Orson Welles, Vol I (66 page)

Such was not yet the case with the investors. With the company, betrayal and disappointment was rife. The
Heartbreak House
company was particularly resentful
of the unceasing emphasis on Welles: as Price later said, not to be paid a proper salary was one thing; to receive no credit either was intolerable. Uncertainty was rife. The only plans for the second season were vague: a revival of
The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Five Kings
(which so far existed only in Welles’s mind) and
The Importance of Being Earnest
, in which Chubby Sherman was to play Algernon,
with Vincent Price as Jack. There were no dates, and no one, apart from those two actors, were allocated roles; the entire company was laid off. Geraldine Fitzgerald was advised to go to Hollywood, since they had nothing to offer her. To all intents and purposes, the acting group ceased to exist. Even me vaguely planned season collapsed completely when Chubby Sherman suddenly withdrew his commitment,
effectively making it impossible to revive
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
, of which his Firk was the linchpin and making
The Importance of Being Earnest
, specifically planned to find him another starring role, pointless. Having repeatedly failed to get a date for the start of rehearsals, he accepted a part in the Broadway revue
Sing out the News
. His withdrawal from the company was a personal blow for
Welles, which he took very badly, repairing to bed for several days. Sherman was as near as Welles came to having a friend. He had been the associate director on
Julius Caesar
, director of the Studio (such as it was), a stalwart colleague, and, as Houseman put it, in some odd way (as revealed in his indiscreet interview in
The New York Times
) ‘the conscience of the company’. Thirty years later
he told Andrea Nouryeh that it wasn’t simply the uncertainty over dates that made him withdraw from the Mercury: it was the life-style. Welles expected him to carouse with him every night after the show, unfortunately neglecting to have any money with him (a regal habit which persisted to the end of his life), leaving Sherman to fork up, which he couldn’t afford to do: ‘the high-livers were killing
me,’
⁴⁹
he said. His decision was surely encouraged by his partner, the undubbable Whitford Kane. So he and Welles parted company; they never worked together again. Houseman added a further reflection on Sherman’s departure. ‘The pace had become so wild, the mood so intense and violent as to be physically and mentally unendurable. Was Chubby, with his low threshold of fatigue and pain, merely the
first of those who could not bear to stay around?’
⁵⁰

There seems to be little doubt that both Houseman and Welles were out of touch, in their different ways, with the company. It is good and necessary up to a point for the directors of a theatre to be somewhat aloof from the members of the company, who have to have the opportunity to gripe and criticise without it becoming an issue every time.
The question is: were Houseman and Welles really thinking about the company’s interests? It came back to the fundamental question: what sort of a company was the Mercury to be? Was its objective simply to produce exciting shows as often as possible? If that was the case, the show was the thing, and the group must be reconstituted every time to serve the particular show. But that was not what
had brought these particular actors together. The problem was partly one of too many fine words, both Houseman and Welles silver-tonguing their cohorts on a minute-by-minute basis, loosely invoking soul-stirring ideals to negotiate the crisis of the moment. They played with their colleagues’ dreams; a dangerous thing to do. Their plans seemed improvised from day to day, as did their views of what
they were up to and who they were. They sank no roots. And now, despite their brilliant season and their golden reputation, they had nothing to build on. The very continuance of the Mercury seemed, unthinkably, in doubt. At this moment of peril, once again something quite unforeseen saved them, as it was with quite uncanny frequency to do, until, in the fullness of time, the luck ran out.

H
OUSEMAN DESCRIBES
the moment at which he heard about the Mercury’s latest adventure. Having left Welles – still brooding over Chubby Sherman’s defection – in a stupor of rage and despair (‘limp and huge in a darkened room with his face to the wall’)
¹
, Houseman sent Augusta Weissberger off on her honeymoon and himself on a brief holiday with his mother.
For all he knew, the Mercury’s first season would also be its last. No sooner had he set out but ‘I saw an oversized black limousine coming up the hill at high speed. As it approached, it began to sound its horn and I became aware of Orson’s huge face sticking out of the window with its mouth wide open and of his gigantic voice echoing through the surrounding woods.’ His news was that the Columbia
Broadcasting System had offered him (and the Mercury) nine weekly programmes to perform adaptations of famous books; the series would be known as
First Person Singular
, and Welles was to be featured as its quadruple-threat creator; ‘written, directed, produced and performed by Orson Welles’ was to be its epigraph.

