Orson Welles, Vol I (44 page)

For the critics the question was whether this
Macbeth
should be assessed as Shakespeare, or as a show. To expect inexperienced black actors to be able successfully to perform a play which has defeated (as several reviews pointed out) highly trained and experienced white companies was unreasonable; to judge the production purely as a diversion not only
seems patronising, but also misses the main point, which is that something big and splendid had been brought off in a section of the community which had been made marginal. It may not have been good Shakespeare, but it was very good Negro Unit, though even here there is a question of whether in the long term it had a beneficent effect. It proved impossible to top The Voodoo
Macbeth
; nor was it
a fruitful vein of work to pursue. For the Negro Unit, it was a one-off maroon, a great big noise to say ‘we’re here!’ Welles had an interesting suggestion to follow it up, a
Romeo and Juliet
with black Montagues and white Capulets – a really explosive notion for a New York stage that had just survived its first inter-racial kiss. But by then, he and Houseman had moved on. Welles’s artistic Don
Juanism starts here.

For him, of course,
Macbeth
was an unequivocal triumph – even though at the time there was some uncertainty about the extent to which it was his sole work. Even Hallie Flanagan, writing five years later, wrote ‘it was difficult to tell who was responsible for what’. The programme even contains the phrase ‘the production supervised by John Houseman’. To Welles’s fury,
The New York Times
had coupled his name with Houseman’s in the review, which led to their first row – ‘a brief, violent, personal row on the sidewalk’ – a taste of things to come. Welles was quite right to claim entire responsibility for the production – it was his, from beginning to end; Houseman had not even been allowed into rehearsals until the very end (another cause of friction: mild now,
later to become severe). But it was Houseman who had given him the opportunity, and Houseman who ensured that he was able to make the best of it. Phillip Barber, the head of the New York division of the Federal Theatre Project, said in an interview: ‘Welles has all the gall that you can possibly conceive of any human being ever having in all of time, and he always had it. And Jack Houseman is one
of the most astute and clever managers that ever lived on shore. And he used Orson and in a sense protected him. He had to fight him to the point of separation practically … to prevent him from doing
things. But he kept that force contained and moving in a direction, and there was nothing like that.’
⁴⁸

The deep underlying knowledge that this was the case – that he needed Houseman, and that
somehow this detracted from his glory – grew from this tiny spat on a Harlem pavement into an obsession. It was not unilateral. In an interesting passage from the early part of his memoirs, Houseman describes a relationship that he had with a school-fellow, Eric, the son of the headmaster. The seven-year-old Houseman shared a room with him. ‘It was here that my first male relationship was formed
– an intimacy based on inequality and fear … (it was)
HIS
house …
HIS
room … through
HIM
the hope of acceptance and the menace of rejection were kept in constant suspense. This created a pattern of insecurity that has persisted through most of my life and … left me incapable of parity – a prey to competitiveness in its most virulent form. More than once, at some critical point in a working relationship,
I have had the uncomfortable feeling that I was following the emotional curve of that first ambivalent children’s intimacy of long ago.’
⁴⁹
The sense of inequality and aspiration, his desire to be liked and affirmed, simultaneously fearing both rejection and domination, that lurked beneath his surface calm and confidence, was a fertile soil for Welles to sow his seeds of, alternately, affection
and resentment. Their relationship was, in fact, a classic instance of what has come to be called co-dependency: an addiction to the power struggle at the heart of the relationship.

This was to come. For the time being, they were the toast of Harlem (‘I was really the King of Harlem! I really was,’
⁵⁰
Welles told Barbara Leaming) and the wonder of Broadway. The show sold out for all of its sixty-four performances; on the opening night it was announced that on Monday evenings, two-thirds of the seats would be set aside for ‘persons on home relief who would receive tickets on
presentation of relief identification cards’. At 9 o’clock on the first Monday, the box office manager announced that all seats had been filled. The queue, stretching back a whole block, continued to push forward, however, and a pane of glass was broken at the theatre entrance. A year ago, the same crowd had been burning cars and smashing shop windows; now the peace was broken in the name of theatre
tickets. Progress of a sort.

