like these other shows it had enhanced Agnes’ career. She often
appeared on five or six different radio shows per week in steady demand.
She soon became part of an important radio news dramatization program,
The March of Time,
which would reintroduce her to the young man she had
met while working on
The Gumps,
Orson Welles, and, with him and an
extraordinary group of fellow seasoned radio veterans, would go on to
create radio history — with a bit of notoriety in the process.

In the early 1920’s an Aunt took Agnes on a trip to New York. They stayed
in the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. One day Agnes was sitting at a table next
to a precocious little boy, probably seven or eight years old, who was chubby
and had expressive eyes. The little boy was deep in conversation with, who
she thought, was his father and two elderly women. “It was at an afternoon
tea,” Agnes recalled, “and he was talking learnedly about musical theory.”
Years later she encountered a young man who reminded her of this young
boy but didn’t say anything to him because she just didn’t think it could be
the same person. Some time after that she was reading
Life
magazine, which
had an article that greatly interested her; as she turned the pages, she found
a picture of the young boy she had encountered those many years earlier at
the Waldorf Astoria — she was absolutely convinced it was he. That young
boy was the focus of the story she was reading. It was the same young man
she found so familiar when she met him years later. Agnes now realized that
the precocious young boy was none other than Orson Welles. When Welles
was finally told of the incident he began to fondly tell people that he had
known Agnes Moorehead “since I was seven years old.”

No doubt about it: Orson Welles was a prodigy. He was born George
Orson Welles, on May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His father, Richard
Welles, had been an inventor who had patented headlamps for the first
automobiles, and Welles would later say that Booth Tarkington had based
the character of Eugene Morgan in his famous novel,
The Magnificent
Ambersons,
on his father. Welles’ mother, Beatrice, was a musician, who
later became one of the first women elected to public office in Wisconsin,
when she was elected to the Kenosha School Board. Welles had one brother,
who seemingly was not as bright as Orson, and who stuttered; the brother
must have experienced a terrible inferiority complex, since the parents
lavished praise on Orson, while ignoring him.

Orson’s parents divorced when he was six. His father had developed a
serious drinking problem and his mother had fallen into an affair with
another man — a doctor who had treated Orson’s grandmother when she
was dying of stomach cancer. When they divorced Orson moved with his
mother to Chicago where she helped support them by giving piano lessons
while Orson recited Shakespeare. In his spare time young Orson wrote
plays, developed an interest in magic tricks and performed in puppet
shows. When Orson was nine, his mother died of hepatitis. Orson was
devastated and his father was of little help because of his own losing battle
with alcoholism. As it turned out, Orson stayed in the care of the doctor
his mother had an affair with. They lived for a few years in the Chicago area
where Orson was able to enjoy the culture the city had to offer such as
attending the theatre or symphonies.

When Orson was 11, he returned to Wisconsin where he attended
public schools in Madison living with a friend of the doctor’s. Orson had
no formal education prior to this, but having been home schooled by tutors
he excelled and was advanced from the fourth to the fifth grade. One of his
teachers, Dorothy Chapman, later said, “His interests were definitely
toward art and dramatics. He disliked arithmetic and found the regular
school curriculum much to his disliking. He was permitted to take special
art courses, in which he showed marked adeptness.” After a year in
Madison, Orson was enrolled at the exclusive Todd School in Woodstock,
Illinois. At Todd, Orson’s creativity flourished and he appeared in numerous
plays and shows.

His father died in 1930, alone in a hotel room. During these years Orson
did a great deal of traveling — to the Orient, Cuba and Germany. When
Orson graduated from high school (at age 16), rather than going to college
he went on a sketching tour of Ireland; when his money ran low, he
managed to get a job performing at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. He gained
much useful experience in Dublin. When he returned to the United States,
he joined with Roger Hill, the headmaster of the Todd School, who had
been much impressed by Orson’s skills as an actor, in forming a touring
company and writing a play,
Marching Song,
about the underground railroad.

A break occurred in 1933 when Orson, now 18, ran into the playwright
Thorton Wilder, who had recalled Welles from the Dublin Theater. Wilder
wrote a letter of introduction for Welles to present to theatrical managers
and other influential people in New York. This led to an introduction to
the critic Alexander Woollcott who in turn introduced Orson to Katharine
Cornell, who cast him as Mercucio in a nationwide tour she and her
husband, Garrett McClintock, were undertaking in
Romeo and Juliet.
Jane
Wyatt would recall the spectacle of middle-aged Cornell and McClintock
playing the teenage lovers and how the theatre came alive when Orson came
on stage as Mercucio — “we knew a star was born.” In 1934, Orson was
introduced to sometime-actor and producer John Houseman, twelve year’s
Orson’s senior, who invited Welles to appear in his play,
Panic.
This led to
a partnership between the two which culminated with an all-black version
of
Macbeth,
which Houseman produced in cooperation with the WPA’s
Negro Theatre Project, with Welles directing.

