Orson Welles, Vol I (32 page)

Welles repeated his Ghost from the original Dublin production. ‘An unhorrific old ghost, gentle and grandfatherly, and almost a crooner,’
²⁸
said Lloyd Lewis. It is interesting to compare
this comment with the notices he received in Ireland two years before: ‘he made the speech of the Ghost almost human as well as awesome.’ Perhaps his father’s death was now more distant, and the sense of urgency that he had found in Dublin had gone from the performance. The production in general was liked; Hilton mildly praised for his Polonius, greatly admired for daring to include so much of the
text, and for his directing and lighting. It was another opportunity for Welles to examine at close hand Edwards’s immense skill in these departments. He learned his grammar of stagecraft directly from Hilton: what he had to say was different, as was his way of saying it, but the swiftness of transition, the economy of action and precision of focus that characterised Hilton’s work were all to inform
Welles’s work as a director. Less influential, perhaps, were Hilton’s manners. ‘Would it be reasonable,’ Hascy Tarbox reports him as saying to a student actor, ‘do you think it might help, if you moved
HERE?’
Orson’s way was to be a little more direct.

The third and final offering of the season,
Tsar Paul
by Dmitri Merejkovsky, was designed to show Hilton off as an actor. He had had a substantial
success with the piece in Dublin; it had created a stir in London, too, when Laughton played not the title role but the part, Count Pahlen, Welles was to play in Woodstock. This was its first staging in America. ‘This comment on the life of the mad Tsar Paul I,’ said the production note, ‘should prove apropos at a time when so much attention has been focused on the life of his mother, Catherine
the Great of Russia.’ Interestingly, it got the best notices of the three plays, and Welles, too, came out of his relatively unshowy role crowned with laurels. Both Mac Liammóir and Welles may have been a little miffed to read of their supporting performances in
Tsar Paul
that ‘Hilton Edwards, Orson Welles and Micheál Mac Liammóir all three appear to better effect than in their earlier summer’s
work.’
²⁹
Edwards was praised as expert and intelligent, which may not be the ideal combination for conveying lunacy, but was clearly technically impressive. Mac Liammóir’s Tsarevich was held to be properly touching, but the reviews concentrated on Welles’s Pahlen. The make-up box had again been raided, of course: ‘he achieves the effect of vigorous and cunning old age
with a make-up that suggests
a death’s head,’ said Charles Collins in the
Tribune
. Enough already with the make-up, Orson! one is tempted to cry, but it is evident that in this role, at any rate, he didn’t lead with his false nose. ‘The surprise of the performance is Orson Welles as Pahlen. Mr Welles hides his 19-year-old face behind a make-up that is a cross between the saracen Saladin and General Pershing, a swarthy, weather-tanned
face of sixty, military, stern, zealously patriotic. Restrained within the monosyllabic nature of a soldier, Mr Welles is an exceedingly good actor. The overboyish exuberance which made him caricature Svengali and the Danish king, is witheld here by Pahlen’s self-discipline. Mr Welles has, for the moment at least, quit trying to scare his audience to death, and is the artist, making Pahlen
come alive by thinking and moving as Pahlen would think and move. Welles catches the chained fervour of Pahlen so perfectly.’

Mac Liammóir, too, admired his performance. ‘His Count Pahlen kept all the essentials of the part and extended the limitations of its framework.’
³⁰
He added – an important comment – ‘in the second of the two productions which he put in Hilton’s hands, he was superb.’
The diagnosis for this young actor with a case of uncontrollable overacting would be, first, a steady diet of Pahlens; second, put yourself in the hands of a skilled director. Welles was fatally drawn to roles in which he could experience the rush of adrenalin that comes from eating up the stage. A few of these from time to time in a career is a fine thing, but regular exposure to them can only
lead to diminishing returns. Secondly, although directing and acting in the same show is a feat that has been triumphantly achieved, and not merely by barnstorming actor-managers – Louis Jouvet, Stanislavsky and Harley Granville Barker to name but three great artists have all done so with success – it is not recommended at the very start of one’s career. One thing at a time. This was a lesson Welles
would never learn, or, more to the point, a proposition he would never accept. But it seems clear that his best early performances were those given under the direction of someone else.

