Orson Welles, Vol I (67 page)

The first show – true to his programme outlined above – would not be a play, but a story:
Treasure Island
. He had four weeks in which to prepare it. He had brought Houseman with him to the crucial
meeting with Bill Lewis; now, without hesitation or indeed formal invitation, he turned to him to help him in the adaptation. ‘He seemed to assume I would be working with him,’
⁷
wrote Houseman. ‘I reminded him that I knew nothing about radio. He said I’d better start learning in the morning.’ There is no phrase that better expresses the outrageous charm of Welles, compounded of trust and demand,
confidence and challenge. It was, however casually entered into, a huge new development in their relationship, as Houseman saw years later when he wrote his autobiography: ‘Throughout my theatrical association with Orson over the past three and a half years, much of the initiative had been mine – strategically and artistically. While I had never hesitated to acknowledge Orson’s creative leadership,
I had managed, consciously and not without effort, to maintain the balance of power in a partnership which, for all our frequent and violent personal conflicts, had remained emotionally and professionally stable. With the coming of the radio show (though my contribution to its success was substantial) this delicate balance was disturbed and, finally, destroyed. The formula “produced, directed
and performed
by Orson Welles” was one that I approved and encouraged … but its effect on our association and on the future course of the Mercury was deep and irreversible. From being Orson’s partner, I had become his employee: the senior member, but still no more than a member of his staff.’

For the time being, Houseman had to produce a script. He started to hack away at
Treasure Island
when,
after three weeks, Welles suddenly changed his mind. They would do
Dracula
, one of many pseudo-gothic horror stories he loved, and to which Columbia had just acquired the rights. Now the heat was really on – just the way Welles liked it to be – and he and Houseman set to feverishly. Over several meals and without benefit of sleep, awash with bottles of wine, balloons of brandy and great pots of
coffee in cyclical alternation, they gutted the book of its most striking moments, thrashed out a framework onto which they latched dialogue transcribed from the book, cobbled together narrative links (in this case using Stoker’s device of multiple narrations) and finally staggered away from the restaurant with a script. Their purpose was maximum effectiveness. They wished to avoid the form and
structure of the stage play, and their radio dramaturgy – with its freedom of location, rapid succession of short scenes and liberal use of the narrator – celebrates the medium’s unique possibilities. None the less, their approach can only be described as theatrical. There is little here of the multi-layered use of sound that distinguishes the poetic tapestries of Norman Corwin, nor any of the riddling
originality of Arch Oboler. ‘Welles’s specific contribution,’ said Barnouw, ‘was putting it over in bravura style – he could make anything work.’
⁸
The Mercury Theatre of the Air was good, old-fashioned barnstorming: Henry Irving (a possible model for Dracula, as it happens) would have warmly approved.

Welles found inspired collaborators. Bernard Herrmann, CBS’s head of music, was reluctantly
assigned to the show (their
Macbeth
of two years before still smarting in both men’s minds), and found himself required to produce ever more music, sometimes, Houseman notes, as much as forty minutes out of a fifty-seven-minute show. Herrmann’s unusually catholic taste in music (he had a show of his own devoted to playing arcane and exotic scores; the music of Samuel Pepys was the subject of one)
and his uncanny ability to reproduce the musical voice of his fellow composers made him invaluable. Sometimes his instrumentalists were responsible for the sound effects, while sound effects were used to create music – the wind, a whistle, a dog howling. He took advantage of the flexible composition of his orchestra – as he was later to do when
writing for films – to introduce unusual instruments,
or familiar instruments in unusual numbers.
Dracula
is full of curious orchestral touches, extensive use being made of disturbing harmonics. To his prodigious gifts was added a famously peppery personality, which complemented Welles’s in its fanatical perfectionism, allied to deep feeling for language; he knew as much about literature and its byways as he did about music.

