Orson Welles, Vol I (36 page)

The idea that the nineteen-year old Welles, who had struck Houseman as a ‘monstrous boy … with his pale, shiny child’s face’, would be able convincingly to play the sixty-year-old, all-powerful McGafferty in Archibald MacLeish’s
Panic
was, to put
it mildly, a long shot, but Houseman became convinced of its rightness. Thus it was that the ‘feared and eagerly awaited moment … with its predictable consequences’ arrived. Houseman, relishing every deliciously romantic moment, paid a ‘secret visit’ to Welles during a performance of
Romeo and Juliet
. He found Tybalt (by now dead) half in and half out of costume and character, beardless and naked
to the waist, but still covered in greasepaint, still falsely nosed. Houseman noted the discarded costume, ‘stiff with sweat’, the extraordinarily beautiful hands ‘with enormous white palms and incredibly long, tapering fingers that seemed to have a life of their own’, the play ‘about the Devil’ that Welles was working on. They agreed to meet at a bar across the road. When Welles arrived, Houseman
was amazed by his boyish appearance; it was his ‘shuffling, flat-footed gait’ that identified him as Cornell’s Tybalt. His physical features indelibly impressed themselves on Houseman; he writes of them, not necessarily with admiration, but with startling precision. He was obviously hypnotised. He describes ‘his pale pudding face with the violent black eyes, the button nose with the wen to one
side of it and the deep runnel meeting the well-shaped mouth over the astonishingly small teeth’; he is struck again by those mobile, expressive hands; above all, he is stirred – as so many had been before, and so many, many would be again – by the beauty of the voice ‘that made people turn at the neighbouring tables’. As Houseman acutely observes, it was not the volume of the voice
that made
them turn, but its ‘surprising vibration’. The power of the speaking voice is widely underestimated. Welles’s was an instrument like that of Steiner’s Hitler, a siren voice to which Houseman succumbed completely.

During the three delicious weeks of waiting, Houseman had ‘eagerly absorbed’ the already considerable legend surrounding Welles: from it he would have expected to meet a dazzlingly
precocious, multi-talented budding actor-manager of genius, a teenaged combination of Leonardo da Vinci and John Barrymore. Instinctively recognising the successor to Dadda Bernstein and Skipper Hill, Welles presented himself quite differently to Houseman. Coming on as the Boy Wonder of the Western World would not have created the emotional commitment that he required of those who provided him with
the supportive context without which he could not function. He needed to create intimacy. So, applying his usual strategy, he offered himself with a mixture of deference and demand, to which Houseman immediately responded. He was both flattered and appealed to, wooed and honoured, swept off his feet and placed on a pedestal. His first impression of Welles’s power was thus tempered by a desire
to protect and nurture the rare spirit who had revealed himself so completely and sweetly. Houseman gave him a copy of
Panic
, and arranged a meeting with MacLeish. ‘After he had gone, I was left not so much with the impression of his force and brilliance as with a sense of extreme youth and charm and of a courtesy that came very close to tenderness.’ ‘At first,’ Welles plaintively told Barbara
Leaming, ‘he fell in love with me.’
⁵
He says nothing about his own emotions, as ever. He had always to present himself as the passive and innocent recipient of love or hate, just as it was important for him to believe that his career had simply happened to him, a series of happy accidents. But in these crucial relationships, he was a very active partner, and their trajectories are often identical
to those of intense love affairs.

