Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (76 page)

But Stony Creek was part of a scheme to launch Virginia, or “Anna Stafford,” as an actress in her own right. Orson made frequent trips to Stony Creek to see his wife’s summer stock performances. He brought her roses on July 4, when he came to see her in a supporting role on the opening night of
Caprice,
a comedy made famous by Lunt and Fontanne on Broadway. And he returned often to review the facilities and visit the Mercury players, including Edgar Barrier, Arthur Anderson, and William Mowry, whose future wife Sherrard Pollard was also in the troupe.

By August 1, Orson was commuting almost daily from midtown to Stony Creek, a small shoreline hamlet east of New Haven, almost one hundred miles up the coast highway. Many of the New York actors made the same daily trip, though a few took summer leases in Stony Creek. Until the second week in August, Orson rehearsed the cast of
Too Much Johnson
on the bare Mercury Theatre stage in New York, with the scenes mutating as the mastermind flogged the script. Houseman found the live rehearsals “desultory,” and Simon Callow tsked: “Rehearsals on the play were fitful. When they did take place, they were spent developing routines, sections of stage business, which Welles typically worked and worked, ignoring character, relationships, or the life of the play.

“Andrea Nouryeh [in her unpublished thesis on the Mercury Theatre] describes a sequence in which three of the men enter from three different doors singing ‘Swanee,’ exiting and entering with perfect rhythmic and harmonic coordination,” Callow continued. “This was gone over again and again and again, finally attaining the perfection Welles sought.”

By the time the cast arrived at Stony Creek, suspense over the film footage, and renewed anxiety over the actors’ summer salaries—“shamefully low,” in Houseman’s words—sharpened the collective anxiety. Some, but not all, of the cast members involved in the summer tryout of
Too Much Johnson
were able to supplement their income by regular appearances on the more lucrative (and more reliable)
Mercury Theater on the Air.
The actors were paid unequally for the play, depending on the importance of their roles. And some of the actors felt they had been paid unfairly for their work on the film: because they were acting in scenes being photographed for a stage play, they were paid rehearsal rates for a theatrical production, not “performance rates.” Nine of the actors filed a complaint with Equity, arguing that the Mercury had not compensated them adequately for the sometimes laborious ten days of photography. The action was still pending as
Too Much Johnson
opened; it would not be resolved until after the premiere, when a special union committee granted the complainants an additional increment of one-eighth of one week’s salary.

Adding to the accumulating pressures, at the eleventh hour a lawyer from Paramount popped up with a stern warning. Mercury might have leased the stage rights to
Too Much Johnson
, but Paramount had a claim on its screen rights, having produced a film version of Gillette’s play in 1919. “If the play reached Broadway with the film in it, payment, perhaps substantial, would have to be made,” wrote Frank Brady.

The last manic week of preparations and rehearsals involved erecting the sets and hanging the lights. Orson brought a work-in-progress version of the film sequences to show to the cast and friends. The length of the first and longest portion of the action kept shrinking in press mentions (the pre–Act One footage was now down to “five minutes,” according to New York columnists), and some footage was still being held by the lab, but for the first time Orson projected all three segments on a screen erected onstage for the private audience. None of the Mercury insiders were thrilled with what they saw. And there was one big technical problem: the playhouse’s low ceiling obstructed the view of the stage for many in the audience. This was “the last straw,” wrote Brady, and “the film portion” of
Too Much Johnson
was abandoned in favor of hastily prepared expository additions to the live script.

Orson felt he had let everyone down, even himself. On the Sunday night after the last dress run-through, he and the cast drowned themselves in champagne, on his dime.

The actual premiere of
Too Much Johnson
came two days later, on Tuesday, August 15, the night after Orson played Abraham Lincoln in his radio adaptation of John Drinkwater’s play chronicling a day in Lincoln’s life. In his signature fashion, Orson took the Stony Creek stage before the curtain was raised to apologize to the audience, because what they were about to experience had not yet “jelled” in the preferred manner. By the time
Johnson
made it to Broadway in the fall, he promised, the farce would be augmented by filmic material he was unable to project in the playhouse, along with more elaborate sets and musical orchestration. (Scholar Andrea Janet Nouryeh reported that Marc Blitzstein supplied piano accompaniment, at least for the premiere).
³²
Welles asked the local audience to be patient with the actors and with the work in progress.

According to some accounts, the crowd was not a model of patience. “We never integrated the film with the play, so when we put on the play but didn’t show the film, of course, the audience had no idea what
Too Much Johnson
was all about,” recalled Mercury actress Ruth Ford. During a subsequent performance, the audience grew so “furious” at the half-baked show, Ford insisted, that some spectators threw “everything in their hands at us on the stage. Apples, bananas, every single thing they had, they threw at us. They didn’t understand what they’d seen. We were just all going in and out, opening and slamming doors.”
³³

“The [opening night] curtain went up at nine with two intermissions and came down at ten thirty and the audience didn’t know what hit them,” said the summer theater manager, Herz. “It was an absolute mess. I had no idea what was going on on that stage and I can tell you, neither did the audience. They were absolutely appalled. The actors were also in the dark.”

One of the first-nighters was John Houseman, who later recalled that on the “small dreary” Stony Creek stage, the filmless comedy seemed “trivial, tedious and under-rehearsed, and I set myself firmly against its coming in as the opening production for the Mercury Theatre’s critical second season. This led to an ugly scene with Orson, who secretly agreed with me but who needed to play out the sabotage scene to salve his pride.”

There is good reason to doubt this version of events, since echoed in multiple other accounts. For one thing,
Too Much Johnson
was already no longer in contention as the opening play of the fall schedule: as far back as July 30, the
New York Herald Tribune
had confirmed that Georg Büchner’s
Dantons Tod
(
Danton’s Death
) would be the Mercury’s “first fall production,” with Martin Gabel as Danton and George Coulouris being eyed for Robespierre. “Orson Welles will direct.” This was two weeks before the Stony Creek premiere and the supposed “ugly scene” over whether
Too Much Johnson
should open the Mercury season.

And these doomy accounts of the audience reaction are balanced by other, far kinder reports. Connecticut summer resident Katharine Hepburn, for one, saw the Stony Creek show and liked it enough to pluck Joseph Cotten from the cast to play her ex-husband in the planned Broadway comedy
The Philadelphia Story
, a big break in his career (taking him away, eventually, from Mercury Theatre plays). And though New York critics did not cover the tryout, the local press turned out in force. Local reviewers may have been inclined to be supportive, but their notices were surprisingly unanimous and favorable. The
Hartford Courant
said that Orson had directed “with all the flair and originality of the superb theater technician he is. He uses rhythmic motion and dialogue in spots to gain unexpected humor, many doors in various sets for hurried comic entrances and exits, unusual costumes and trick lighting, shades and nuances of all sorts.” The critic from the town of Branford (within which Stony Creek was a small community) found
Too Much Johnson
original and promising, and predicted that the film footage would improve it. “I think it’s going to be screamingly funny,” wrote the reviewer, “before Mr. Welles gets through with it.”

It was not a perfect debut for Orson’s innovative hybrid—but then his previous foray into farce, the frenetic
Horse Eats Hat
, had also divided audiences. Orson made many adjustments to
Too Much Johnson
throughout its extended two-week run, during which time the local word of mouth was positive enough to fill the summer playhouse every night. In any case, Welles was not finished with his half-film experiment: he was determined to keep editing the footage and bring the production to life on Broadway as the second offering on the Mercury’s fall schedule.

CHAPTER 15

September–December 1938

War of the Worlds

Reflecting his growing estrangement from Welles, John Houseman viewed the downfall of
Too Much Johnson
as apocalyptic. In
Run-Through
he portrayed his partner as severely depressed, taking to bed after the Stony Creek premiere to lie in darkness “for a week surrounded by twenty-five thousand feet of film, ministered to by Augusta Weissberger and the slaves, rising from his bed only for the radio show or for one of his amorous sorties. The rest of the time he lay there, like a sick child, convinced that he was going to die, racked by asthma and fear and despair . . .

“On the seventh day he rose from his bed and returned to the world.”

On Monday September 5, Orson did rise for the final radio broadcast of the summer series. The replacement program had proved a resounding success, following “Dracula” and “Treasure Island” with a series of further triumphs: a clever condensation of Charles Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
; an elegant episode of short stories by Saki, Sherwood Anderson, and Carl Ewald; an adaptation of John Buchan’s
The Thirty-Nine Steps
, faithful to the novel, not Hitchcock’s famous film; and praiseworthy versions of John Drinkwater’s
Abraham Lincoln
, Alexandre Dumas’s
The Count of Monte Cristo
, and Arthur Schnitzler’s
The Affairs of Anatol.
Even the increasingly demoralized Houseman saw it as a bright spot: “the summer’s leading dramatic program on the air,” and “another bright feather in the cap of the Mercury.”

The last episode of the summer was G. K. Chesterton’s
The Man Who Was Thursday
, a philosophical thriller about a Scotland Yard undercover agent. Though Orson often accepted Houseman’s scripts “with minor corrections,” in Houseman’s words, “once in a while, out of caprice or ego, because he really felt he had a superior idea, he would make substantial changes. . . . He also counted on me for the drastic, last-minute editing which took place every week just before air time.”

The Man Who Was Thursday
, though, was “a work long dear to Orson’s heart, but not to mine, and this time, Orson said, he would write his own script; he wanted none of my cosmopolitan pussyfooting; this would be pure Catholic-Christian Chesterton as only he could understand and express it.”

Regardless of all the hectic activity surrounding
Too Much Johnson
, Orson had made it to the radio mike on time every Monday at 9
P
.
M
., to lead his band of players and coo and roar his way through one of the most shrewdly crafted radio drama series yet produced. Now, at the last moment, according to Houseman, Orson reneged on his pledge to write the “Thursday” script. He surrendered to Houseman his copy of Chesterton’s novel, “uncut and immaculate except for a few mysterious markings and some doodled sketches of the celebrated ballerina [Vera Zorina],” Houseman wrote, “three days before air time.” Houseman frantically cranked out the final pages in a CBS office—but the resulting script fell twenty minutes short in dress rehearsal.

Even assuming all this to be true, Orson the performer had a remarkable knack for stretching or squeezing a script to fill the hour of airtime, capable of closing a gap of ten or even fifteen minutes with his sleight of drama. Twenty minutes was a tall order, however. Houseman dashed to the network library, he recalled, scooping up books he and Welles had discussed as possible episodes for the fall. The summer replacement series had been renewed for September, and Orson was saving that announcement for his coda at the close of the Chesterton episode.

When the last broadcast concluded (“one of the finest shows of the series,” according to Frank Brady), Houseman handed the library books over to Orson one by one. “Without turning a hair, as his own master of ceremonies,” remembered Houseman, “he used the remaining time to thank his audience for their loyalty and to give them a foretaste of pleasures to come.”