Orson Welles, Vol I (53 page)

Roosevelt was quite consciously playing two sets of extremists off against one another. Welles and Houseman had tried to secure themselves against government intervention by inviting Flanagan and the WPA bigwig Lawrence Morris to a run-through; ‘magnificent’, he had
pronounced it. There was enormous interest in the show, mainly from leftist organisations; the theatre had already, a week before the start of public performances (an unusually large number of previews, thirty-one, had been scheduled) sold 18,000 tickets. Welles and Houseman were determined, directive or no directive, that
The Cradle Will Rock
must open. Had they not done so, it would inevitably
have seemed that they were bowing to government pressure.

Their first move was to arrange a public dress rehearsal, which duly took place on 14 June, in front of New York’s most fashionable and progressive elements. The show itself, plagued with technical problems, went somewhat flatly; the singers were still battling with the thirty-piece orchestra. None the less, the audience went wild at
the end of it; a gesture of solidarity. Another dress rehearsal passed without incident. The following day, the 16th, was the scheduled first public performance. The house – 600 seats of it – had been sold to benefit the Downtown Music School where Blitzstein taught; everything was ready for the show to open. But, according to Houseman, ‘the customary telegram authorising the production
never
came’. Instead what he called the WPA’s ‘Cossacks’ were guarding the theatre with instructions to see that no government property was removed. ‘The theatre was sealed. Neither the audience, which had gathered outside, nor we, the performers, could enter it,’
¹³
recalled Howard da Silva, Larry Foreman in the show. ‘I made a big fuss, threatened to storm the barrier single-handedly, principally because
my new” toupee was in my dressing room and I loved it.’ Will Geer and Howard da Silva entertained the audience in front of the theatre, Geer singing mountain songs while da Silva, ‘continuing to rehearse’, gave them one of Larry’s speeches about the difference between closed and open shop.

‘And now,’ wrote Marc Blitzstein, ‘the irrepressible energy and lightning drive of Orson Welles revealed
themselves. He called us all together … in the only green room we had. It was actually the ladies’ powder room downstairs. I remember an unexplained pink mannequin standing in the corner. Welles said to us, “We have a production ready; we have a fully paid audience outside. And,” said Welles, “we will have our première tonight.”’ For Blitzstein, Welles was the uncontested hero of the hour: ‘Welles
proceeded to solve the problem with an ingenuity, a speed and a daring I can almost not believe as I tell it.’ Houseman’s account of events is more detailed (some details have been contested) and suggests that Welles was as much at the mercy of minute-by-minute developments as anyone else. The problems were twofold: the simple physical problem of how and where to perform the show; the second,
how to do so legally. The musicians’ union had stated categorically that if the show were to be done in a commercial theatre, then its members must be paid at regular commercial rates; the actors’ union had insisted that the material belonged to the Federal Theatre Project and could only be performed under their auspices. The irony of a pro-union show being blocked by the unions of the people performing
it was lost on no one. These objections were at any rate academic in the absence of a suitable theatre. The ‘Historical Background on
The Cradle Will Rock
’ prepared by Unit 891’s press office three days later details the search: ‘The Comedy and the 49th Street, it developed, were not union houses. The Empire was done up in mothballs. The seats at the Guild were torn up for a repainting job. The
National was too expensive. During much frantic telephoning a smallish man in a dark hat had been trying to tell the boys something …’ Finally, when they had abandoned any hope of finding anywhere, ‘the little man in the dark hat spoke up. “Why not take my theatre?” he asked. He was the renting agent for the Venice.’ According to Blitzstein, Welles
told the actors: ‘you may not appear onstage,
but there is nothing to prevent you from buying your way into whatever theatre we find, and then why not get up from your seats, as first-class American citizens, and speak your piece when your cue comes.’ The actors then trooped down the several blocks to the old theatre in company with their excited audience (who had been regaled outside the sealed theatre with pamphlets saying
YOUR FRIENDS
HAVE BEEN DISMISSED! YOU MAY BE NEXT!
). Along the way they picked up interested passers-by, while the technicians started to prepare the building for the show. Jeannie Rosenthal finally delivered the piano she had been driving around until the theatre was confirmed.

