Orson Welles, Vol I (59 page)

Happy the actor who knows his own gift. He has at least a chance, given a moderate amount of luck and a shrewd choice of work, of playing straight down the centre of the character to create a vivid and clear image of a particular human being. If he is struggling against
type, to express things not in his personal experience or make-up, then he will almost certainly miss the core of the character, however interestingly he may embellish its surface. Though Welles was unquestionably intelligent, the most striking feature of his acting persona is not intelligence but power; he described himself, quite accurately, as ‘he who plays the king’. Curiously enough, his
portrayals of ‘thinking people’ often lack intellectual conviction: what he demonstrates is thoughtfulness. Partly this stems from a lack of structure in his own thinking; mostly it derives from the simple technical fact of not having completely mastered the text, and thus the thought. Welles, instead of actually thinking, acts it.
It would seem that what really drew Welles to the role of Brutus
was not so much his cerebral nature, but rather his nobility: this dark, wild, immature, titanically possessed young man wanted to present himself as the very soul of dignity and responsibility. His method of doing so was – according to his own formula – simply to suppress the ignoble parts of himself. Easy.

This cavalier attitude to his own performance is partly explicable by absorption in
other responsibilities; but there is a strong suggestion that he became involved in his other responsibilities in order not to have to immerse himself in his own performance. He didn’t want to evolve his performance; he didn’t want to talk about it, or to think about it. In Lehman Engel’s acute words: ‘His own performances happened suddenly for good or ill. They were or were not at the very outset.’
¹²
In none of his utterances on the subject of acting does Welles ever speak of the work that goes into a performance. The assumption is that you can either play the part or you can’t; if you can, then that’s it: you play it. It is a complex matter: he seemed to want to be acclaimed for his acting, but not to have to work on it. He expected to be acknowledged as a major actor, while insisting
that acting wasn’t a terribly important thing anyway.

His Brutus was barely glimpsed before the dress rehearsal. When the company were finally able to enter the theatre, the physical aspect of the production dominated totally. Every rehearsal was a technical rehearsal. Once the lights started to appear, Welles would move actors into their most effective groupings; he and Jeannie Rosenthal
would spend hours moving the actors or the lights to achieve the images they were striving for. They were in a state of constant experiment, Welles improvising as more and more lamps appeared, Rosenthal trying to make possible what he wanted. Despite the advances in technology and the brilliant innovations of McCandless and Feder, the art of lighting was still an approximate one. Houseman maintains
that only 50 per cent of cues plotted would materialise as envisaged. In order to combat this, Rosenthal invented a complex system for recording them which immediately enabled the Mercury to be more ambitious in terms of light than any other theatre. The theatre groups of the thirties were in the vanguard of the development of lighting design, not initially for aesthetic reasons, but from necessary
thrift. ‘The idea, the actor and a pool of light to focus interest on the performing area were used to convey the essence of meaning as never before. These pools of light,’
¹³
wrote Jean Rosenthal, ‘alone could create theatricality. Varied as directed,
downward or angled from back or front, left or right, high or low, each position produced its own plasticity and pattern.’

This was very much
the form of light identified with Welles’s stage productions; as Rosenthal became over the remaining twenty-five years of her life the dominant lighting designer of the American theatre, her view of light predominated too. ‘Jeannie considered the most important lighting was lighting air, not scenery or people,’
¹⁴
wrote her friend Lucia Victor. ‘The air in one of Jean’s shows vibrated with the
emotion of whatever the particular scene was about.’ Welles’s view exactly. In order to achieve it in
Julius Caesar
, they needed an enormous amount of equipment which they didn’t always have; the only solution was to replug the lights three times during the (interval-less) performance. ‘Every elaborate effect had to be created by hand,’
¹⁵
reports Andrea Noryeh. ‘Rosenthal stood on a catwalk to
synchronise the counts for dimming two distinct spotlights. She tapped on one crew member’s shoulder with one rhythm and on another crew member’s shoulder with a different one.’

