Orson Welles, Vol I (58 page)

Its function in the staging was heightened, streamlined; but it became a many-headed hydra, losing the dynamics of individuals in a crowd. ‘Here we have true fan psychology,’
²
he told
The New York
Times
. ‘This is the same mob that tears the buttons off the coat of Robert Taylor. It’s the same mob, too, that hangs and burns negroes in the South, the same mob that maltreats the Jews in Germany. It’s the Nazi mob anywhere.’ Significantly Welles’s version starts, not with the scene analysed by a million schoolchildren (‘Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!’) but with Caesar silencing
the crowd. ‘Bid every noise be still!’ We are in the presence of the Great from the start; there is no context. Rome is its leaders; a distinctly bourgeois reading of history.

Whatever the interpretation, the result was nothing if not effective; a great deal of the Mercury version, in fact, was devised for no other reason than to generate theatrical excitement. The text gives every appearance
of having been shaped to accommodate the production, rather than the other way round. His adaptation is exactly comparable to those reviled eighteenth-century adaptors, Garrick and Cibber, his purposes exactly the same as theirs: to exploit the possibilities of their stage-craft and to fit the play to the temper of the times. ‘In drastically cutting the last twenty minutes of the play,’
³
wrote
Hank Senber in
The Mercury
, ‘Welles was working to clarify the personal aspects of the tragedy and to liberate the play from such concessions to Elizabethan tastes as drums, alarums and mock battles on stage.’ And of course, those things did look and sound ridiculous when the warriors in question were wearing long black leather overcoats and jackboots. Welles certainly wasn’t going to lose the
stunning effectiveness of the uniforms because some of the play didn’t fit. Cut it! The lurid theatricality of the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler was an essential element in choosing the context for the play, and the physical look of the production was absolutely clear in Welles’s mind from the beginning. There seems, however, to have been some conceptual confusion. If the play – or at any rate
the production – is a critique of Caesarism, what does Antony represent? He, surely, is the demagogue, not Caesar: he’s Hitler, he’s Mussolini. Is Caesar then Hindenburg? Somewhat defensively, Welles told
The Mercury
: ‘I produced the play in modern dress to sharpen contemporary interest rather than to point up or stunt up present-day detail. I’m trying to let Shakespeare’s lines do the job of
making the play applicable to the tensions of our time.’ It was a general feeling of contemporaneity that he was after; not a blow-by-blow parallel.

His absolute certainty about the physical realisation of the concept made his collaborators’ work quite cut and dried. Jeannie Rosenthal wrote: ‘Welles dictated very clearly and exactly the kind of look he wanted the production to have, a very
simple look, based on the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg. The patterns implied in the Nuremberg “festivals” were in terms of platforms, which were the basis of the scenery, and light which went up or down. The uplight was really taken from the effect the Nazis achieved.’
⁴
(And which Houseman had used before in
Panic
.) Welles described his concept of the physical production in
The Director in the Theatre
Today
the following year: ‘I wanted to present
Julius Caesar
against a texture of brick, not of stone, and I wanted a color of red that had certain vibrations of blue. In front of this red brick wall I wanted levels and places to act: that was my conception of the production.’ Welles’s visual confidence is rare among directors. His own skills as a graphic artist, coupled with his experience in
designing and building for the Todd Troupers and the Gate Theatre, made him a daunting prospect for a designer. Young Sam Leve, fresh from triumphs with the Federal Theatre Project and the Yiddish Art Theatre, in his own words ‘
oozing
imagination’, found that Welles was uninterested in his suggestions. In order to get them even considered, he had to convey them to Houseman, who might, if he liked
them, pass them on, a ‘humiliating process’ for the young designer, in his own words. However, when Welles asked him for sketches, from the hundreds Leve would produce, on Leve’s admission he would unerringly choose the best, dismissing the less good ones: ‘Sam, you can do better than that.’ The two men were exactly the same age, but as usual Welles immediately and automatically assumed command.

