Orson Welles, Vol I (45 page)

Fiske then stops pussy-footing around: ‘the Federal Theatre’s hair is full of communists … they found inspiration in the
fact that Mrs Flanagan cherished the ambition to Russianise our theatre, to transform it into “the true theatre which reflects the economic forces of modern life.”’ His triumphant conclusion reports that the Theatre Veterans’ League had accused Mrs Flanagan and her colleagues of using the FTP primarily ‘as a means of disseminating communistic propaganda … Helen Arthur, head of the Manhattan Theatre,
has invited the cast to tea in the lobby, for the purpose of studying the Soviet Theatre and the theory of government back of it.’ Somehow, tea in the lobby is to Fiske as sinister as the Soviet system itself. When the Veterans’ protest was made public, Flanagan simply pointed to the track record.

Of course it is true that there were communists in the Federal Theatre Project, and it is certainly
true that the work was broadly left wing. Harry Hopkins had roundly declared that they were ‘for labor, first last and all the time. WPA is labor – don’t forget that.’ And there is no question but that Mrs Flanagan had swallowed the vision of Soviet Russia as a nascent utopia, especially in matters theatrical. However, she was no more a Marxist than Roosevelt himself. They shared a belief in
the mobilisation of labour, and sought to correct what they perceived as a flaw in the capitalist system. Neither desired to overthrow it, much less to replace it with a system absolutely alien, as both of them believed, to American history and the American way of life. Their critical view of the capitalist system was strongly in tune with the times, both in the population at large and within the
artistic community. While Broadway ran ever further into the past, or cloud cuckoo land, the Federal Theatre Project insisted on relating everything to the present, regarding it with a challenging eye, believing that it was the job of the theatre not to anaesthetise, but to stimulate, the citizenry. It
was naturally regarded as a threat, at many levels. Against this background, Hallie Flanagan
must have greeted the notion of a Classical Unit with pleasure and relief.

Confident that Welles and Houseman would turn out challenging work, she was none the less grateful that the plays they would choose could scarcely be accused of being left wing. As it happens, the first play that the Classical Unit chose to do was neither classical nor left wing; it almost defies categorisation, particularly
as staged by Welles. In fact, it wasn’t even put on by the Classical Unit, because both Welles and Houseman hated the name. Receiving a government document formally initiating the unit, they were delighted to discover that their official designation was Project 891; that became the title of their organisation. The incongruity of their new home, the Maxine Elliott Theatre, delighted them
too. Built for the mistress of the financier J.P. Morgan, it was a 900-seat jewel-box: ‘For eight years I have cherished consistently – though I am a woman,’
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Elliott wrote, ‘the dream of building a theatre that should be small and intimate; that should be beautiful and harmonious to the eye in every last detail; that should be comfortable for the spectators, and, behind the scenes, comfortable
and humane for every last player.’ There was gold silk on the auditorium walls; English veined marble lined the lobby walls; the façade was of Dorset marble.

Until recently it had been the home of Lillian Hellman’s long-running
The Children’s Hour
. It is a measure of the starkness of the times that the Shubert organisation had little faith in their ability to find a successor to it, preferring
to lease out the theatre for an exiguous sum to the Federal Theatre Project. Miss Elliott (who had long ago retired but was still alive) might have been a little surprised to find her exquisite pink dressing room commandeered as Welles’s office, and even more surprised to see passing through its doors the procession of ‘ageing character actors, comics and eccentrics that delighted Orson’s heart
… middle-aged, garrulous ladies with bright coloured hair whom nobody else seemed to want and a number of bright young ladies’
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all auditioning for a place in 891’s first production, Labiche and Marc-Michel’s vintage farce,
An Italian Straw Hat
. The play had been chosen specifically to mop up the pool of performers left without anything to do after the dissolution of their units. The vaudevillian
faction was predominant, which tipped the balance in favour of opening with Labiche; at the same time they announced their second play,
Doctor Faustus
(with its own – more limited – opportunities for knockabout comedians). Shamelessly, they justified the inclusion of
An Italian Straw Hat
by
claiming, no doubt accurately, that nineteenth-century French farce was a genre taught in schools – a fact
which is none the less hardly a basis on which to construct the repertory of a classical company.

