Orson Welles, Vol I (22 page)

He must have returned to Chicago, and then Woodstock, with his tail rather between his
legs. He was plagued with hay-fever and asthma as usual in the summer, and in a moment of inspiration, Roger Hill suggested (‘to get him out of my hair’
⁴
) that he take a trip to Mercer in the cooler area up-state Wisconsin near the lakes, and try his hand at writing a play. Hill promised to start the play off. Orson happily agreed. They decided to take the controversial figure of John Brown, unilateral
anti-slaver, as their theme; he was much in the air, the subject of two recent biographies, a play, and an epic poem: an emblem of muddle-headed, or perhaps pig-headed idealism that seemed to touch a chord in depression America. Orson made for the North. Once again he sent a generally exuberant set of letters which record his adventures, chronicle his observations of nature – and human nature
– and blush for shame at asking – again! – for money. Their special interest is that they record his progress on the play, showing something of his developing grasp as a writer and editor. The letters are fun; he seems to have had a delightful time.

On the train he had the good fortune to bump into the Meigs, friends of the Hills; they had a summer home in the area of the Chippewa Indian reservation
at Lac du Flambeau, and invited him to stay with them, at the bottom of their pine-grove. ‘How delightfully unexpected everything turns out for me! In the seventeen kaleidoscopic years of my existence I have not once successfully predicted any one minute of my following future!’ He got some ‘squaws and a few antiques of the neuter gender’ to put up a wig-wam (‘or more correctly, a “wig-ii-wham”’)
and settled in for the duration. Immediately his ‘tortured nasal passage and bespasmed bronchial tubes’ improved. He hadn’t entirely gone native – he ate with the Meigs and their ‘rosy-faced and multitudinous’ children – but he abandoned himself to the reservation’s picturesque charm: ‘A tuneful country, this … woodland sounds from the wild where the Chippewa hunt bear and deer, silver
sounds from the lake and sunny insect-sounds at mid-day. A little sad, perhaps, the song the marsh-folk sing, and sadder yet the endless dirging of the wind in the fir-trees. At night there are stealthy little sounds, and always the unbelievable; ceaseless, in the air, the throbbing of medicine drums.’ Mac Liammóir wasn’t entirely right that Orson failed to give himself
over to nature; but he
wasn’t entirely wrong, either: his descriptions have the feeling of stage directions about them. Hardly surprising, since he was here to write a play, a matter to which – with occasional lapses – he applied himself very seriously.

Roger Hill sent him the first act immediately, nonchalantly claiming to have written it in a day; this galvanised Orson, and he boasts quite soon to his ‘beloved
co-author’ that he is writing furiously to produce what he spells as a ‘first draught’ so that they can see the thing whole, like ‘a great uncut diamond’. He offers advice to Skipper on his first act: ‘it’s mighty damned good. Personally I think it’s
great
. Wonderful!! And with this opinion clearly understood may I offer the inevitable criticism?’ He finds that Thoreau is made too interesting:
‘if he remains as he is at this writing nothing on earth will persuade me away from him into playing John Brown!’ He tells Skipper that some of the speeches he’s written are too good. ‘We don’t want to be accused of bombast. I think neat lines are a fault of mine, too, we must both beware, for that way lies floweriness …’ Everything that he writes seems shrewd and practical.

Halfway through
his sojourn, as autumn started to threaten with an east wind blowing up and a prolonged rainy season imminent, he moved across the lake, to share a lodge with a silent and solitary archer by the name of Larry to whom he paid a few cents for board. There he stayed till he returned. When Larry had done his bow and arrow work, he sat at his typewriter, Welles sat at his, and so the play got finished.
Welles’s ability to team up with companions in this way – Mr O’Connor on the Shannon expedition is another instance – is interesting; interesting, too, that he was happier with his silent friend than in the bustle of the Meigs’ noisy hearth. He was, after all, to all intents and purposes an only child; solitude
à deux
may have suited him better than the competitive atmosphere of a big family.

