Orson Welles, Vol I (30 page)

Chicago had made an almighty effort, in the midst of economic despair – and Chicago’s depression was among the worst in the country – to put a brave face on things. ‘It
exhibits the spirit that enabled Chicago to overcome all obstacles,’ said a local politician. ‘It is typical of Chicago for it was achieved in the face of great obstacles. In Chicago there is no backward step.’ It looked to Roger Hill as if he himself were about to take a giant one. But Clayton was resourceful: ‘There’s one way we might pull it off … the society gals. They all owe me favours.’ He
persuaded Skipper to spend yet another $1,000 on a party to launch the Festival; together they drew up a list of intellectually respectable patrons and made sure that they had invited le tout Chicago. Clayton addressed them: ‘Roger and Hortense Hill will lose their shirts unless you give them a big send-off.’ Roger Hill wrote in his memoirs: ‘The party had cost a fortune by depression standards and
seemed to us only a moderate success. Then came the Sunday papers!! We read them in utter disbelief. It was our first lesson in the phoneyness of “society” as portrayed in the press. Anyway we were gloriously launched; a flaming rocket in the sky. The glow lasted all summer. Marshall Field ran a full-page ad on what to wear at our final opening night.’
³

Hill was in no doubt whatever that the
success of the season (and the aversion of financial catastrophe for him personally) was entirely due to Clayton’s activities. At one remove, Welles’s umbilical relationship with publicity continued apace. As soon as the Cornell tour came to an end, he was able to contribute personally; there was no holding him back. ‘Orson Welles,’ burbled the
Chicago Herald and Examiner
, ‘says that the festival
will be in spirit at least something of a combination of Bayreuth and a strawberry festival … a revival of great plays, rather than a try-out of new ones or a rehash of recent B’way successes, is planned.’
⁴
So
SOME NEW PLAYS
had been dropped. ‘Most everyone knows Orson Welles’ history …’ Indeed. Meanwhile, the society pages were in full thrill: ‘Not to be taken in by anything that might not measure
up to the social standard of the summer repertory companies at Newport, Southampton etc in the east, a great many of our sophisticates have been going a little slow … until they heard more about it. Now that they’re quite convinced it’s going to be one of the gayest things to do, to go to the Theatre Festival, there’s no end of talk about routes to Woodstock. And on July 12th it’ll be
THE THING
to drive out to the Op’ry House in the pretty sleepy little town.’ When the local paper reproduced
this item, its headline ran:
TRILBY WILL BE FIRST PRODUCTION AT OPERA HOUSE/TODD SCHOOL THEATRE FESTIVAL OPENS HERE FOR THE SUMMER ON JULY 12/JUST THE THING/WRITER IN CHICAGO PAPER SAYS FASHIONABLES FROM NORTH SHORES WILL DRIVE OUT
, which Seems to contain an understandable note of apprehension. An
invasion was under way.

First to arrive were the aspiring students. Skipper’s original Big Idea, the notion of a real intensive summer school of drama, had become a mere appendage to the Drama Festival; financially speaking, it was its foundation. ‘Anyone who had 500 big depression-time dollars also had a child with a talent we were anxious to develop,’
⁵
wrote Roger Hill, despite the brochure’s
claim that ‘enrollment is extremely limited and the remarkable attractiveness of this offer makes possible the strictest exclusiveness and the very highest standards of admission requirements.’ In fact, they had reduced the fee to $250, when it seemed that the higher figure would be prohibitive, finally selecting twenty ‘students’ – Roger Hill’s inverted commas – ‘a mixed bag including a professor
of Drama at Iowa and a bevy of stage-struck high-school kids’. Welles took the auditions; among the successful candidates was Virginia Nicolson, a friend of the Hills girls, a pretty, sassy young woman, whose recitation of a large section of
Henry IV, Part One
, convinced Welles that she was steeped in the Complete Works – something which enhanced the attraction he felt for her. They began, as
the phrase had it, ‘seeing each other’ shortly afterwards: his first acknowledged girlfriend.

