Orson Welles, Vol I (28 page)

The production over which McClintic had laboured so intensely was received with respect (‘it is admirable Shakespeare, offered with a lavish hand to the playgoers of a period that has been treating the noblest heritage of English-speaking drama with shocking neglect’
²¹
); Woodman Thompson’s solid design was admired for the way in which
‘he has created a glowing spectacle of the romantic period that serves as a background for Shakespeare’s greatest love story’; Cornell’s radiance was routinely praised, the ensemble acclaimed – ‘a marked improvement over the Shakespeare that the American stage gave its patrons in the much-lamented “good old days” … they were Shakespearean giants in those days but the aforesaid giants too often
held sway over courts of pygmies.’ But it was Welles, particularly in his home town, who elicited the golden
plaudits. ‘Passing over Basil Rathbone’s Romeo, already described as handsome but cold,’ said the
Chicago Tribune
, most gratifyingly, ‘attention focuses on Orson Welles’s Mercutio – a new treatment of the character, abundant in vitality … I had never seen him acted in a style that approached
my conception until young Welles swaggered out to prove that the critics of Dublin who hailed him as a wonder-boy were not crazy. Welles is flamboyant, some will say – but so is Mercutio. Welles violates tradition by wearing a half-fledged beard – but it gives his boyish face a definite Tudor look. He reads the Queen Mab speech with merry flourishes, and he plunges into the duel scene with a
fine fury of swordmanship.’

A photograph of Welles in the role suggests a robust, piratical figure, ear-ringed and bearded; more like the traditional image of Petruchio. It can well be imagined that Welles’s size and force could have made for an original and startling Mercutio, quite unlike the jolly jester of Victorian tradition (‘that indestructibly happy part’, Stark Young called it, as
late as 1923), or the neurotic ectomorph of current fashion. The contrast with Rathbone’s Romeo (‘which seemed to meet with McClintic’s and Cornell’s approval, as later it was to do with every critic throughout the country’,
²²
in his own modest phrase) must have been rather striking; Rathbone forty-one years old, Welles eighteen.

Chicago’s press, at any rate, was in no doubt that a star had
been born. The
Tribune
followed up their enthusiastic notice with a feature on their theatre page, headed
WONDER BOY OF ACTING.
The page is dominated by a fine photographic portrait by Vandamm with Welles in mid-profile, a looming shadow on the wall, his right hand hanging expressively down. He looks fifteen at the most. ‘Orson Welles, who has scored a hit as Mercutio in Katharine Cornell’s production
of
ROMEO
&
JULIET,
’
²³
reads the caption, ‘is a young Chicagoan of amazing precocity. A prep school lad, at the age of 18, he takes a leading role with the power and skill of a veteran.’ The allusions to his ‘preppy’ manner are confirmed by contemporaries; he was still recognisably a middle-class boy from the Middle West. The manner made the myth even more remarkable in the eyes of his early chroniclers.
The romance of the Irish sojourn takes another leap forward; here he is ‘the David Garrick of the Irish Free State’. Reality has long been left behind. The more recent past, too, is endowed with a legendary touch: as he prepares for rehearsals with the famous drama coach Miss Dorothy Corrington, she hands him a copy of
Hamlet
. It is inscribed ‘John Barrymore’. She taught him, too. ‘It was a favourable
omen.’ The essential elements of Welles’s
public profile had now been established: precocity, direct succession to the great ones of the past, possession of special insights gained from foreign wanderings. His curriculum vitae thus presented bears a striking resemblance to that of Jesus Christ.

It is worth mentioning that Welles’s father and Roger Hill both had close contacts with Chicago’s
journalistic fraternity; Ashton Stevens was Dick Welles’s best friend, and most of the other arts journalists took a lively interest in Todd School. Many of their children studied there. Welles would not have been given any attention had he lacked talent or news value; but chums in the press were very happy to fan a spark into flames.