‘At the Mercury,’ wrote Jean Rosenthal, ‘nobody else had any identity for him at all. You were production material. If he liked you, the association could be pleasant. If not, it was injurious. As a director, he approached other talents as he did his gargantuan meals – with a voracious appetite. Your contributions to his feast he either spat out or set aside untouched, or he ate them up, assimilated
them, with a gusto which was extraordinarily flattering.’
⁵
And fun: ‘the initial stages of anything with Orson were immensely entertaining, which carried everything along … he never counted the cost of anything to himself or to anyone else.’ Rosenthal, who became one of the crucial figures in the development of American theatre lighting before her early death in the sixties, was keenly aware of
the growth of the power of directors, and identified Welles as one of the first to dominate every single aspect of a production.
Rosenthal avoided confrontation with Welles, but he never doubted her strength, demanding much of her within a framework of respect. Her final judgement, though, on her work with him is a chilling one: ‘I do not think Orson made the utmost use of his collaborators’ talent,
although he often inspired their achievements. He did make the utmost use of his talents at the beginning, but perhaps his lack of respect for others accounts in some measure for the ultimate dissipation of his multiple talents.’

For the time being, the actors were not complaining. Few of them would have been aware of his philosophical baggage. What they saw was a man with very determined
ideas putting them into practice with a disarming combination of ruthless drilling and amiable anecdotalising, plus a good deal of horseplay. Exuberant, in some ways still a very young man, almost a boy, he dictated the pace and regularity of work according to his personal mood. ‘When he felt like rehearsing, we rehearsed. When he felt like sleeping, we didn’t rehearse. If he felt like rehearsing
from 11.00 at night to 6.00 in the morning, damn stage-hands’
⁶
overtime, full speed ahead,’ according to his then stage manager Howard Teichmann. ‘He was a brilliant, inventive, imaginative, director … in a class all by himself. He would sit generally at a table in the centre aisle behind the table, and he would have a microphone on the table. And he would whisper his directions into the microphone.
This table also served as his dining table. When he was hungry, he would send people out and they would bring in the steaks and the french fries and the ice cream and pots of coffee a foot and a half high, which he would consume with great relish. And when he was tired, he would say, “All right, children.” Now mind you, he was younger than most of the people but we were his children.’

‘There
was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Orson was the big star,’ said Teichmann. ‘He was a year or two older than I am, and he was slim, with a big head and round cheeks and very boyish. And “boy genius” was a term if he didn’t create, he didn’t fight it off … You had to be a certain kind of a personality to work with Orson. You either had to worship him or you had to meet him on an equal level, or
you had to crumble. And a great many people, you know, would end up with ulcers and he was a great one for giving them. He loved everybody, but, boy, he was tough. “Who me, tough? I’m a pussycat.” You know, that was his thing … he played people off against each other.’ His manner was calculated to be humorously high-handed, shouting out admonitions – ‘shame on you!’ a favourite – if the actor’s work
wasn’t to his liking. He was
not averse to having a whipping boy: young William Alland, later famous as the producer of
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
, and known to movie buffs as the shadowy reporter in
Citizen Kane
, had, when the Mercury was being set up, more or less thrown himself at Welles’s feet, and that’s more or less where he stayed, as actor, stage manager, gofer and pimp. Welles
would roar his name out, abusing and cajoling him. It was good-humoured, but only just: a throw away from bullying. If you weren’t on the receiving end, it could be fun; to Peg Lloyd it was cheap: ‘he seemed a prep school boy with the cheap humour that preppies have. A genius preppy, that’s what he was: the ringleader of the bullies on the corner.’
⁷

Rehearsals for
Julius Caesar
took place,
initially, not in the theatre (the stage was still being reconstructed) but in an abandoned movie studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, ‘the place where the movie industry began’ in the words of Elliot Reid. Under a couple of worklights, while the incessant rain dripped into strategically placed buckets and the plaster tumbled from the roof, Welles arranged his cast on the platforms which Sam Leve had
found in an old Shubert warehouse, and which were the essential element of the set that he and Welles had devised. There were four platforms: the first fourteen foot deep (the downstage playing area), the second a narrow high step, the third an eight foot deep plateau, the last a narrower platform rising to a total height of six and a half foot above stage level; there were two flagpoles on either
side of the stage. Within this framework, Welles laboured to create the images that he had in his mind. Despite the great informality with which he worked, the stories and the atmosphere of wild, almost boyish fun that he engendered, he was always straining towards a specific and precise visual notion, what Norman Lloyd (playing Cinna the poet) described as ‘the shot’. ‘Every scene had to have a
production idea. Is it a shot? Is there something interesting in it?’
⁸
He improvised the physical action, constantly altering the moves to achieve the desired shape; the scene wasn’t worked out in advance, in the Reinhardt manner, every eyebrow, every sniffle planned. But the effect was much the same: there was no discussion of character or motivation, simply a dedication to discovering what Brecht
had called the ‘gestus’, or the gesture, of the scene.

