Me and Orson Welles (7 page)

“And he's out there now. Sunday morning. He's out raking leaves. With
his
back. And you—every two seconds you're running out that door.”

“Ma! I'm raking right now. Caroline, I'll call you later!”

 

I raked the dead leaves into a pile in the backyard, and then began burning them in a wire metal trash basket. In about ten minutes the entire backyard was on fire, and my mother had to call the fire department.

“It's no use,” she said.

 

At Newark I took the bus to Broad Street. I carried my ukulele and my script in a grocery bag. My clothes and skin still smelled like smoke.

I was working that fall for Leonard Goldberg, who managed the Rialto Theatre. He was fat and nervous; he chain-smoked Kools, and he was allergic to practically everything. He was also pretty much entirely incapable of dealing with other human beings, so he spent most of the day hiding in his office, sending me out for a “blueberry Danish and a Sanka-dark-half-sugar.”

He generally let me run the place. First, I sold tickets at the window (that week it was
Broadway Melody of 1938).
Then, in between features, I'd walk center stage. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” I'd say, “and welcome to another gift night at the Rialto Theatre.” Just this sentence usually got some applause. Then I'd reach into a wicker basket and draw out ten winning ticket stubs, reading the numbers out loud. The winners stood up, and I'd get the rest of the audience to applaud them. Later on, they'd come up to claim their broken lamps and their too-tight shoes or their year's supply of Fleischmann's yeast. What the audience didn't know—and what even Mr. Goldberg didn't know—was that I'd rigged the entire thing so that my family won every single drawing. Some nights it was my mother, other nights my grandmother, my sister, my Aunt Minnie. When I'd sell them their tickets, I'd write their ticket numbers on the palm of my hand. Then, onstage, I'd reach into the basket, pull out a ticket, then read the number on my palm. “And the first of tonight's lucky winners is number 0144!” My Aunt Minnie would cry out in surprise. Or my grandmother would stand up smiling. My sister was the best at winning; she'd scream, jump up and down, hug her girlfriend.

Pretty soon all our houses were filled with enough boxes of dishes and glassware to entertain twelve thousand for lunch.

I told Mr. Goldberg that I wouldn't be able to work that evening's show, or any night that week, because of a “death in the family.”

“Ah bruch,”
he said. “Who died?” He sneezed messily into his handkerchief.

“My Aunt Minnie.”

His hands were shaking as he tried to light a Kool. “The whole week you're gonna need?” he asked. Then he cleared his throat and spat into his handkerchief.

“We have to sit shiva.”

“Naturally. Naturally. But
(sneeze)
I'll tell you something, Richie, it kind of leaves me in the lurch, doesn't it?”

“If you like, Mr. Goldberg, I can get my friend Phil Stefan to do it; he's completely square, and he'd be glad to pick up the extra jack.”

“Could you do that for me, Richie?
(Volcanic sneeze)
Oh, Jesus, that one got all over you, didn't it?”

 

 

 

 

More madness. Another train, and I made it downtown by one o'clock. Welles had told me to be at the theatre by noon. I ran all the way to the Mercury— steering northeast with every green light; horns honking; people yelling.

I came whipping down 41st Street, and I pulled back the metal gate of the stage door, entering where the insiders did.

The theatre smelled like rotten fish. People were waving away the noxious fumes, and two large electric fans were aimed at the back theatre wall in an effort to dry the horrible-smelling paint.

But it
looked
terrific—the entire back brick wall was painted blood red.

Muriel Brassler, the dark-haired beauty who played Portia, was complaining to Welles about the lights. “These are all wrong for me, Orson. I
cannot
work with these.”

“They look fine,” said Welles, who was trying to block his scene with her and work out the lighting cues at the same time.

“Orson, I never heard of lights with no color in them. Where are the gels?” She was dressed in her pale blue gown; Welles wore his black military overcoat.

“Muriel, let's worry about the gels later,” he said.

She picked up a large manila envelope. “Barrymore Pink is the only color that effectively highlights the natural tonalities of my skin.” Then she removed from the envelope some plates of colored glass. “Believe me, I know what works for me.”