The next invasion consisted of what Roger Hill called the Dublingate boys. This invasion may have amazed Woodstock considerably more than that of the visiting students. Their departure from Ireland had been noted in the New York press; the
Chicago Tribune
, once they had arrived, hailed them under
the heading
DUBLIN FLAVOR TO DRAMA FESTIVAL.
‘The work of Mac Liammóir and Edwards at the Gate Theatre has attracted international acclaim,’
⁶
the writer averred, which was not exactly true yet, but would be. They arrived in New York on 25 June; Welles was there to greet the travellers at the quay – a rather different Welles from the one they had last seen two years before. ‘Orson began to swell
again. Now he had added to the swelling a new habit of towering … a looming tree, dark and elaborate as a monkey-puzzle, reared above your head, an important, imperturbable smile shot down at you from afar.’
⁷
His manly persona was beginning to take, ousting the boyish one they had known. This was a Welles in charge – his charm a
necessary mask for his authority, an integral part of his public
self. The gauche show-off of the Dublin days, alternately exasperating and endearing, had modulated into this new figure: the master of the press conference, both intimate and magisterial, his omniscience qualified by a carefully controlled vulnerability. This mask stood him in good stead for many years, until it began to crack under strain in middle age, resulting in curiously ugly outbursts. By
the end of his life, however, something like serenity had returned.

Here, now, in Woodstock in 1934, the ‘important, imperturbable smile’ was brilliantly effective, especially when accompanied by that irresistibly self-humorous dent of the eyebrows that spoke of fathomless frailty. Mac Liammóir and Edwards were disconcerted by the new Welles, and even more disconcerted to find themselves in
the midst of what was in effect an American summer camp with a theatrical theme; disconcerted to find themselves the centre of so much ill-informed enthusiasm; disconcerted, most of all, to find their former junior company member displaying them to his public – the massed press of Woodstock and environs – with an unattractive mixture of exaggerated awe and inappropriate mockery. ‘Micheál Mac Liammóir
talked the least of the actors’
⁸
– a sure sign of something being not quite right – ‘seeing him sitting at his head of the table, so handsome in his dinner clothes, it was easy to believe that he was the last actor ever invited to speak at a certain girls’ boarding school. “Devastating fellow,” reported Mr Welles.’ To add to the homely feel of this little fireside chat of Welles, his cousin, Mrs
Dudley Crafts Watson, chipped in with ‘You were play-acting when you were scarcely able to talk, Orson. And you’re still making those funny faces.’

Mac Liammóir and Edwards must have felt that they had strayed into a suburban nightmare. They may not, either, have been best pleased to realise that the Woodstock Summer Festival was in reality a celebration of the life and work of Orson Welles.
‘A great-grandson of Gideon Welles, the black-eyed young director is the star alumnus of Todd School … Orson Welles, the boy actor from Racine, Wisconsin.’
⁹
A convincing report states that ‘he relieved everyone at his end of the table of the responsibility of talking’. His frame of reference could hardly have been grander; Woodstock was already, in his mind, an event of international significance.
‘As in the Salzburg drama festival and the musical festival in Beirut, the performers live in the town and become a part of it during the festival.’ It was Orson, Orson everywhere, organising, giving interviews, a whirlwind of promotion: self-promotion, particularly, but the effervescence of it
all is contagious. It’s brilliant, breathtaking, delightful: one of the greatest one-man publicity machines
ever created. Did he have any real vision, though, or did he simply say whatever would go over best?

‘Young Mr Welles has brought forth another idea for this dramatic festival,’
¹⁰
reported a slightly exhausted Ashton Stevens. ‘He now thinks that now is the time to revive Romance in the form it took when Woodstock’s op’ry house was young. He now believes that there are comparatively recent
classics or near-classics that need only spirited reproduction to attest their worth.’ Welles thereupon, without pausing for breath, dashed off a list of those plays:
Trilby, The Only Way, Under the Red Robe, In Mizzoura, The Girl of the Golden West, The Rose of the Rancho, The Third Degree, Arizona, The Great Divide, If I Were King, The Thief, The Copperhead, Raffles, Romance
, and
Davy Crockett
. So much for the scheme to do the great masterpieces of the past, not to mention new plays too new or courageous to be attempted by a commercial management. But of course, the season no more consisted of a systematic examination of Victorian and Edwardian American melodrama than it did of Beaumont and Fletcher or intractable modern plays. Welles instinctively knew what would appeal to the journalist
to whom he was speaking. In the event, he was, inevitably and rightly, governed by practical considerations. Out of that list, produced like hankies from a conjuror’s hat, he selected one play,
Trilby
, with which to start the season. It seems that it was originally included in the programme to lure Whitford Kane into appearing in a play as well as directing the students. When Kane finally decided
that Hollywood and its pay cheques were more attractive than a summer in Woodstock, Welles took over, as both director and star.