Debate over his methods constantly raged amongst the company, though rarely to his face. Moody, sardonic Coulouris (who during breaks from rehearsals would throw tennis balls against the wall, muttering ‘Be a singer, be a singer! Don’t be an actor! Acting’s horrible’)
⁹
openly challenged Welles, but he became, Jaques-like, a sort of licensed
melancholic within the group. For the most part
the actors worked happily at the service of Welles’s invention. Nor was he intent simply on imposing his ideas on them. Norman Lloyd reports Welles as saying, ‘I may not be able to direct actors very well, but once an actor gives me something, I know how to stage it.’ Lloyd himself fretted over the absence of any sort of methodology, feeling that
the essence or the truth of the scene was sometimes sacrificed to effect; he was none the less delighted by the opportunities Welles’s staging afforded him. Welles’s instinctive sense of how to release an actor and a scene in physical movement was the equal of his English contemporary, Tyrone Guthrie, with whom he shared a revulsion for dealing with the inner life of the character, or indeed, of
the actor. ‘Your problem!’ Guthrie would briskly tell his actors as they wrestled with difficulties of this kind; the phrase could just as easily have come from Welles.

The concomitant of this external, linear approach was that if the scene was effective, it succeeded; if it wasn’t, it was nothing. Welles struggled for weeks with scenes which resisted his best efforts; this process continued
up to the very opening. One such was the scene in which Cinna the poet is killed by the mob. There was from the start a disagreement between actor and director over interpretation, Welles seeing the poet as a version of Marchbanks, all long hair and floppy ties, Lloyd, playing the part, seeing him rather as the sort of man who wrote letters to
The New York Times
, a prototypical liberal, brilliantly
able to see both sides of the situation, congenitally incapable of deciding between them; Archibald MacLeish, in fact. Lloyd hoped to achieve, as he says, an ‘essence’. ‘I thought you could say “this is what it is to not take a position.”’
¹⁰
Welles quickly gave in over the characterisation, because he was obsessed – ‘consumed’ is the word Lloyd uses – by an idea of how to stage the scene, a musical,
a choreographic conception of how to show a mob destroying an innocent man. First of all he needed more lines than Shakespeare had provided, so, after experimenting with improvisation, he drafted in a few from
Coriolanus
; then he enlisted Marc Blitzstein to orchestrate the voices using a beating drum to indicate the rhythm. Welles rehearsed ‘this goddam chanting and boom boom boom’ for over three
weeks. Sometimes Blitzstein took over; neither of them spent any time on the characters or the acting as such.

As for Welles’s own performance, it was a low priority. A stage manager stood in for him throughout rehearsals. The result was that by the time of the dress rehearsal, he had barely acted with his fellow players (which can scarcely have helped them in creating
their own performances);
nor, never having run the scenes himself, was he very clear about where he should actually be standing. No one knew where he would be coming from or where he would be going to and he was frequently shrouded in darkness. To add to the uncertainty, he was very shaky on his lines, having scarcely uttered them during rehearsals. Throughout his career, on film and on stage, he was never entirely in
command of his texts. He was not a quick study and rarely had the time or the inclination to ensure that the words were so securely lodged in his memory that they would spring spontaneously to his lips at the appropriate moment. Fortunately, he had considerable powers of iambic improvisation, and could sonorously if meaninglessly coast along for minutes at a time until a familiar line would, to
the relief of the actor who was waiting for his cue, emerge. Since he had not rehearsed the part of Brutus, he had of course no opportunity to explore the character, to experiment with his approach, or to open himself to anyone else’s view of his work. He had decided at some earlier time who Brutus was – who
his
Brutus was – and simply slotted it in to the production. Brutus, he said on several
occasions, was above all intelligent (the character description for Marcus Brutus in
Everybody’s Shakespeare
reads: ‘he is a fine patrician type, his face sensitive and intellectual’). It was Welles’s belief that he had a special gift for playing ‘thinking people’: not, as he expressed it in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, ‘that they’re thinking about what they’re saying, but that they think
outside of the scene … there are very few actors who can make you believe they think … that’s the kind of part I can play.’
¹¹