Orson Welles, Vol I (65 page)

The sheer scope of his ambition for the Mercury is exhilarating and inspiring, even though it is inseparable from his ambition for himself: he told a reporter in New Haven at the start of the
Julius Caesar
tour ‘I wouldn’t be happy if I couldn’t convince myself that I will alter at least the cultural course of history in the theatre.’
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(The ‘at least’ is a characteristic touch.)
What is disturbing is to find him, at the first bright dawn of his career (it is worth remembering that he was just about to celebrate his twenty-third birthday), quite so cavalier in his dealings with his fellow workers. The conclusion is inescapable that he had begun to believe his own publicity: that he had single-handedly and magisterially created the success, instead of forging it minute
by minute, effect by effect, with a uniquely dedicated team. He had started to think that because they needed him more than he needed them, he could simply dispense with them and their views. Here are the seeds of self-destruction.

Meanwhile, there was
Heartbreak House
to be rehearsed. The play has a small cast; the company were dismayed to discover that even those few roles were being cast
from outside its ranks. Welles, he said, wanted to avoid obvious casting. He himself was slated to play the ninety-year-old Shotover, which was a throwback to his days at Woodstock and in Dublin; Coulouris was Boss Mangan (their two roles in
Caesar
were taken over by Powers and O’Brien from the touring company). Vincent Price played the tiger-wrestling Hector Hushabye, John Hoystradt the flute-playing
Utterword. Otherwise
the company was entirely new: not at all the nascent American National Theatre that Price and others in the company had hoped they were joining. It was close, in fact, to being a Broadway cast, with a heavy bias towards the English theatre. Erskine Sandford repeated his Mazzini Dunn from the last New York production; Eustace Wyatt, an English actor of episcopal demeanour and
a fondness for the bottle, played the burglar; Brenda Forbes, also English, Welles’s old and none-too-loving colleague from Cornell days, was Nurse Guinness; Phyllis Joyce, an Australian actress with extensive experience in London, was Lady Utterword; and the Austrian Mady Christians, one of Reinhardt’s stars and already featured in several American films, was Hesione. Ellie Dunn was to be played
by Geraldine Fitzgerald, a recent graduate of the Gate Theatre in Dublin and star of two British movies.

Welles may have been nervous of the play, for which he had a respect verging on reverence, and sought to back himself up with seasoned actors, experienced in the demands of modern realistic theatre. Perhaps this was the ‘real play’ that Chubby Sherman had been so nervous of ‘in which an
actor opens a door, a real door, walks in, sits down and begins to talk’. Welles knew from his negotiations with the author that he would brook no cuts, no transpositions, and no divergence from the printed stage directions. There was no possibility of a concept here; they must simply perform the play as written, which is essentially what they did, though somewhat unwisely Welles cut up the longer
speeches, interspersing them with lines from other actors, thus destroying the musical line on which Shaw placed such stress (‘it’s Mozart!’ the old gentleman would tell his actors).

Rehearsals, it seems, were dominated by the never-ending feud between Coulouris and Welles. To this was added a new one, between Coulouris and Geraldine Fitzgerald, who proved able to give as good as she got,
and better: at one point during the run, exasperated beyond endurance, she kicked him on the shins. The ever-crabby Mancunian no doubt resented the special treatment that he felt she was receiving. Welles’s charm was extended in its full golden warmth to her; at her audition Fitzgerald had first met Houseman, who had been sober and courteous, then when Welles arrived he said, with an irresistible
smile (irresistible to Fitzgerald, that is; less so, perhaps, to Houseman): ‘Oh, don’t carry on Jack – you know we’re going to take her.’ She was struck, as so many had been, by his great height (he seemed taller, she said, as a young man), by the round baby face, the amazing eyes, his enormous beauty and charm,
his ability to create intense intimacy on first contact. Maintaining it was more of
a problem. ‘He actually “saw” you: seemed to be very pleased to see you.’ In a brilliant phrase, she compared his personality to that of a lighthouse: when you were caught in its beam, you were bathed in its illumination; when it moved on, you were plunged into darkness. Coulouris and Price were well out of the light by now, both exasperated by what they saw as Welles’s tricks of personality, and
somewhat sceptical about his attitude to his own acting. Rehearsing
Heartbreak House
, he again used William Alland to read in his part; Price said that he never really learned it at any time during the run. A report in the
World Telegram
on 9 April suggested another reason for company frustration: Welles’s baby was born on 27 March: ‘she timed her entrance into this world so as to create the greatest
conceivable commotion, arriving just five minutes before the first reading of our next production,
Heartbreak House
. Needless to say, the reading was called off, and the entire company, which had stayed in town all day for the occasion, felt that their day had been ruined.’
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Welles was at Virginia’s bedside shortly after the delivery of the child, whom they called, for no discernible reason,
Christopher. The cavalier approach to naming her proved indicative of Welles’s relationship to her in general; the commotion that she allegedly created was not reproduced in Welles’s life. Ballerinas continued to be more interesting than either wife or child; Barbara Leaming even reports him flirting with the nurse on the maternity ward because she moved like a dancer. There is an awkward photograph
of the young mother, father and child: Virginia looks strongly and almost defiantly at the camera while Welles stares down somewhat theatrically at the bundle of flesh in her mother’s arms. There is nothing remotely spontaneous about the pose.

