Orson Welles, Vol I (52 page)

The Cradle Will Rock
, Blitzstein’s best-known work, had followed immediately on the death of his wife in 1936. Now a member of the Composers’ Collective, his works up to this point included a Piano Sonata and a Piano Concerto and two operas:
The Condemned
(concerning the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti), and
The Harpies
. Meeting Brecht, he had played him his song ‘Nickel Under
Foot’, written for a workers’ revue. Brecht, impressed, urged him to expand it into a full-length piece about the varieties of prostitution – ‘the press, the church, the courts, the arts, the whole system’. Suddenly galvanised by the death of his wife, he set to work furiously on
The Cradle Will Rock
, putting some of his grief into writing it. The result is taut and fierce, but buoyant and funny,
too, the work of an absolutely individual voice. Copland, ever generous to his fellow musicians, wrote that ‘he was the first American composer to invent a vernacular musical idiom that sounded convincing when heard on the
lips of the man-in-the-street. The taxi driver, the panhandler, the corner druggist, were given voice for the first time in the context of serious drama.’
³

It thrilled Welles.
‘Orson was excited by the challenge of this, his first contact with musical theatre,’
⁴
wrote Houseman. ‘I remember listening jealously, with an ill-concealed sense of rejection, to Orson’s enthusiastic comments about the piece (which I had not heard) and to his ideas for casting and staging it, which he elaborated for my annoyance.’ As usual, Houseman is quite frank about his feelings. When, to
his quiet satisfaction, the American Repertory Company folded, Houseman, taking his time, eventually suggested that if they’d play the piece to him, he might find it suitable for Unit 891. They did; and he did. The next step was to play it to Hallie Flanagan. ‘Marc Blitzstein sat down at the piano and played, sang and acted,’
⁵
she wrote, ‘with the hard hypnotic drive which came to be familiar
to audiences, his new opera. It took no wizardry to see that this was not a play set to music, nor music illustrated by actors, but music + play equalling something new and better than either.’ Blitzstein exuberantly reported this in a letter on 3 March: ‘Hallie Flanagan … is crazy for it, says it’s the biggest best etc – and is also terrified about it for the Project. She’ll take no responsibility,
but is having us – Orson, Houseman and me – fly down to Washington … I’ve apparently turned out a firebrand that nobody wants to touch.’
⁶
It is a measure of the newly charged political situation that it was deemed necessary for producers and directors to clear their choices of work with the central government. Houseman was convinced that though Hallie Flanagan was fully aware of the dangers of
programming such a potentially explosive piece, ‘she was determined to fly into the eye of the storm’. As for himself and Welles, the more controversial the better, of course. The distinguished Welles scholar Richard France maintains that Welles and Houseman were eager to escape from the Federal Theatre’s confining embrace, into that of the organised left, where they perceived their audience to be.
They deliberately chose the show, he believes, because they knew it would be provocative – too provocative for the Federal Theatre Project. If so, they miscalculated, because they had support within the Project from the highest level from the beginning.

The piece itself is unusual in form; in content it is absolutely explicit, a call for unionisation. The story is set in Steeltown, USA, in
the throes of a union drive. Moll, a prostitute, is arrested by Dick because she refuses to come over with free sex. She’s taken to the night court, where she meets Harry Druggist, once respectable
but now a lush. In the same cell are the members of the anti-union Liberty Committee – all of whom, including Harry, are revealed in a series of flashbacks, to be in thrall to Mr Mister, the steel boss
who controls Steeltown: ‘there is not one of these eminent, deserving citizens who isn’t just as guilty as Moll is,’ writes Blitzstein. The Rev Salvation was prevailed upon by Mrs Mister to preach peace or war, according to the needs of her husband’s business; Editor Daily has printed a phony exposé of Larry Foreman’s activities; Harry kept quiet when he knew a young worker was being framed; Yasha,
the violinist, and Dauber, the painter, have been bought out by their rich patroness Mrs Mister; President Prexy of the college has supplied academics to support the National Guard; Dr Specialist has falsified medical reports on a steel-worker crushed by a machine. In the final scene, Mr Mister tries to bribe Larry Foreman to join the Liberty Committee; in the heroic finale he is mocked, and
the triumph of Labour is hymned. The anonymous names were not present from the start; originally Blitzstein was going to call characters Morgan and Lewis, after industrialists of the day; at some point there was to be a pro-union farmer called Sickle who united with a worker called Hammer.

