Orson Welles, Vol I (74 page)

Little did the analysts of the Mercury’s malady know that only ten days after delivering their diagnoses, they would be writing its obituary.
‘After twenty-one performances,’ wrote Houseman, ‘we threw in the sponge – not just for
Danton’s Death
but for the Mercury Theatre.’
³³
They had had enough. ‘The truth is – we were no longer interested. In the grandiose and reckless scheme of our lives, the Mercury had fulfilled its purpose. It had brought us success and fame; it had put Welles on the cover of
Time
and our radio show on the front
page of every newspaper in the country. Inevitably, any day now, the offers from Hollywood would start arriving. It was too late to turn back and we did not really want to.’ Any suggestion that the Mercury Theatre might have been one of the great idealistic theatrical experiments of the century is conclusively dispelled by Houseman’s candid if unattractive admission that the purpose of the organisation
had been to provide its directors with fame and success, not perhaps an admission that Stanislavsky or Nemirovich-Danchenko would have made, nor Micheál Mac Liammóir or Hilton Edwards, for all of whom the glory was incidental. Their dreams of art demanded a commitment to something bigger than themselves that neither Welles nor Houseman (at this stage of their lives) could pretend to.

Well,
why should they? They had created many memorably
gaudy hours on their tiny stage. It had been fun while it lasted. The only real casualties were a few actors who had for a moment thought that they were engaged in the remaking of the American Theatre; a few technicians who had been driven to the point of physical collapse getting Welles’s extravagant and heavily impractical visions onto the stage;
and a new audience which had become excited by the possibilities of a young and radically imaginative theatre. To none of these groups did Welles and Houseman feel they had any particular loyalty. They had arrived with their box of fireworks and let them off to loud acclaim; then they produced a squib. At the first murmurs of disappointment, they departed, leaving nothing behind but the memory
of brilliant cascades and thrilling explosions. What more can one ask? The critic of
The New York Times
had no quarrel with it. Identifying the Mercury as ‘Hobohemia in the theatre’ and a generous contributor to the gaiety of nations, he accepted its capriciousness as a lively virtue. Others were sterner. Sidney Whipple in the
New York World Telegram
devoted two aggrieved pieces to the Mercury’s
demise, the result, he claimed, of an absence of a definitive programme and a refusal to accept that a successful venture in the theatre must be ‘co-operative in every sense of the word’.
³⁴

Welles answered him by pretending that the theatre had closed because it had been denied the right to fail. ‘The Mercury has many faults, including its inability to produce an unbroken succession of smash
hits, which is exactly and with absolutely no exaggeration essential to the maintenance of the permanent repertory company devoted to elaborate experimental productions under present Broadway circumstances.’ On the contrary, the Mercury had produced an unbroken succession of hits; with its first flop, it folded. A company that cannot withstand the impact of one failure is clearly built on unstable
foundations, psychologically as well as financially. It was as if the Mercury depended for its life on the acclaim of the press. Sustained by that bright sun, it flowered; at the first cloud, it withered and died. Harold Clurman described the Mercury, with justice, as ‘an enterprise that the press was sincerely fond of. The press operation, shrewdly directed by Houseman, skilfully run by Hank
Senber and incomparably fronted by Welles was without parallel in the modern American Theatre. A torrent of witty, informative press releases kept things bubbling along; no journalist was ever refused an interview with Welles, who always provided memorable if erratic copy. The critics (with the single uninfluential exception of Mary McCarthy) were on the Mercury’s
side from the beginning, always
ready to play down the minuses and to write up the pluses. This sort of relationship with the press is always – like any dependent relationship – fraught with danger. Who needs whom? The plug can be pulled at any moment; but it wasn’t. The critics had certainly turned on
Danton’s Death
, but not on the Mercury. And yet they had put up the shutters for good. It was puzzling.
³⁵

For a moment,
it seemed as if Welles was going to attempt to create the theatrical heavenly kingdom on earth. This was not foisted on him: he and Houseman had made such bold declarations when they founded the Mercury that hope for this elusive vision was born again; now it appeared that he hadn’t really meant it. Instead, he simply offered a lively alternative to what was on offer elsewhere. Welles later insisted
that there had never been a possibility of creating an ensemble because the real talent was never available to him. This is shameful nonsense. He had the pick of the younger profession, and chose well. Certainly in his first season, the company had the makings of a world-beating team. For a multitude of reasons, he failed to keep them together. The
Danton’s Death
company was equally promising:
with players like Joseph Cotten and Mary Wickes in tiny roles, he had a strength in depth which is the essential requirement of a serious acting company. But he did nothing with them; had no plans for them.

