Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (70 page)

No surprise that people wondered when Orson slept, or with whom.

Despite all this activity, the Mercury’s home stage was now empty at night—and it threatened to stay that way for weeks, even months. While Welles and Houseman now had three plays on Broadway—
Julius Caesar
and
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
alternating in repertory at the National, and
The Cradle Will Rock
licensed to an outside producer at the Windsor—the partners could not nail down the next Mercury production.

As a stopgap, they introduced Worklight Theatre, a series of Sunday night showcases of works in progress. The first of its presentations, staged on the second Sunday in January, was
Dear Abigail
, a domestic drama set in a New England fishing village in the 1840s, written by David Howard, whom Orson knew through radio. A bare-bones offering, one step up from a reading, it featured Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead, with Orson listed as codirector along with radio man Knowles Entrikin. Other works in progress were scheduled for the next several Sundays, but after a month the extra effort proved too much; the Worklight experiment was canceled, and
The Cradle Will Rock
returned to the Mercury after the expensive orchestra-seat sales flagged at the Windsor.

Welles and Houseman hoped to produce Shaw’s
Heartbreak House
, but they had not heard from the playwright, who tightly controlled the rights. With foolish optimism, Orson thought he might be able to throw together his envisioned “marathon production” of Shakespeare’s
Henry IV
(
Part 1
and
Part 2
) in combination with
Henry V
, first announced in the New York press the previous August. Orson would play Falstaff, with Vincent Price announced as Prince Hal, who later becomes King Henry V. It was a project Orson long had talked about, amounting to another stab at his Todd School graduation play.

By the end of February, this long-standing brainchild of Welles’s had evolved into one “evening’s entertainment” culled from
Henry IV
and
Henry V
, to be followed by a second evening consisting of a condensed
Richard III,
with one short scene from
Richard II.
Orson would play Falstaff in the
Henry
s and Richard II in the
Richard
s. Together the two nights of Shakespeare would be known as
Five Kings
: “an English cavalcade of the fifteenth century,” in the words of the
New York Times.
Though commonplace today, the proposed “marathon Shakespeare” was an audacious concept for American theater in 1938. Welles insisted the two
Henry
s could be ready for audiences as early as mid-April, the
Times
reported.

A fencing expert was brought in to drill the Mercury extras in stage fighting as it was practiced in Shakespeare’s day. Orson may have presided over a few read-throughs of scenes as he dived into the text, as some accounts suggest, but when he sank his teeth into something this ambitious, his outpouring of ideas and inspiration kept multiplying the scope and challenges. With all of his responsibilities for
Julius Caesar
, the
Five Kings
script seemed forever “in progress,” and Orson couldn’t find time to finish it. The tantalizing project was announced, postponed, and reannounced repeatedly in the first half of 1938. “If possible,” according to a “progress report” in the
Times
that spring, the “marathon Shakespeare” would debut “early in June and run until July, the Mercury declaring that it recognizes no hiatus between seasons. Besides its house has a cooling system of a sort. . . . There is talk, too, of the whole company going on the road [with
Five Kings
] this summer.”

By the first of March, however, Welles and Houseman knew that
Five Kings
needed time to germinate, and they had to fast-track another play, or risk forfeiting the remainder of the 1937–1938 season. At last, they elected to forge ahead with John Webster’s play
The Duchess of Malfi
, a rarely produced sixteenth-century tragedy in the mold of
Dr. Faustus.
The partners’ enthusiasm for
The Duchess of Malfi
was bolstered when veteran stage and screen actress Aline MacMahon agreed to join the Mercury in the title role, and Pavel Tchelitchew, whose sketches were among the casualties of Welles and Arthur Hopkins’s canceled
King Lear
, said yes to designing the show.

Rehearsals for
The Duchess of Malfi
were set to begin at the end of the first week of March. Norman Lloyd wrote in his memoir that Welles convened the first reading of the script after midnight, with “eighty or ninety actors, looking at each other and wondering what was going on; there were only eight parts in the show.” Orson took the stage, Lloyd recalled, “fingering the gardenia he was wearing and carrying a large dollar cigar,” having arrived breathlessly from Tony’s, “a very chic eating club.”