There was a third member of the team, poor downtrodden Sam Leve, and he made his contribution to the lighting (it was he, for example, who realised that the famous Nuremberg lights would only work if the actors brought
smoke on with them, an effect achieved by stationing smudge pots in the wings). His claim, however, that the light-plot was his alone, executed to his prescription by Rosenthal, seems unlikely. He, Welles and Rosenthal all had strong ideas; Welles created an atmosphere where everything seemed possible. No one was tolerated who expressed caution or anxiety; neither time nor money were held to
be acceptable limitations. But there was no master-plan. The whole thing, once the basic line had been established by Welles, was open to negotiation, and to happy accident. ‘One effect, spoken of as stunning and innovative, was a marvelous accident,’
¹⁶
wrote Rosenthal. ‘During a dress rehearsal someone forgot to turn out the bald, overhead work lights – whose sole purpose is to illuminate the
grid from which the scenery ropes and pulleys are suspended – and they continued to shine down during the blackout just before the orchard scene. The pattern criss-crossing the stage, conveyed an impression of ground beneath bare branches. Paradoxically in view of the hard thinking and planning I believe in, accident is often the source of inspiration.’ A similar happy accident had occurred with
regard to the platforms. The original plan had been to pad the hollow platforms to stop them from amplifying the sound of the conspirators’ heavy boots; this plan was abandoned
due to cost. The boots’ drumming sound, urgent and menacing, became one of the production’s most distinctive features. Welles’s ability to exploit mishaps remained one of his enduring traits. He was galvanised by them;
the rush of adrenalin that they brought often redeemed what threatened to be dull work. Of course in October 1937 he was in no need of additional infusions of adrenalin; he was made of the stuff, and without even trying to, sent it pumping through the veins of anyone who came near him.

As far as the costumes were concerned, the production concept dictated uniformity. Welles’s friend Millia
Davenport refused to work on the show: too dull, she said, for a costume designer. In the event, they hired a job lot of olive-green military outfits which had been used in Maxwell Anderson’s 1924 anti-war play
What Price Glory?
The conspirators wore gangster-like clothes. The fascist feeling was startlingly underlined by Marc Blitzstein’s score, a series of grinding processional interludes scored
for a band consisting of trumpet, horn, percussion and Hammond organ, freely quoting Mussolini’s anthem, the ‘Giovinezza’, making Welles’s cheeky claim in interviews that he had intended no specific parallels rather hollow. In addition to his regular percussion, Blitzstein had somehow managed to locate a vast thunder drum constructed for the initial run of
Chu Chin Chow
, which was used to suitably
shattering effect; at the other end of the scale, he composed a delicate Kurt Weill-ish lute song for Lucius to sing to Brutus, a setting of
Orpheus with his Lute
. There was, too, an immensely complicated and endlessly troublesome sound score devised by the radio producer Irving Reis, of the
Columbia Workshop
. Apart from simple effects (crickets, owls, railway trains) played on gramophones, sound
in the theatre was virtually non-existent. Welles and Reis were experimenting with the sort of ambitious collages that radio engineers were starting to develop; the theatre’s speakers were not designed to cope with the levels of sound that the engineers provided, and piercing shrieks and incomprehensible rumbles were the only result.

The company were reeling under the weight of all this additional
input. The dress rehearsal is always a difficult moment in any production. The actors must desperately hang on to what they’ve achieved in the rehearsal room, and use the new elements to enhance and expand their work. The danger, especially in a non-realistic conception, is that they will be disorientated by the physical production, and sink under its weight. It takes some runs of the show
for the actors to rise above all these new factors and turn them to their advantage; particularly difficult if the director, as in this
case, is given to constant modification of every single aspect of the production. Some things suddenly became thrilling: Caesar’s death, for example, as he rolled down the diagonal line of conspirators till he came to Brutus, hanging on to his lapels, and gasping
Et tu Brute. ‘The way they came up the ramp to greet Caesar was wonderful,’
¹⁷
Norman Lloyd recalled. ‘Everybody had a real dagger: the lights caught them beautifully. Orson went upstage to stab Caesar. The first time we did it, Orson’s knife stuck in the stage and quivered. Jesus! it was unbelievable.’ But just as many things made no sense at all. In the prevailing confusion, Welles managed to
fall fifteen foot off one of the platforms; miraculously, he picked himself up and carried on changing everything. Still there had been no dress rehearsal. Finally, it took place and was a desperate shambles. Welles found himself faced with a mutiny: Norman Lloyd refused to play the Cinna scene, the scene on which they had worked obsessively week in and week out, on the grounds that they had never
really rehearsed it – not for its acting content. Welles acceded; at the first preview, to replace the scene, stage-hands wheeled a large brute light to the foot of the stage and shone it into the audience’s eyes. This – matinee – performance was an unmitigated disaster: the primitive sound system became completely unmanageable. At the end of the show there was no applause. Henry Senber, the press
officer, went backstage, aghast and said to Welles ‘My God, we didn’t even get a curtain call.’ Quite understandably, Welles spat in his eye. Senber was about to strike him. Welles begged him to spit in
his
eye, which he did. Life went on.