Behind this show, influencing it in innumerable ways from the beginning, was Virgil Thomson. It had been his idea to do the play in the first place, and his was the inspired title of their version,
Horse Eats Hat
. Thomson suggested both the translator – the poet, dancer and librettist Edwin Denby,
another American denizen of the Left Bank and habitué of Miss Stein’s salon – and the composer, Paul Bowles, not yet a writer (not yet, in fact, a composer, properly speaking, but he had Thomson’s imprimatur, and that was all that seemed to matter, on this project). When Denby and Welles went about adapting the translation – which they did in the manner that seemed best to suit Welles, writing
all through the night, one taking it in turns to doze while the other wrote, then Welles reading it out loud – the end result was an extraordinary mixture of Paris and the Middle West: precisely the combination that made Virgil Thomson himself so striking. As far as the music was concerned, Thomson advised Bowles at every turn, and finally orchestrated what he wrote, since the younger man had no
experience in that sphere. He was at very least a godparent to the show, and took properly godparental pride in it. His contribution was made for his own amusement, and out of affection for Houseman. Welles continued to irritate him, but he was fully aware of the size of his talent and the prodigiousness of his energy. He simply found him intellectually insubstantial, socially gauche and lacking
in proper seriousness as an artist. Apart from that, he liked him a lot. ‘Working with him in his youth was ever a delight,’
⁵
he wrote, ‘also a lesson that might be called Abundance in the Theatre.’ Notwithstanding, he took pleasure in pricking Orson’s bubble. He and Houseman made a point in conversing in French whenever he was around, which infuriated him, as it was meant to.

This was a small
tension in what were, by all accounts, wildly amusing rehearsals. Denby and Welles had taken the wonderful old play (which had been seen a decade before in a production by Richard Boleslavsky for American Laboratory Theatre, when it was greeted with bewilderment) and seized on its almost surreal progression from incident to incident to create something which owed a great deal to American vaudeville
and almost nothing to the French genre of the same name. It became in their hands all form and no content: a delirious string of gags bearing only the most tenuous relationship to the basic situation, thus somewhat tampering with the nature of the original play.

French farce is utterly unlike English farce, which is an extension of the nonsense tradition, also nightmarish but a child’s nightmare,
nor does it bear much resemblance to American farce, which is usually a celebration of eccentricity and tends towards unbridled zaniness. French farces, especially those of Feydeau and Labiche, are rigidly rooted in a real world, and their plots have a grinding relentlessness that has been compared, not without justice, to those of Sophocles. They devolve without exception on sex – either
the longing for it, or the illicit consummation of it. Real sex is entirely absent from both English and American farce.

What Denby and Welles did to
An Italian Straw Hat
was to turn it into an American farce, a wild farrago of the incomprehensible in pursuit of the unbelievable. Maintaining the Parisian setting, Denby and Welles none the less make all the characters unmistakably Mid-Western:
Fadinard is Freddy, Nonancourt his father-in-law to be is Mugglethorpe, Beauperthuis, the husband of the woman whose hat is eaten becomes Entwhistle, Trouillebert is called Little Berkowitz, ‘better known as Gumshoe Gus, of the pantry school’, and so on. The incongruity of these people apparently perfectly at ease as their carriages (or rather cars, since the piece had been updated to the Edwardian
era) whizz past the Eiffel Tower only adds to the general barminess of the action. The text has been thoroughly Americanised:
DAISY
(the maid): ‘What’s the bride like?’
JOSEPH
(the valet): ‘Oh … countrified … but plenty mazooma.’ Characters are given to Will Rogerisms like ‘What in Sam Hills is the matter with her?’ and ‘Creeping Jesus!’ (which got them into hot water with the censors). Sometimes
the script becomes positively surreal, as when the guests for the party are announced:

Dowager Lady Sucker

Duchess O’Grady

A large piece of pastrami

A simple tick from Siam

The three little pigs

The teeth of Gloria Swanson

This text, full of corny jokes, dadaist riffs and schoolboy double entendres (the second verse of Mugglethorpe’s song about his rubber plant went
‘And when of an evening your mother/Unbuttoned her blouse and began/She fed one and I fed the other/With the aid of my watering can’) was simply the pretext for a non-stop demonstration of physical theatre of a kind that can rarely have been attempted
before or since. Only the resources of the Federal Theatre could have made it possible, and only someone given an absolute free rein could have
carried it to the extremes to which Welles took it. His production was, in effect, an anti-production: everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, not for the characters – for the show. Labiche’s universe of treacherous conventions and devastating coincidence was replaced by treacherous scenery and terrifying mise-en-scène: collapsing proscenium arches, collapsing chandeliers (fifty years before
Andrew Lloyd Webber attempted the same thing), and, particularly hair-raising, collapsing actors, occasionally hurtling to what seemed to be their deaths. Where Labiche’s characters are trapped in the remorselessness of the plot, Welles’s actors are overwhelmed by the physical production.