Meanwhile there was the tour, with its twelve cities a
month; three moves a week, all three plays in each city. The organisational effort required to make this happen was enormous, with large and elaborate realistic settings to be transported and installed, lighting facilities varying from house to house and having to be adjusted to, the actors (over thirty of them) to be accommodated and looked after. The Cornell management was famous for its generous
treatment of the company and crew; Welles, though not exactly handsomely remunerated – his salary was described by the company manager as ‘small’, so it really must have been – stayed at excellent hotels throughout the tour. Discomfort was minimised; Cornell and McClintic were good if demanding parents of their ‘well-disciplined, strictly-ordered family’.
²⁴
This was not anything that Welles knew
about, and sure enough, his role in the family rapidly became that of black sheep. Touring is traditionally an adventure playground for young actors and those who would remain young past their first youth; oats are sown, hell is raised, candles are burned at both ends. The twin excitements of a new town and an almost unbroken succession of first nights, every one a triumph of adrenalin over adversity,
added to the curious sense of truancy involved in being away from home, create an emotional wildness that Orson Welles was the last person on earth to be able to resist. In a sense, he was living out his adolescence – for once, slightly later than most people. Though he had adventured way beyond his years, both mentally and geographically, he had done so as a loner. Until the
Romeo and Juliet
tour, he had been a stranger to the intoxicating company of his contemporaries. In fact, as John Hannah has sharply pointed out, he was living offstage the life of the Veronese youth that he and his companions in carousal (always excluding the tremendously proper Basil Rathbone, of course) were playing each night onstage.

Miss Cornell and Mr McClintic were not amused. ‘He was
at all times
during this long tour an arresting, stimulating and at moments exasperating member of the company,’
²⁵
said McClintic, and one can hear his teeth grind as he speaks. The theatre was not fun and games to Kit and Guthrie; it was life and death, not to mention bread and butter. They put their every penny and all their dreams into the work; they strove unceasingly, if not always blithely, to improve
its quality and to enhance the status of the theatrical profession (a note in the programme for the tour says ‘to aid the Actors’ Fund of America, Miss Cornell makes a charge of 50c for her autographed photograph. The entire sum is given to the fund’). It was her public comportment as much as her professional prowess that earned her the title of First Lady (and, as Tynan wittily commented, Last
Lady) of the American Theatre. She and McClintic had come about as far from roguery and vagabondage as it was possible for actors to come. Welles, by temperament and by conviction, as well as by sheer youth, embraced the contrary idea of the actor as a law unto himself, anarchic, antinomian, born for the exception, not the rule. Drinking and dining all day and all night, he was frequently in danger
of failing to fulfil the actor’s absolute minimum obligation: turning up on stage in time for one’s entrance. Missing his last train for one touring date, he was obliged to charter a plane to make the show, which he did by the merest hair’s breadth; Miss Cornell was furious. Miss Cornell was often furious. When he and a chum wearing false beards and heavy cloaks, posing as foreign dignitaries, paraded
round a restaurant in San Francisco in which she and some friends were dining, she was so furious that she ordered him to go to bed immediately. This is high spirits mixed up with teenage rebellion. McClintic and Cornell were very satisfactory authority figures against whom to hurl himself; better than any of the various alternately pliant or anxious adults, the Daddas and the Skippers, by
whom he had been brought up and whose method was to nag, and then to indulge. There was small satisfaction in rebelling against them.

He wrote an interesting letter to Katharine Cornell after one of these misdemeanours:

About twice a year I wake up and find myself a sinner. Somebody slaps me in the face, and after the stars have cleared away and I’ve stopped blubbering, I am made aware
of the discomforting realities. I see that my boots are roughshod and that I’ve been galloping in them over people’s sensibilities. – I see that I have been assertive and brutal and irreverent, and that the sins of deliberate commission
are as nothing to these. – This of course is good for me, coming as I am, noisy and faltering out of the age of insolence – just as the discipline of the tour
is good for me.
²⁶