Welles’s general distractedness at this period was reflected in his work on
Heartbreak House
. Clearly the atmosphere was very different from that on
the two classical plays. Apart from the diversion of the newcomers, he seems not to have fully engaged with the play. Partly this stems from the restrictions imposed by the ever vigilant author and his representatives. Welles’s adrenalin was not made to flow at the prospect of interpreting a play on its own terms. It must be his, visually, physically, textually. This is the way of the conceptual
director, who regards his relationship to the writer as an equal partnership, in which he has the casting vote; it is also, of course, the way of the film-maker, for whom a script is always only a point of departure. In this
Heartbreak House
, the settings were largely as the author prescribed, executed, to Welles’s very specific instructions,
by John Koenig (‘a window-dresser’, the stage manager
Walter Ash dismissively called him); the lighting was straightforward, though expert as usual. The only real scope for theatrical effect came with the bomb at the end, a startling moment in this production, created by the deepest notes of the
Julius Caesar
Hammond organ and the thunderdrum being sounded simultaneously. His frustrated creativity was largely channelled into his own make-up, of which
several versions can be glimpsed in various production photographs. When he appeared at the dress rehearsal with the first version, Coulouris cried: ‘My God, the ceiling’s fallen in!’
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At first, the make-up took Welles three hours to apply; eventually he got it down to an hour and a half. It was a passion with him, which he indulged to the full, even if – to Houseman’s chagrin – it meant holding
the curtain till he was ready, thus sending the show (at four hours’ running time) into overtime.

The reviews were distinctly mixed. The Mercury had taken an extreme gamble in staging a play directly on Broadway’s terms, without its own signature stamped oh it – a play which was anyway, as it always had been, and still is, highly problematic. Is it, as the author believed, his masterpiece,
or an indulgent and misfired attempt at a homage to Chekhov (signalled on the title page, ‘A Fantasia in the Russian Manner’)? The critics reviewed the play (whose première had been, not in London, but in New York, eighteen years before) almost as much as the production: ‘one of Mr Shaw’s more interminable plays’,
⁴³
as Brooks Atkinson said. ‘He steps light but – oh lord! he steps long.’ Despite
the occasional roar of approval for the production, the general tone was muted (Atkinson even using the dread word ‘workmanlike’); there was a feeling of quiet disappointment.

One or two critics rang alarm bells. John Mason Brown, who had been so crucial to the success of
Julius Caesar
, sternly wrote that ‘the truth is that the production is not up to the Mercury’s high standard. If it were
not for the programme, one could swear that Shaw’s play were being performed by an over-ambitious stock company.’
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The acting, with the exception of Coulouris as Boss Mangan, was not greatly admired. Welles’s Shotover had its enthusiasts (Lockridge: ‘Mr Welles as Shotover plays much better than I have ever seen him’)
⁴⁵
but they were few. Mason Brown continued his mournfully disappointed review:
‘Mr Welles behind a great flow of whiskers wins his laughs as Capt Shotover. But, if I may say so, he seems to be winning them in spite of rather than because of himself. The part is almost surefire. Yet in performing it, Mr Welles lacks comic
precision and muffs point after point which cries to be made.’

