Me and Orson Welles (3 page)

“So what do you write?” I asked.
(Talk in terms of the other person's interest.)

She stopped and touched her neck again. From one of the booths I could hear somebody listening to “Have You Met Miss Jones?”

“God, I like that song,” she said.

“Beau-dee-ful melody,” said the salesman: a short guy who looked as if someone had just poured hair tonic on his face. “There's only
one
man on earth who can write a melody like that. Rodgers. Just got copies today.”

“His melodies are like lullabies, aren't they?” the girl said to me.

“Beau-dee-ful,” said the salesman.

“And he knocks 'em out in ten minutes,” I said. “I heard him on John Gassner.”

“You listen to that, too? God, sometimes I think I'm the only one in New York who listens to that show. Can you imagine just sitting down and coming up with the melody to ‘Small Hotel'?”

“We got ‘Small Hotel'!” said the salesman. “Ten weeks on the Hit Parade. Couldn't keep it in the store.” He was wildly trying to locate a copy on the wall. “People came in. Didn't even ask what they wanted. Just handed them a copy.”

“I'd give my
blood
to write any five notes as beautiful as the first five notes to ‘Small Hotel,' ” she said.

“What
do
you write, uh—”

“Gretta. I haven't written anything very
significant
yet,” she said. “Actually, I'm trying to write a play.”

“A play? Wow. That's interesting, because I'm a sort of actor.”

“Really? What have you done?”

“Oh,” I said, “you know, Federal Theatre mostly.
It Can't Happen Here . . . Injunction Granted . . .
the Voodoo
Macbeth.”

She smiled at my lunatic catalogue of lies. “I thought the Voodoo
Macbeth
had an all-Negro cast.”

“Well, I stood in the shadows most of the time. So you're really a writer, Gretta?”
(Remember that a man's name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in any language.)

“I wish I could convince the
New Yorker
of that. And then my parents. And then myself. Actually, I'd skip my parents and myself, if I could just convince the
New Yorker
. Did you read the John Cheever piece about his childhood maid? God, that was so beautiful. And so
quiet,
you know? Just this small miracle. Have you gone to the
Times
bookfair yet? Don't. It's lousy. And so crowded. I gotta go, uh—”

“Richard,” I said. “Do you want to have—”

“Good luck with your acting. Wouldn't this make a great scene for a story?” she said. “Just two people meeting like this? Nothing more. It's just so New York.”

 

 

 

Later that afternoon I took a bus downtown to the library. I thought maybe I'd read some plays.

I studied the piece of sheet music I'd bought: “Have You Met Miss Jones?” Sam H. Harris presents Geo. M. Cohan in the new musical comedy
I'd Rather Be Right.
Book by Geo. S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Lyrics by Lorenz Hart. Music by Richard Rodgers.

The electricity of those names! They radiated a kind of
significance.
Kaufman . . . Hart . . . Rodgers. And they walked the same streets I did.

The bus stopped at 42nd Street in front of the library, and I noticed a little action down beyond Bryant Park. I walked toward Sixth, and there on West 41st Street was a truck, a ladder, and a group of people standing outside a theatre.

O
n the side of the theatre, painted on the brick wall, an old sign still read Comedy Theatre, but a new electrical sign was being bolted into the brickwork at the center of the building. Its wires trailed through the third-floor window.

A dozen people stood outside. Nearly all of them looked to be in their twenties.

“Wait a second! Wait a second!” yelled a hatless guy with curly sand-colored hair. He was calling up to the electrician. “Don't do anything 'til I come back.”

The guy on the ladder called down, “I shouldn't be doing this on the Sabbath. The Talmud says—”

Everybody groaned.

“Thus spake the Rabbi,” said a heavy-set young man with a British accent. He leaned a foot on the fire hydrant in front of the theatre. He was dressed in an expensive-looking coat, and, clearly, he was in charge. Next to him stood a young woman holding a clipboard. She was hardly older than I was. She wore no coat: a gray sweater with its sleeves pulled back. College, I thought. Below the sweater she wore—long and loose—a brown and gray tweed skirt. The stitched collar of the sweater was highlighted by a string of pearls. Her face was round, shadowed—the eyes dark, sharp, staring down at the ground in thought. Her chestnut hair was parted exactly in the middle and then pulled back tightly. Running from behind her ears, around the top of her head, almost like a tiny garland, was a hairband designed to resemble a slender braid of chestnut hair. I thought: How could one city be filled with so many striking women?

She looked up suddenly, right at me—took my measure, smiled—then returned her gaze downward.

My blood pulsed.

“Will somebody go find Orson?” said the man with the British accent.

There came the sound of jackhammering down the street—and then there was an ambulance, lights flashing, pulling up in front of the theatre. No one seemed to notice it.

One of the lobby doors opened and the curly-headed guy ran out carrying a snare drum on a stand. “Wait! Don't start 'til I get this set up.” He was like a one-man Three Stooges trying to set up the drum kit. The cymbal went rolling down the sidewalk. I caught it. He tentatively hit the drum a few times, then spoke into the drumstick. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is Ben Bernie and all the lads coming to you live from the beautiful Derelict Theatre on West 41st Street—yowzah!”

“Sonja, will you tell Orson to get
out
here?” said the British gentleman. He sneezed, then wiped his nose with his handkerchief.

“Difficult to tell Orson anything,” said the girl.