Houseman and Orson continued to work producing plays for the WPA
including
Dr. Faustus
and
The Cradle Will Rock
. To supplement his meager
income, Orson began to do extensive work on radio His rich, deep voice
and perfect enunciation were made for the medium and, like Agnes, Orson
had a talent for dialects. He became very much in demand and it was
through his work in radio that Agnes got to know Welles, whom she later
would remember as “quiet and introverted.” “He was always very clean,”
Agnes would recall, “but with frayed edges on his shirt. He carried a shillelagh
and had a marvelous voice and diction. Everyone else was afraid to talk to
him, but he fascinated me and we became great friends. One night, he
asked me whether I’d join him and Joe Cotten to do the classics on Mutual
radio.” Houseman and Orson finally left the WPA to form their own repertory
company — The Mercury Theatre — and they wanted Agnes on the team.

While Orson Welles was finding his way on stage and radio, Agnes was
increasingly in demand. She was known by many as a comic “stooge” for
Phil Baker, but had shown considerable versatility on radio performing on
many dramatic programs as well as comedies. Her versatility helped make
her part of the ensemble company of the radio program,
The March of
Time. The March of Time
dramatized news events using actors to accurately
impersonate the newsmakers of the day along with classic radio sound
effects to make it seem to the audience that they were actually listening to
the real event. Because the show covered all major newsmakers around the
world, the best radio voices were needed and wanted to do the show. It was
on this and other shows of this period, such as
The Cavalcade of America,
that Agnes got to know and
work with some of the other
great voices in radio. By
the time Agnes joined the
March of Time
cast in 1936,
the show had been on for
five years. Franklin Roosevelt
was president and among
those who specialized in
impersonating FDR were
Bill Johnstone and, nearly
twenty years before he skyrocketed to fame as Ed
Norton, Art Carney. Eleanor
Roosevelt was one of the
first voices Agnes was called
upon to do and her interpretation was letter-perfect.
She had down Mrs. Roosevelt’s
high-pitched, often piercing
voice — and did so without
it falling into parody or, as
some people who “did” Mrs.
Roosevelt, as a way of ridiculing her. In fact, Agnes would recall that she
was performing as Mrs. Roosevelt on a
March of Time
broadcast when she
looked into the control room and saw the real Mrs. Roosevelt watching her
— intently. Agnes was a bit shaken as she continued her performance and
was, afterward, apprehensive of what the First Lady would say to her. She
was relieved when Mrs. Roosevelt congratulated her and said that she felt
Agnes did the best job of anyone she had ever heard impersonating her.
Agnes was always very proud of that accolade from a woman she came to
admire very much.

In addition to Mrs. Roosevelt, Agnes also performed over the years in a
number of other parts on the show.
Life
magazine ran an advertisement for
The March of Time
which featured Agnes and included pictures of her
impersonating, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, The Dutchess of Windsor,
Eleanor Roosevelt, and Yetta Rothberg. The ad is interesting since it
illustrates how Agnes (and many of the other actors on the show) prepared

for their roles. “The poignant, tragic simplicity of Madame Chiang KaiShek, wife of China’s dictator, the gay sophistication of “Wally,” the
Dutchess of Windsor, The ebullient energy of Eleanor Roosevelt, or the
pathos of plain Yetta Rothberg of the Bronx — Agnes Moorehead, who
plays these and many other part in
The March of Time,
is acknowledged as
radio’s most sensitive, most versatile, and most authentic artist in re-creating
the characters of living women. A familiar sight in the
March of Time
studio is Agnes Moorehead listening in tense concentration to a recording
of one of the voices she is to reenact, following it with her own voice, learning
inflection and accent, perfecting tone and timbre.”

Elliott Reid was barely 16 when he joined the cast of
The March of Time.
He recalls Agnes as a “handsome woman, which was my first impression of
her. I was new and not totally at ease.” As he got to know her, he came to
recognize her as a “brilliant actress. On that program she did a number of
impressions of world-famous people. She specialized in Eleanor Roosevelt
— very nice and not exaggerated — she did it very accurately. Agnes would
get up and do a sketch and rehearse it very shrewdly and perform it tastefully.
She was a very tasteful person in everyday life and it spilled over, into her
acting.” Reid would recall that they didn’t have time “to struggle with the
method” since they basically had to rehearse a show in an hour. “We couldn’t
take all day to get an effect, we basically had to get it on the first reading.”