The Mercury was a maverick actor-manager’s outfit, existing to support the leading actor’s performances and serve his brilliance as a director. ‘I think it might almost go without saying,’
wrote Sidney Whipple in his aggrieved article, ‘that some of the most valuable talent has been lost to the Mercury because, to the actor, the road lying ahead was so uncertain. It is not security alone that actors want. Their great desire is to demonstrate and enlarge their artistic abilities. The question of a program should be determined by joint consideration and the plays that are chosen should
have not only the best of direction, which is Mr Welles’s forte, but the best of writing and the best of acting.’ This was simply not the way Welles functioned. Whipple was dreaming, as so many American theatre people had for so long dreamt, of a National Theatre, an organisation nourished by and nourishing talent; a company with roots, capable of growth; an ensemble, in fact, in the tradition
of the great European ensembles, the Comédie Française, the Moscow Art Theatre, the Burgtheater in Vienna and the Schiller in Berlin.

In contrast to all these other groups, the Mercury had neither theory nor vision, neither craft nor continuity. It depended on
justifying the moment – providing thrills. Its particular originality was that it did this with classical plays. As such, it may have
been a wonderful antidote, but it was incapable of sustained growth. Clurman, defending himself and his theatre against accusations that the Group was rigidly theory-bound and lacked a sense of humour, noted that ‘Behind [all this] is the need to be free, to pick up or drop any notion according to convenience, to avoid choice, lest one be caught in the rigidity of a definite position, for in that
lies difficulty and even danger.’ The Mercury was never dangerous; was, according to Clurman (who cannot of course be described as an objective witness, though his point is well made) ‘sensational and not controversial. It had the rebel air of a “hep” and hearty youth that suited the rejuvenated epoch of the late 30s. The Mercury was safe. It treaded on no toes, but rather kicked the seat of plays
and traditions for which our reverence is more advertised than real … the theatre in our slippery society has become very much like gambling. The reviewers, like the financiers, hate to back a loser.’ The Mercury was a speculators’ delight; once it was bust, it proved to be perfectly dispensable.

And it had been a beacon: in its verve and fearlessness, it had seemed to revitalise the idea
of the theatre, for a while. In their 1938 play
The Fabulous Invalid
, Kaufmann’s and Hart’s survey of the theatre’s indestructibility, an eager little group, led by
THE YOUNG MAN,
appears at the end of the play, when all seems lost.

THE YOUNG MAN

Well, you know why we’re here, everybody, and what we’re going to do. There’s only one thing I want to say today. We’ve got our own theatre.
It’s not in a very good neighborhood; it’s been closed for years, and it’s in pretty bad shape. But it’s a theatre, and it’s ours. It’s got a stage, and it’s got seats, and that’s all we care about … they’ll tell you it isn’t important, putting make-up on your face and play-acting. I don’t believe it. It’s important to keep a thing alive that can lift men’s spirits above the everyday reality of their
lives. Remember, you’re going to be kicked around, and a lot of the time you’re not going to have enough to eat, but you’re going to get one thing in return. The chance to write, and act, say the things you want to say, and do the things you want to do. And I think that’s enough.

No Broadway theatre-goer in 1938 had the slightest doubt as to which particular
YOUNG MAN
was supposed to be doing
the
talking. He ran the flag up for the theatre, for a while. Time for someone else to take over.

Welles and Houseman were in it for the pleasure and the gain of the moment. It is hard not to think of them (however affectionately) as opportunists and buccaneers. Certainly they shed no tears for their lost theatre, whose lease, the one Welles had insisted would keep them in business for at
least five years, was made over to Laurens and Benjamin, for their children’s theatre; later it passed to the radical Yiddish group ARTEF. The neon sign which had raised such a cheer when it was installed a mere fifteen months earlier remained incongruously in place till the demolition men moved in four years later to knock the theatre down.