Somebody said, “Tell him there's a dozen young, well-toned ballerinas out here. That'll get him out.”

People laughed.

I watched as she pushed open the theatre door.

“Well,
she'll
be gone for an hour.”

“Steady, lads,” said the British gentleman.

A delivery truck pulled up behind the ambulance. The driver dragged out some cardboard boxes. Attached to the top of each box was a sample of what was inside—a flier printed in blood-red letters on yellow paper.

“Notice there's no date for the opening.”

“At least we're opening in
November.”

As the British gentleman signed for the boxes, the curly-headed guy was still trying unsuccessfully to play a drumroll. Somebody else tried, too—also terribly.

“This is the best drumroll the Mercury Theatre can come up with?” asked the British gentleman.

“It's the best we can do with a nonunion drummer. Comes the revolution—”

“Strike! Strike!”

“All ready up here!” called the little man on the ladder. He had climbed into the third-floor window. “Later I'll wire you a switch. Now I'll just plug it in.”

“Will someone
please
get Orson!”

“Vakhtangov!” somebody cried. Then the cry was picked up by the others. “Vakhtangov! Vakhtangov!”

A poor skinny guy in a massively wrinkled white shirt headed into the theatre, tripping over the doorjamb.

“I'm going to plug it in,” said the little man in the window.

“Wait! Wait!”

They were still fumbling with the drumroll—and with a kind of crazy boldness and a sense of
What the hell do I have to lose?
I said to the curly-haired guy, “Give me the sticks. I'll do it.”

“What?”

“I said I'll play you a drumroll.”

“Oh, yeah? And who are you?”

“I'm Gene Krupa. Who are you?”

“ ‘Truly, my name is Cinna. I'm Cinna the poet.' ”

Then there was laughter, and instantly about five of them were doing a scene.

“ ‘Where do you dwell?' ”

“ ‘In the Capital.' ”

“ ‘Whither are you going?' ”

“ ‘I'm going to Caesar's funeral.' ”

“ ‘His name's Cinna.' ”

“ ‘Tear him for his bad verses!' ”

“Tear him for his bad drumming!”

The little man at the third-floor window called out: “I'm going to plug it in!”

I sizzled into a killer drumroll on the snare. The Westfield High School marching band had never heard one better. Possibly all of America had never heard one better. The drumroll alone got me a hand from the crowd.

“Swell!” the curly-haired guy said. He wagged his forefinger and started truckin'. “Peel the Big Apple, kid!”

“Tear him for his bad dancing!”

I thought of Stefan's words: And who you
are
—is that who you
want
to be?

And I answered him:
Starting today it is.

The double doors of the theatre entrance flew back, and a young man emerged swearing loudly in an astonishingly deep and resonant voice. “Goddamn-sons-of-bitches! Is every
single
person in this show against me? Is this a goddamn
conspiracy
to wreck my show?”

It was Orson Welles. At twenty he had starred on Broadway in
Romeo and Juliet.
At twenty-one he had directed
Macbeth
for the Negro Theatre in Harlem—transforming the witches into witch doctors and setting the play in Haiti. Later that year he'd directed and starred in
Doctor Faustus—
then marched an entire audience to an empty theatre uptown when the federal government had locked out his production of
The Cradle Will Rock.
I'd heard that now he was forming his own classical repertory company on Broadway. He was to be the director, the producer, the star.

He was twenty-two years old.

Five years older than I was.

He held a bound script in his black-gloved hands, and he wore a blue pinstriped suit under an open overcoat. Sonja and Vakhtangov followed in his wake.

The British gentleman—who by now I figured out was John Houseman—handed Welles one of the newly printed fliers.

“This is completely inadequate,” said Welles. “Very possibly the worst-looking thing I've ever seen in my life.”

“We just had two hundred thousand of them printed.”

“They're not
entirely
bad,” said Welles, then he wheeled on me. “Can you play the ukulele?”

I looked up into the round boyish face from which that amazing voice issued. “Sure,” I said. I figured how hard could it be? It only had four strings. I kept the drumroll going.
(Talk in terms of the other man's interest.)
“Mr. Welles, if you need somebody to play the ukulele, you couldn't find anybody in this city better than I am.”

“The kid's got balls. Will you work for nothing?”

“
Orson—
” Houseman said.

“Quiet! I'm
negotiating.”
He saw the copy of
John Gielgud's Hamlet
that I had jammed under my arm, and he pulled it out. He frowned at the cover photograph. “Have you ever heard anybody so in love with the sound of his own goddamn voice as Jack Gielgud? It's that drawing-room school of Shakespeare. Makes my blood boil. It has nothing to do with the violence, the passion, the
blood
of the Elizabethan stage. Did you hear my
Hamlet
on the radio?”

I had heard it on the
Columbia Workshop
last fall. God help me, but it was terrible. Even the papers had panned it.

“Yes,” I said.

“What did you think?” He narrowed his eyes.

“Considering the time constraints you were under,” I said, “trying to squeeze
Hamlet
into two half-hour broadcasts, I think the result was very close to brilliant.”

I immediately regretted the
brilliant
—too transparently ass-kissing—Christ, my whole theatrical career wrecked with one astoundingly stupid word choice.

Welles pointed a black-gloved finger right in my face. “That is
exactly
correct. People criticized me for cutting ‘To be or not to be,' but dramatically, in terms of pure story, that is the most expendable speech in the entire play.”