This last notion was jointly conceived by Welles’s agent Schneider (‘you gotta
do it all, Orson’) and William Lewis of CBS, who was happy to use it as the show’s formula. Lewis, the network’s chief executive, had acquired considerable respect as someone with an eye for talent and a readiness to back it. ‘What can management do to encourage the superb craftsmanship that this business so desperately needs? Mainly it is in the wise and sympathetic handling of the creative people
you have developed. Make them feel cherished and important; praise good work or extraordinary effort on the part of creative people – and – above all – see that they get credit for it.’
²
Hence, for example,
Norman Corwin’s Words without Music
; hence Welles’s billing. The incentive that he fails to mention, of course, is money. He had very little to give. What he offered was freedom to experiment
and prestige, which is also what he wanted – not for himself but for his network.

This was no form of philanthropy. Radio listenership was vast, but standards were pitifully low. There had been considerable legal
pressure on the networks to counteract the overwhelming amount of mindless (and highly popular) banality being dispensed over the air waves under the sponsorship of commerce, for
whom the programmes were the merest peg for their plugs. A coalition of liberals, academics, artists, leaders of labour, agriculture, religion, and, in the words of the historian Eric Barnouw, ‘the non-profit world’, formed a pressure group in the early days of the New Deal (when no problem seemed unsolvable) to denounce radio’s current output with some vehemence as ‘a pollution of the air’, ‘a cultural
disaster’, ‘a huckstering orgy’, ‘a pawnshop’, and, conclusively, ‘a sickness in the national culture’. (More moderately, but perhaps even more witheringly, Norman Corwin, later one of the medium’s most distinguished practitioners, had written ‘There is about as much creative genius in radio today as there is in a convention of plasterers.’) The pressure group demanded the revocation of the
networks’ licences, and a new allocation of frequencies ‘with one fourth going to educational, religious, agricultural, labor, co-operative and similar non-profit organisations’ (Barnouw). The measure was heard with some sympathy in Congress, galvanising the networks into trying to transform themselves (at least in Congressional eyes) into patrons of art. On the strength of their good intentions,
the legal measure was abandoned, but it hovered, a perpetual threat.

The transformation of the networks into Gonzagas and Medicis of the air waves was easily and cheaply accomplished. The pressure groups were offered free slots (of which there were plenty) and there was a move to engender new and serious programmes, unsponsored. This lay the foundation for what is known as The Golden Age of
Radio. It was a part of Welles’s extraordinary good fortune that he appeared on the radio scene at exactly the moment when it was ready to develop into a major expressive medium. William S. Paley, who had recently bought and revitalised CBS, had 77 per cent of unused air space; this he deployed in the creation of a number of so-called ‘sustaining’ programmes of which Irving Reis’s
Columbia Workshop
was the supreme example: unsponsored, cheap ($400 a programme), but with creative carte blanche. These slots were mostly those impossible to sell to advertisers because the competition –
Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy
, for example – was just too powerful. Absence of advertisers meant that there was no need to pitch the programme at any specific group, which need more than any other factor dictated
the nature of the programmes on the mainstream frequencies. Thus Paley accrued great prestige for his network, and created great opportunities for the artists and
technicians, and all for a song – to the chagrin of NBC who were loaded with money, but devoid of kudos. Their kudos was acquired later, in the very expensive form of Toscanini.

Lewis offered Welles a total budget of $50,000 for
nine programmes, out of which he had to pay for everything but the orchestra. For someone who had been earning as much as $1,000 a week for the previous three years, this was small beer, but a glorious opportunity. Lewis’s approach to Welles was characteristically bold, though it was not exactly a reckless gamble.

He was scarcely entrusting the new series to a tyro.
Les Misérables
had placed
Welles among the leaders of quality radio; a small group, and not widely known, but a formidable one. The exploration of the medium’s possibilities had been recent and remarkably quick, and had already thrown up two or three brilliant producers. Welles was the only actor-director among them; his peers were Reis of the
Columbia Workshop
, the highly original Arch Oboler, master of bizarre suspense
stories, William Robson (who had produced a re-creation of the San Quentin prison break as it happened) and Max Wylie. Welles had worked as an actor with most of these men, as well as on
The March of Time
, no mean innovator itself, and was fully aware of the technical possibilities of the moment. He had arrived in radio when it was starting to grow, to develop: the vocabulary was in flux, the
scope of expression seemingly limitless.

