Orson Welles, Vol I (64 page)

There
were now two enormous hits playing in tandem at the Mercury. Discipline was not always of the best: Welles received a report from Dick Wilson and Bill Alland that there was a total breakdown of it on
Shoemaker’s Holiday
; he duly went down to the theatre to crack the whip in his own original way. Standing in the wings with a one-fifth of Ballantine’s, he simply sprayed Scotch into the offenders’
faces. It seems not to have worked; mayhem continued to reign. In fact, the run of
Shoemaker’s Holiday
at the Mercury lasted no more than three and a half weeks; it and
Caesar
transferred to the much more capacious (and resonantly named) National Theatre two blocks up. Houseman wanted to exploit the commercial success of the shows by playing in a larger house, while maintaining their much-vaunted
repertory policy. The move was fortunate, because he soon needed to find a new theatre for
The Cradle Will Rock
, which had been playing under a commercial management to only moderate business at non-Broadway prices at the Windsor Theatre. The producer, Sam Grisman, begged him to increase the prices. How could he? They were absolutely publicly committed to their cheap-ticket policy; the press were
already on the look-out for any attempt to renege on it. ‘God keep them from all Broadway entanglements,’
³²
wrote Burns Mantle in the
Daily News
. ‘My only fear for the Mercury boys … is that they might make their productions collectors’ items if they kept the cost of them too high or gave with them something less than a fair evening’s entertainment … happily, the young experimenters have held
to their popular-price schedule, despite their success.’

Unimpressed–he was losing money – Grisman broke his contract and pulled out, leaving Houseman with debts and a commitment to complete a thirteen-week run, which he hoped to honour by bringing the show home. He was, in fact, despite the triumphant success of the two shows at the National (nearly twice the size of the Mercury), in some
financial difficulty; Welles had wildly overspent on the two classical productions, and the returns from the box office, at the specially low prices, were not sufficient to cover the expenses of what had quickly become a major classical company. A further money-making ploy was a five-month, nationwide tour of
Julius Caesar
from Providence to Toronto (in association with the perhaps unhappily named
Alex Yokel). The entirely new company was headed by – as Brutus – Tom Powers (who had created the role of Charles Marsden in
Strange Interlude
) and Edmond O’Brien
as Cassius. Welles flew out to Chicago several times to supervise the production, and it opened to great acclaim, though reading the reviews may have given him mixed pleasure. ‘Let it be said now and boldly,’ wrote the
Pittsburgh Journal’s
Florence Fisher Parry, ‘this Pittsburgh
Julius Caesar
far outranks the New York production … Orson Welles is the Mercury Theatre Brutus, and a bad one. He is a genius, but not in acting … Tom Powers has been vouchsafed the opportunity to reveal, as never before, his innate soundness of spirit.’ Her admiration of the production was unstinting, however. ‘It shows us in ten minutes the real meaning
of rabble-rousing and why men who have that power rule over the world today. It writes the best editorial we have yet been given on
WHY
Mussolini,
WHY
Hitler,
WHY
Lenin and his unearthly post-mortem power.’

Despite the critical enthusiasm, specially arranged lectures, gramophone records of the show (the first in a series of
The Mercury Shakespeare
, with Welles as a plummy Cassius, and the
relevant, slightly amended, volume from
Everybody’s Shakespeare
), and what Andrea Nouryeh calls ‘high-powered selling techniques’, business was unexceptional, and the Mercury’s half share of the profits never materialised, for the good reason that the show never went into profit. These financial set-backs, whose implications would eventually catch up with them in ways that could scarcely have
been predicted, did nothing to daunt their high spirits. As Houseman later wrote: ‘during February and March, the Mercury Theatre had one hundred and twenty-four actors performing in four shows in three theatres. Our three New York shows were playing within two blocks of each other on West 41st Street. We renamed it Mercury Street, and without permission from the city, put up temporary signs to that
effect on the corners of 6th and 7th Avenues and Broadway.’
³³
And they continued with their announced plans: the next show would be
The Duchess of Malfi
, and the one after that
Five Kings
, a two-part, two-evening amalgam of the two parts of
Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI
, and
Richard III
: the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Wars of the Roses twenty-five years ahead of time.