He succumbed to the charms of ‘the crystal lakes and timberlands and all that sort of thing, well-stocked, understand, with the leaping trout, the bounding deer, the scudding muskie and the grunting Indian, all rampant, so to speak and in great abundance’ and occasional trips to the movies with the Meigs (‘the movie tonight was distressingly adequate on the subject of skyscrapers … may the
show business flounder until producers cry out in agony for the return of the mov
ing
drama (
D
rama) for the return of the good old lengthiness, the romance and the real melo-drama!’); mostly, though, he was plugging away at John Brown, and also at another play:
The Dark Room
. ‘It’s a natural, a positive honey! … every
English-speaking repertory company on the globe will be doing that show, mark
my words!’ It concerns a representative group of people – a gangster, a society-queen, a financial leader, a diamond-merchant, the mayor of the town and others – who assemble for a seance (an early appearance of the supernatural figures in Welles’s work). ‘And through all of this exciting, rapid-fire,
sure-fire
, melodrama, moves the sinister shadow of Dr Marvel! … then for the last time, the lights
go out and The Voice speaks! The answer to that is a wow, a perfect wow … it could be produced for the price of a theatre rental, the set is in every scene dock in the world – a new coat of paint …’ From this description, it would not have been entirely out of place in the Gate’s repertory.

He could hardly wait now to get back, with his two thrilling properties in his rucksack. He looks forward
to returning to civilisation, ‘in the sunshine of your enthusiasm’, in less than a week. He expresses himself to Hill (‘Skip’) with absolutely direct affection, signing off ‘Love without end’. From time to time he worries in a letter that he hasn’t heard from him and fears that he might be in his bad books: ‘you aren’t angry, are you? Are you?’ Generally these anxieties concern his constant
requests for money: but since ‘Doctor’, as he refers to his guardian, is so unforthcoming, what can he do? He signs off his last letter from Lac du Flambeau – ‘the merest word from Woodstock would send me into perfect triologies of delight’ – then throws in his joke of the moment, repeated in more than one letter: ‘I can ride a canoe, canoe?’ Skipper brought out the boy in him.

Not another
word is ever heard about
The Dark Room
; but the John Brown play – which they called
Marching Song
– filled them with excitement and hopes of a production. Once they’d rewritten it, Skipper sent it to an old acquaintance, Samuel Raphaelson, who wrote back ‘Stick with this boy! … Any three pages of this script sing. But any 20 pages fall apart. Tell your star pupil to either turn this into a novel
or teach him that stage plays are tight little miniatures’
⁵
– not a lesson that Orson Welles was ever going to learn, thank God. They decided that they needed to be on the spot if they were to place it; Hortense and Roger Hill and Orson travelled to New York in what they liked to call the ‘land-yacht’, the caravan bus in which the Todd Troupers toured, ‘complete with its chauffeur-cook’.
⁶
Once
in New York, they rented a suite at the Algonquin (not cheap at any time, least of all at its zenith in the early thirties) and approached as many producers as they could. They had scant success. Even Dwight Deere Wiman, an ex-Todd man, Skipper’s contemporary,
and America’s most prolific producer, turned them down, as did the almost equally prolific William A. Brady. Depressed and out of pocket,
the Hills returned to Woodstock; Welles moved into a cheap room on West 77th Street, off Riverside, and continued to peddle the play around town. Ben Boyars read it, and he was at least kind. ‘It’s a swell show,’ he told Welles. ‘It makes good reading. It would be a good book. I think maybe it’s even a good play. But that doesn’t matter. It won’t make money. It isn’t a commercial piece. At least
that’s what I think.’
⁷

Maurice Bernstein wrote to him in New York: ‘I do hope you won’t continue to waste your youth aimlessly.’
⁸
Then, in the absence of any reaction, sent a telegram: ‘leave play with agent and come home’. Which he did, after a final rebuff from yet another manager who read the play, declared it ‘unsuitable’ and then charged him $5 for the opinion. ‘Unsuitable’ for what,
one may ask; but he was not wrong to reject it. Ben Boyars hits the nail on the head: ‘it makes good reading.’ It’s a good solid slog through some tangled history, but except for a few interesting moments of stagecraft is dramatically inert. It is in fact the stage directions which quicken the pulse, suggesting that the authors were not born dramatists but perhaps born directors; one of them, at any
rate. The subject none the less has considerable resonance in Orson Welles’s life and even in some of his future work.

