Orson Welles, Vol I (69 page)

Rehearsals on the play were fitful. When they did take place, they were spent developing routines, sections of stage business, which Welles typically worked and
worked, ignoring character, relationships, or the life of the play. Andrea Nouryeh describes a sequence in which three of the men enter from three different doors singing
Swanee
, exiting and entering with perfect rhythmic and harmonic co-ordination. This was gone over again and again and again, finally attaining the perfection Welles sought. The discipline is essential; but in farce, above all
in farce, it’s not simply what is done, but
who
does it, and to whom, that creates the comedy. Welles never troubled himself with those considerations.

Apart from the intensive drilling sessions, he was rarely seen at the theatre. He had discovered a new passion, one that lasted to his dying day, never losing its absolute fascination for him: editing. Having repaired to a suite at the St Regis,
he had a Moviola installed, and – when not ‘on the air or with his paramour’, in Houseman’s words – he sat surrounded by thousands of feet of film and the young apprentices from the Mercury, ‘laughing at his own footage while the slaves hunted in vain for the bits of film that would enable him to put his chases together into some kind of intelligible sequence’.
¹⁶
He had discovered the Frankenstein
element of film-making. Sitting at the Steenbeck, it is really possible to assemble your own creature, and give life to it. The sense of power is intoxicating: a slow scene can be made fast, a funny one sad, a bad performance can be made good, and actors can be expunged from the film as if they had never been. To shoot is human; to edit, divine.

Both are expensive. Houseman was increasingly
disturbed by the outlay for this supposedly cut-price try-out. Not only was the stock and the editing facility expensive; his attempt to pay the actors no more than the ordinary theatre rehearsal money while they were filming failed, Equity demanding the standard rate. At this point, they discovered that Paramount had the film rights: when they did the play on Broadway, they would have to pay the
film company. No sooner had they made that discovery, than they realised that they couldn’t even show it in Stony Creek: the projection booth
in the little theatre wasn’t fire-proofed. So that was that. They couldn’t show the film; instead the actors had, overnight, to learn and fling together the beginning of Act One of the play – the exposition, always the hardest to learn and the hardest to
play. The resident designer’s set went up, the most satisfactory element of the production, as it turned out: a surviving photograph shows a ship’s deck, square, with a ladder coming down from the poop deck, stage left; the ship’s funnels are visible. The impression is slightly cartoonish. Paul Bowles had written a score for small orchestra; this too was cut for economy’s sake, and Marc Blitzstein
improvised an accompaniment at the piano. The show, inevitably, was chaotic and interminable, studded with occasional brilliantly rehearsed moments,
Swanee
among them.

After the disastrous first performance, there was a rather muted usual celebration. Once the actors had drifted miserably away, Welles, Joe Cotten and Kevin O’Morrison, the stage manager, took a few remaining would-be celebratory
bottles of champagne and a copy of the script down to the harbour. After knocking back the champagne, O’Morrison told Andrea Nouryeh, ‘Orson opened the script and said, “What do you think of this page?” Joe would look at it and he would say, “Nyah,” and he would ask me, and I would say, “Nyah.” So he would take it and crumple it up. We went through the script this way, taking pages and throwing
them out. Drunk as lords with no idea what we were doing.’
¹⁷
This aleatoric method of cutting is one of Welles’s less well-known innovations, more Luke Rinehart than Max Reinhardt, but worth a try, perhaps. In the event it didn’t work. The audience hurled things at the stage during the remaining few performances. Later, Welles liked to think of the show as pioneering work – ‘the play and the film
were too surreal for the audience. They couldn’t accept it. It was like
Hellzapoppin
, years ahead of its time,’
¹⁸
he told Brady; ‘one of our best things, I reckon, but aborted’
¹⁹
was how he described it to Bogdanovich – but the simple fact is that it was an utter shambles, a flop, and Houseman decided, in the teeth of tremendous opposition from Welles, that it would not go to the Mercury. Welles
was later to return to the notion of mixing film with staging, both in
The Green Goddess
of 1941 and the celebrated
Around The World
of six years later. The important thing – for him and for posterity – was that he had found film. He now had the celluloid bug; it would never leave him.