Too often his own central performances were the last element in the production to which he turned his attention. His Pahlen is a glimpse of the different sort of actor that he might have been. Claudia Cassidy
had no doubts about him whatsoever. She told her journal: ‘His variety and range are amazing and his youth has nothing to do with the matter except to hint at genius. The man is an actor and I think one of our major theatre pages will have fine things written in his name. Perhaps the Todd Festival’s chief achievement will be
to permit a lot of people to say of Orson Welles, “I saw him when.”’
³¹

Getting the plays on had been the overwhelming priority; but with performances on only four nights a week (Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 8.30) there was plenty of spare time, both for the students and for the faculty. The advertised curriculum never existed except in the brochure; had it done, it would have been rather marvellous: ‘Todd presents its students with a two months’ comprehensive
apprenticeship on both sides of a fine working theatre … experiment, major production … every student will receive careful personal attention … acting, voice, scene and costume design, make-up, journalistic criticism … a long series of visiting lecturers …’ There was little evidence, apart from a late-night performance of
The Drunkard
and the après-show cabarets, of any student productions; instead,
taking a cue from the conveniently flexible first line of the blurb (‘Favouring a less formal and a practical rather than a theoretical approach to dramatic education’) they put the students to work as an adaptable army of theatrical helots, either as stage hands, set builders, or bit-part players, fit to start a scene, swell a progress. There could be worse educations.

For the rest, it would
appear that any remaining time was filled, in time-honoured fashion, with sex. Whether the unthinkably politically incorrect occurred, and the faculty and the students canoodled together, or whether each kept to his own, is hard at this distance to determine. Welles himself certainly crossed the divide, in his relationship with Virginia Nicolson. As for the other professional actors: the rather
grand Louise Prussing is unlikely to have consorted with the student body, the Horatio, Charles ‘Blacky’ O’Neal and Ophelia, Constance Heron, were married to each other (a union that was eventually to give Ryan O’Neal to the world). As for Micheál and Hilton, Welles painted a lurid picture of their campus activities for the benefit of Mrs Leaming, some of which may be true but which reads as an
act of revenge, a posthumous character assassination. ‘Oh it was wild because these fellows were at the absolute high pitch of their sexuality! They went through Woodstock like a withering flame.
NOBODY
was safe, you know. Down the main street of Woodstock went Micheál, with beaded eyelashes with the black running slightly down the side of his face because he could never get it right, and his
toupee slipping, but still full of beauty. Hilton couldn’t keep his hands off his genitals.’
³²
No doubt they were knocked sideways by the summery beauty of young American manhood – always breathtaking at first sight to Europeans, particularly at a time when European youth kept itself properly covered no matter
what the temperature. It is certainly true that Mac Liammóir cut a bizarrely theatrical
figure wherever he went. But – as Orson acknowledges elsewhere – his taste in men was essentially for ‘vigorous, non-homosexual types’,
³³
in Welles’s own phrase. He was not a sexual omnivore, though he could never have too much of what he liked. It is highly unlikely that he would have found that among the students, and to claim as Mrs Leaming does that he chased Hascy Tarbox is laughable: Hascy
as a grown man had a pixie-like quality, almost feminine, though resolutely heterosexual. As a boy nobody on earth would be a less likely object of desire for Mac Liammóir. As for Edwards, discretion was his middle name. To describe him, with his demeanour of a bank manager or a senior civil servant as a ‘roaring pansy’ is simply a piece of vulgar inaccuracy. The tendency of this entire passage
is to render both men laughable and pathetic. Why did Welles feel the need to do this?

