Orson Welles, Vol I (31 page)

That it was not a strictly dramatic occasion is made clear by Miss Moffett’s last paragraph. ‘It is delightful to sit and be thrilled by Orson Welles’s Svengali and be reached by Louise Prussing’s helplessness and loveliness as Trilby and every now and then to glance out through the windows and see
the green leaves moving gently in the last glow of the twilight.’ The auditorium, sweltering in the absence of air-conditioning, was a-flutter with the swish of fans thoughtfully provided by the management and printed with details of the remainder of the season. Small children ran around; dowagers ate ice creams. All this was grist to Welles’s mill: ‘altho he disclaims a “purpose” in his artistic
venture, feeling that “the instant a ‘purpose’ is introduced to art, it becomes propagandistic and the true spirit of art disappears,” young Mr Welles wants, he says, to help recapture the fun which should accompany our going to the theatre. “What I should like is for them to come joyously as schoolchildren going to a fair. Theatre is the only social art left which brings all sorts of people together.”’

The marketing had triumphed. Woodstock remained suspicious. Lloyd Lewis told his readers in the
News
: ‘the natives sat, early on the opening evening of the festival, watching the reputedly great folk from Chicago arriving in limousines to pay the incredible price of $2 a ticket. Among these sceptics it was being enviously whispered that the jailbreak of Woodstock convicts last Sunday was inspired
by the prisoners’
¹⁶
fear that some kind-hearted warden intended to make them see the show. But I am confident that the citizens will in time find the town’s dramatic prominence as did the reputedly “great folk” from the big, wicked city.’

It was a brilliant operation, brilliantly mounted; and there was more. A note at the bottom of the programme said: ‘A buffet supper
with the cast will be
served on the campus of the Todd School after the performance. Reservations are necessary.’ Hortense Hill presided at these events (‘she was a harried gal that summer’) which would go on for hours, while the cast performed for specially invited celebrity guests, including Hedda Hopper and other figures from Chicago’s beau monde. The society angle was doggedly maintained; Marshall Fields ran full-page
advertisements featuring gowns for Woodstock opening nights. And though society had ensured the house full notices on which avoidance of bankruptcy depended, there was an equally important – for Welles’s purposes, more important – section of the community that needed to be considered: the critics. Skipper arranged for the school bus, his ‘land yacht’, to pick the critics up in Chicago. ‘A man
of impeccable social standing was aboard to serve drinks en route,’
¹⁷
wrote Hill, still evidently bewildered by the manipulatory ploys in which he found himself conniving. ‘On the way back he provided them with typewriters for their fables.’

Their fables were, on the whole, (surprise surprise), favourable, though not without an element of persiflage. ‘I could only quail and shiver as Mr Welles,
striding the antique stage of the opry house added a horrendous Dracula touch to his performance. Svengali has made enormous hams out of some of the best veteran actors in stage repertory … so there is plenty of excuse for Mr Welles who is only 19,’
¹⁸
said Lewis of the
News
. Mrs Henry Field of the
Herald and Examiner
held that ‘he played the villain last night with great success … his acting has
great bravado, and his voice booms,’
¹⁹
an equivocal sort of a compliment. His make-up was much commented on: ‘Welles’ friends and fellow alumni of the Todd school, where his career started, would fail to recognise him. He has a striking gift for make-up and the tricks that go with the trade of character acting. Too much Franco-Yiddish accent and too hurried diction were minor flaws in his performance.’
Claudia Cassidy, later Chicago’s most powerful critic, confided to her diary: ‘Orson’s Svengali was a cadaver after Du Maurier, with an operatic flair out of the music master in
The Barber of Seville
and Dr Miracle in
Tales of Hoffmann
. He could trick you into thinking his chubby youth the shell of weakness.’

The role is so extravagant, so exotic and fantastical, that it is hard to imagine
what a young actor could do with it but cover himself in make-up and run his personal gamut of effects. ‘Wunderschon!’
²⁰
cries Svengali, on first hearing Trilby sing. ‘It comes straight from the ’eart; it has its roots in the stomach – pardon, mademoiselle, will you permit that I look into your mouth? Ach
Himmel! Wunderbar! Mon dieu, the roof of your mouth is much like the dome of the Pantheon.
The entrance to your throat is like the middle porch of Saint Sulpice when all the doors are open on All Saints’ Day.’ Only a Laughton might have taken the part seriously and discovered its broken heart, rendering the charismatic monster a part of the human race. Welles was not in the job of reclamation; adrenalin was the name of his game. The thing that he brought to the part was size: not just
his height and bulk, but the physical impact (that booming voice). ‘Even his fakes were on a Titanic scale. His Svengali lacked grace and humour, he was a lowering barbarian,’
²¹
wrote Mac Liammóir, who had vivid memories of Beerbohm Tree in the role.