For the present, however, he was shattered by the failure of
Too Much Johnson
: Houseman believes he secretly
agreed with his cancellation order but that ‘he needed to play out the sabotage scene
to salve his pride’. What followed was real: ‘he retired into his air-conditioned tent at the St Regis, where he lay in darkness for a week surrounded by 25,000 feet of film … convinced that he was going to die, racked by asthma and fear and despair.’
²⁰
Bill Alland was with him during most of that time and reported
‘the self-vilifications and the remorse for what he had done to those around him … for the cruelty and moral corruption with which he reproached himself.’ The failure was unendurable, a confirmation that all his inner voices, the ones spurring him on, and those others telling him that he was fundamentally worthless, were right. At times of crisis, his asthma always asserted itself, forcing
him to bed where he would agonise, paralysed, in a state of primordial emotion. His self-accusations were terrifying to those who heard them, utterly negative and destructive. When the fit passed, he would throw himself with redoubled energy into food, drink, sex; he was now, only three months after the birth of Christopher, juggling numerous paramours. But as always, the best antidote for Welles
was work. In this instance, the thing nearest to hand was the Mercury Theatre of the Air.

The transmissions had, of course, continued throughout
Too Much Johnson: Treasure Island, A Tale of Two Cities, The Thirty-Nine Steps
, a triple bill including
My Little Boy, Abraham Lincoln
, Schnitzler’s
Anatol
(actually transmitted the Monday after the disastrous Stony Creek run). There were two more
programmes out of the originally contracted nine:
The Count of Monte Cristo
, and
The Man Who Was Thursday
, this last adapted, at his own insistence, by Welles himself. Welles having refused even to give it a dress rehearsal, it transpired during transmission that the show was clearly running at least thirteen minutes short. Houseman thrust various great novels into Welles’s hands; he read sections
from them as a trailer for future shows, to the great admiration of studio executives, who naturally thought that the whole thing had been carefully planned. Welles never again attempted to adapt the show himself. (Says Houseman, in a memorably comic paragraph in
Run-Through
. In fact, the show as broadcast contains none of the improvisations described by Houseman, and seems perfectly to fill its
allotted span. Either Houseman was thinking of a different show, or he was amalgamating a series of events to create an essence of the Welles experience. Another instance of the layers of fable that almost everything to do with the man seem to attract.)

The second show, a spirited
Treasure Island
, had fallen short too, and to fill in the time he improvised a little speech at the end which
gives the sense of his charm and fun and elegance in gorgeous
off-the-cuff word-spinning. Houseman said that Welles could make an impromptu speech to fit any occasion; this one is a winner: ‘I’d like you to meet Jim Hawkins, Jr. Our leading man is fourteen years old. Last season he made a really startling contribution to the stage history of Shakespeare’s plays. This was during the course of some
experiments with the Mercury Theatre’s sprinkler system. As the consequence of what must certainly have been extensive research in the field, he caused it to rain, actually to rain, and copiously to rain where in more than three hundred years it has never rained in
Julius Caesar
before. It rained on Brutus, it rained all over Brutus in the forum, I was Brutus and I ought to know.’
²¹
A perfect
example of Welles’s rhetorical style … the rain, the rain, the rain … Brutus, Brutus, Brutus …

‘Now, as dramatic criticism,’ he continued, ‘I found this telling, and even final. And as a surprise item in the funeral scene I can assure you that the unexpected appearance on the stage of so many gallons of real water created in us all an impression that was almost overwhelming. Our popular leading
man says he did it all with a match. I don’t dare think what he’ll do when he’s old enough to run for president, but meanwhile, no matter what happens to the plumbing, he can always work for the Mercury. As you’ve probably discovered he’s something more than a very gifted performer, and as I told you, he’s something less than fifteen. His name shall not be withheld. I refer to that fine old
actor … Arthur Anderson. Mr Anderson is not new to the microphone nor the Mercury.’ Welles details Anderson’s work for the company, then throws in some comments on the other actors. You can feel his eye on the clock, spinning out his slender material to the point where it almost becomes disc-jockey burble. He starts to advertise the next show. ‘Next week we’ll offer you the most ominous and authentic
click of the world’s most famous knitting needles, and Madame herself, Dr Manette, Sydney Carton, and the entire French Revolution, same time, same station. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. Charles Dickens! That is correct, that is absolutely correct! … Charles Dickens’s
Tale of Two Cities
.’ His voice rises to manic levels on ‘Charles Dickens! That is absolutely
correct!’ He’s in the home stretch now. ‘There is at this moment a disturbance in the sub-control room and if it isn’t a tumbril it’s Arthur Anderson. It’s a good thing the program’s over. Good-night everybody. Thanks. Please write me the stories you’d like to hear … and good-bye till next week.’ The howl of long-suppressed laughter is almost audible.

