Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (46 page)

The summer theater had been a critical and popular success, but it was underbudgeted and operated at a loss—this would not be an unfamiliar pattern for Orson Welles in the future. Despite an estimated cumulative attendance of eight thousand people, the company’s gross expenses came to around $15,000, according to Chicago press accounts, and Roger Hill was left with about $1,500 in bills. As was typical of him, Orson had paid the professional actors salaries, while paying himself little or nothing. Dr. Maurice Bernstein fronted his travel expenses to New York, but he would have to survive on a $100 monthly allowance while waiting for news from McClintic.

Orson returned dutifully to several writing tasks he had been neglecting for months. The headmaster wanted to bring out their Shakespeare volume by the end of 1934, but the manuscript still awaited Orson’s final round of sketches and changes. Orson also returned with fresh enthusiasm and determination to “Bright Lucifer,” the north woods stage play he’d begun in the summer of 1932 and worked on intermittently ever since. Building on their summer partnership, Orson wanted Hill to produce “Bright Lucifer” in Woodstock or Chicago. The headmaster was intrigued.

One of Orson’s first appointments in New York was with producer George C. Tyler, who remembered him from “Marching Song.” Tyler had been tempted by that play, and he was open-minded about “Bright Lucifer.” But he wondered if Orson would consider writing a play expressly for him. Orson was willing. “If he’ll pay me,” he wrote to Skipper, “I’ll do it.”

Among the unemployed actors Orson bumped into on his rounds of agencies and producers were other veterans of the Cornell tour, along with more recently familiar people such as Louise Prussing, who had preceded him from Woodstock and also installed herself at the Algonquin.

He made new friends, including journeyman actor Francis Carpenter, who was trying to branch out as a producer. Carpenter was five years older than Orson and had appeared as a child actor in silent pictures such as
Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp
back when Orson was in diapers in Kenosha; he told Orson hilarious anecdotes about touring with the famed actress Maude Adams in the stage version of
Peter Pan.

By the mid-1930s, though, Carpenter’s acting opportunities had dwindled to small parts in unimportant plays. He and Orson talked about coproducing a Shakespeare play, and hit on the idea of a Caribbean
Romeo and Juliet
with a largely black cast. Orson, who knew the play by heart, was just the enthusiast Carpenter needed to help transfer the drama to the new setting. What Orson didn’t know about black patois already he could pick up on the street, at Harlem clubs, from books, and from the numerous all-black plays suddenly in vogue in New York.

He and Carpenter imagined a
Romeo and Juliet
set in Martinique, the lovers divided not just by family but by race: one family white, the other black. Orson snared an established scenic designer with Wisconsin roots, Albert Johnson, to sketch costumes and settings for the project. What eluded the partners was what often eluded Orson: the dough-re-mi. The Caribbean
Romeo and Juliet
was announced in the
New York Times
, only to be postponed and announced again.

Most nights Orson was up past midnight, shuffling projects like playing cards: the Shakespeare guide for young people, his work on “Bright Lucifer,” the new idea for George Tyler, and the Caribbean
Romeo and Juliet.
He took breaks to write “punk and rambling” letters to Chicago and Woodstock. “Sleep with my asthma, which is pretty bad, is impossible,” he wrote to Skipper Hill.

The days were also endurance tests; he waited endlessly for McClintic and hung out with fellow actors who were similarly treading water. “New York couldn’t be worse,” Orson complained. “It’s hotter and emptier and noisier than I’ve ever known it before.” He had dinner with Louise Prussing a few times, reminiscing about the summer. He spent idle time with Dick Ogden, another Woodstock alumnus who amused him, and palled around with George Macready, another veteran of Cornell’s ensembles, both still waiting for news about
Romeo and Juliet.

Orson refused to see himself as an unemployed actor. He had a job pending, and he was also a producer and a writer whose recent summer theater operation had been written up in the
New York Times
and
Variety.
One day, he grudgingly accompanied Macready on a circuit of casting offices—but “unofficially,” he wrote to Hill, as “just a friend.” Orson was pledged to writing. “I’m still sticking, rather futilely and pathetically, to my high horse.”

One thing had changed: important people were no longer dodging him. He was treated like an up-and-comer. “I seem to have an excellent name here,” he reported to Skipper. “But no work. Of course I could go after things by sitting in the shoe-stringer’s offices, but I haven’t sunk to that. I will, though, the way it looks.”

Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir blew into New York in mid-September, weary from sightseeing and eager to get back to Ireland. Their summer with Orson had recharged their creativity, and when they returned they mounted a new production of
The Drunkard
in the Gate’s very next season. “They fell under its spell,” reported the
Irish Times
, “obtained a copy of the script, and brought it home with them.” In time, they even tried
Trilby
at the Gate
.
Whatever friction they may have had, their time with Orson had left its mark.

“Very doleful parting, indeed, with a bad little band playing on the practically empty deck of the same ship on which they arrived,” Orson wrote to Roger Hill. “It seemed to them that they had never really been to America, but I knew better.”

These days, many of Orson’s letters went to a new confidante: Virginia Nicolson. The aspiring actress rebuffed Orson’s first attempts to coax her to New York, heading home to Wheaton after their summer fling. Her parents sniffed at her theatrical ambitions, at Orson, and at theater in general: her father, Leo Nicolson, a self-made man in industrial real estate, lumped theater people together with “blacks, Jews, Democrats, ‘pansies,’ ” according to his granddaughter Chris Welles Feder. The staid Nicolsons expected their beautiful, cultivated daughter to matriculate in college, or at the very least land a business-minded husband from among the eligible bachelors at the Wheaton Country Club.

After about two weeks in Wheaton, buffeted by letters and phone calls from her boyfriend and constant badgering from her parents, Virginia surrendered to Orson’s enticements. He had found work for her assisting Francis Carpenter, helping with research on their upcoming Shakespeare production. (It might not have gone well when her parents learned their daughter was going to New York to work on a Caribbean
Romeo and Juliet.
)

Arriving in mid-September, Virginia moved into Orson’s suite at the Algonquin, stealthily evading the maids and room-service waiters so he could still claim single occupancy. Her presence buoyed his spirits. Virginia communed with Carpenter, though without pay; more important, she became Orson’s muse, typist, and co-conspirator on the Big Ideas. She was game for anything. “She was the essence of innocent youth when she came to New York,” Welles told Barbara Leaming, “and it brought out a wonderful spirit of
let’s go with whatever’s going
in her.”

When not dining extravagantly on meals they couldn’t afford, the young couple spent their remaining money on plays and films. Watching
Small Miracle
, the new Norman Krasna play staged by George Abbott, Orson was struck by the lead, the onetime opera tenor Joseph Spurin-Calleia, who was electrifying in the role of a homicidal fugitive. “I could never forget that performance” in
Small Miracle
, Welles told Peter Bogdanovich decades later. One day, Welles vowed to Virginia, he would work with Calleia—and so he did, casting Calleia as Menzies, his own character’s corrupt partner in
Touch of Evil.
It was one of the finest roles of Calleia’s career. “One of the best actors I’ve ever known,” Orson called him. “You play next to him and you just feel the thing that you do with a big actor—this dynamo going on.”

The theater scene was dominated by left-wing plays, and Orson kept up with that movement as well as traditional show business. His politics were instinctually progressive, but he was also interested in the agitprop productions because they featured people whose careers he followed. Roman Bohnen, from the Goodman Theatre, had joined the Group Theatre, and Welles went out of his way to see Bohnen and other Goodman alumni perform in New York.

One of the fall sensations was
Stevedore
, playwright Michael Blankfort’s call to action against racial prejudice, produced by the Theatre Union at the Civic Repertory off Union Square. Set in New Orleans, the drama involved labor unrest, a rape, a lynch mob, and a race riot. The play seemed almost as exciting off the stage, with firebrands in the audience jumping up to improvise their own speeches and plainclothes cops on the sidewalk taking down names of attendees.

Several of the leads were African Americans. Orson was captivated by Jack Carter, who had been the original Crown for 367 performances in
Porgy
on Broadway; and by Edna Thomas, a star of the Lafayette Theatre’s stock company in Harlem. After the performance Orson attended, one of the supporting players, Canada Lee—a former jockey, musician, and boxer—stepped in front of him to prevent an altercation between Welles and young hoodlums spoiling for a fight outside the theater. Gratefully, Orson shook Lee’s hand. Orson would remember Jack Carter, Edna Thomas, and Canada Lee.