As for the production: ‘Due obviously to this youth’s fervour for the eccentric, the whole revival of this 45-year old melodrama is so bizarre
as to become more mystery-farce than Victorian museum piece. Weird lights playing upon Svengali’s staring eye, savour not so much of old-time atmosphere as of hokum murder movie technic. As played … the melodrama is all Svengali … the other characters were puppets moved around so that the occult impresario might have effective moments.’
²²
Mac Liammóir – who might not have been best pleased by
this last detail – wrote that ‘the production was disappointingly vague and indefinite, but that was because he could know nothing at that period of love, of intimacy, of Paris.’
²³
Mac Liammóir is surely right: the play hinges on tenderness and youthful romanticism to which the monstrous Svengali is a counterpoise. It seems likely that Welles was simply trying to pull out all the stops for his
first show – as much to impress Hilton and Micheál as anyone. His curtain speech at the last performance gracefully drew attention to his guests’ main contribution:
Hamlet
. ‘Joseph Jefferson made a curtain speech here, 65 years ago. Since then the speeches have been of lesser and lesser importance. But I can say without any maidenly blushing, that our next play will be really good.’

It was.
Abandoning the arch smiles appropriate both to melodrama and the efforts of the boy wonder of acting, the critics approached the masterpiece of masterpieces on bended knee. They were scarcely less respectful of Mac Liammóir. The
Tribune
gave advance notice that he was ‘said to be one of the few first-rate Hamlets of this generation’,
²⁴
adding that ‘a conservative historian of Irish drama’ believes
it will be recognised as the greatest of our day. Hamletolatory, rife in England, was even more strongly established in America. The number of Shakespeare’s plays actually performed was small: when Maurice Evans played Richard II in New York
it was the first time the play had been given professionally since Edwin Booth’s 1878 performance. The same few plays recurred over and over,
Hamlet
more
than any; there was frantic competition to say who was now the best exponent of the leading role. John Barrymore in 1923 had set the benchmark, which was not to be seriously challenged until John Gielgud in 1936. Meanwhile, the ‘young Irishman’ (he was thirty-five) was keenly anticipated. As Hilton Edwards’s production note indicated, the production was ‘a replica of that directed by myself at the
Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1932 and 1934. After 300 years of almost continuous performance,’ he continued, ‘it seems not only difficult but inadvisable to attempt anything new in the performance of
Hamlet
. Rather we have deemed it necessary to discard much that this play has accumulated through the ages … [we have chosen] a method that allows the scene to change and the action to proceed with the
swiftness of speech and light … we have put our faith in color, movement, and above all in a faithful and vital interpretation of Shakespeare’s words.’

These were the words of a member of the modern tendency of Shakespearean production. Micheál’s designs were evocative but minimal, a far cry from Woodman Thompson’s solid, monumental settings for the
Romeo and Juliet
in which Orson had just
been appearing, but equally seeming to owe little to Craig’s epic linearity, on view in Robert Edmond Jones’s famous designs for Barrymore. It was a chamber approach, as befitted both the intimate dimensions of the Gate Theatre and Mac Liammóir’s own susurrated performance, which the audience seemed not so much to hear as to overhear. ‘I fancied at times … to have penetrated to strange moods, strange
perfumes, strange shadows in the depths of his mind, as when the soul, shuddering before that welter of mortal sorrow, sought release in temporary expansion of the spirit, and wandered alone and undismayed in a freedom the body could never know. Like a disembodied being indeed one could imagine him pacing amid the wintry cloisters on that pale interminable afternoon in which the first part of
the play is steeped before the dreadful night of action begins.’
²⁵
His performance was perhaps like his prose: dreamy, diffuse, richly and sombrely coloured.

It was received with respect, but not excitement. Immense stress was laid on his youthfulness, which reminds us that it wasn’t until John Gielgud’s sensational performances of the thirties that the tradition of elderly Hamlets was swept
away.
HE KNOWS A HAWK FROM A HANDSAW,
said the caption over a strikingly posed photograph of Micheál, arms upraised, palms flat. ‘A Hamlet of metropolitan stature
and a distinguished addition to the meagre Shakespearean annals of the contemporary stage,’
²⁶
said Charles Collins. ‘Mac Liammóir has youth and the romantic qualifications for the great role – a sensitive and poetic face which wears
the mask of tragedy nobly … slowness of pace is Mac Liammóir’s handicap.’ And it is true: celerity was not Micheál’s strongest suit; a measured relish was responsible for some of his finest effects, but the mercurial aspect of Hamlet, in which Gielgud was supreme, was not attempted by Mac Liammóir.

