Orson Welles, Vol I (35 page)

The New York Times
despatched a reporter to put a foot in the water. The result was positive, despite the curious wording: ‘Audience warm in its commendation of the most pretentious Shakespeare representation
here since Belasco’s
Merchant of Venice
’.
⁴⁶
It was equally successful in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Toronto, before finally opening triumphantly in New York. Every aspect of the production was praised in terms which McClintic must have relished: ‘It was a performance at once resonant and vibrant; neither “modern” nor archaic; but infinitely human; a performance which glorified neither the star,
the actors, nor the director, but all three together, and therefore the play.’
⁴⁷
That was his purpose, in a nutshell. ‘Guthrie McClintic has somehow managed to persuade all the members of the cast that the word Shakespeare is one which need not freeze the lips.’
⁴⁸
Edith Evans, who had just played the Nurse successfully in London for the first time, was universally lauded, her performance simply
described by Brooks Atkinson as
‘a masterpiece’. (New York only saw her for a week before she returned to England, her husband having suddenly died.) Rathbone was reasonably well reviewed, as was Brian Aherne.

It was, above all, a great triumph for Katharine Cornell, one for which she had worked with unrelenting application. ‘Miss Cornell has kept faith with her audiences by giving
Romeo and
Juliet
a thoroughly gifted performance. She has kept faith with herself by acting Juliet with the humility of an artist who respects her material. Fortunately she is a great actress, and that is why her Juliet is a deeply moving realisation of fate.’
⁴⁹
Moving as is McClintic’s refusal to be beaten by the challenge – not to take any short-cuts to success – Cornell’s painstaking realisation of each
moment for the role, her slow development of complete belief in herself as Juliet is a model of artistic dedication. Her biographer, Tad Mosel, reports her standing in the wings for ten minutes before her entrance clenching and unclenching her fists, her arms in the air, to give her hands ‘the smooth, veinless look of a young girl’s’.
⁵⁰
Invisible from anywhere further than the third row of the
stalls, a glimpse of veins would have interfered with her belief in herself.

As for Welles: he didn’t do badly at all. Atkinson in
The New York Times
noted his Tybalt, (along with Moroni Olsen’s Capulet and others) as ‘instances of minor parts played with something more than minor authority’.
⁵¹
The
New York American
more enthusiastically described his Tybalt as ‘a performance to watch and
applaud: there was never a Tybalt so feline and subtly hateful’.
⁵²
There was no avoiding it, however, he was playing a supporting role, not merely in
Romeo and Juliet
, but in what was the greatest drama of McClintic’s and Cornell’s careers. It was an intersection of two radically different approaches to life and art. There was hardly a point of meeting. For the McClintics, this had been a crusade,
for Welles simply a stepping-stone, a stage in his career. For the McClintics, this First Night was a mythic moment, for Welles a bit of a humiliation. He can hardly have shared McClintic’s excitement, so vividly conveyed in
Me and Kit
, though he was physically part of it: ‘Before our beautiful green sage curtains with the crest of the Capulets embroidered on one side and the Montagues on the
other, Orson, resplendent, shielding his face with a gold Benda mask, came through and in his magnificent voice began the Prologue: “Two households both alike in dignity …” When he finished, his spot went out and there was the first scene exactly as I had wanted it to be.’
⁵³
One senses Welles’s separateness from the rest of the company. McClintic even had to insist that he took the curtain call.
There is something sad about
this, because it was obviously a great event for the audience and for the actors. He had not really been part of it. It was, none the less, a turning point in his life, though he could scarcely know it, on that December night, in 1934, at the Martin Beck Theatre as he stood scowling in the line of actors while the audience roared its approval and the curtain went up
and down, again and again.

T
HE INSTRUMENT
of Welles’s destiny that night was a stocky, balding thirty-three-year-old Jewish-Alsatian Anglo-Rumanian, born Jacques Haussmann and renamed John Houseman, which perfectly suited his accent and bearing, those of an English gentleman. His view of what he had just seen on stage was rather different from that of his cheering fellow spectators:
‘that glossy and successful evening,’
¹
as he referred to it in his memoirs, written some thirty years later, ‘with Brian Aherne’s Mercutio exuberantly slapping his thighs as he strutted through Jo Mielziner’s bright Italianate scenery … Basil Rathbone’s polite, middle-aged Romeo.’ His nodding attention was galvanised when ‘the furious Tybalt appeared suddenly in that sunlit Verona square: death,
in scarlet and black, in the form of a monstrous boy – flat-footed and graceless, yet swift and agile; soft as a jelly one moment and uncoiled, the next, in a spring of such furious energy that, once released, it could be checked by no human intervention. What made this figure so obscene and terrible was the pale, shiny child’s face under the unnatural growth of dark beard, from which there issued
a voice of such clarity and power that it tore like a high wind through the genteel, modulated voices of the well-trained professionals around him. “Peace! I hate the word as I hate Hell!” cried the sick boy, as he shuffled along, driven by some irresistible interior violence to kill and soon, inevitably, himself to die.’

