Orson Welles, Vol I (29 page)

Once the idea had seized him, suggestions pour out: combined dinner-and-show tickets, for example, with meals whipped up by ‘some picturesque black chef’. As he plans the publicity campaign – ‘both intensive and extensive’ – he begins to write like a press release.
‘Theatre-goers will be urged to make pilgrimages to the charming old festival town of Woodstock, to dine al fresco on the campus of Todd, world-famous preparatory school for young boys.’ He instructs Roger Hill to get to work on the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce to secure their ‘delighted co-operation’. There will be, in the square, ‘a certain amount of festooning, some gala sort of illumination
… and above all, in the bandstand, a rousing local band’. This goes on, he hopes, ‘merrily’, for a month, then, assuming the success of the professional productions (the student productions
won’t be for public consumption) the whole thing transfers to Chicago for a fortnight.

How will it all be paid for? Welles will chip in a thousand dollars which he thinks he can save from his salary, they’ll
charge the students for their tuition, of course, and ‘a little more money should be quite easy to get hold of by organising a company or something’. The question is not how, much less if: when? is all he wants to know. – Poor Roger Hill! His solid and practical idea transformed into a dream of megalomaniac speculation. But he couldn’t refuse. Welles was his favourite, almost as a Roman emperor
or a Stuart monarch might have one. There was nothing Skipper could deny him. And indeed, few people could when he was in this vein. His passion for the idea, his inventiveness, his need all add up to an unstoppable impulse. There is something heartless about the way in which Woodstock, Skipper, the school, even the as-yet-unformed company, are all bent to his will – but then it’s so self-evidently
for their own good! And for the good of the theatre! And indeed, it was, on the whole. It all came to pass, pretty well as he laid it out to Roger Hill in that first letter, with an important subtraction: the original idea.

Meanwhile, he was planning, drawing more people into the net. His first approach was to Whitford Kane, under whose direction he mendaciously claimed in the Irish press
to have acted. A distinguished Ulster actor who had played an important part in Chicago’s theatrical life, directing and acting at the Goodman, he had been the first actor to play O’Casey’s Captain Boyle in America. Welles and Roger Hill knew him from the Chicago Drama League; he and his protégé and lover Hiram ‘Chubby’ Sherman were on the panel which had singled out Welles for his performance in
the dual roles of Cassius and Caesar, and had protested when he failed to win a prize. Welles wanted Kane to be the Director of Studies for the Summer School. In describing the set-up to him, Welles says that he’s hoping to get Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir to come over as the mainstay of the professional company; he hopes to do
Doctor Faustus
and an Arthur Schnitzler play. As for funding,
he writes, shamelessly: ‘Roger is putting up most of the money. He figures the idea is a good publicity stunt for his school … he has a good many publicity connections. He has been in his time a tophole advertising man and I have every confidence he will be able to sell the idea to a large and desirable group of young people.’ He offers the job to Kane for 6 per cent of every tuition fee (about
$300) and a salary – ‘here I blush a little’ – of $25 per week. It must have felt strange to be
thus (in Welles’s own words) propositioned by someone who was as far as Kane was concerned only yesterday a schoolboy, but the tone of authority is compelling, the wooing direct and shameless. ‘The smart magazines are going to begin flaunting advertisements of the Todd Summer School of the Drama pretty
soon and we want to be able to put “Under the direction of Whitford Kane.” Well, how about it?’ For good measure he throws in an offer to Sherman – ‘there’s a job for Chub’ – lest the thought of being separated from him might have stopped Kane from agreeing.

Kane’s letter back is cautious: his Broadway play is doing well, but even if it closes, he fears he’s going to have to go to Hollywood
to make some cash. He might spare a week or two to do one production. He’s due to teach a little at the University of Michigan, so this might fit in. He doubts whether Welles will be able to afford to bring over Hilton and Edwards, as he calls them. On the strength of this really rather uncertain commitment, Welles immediately had leaflets printed emblazoned with the promised phrase Under the direction
of Whitford Kane; the paragraph detailing the members of the faculty concludes: ‘This is too brief for the proper consideration of Whitford Kane. His epic career as player and producer on both sides of the Atlantic is an important chapter in the history of the stage and the outlines of his career need no rehearsal. Of all our blessings, perhaps the chiefest is the privilege of heading the
constellation of the school faculty with that illustrious name.’