The play takes the form of an inquiry into Brown, his motives and the value of his actions: was he self-motivated? A genuine idealist? A clever strategist? A megalomaniac? Or simply mad? The play starts and ends with journalists trying to answer some of these questions, questions
posed in his lifetime, and still not satisfactorily resolved. The play’s subject is the paradox that whatever the answer to these questions, he became, especially after his death at the gallows, an emblem of the anti-slave movement, and a vital rallying point. ‘His soul,’ in the words of the great song he inspired, ‘goes marching on.’ On being told that abolitionists were planning to spring
him from jail before his execution Brown responded ‘Let them hang me. I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose’ – a remark (not in the play) which reveals an acute sense of the value of publicity. It is this that fascinates Welles. Brown’s conduct at all times was highly theatrical, and reported on by a permanent phalanx of journalists. Even as he lay on the grass after being
beaten unconscious with the hilt of a marine’s sword, he gave interviews. Q: What was your object? A: To free the slaves from bondage. His trial, during which he lay on a cot, was a magnificent
piece of stage-management; a show-trial, in fact, but one in which the accused was putting on the show for his own benefit, and that of his cause.

The press coverage was the first newspaper great campaign
of modern times. The theme of Brown’s possible madness, coupled with that of the power of publicity obviously had considerable resonance for Welles; as did the additional theme of the vanity of the man who believes he is God’s vessel. Brown was certain enough of his own destiny to have ordered one of his men somehow to procure George Washington’s sword, with which he then proceeded to lead
the battle. This hubris of his is given great weight in
Marching Song
, which is essentially a political piece; in no way does it resemble Stephen Vincent Benét’s great poem, ‘John Brown’s Body’, with its complex lament for a vanished culture.

The canvas is enormous: its eleven scenes convey dense action; there is a cast of twenty-six, plus three children. Characterisation is clear and detailed
closely following historical fact; the one character who has been somewhat extrapolated from recorded reality is John Brown’s son, John Junior, who suffered a nervous breakdown witnessing the Potawotomie Massacre – the event that precipitated his father’s commitment to the cause. Welles and Hill have made him ‘an idiot, with a loose, wet mouth and saucer eyes’.
⁹
He laughs and giggles, until suddenly
tormented by the imagined sound of marching; he identifies passionately with the suffering slaves. There is a Jacobean feel to his presence in the play; frequently he burbles on at the side of the action, apparently irrelevant. It is hard not to be reminded of the fact that Welles’s brother Richard Junior was, as he was writing the play, still repining, hungry and unclothed, in Kanakee Mental
Asylum.

JOHN JUNIOR

Inspiration! Inspiration! You don’t understand! You don’t know what inspiration means! … I’ve been inspired … I can tell you about it … inspiration don’t mean being crazy … not … not exactly … inspiration is a kind of happy song, it’s like a spring rain shower falling soft and sudden on young leaves … it’s like a ray of dawn sunshine smiling, and pointing at the mountain-tops
… and mostly, mostly it’s like my dreams … the dreams I have I can’t tell you about … take that marching, now … the sound of that marching … believe me that sound isn’t crazy … it’s a fine wild kind of music … a Call … it ain’t insane, I tell you! It ain’t crazy! It’s the footsteps of a whole nation, marching in the
chains they was born in! … you don’t have to be simple to hear that echoing and
echoing in your heart, do you? … John Brown hears it and he knows what it means!!!

Clumsy though it is as writing, it has real feeling; the idealism, the hysterical identification with the oppressed, is unmistakable. Throughout, despite the reckless proliferation of exclamation marks, elevated states of emotion are powerfully conveyed. Belief is a central question, and the issue of Brown’s
prophetic inspiration is not dodged:

JOHN BROWN

THE SWORD OF THE LORD AND OF GIDEON!

(Suddenly a great unearthly light falls full upon him. He is transfigured … his arms have been stretched sideways in triumph and now a strange thing happens to them, they are momentarily paralysed … with a shock we realise that the attitude is no longer that of triumph but of crucifixion!)
O my Father,
if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it.
(Kagi and Anderson sink to their knees, awed and prayerful.)

In a Victorian sort of way, it is all quite powerful; the Christ image boldly undertaken. There are reminiscences of
The Servant in the House
(also about a man who would be king). No irony seems to be intended, nor is it told from Brown’s point of view. The moment of transfiguration
simply happens,
tout court
. In the penultimate scene, the journalists discuss Brown outside his cell, where he’s giving interviews and writing pamphlets. Is he mad? Or what? A soldier passes by, producing an article by Abraham Lincoln condemning Brown. The soldier gives his name: Booth – John Wilkes Booth, who was, indeed, there.