Welles stared at her in disbelief. “She packs her own gels.”

“I have
one
scene, Orson. Allow me my one scene? Jeannie! Please put these in, dear?”

The lighting assistant came out from the wings.

“Do whatever she says,” said Welles hopelessly. “I just don't want to hear any more about tonalities. Can we at least
block
this scene? Can we make
some
progress here? All right, I'm reading the letter downstage right.” He assumed his slightly professorial Brutus voice. “ ‘But 'tis a common proof that lowliness is young ambition's ladder, whereto the climber upwards turns his face. But when he once attains the upmost round—' ”

“Is that where you're going to be standing?” asked Muriel. Her hand was on her hip.

“Yes, my dear. Would you like to redirect the play? Maybe we can bathe the entire audience in Barrymore Pink.”

“I have a two-page scene, Orson. Two effing pages.”

“What, in the
depths
of your ignorance, do you want me to do?”

“I am simply worried that the difference in our height—”

“Your height! I swear to God, Muriel, if you mention your height to me one more time I'm cutting this scene. Your height is fine! Nobody thinks you're too tall except you.”

“I look like some kind of effing giant next to you! People are going to laugh.”

“Nobody is going to laugh. Nobody is even going to be looking at you.”

“There, you see! Nobody's going to be looking at me!”

“You are deeply disturbed. Look. Nobody is going to be looking at you because they'll be
listening
to you—transported by the poetry.
That's
the magic of this play, not the goddamn-son-of-a-bitch Barrymore—”

“All I want,” she said with her hand to her chest, “and I do
not
think this is unreasonable, is for you to take one step up the ramp before I enter.”

“Anything you say, Muriel.”

Muriel looked up toward the lighting assistant, who was standing on a ladder now. “Can you aim that spot directly down, dear? When the light hits my face correctly, a tiny butterfly-shaped shadow appears under my nose. That's when you know you've got it right.”

The fire doors on the side of the stage opened, and Houseman led onstage a gigantic Negro man dressed in African tribal costume; he was holding a long staff with a screaming animal skull at the end of it.

“Meestah Whales! Meestah Whales!”

“Abdul!” cried Orson, and he hugged the tribal chieftain.

“Abdul need five teek! Opening night.” He shook his staff.

“Abdul did the drumming for my Haitian
Macbeth
,” explained Welles to the company.

“Abdul need five teek for
Caesar!
Opening night!”

“I don't know if—”

“If I no get, bad spirit in theatre! Bad review!”

Orson went pale. “John, give him the tickets. That's all we need now: the Bad Luck Thing.”

 

Welles rehearsed the funeral oration scene until everybody was sick of it. Now he had the actors stomping the platforms as they demanded to hear Caesar's legacy. (“The will! The will!”)

Joe Cotten, Norman Lloyd, and I sat in the audience and watched Welles yelling out the light cues.

I had unerringly been drawn to the two least serious members of the company. The major source of our entertainment was Cotten's inexhaustible tales of his sexual conquests. Cotten really was an astonishingly handsome young man, with a leading man's curling blond hair and blue eyes. Lloyd had nicknamed him “Fertilizer.”

Cotten was sitting in the seventh row with Lloyd and me cataloguing all the New York theatre women he had slept with during the past two months. He was counting on his fingers, and he'd moved onto his second hand. “There was Jeanette Bradley. She and I got together the night after she broke up with Orson. I broke up with her twice, each time for two days, and during those two days I messed around with Jeanette Lee, Velma Lord, and Kate Fredric, who asked me if I would go to bed with her and her twin sister, but I told her no. That was too much even for me.”

“Fertilizer draws the moral line,” said Lloyd.

“Then I got back together with Jeanette Bradley, but she dicked me over by sleeping with Orson again. So that same night I met up with both Evelyn Allen and Muriel Brassler.”

“What's the dope on Muriel?” Lloyd asked, looking at the stage. “I heard she's a gymnast.”