Welles had meanwhile got in touch with Mac Liammóir and Edwards who had been somewhat amazed to receive an urgent telegram: ‘Would you both join me for summer season at campus in Woodstock, Illinois? 3 plays running for a fortnight each stop
HAMLET
for Micheál,
TSAR PAUL
for Hilton, something for me so far undecided stop I am
trying my hand at production stop lovely school to live in and small Victorian theatre stop can pay your expenses of course and whatever is going stop now do say yes it will be a kind of a holiday and lots of fun stop love Orson.’ Their plaintive request for particulars was met with a torrent of enthusiastic persuasion: ‘With the idea of founding in America a Festival theatre in the European spirit
and tradition, Woodstock, fifty miles from Chicago by easy motor drive, is to become the scene of a good deal of theatrical hysteria during the months of July and August … each production will have careful, painstaking and leisurely consideration, so that by the time the critics get at them they won’t need either the apology of the summer repertory theatre,
or the older apology of the first night.’
Rehearsals were to start on 1 July; the first play to open 12 July. So it was not exactly the Moscow Art Theatre. In his mind – or in his publicity, which often amounted to the same thing – the season was a fulfilment of the wildest dreams of the most inspired visionaries the theatre has ever known. He then supplies Micheál and Hilton a list of the company which includes Kane, Sherman, Brenda
Forbes (the Nurse from Cornell’s
Romeo and Juliet
) and others, not one of whom actually appeared. His list of plays includes, in addition to
Hamlet
and
Tsar Paul, Doctor Faustus
, Schnitzler’s
Living Hours, Bleak House, The Idiot, Brothers Karamazov
– and
‘SOME NEW PLAYS.’
The enterprising list reflects the reading of nineteen-year-old Welles: a typical late adolescent’s discovery of the great,
dark classics, all meaning a great deal of work for the Dubliners, already exhausted by a long season. Surprisingly, however, they said yes. Hilton had been against it, but Micheál was swayed by an encounter with a mystical American acquaintance: ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit!’
¹
she said. ‘I wanted to tell you you’re a Navajo Indian. Yes! Isn’t that splendid. Now, here’s what I’ve just had revealed.
It’s the loveliest thrill; you’re going to America.’ Bludgeoned by Orson’s exuberance, and cornered by the clairvoyant, they seem to have set out with few artistic expectations, in a mood of resignation rather than anticipation.

Welles immediately cabled them for pictures: ‘Our publicity man is particularly partial to Sex Appeal (note the capital letters) and costume. You and Micheál together,
apart and under every sort of lighting and wig.’ Hilton and Micheál too may have been somewhat astonished at receiving such urgent and authoritative instructions from the cumbersome and boyishly brash lad who had hurled himself so prodigiously across their tiny stage two years ago for a few months. If they had remembered the amount of publicity he had engendered during that brief stay, they might
not have been so surprised. Here, from hotels across America (the Cornell tour still rumbling inexorably on) Welles masterminded The Selling of Woodstock, Summer of ’34. His instructions to Skipper were clear and detailed. He started with the folder: ‘this folder should have a good deal about me in it,’ he decreed, magnanimously adding ‘as well as the others and stuff about Woodstock and the
Opera House and the Festival idea.’

The first formal announcement spoke of Roger Hill conducting the summer school of the theatre with Whitford Kane as its director. Then there was a list of plays, some of which he had mentioned to his various collaborators, others of which had obviously been thrown
in on the spur of the moment. Reciting lists of plays is a favourite activity of artistic directors;
it was a sport at which Welles excelled throughout his career.
Spring Awakening, The Constant Nymph
and Strindberg’s
The Father
made their first, and last, appearances here, as did ‘one of the Beaumont & Fletcher comedies’. The mailing list received this: ‘Here is the most important dramatic news of the decade for the Chicago territory – the founding in the middle-west of an American Festival
Theatre of genuine distinction. Probably no finer acting company will be assembled on the continent during the summer than the acting group headed by Orson Welles, Louise Prussing, Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir.’ The billing is interesting. Under
Hamlet
, Mac Liammóir’s ‘first appearance on this continent in his phenomenally successful interpretation’ is welcomed. ‘Mr Welles is doubling
for the first time in the history of the play, as the Ghost and his brother the King.’ The third play is to be either Dmitri Merejkovsky’s
Tsar Paul
or a first production of
The Master of the Revels
, Don Marquis’s four-act comedy written that year and set in Tudor times.