Welles and Houseman had gone rapidly on to the next
projects, the first of which, significantly, involved further dismantlement of the Mercury in its other shape: the Theatre of the Air. The radio programmes were about to undergo a change of gear, with the arrival of a sponsor (always referred to by Houseman as The Soup Company) and a change of name. Now the programme was
The Campbell Playhouse
. ‘I guess they figured if we could sell the end of
the world,’ said Houseman, ‘we could sell tomato soup, too.’
³⁶

T
HE MERCURY
Theatre of the Air made its last transmission on 4 December with
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Welles’s old mentor Thornton Wilder. The broadcasts had, astonishingly, continued their ambitious and sparky course through the débâcles of
Too Much Johnson
and
Danton’s Death
and
The War of the Worlds
sensation. Adaptations of Schnitzler
(
Anatol
), Chesterton (
The Man Who Was Thursday
), Dumas (a thrilling
Count of Monte Cristo
) and Brontë (
Jane Eyre
) jostled with Jules Verne, Saki and Sherwood Anderson. For
Julius Caesar
, Welles again stressed the contemporary parallel, this time having the relevant chunks of Plutarch read by the foremost political commentator of the day, H.V. Kaltenborn, whose mid-European accent, regularly heard
by millions of listeners describing the gathering storm in Europe, must have given a peculiar urgency to the story for contemporary listeners. There were larky versions of
The Pickwick Papers
(featuring Welles’s Sergeant Buzzfuzz) and
Sherlock Holmes
, a somewhat sketchy version of
Heart of Darkness
as part of a triple bill, and a genuinely First Person Singular adaptation of
My Little Boy
by Carl
Ewald (a shamelessly sentimental but curiously affecting piece which is perhaps the most experimental production they had so far attempted, pioneering an almost stream-of-consciousness approach). In addition, with
Clarence
and
Seventeen
Welles celebrated his affection for the work of the Middle West’s great chronicler, Booth Tarkington, an affection that resulted first in his radio adaptation,
then his film, of
The Magnificent Ambersons
.

The programming – eclectic, middle-of-the-road, but always stimulating and personal – was as characteristic as the versatile and witty performances by the regular team, a tight-knit group of masterly radio actors – Ray Collins, Agnes Moorhead, Gabel and Coulouris foremost among them. The tone was only occasionally reverential, more often blithe,
high-spirited, dashingly dramatic. Not all of that was lost with the reinvention of the programme as
The Campbell Playhouse
, but it was a radically different animal, and it made of Welles a rather different animal, too. The first show,
Rebecca
, set the pattern; being the first show, it was launched with fanfares, both musical and verbal, quite unlike anything heard on the Mercury Theatre of the
Air. Bernard Herrmann’s specially composed Hollywood-style musical call to attention merges into a new treacly allargando version of the opening of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, over which the announcements are made. If the Mercury Theatre of the Air had seemed to glorify Welles, this was his apotheosis.

‘I am here,’ the announcer tells us, ‘to introduce the white hope of the American
stage as the director and star of
The Campbell Playhouse
– he writes his own radio scripts and directs them, and makes them live and breathe with the warmth of his genius.’
¹
Having lamented that there is no time to adventure into the story of his life, the announcer feverishly recapitulates the familiar events, culminating with his foundation of the Mercury Theatre and his operation of it ‘with
magical success’; news of its disbandment had clearly not yet reached Campbell’s Soup. ‘He had four hits last year on Broadway, which beats Noël Coward’s record from here to Kalamazoo. And he’s generally recognised today as being the most gifted stage director and actor of our time.’ Referring to his radio productions, the announcer tells us that though Orson Welles is ‘the master of realism over
the air on radio, unique, exciting – he shocked you, he sent the cold shivers racing up your spine – that is not the thing he does best, or best likes to do. He loves,’ the announcer consoles us, ‘to tell a story, a great human story, welling up from the heart, brimming with deep and sincere emotion and lively with comedy.’ Such are the stories, apparently, that he will bring to
The Campbell Playhouse
.