“This is only going to please a few friends and myself,” Welles announced grandly to the assembly before inviting “eight of us up on the stage to read the play, leaving all the others who had been told they might be in
The Duchess of Malfi
sitting in the audience,” Lloyd wrote. Whitford Kane, Chubby Sherman, and Lloyd were among the privileged invitees—“the three madmen, each with about three lines”—as the rest watched in piqued silence.

This is a peculiar anecdote, considering that New York papers already had identified Kane, Sherman, and Lloyd as members of the
Duchess of Malfi
cast—along with George Coulouris, Vincent Price, Edith Barrett (Price’s wife), and Frederick Tozere, all from
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
; plus Will Geer from
The Cradle Will Rock.
Whatever the case, Lloyd insisted that the first reading “didn’t go very well.”

According to Houseman, the reading began at 10:15
P
.
M
. “It was a disaster,” he said, agreeing on that much with Lloyd. “With the exception of Welles himself, whose fantastic voice seemed ideally suited to Webster’s extravagances, the actors seemed incapable of capturing the mood of the piece, which sounded muddled, verbose, and in its wildest moments, merely foolish. Having failed to ignite in its early scenes, it dragged itself on through the night, growing more dreary and embarrassing.”

That very night, Orson explained later, he realized for the first time that the Mercury was not a genuine repertory company. It was merely “a group of people” cobbled together for
Julius Caesar
who were being retrofitted, willy-nilly and at random, into roles for the other Mercury plays. “We didn’t have a strong enough company,” Welles told Barbara Leaming. “I saw they weren’t up to it, and I didn’t have people for three of the leading parts. They just weren’t disciplined classic actors.”

When the unfortunate late-night reading ended, the partners convened “a brief, private meeting in [Orson’s] dressing room,” according to Houseman. “There was no argument.
The Duchess of Malfi
joined ’
Tis Pity She’s a Whore
in the locked cupboard of our discarded loves.”

The Mercury players had been sent a clear signal: they fell short in Orson’s eyes. This hardly pleased his band of regulars, and the veteran actor Coulouris, for one, was incensed. Once promised a role, he now felt as if he’d failed an audition for which he’d never volunteered. “There was quite a hullabaloo about the reading and such a bad feeling was created in the company that it was the first and last rehearsal of the play,” Lloyd wrote.

The “bad feeling” lingered, and the disgruntlement filtered into press updates about the Mercury. For two weeks, Welles and Houseman dissembled when asked about the future of
The Duchess of Malfi.
Then, out of nowhere, a letter that had been bouncing around from one wrong address to another finally arrived, from George Bernard Shaw. Orson placed a hasty transatlantic phone call to the playwright in England, who did not remember meeting him in 1932, and had not heard of the Mercury. But Shaw was willing to let the partners produce
Heartbreak House
if they met his financial terms and other stipulations.

In the third week of March,
The Duchess of Malfi
was shelved.
Heartbreak House
was swiftly advertised for an April 29 opening, with Welles set to star and direct. Much to the chagrin of the
Shoemaker’s Holiday
ensemble, which included the camp of malcontents, the Thomas Dekker comedy would be shut down when
Heartbreak House
was ready, with only three actors moving on into the new production.

Orson’s hours, personal and professional, were filled to overflowing. In just two years he had become a Broadway brand name, with multiple products. He bore writing, directing, or acting responsibilities for several ongoing Mercury productions. He was still performing on radio, although nowadays he could afford to be more discerning about his jobs. He relied on a chauffeur to keep him on schedule.

Orson resisted any attempts to make him account for his time, by either his wife or his producing partner. Without letting Houseman know, Welles sneaked off to vaudeville shows, private magic clubs, and romantic assignations. More and more, he was turning up at awards ceremonies, emceeing dinners, gracing the daises at political or charitable events.

