Orson Welles, Vol I (11 page)

It seems that by this time Dick and Orson were losing each other. Dick would occasionally go to Todd; according to Paul Guggenheim, Orson used to hide from him when he did, saying that he hated him. His drunkenness was impossible to ignore, an unbearable embarrassment in front of his fellow students. So Orson hid. In effect he disowned him. In this he was encouraged by the Hills, who thought
him an appalling influence. But Dick in a way disowned Orson, too. Coming unannounced to a performance of
Wings over Europe
, he left before the end of the play, because, Welles told Barbara Leaming, ‘he didn’t want to admit he was interested in my acting career or some damn thing’.
⁵⁴
There was nothing Dick Welles could do to bridge the gap between himself and this son whom he so deeply but unusefully
loved. For Orson, the theatre,
Todd, and the Hills were his emotional reality. His work on plays continued with unabated intensity. Now – at the age of fourteen – he was designing and directing as well as starring in the Todd Troupers productions. This was a serious business, thanks to Roger Hill’s policy. ‘I felt that the ordinary audience for school shows was worse than none at all because it
consisted of parents and friends who were completely uncritical. So we organised the Todd Troupers and started taking shows out of town. We would rent the Goodman Theatre in Chicago or use some of the suburban movie houses in the area.’
⁵⁵
Welles also wrote the programmes:
‘ANDROCLES AND THE LION: JUNIOR TROUPERS OF TODD
together with
LEARN PIGEONS PRESENT FOR WOODSTOCK’S WOMEN’S CLUB
a special
performance of
ANDROCLES AND THE LION
being an arrangement of the play by
G. BERNARD SHAW
and staged by
ORSON WELLES.’
There is an excellent woodcut by Welles on the cover.
‘NOTE:
A mystery surrounds the author of this delightful satire. Just what is Bernard Shaw, vegetarian, socialist, anti-vivisectionist and Irishman, really driving at? … In
ANDROCLES AND THE LION,
the author flaunts the wormy
spots in Caesarism, Paganism and Martyrdom right in our faces. But don’t let that worry you. Somewhere in Hertfordshire a blue eye is winking. It is suggested that you wink right back and accept, for this evening at least, the Shavian doctrine of the theatre: “Don’t take anything seriously.”’

There was nothing makeshift about the productions or the presentation. The good people of Woodstock
or the Goodman Theatre’s subscribers could count themselves lucky to catch Orson’s production of
The Physician in Spite of Himself
, in a full-blown constructivist setting with its naked structure, inclined planes, platforms, wheels, stepladders and stage lights clearly visible, an environment that deliberately forces a playing style of extreme physicality. The set is pretty well a duplicate of
Meyerhold’s design for
The Magnanimous Cuckold
. But that famous production had been staged only seven years before, in 1922, and on the other side of the world. Its implications had barely been absorbed by the avant-garde of the English-speaking theatre. And here it was, being boldly reproduced by a small boys’ school in a small town in the Mid-West of America. Of course the idea was a borrowed
one; but Picasso’s
mot
about originality is particularly appropriate here: to imitate others is necessary; to imitate oneself is pathetic.

There was, too,
Julius Caesar
, the entry for the Goodman Theatre Amateur Drama League, hence pared down to sixty minutes. On the evidence of surviving photographs, the design uses the width
of the stage but is scenically relatively conventional, the set
consisting of boxes shifted around during the action; togas were worn, created from bedsheets the boys stripped from their own beds. Fifteen-year-old Orson played both Antony and Cassius. In the competition, the boys playing these two roles were highly praised, but disqualified because they were evidently older than seventeen, the age limit for entrants. Or so the story goes; certainly a photograph
of his Cassius shows him expressionistically intense in his shock wig, with no hint of the schoolboy about him. Welles was evidently very upset to have lost; Dadda Bernstein wrote him a charming note of consolation, containing sentiments that only someone who had never stood on a stage could have expressed: ‘even though you did not get the first prize it was worth doing. Applause means little in
the long run and not all the things we do that are worth while receive recognition … some day when you will be in the eyes of the world doing big things as I know you will, you will look back on this disappointment as having been just a passing experience … “Success is in the silence, though fame is in the song.” I know your true values and hope to see them grow into fruition. I love you more than
all else. Dadda.’
⁵⁶
Over the years in which Welles sometimes seemed to value the song far above the silence, he never lacked either love or faith.