Interestingly, this particular relationship was opposed from the beginning by the woman who, the day after the opening night of
Romeo and Juliet
, became (at a glamorous candle-lit ceremony in Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, attended among others by Katharine Cornell, Guthrie McClintic and Thornton Wilder), the first Mrs Orson Welles – Virginia Nicolson, friend
of Skipper’s daughters, apprentice actress at Woodstock, and Orson’s first girlfriend. In fact, in order to satisfy the stuffy landlord of the boarding-house in which they were living together, they had already been married in a secret ceremony some six weeks before. The match was opposed
by Virginia’s wealthy father Leo (who, faced with the inevitable, tried to persuade Orson to join the Stock
Exchange as a broker; a somewhat surreal notion) and actively encouraged by Hortense and Roger Hill, anxious that he should find a legitimate channel for his burgeoning sexuality. (They acted as witnesses at the first wedding; as a consolation prize, Maurice Bernstein was best man at the official ceremony.) All this cloak-and-dagger business, the real wedding and the false wedding, was greatly to
the taste of the bride and groom, to whom getting married was essentially something of a lark. There was no suggestion of high romance. In his screenplay for
The Cradle Will Rock
, written in the 1980s, Welles has given himself the following speech: ‘you know what she said to the Minister? Practically on the steps of that cheesy little altar? “Reverend –” she said, “because of our youth we’re being
forced to do this in New Jersey, and it’s all rather irregular, isn’t it? What I want to know is – will there be any trouble if we want to get divorced?”’ And elsewhere in the same screenplay he says: ‘the only reason she married me was to get away from home … I was the first train out of town.’ As usual, he says nothing about his own motives or feelings, but there is no reason to assume they
were anything other than those of a lively and highly sexed young man. Fun was the basis of their early relationship. Even at this stage, they were scarcely equals professionally; in fact it might be said that the considerable newspaper coverage received by their marriage (the official one, of course) was the first and last time she ever stole the headlines from Orson:
VIRGINIA NICOLSON BECOMES
A BRIDE
The New York Times
, 24 December. They had no money, which might have been a problem: ‘I promised her the Great White Way, and glamour – and, you know – the whole megillah. And instead, when she got here we were splitting up Horn and Hardat’s 25c daily blue plate special, half and half, and filling up with water and free bread.’ They had found a tiny little duplex on 14th Street which was
considerably more modest than any home either of them had lived in before. But they were together and in New York when New York really
was
New York and everything seemed possible.

Unusually, when Welles went with Houseman to meet MacLeish, Virginia came along too. ‘A delicious child with blond, reddish hair and ivory skin’, Houseman found her to be. MacLeish was more concerned with Welles,
also, to all outward appearances, a child. How could he possibly do justice to that Lear of Wall Street, McGafferty? The poet – still, according to Herbert Kline, ‘slim and graceful of movement, as he had been in his days as
an Ivy League football star halfback, holding himself ramrod straight from his military service as a World War One hero’
⁶
– expressed impatience. Then Welles read. ‘Hearing
that voice for the first time in its full and astonishing range, MacLeish stared incredulously. It was an instrument of pathos and terror, of infinite delicacy and brutally devastating power.’
⁷
In a daze of mutual excitement, Houseman beaming with nearly parental pride in his discovery – his protégé – it was agreed that Welles would play the role. He was very happy to give two weeks’ notice to
the Cornell company. In the event, it was unnecessary. Despite those glittering notices,
Romeo and Juliet
had not sold out, and McClintic terminated the run after nine weeks, replacing it, again, with
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
, which, with Brian Aherne as an unlikely but popular Robert Browning, played to capacity houses. Thus ended Orson’s involvement with establishment Shakespeare. With
Panic
he came in contact for the first time with the radical political theatre of his day.

MacLeish’s conversion to the left was something of a sensation in its time. He had had a reasonable claim to being the foremost American poet from his early twenties, when, under the influence of T.S. Eliot, he had articulated ‘the voice of the hopeless individual in a chaotic postwar world’,
⁸
in, among
other works, his verse drama,
Nobodaddy
. Returning from Europe, he opened himself to American influence and heritage, finally, with the depression, becoming actively politicised. This development was the more surprising in view of his parallel career as an editor of
Fortune
magazine, and author of
The Young Men of Wall Street
, an admiring account of the Stock Exchange. Neither a Marxist nor even,
formally, a socialist, by the time of
Panic
, he had become convinced of ‘the symbolic death of capitalism’. His shift was hailed in an article for
New Theatre Magazine
:
HOW ARCHIBALD MACLEISH JOINED THE NEW THEATRE MOVEMENT,
which then went on to publish scenes from
Panic
. Neither the play nor MacLeish were greeted with unalloyed enthusiasm by the serious left-wing theatre. His statement, being
largely apocalyptic, lacked both diagnosis and prognosis, and his artistic method was ambitious to the point of elitism. But for Houseman, unable, as he felt, to function within the patterns of the existent commercial, social or art-theatre set-ups, ‘it had become necessary for me to create the image of a man who would undertake what no one else would venture.
Panic
was the perfect vehicle for
such a demonstration.’
⁹
Houseman was wryly able to identify with the crash of a capitalist; but he doesn’t try to conceal the fact that the whole venture had more to do with his personal ambition than
any political impulse.