Dedicated ‘to Bert Brecht: first because I think him the most admirable theatre-writer of our time; secondly
because an extended conversation with him was pardy responsible for writing the piece’,
⁷
it is not a work of great political complexity. Eric Gordon calls it a lehrstück in the manner, presumably, of Brecht–Weill pieces like
The Exception and the Rule
, in which the necessity of strict submission to the Party line is demonstrated; but it doesn’t actually have that form – no one learns, except perhaps
the moll, no one is changed. And of course there is no Party. It’s more a simple cartoon, a rallying piece: a pro-syndicalist cantata, in fact. This dismal description is belied by the lyrics, succinct and vivid, and especially by the music. ‘I used whatever was indicated and at hand,’ Blitzstein wrote in
The New York Times
. ‘There are recitatives, arias, revue-patters, tap-dances, suites, chorals,
silly symphony, continuous, incidental commentary music, lullaby music – all pitchforked into it. There are also silences treated musically, and music which is practically silent.’ Kurt Weill is the obvious reference (indeed, after the première of
The Cradle Will Rock
Weill went around saying, ‘Have you heard my latest musical?’), but the American popular influences that for Weill are exotic and
ironic are here entirely idiomatic – there is real jazz, plus hymn tunes, à la Ives. Like Weill, Blitzstein sometimes has recourse to Bach. A lot of the score, in fact, is underscoring to spoken text;
but the songs proper are varied and immediate in their appeal, from the austere ecstasy of the ‘Gus and Sadie Love Song’, to the chippy satire of ‘The Rich’ and the tango with riffs of ‘Ask Us Again’.
‘Art for Art’s Sake’ enables him to have fun with Beethoven’s
Egmont
; while the title song is appropriately punchy. The great number of the score is the one that was the starting point for the whole piece, ‘Nickel under Your Foot’, a real hit song, the ache in the music quite palpable, intensified by the square accompaniment under the soaring tune, the cleverly simple lyric richly fulfilled.

MOLL

Oh you can live like Hearts-and-Flowers,

And every day is a wonderland tour.

Oh you can dream and scheme

And happily put and take, take and put …

But first be sure

The nickel’s under your foot.

Go stand on someone’s neck while you’re talkin’;

Cut into somebody’s throat as you put –

For every dream and scheme’s

Depending on whether, all through the
storm

You’ve kept it warm,

The nickel under your foot.

‘The Cradle Will Rock’ with its staccato, surging energy and irresistible rhythm is electrifyingly reprised for the finale, ending with the words
THE
–
CRADLE
–
WILL
–
ROCK
– blasted out by the ensemble.

LARRY FOREMAN

That’s thunder, that’s lightning.

And it’s going to surround you!

No wonder those stormbirds

Seem to circle around you –

Well, you can climb down,

And you can’t sit still!

That’s a storm that’s going to last until

The final wind blows –

And when the wind blows –

The cradle will rock!

Thrilled as always by a new medium, Welles planned to stage the show on a grand scale. He designed huge glass wagons to create the different scenes; the scene plot reveals four
parallel moving platforms, screens, a traveller for the moon, and one for hammocks. There were, too, a double-quarter revolve and an ingenious aperture curtain. There was a large cast of solo performers, forty-four members of chorus, black and white, and twenty-four musicians. From the middle of April, the orchestra rehearsed five days a week, five hours a day. The taut, gritty workers’ opera was
being done to all intents and purposes like a Broadway musical, an odd paradox that troubled a number of people (Hallie Flanagan wrote: ‘I didn’t see why they needed any scenery’.) Welles produced a leaflet for the show (‘opening on June 1st’) which is oddly inappropriate; it looks as if it’s advertising a rather jolly university revue. The words
The Cradle Will Rock
are boldly written over music
staves, with a dancing matchstick-man fiddler (Yasha, presumably), thunder and lightning in the bottom right-hand corner, and, looming above it all, an inexplicable figure with a mortar board and a pile of papers, bearing some resemblance facially to Welles. It is, to say the least, odd. But Welles was in the full flood of his driven youthful energy, increasingly so as the first night approached.