That summer, in July of 1930, Orson and his father went by sea to Shanghai. Earlier, in the middle of June, he had resumed his column for the
Highland Park News
. No longer music critic for the Festival (after death threats, perhaps?), he had his
own chat spot: ‘Inklings’, with a smart logo (the name of the column being poured out of an ink bottle) designed by himself. The June 30th piece is a vacuous piece of chatter, a word-spinning puff for his editor’s forthcoming marriage, replete with middle-aged matrimonial jokes (‘All of which goes to show that intelligence and world-wide experience has nothing to do with it. Immunization is impossible!
Our brainiest men are acquiring the ball and chain every day. Nothing can be done, Mort has put his foot firmly in the molasses. All we can do is to smile through the tears and yell a hoarse “Congratulations!”’ On July 4th, he announced the Shanghai trip. The column has a new, cunningly fashioned logo showing assorted Chinese heads on a globe over the rim of which a steamer is puffing; there
are clouds on the other side; a placard, upside down, says
OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD.
At the bottom of this there is a slogan:
THE INSIDE DOPE ON CHOP SUEY LANDS.

More or less (in the manner of the
COMING ATTRACTIONS ANNOUNCER
of the Talkies) Ladeez and Gentlemen: … instead of lingering
here in HP to prattle weekly – (voice from the gallery: ‘weakly is right!’ – we are packing up and going far
away … very, very far away indeed. Even unto the other side of the earth i.e. China and environs – many thousands of miles beneath Central Avenue, to the under-world kingdoms of dog-stew and birds’ nest soup … we are broadening out, we will write about the East, and we’ll spill you the whole business, absolutely everything … All the clout, glamour, romance of the Orient will troop in Literary Caravan
across the glowing lines of this: your favourite feature of your favourite journal … I thank you!!!! (loud sound of escaping steam as we take our bow).

It’s school magazine stuff, but fun. The next column, July 11th 1930, describes the journey to Victoria, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, whence the boat departed:

Dear Readers: We’ve rattled down out of the cool, clean air of the mountains
on to a dry and dusty desert wasteland … nothing is particularly desirable today. Gissing would terminate his feverish search for ‘where the blue begins’ were he here now, for this is where the blue ends, the sky being considerably faded with the heat …

Further instalments will come, he says, but fitfully: it takes fourteen days for the mail boat to return.

We’d write more but there’s
about a second left for us to get to the gang-plank. And so – Adios!

His slang is more Edwardian, it seems, than 1920s – perhaps because he spends so much time around older people. He seems to want to present himself as an old buffer; an Alexander Woollcott tone prevails. But he paints the scene amusingly, dramatising himself, as he was to do for the rest of his life. He is ever-present between
the reader and the subject.

The last column was that of 5 September 1930: headed
MIDNIGHT, YELLOW SEA.
It is worth quoting at length:

The heart of the Chinese pirate country: the first day in Nara was an adventurous one to say the least. Nara is picturesque and lovely, one of the most beautiful spots in Japanese Japan and particularly so in the rain. It started to sprinkle just as we left
the station in our ricksha and increased in violence as we
rode. There was a thin green mist hanging over everything as we went scurrying through a kind of three-dimensional Japanese print, rattling over little lacquered bridges across willow-bordered streams under huge pines as old as time itself, crunching across temple yards, past age-old pagodas, and on up to the hill to our hotel. The furnishings
in our room were typically Nipponese and most fascinating but not sufficiently so to keep us among them, so leaving our Dad to snooze under mosquito netting we stepped out the back entrance and took a walk. It had just stopped raining. You know how lovely it can be right after a summer rain – everything clean and green and glistening? It was like that, just as fragrant as a flower, as warm
and wet as the tropics in heaven. The willows wept liquid sunshine into the silver streams, lovely little sacred deer stood in the deep, damp grass, a pilgrim scuffled along the road, his bell tinkling faintly from beneath his great straw coat, and behind the pagodas above everything, there hung a rainbow … ! In the park we found an open space in the centre of which was a gayly-curtained platform.