There can have been little reluctance on his part. Melodrama was always close to his heart, with its opportunities for extravagant displays of acting not too closely linked to intimate emotions, its limitless opportunities for theatrical effects, and its stark opposition
of good and evil. The role of Svengali, moreover, offered limitless opportunities for another of his enthusiasms: make-up. ‘He will do Svengali in a long black beard and with his own thick black hair marcelled,’ one of his many interviewers was thrilled to report. Mac Liammóir and Edwards were a little less thrilled at the choice of opening play, though it was not without sentimental resonance
for them; they played the same parts – Little Billee and Taffy – that they were unwillingly about to play for Welles when they had first met as members of the Anew McMaster company. Rehearsals
in that sweltering summer of 1934 were conducted al fresco and en déshabillé: swimming costumes all round (Micheál’s of unexampled brevity), which must have made the experience even less like any form of
professional theatre in which they had ever been involved before. Welles told Mrs Leaming that Micheál and Hilton spent the entire time in Woodstock hating him. If this was the case, it was presumably because of their changed status in relation to him. He further alleged to her that Hilton refused to help him with his debut production itself, maintaining that the very idea of Welles as a director
was absurd. ‘It was a real vendetta against me,’
¹¹
Welles claimed. Even Roger Hill, normally reliable, says ‘They were really, I think, rather mean to Orson.’
¹²
Meanness was not something of which they were incapable, but if things were so wretched between them, it is mysterious that until Mrs Leaming’s biography, Welles had seized every opportunity to praise them and their work to the high heavens,
to work with them again, to send them letters and even, during the war, food parcels. Whatever the truth of this, their attitude can hardly have figured largely in his consciousness. He was acting, directing, designing, scene-painting, prop-making, furniture-borrowing, costume-fitting, and having an affair with Virginia Nicolson – not to mention masterminding The Selling of Woodstock.

Woodstock
was in two minds about Orson’s view of it. ‘Like a wax flower under a bell of glass, in the paisley and gingham County of McHenry is Woodstock, grand capital of Victorianism in the Mid-West. Towering over a Square full of Civil War monuments, a bandstand and a spring house is the edifice in the picture. This very rustic and rusticated thing is a municipal office building, a public library, a
fire department and, what is more to our purpose, an honest-to-horsehair Opera House.’ This celebration of quaintness (purportedly written by Thornton Wilder, who was in residence that summer, but bearing the unmistakable stylistic fingerprints of the young Welles) was far from what the people of Woodstock wanted to hear: they saw themselves as citizens of a small and rapidly expanding city, proud
of their typewriter factory and Alemeite plant. Mac Liammóir saw the place in yet another light: ‘To us it looked like any short screen comedy, new and glistening with white wooden houses and open lawns and barbecues and druggists and a procession of ice-men and plumbers who always seemed to be on the brink of calamitous comedy.’
¹³
That is certainly the impression that the town makes today. Welles’s
version was another triumph of publicity over truth.

The excitement was building.
DRAMA IN HINTERLAND,
said Charles Collins in the
Tribune
, no doubt to the further displeasure of Woodstock. ‘It represents, chiefly, the conjurations of a 20-year-old lad who appears to be a striking specimen of adolescent genius of the drama. His name is Orson Welles, and his story has often been told …’
¹⁴
The
opening night of the festival was stage-managed as carefully as anything that happened on the boards. India Moffett of the
Tribune
painted the scene for Chicago stay-at-homes: ‘It is a gala occasion, perhaps the most exciting the little town of Woodstock ever has had and certainly the most thrilling it has had in many a day. The whole town was out to watch the guests assemble in front of the theatre
and the square in front of the theatre was as gay and crowded as it is on Saturday night.’
¹⁵