‘Even during those early years he was driven to being overbusy. When he was not busy, he was lonely and miserable,’
⁸
wrote Lehman Engel, the conductor of
The Cradle Will Rock
, adding: ‘he was, always has been, and still is, a boy: a Peter Pan too heavy for flying … despite his youth Orson was in full charge of whatever he undertook. When he was inclined to lag, Jack [Houseman] sped him on his
way. He was inventive, witty, alternately lazy and energetic, and knowledgeable. His thinking was bold and his work usually produced sensational results … he never tired of going over the smallest details a hundred times in order to have it precisely as he wished it. He would start at ten in the morning and not leave the theatre. He might dismiss his cast at four the next morning but when we would
return at noon, we would find Orson sleeping in a theatre seat … Augusta’s mother Anna Weissberger … would rush down the aisle carrying chicken soup.’

He maintained his usual pattern of pushing himself to extremes in order to engender what he considered to be the necessary levels of adrenalin. If not precisely like Peter Pan, he was certainly, in the white heat of rehearsal, flying like a
kite. ‘Orson was in a regular fever heat of creativity,’
⁹
recalled his stage manager, David Clarke. ‘And I remember him turning to me and saying, “Did you get that?”
And I’d say, “Yes, I think so,” and he’d say, “Well, you’d better, you know,” because he couldn’t remember ten minutes later what he had done … he gave them so much stuff that they couldn’t possibly use it all, and still it was just
rolling out of him.’

Rehearsals were conducted with the usual substitute props and furniture, the changing positions of the moving trucks marked out on the floor with chalk or tape. It was nevertheless a shock when, at the technical rehearsals, the set arrived. Howard da Silva (Larry Foreman) recalled in an interview that ‘as actors, it diminished our size and feeling because the production
of the thing just overwhelmed us’.
¹⁰
Hiram Sherman says much the same; it is clear that the actors, not for the first time in the history of the theatre, loathed the set. They were already unhappy with the orchestrations, of which, said Sherman, Blitzstein was not yet a master; it had sounded so much better with the piano accompaniment. With the chorus in the basement, singing under the stage,
and loudspeakers throughout the auditorium, while the illuminated glass blocks trundled back and forth, the effect may well have been overwhelming in quite the wrong way. Blitzstein’s tough little piece had turned into a monumental theatrical statement. David Clarke estimated that ‘the production would have cost at that time in the commercial theatre $150,000’ – the equivalent in today’s prices of
$1,000,000.

While all this was inexorably proceeding through a series of typically strenuous and explosive technical rehearsals towards the dress rehearsal and the first public performance, events both within the Federal Theatre Project and in the real world beyond were becoming critical. The economic situation was making it increasingly difficult for Roosevelt to sustain the public programmes
which had characterised his earlier period of office. Already anticipating cuts, on 27 May there had been a one-day city-wide stoppage of all WPA work; 7,000 out of 9,000 came out. Hallie Flanagan, addressing a meeting of the American Theatre Council that day, had defended them: ‘Federal Theatre workers were striking for what was once described as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness …
if we object to that method I feel that some word should come from this gathering as to a better method.’
¹¹
The blow fell on 10 June, just four days before
The Cradle Will Rock
was due to open: Mrs Flanagan was instructed to cut the Project by 30 per cent; in effect, as Goldstein points out, ‘to do so meant issuing pink slips to 1,701 workers’. This was accompanied by an instruction prohibiting
‘because of the cuts and the reorganisation’ any new play, musical performance or art exhibition to open before 1 July. There was no question in the minds of Welles, Houseman
or Hallie Flanagan that this directive was specifically aimed at
The Cradle Will Rock
.

Their assumption was that the show would be considered too touchy politically. Since the beginning of rehearsals, the labour situation
had become explosive – specifically in the steel industry. In Chicago, communist-led industrial protest had been met with police gunfire; ten workers had been killed. Blitzstein’s show seemed transcribed directly from the daily headlines. Government uneasiness is understandable. Three years later, the
Saturday Evening Post
expressed this in its habitually trenchant fashion. ‘Before this date,
the WPA chiefs had been fairly audacious in backing pink propaganda, but they became thoroughly frightened when congressmen and others began to murmur. The Blitzstein operetta was supposed to have all the dynamite of Beaumarchais’s
Marriage of Figaro
, which was supposed to have touched off the French Revolution.’
¹²
It is interesting to observe how distant the turbulent events of the period seemed
by 1940; in June 1937 there remained a genuine expectation – as there had been since the great crash in 1929 – of revolution.