Welles was at his most jovially demonic in rehearsal, possessed by a spirit of almost unstoppable invention,
regardless of life or limb. As well as the ex-vaudevillians and broken-down tragedians, he had surrounded himself with friends and contemporaries – Joe Cotten, Arlene Francis, Paula Laurence, Chubby Sherman – and with them any trace of inhibition he may once have had disappeared. Like a huge child, he romped gloriously through rehearsals, cheered on by the company. Welles’s ability to laugh
at himself, at life, at almost anything at all – never deserted him; any of his collaborators or friends, before listing the torrents of rage or the storms of inspiration, will first cite laughter as the predominant memory of time spent with him – laughter which was often quite silly, and which could leave him (and you) helpless, with tears streaming down your faces. But there was hard, disciplined
work, too. For things to appear to be going wrong, it was essential that they went absolutely right, and this required drilling, not only of the technical crew, but of the actors. ‘He fed them every line, every inflection. It was like Reinhardt mouthing Schiller,’
⁶
said Edwin Denby.

Welles was very sweet with the older actors, the ex-vaudevillians, the broken-down tragedians, the one-time
showgirls. People who had been subjected to his whirlwind ways were astonished at the gentleness of his dealings with this senior citizenry of the theatre. For the younger actors, he delighted to give them ever more amusing and audacious business. ‘Everyone,’ said Paula Laurence, ‘had their own aria.’
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‘Can you faint backwards?’ he asked her one day. ‘I said of course – so I did. I’d never done
anything like it in my life before – but I just went straight back, and I was six inches from the floor before Joe Cotten caught me.’ The prop-maker and puppeteer Bill Baird had dropped by to deliver part of the eponymous horse just as
Welles was trying to get Hiram Sherman to fall into the orchestra pit. ‘Hiram said he wouldn’t do it. So I went, “Whoop!” like that, and did a flop and landed on
my back in the orchestra pit. Everybody applauded and Orson said, “Mr Baird, you’re hired.” I wasn’t on the Project. I didn’t get paid. I was just a stage-struck kid.’
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There was only the mildest tension between the relief artists and – slightly more of them than the statutory 10 per cent – the non-relief players, those who had separate incomes. These included Joe Cotten and Arlene Francis.
Francis, in her own words then ‘Queen of radio soap operas’, arrived for rehearsals one day wearing a suit with orchids; one of the reliefers wisecracked: ‘WPA orchids, I suppose.’ Despite the occasional touch of persiflage, Welles had bound his disparate company into a whole. The only sign of resistance came from Virginia Welles, who one day dared to say: ‘I don’t think this is right.’ ‘But I do,’
replied Orson, whereupon she threw a milk-shake at him. He would accept any suggestion from anyone; but to have a suggestion of his own refused (particularly by his own wife) was unacceptable, smacked of criticism. That was intolerable to him. Of course, Virginia’s outburst may not have been unconnected with the nights without number he spent away from their duplex, nights when he preferred to
adapt plays, or rehearse, or carouse or simply disport himself elsewhere. And maybe she was struck from time to time by the irony of being cast as Myrtle, the hapless would-be bride of Freddy, humiliatingly condemned to trail round after her man, uncomprehending, as he pursues she knows not what.

The only other serious check on Welles’s high spirits was Houseman. There is a photograph of the
two of them standing together in the stalls of the Maxine Elliott: the black rage on Welles’s face is only matched for intensity by the look of miserable concentration on Houseman’s, all conversation having clearly come to a complete standstill. It was Houseman’s unhappy lot to point out the realities of the situation to Welles – any situation. He may have done so with more or less tact, but whatever
he said would have enraged Welles who was only interested in possibilities, not in limitations. Houseman’s job, in Welles’s view – his function in Welles’s life – was to make things happen, not to prevent them from happening. Even a suggestion to the effect that he was going to be denied something was enough to awaken oceanic feelings of emptiness and impotence; the immediate outcome of which
was rage. The tragic situation that Houseman had constructed for himself was that he had allied his destiny to someone who profoundly resented the only gift he could
offer: his sense of what was practical. Houseman wanted something: he wanted to be a part of Welles’s work. This was intolerable to Welles. He gladly accepted the input of his collaborators; it was absorbed and integrated into the
concept. But Houseman wanted partnership; shared credit. Welles’s sense of his own worth was insufficient to share any credit. He needed his achievement to be endorsed unequivocally; like Walt Whitman, his cry was ‘O if I am to have so much, let me have more!’