This is the first of many, many such letters in his collected correspondence. ‘Sorry, I behaved badly – but I didn’t mean to’ is the burden of them all; ‘I’m just a kid, after all.’ And all these letters have something else in common: they are apologies which aren’t really apologetic at all. The transgression to which the above letter is a reply is not recorded, but there
is one offence which is indicative of the gulf that separated their attitudes. He had had his hair permed for
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
, as he told a reporter, and he felt a fool in it. ‘I couldn’t bear it after a while, so I had my hair cut short – and nobody except Miss Cornell noticed.’ You bet she did. His casual destruction of a detail of the production carefully thought about and agreed
upon must have been anathema to her, a slap in the face. Her work, and McClintic’s, depended entirely on an accumulation of detail. Lose any detail, and the whole show suffered; that was their credo. It could not have been further from Welles’s, neither then nor ever. The big gesture, the overpowering effect, the glorious surge of adrenalin: these were the ingredients of Welles’s bank-holiday
approach to the theatre, gratifying for the performer, thrilling for the audience, however temporarily. For the McClintics it was a daily and painstaking re-creation of what had once been painfully established, an exhausting but necessary uphill struggle, all too liable to fall short of excellence. Perpetual vigilance was the price of this approach. (Small wonder, when Edith Evans joined them for
the New York revival of
Romeo and Juliet
, she felt so in sympathy with their attitude that she volunteered a cut in her salary.) Welles’s very existence was an offence to their values. ‘I found myself wondering skeptically,’ wrote Alexander Woollcott, ‘if Mr Wilder and I had done well by Miss Cornell.’
²⁷

The impression he made on the rest of the company was not much more favourable: Brenda
Forbes, the Nurse in
Romeo and Juliet
, said later: ‘He was gauche and tiresome. He was always talking about plans for his own theatre, or else wanting to “take over” any group he joined.’
²⁸
He was, of course, frustrated. He felt awkward in
Candida
, loathed being in
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
, and though clearly enjoying himself enormously in
Romeo and Juliet
, he was dead by the interval; there
was another two hours to go, and McClintic absolutely refused to allow him to skip the curtain call. His prodigious energy was underused. He had
no regard for the production, either, whose tastefulness seemed to him the opposite of the conception of the Elizabethan theatre that he and Skipper were evolving for
Everybody’s Shakespeare
, on which he continued to work during the tour. The final straw
came early on, in February of 1934:
Romeo and Juliet
, for all its respectable notices, was failing to draw the crowd. This was partly because ‘on “Big Time,” so to speak, Shakespeare had been a box-office graveyard since Barrymore’s
HAMLET
and Jane Cowl’s
JULIET
twelve years before,’
²⁹
as McClintic put it (‘when we substituted
The Barretts
, the business leapt to capacity’) but also because there
was something, he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, not right with the production. They would not, he decided, show it to New York, or certainly not this year; it would end at Cincinnati, where they donated the set, all $ll,000-worth of it, to the local Little Theatre. The tour continued, miserably for Welles, with
Candida
and
The Barretts
.

‘That cooks my Manhattan opening that had been
held out to me,’ wrote Orson to Skipper from Detroit. It also seems to have scuppered another venture because ‘it alters all plans for Central City … [Katharine] Carrington has called off previous plans and she and [Robert Edmond] Jones will do (God dammit!)
Othello
with a whole milky way of Big Stars. That hurt for a while …” The tone of this letter is very different from that of the roustabout
most often found standing sheepishly on Miss Cornell’s carpet. There is serious career consideration here, steely calculation. The tone is properly, even alarmingly, grown-up. ‘Now that I’ve begun to cool off, it seems to me that the free summer might be made to mean a great deal for us both. I have an idea.’ He pursued this idea with extraordinary vigour, and in the end pulled it off with real
flair. It was, he told Skipper, ‘an old idea of yours jazzed up some, and improved and made practical, I think, by an addition’.

R
OGER HILL
’s original notion which Welles was about to jazz up had been to hold a summer drama course at Todd. The school was often used for similar purposes; the drama course idea seemed to Hill an excellent way of achieving his perennial objectives: making money and keeping Welles busy. The addition which Welles proposed in his letter was
a professional repertory company in residence at Todd: nothing short of an integrated school and company. It was to be ‘not simply another school, or a Summer Repertory Theatre in another barn, doing last season’s light comedy successes and sometimes trying out next season’s but (by High Heaven!) A Chicago Drama Festival, devoted to the production of representative classics, that majority of the
very greatest that nobody’s done in living memory … and those new plays which are both too good and too exciting or courageous for anyone to dare to do anywhere else.’ Among these might be, he tentatively suggests, their very own
Marching Song
, despite – or because of – the flop of a recent Broadway play on the same theme. He suggests a tie-in with Ravinia, his old stamping-ground; but no, better
to centre it on Todd’s nearby town of Woodstock with its quaint charms, its lovely old Opera House and adorable tree-shaded square.