At the time – despite his claim to Mrs Leaming that they ‘hated him’ all that summer – he spent a great deal of his spare time with them, indulging Micheál’s passion for the movies (
Whom the Gods Destroy
;
Martyred by his Love
;
Little Man, What Now
were the hits of the day). They were at the movies the afternoon
John Dillinger was gunned down by the FBI, only a few blocks away from the cinema they were in. They visited the World’s Fair, though whether they attended the reproduction of the Globe (‘In Merrie England, world’s fair grounds, tabloid Shakespearean and classic plays, daily at 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.30, 8.30 and 9.30’) is unrecorded. There were meals, and parties, and long and passionate conversations
with Thornton Wilder, who seems to have been in residence most of that summer. As far as Mac Liammóir was concerned, writing some ten years later, the whole period had become suffused in a golden glow of reminiscence: ‘Our season at Woodstock ended for us all amid whoops of youthful triumph, and for me with two offers of film-tests for Hollywood … but the thought of not returning to Dublin was
unbearable: I would have a few weeks more in this marvellous, unreal country, and then I would inevitably wake up, and when I woke, I would have to continue what I had begun. To leave a house half built in a land of ruins was impossible. So it was at last over, this early venture of Orson’s, and on the last regretful night of
Tsar Paul
amid the lantern-lit trees in the courtyard of the school
we drank his health and swore lasting friendship with them all.’
³⁴
They packed up and departed for home, pausing only to become involved in an extravagant Gaelic Pageant in Chicago, written by Mac Liammóir, staged by Hilton Edwards, which they ended up doing for nothing,
the management having decamped. Then they returned to Dublin to continue what they had begun; they continued it till the day
they died.

As a sort of end-of-term romp, Welles and assorted Woodstockites hired a camera and made a little film, a wild parody of avant-garde film styles to which they had recently been exposed at a local film society.
Hearts of Age
, they called it: Welles claimed in later life that it was his satire on Bunuel and Cocteau, but the real influence is
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
. Jerky, grotesque,
melodramatic and full of the imagery of death, it is, for all its technical limitations, a highly distinctive piece of work. Welles is of course the central character, made-up like something out of E.T.A. Hoffmann, high-domed and wild-eyed, with a steeple-top hat, cane and prancing gait. Virginia is a mournful old lady, little Egerton Paul appears in blackface as a servant, Keystone cops come
hurtling through, as Welles is coming down the stairs three times in a row, leaping onto the roof, moodily playing the piano with bent fingers. Bells toll, candelabras gutter, Virginia dies. The final sequence shows a selection of tombstones, the last one of which, of course, is inscribed
THE END.
The images stick in the mind. Even with a cumbersome old 16 mill camera, Welles was able to frame
interesting shots, and the action he unleashed for the camera to record is nightmarish and alarming. The angles of shooting are Dutch and distorted, from low down and high up, odd, glancing shots. The entire film (which would gain him immediate admission to a film school today) is full of life and imagination, highly theatrical, but keen to exploit the freedom and the tricks of the cinema; in these
regards it bears an uncanny resemblance to Eisenstein’s first film,
Even a Wise Man Stumbles
, shot for insertion into a stage production of Ostrovsky’s play. The influence of
Caligari
is equally strong there; considering that that famous film is more or less lifted straight from current German expressionist theatre practice, the appeal to both stage-struck young men, Welles in Woodstock, Eisenstein
in Moscow, is understandable. It was to surface again in both men’s mature work.

The students (including Virginia, with whom Orson was now intensely involved) went back to their homes; the socialites and the critics departed. Woodstock breathed a sigh of relief, and Todd went back to being a school. For Welles (though presumably no offers of film-tests had been forthcoming) the season had
been an enormous personal triumph, as actor – less so as director – as organiser, as front-man and not least as publicist. Skipper was reasonably content and not financially disadvantaged. They scarcely had time to think
about it, because, in the midst of the season, their earlier joint venture,
Everybody’s Shakespeare
, was rolling off the school press. It is typical of the density of Welles’s
life, now and always, that two of his most ambitious enterprises should have occurred simultaneously. And
Everybody’s Shakespeare
is an extraordinary achievement by any standard.

Extracting illustrations from Welles had been like pulling teeth; Roger was still nagging him while
Romeo and Juliet
was lugging itself round the country: ‘plug at that book. Work will be impossible later … finish
first – and soon – the Malvolio lock-up scene. We must get forms for the introduction and first two plays to the press to send to prospective foreword writers. Then we must finish the book and circulate literature before the closing of the schools – a better time to introduce a text than the fall.’
³⁵
Skipper was as ever trying to make practical, financially feasible sense of the venture. Without
him, it wouldn’t have existed at all. But he was content to function as Welles’s handmaiden. He beavered away in research libraries to provide the academic apparatus for the edition, but claimed no creative contribution whatever: ‘it is a mystery to me and will be a blank to you how I could spend the immense amount of time on a mere detail to make a dummy from your work.’ Orson was eighteen; Roger
Hill was forty-one, his teacher and surrogate father. Yet there is no mistaking where the power in the relationship lies.