The show itself follows the pattern, and
maintains the standard,
of
Dracula
. The narrative form was slightly different, becoming
Moby Dick
-like: the quest for Long John Silver. This form, a very useful one for radio, served him also well as a film-maker – a mystery, the central character only slowly discovered. Welles’s Silver is a far cry from Robert Newton’s more famous assumption: a sturdy, metal-voiced cockney, harsh and dangerous,
but absolutely lacking the English actor’s insinuating charm. The much-lauded Anderson is excellent, clear and – thanks to his English mum – credibly British. At one point he stumbles over his script; this is the only fluff heard on any of the programmes, something of a miracle considering not merely that they were broadcast live, the rehearsals taking place in absolute chaos, but that Welles and
many of the actors were heavily involved in, first,
Too Much Johnson
, filming and all, and then
Danton’s Death
. Neither Welles nor any aspect of the programme bears the slightest trace of the panic and despair which was engulfing the Mercury stage work, nor indeed the frenzied conditions in which the show was made. The show is confident, skilful, good-hearted.
Treasure Island
, as it happens, had
been their audition piece for Campbell’s Soup, from whom they hoped to get sponsorship. Campbell’s didn’t like the show, so they carried on under CBS’s banner; the contract was renewed for a further ten programmes (no longer under the banner
First Person Singular
, which had never been given great prominence anyway).

It is hard to imagine what more the potential sponsors had wanted: the programmes
are direct, accessible, colourful, funny when appropriate and always lapel-grabbingly urgent, with Welles himself an irresistible master of ceremonies. They are neither highbrow nor lowbrow; their appeal is, literally, to all the family. A ten-year-old could enjoy them (and most of the stories, with the exception perhaps of
Anatol
, Schnitzler’s study of sexual compulsion, were children’s classics)
but there is no condescension in the presentation. They exploit the medium fully, but without a trace of self-consciousness. The Mercury Theatre of the Air programmes embody everyone’s ideal of radio drama, projecting larger-than-life images onto our mental screens, plundering our own memories to tell the story. The most radical medium devised by man (nothing but disembodied voices and sounds;
talking furniture, as the man said), its decline in the latter half of the twentieth century (with the honourable exception of the BBC) into a mere carrier of music and news is a shameful waste. Welles and his collaborators’ work in radio (now available on Compact Disc and cassette) is a great memorial to an exceptional art form, one whose influence remained central to his output.

With the
radio shows, out of the chaos came something marvellous. Back at the Mercury, where, after a false start with
Too Much Johnson
, rehearsals for
Danton’s Death
were underway, chaos simply bred worse chaos. Things started uncertainly then rapidly descended into total confusion. For once, Welles had been unable to find a concept for his production. In
Heartbreak House
, the author had banned him from
having one; here, he was simply unable to reach one. There are few unhappier human beings than a conceptual director without a concept. The truth is that he hardly knew why he was doing the play at all. It had been included in the season on the spur of the moment: Martin Gabel had thrown it on his and Houseman’s desk during one of the first of the Mercury broadcasts, saying how much he’d like to
play Danton. ‘It struck us as a brilliant notion,’
²²
Houseman reports, ‘a contrast to the frivolity of
Too Much Johnson
and something we could sell to our politically minded theatre-party audience.’ The play is notoriously difficult to interpret, much less bring off. Dealing with the most stirring period of the French Revolution, it is strangely undramatic: almost an anti-play. A hundred years
before Brecht (‘there are no great criminals, only great crimes’), the twenty-one-year-old Büchner, on the run from the Prussian police for political subversion, was concerned to de-mythologise the giants of the Revolution. ‘The individual just foams on the wave, greatness mere chance, the rule of genius a puppet-play, a laughable struggle with an iron law … it no longer occurs to me to bow down
before the monuments and big-wigs of history. I cannot make virtuous heroes out of Danton and the bandits of the Revolution!’ This is an immensely sophisticated and elusive theme, one which, on the face of things, was a rather unexpected subject for Welles, with his post-romantic sense of fated personality, of good and evil, guilt and nemesis. The drama of the individual was at the heart of Welles’s
approach; nothing could have been further from Büchner, whose incomplete masterpiece
Woyzeck
gave the drama its first real anti-hero, a man of no qualities, no interest, no personality in any discernible sense.