In early March, Orson spent most of one day in front of a Senate subcommittee in Washington, D.C., testifying in support of the doomed Federal Theatre Project. (This was also the occasion of his “first adulterous weekend” with ballerina Tilly Losch in the nation’s capital.)

Later the same month, egged on by a new friend, Burgess Meredith, Orson stood for a hotly contested Actors Equity election. He ran as one of six members of a “liberal slate” seeking to assume control of the New York branch of the performers’ union. Ultimately, the conservative, anti-CIO slate swept the vote, declaring a victory over “communism in Equity.” Orson also logged time on the Negro Cultural Committee, which mounted interracial programs at the Mecca Auditorium, and showed up dependably for Spanish Civil War causes. Along with Marc Blitzstein and Will Geer, he hosted an auction to raise funds for medical aid for the anti-Franco side.

Houseman joined Orson on the platform at some civic events, but Orson was more in demand. He also addressed large groups like the National Council of Teachers of English, sometimes asking a fee; and he joined public roundtable discussions, such as a radio broadcast exploring the wellsprings of creative arts, with a panel that included a Columbia professor, a newspaper editor, a music critic, and artist Rockwell Kent.

To help publicize the new touring production of
Julius Caesar
, he made arrangements to appear at its opening in Chicago on Monday, March 7—a date chosen largely so Orson could play the Shadow on Sunday night and fly out the next morning—but at the last minute, the crisis surrounding the cancellation of
The Duchess of Malfi
, and the complicated recording sessions for the
Julius Caesar
LP, forced him to postpone the trip. (He told Chicago reporters that the “impending birth” of his first child had hindered his travel plans.)

When he finally reached Chicago, in the second week of the run, Orson made a flurry of public appearances. He spoke to hundreds of students and educators at a forum on “The Modern Approach to Shakespeare” at the Erlanger Theatre before
Julius Caesar
took the stage. He brought Tom Powers, the touring company’s Brutus, to a Cliff Dwellers luncheon, and toured the new Arts Club galleries in the Wrigley Building, which included an exhibit of still lifes and paintings by composer George Gershwin. He squeezed in dinner at Le Petit Gourmet with columnist Ashton Stevens, who had last glimpsed Orson during the summer of 1936. “He seemed to have developed half a century in the two years since I’d seen him,” Stevens wrote. “He was less excited and more exciting. His humor was leaner. He could laugh at himself with more conviction. Whether you agreed with him or not, his opinions were surer and saltier; because they sounded like his own rather than the last he had heard or read.

“He has a magnificent ignorance of the requirements of a snob. He is a restlessly constructive fellow who just won’t leave the stage where he found it. I’m afraid he’s a genius; but mighty good company nevertheless.”

Dr. Maurice Bernstein, still Orson’s guardian, was among the other “old intimates” at that dinner, in Stevens’s words. Drawing Dr. Bernstein aside, Orson pleaded impending fatherhood, and negotiated a small increase in his monthly allowance, as well as a personal loan of $1,000.

Bernstein insisted that the loan be covered by a promissory note against Welles’s inheritance but the doctor was otherwise in unusually generous spirits. Hazel Moore, whom Orson had known since boyhood, had filed a $10,000 lawsuit alleging the wrongful death of her husband, whose heart attack in 1935 had been aggravated by a traffic accident en route to the hospital. After a settlement came through, “Dadda” and “Aunt Hazel” announced plans of their own for the summer of 1938: marriage.

Returning by midnight plane to New York for the Sunday, March 20, final broadcast of
The Shadow
, Orson dashed into the studio, riffling through the script with only moments to spare. The following week, even as he initiated the “first reading” for
Heartbreak House
on the Mercury stage, according to newspaper accounts, a phone call came: Virginia was in labor at Presbyterian Hospital on 168th Street, with her mother at her side. Adjourning the read-through, Orson and the Mercury’s publicist Henry Senber jumped into a taxi and raced to the hospital. En route, according to Frank Brady, they reviewed the publicity outlook for
Heartbreak House
: Senber had a feeler from
Time
magazine about putting Welles on its cover to coincide with the opening.