“She's got a gymnast's body, I can tell you that.”

“Did she get a firm grip on your monkey bar?”

“Tell me about Evelyn,” I said. Evelyn Allen played Caesar's wife. Her part only ran about a page and a half, but you stopped to notice her. She had these lovely arms, bare to the shoulder. Backstage, she always sat by herself reading a book. “I think she's got style.”

Lloyd and Cotten leaped into some old vaudeville schtick of theirs:

 

“I like her
style.”

“I like her
smile.”

“I like her
class.”

“I like her—
other features.”

They found this extremely amusing, and, once again, Lloyd played his stripper's bump-and-grind drumbeat on the seat as he sang out: “Oh! Doc! I-feel-so-good! Meetcha-round-the-corner-in-a-half'n-hour!”

“I'm kind of fascinated by her,” I said. “I always wonder what she's reading. She's got class.”

“She's gotta big
what?”
said Cotten.

“A toast to class!” said Lloyd. He lifted his bottle of root beer, and intoned: “The deep red wine may
kiss
the glass; and
you,
my friend—”

“Farewell forever,” finished Cotten.

“What
is
she reading?” I asked.

“This kid's got the hots for every broad in the show!” said Lloyd. “Who the hell cares what she's reading. It's those bee-stung lips! God, I want to bite those bee-stung lips.” He gestured to the back of the theatre, where Sonja had entered eating a tangerine. “Now here's a cute little lass.”

“Nice face, too,” said Cotten.

I had tried not to think about her all morning. I had said to myself: All right, Richard, this girl is older than you. You think she's beautiful, but
everybody
thinks she's beautiful.
She
thinks she's beautiful. Time to grow up, Richard. You want to be taken seriously, then look at reality. Girls aren't knocked out by you. They
like
you. They're charmed by your courtesy, your boyishness. They don't look at you in any sexual or romantic way. You're kind of sweet, amusing, but their hearts don't drop,
oh, God,
when you enter the room. This girl's made it from Nowhere, Ohio, to the Mercury Theatre on nerve and beauty and ambition. Get a hold of your monkey bar, Richard.

God, I hated being the nice guy. Skelly and Stefan got every girl in the school. I mean, they actually were allowed to
touch
them. But Skelly and Stefan were athletes. Stars. They were the “Fertilizers” of Westfield High School.

And I played the drums at the football games and watched the girls in the stands; watched the beautiful, unapproachable girls like Kristina Stakuna joke with each other in their made-up Spanish slang. And their scarlet lipstick. I watched Kristina walk to the hotdog stand every five minutes just to talk, and she stood with her back to the game and smoothed her hair and pulled down the edges of her oversized sweater.

Sonja walked right up to me. “Hey, Richard. How's my favorite Equity Junior Member?”

“Is that a new blouse?” Cotten asked. “I don't think I've seen that one before.”

“Actually, it
is
new,” she said. “Thank you for noticing.” She was wearing a blue long-sleeved shirt and blue jeans.

Cotten gestured to her copy of
Gone with the Wind.
“Still reading my favorite novel?”

She finished her slice of tangerine and licked her fingers. “I'm annotating it so when I meet with Selznick we'll have something specific to talk about.”

Lloyd said, “And when, may I ask, are you meeting Selznick?”

“John's trying to get him here for opening night.”

“Are you kidding?” said Lloyd. “I'm going on in a completely unrehearsed scene—and David O. Selznick is gonna be here? Oh, sweet Jasper, I'll end my Broadway career and my Hollywood career at the same time. Thrift! Thrift!”

“That'd be quite a coup if you could actually meet him,” said Cotten.

“Oh, I'll meet him,” said Sonja.

“Tell him I'm available for Ashley.”

“Actually you have the right face for Ashley.”

“You know, Sonja,” said Cotten, seamlessly, “there's this
exquisite
little place I discovered in the Village—you loved Amalfi when I took you there? Well, you're going to love this place; called Marta, down on Waverly. Would you let me take you there tonight after the rehearsal? It's open late.”