Welles invited the brilliantly
original painter and stage designer Pavel Tchelitchew (his work on the ballet
Ode
had been one of Diaghilev’s boldest experiments) to design
The Duchess of Malfi
; work was far advanced when a read-through of the play was announced. At a late-night session, eighty actors were present to read a play which has only eight roles of any length. Welles was late. Finally, when he arrived, ‘he’d had his
hair just done’,
³⁴
according to Norman Lloyd. ‘I’ll never forget him fingering his
gardenia and saying
THIS WILL PLEASE A FEW CLOSE FRIENDS AND I.’
Sherman, Kane, and Lloyd were designated the roles of madmen; Aline MacMahon read the Duchess; Coulouris, Price, and Welles read the rest. At the end of the read-through, nothing was said. It was never rehearsed again, and immediately thereafter dropped
without a word of explanation to either company or press.

It was obvious that there was trouble in the paradise that the Mercury had seemed to be. As they will in any group, half-formed suspicions, anxieties and grievances, invisible while momentum was being maintained, suddenly emerged, confirmed. The complicated manipulations of the repertory had seemed generally fruitful, if not always
comprehensible. There had been no consultation; the actors were among those who had to learn, in Welles’s phrase, ‘to shut up’. An increasing uncertainty as to the future of the group began to be voiced, fuelled by the postponement, hard on the heels of the cancellation of
The Duchess of Malfi
, of
Five Kings
, and the suspension of company night rehearsals to prepare for it. It was decided that
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
should be dropped from the repertory at the National; those who were not in
Caesar
or the forthcoming
Heartbreak House
(announced to open in April as the last play of the season at the Mercury after the closure of
The Cradle Will Rock
) were discharged, with neither retainer nor the promise of employment in the second season. A further problem was the overwhelming emphasis
placed on Welles himself, both in the press and in the Mercury’s own publicity. Few had failed to note the irony of one of the supreme exponents of theatrical caesarism working with such dictatorial fervour on a production subtitled Death of a Dictator:

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world

Like a Colossus, and we petty men

Walk under his huge legs, and peep about

To find
ourselves dishonourable graves …

Now in the names of all the gods at once,

Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed

That he is grown so great?

It was scarcely possible to open a newspaper without reading further paeans of praise. The
Time
magazine profile,
MARVELOUS BOY,
appeared in May of 1938: ‘With a voice that booms like Big Ben’s but a laugh like a youngster’s giggle, Orson
Welles plays lead off-stage as well as on. He loves the mounting Welles legend,
but wants to keep the record straight. Stories of his recent affluence annoy him … as active as a malted-milk mixer, Welles is for all that very heavy-set, his adolescent moon face slowly beginning to resemble an American Emperor’s. Told he looks Roman, he asks, interestedly: “Do you mean sensual?” His own description
of himself: “I look like the dog-faced boy.” Troubled by his asthma, untroubled by his flat feet, Welles gets a little exercise walking and fencing, most by directing and rehearsing. He starts off a Falstaffian meal with a dozen oysters, tops it off with a big black cigar … at the Mercury, Houseman runs the business end, Welles is Caesar (not Brutus) where stagecraft is concerned, and in his own
opinion “pretty dictatorial.” Shadow to Shakespeare, Shoemaker to Shaw – all in one season – might be a whole career for most men, but for Welles it is only Springboard to Success … the brightest moon that has risen over Broadway in years, Welles should feel at home in the sky, for the sky is the only limit his ambitions recognize.’
³⁵
The Mercurians were beginning to feel that they were distantly
accompanying a spotlit soloist in a concerto of his own composition.

