Orson Welles, Vol I (62 page)

For the revival,
Welles had handed the show over to Blitzstein who formalised and structured what had happened that night. The result was neither as spontaneous – how could it be? – or as passionate as before. Alistair Cooke (an enthusiast of the piece) described the evening with masterly precision in an NBC broadcast: ‘I only wish that the present production did not bear the marks of its early martyrdom. In the
beginning they put this on in a bleak way out of desperation. There is just a suggestion that now it goes on that way out of religious zeal … people who can overlook the slight strain
of evangelism will recognise that in
The Cradle Will Rock
there is the constant echo of a clarion call, not only to American writing, but to American life.’
⁴

Mary McCarthy,
not
a friendly witness, had already,
in no uncertain terms, taken against Blitzstein himself: ‘His acrid personality is, in fact, the whole show. He, as insolent and sardonic entrepreneur, sits downstage centre at the piano; the actors behind him are his marionettes. The timing and precision of the cast’s performances have the cold, military precision of the dance routines of the Radio City Rockettes.
The Cradle Will Rock
is a triumph
of theatrical goose-stepping. The drama has become de-humanised; it has been made into a marvelous mechanical monster which begins to operate with great efficiency whenever Mr Blitzstein pulls the switch.’
⁵
None the less, the show, and its presence on Broadway, further confirmed the image of the Mercury as the most dynamic outfit in town.

Rehearsals for
Shoemaker’s Holiday
had started shortly
after the opening of
Julius Caesar
. Welles lost interest in playing Brutus very early on. Virgil Thomson reports a telling incident during the early part of the run: seeking to persuade Welles to let him, rather than Blitzstein, write the music for the projected production of
The Duchess of Malfi
, he took Welles and Virginia to supper at Sardi’s before the show for ‘a blow-out’. Welles ate oysters
and champagne, red meat and Burgundy, dessert and brandy, before he pulled himself into his canvas corset for playing Brutus. ‘It’s lucky I’m playing tragedy tonight, which needs no timing. Comedy would be difficult.’
⁶
He had discovered that there were two points during the show when he had just enough time to go to Longchamps Diner down the alley behind the theatre and have a substantial snack,
generally a triple-decker steak sandwich washed down with bourbon. The assistant stage managers Bill Alland and Richard Wilson were deputed to ensure that he returned on time, which he quite often did, arriving in the wings panting and sweating, somewhat incongruously for the noble figure he was trying to portray. Not surprisingly, his performance began to lose such vitality as it had originally
had, to the point where one night someone in the audience had called out ‘Louder!’ Often he would lose his way during the longer speeches. He claimed humorously to have lost belief in the production after Mrs Patrick Campbell had come backstage and asked him ‘Why do you have everybody dressed up like chauffeurs?’
⁷
‘And it’s true!’ Welles told Peter Bogdanovich. ‘It spoiled it for me. Ever since
then, it looked like a whole convention of Rolls-Royces.’

There were the usual number of misfortunes during the run: the occasional unscheduled appearances onstage of people having wandered in from the alley; the accidental unleashing of the fire-sprinklers by a bored Arthur Anderson, fiddling with them backstage. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ said Welles, ‘there seems to be water on the stage.’
Anderson was fined $50, plus 50c a show for a permanent bodyguard. At one performance, possibly a little the worse for wear, Welles became overexcited during the assassination sequence and plunged the dagger that had so gratifyingly stuck in the floor deep into the flesh of Joseph Holland, playing Caesar. The actor, a professional to his fingertips, lay motionless while blood poured from his veins,
crawling off at a convenient blackout and only then collapsing. He was in hospital for some months. All this was part of the fun (except perhaps for Holland). The mood in the company was one of triumphant exhilaration. Even rival groups admired the work. Clurman of the Group Theatre reluctantly admitted that ‘
Caesar
had a dash of originality, a boyish zip’ and Sandy Meisner, bumping into Norman
Lloyd, told him: ‘I saw the production – very clever.’ Lloyd then ‘knew we were good. It felt great.’ The show was an enormous hit, the talk, not only of the town, but of the world. Its fame (more particularly that of its director) had even reached England, courtesy of the globe-trotting C.B. Cochran who tried to persuade the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford to take the production: ‘It
is the best thing I have seen for a long time,’
The Daily Telegraph
reported. ‘There is no fake about it. It is real theatre. Mr Welles starts where Reinhardt left off.’ He wanted to play the production at the Albert Hall. ‘I say this in all seriousness. Mr Welles seems to me to be the white hope of the English-speaking world.’
⁸
Christmas of 1937 found him at one of the peaks of his young life,
emotionally as well as professionally; his card that year reveals that Virginia was pregnant. He had it all: fame, money, respect, wife, incipient fatherhood – and mistresses, two of them, in fact, both ballerinas, to whom his impassioned attentions did not cease during (and indeed after) his wife’s pregnancy. It seems that it was important for his self-respect to be attached to lithe, glamorous
beauty; his wife no longer fell into that category.