Inside is Welles’s account of himself: ‘Chicagoans have read for years of the acclaim accorded their own Orson Welles both
abroad and throughout the wide reaches of the continent. Now for the first time they will have the opportunity to see him at home. The return of the only foreign artist to be starred in the Irish Abbey; the only actor of recent times to be cast simultaneously in such divergent parts as Marchbanks and Mercutio, is a genuinely important event. Within recent months every important critic has lavished
praise on this young actor’s portrayal of leading roles opposite Katharine Cornell.’ There are equal extravagances for Louise Prussing (‘another Chicagoan who journeyed far from home to meet honor and rich reward. After 4 glamorous years in London where she was leading lady for such luminous names as Gerald du Maurier, Arthur Bourchier, Leslie Faber, she came back to New York’), for Mac Liammóir
and for Edwards, and including the odd grammatical howler: ‘Todd School, one of the most unique educational institutions in the world. Vacant in the summer months, Mr Roger Hill, its headmaster …’ There was no danger of Roger Hill being vacant
this
summer.

The leaflet discloses the names of the distinguished
COMMITTEE OF FRIENDS OF THE FESTIVAL:
the
CHICAGO PROMOTION
includes Lorado Taft,
Mr & Mrs Dudley Crafts Watson; more significantly, the
PROFESSIONAL ADVISORY
panel includes Charles Collins, Ashton Stevens, Lloyd Lewis – the three most influential critics in Chicago,
with all of whom Welles was on first-name terms. He shrewdly made sure they were on the festival’s side telling Hill to invite ‘Ashton, Charlie or all the critics’ to sign a circular letter advertising the season.
But he had a much more ambitious proposal for harnessing their power: ‘they to decide on the plays and launch the whole festival as their peculiar pet and beloved creature, it being first impressed on them that after the launching they are to sit back and be as cold-bloodedly critical as critics can be … I therefore propose you give a great dinner for them all in the Tavern, bringing with you
photographs, your winning way and the proposition. Are they willing to be organised as a jury, will they give their very hearty approval to something that will really mean something to the Middle West? If a company of really fine actors are placed at their bidding it should be worth their bid. They are offered the entirely unique opportunity of genuinely representing the public by planning the plays
they’re to see and giving a fine project their personal blessing. If the performance and execution of the plays are not to their liking they are under no responsibility or obligation.’ A likely story. There is something a little chilling about Welles’s determination to make this thing work by whatever means. ‘I expect you to shine brightly at that great dinner,’ he says to Skipper, ominously.

Skipper, in fact, was beginning to feel very frightened by what he had unleashed. Welles’s cavalier attitude to money bordered on the callous, considering it wasn’t his own that was at risk. The school had been hit by the continuing depression and attendances were down; Skipper was committed to bringing Mac Liammóir and Edwards over from Dublin; the only way ends could possibly meet would be
if the season was 100 per cent sold out. As a casual aside in his first letter to Whitford Kane, Welles had written: ‘The only person that can possibly lose is Roger, and he is ready for that.’ To Skipper himself he wrote: ‘I don’t blame you for feeling a little worried about money, particularly if the school isn’t filling up as it ought to and no money is coming in by way of enrolments. Perhaps,’
he helpfully adds, ‘you’d better look for some outside money from somewhere.’ Then: ‘
I’ve
spent over $300.’ Skipper’s anxiety turned to real panic when he consulted John Clayton, social director of the faltering Chicago magnate Samuel Insull, on how best to shift the seats. Clayton was a communications wizard whose income had suffered badly during the depression; his children were at Todd on scholarships.
‘My God, Roger, do you realise what you’re up against?’
²
he said. ‘There’s a World Fair out there on the lake front with a million dollars’ worth of
ballyhoo and a dozen publicity men to feed stories to papers all summer.’