The technicians were
generally delighted to be challenged by Welles’s quest for new and ever more real effects. He created a mood of restlessness and experiment which infected everyone. Paul Stewart recalled the technicians attempting to replicate the sound of leaves with a newspaper. ‘Orson in his usual way heard it and said, “That won’t do. Leaves don’t sound like that. It sounds exactly like a newspaper.” Actually,
it didn’t sound like newspaper at all, but he always had to have his moment of bad behaviour, for his own personal satisfaction. “Go into Central Park,” he said, “find me real branches from a real bush.” “Orson,” said the effects man, “it’s February, the bushes have no leaves.” “You’re right,” said Orson. “Use the newspaper.”’ (By a nice irony, noted by Houseman, most radio sets were incapable
of picking up ‘all those wonderful sound effects.’
⁹
They are now clearly audible on cassette and compact disc.)

Stewart, who had given Welles his first job on the radio, had been called in because he was vastly experienced both as actor and director, having been responsible for some years for
Cavalcade of America
, a pioneering history pageant programme, among many other shows. ‘At first Orson
tried to produce the Mercury Theatre of the Air on his own, but he was incapable of doing so, being a very poorly organised man,’
¹⁰
Stewart told François Thomas, ‘and Houseman, at least at the beginning, knew nothing about radio, and was of no use except in matters concerning the script – few people better understood rewriting, reshaping or reworking a script.’ Stewart gave structure to the rehearsals,
held everything together; he was a crucial figure in getting the shows on. Almost immediately after
Dracula
, Welles established a pattern of work for the Mercury Theatre of the Air in which Stewart was the indispensable linchpin, a pattern which he maintained on all his shows over the next few years. The book, once chosen (generally not till the Monday of the week of transmission), would be turned
over to Houseman and whoever else had been roped in to write it. On Wednesday the script would be rehearsed in the studio without Welles; a trial recording on shellac discs was made under Stewart’s
supervision. Welles would listen to this and make script suggestions, which would then be incorporated. Only on the Sunday, the day of transmission itself, would he be physically involved.

At noon,
he arrived in the studio, and all hell broke loose. Richard Barr in his unpublished memoir describes the scene: ‘Orson did not direct his shows; he conducted them. Standing on a podium in front of a dynamic microphone (to diminish his sibilant “s”) he waved his arms, cued every music, sound and speech cue.’ A disc of the dress rehearsal of the
Julius Caesar
broadcast captures him in action, slipping
in and out of character, now sonorous Brutus, now screaming and most unstatesman-like autocrat, demanding that the band play louder/faster/with more feeling, that the actors should be more animated or not so rushed, that the wind had to howl more. His impatience is given full voice at this dress rehearsal; the excitement leaps off the acetate. Stewart described to Thomas the aftermath of the
final dress rehearsal: ‘There was absolute chaos – absolute chaos, every week. Welles is a very destructive man, he has to destroy everything, then put it back together again himself, and there were endless passionate discussions between him, Houseman and me. Then suddenly someone would say “We’re on air in two minutes.” The ground was strewn with paper. That we got on the air at all was a weekly
miracle, because it was always like that.’
¹¹

The very opening titles of this first programme set the tone: the swaggering first few bars of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, generating extrovert excitement, as two announcers in alternating phrases tell us that the Columbia Network takes pride in presenting Orson Welles in a unique new summer series. Breathless with excitement, they continue:
‘In a single year, the first in the life of the Mercury Theatre, Orson Welles has come to be the most famous name of our time in American drama.’ They quote
Time
magazine – ‘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 which his ambitions recognised’ – and finally, the United Press: ‘The meteorite rise of Orson Welles’s
Mercury Theatre continues unabated.’ Tremulously noting its four hit shows in a season ‘unparalleled in Broadway history’, they reveal that ‘Mr Welles has long been working on a greater project, the Broadways of the entire United States.’ He is about, they promise, to bring to the air ‘those same qualities of vitality and imagination that have made him the most talked-of theatre director in
America today.’ This is the project Columbia is bringing; the first time in its history, they claim, that radio has ever extended such an invitation to an entire
theatrical institution. Finally, we get the great man himself: ‘Orson Welles – the director of the Mercury Theatre, the star and producer of these programmes: “Good evening,” Welles intones. “The Mercury Theatre faces tonight a challenge
and an opportunity for which we are grateful.”’ They will, he says, present during the next nine weeks many different kinds of stories – ‘stories of romance and adventure. Biography, mystery, and human emotion. Stories by authors like: Robert Louis Stevenson, Emile Zoladostoievsky [as he invariably phrases it], Edgar Poe, P.G. Wodehouse.’ Then he introduces his cast and tells us what they have
played at the Mercury then bids us good-bye ‘for a moment. I’ll see you in Transylvania.’ Finally there is the formal: ‘The Mercury Theatre on the air presents Orson Welles as Count Dracula in his own adaptation of Bram Stoker’s great novel.’ It is interesting to note that within the first three minutes of the programme, Welles’s name has been uttered nine times. It is something of a relief when
he tells us: ‘The next time I speak to you I am Dr Arthur Seward.’