The Venice (formerly Jolson’s 59th Street Theatre) was much larger than the Maxine Elliott: with its 1,700 seats and huge stage
(eighty foot by forty-five foot), it had been home to many musicals (
The Student Prince
amongst them) but its history encompassed seasons with the great Shakespeareans Southern and Marlowe and the famous twelve-week visit of the Moscow Art Theatre who played
The Cherry Orchard, The Three Sisters
, and
The Brothers Karamazov
. Having somewhat fallen on hard times, the theatre was only used now by
an Italian company at weekends; when the audience for
The Cradle Will Rock
finally entered the auditorium, they found the Italian flag draped over a box, an emblem of Mussolini’s state which was then swiftly torn down to a huge roar of approval. The audience was now performing itself, everyone knowing beyond doubt that they were present at an event. Welles and Houseman too were elated by the drama
of it all.

‘Like partners in a vaudeville team, Orson and I made our entrance together from the wings onto the stage.’
¹⁴
Houseman’s brief speech expressed his gratitude to Hallie Flanagan and the Federal Theatre Project for backing a show that no one else would but insisted that the show had to open. Then, according to Lehman Engel (who had stuffed Blitzstein’s score down his trousers to smuggle
it past the guards at the Maxine Elliott Theatre), Welles ‘made a too-long speech to explain the situation, the scenes, the deficiencies of this kind of presentation’.
¹⁵
He insisted that they were making an artistic protest, not a political one, and, having described the production as it would have been, he finally announced: ‘We have the honour to present – with the composer at the piano –
The
Cradle Will Rock
!’ At that moment, Welles handed the show back to Blitzstein; it now belonged entirely to him. Feder’s spotlight swung round to pick him out, sitting in shirt sleeves and suspenders at the piano, its back removed for increased volume, chewing peanuts as he continued
to do throughout the show. He started to play and then to sing his score ‘as I had done so often for prospective
producers – we used to call it my Essex House run’. After a line or two Olive Stanton (the Moll) from her place in the stalls joined her voice to the composer’s, giving courage to all the others who, one by one, joined in. Eventually, the actors got up, stood in the aisles, even danced a little. Then the chorus, sitting behind Lehman Engel, started to sing. The only instrumentalist who turned up,
the accordionist, Rudy, joined in whenever appropriate.

‘At the end of the first act,’ wrote Blitzstein, ‘the poet Archibald MacLeish sprinted backstage to say “a new day had dawned in the theatre, the stagnant and supine audience had been killed forever” and he had to make a speech about it. And so he did, after the final curtain.’ That final curtain (there was of course no curtain as such
at all) had provoked a storm of applause. ‘Even that moment had its particular theatrical flair. MacLeish wore a Palm Beach suit, and when Welles held up his hand and finally stopped the roaring pandemonium that greeted us, saying, “We will all now sit down, and the one man left standing will be Mr Archibald MacLeish,’ there stood the white suit gleaming conspicuously, and we were told we had witnessed
a historical event.’ It is hard not to share Blitzstein’s sense of the comedy of the liberal poet. ‘The chief accomplishment of the Federal Theatre Project,’ said MacLeish, ‘has been to return the arts to the artists and to the people who love them and to bring artists and their audiences together. Mr Blitzstein was perhaps as good a composer two years ago as he is now but two years ago he
could not have found a relationship with an audience which he has tonight and of which you have had a part.’ For MacLeish it was the dawn of a new golden age – the rebirth of that very Greek figure, the public artist, performing his own work. For Blitzstein, it was the opening salvo in a revolutionary war.

Elsewhere in the city that night, there were other demonstrations of defiance against
the impending threat to the Project: after a performance of
The Case of Philip Lawrence
, and, somehow bizarrely, after an all-Brahms chamber concert, there were sit-down strikes; later there was a night-long sit-down strike for the WPA Music Project. Events at the Maxine Elliott Theatre had been reported in
The New York Times
the following morning.

STEEL STRIKE OPERA IS PUT OFF BY WPA:
¹⁶
Persons
who heard the opera’s score and extracts last night carried away no very clear impression except that its theme was the steel workers should join a union.
There was a song (uncomplimentary) about military training in colleges, one about Honolulu, and one about ‘the freedom of the press,’ the purport of which was that there isn’t any … when the opera ended after about two hours, Mr Welles made
another speech saying the performance was ‘not a political protest but an artistic one’. Archibald MacLeish made a speech in which he praised the ‘vitality’ of the FTP.