This was not entirely Welles’s fault. Like any theatre, the Mercury was always eager to sell itself to the press, and that meant pushing whatever was most newsworthy, and
that
meant Welles. He eagerly embraced this destiny, oblivious of, or at least indifferent to, the disaffection so easily provoked among fellow workers.
There was even resentment at the disparity between his income and theirs (his radio career had never faltered for one moment). He defended his standard of living in the
Time
magazine profile, citing ‘the Big House at Sneden’s Landing, N.Y., the luxurious Lincoln town car and chauffeur’. The Big House, Welles insisted, wasn’t such a big house (‘eight rooms and four nooks, $115 a month’), the car
was second hand, and the chauffeur existed because Welles himself didn’t drive. ‘I’m one of those fellows so frightened of driving that I go 80 miles an hour,’ he says, ‘and the more frightened I get, the faster I go.’ This has the ring of truth about it. But he was coy about the amount of his earnings, as
Time
reported. ‘How much money Welles is making he will not say. He is not even sure he
knows …’ There is no reason to assume that he had fallen significantly below the figure of $1,000 a month, particularly since his assumption of the Shadow’s mantle. In modern equivalents, this means that he was earning half a million dollars a year, which might indeed have been a galling thought for his poverty-stricken colleagues, squeezing by on their $28.75 Per week. Of course many of them were
also doing extensive radio work; and it is absolutely true that he had earned all
this money entirely on his own merits. None the less, the him-and-us feeling was hard to counteract; in this same month of April, he received an award for outstanding theatrical achievement from the New York Drama Study Group. Welles, Welles and more Welles. Receiving the award, he seized the opportunity to announce
major touring plans; he wanted, he said, to do as many performances on the road as in New York. The Mercury, he said, harking back to Todd and Skipper, was to become an independent film-making company, shooting productions for schools and colleges. There was no end to what he planned: ‘Nor does he want the Mercury to pin all its faith in the classics,’ continued the
Time
profile. ‘He pines to
do a real mystery, a real farce, a British pantomime, a fast revue, a Mozart opera.’ All of this, which might once have thrilled his fellow Mercurians, may have seemed less enthralling now they realised that they were unlikely to be part of it.

Brooks Atkinson of the
Times
, who was among the Mercury’s staunchest and most concerned supporters, noted some of this in a piece entitled
GOTHAM HOBGOBLIN:
‘He is an intuitive showman. His theatrical ideas are creative and inventive. And his theatrical imagination is so wide in its scope that he can give the theatre enormous fluency and power. Ingenious lighting, stylised grouping, strange sounds and bizarre show effects are the instruments he uses for playing his macabre theatrical tunes. Plays have to give way to his whims, and actors have
to subordinate their art when he gets under way, for The Shadow is monarch of all he surveys. It is no secret that his wilfulness and impulsiveness may also wreck the Mercury Theatre, for he is a thorough egotist in the grand manner of the old-style tragedian.’
³⁶
This piece provoked a letter to the editor from ‘an ex-Mercury actress’: ‘1) I found Welles less insistent on his own point of view
than most directors, more receptive to accepting the actors’
³⁷
alternative interpretation and extraordinarily generous in giving recognition to a good performance. 2) As to “wilfulness and impulsiveness” I encountered nothing of the sort … he didn’t do the usual shifting from day to day, but simply developed as the play unfolded itself under actual acting.’ Tellingly, she adds: ‘Welles as a director
has faults. For one thing, he’s almost always late. For another, he himself wastes time and permits others to waste time in irrelevant discussions. And so on. But he’s far too brilliant a force in the theatre to permit an aura of discredit to grow up around him which in the specific respects generally mentioned is quite without basis.’ Not many presently employed, about to be ex-Mercury actors,
would have felt inclined to append their signatures.

Feeling was so strong in the company that a meeting was called: something which had never before happened. The company expressed their fears and anxieties, particularly concerning the project of preparing a touring version of
Five Kings
as a try-out for its inclusion in the second season. Welles replied: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you may have
heard some rumours that the tour is off and it’s true. Some of you may have thought that as a part of the Mercury Theatre, the Mercury Theatre owes some obligations. I want to state, here and now, I am the Mercury Theatre.’
³⁸
Hearing this regal pronouncement, Kevin O’Morrison, playing small parts in
Caesar
and
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
at the National, told Andrea Nouryeh, ‘most of us in our hearts
just tore whatever loyalties we had’.
³⁹
Among the defectors was Aline MacMahon, who immediately turned down the role of Hesione Hushabye she had just been offered. It may be argued that the company’s success was largely due to Welles; certainly it would have been inconceivable without him, his flair, his courage, his talent, and, to a large measure, his personality, so impressive and intriguing
to the press.