His show was announced, in
The New York Times
, with predictable flourish: ‘Orson Welles, the twenty-three-year-old actor-director who has introduced several innovations in the technique of the legitimate theatre, has been invited with the Mercury Theatre to produce nine one-hour weekly broadcast dramas over WABC’s network, beginning July 11, 1938.’
³
Welles was quoted as saying: ‘we plan to bring to radio the experimental techniques which have proved so successful in another medium, and to treat radio with the intelligence and respect such a beautiful and powerful medium deserves,’ rather cheekily suggesting that no one had thought of this before. He wanted to make it very clear that there was no question of simply transferring the Mercury’s
repertory to the radio. ‘I think it is time that radio came to realise the fact that no matter how wonderful a play may be for the stage, it cannot be as wonderful for the air.’ In saying this, he was declaring war on his predecessor in the same slot, Lux Radio Theatre, introduced by Cecil B. de Mille, and, even more directly, on
First Nighter
, billed as being broadcast from ‘The Little Theatre
off Times Square’. The format of this programme
had ‘Mr First Nighter’ being shown to his seat by an ‘usher’ just before curtain time. At intermission between acts, the usher would call out, ‘Smoking in the downstairs and outer lobby only, please!’ After the commercial a buzzer would sound and the usher would call out, ‘Curtain going up!’ Welles was having none of this. His brief was to innovate;
that was his profile: The Innovator. Actually, in this medium, as in others, he was the Fulfiller: absorbing innovations, and applying them at high pressure.

Welles strenuously insisted on the distinction between his theatre work and what he was attempting on radio. In an article for
Radio Annual
, he says ‘The less a radio drama resembles a play the better it is likely to be. This is not to
indicate for one moment that radio drama is a lesser thing. It must be, however, drastically different. This is because the nature of the radio demands a form impossible to the stage. The images called up by a broadcast must be imagined, not seen. And so we find that radio drama is more akin to the form of the novel, to story telling, than to anything else of which it is convenient to think.’
⁴
He pursues this theme in his unpublished
Lecture Notes on Acting
: ‘There is no place where ideas are as purely expressed as on the radio … it is a narrative rather than a dramatic form.’
⁵
This emphasis on the narrative element was not unique to Welles; Eric Barnouw has identified ‘an explosion of interest in radio as a narrative device’. His most distinctive contribution – already evident in
Les Misérables
– was in giving the narrator an identity. He described this rather grandly, but not inappropriately, as ‘the revival from desuetude of Chorus, the fellow who used to come out between the acts and explain what was going to happen next and why. Radio’s particular amendment is the personalising of Chorus, of making him a character in the play rather instead of an outside character looking
in.’ In fact, what he describes here, the notion behind the title
First Person Singular
, was a sparingly used device of limited application, even in the series of that name.

A more remarkable innovation was the omnipresent narrator, often playing several roles within the piece. The effect is of direct contact between the narrator and the listener; he becomes not merely a neutral story teller,
but the author himself, of whom the characters are simply projections. And this omnipresent, all-knowing figure was, of course, Welles. Reduced to a voice, relieved of the tedium of having to learn the script, get into costume and actually move around the stage, his personality was able to flourish untrammelled. He was able to establish with a numberless audience the gift of immediate intimacy
of which he was such a master in life (though less so
in the theatre). He acknowledged this, too, in his
Radio Annual
piece: ‘radio drama has done another thing. It has continued the process of bringing the actor near the audience, a development which has been detectable for about a hundred years. The actor’s problem of projection has ceased to be troublesome and the test of a good performance
has come to be its honesty and integrity. The invention of the close-up has had a profound effect upon stage acting. The penetrating effect of radio performing, the last word in bringing the actor and audience face to face, has also had its effect on the stage.’ The historical analysis may be faulty (theatres had been getting larger and larger during the hundred years between the mid-nineteenth and
the mid-twentieth centuries) but he exactly identifies the genius of radio: it gets inside your head as no other medium can. The narrator has your ear.
Newsweek
told its readers that in the new programme ‘avoiding the cut-and-dried dramatic technique that introduces dialogue with routine announcements, Welles will serve as genial host to his radio audience. As narrator, he will build himself directly
into the drama, drawing his listeners into the charmed circle. He reasons a radio audience is apt to be bored when it hears someone say “Once upon a time”. Not so if you say, “this happened to me.”’
⁶