It is hard to see how it could be otherwise. For a twenty-two-year-old, however gifted,
to attempt Shotover is an impossibility: an excellent thing to do in repertory, in the course of winning one’s spurs, but folly to attempt on Broadway. Of course, the Mercury wasn’t (quite) on Broadway, but to all practical intents and purposes it was. It had created an excitement and raised expectations that demanded that its work should be judged by the highest standards. Here it had seemingly
set itself up simply to be shot down. The remarkable thing is that only one out of every two critics chose to do so. Their hearts were with the Mercury; the goodwill was enormous, and even the attacking notices came from a position of great affection. One notice, predictably, came from no such position. It is none the less the most penetrating and the most interesting, and it was written, of course,
by Mary McCarthy: ‘The Mercury Theatre company act out
Heartbreak House
as if it were one of those weekend comedies by Rachel Crothers or Frederick Lonsdale.’
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In writing about Welles, she went, again, for the jugular. ‘Mr Welles as an actor has always seemed to secrete a kind of viscous holy oil with which he sprays the rough surfaces of his roles. The sentimentality of Mr Welles’s acting,
the nervelessness of his direction, the bare, mechanical competence of the majority of his supporting cast combine to act as a steam-roller on Shaw’s
Heartbreak House
… Mr Welles’s production can only serve to remind the public that the original still exists in the library.’ Despite the gratuitous aggressiveness of the notice, she makes a telling point about Welles’s acting: his sentimental side
is, as it were, the bank holiday of his rhetorical one. Both modes deny real feeling, seeking rather to impress the spectator than to reveal an inner truth. They are external applications, designed to mask an absence of emotion; they draw attention to the actor rather than to the character. Coulouris, for all his rebarbative and wilful traits, was able, presumably by having access to his own inner
life, to create an authentic person: as McCarthy reports ‘his Boss Mangan was a genuinely strident, strangled, unhappy self-made man’.

McCarthy’s voice was unique in its insistence on Welles’s shallowness. The overwhelming view was that, even if they had bitten off more than they could chew with
Heartbreak House
, the Mercury’s first season was a dazzling and inspiring one. In a
New York Times
piece in July of 1938 entitled
THE SUMMING UP
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Houseman and Welles (the piece was actually written by Houseman) looked back fairly frankly on their first season at the Mercury: their problems with the
repertory system, both in building an audience and in cross-casting, and the need to terminate successes. ‘However,’ Houseman ended, with a justifiable flourish, ‘at the end of the first season
we find we have played to over a quarter of a million people at an average price of slightly less than a dollar. Of this: 20 per cent = carriage trade; 40 per cent parties; 40 per cent doors. 120,000 student cards were distributed. l/3rd of audience comes from educational organisations.’ They were already an institution, the white hope of the theatre, both progressive and classical, audacious and
serious, innovative and accomplished, polished and affordable, original without being elitist, and they had captured the most vital section of the theatre-going public.

The problems which Houseman had understandably chosen not to air in print – the collapse of company morale and their severe financial straits – now had to be addressed. No one could have imagined that after the exposure and
the success they had had they could be in quite such a parlous financial condition.
Heartbreak House
had proved a calamity from that point of view: the solid realistic settings were immensely more expensive than
Caesar
’s platforms rescued from a deserted warehouse, or the orange crates and cocoa matting used in
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
. The six new cast members had added substantially to the wages
bill, too; above all, they had to pay Shaw’s royalties. He had offered them terms that were what he called ‘not too unreasonable’: 15 per cent of the gross when the receipts exceeded $1,500 a performance, 10 per cent when they were between $500 and $1,500, 7.5 per cent when they were between $250 and $500. No doubt, by his stringent standards, the terms were not too unreasonable, but to a theatre
that had never paid a penny in royalties by the simple expedient of only working with dead authors, it was a severe blow. None the less, it was a blow they could weather. Their investors remained loyal, despite the somewhat ungenerous attitude of Houseman and Welles: ‘Personally, we were grateful to our investors for the generosity that had made the birth of the Mercury Theatre possible. But as
business associates, our feelings were as ambivalent towards them as those of adolescents towards their parents.’
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Their dealings were largely with Houseman, of course, and his formal manner and natural courtesy masked his ambivalence. With Welles, it was another matter. ‘While things were going well, he regarded them as parasites and exploiters, fattening on the success wrung from his creative
energies. When they began to go badly, this hostility was aggravated by shame and guilt: anticipating their reproaches he developed a loathing for them such as
one inevitably feels towards a benefactor whom one has disappointed or betrayed.’