We guessed correctly that it was a temporary stage erected by some company of strolling players. We parted the drapes and peered in. The actors were clustered about a tiny stove eating their supper. They invited us to join in with them and of course we accepted. We shall not forget that meal. How we thanked our lucky stars we had learned to eat with chopsticks! We were the honored guest. Seated
in the only chair, we were stuffed with rice, raw fish and ‘saki.’ And while even our Japanese was more extensive than their English we carried on a successful conversation of three hours’ duration entirely with our hands. We taught them a song from a school musical comedy and they instructed us in the art of Oriental theatrical fencing and make-up. It was a truly fascinating experience. Late
that afternoon we left, promising to return to their show that evening. We did, but we found ourselves alone in the park. The moving picture industry is hitting the theatrical world even in the East, and it was raining a little. The players laughed long and heartily, and we had tea. We were shocked by their living conditions, their poverty. They told us that they had enough rice for one more day,
if no one came the next night … They felt hurt when we offered them some money and laughed at our sympathising. They would laugh at death … we said goodbye and the last thing we heard as we walked off down the road was the sound of their merry voices singing the American song we had taught them.

It’s an authentic cameo, charming and evocative. Naive, pardonably, and still a bit stilted, but
the narrative and the images are vivid: the best of his childish writing. The performance is most likely to have been Kabuki, with its mix of music and drama. He must have had occasion to see many varieties of theatre – a whole other world unknown to his contemporaries. If his boyish prose scarcely reflects that, it’s hardly surprising, but this Far Eastern journey – and an earlier one, when he
was twelve – gave him the certainty that there was a world elsewhere.

Something else his despatches to the
Highland Park News
fail to convey is that he was travelling with a hopeless drunk: his father (‘our Dad’, snoozing under the mosquito net). This last trip to Shanghai has the air of a farewell voyage: Dick’s farewell to travel, to Orson, to life.

It seems that the razing of the Sheffield
House Hotel was a psychological blow for Richard Welles. He appears to have done everything he could – the toy house, the smoked sausages – to make it somewhere special for him and his son, away from Todd, away from Maurice Bernstein, away from the theatre, which was sucking Orson in. He would have been only too happy if it had been the theatre he, Dick, loved: vaudeville, musical comedy,
the circus. Of all of these he was a connoisseur, known backstage and in the theatre bars. He would take Orson to meet the stars, especially the magicians. Welles said later that love of magic was what bound him and his father together; a curious thought. Magic, both black and white, threads its way through Welles’s life and career. He had performed it to delight his mother’s guests; he had used it
to lasso Roger Hill’s affection. It is the theatrical equivalent of fireworks: brilliantly impressive, it leaves nothing behind. It is an end in itself, contentless, inexplicable. It renders the successful practitioner mysterious and powerful, though there is never any doubt in the audience’s mind that it is not real. The word trick is significantly central to descriptions of magic. We, the audience,
are bamboozled; the magician has got away with something.

Alcoholics are always trying to get away with something, too: hoping – believing – that their condition passes unnoticed; or that it doesn’t matter; and, in a brilliant double bind, that if things go wrong, it was only because they were drunk, so that’s all right. They didn’t mean it or they didn’t see it. They, too, are involved in
a conjuring act: by taking the magic potion, they make things disappear – the past, the present, the future; pain, complication, loss; the truth. Hey presto! It’s gone. So Orson and his father were
great fans of magic. There is a story that Richard Welles took Orson backstage to meet Harry Houdini. Orson enthusiastically showed the great conjuror his handkerchief trick, to be told to keep working
on it: he must never, ever, perform a trick until he’d practised it in private at least a thousand times. Going back some little while later to show Houdini how much he’d improved, Welles found the great man having a brand new trick demonstrated by its inventor. ‘Great,’ says Houdini, ‘I’ll put it in tonight.’ A turning point, and a dangerous lesson. Getting away with things is always exciting,
of course – until you don’t.