The show, however, did not. The next few previews were suspended, while they set to work on solving their problems. Houseman, who, stealing time from his
teaching schedule at Vassar, had been at Welles’s side, on his insistence, twenty hours a day during the entire period of technical rehearsal, kept calm, which is exactly what a producer should do. It is unlikely that his outward demeanour was an accurate reflection of his inner state. The Mercury Theatre had been in crisis since its inception, a bare six weeks before. By November 1st, the money
initially raised had run out. At the box office, the cheaper seats were doing well but the carriage trade was resistant. The ticket agents were openly scornful of them as ‘amateurs’. The first investment had rapidly disappeared; only a fortnight before the official opening of
Julius Caesar
, Rosenthal and George Zorn presented Houseman with a union labour bill for $2,000 which he simply didn’t
have. The reality of life away from the comfortable, labour-intensive Federal Theatre was made
rudely apparent. Thanks to a chance meeting, Houseman was able to explain his plight to the playwright Clare Booth and her husband Henry Luce, proprietor of
Time
magazine: they chipped in $2,500, a bagatelle for them, the difference between life and death for the Mercury. Houseman’s old flame Mina Curtiss
put in another thousand, and they were in business again. It all hung by a thread, though.
Caesar
must be a huge success, or the Mercury would fold as soon as it had opened.

These anxieties of Houseman were scarcely tempered by his relationship with Welles, or indeed the company. Typically, the actors were suspicious of and in some cases actually hostile to ‘the management’. He was perceived
as financially stingy, and was, from time to time, quite prepared to cut the actors’ salaries. The company joke was that they’d bring a horse into Houseman’s office. He wouldn’t mind, the joke went, he’d just persuade the horse to take a cut in its oats. Welles did nothing to explain his function or support him. Norman Lloyd, later a close friend, shared the general view: ‘In those days we never
took him very seriously. We thumbed our noses at authority – and Jack was the boss. He lacked Orson’s charisma, he totally lacked confidence. He stuttered, he stammered. His English accent was against him because it made him affected; he wore a suit. We felt what’s he doing in the theatre? Little did we know that he was an essential part of Orson’s success.’
¹⁸
Years later, Lloyd said to him, ‘You
were scared to death in those days,’ to which Houseman replied ‘the fear was infinite.’ Teichmann describes him as living ‘in anguish, fear and righteous indignation’.
¹⁹
Welles – ‘this creature, this Frankenstein that he had built’ – had taken over. ‘Orson hired press agents, Orson gave interviews, Orson was photographed, and Houseman was left there to run the operation.’ Goostie Weissberger was
aware of Houseman’s desperate need of Welles. ‘He was the most insecure man you ever knew, terribly afraid of doing or saying something that would sever their relationship.’
²⁰

This anxiety did not prevent him from engaging with Welles in huge rows, one of which Welles describes in his screenplay for
The Cradle Will Rock
: ‘the entire theatre is treated to the alarums and discursions of a classic
HOUSEMAN-WELLES
difference of opinion. As an actor, trained to project iambic pentameters to the furthest reaches of large rehearsal galleries,
ORSON
is, inevitably, the noisiest and therefore sounds the more aggressive …
HOUSEMAN
is busily, but quietly, kindling the flames … if
ORSON
can roar like a lion,
JACK HOUSEMAN
has a smiling mouth which “biteth like an adder”.’ But the relationship was
as complicated for Welles as it
was for Houseman; Welles required approval, as is made clear in a speech a little later on in the same screenplay: