Me and Orson Welles

Table of Contents

 

 

PENGUIN BOOKS

Robert Kaplow is a teacher and writer who for over fifteen years has written satirical songs and sketches for National Public Radio's
Morning Edition
, where he created “Moe Moskowitz and the Punsters.” His acclaimed young adult novels include
Alessandra in Love
and
Alex Icicle: A Romance in Ten Torrid Chapters
. He lives in Metuchen, New Jersey.

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First published in the United States of America by MacAdam/Cage 2003
Published in Penguin Books 2005

 

Copyright © Robert Kaplow

All rights reserved

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-15231-7

1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Dramatic production—Fiction.
2. Broadway (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 3. Welles, Orson, 1915—Fiction.
4. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 5. Teenage boys—Fiction. 6. Actors—
Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.A565M4 2003
813'.54—dc22 2003014982

 

 

 

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to my father Jerome

Me and Orson Welles
is a work of fiction. Although it is set against a background of real persons and historical events, those persons and events have been substantially reimagined in the storytelling.

 

Special thanks to Arthur Anderson and Samuel Leve of the 1937 Mercury Theatre production of
Julius Caesar
for the hours they spent talking to me.—R.K.

T
his is the story of one week in my life. I was seventeen. It was the week I slept in Orson Welles's pajamas. It was the week I fell in love. It was the week I fell out of love. And it was the week I changed my middle name—twice.

My memory of that period is of things
happening
—almost without cease. There must be a remarkable time in everybody's life when the phone doesn't stop ringing—when the mailman brings you nothing but success—when you walk down the street, the sunlight pouring around you, scarcely able to believe your own good luck.

That Saturday morning the phone was ringing again. My grandfather's Model A was pulling up in front of the house. The living-room radio was blaring news about the Japanese invading China.

On the second floor, my sister was playing her Crosby record of “The Moon Got in My Eyes” for the eight-millionth time. It was the latest in a series of sentimental ballads that served as emotional chapter titles to what I imagined was her overdreamed and underlived life.

“Change the needle!” I said as I headed toward the bathroom. “You're wrecking it.”

“Twerp.”

“Another county heard from.” This from my mother. She was knocking spiderwebs from the ceiling with a broom. “Your father works every day 'til nine o'clock at night, and now on Saturday he has to rake leaves yet? You
enjoy
giving him more work?”

I went into my Paul Muni impersonation from
The Life of Emile Zola
: “The day will come when France will
thank
me . . . for having helped to save her
honor!”
(Voice breaking huskily on
honor
to simulate overwhelming emotion.)

“It's no use.”

“What's he shouting for, Nutsy Fagen?” This from my grandmother downstairs.

I checked my reflection in the hall mirror. Not bad, I thought. Sometimes I really did look like somebody—a writer, an actor—the earnestness of Gary Cooper, the playfulness of Cary Grant, and maybe just a whisper of Astaire. I struck an Astaire-like pose, straightened an imaginary tie, and sang into the camera:

Oh, I was crazy for songs that year. Knew all the verses; knew the names of all the composers and the lyricists; knew the shows and the movies they were from. I'd picked a lot of it up from my grandmother's sheet music collection, but even more I'd learned from my near-obsessive listening to the radio. (The radio and the public library were my two connections to something bigger than Westfield, New Jersey.) My parents' old Atwater Kent sat next to my bed, the hot dust from the tubes sweetening the air 'til two in the morning, filling the room with Benny Goodman's “Avalon,” Mildred Bailey's “There's a Lull in My Life,” Glen Gray, Ruth Etting, Isham Jones. And Saturday nights there was
Theatre News
with John Gassner—and voices in my own bedroom were talking about the new George S. Kaufman play, and Richard Rodgers himself was playing the piano, and Lorenz Hart was speaking: “Here's our first song hit, ‘Manhattan,' from the
Garrick Gaieties.
” And the Lunts were laughing about
Amphitryon 38,
and Harold Clurman was directing the new Clifford Odets.

I lay there at night, and I felt
close
to it all. New York City and the CBS Radio Workshop. Close enough to touch, if I could just get through the right door. Forty minutes from where I lived, Irving Berlin was writing a new song that two months from now every person in the world would be singing. All of it
vibrating
out there!

And some mornings when the light was good, and the coffee and the Fig Newtons were scalding through me, I'd think—at least for a few intoxicated seconds: “You know, Richard, you can do all that, too.” I wasn't sure whether I wanted to write songs or direct plays or write novels or maybe do everything—like the Jewish Noel Coward.

So I pored through the memoirs and the back issues of
Theatre Arts Monthly
in the public library searching for the answer. I read the biographies of every actor and writer I admired for their secrets. How did it happen? When did they know? What was the breakthrough?

I'd just finished Noel Coward's autobiography,
Present Indicative.
I thought it was the best book I'd ever read, and I kept comparing myself to him: O.K., Coward was twenty-five when he wrote, directed, and starred in
The Vortex.
That still gave me eight years. He wrote “A Room with a View” when he was twenty-eight, so I still had a little time there, too. But Berlin was only twenty-two when he wrote “When I Lost You.”

God, it was going to be hard to keep up.

Downstairs, the phone was still ringing. It was nearly always for me; mostly the guys at school—the Black Crow Crew we called ourselves, the seven of us, in celebration of our drinking exploits. (Black Crow was this toxically cheap beer we drank.) But it wasn't the drinking that had pulled me to the Black Crow Crew. It was the
energy
of Stefan and Skelly and the rest of them—this vanguard of good-looking male power in Westfield High School. They had a kind of celebrity glow about them that just about defined the word
desirable
. That I was permitted to be close to them seemed nothing short of a miracle. Last year, Stefan had been standing outside of study hall eyeing up this amazing tenth-grader, Kristina Stakuna. We noticed each other staring at her ass, and we both cracked up laughing. We ended up sitting next to each other in that study hall for half a year, and so became friends. It was strange, because we seemed almost opposites. Stefan was five feet tall, tough, physically intense—about once a week he got thrown out of school for beating the crap out of somebody. I was taller and significantly less imposing, an Honors English type. Sometimes, with Stefan, I felt I was the pilot fish hovering just behind the shark. I think I gave him some sort of dubious intellectual credentials—and in return I fell under his protection. Nobody could mess with me, or they'd have to deal with Stefan and the Black Crow Boys. I rewrote his entire research paper on Walt Whitman.
A+, Phil, it's great to see you finally working to your potential.
In return he set fire to Kimberley Kagan's car when she refused to go to the prom with me. It was definitely a fair trade. Of course, Skelly, Stefan, Korzun, Townsend, and the rest of them knew every beautiful girl in the school—I mean, these girls were
lining up
for the privilege of dating these guys, or even being near them, sitting in the same diner as they did on a late Saturday night. And while those particular romantic spoils hadn't yet fallen my way, just the
proximity
of beautiful women was exciting. I was sort of the approachable liaison to the Black Crow Crew. Gorgeous girls would stop and ask me if I knew whether Stefan had plans for the weekend. They were so close I could smell their perfume, could stare with perfect innocence at their impossibly lovely arms and the sculpted perfection of their stockinged legs. And, all right, I may have been invisible to them, but they weren't invisible to me. One time Kate Rouilliard looked directly at me with the cool lamps of her enormous blue eyes, and I couldn't sleep an entire week.

My grandfather was standing in front of the phonograph in the living room listening to my father's Jolson records. He was still dressed in his hat, scarf, and black Chesterfield coat with the velvet collar.

My heart leapt a little. All right, she was short, she looked a little “librarian,” but, hell, it was a start. I thought she was pretty. My affiliation with the mighty Black Crow Crew was finally beginning to pay off—although my relationship with Caroline Tice had become a sort of joke among the Boys. I'd been seeing her for two months now and hadn't even kissed her. “Pounce!” Stefan and Skelly kept yelling at me.
“Pounce
that broad. That's what she's
waiting
for you to do. Don't
ask
her, for Christ's sake.”