This electrified response to a performance that had passed largely unremarked
by either critics or audience came from a man who was quite as complex and needful as Welles himself. His life, though without the dramatic contrast and colourful incident of the younger man’s, had taken him through a startling variety of experiences and incarnations and was based, like Welles’s, on an early emotional background both conflicting and confusing. Born in Bucharest, as a child
Houseman spoke French, German, English, and Rumanian. His early life was erratic and peripatetic; his parents distant, glamorous figures who handed him over to a succession of governesses. At six he was in Istanbul, where his father was
stationed. At seven he was sent to Clifton College in England; while there, his father died. He was perceived to be ‘a fat French boy named fat Jack … a spoiled
only child who arrived from Paris with a beautiful mama’. His fellow students set about knocking all delusions of self-respect out of him, along with any traces of foreignness, all of which delighted his Anglo-Welsh mother, who also urged him to convert to the Church of England. This confused and upset him: he felt that he was betraying his Jewish father, and himself. His mother saw no conflict,
actively urging a policy of dual consciousness at every level: ‘she believed that by combining the healthy austerity of my life in England with the glamour of her own cosmopolitan world, she was giving me the best of all possible lives. It didn’t work out that way … divided between my two worlds, I belonged to neither.’

Having won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, he took a year
off to work on a farm in Argentina; while there he discovered his mother’s desperate financial straits, and, in a spirit of guilt-induced self-sacrifice, forwent the campus for the high pampas. There he made enough money to put her affairs on a more secure footing. Returning to England, he anglicised his name, but the basic duality of his existence continued, as he reviewed books for
The New Statesman
by night while selling grain in the exchanges by day. His firm sent him to America; after two years of listlessness in the job, he suddenly discovered ‘some inherited, long-buried Alsatian trader’s instinct’ and overnight became a brilliant success as a businessman – whereupon he gave up the job and, by now married to an actress, devoted himself to his dream of being an artist. He co-wrote
a play (which was performed), collaborated on a series of translations and adaptations (which were sold), had a brief period as one of a team of writers on a Hollywood movie (which was made) then, dissatisfied with his own efforts, drifted back to New York where he became part of that city’s thriving salon society. At one gathering, he met Virgil Thomson who, taking a shine to him, invited him to
direct the world première of his chef d’oeuvre, the Gertrude Stein opera
Four Saints in Three Acts
. This production of all the talents (Ashton choreography, Florine Stettheimer designs, Lee Miller photography) was a huge success, admirably co-ordinated by Houseman; after it, the toast of Hartford and later Broadway, he was unable to repeat his success, nor even find his niche. Feeling less confident
with every fresh attempt, he emerged ‘with an almost total lack of faith in my own creative ability’. No existing group seemed to have a place for him, with his inflated reputation and diminished sense of
identity. What he needed was a sense of purpose and a channel for his own unrealised gifts. He had reached an absolute impasse – a writer lacking the courage to write, a director terrified of
entering the rehearsal room (‘my shame and fear were almost unbearable, my ineptitude so glaring that I could conceal it from nobody – least of all myself’). He needed a solution to his life.

For no reason he could articulate, he knew that this electrifying Tybalt contained the answer. A first-night guest of the Mielziners, he went backstage to congratulate them. ‘I looked around in vain for
a glimpse of the red and black costume. I left without seeing him; yet in the days that followed, he was seldom out of my mind. My agitation grew and I did nothing about it – in much the same way as a man nurtures his sense of excited anticipation over a woman the sight of whom has deeply disturbed him and of whom he feels quite certain that there will one day be something between them. He postpones
the meeting until it can no longer be delayed.’ The nakedness of the language, which is repeated throughout Houseman’s account of his relationship with Welles, makes it quite clear that he knows the nature of his feelings for Orson: he experienced a submission of his whole being to another. In this there is certainly a sexual component, but its objective and conclusion is not sex. The emotion
is the classic one described by Plato’s Diotima: the longing for something in another which one feels oneself to lack, mingled aspiration and abnegation, hope predicated on hopelessness; the desire for completion by one whom one perceives already to be complete.