Welles’s performance as Claudius was so much clearer and easier to respond to. ‘Into this version
of the world’s most interesting drama, Orson Welles, the bright morning star of Woodstock drama, fits himself with zest. He views the fratricidal king as decadent and monstrous enough to make the situation between uncle and nephew as melodramatically simple as that between Oliver Twist and Fagin. With the courage of his 19 summers and the impact of his own vigorous imagination, Mr Welles plays
the king much as Charles Laughton played Nero, lasciviously, swinishly. With no beard to hide a sensuously made-up face, and with bangs half-obscuring his sidelong eyes, this king is frankly degenerate. So much of an eye-catcher is this king that he at times hampers the play … [during the play within the play] he allows the audience to be conscious of nothing but the king, for during the major
part of the scene he is busy making love to his queen. Sitting with Miss Louise Prussing, who obligingly bared one shoulder to make the most seductive Gertrude in my experience, Mr Welles exchanged caresses, ripe plums, California grapes and lawless looks with her, interjecting so much amorous business as to fairly hog the scene. It is brilliant technical character work, but it flattens the drama,
which, as Hamlet remarks, is the thing.’

It sounds as if it might have led to an outbreak of justifiable thespicide from either of the distinguished professional players whose production Orson had thus invaded, but no: ‘his King was outrageously exciting,’ wrote Mac Liammóir. ‘Had he kept control and given the performance he promised in rehearsal’ – before he invented the make-up, perhaps?
– ‘it would have been the finest Claudius I have seen, but Orson in those days was a victim of stage intoxication: the presence of an audience caused him to lose his head; his horses panicked, and one was left with the impression of a man in the acute stages of delirium tremens.’ Even the amiable, ice-cream licking, fan-waving, buffet-supper chomping Woodstock audience was in two minds about it.
‘Some of the Woodstock patrons have been proclaiming that they didn’t like him, which merely means that
they didn’t like the character. That was young Mr Welles’ intention … the speech that contains the lines “there’s such divinity doth hedge a king” was fat meat for the elder Thespians. They made a play to the gallery with it. Welles takes that speech and shrewdly molds it into his treatment
of the king as a wheedling, cajoling scoundrel. Trembling inwardly, he pours out his oily rhetoric and bluffs Laertes into submission. This is a new idea, cleverly carried out; and it deserves a cheer.’ Mrs Henry Field confessed her doubts to the readers of the
Herald Examiner
: ‘Orson Welles departed from the orthodox king and we have not yet decided exactly what we think of his new departure.’
²⁷
Claudia Cassidy well describes the knife-edge on which the performance existed: ‘he thumbed a flat nose at convention, achieving a make-up somewhere between an obscene old woman and the mask of lechery that visits Dr Faustus. Decadence is here in a thicket of curls hung from a bald pate, with voluptuous mouth confirming the evil glimpsed in heavy-lidded eyes. Almost a caricature, this face, but
rescued from absurdity by the command of the voice that is the Welles passport to stardom.’

It is clear from this description that his performance was a melodramatic one, again: he created an ogre, a nightmare figure. It is hard to imagine what else, at his age, he could do – other than play safe and dull. He could hardly create a credible middle-aged, adulterous, guilt-haunted, manipulative
politician-king. Instead he did something in broad strokes which made a strong impact, sustained, always sustained, by that mighty organ, his voice. The voice is the focus of so much comment on Welles’s performances, early and late, that it is worth observing that any huge natural endowment is a double-edged sword for a performer. The temptation to rely on it to get you out of trouble is overwhelming,
and can prevent proper development. The greatest artists – Olivier and Margot Fonteyn spring to mind – are those of modest natural endowments who have worked and worked to extend them, thus developing in themselves disciplines and hard-won strength which open up worlds of expression and imagination unknown to those who had it all for nothing. In his performance, Welles was going for broke
– throwing in everything that he knew, exhausting his make-up box and rolling the verse on his tongue like vintage wine. These are the excesses of young actors with courage, appetite and ambition. What is odd is that the performance should have been given opposite actors – Louise Prussing, Hilton, Micheál – of great experience and consummate technique. It also odd for the performance to have been
reviewed by critics of major newspapers.
That, however, is what Welles had engineered for himself. His desire to shortcut the usual processes, had the usual consequences: forcing growth is a risky business.