The excitement and intensity of the transmission, as vivid fifty years later as it must have been at the time, is imbued with Welles’s personal quality. ‘The feeling, the atmosphere, all the Wellesian eccentricity, was there in the show,’ as Stewart says. There is, too – surprisingly, perhaps, in view of the circumstances but
a vital part of the young Welles – a tremendous sense of fun. There is the odd private joke: in
Dracula
, one of the men overboard is called Balanchine, a jest for the personal amusement of the ballerina Vera Zorina who was at that moment being pursued with equal ardour by both Welles and the distinguished Russian choreographer. ‘Balanchine! Balanchine! Is Balanchine below?’ the sailors cry. ‘Balanchine’s
gone! – Like the other! – Like all the others!’ For those who knew what the joke meant, he was delighted to boast, in this oblique fashion, of his conquest. All in all, radio suited him down to the ground. The immediacy of its impact, the flexibility of its language, above all, perhaps, the circumstances of its creation, were ideal for Welles: a whole world summoned up in a few days’ rehearsal,
the cycle of theatrical creation speeded up to engender maximum adrenalin (read-through, rehearsal, dress rehearsal, first and last performance). Later he was to find the same cycle in movies, endlessly repeated for each shot. And here, in his first major outing on radio, he was already able to limit his involvement to the day of recording itself, arriving at the dress rehearsal the way
Kean might have arrived in Dublin to give his Shylock, suddenly galvanising the unsuspecting local actors. Personality, in these circumstances, becomes everything.

As well as Seward he, of course, plays Dracula. Why, it may be asked, was it necessary for him to play more than one part in the programme? Why, indeed, was it necessary to act in the programme at all, rather than simply narrating?
There are obvious reasons, of course (why should the others have all the fun?) and he was the star, after all. But beyond that, it seems to be part of his method – his magician’s method, one might say – to draw attention to what he’s doing: ‘and now, before your very ears, I shall become … Dracula!’ The transformation demands applause, admiration; but the essential element is that you never forget
that it’s Welles doing it; you never believe that you’re listening to the character himself. His fellow actors – particularly Gabel and Coulouris (who had clearly swallowed his irritation sufficiently to participate in the new venture) – are all highly skilled and effective, all in full command of the microphone and its demands, but they lack the instant identifiability of Welles. That, of course,
was their purpose; they create and inhabit their characters to the point that we forget that this actor or that is playing them. Gabel’s Viennese Van Helsing is a triumph. For him the accent is a liberation, giving him consistently interesting phrasing. Coulouris’s Harker is also strongly and convincingly realised; there are no inverted commas round his performance as there are in Welles’s.

No matter what voice Welles assumes, it’s always unmistakably him: he doesn’t begin to rival Peter Ustinov, for example, in virtuosity of pitch, accent, rhythm, character. He often brilliantly catches a colour, a flavour, but he doesn’t submit to its character. He manipulates it, usually to sonorous effect. Above all he creates atmosphere; it is his presence that dominates the entire show. His Dracula
voice sounds artificially manufactured, like the controlled belches by which the late Jack Hawkins was able to find a substitute voice when his vocal cords had been destroyed by cancer. Welles’s Dracula voice may have been slightly treated – it has an acoustic unlike the others’ – but it is really his own special resonance that creates the effect. The camera is said to love certain actors;
the microphone positively adored Welles.