Having Virginia with him in New York, of course, doubled Orson’s money problems. The couple didn’t stint on their nights out, and Orson raised eyebrows at the Algonquin when he ordered two of everything for breakfast and lunch. Dr. Bernstein insisted that his allowance must suffice, but Skipper was more sympathetic to the young lovers, and in mid-October he sent them $50: a godsend.

Hill could do little to salve Orson’s wounds in late October, however, when McClintic phoned to say that the role of Mercutio in the Broadway retooling of
Romeo and Juliet
was going to another actor: Brian Aherne, an older, dapper veteran McClintic and Cornell also wanted for their revival of
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
, which was going to follow the Shakespeare play. (Aherne would play the same role—poet Robert Browning—that he had in the original 1931 Cornell production.) Adding insult to injury, McClintic was also going to cast a new Octavius: Burgess Meredith, whom
Time
magazine had hailed as “the most promising juvenile on the U.S. stage.”

McClintic insisted that the decisions had nothing to do with Orson, per se. Meredith was a name, and Aherne, in his early thirties, better complemented the other leads of
Romeo and Juliet
(Cornell and Basil Rathbone, still Romeo, were in their early forties). “Orson’s extreme and obvious youth in such an important part” as Mercutio, McClintic told Peter Noble, “might make certain other members of the company appear older than they should.” McClintic had only the merest consolation prize to offer: Orson could play Tybalt, rival of Romeo, fiery cousin of Juliet.

Orson had feared the worst, and now it had happened. Tybalt was a good role, but decidedly lesser than Mercutio. Saving face, he told people the casting switch was a joint choice on artistic grounds. “Tybalt seldom gets a notice,” Orson wrote to Dr. Bernstein in Chicago. “I want to see if Tybalt can be played so it can stand out.” But privately Orson was crushed, and he rationalized the situation endlessly to friends.

Virginia was his salvation. The two young people were very much in love, regardless of what Orson said later. Orson always stressed Virginia’s innocence when they met, but he was vulnerable too. “Your father was a virgin when he met me, whatever nonsense he tells his biographers these days,” Virginia told her daughter, Chris Welles Feder, years later.

When the Algonquin management figured out that the unmarried, underage couple were cohabiting in the hotel, Orson and Virginia were told, essentially, to produce a marriage license or move out. The couple decided to wed, quickly and quietly, in a civil ceremony in Manhattan on November 17. Orson placed an eleventh-hour phone call summoning Roger and Hortense Hill from Woodstock to stand as their witnesses—Orson seemed “terrified” on the phone, the headmaster recalled—and the Hills brought gifts and cash.

Dr. Bernstein wasn’t there, because he was busy comforting Hazel Moore after her husband Edward Moore, Orson’s beloved “Uncle Ned,” had died of a heart attack at the Highland Park train station, en route to Chicago to review a concert.

To Barbara Leaming, Welles characterized his first marriage as whimsical. “We really got married in order to live together,” Welles told Leaming. “It wasn’t taken very seriously by either of us.” But Orson’s letters to Virginia, from love at first sight through five years of marriage, are full of earnest affection, and they belie his later disavowals.

Virginia’s mother, Lillian Nicolson, raced to New York to confront the newlyweds. The young couple should submit to a proper traditional wedding, she declared, complete with a gown for the bride and a tuxedo for the groom, an official portrait, an officiating minister, and a guest list of family and friends. Virginia said yes—it would pacify her mother and please her too—and Orson, distracted by his comedown in
Romeo and Juliet
, made no objection. Although many knew the truth, Orson and Virginia agreed to pretend they were unmarried until the traditional ceremony. Within forty-eight hours, “rumors that the young couple were married” were squelched in the
Chicago Tribune
’s society column, and an item appeared in the
New York Times
announcing that the young actor debuting in
Romeo and Juliet
was to be married “after the premiere,” around Christmas.

Guthrie McClintic had commissioned a new production design from the leading Broadway stage designer, Jo Mielziner: “In the manner of Giotto,” Cornell recalled, “and very beautiful.” Martha Graham refreshed the choreography. The stage director reinstated some of the text that had been excised from the stodgy road version of
Romeo and Juliet
, restoring some of the humor and romantic spirit of the original. And McClintic’s direction would quicken the pace.