At the end of its run at the Lafayette, the show transferred to the Adelphi on West 54th Street, where it played for eleven performances. Jack Carter’s self-restraint broke down; he started to drink heavily during a show. When Edna Thomas burst into tears on
stage, he simply walked offstage to his dressing room, then out of the theatre, and was seen no more. The
Macduff, Maurice Ellis, took over, and it was he that led the subsequent triumphant nationwide tour: Bridgeport, Hartford, Chicago, Indianapolis, Detroit, Cleveland, Dallas; something of a feat. ‘You have to take into account that this was 110 black people,’
⁵¹
wrote John Silvera, the company manager. ‘And travel for black people at that time … was not the most pleasant or easiest thing in the
world. We were living in a strictly Jim Crow situation where hotel accommodations for blacks were non-existent in many cases. But there were no incidents.’ In another way, then, the Negro Unit had blazed a trail. A hundred thousand people of all races saw the show. In Indianapolis, an event occurred that might have set back the cause of black theatre by many years. Maurice Ellis fell ill; his understudy
too, was sick, nor did the new stage manager know the role. As if it was what he had been waiting for all along, Welles jumped onto the next plane and took over the role, playing it in blackface. This well-attested event is best contemplated in awed silence.

O
NCE MACBETH
was running, Houseman did some quick, hard thinking. The Negro Unit’s next play – partly the work of Gus Smith, one of Houseman’s associate directors, who also directed and starred in it – was
Turpentine
, a dramatisation of the plight of Negro workers in the Florida pine woods. Decent but dull, it ran for as long as
Macbeth
. By contrast,
Zora Neale Hurston, one of the writers attached to the Project, produced a version of
Lysistrata
so inflammatory that it was impossible to stage. Bored by the one and frustrated by the other, Houseman began to reconsider his position. He acknowledged to himself that, however worthy the Negro Unit may have been, there was only one person with whom he wished to work, and that was Orson Welles. The
excitement, however complicated by their separate expectations of each other, proved addictive. Welles gave Houseman the sense of creative exhilaration that he was unable – yet – to muster on his own. Without it he felt dull; felt the way he looked: solid, smooth, middle-aged. In the screenplay for
The Cradle Will Rock
, Welles describes him as follows: ‘Now in his early thirties he conveys an
impression of greater age by virtue of a magisterial air, wholly natural and unforced, and already impressive.’ He must find an honourable way to extract himself from the Negro Project.

There is something both admirable and appalling about the frankness with which Houseman analysed and then served his needs: ‘I must leave the Project on a note of triumph, abandon my position with the Negro
Theatre (turning it over to those to whom it rightly belonged) and risk my whole future on a partnership with a 20-year-old boy, in whose talent I had unquestioning faith but with whom I must increasingly play the combined and tricky roles of producer, censor, adviser, impresario, father, older brother, and bosom friend!’
¹
It’s hard to admire his cavalier attitude to the Unit: he
could
have stayed
on;
could
have found other producers who could have brought up standards, if he had really believed in it. For the negro profession, the Unit wasn’t a career move, or an excuse for getting away with amusingly outrageous productions: it was
a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to break down social and artistic obstacles that destroyed the hope and dignity of many millions of Americans. He was fully
aware of the shallowness of his attitude (as he was fully aware of every one of his shortcomings) and admits to it in one of the bleakest sentences in his autobiography. ‘At the last moment, I was filled with that sense of loss and sorrow and of guilt that I have felt with each of the many departures and desertions of which my life is the sum.’

But there was no going back; he was led by a
sort of compulsion towards Welles, addicted to the adrenalin Welles engendered, and impelled towards the great fame and theatrical excitement that he knew were beckoning. He was not, of course, unaware of the strangeness of this move in personal terms: ‘if I did subordinate myself, consciously and willingly, to a man twelve years younger than myself, it was the price I was willing to pay for my participation
in acts of theatrical creation that were far more stimulating and satisfying than any I felt capable of conceiving or creating by myself … I must immediately supply those new theatrical opportunities of which he dreamed and find fresh scope for Orson’s terrible energy and boundless ambition, before someone else did and before he became wholly absorbed in the commercial success-mill which
was beginning to grind for him.’ He was aware that to launch out into the commercial theatre of 1936 was an impossibility; somehow he must find a way of keeping within the bounds of the Federal Theatre Project which, for the time being, could provide them with everything they needed.