No two men on the face of the earth could have been less alike, and yet they might have been made for each other. They formed one
of the classic working partnerships of the modern theatre; even its bust-up was classic. Both partnership and bust-up are brilliantly documented in a work which is itself a classic, though of necessity, since its author was one-half of the partnership, a somewhat biased one. Conceived on the Rousseau model, John Houseman’s three-volume memoir is a confessional and critical self-portrait, frank –
sometimes blush-makingly so – detailed (he drew on his extensive personal archives, diaries, letters and documents) and stylish. He observes with a novelist’s eye, he dramatises with a playwright’s skill, and analyses with a psychologist’s precision, sparing neither himself nor anyone else. The first and best volume of the memoir,
Run-Through
, is dominated by Houseman’s account of his relationship
with Orson Welles, a relationship which ended in recrimination, and, on one memorably reported occasion, violence.
It is enthralling and convincing; but it is his version of events.

Welles, of course, left no autobiography. Thus Houseman, to Welles’s immeasurable rage, won the war of words. His book must be quoted with caution, but its often unlovely portrait of Houseman himself lends it the
stamp of truth. Welles used Barbara Leaming to pass on to posterity his side of the story. Chivalrously taking up cudgels on his behalf, she seems to think that she’s found Houseman out; but he knew exactly what he was saying, and how he was saying it. Self-knowledge is above all else what differentiates him from Welles. On the other hand, spontaneity is not his chief quality. He observes, others
and himself, with hawk-like eye; but it is almost impossible for him to surrender to impulse without pre-meditation. In Sartre’s famous phrase about Baudelaire, he is a man without immediacy: like a child, as Sartre says, who plays in front of adults. Behind this lies fear. Of himself he says: ‘to anyone as frightened of life as I was …’ Orson Welles must have seemed absolutely unafraid of life,
or any aspect of it. Talking to Peter Bogdanovich, who had gingerly opened up the subject, Welles said: ‘Let’s not talk about Houseman; I want to enjoy the afternoon, and he’s one of the few subjects that depresses me so deeply, it really spoils my day to think of him.’
²
That was in 1965. Twenty-five years later, Houseman, who generally expressed himself on the subject of Welles in terms of ironic
bafflement, declared, literally on his deathbed, that ‘meeting Welles was the most important event of my life’.
³
From the first, he makes no attempt to conceal the violence of his attraction. ‘Orson Welles’s initial impact – if one was sensitive or allergic to it – was overwhelming and unforgettable.’
⁴

He continues the description of their first meeting in
Run-Through
: ‘The period of my waiting,
during which the conditions of my meeting with Orson Welles were ineluctably shaping themselves, was about three weeks, but the event which finally brought us together had been germinating for months.’ Happily for Houseman, he had a project at hand with which to engineer an encounter and then, perhaps, a collaboration.
Panic
, Archibald MacLeish’s apocalyptic verse play about the death of a capitalist,
had been doing the rounds, but nobody would touch it. Conceived as an unequivocally left-wing response to criticisms of his contentious first play,
Frescoes for Mr Rockefeller’s City
, it was a bold attempt to create a demotic – and specifically American – poetic language, an attempt which condemned its author to find favour with neither realists nor classicists. This neither-one-thing-nor-the-otherness
immediately commended it to Houseman, feeling himself
to be in exactly the same boat. Ignoring the small detail that he had never met MacLeish, or had any communication with him on the subject, he announced in the press that he would be producing the play; this audacity led to a meeting, and finally to his securing, for a very modest sum, the rights to the play. Joined by his roguish partner,
the publicist Nathan Zatkin, he determined to set up a new producing organisation: the Phoenix Theatre. With $500 in the kitty they opened offices over a burlesque house on 42nd Street and proceeded to generate excitement over their new property, inhibited in their efforts only by their inability to cast the huge leading role of McGafferty, the prototypical man of Capital. Their offer of the part
to Paul Muni had been greeted with silence. It was then that Houseman saw
Romeo and Juliet
, and various strands of his life began to come together.