He assembled an immensely strong production team: Jo Mielziner and Martha Graham (both fresh from
Romeo and Juliet
), Abe Feder to light, Virgil Thomson to write music and
control the choral speaking; the cast consisted of twenty-five principals and a chorus of twenty-three. The Imperial Theatre was hired. Understandably, Houseman withdrew from directing the play, since to mount a piece of this scale on a budget of $3,000 – two-thirds of which had come from the poet himself – demanded full-time cajoling, wheedling, charming, calling-in of favours and pledgings of
eternal gratitude. Before handing over the actual staging to Martha Graham and James Light – a recruit from the Provincetown Players – Houseman, Mielziner, and Abe Feder (‘pale-faced, garrulous, exhaustingly eager and ambitious’) devised a setting of monumental simplicity, a sharply raked stage with a great trench just beyond the regular footlights which, filled with powerful lights, and supplemented
with others from above, created a wall of light, an effect which later became almost synonymous with Welles’s productions at Project 891 and the Mercury Theatre. Rehearsals, scattered across the city, proceeded with great intensity, particularly the choral sections under the galvanising command of Martha Graham. The individual scenes – the ones which concerned Welles as McGafferty – were under
the control of James Light, who proved to be somewhat frail under pressure. Welles, onstage almost continuously, became the solid foundation of the whole enterprise: contradicting his ‘hair-raising’ reputation, his conduct was ‘from first to last, perfect’. Patient with James Light, considerate with his fellow actors, ‘to his own part … he brought us, as a free gift, the strength, the keen intelligence,
the arrogance and the prodigious energy of his nineteen and a half years.’
¹⁰

The production and Welles both received full marks for trying; Welles was held by the
Times
to be ‘excellent’ while the
New York American
remarked that ‘for such a young actor as Welles to play McGafferty as ruthlessly, as interestingly as he did was a genuine feat and puts him up as one of the most promising artists
of our day.’
¹¹
One imagines his performance may have been rather like the middle-aged Kane; certainly some of his text could be Kane’s:

The Revolution!
¹²

That kind!

The sick souls

Herding like hogs in the hang of the dark to be rid of the

Man’s burden of living their forefathers won for them! –

Rid of the liberty! – rid of the hard choice! –

The free man’s choosing
of the free man’s journey!

Welles excelled from the earliest age at playing monolithic patriarchal figures, halfway turned to stone – Mount Rushmore on legs. His noble lower register, trombones doubled by cellos, would make sense of the vigorous, ugly verse if anyone could (as later, in MacLeish’s acclaimed radio play
The Fall of the City
he was to do with great success). He evidently took
McGafferty on his journey from ascendancy to collapse and ultimately silence and suicide with complete conviction. For him,
Panic
was a triumph; as it was for most of the performers. The play itself was more controversial: greeted with respectful admiration by
The New York Times
(‘the work of our protean poet’),
¹³
it was excoriated by the
Evening Journal
: as ‘a pretentious bore’.
¹⁴
More kindly,
Edith Isaacs believed that ‘the words of the play were packed too tight for the use of a theatre not used to the gaunt fullness of poetry’.
¹⁵
The fledgling Phoenix Theatre deserved congratulations, Brooks Atkinson told the readers of
The New York Times
, for ‘reviving an impulse that our middle-aged stage has long been lacking’: the theatre of public debate.

In truth, the opposite seems to
be the case.
Panic
, as written, reads like the work of a middle-aged aesthete trying to rejuvenate himself by grafting the monkey-gland of political commitment onto his art; as performed, in contrast to the work of other radical groups of the time, its experiment seemed aesthetically motivated, its expressive devices not functional but decorative – imitatively decorative at that. With its vatic
Blind man, its jagged stagecraft, and its powerfully obscure statements it is almost parodistically Toller-like. It is a little hard to determine, for example, what
exactly
is meant by the triumphantly shouted final line (‘Man’s fate is a drum!’). The truth, as Houseman swiftly realised, was that
Panic
was already vieux jeu both in its artistic gestures and in its preoccupations: America wanted
to forget what
Variety
memorably described in its review as the ‘busto-crusto days of 1933’; there were new crises, other battles.