Harking back to those sessions at the top of Sardi’s a year before, when Houseman had first been exhilarated
by Welles’s approach to the classics, they conceived the notion of a Classical Unit within the FTP. It was not difficult to persuade Hallie Flanagan – herself immersed in the classics, especially the Elizabethan classics, which would inevitably form the cornerstone of the repertory – of the value of such a unit; ‘the Federal Theatre,’
²
she wrote, ‘was committed to the belief that a people’s theatre
could be occupied in no better way than by production of the classics.’ She had, moreover, exactly the right theatre on her hands, the Maxine Elliott on 39th Street, which the WPA had just rented from the Shuberts. So Houseman and Welles got exactly what they wanted, when they wanted it. It was a bold decision of Flanagan’s, since the Federal Theatre Project, having survived the early crisis
of
Ethiopia
and to a large extent confounded the Cassandras who had predicted mediocrity and incompetence, was now, after a year of existence,
coming under increasing fire from a right wing implacably opposed both to the perceived radical persuasion of most FTP shows and to the very notion of subsidy in the arts. Essentially the opposition to the FTP was a branch of opposition to the New Deal.
As long as Roosevelt was strong, the Project had a chance of survival, though from this point on it was always under threat, from within and without. There had already been cuts in the budget, sufficient to provoke a one-day strike by FTP workers. The fall of 1936 was the run-up to the crucial December election, Roosevelt’s bid for a second term. His critics were on the attack, and the Federal Theatre
Project, a minor but highly visible example of the New Deal in action, was a prime target.

Harrison Grey Fiske led with a comprehensive assault in the
Saturday Evening Post
, in August 1936, under the punning title
THE FEDERAL THEATRE DOOM-BOGGLE.
At the bottom of the page is a cartoon showing a smiling Roosevelt waving a Promissory Note: ‘We, the undersigned, promise to pay the national Debt
of $35,000,000,000.00 with interest. Signed: American parent, American youth.’ FDR leans on a
MORTGAGE ON AMERICA.
Fiske immediately discerns a conspiracy: first to kill the National Theatre (a bill to create such an institution had been passed by Congress days before the establishment of the Federal Theatre Project, after which the National Theatre was quietly dropped); second to destroy Broadway.
He quotes Elmer Rice: ‘The finish of the commercial theatre predicted by me for two decades is now in sight and inevitable. The present system is archaic and its ability is the only test of a play’s worth.’ Then there were the freeloaders. ‘Scores of impostors made the pay rolls. These included amateurs, office workers, “singing waiters” from village joints, miscellaneous Harlem negroes, idle
welfare workers and plumbers. An especially hospitable welcome was extended to communists and those of radical leanings, white and black.’

Fiske detects subversion. The Living Newspaper comes under particularly savage attack: ‘And so, in this perfectly natural way that has been told, it happened that a play in which a member of the government is personated attacking the US Supreme Court, and
the radical party in the audience is delighted with a tableau that represents the Communist International Program for this country – a work of playwrights employed by the government – was produced in a NY City theatre rented by the government, acted by actors hired and trained by the government, with an official government symbol on the door.’

Even the Project’s triumphs are denounced: ‘On
April 14th
Macbeth
at the Lafayette: floodlights, a big brass band and thousands of excited Harlemites gathered in the streets, blocked traffic and necessitated a detail of police to open a lane for visitors. Thus the initial Shakespearean foray under government auspices was ushered in.’ Welles and Houseman were in the line of direct fire: ‘It proved to be a shameless degradation of the cosmic
tragedy, the scene of which was transferred to Haiti, and its profound metaphysical background was converted into a frenzied voodoo jamboree. Not a vestige of the power, beauty and meaning of the titanic work remained.’ How Welles and Houseman must have hugged themselves.