There was no show the following day while everyone tried to deal with the consequences of that heady first performance. Hallie Flanagan had asked Blitzstein and Welles to go with her to Washington to speak to Hopkins, to try
to retrieve the situation, but Orson had decided to go unilaterally, which he did that day, the 17th. Barry Witham has uncovered the transcripts of the meeting that took place; they give a vivid impression of the gap between the two sides. Welles’s position was simple: the show was ready to open. It was bad for morale, and bad for the show not to do so. The WPA position was equally clear: all units
within the project had to pull together. They were all under threat; if they co-ordinated their efforts in conjunction with the WPA itself, the damage might be contained. Welles was indifferent to this line of argument. He was sorry, but he had a show which was ready to open, and for which he had already sold a large number of tickets. His interlocutors – David Niles and Ellen Woodward, both people,
as Witham makes clear, of impeccable New Deal credentials, fighters for school meals and public health facilities, and passionate supporters of Mrs Flanagan – were genuinely hurt by his lack of esprit de corps: ‘I cannot get out of my consciousness the fact that if we do have any trouble, I will never be able to forget the fact that the people whom we counted on to make our troubles a little
easier dropped this additional burden upon us,’
¹⁷
said Niles.

It is impossible to see how there could have been any compromise between the two sides. It was essential for the WPA that if an order were made, it should be obeyed by all the many troubled sections of the Project; for one unit to break ranks would have threatened the entire delicate structure. From Welles’s and Houseman’s point
of view, failing to open for another two weeks would have brought them obloquy from the left (from which most of their audience was drawn) and restlessness from within the Unit. The ease, however, with which Welles proposed that they take the play away from the Unit and present it commercially (and despite his insistence that he would be happy to see the show open at the Maxine Elliott) suggests
that he had no great attachment to the Federal Theatre Project. It presented him with nothing but constraints; its ideals were not his ideals.

Hallie Flanagan gave her view ten years later in a letter to Marc Blitzstein: ‘Important as the issue raised by
The Cradle Will Rock
was, it was not the only issue facing us. The thing that people on the New York Project never cared about, never understood,
and never took the trouble to find out, is that this is a big country. The Federal Theatre Project was bigger than any project in it. It included not only
The Cradle Will Rock
but the theatre for the children of coal miners in Gary, Indiana, the enterprise for vaudevillians in Portland, Oregon, the negro theatre in Chicago, the research being done in Oklahoma.’
¹⁸
What did Welles care for any of
these? He had a show ready to open. The meeting in Washington ended with Ellen Woodward saying: ‘if you decide to go ahead with a commercial production of the play, I see no reason for Mrs Flanagan not to drop this thing.’
¹⁹
Witham and Richard France before him quite correctly point out that there was never any discussion at this meeting of political censorship, no suggestion on the part of the
government representatives that the subject matter of the piece is regrettable, nor any attribution to them by Welles of that motive. Nor does Welles complain of the sealing of the theatre, of the presence of the so-called ‘Cossacks’. The political theme came later; the immediate issue was one of discipline within the Project.

As soon as Welles (who had been alone, accompanied neither by Houseman
nor by MacLeish, as some reports suggest) returned to New York, he and his partners swung into action; they released the piece for commercial presentation, and gained two weeks’ leave for WPA members, all of whom now joined Equity, as did Blitzstein. Helen Deutsch, normally press agent for the Theatre Guild, chipped in $1,250 towards the $2,305 needed to put up the Equity bond and pay back
dues. It was decided to play a fortnight at the Venice, under exactly the circumstances fortuitously evolved at the first preview; the ticket scale was to be from 35c to a dollar; by error, a roll of 25c tickets was purchased, so WPA members were admitted for 25c. Business was slow to begin with, due to a bad notice (of the dress rehearsal, set and all) in the
Daily Worker
, and an absence of notices
anywhere else. The box office at the Maxine Elliott was busy denying its existence. Eventually, however, after coverage in several magazines including
Time
(where Lillian Hellman said of it ‘There is good contemptuous laughter behind
The Cradle Will Rock
and that laughter gives the play its vigor’)
²⁰
and the denunciation of
the CIO, America’s Communist Party, by the head of Little Steel, there
was standing room only. They then went on tour, principally to steel towns, where business and reactions were variable.