He also had – equally necessary for him – a new production,
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
, for which rehearsals were now well in hand. The cast were, to put it mildly, working at full stretch: most of them (including of course Welles) were putting in regular appearances on radio, doing eight performances a week of
Caesar
, and then – starting at
ten thirty at night and often working through till three
or four in the morning – rehearsing
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
. The core company of
Caesar
was supplemented by some newcomers; a couple departed (the two women, most notably). After the success of the first production, the flood of applications from actors had become a tidal wave. Chubby Sherman (who was increasingly becoming a crucial Mercurian),
already cast as the clown, Firk, was appointed casting director. Welles was not to appear in the play; in the part that he would normally have considered his (Simon Eyre, the shoemaker who becomes Lord Mayor of London) he and Chubby cast Whitford Kane, Chubby’s lover. At fifty-seven, he was a very different person from the elderly gents who had graced certain of Welles’s productions; though
not exactly a star, he was a powerful leading man, a famous Volpone, Falstaff, Bottom and held by some to be a definitive Captain Boyle in
Juno and the Paycock
.

Another newcomer trailing glory was Vincent Price, only twenty-six, but with highly successful runs in the West End and on Broadway in
Victoria Regina
, in which he had created the role of Prince Albert opposite Helen Hayes. A student
of art history who had drifted into the theatre, he had gone instantly almost to the very top of the tree. He knew, however, after his subsequent Broadway run in
The Lady Has a Heart
(for which he received, in Sam Leiter’s words, ‘several stinging notices for comically ponderously playing’) that he needed experience, a thorough grounding in his craft. Seeing
Julius Caesar
convinced him that the
Mercury was the place to get it: the only place. In order to do so, he was prepared to take a drop in salary from $1,000 on Broadway to $125 at the Mercury, signing a seven-play contract. ‘We were all very serious actors, desperately looking for our identification with the classics.’
⁹
Though an enthusiastic Anglophile and connoisseur of English acting (he had seen John Gielgud’s
Hamlet
twelve
times) he was, like so many of his contemporaries, frustrated that ‘90 per cent of the American classical theatre was English actors who were very jealous of American actors invading the American theatre’. The Mercury seemed a way of creating an independent and vital American classical theatre that owed little to the British example.

In
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
, Price was cast as the predatory
Master Hammond; his then wife, Edith Barrett, was Rose. She was one of the prodigiously high number of actresses who applied for the usual miserably small number of female parts. Both she and Ruth Ford (Jane) had begged to be cast against type, and so they were. The amply constructed Marian Warring-Manley, on the other hand, was cast triumphantly in character as Simon Eyre’s forthright
wife, Margery
(‘but let that pass’). Coulouris was the King, Joe Cotten a young gentleman, Norman Lloyd and Elliott Reid Firk’s fellow apprentices. There were rich pickings for everyone, despite Welles’s trimming of the text to a running time of just over an hour. This is astonishingly bold; slightly less than half of the text is left intact. Perhaps even more astonishing is the decision to do the play at
all. Virtually unknown on the American stage, even in England only occasionally played in student productions at Oxford or Cambridge, it was, Welles claimed, part of his reading while he was the guest of the Glaoui in the Atlas mountains. In an interview whose title is itself like an undiscovered play by Dekker –
Everything Old Was Once New
– he told the interviewer, Helen Ormsbee, that besides
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
, he had read
The Roaring Girl
and
If This Be Not a Good Play, The Evil Is in It
. ‘How do you like that for a title?’
¹⁰
Then there were
The Humorous Lieutenant
, Jonson’s
Bartholomew Fair
, and Heywood’s
A Woman Killed with Kindness
and
If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody
. He seems to be naming the plays simply because he likes the titles.

‘
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
is a
glimpse,’ he continues, ‘of the kind of domestic drama that was popular at the very time Shakespeare was writing.’ Welles was no archaeologist of the drama, however; it was the curiously modern feeling of these old plays that fascinated him. ‘Of course, plays of the present are first in importance to audiences of the present. That is always so. But once you dip into the past there is no drama that
can equal the Elizabethan for universal appeal, humanity and richness.’ Dekker’s play, first performed on the first day of the seventeenth century, brimful of uncontrollable life, interweaving the classes, with a plot loosely revolving around the advancement of Simon Eyre, the legendary Lord Mayor of London, is so human, so rich and so universally appealing, that it can be taken in many different
ways. Rosamond Gilder found a parallel in modern life: ‘Simon Eyre is the prototype of all the lads who make good; the industrious apprentice who becomes Lord Mayor of London or President of the United States; the poor boy who earns a fortune but never forgets his friends;’ Eleanor Flexner, writing in
New Masses
found quite another: ‘The play is laden with sentiments for the times: a passionate
democracy of the spirit, a hatred of wars, which tear families asunder, reverence for the men who toil with their hands, and an abhorrence for the fetishes of wealth and position.’
¹¹
Both are right; both are wrong. Welles, having read the report by his literary manager, Alexander Campbell, initially thought to emphasise the class conflict (which is plentifully
present); instead, Andrea Nouryeh
reports him as choosing to celebrate ‘democracy, brotherhood between the classes, and the rising power of the bourgeoisie’. This is without question the spirit of the play, even if the letter can be variously interpreted. In practice, what he made of it was something altogether different: a non-stop riot of gags.

His adaptation took as its spine, not the glorious, rambunctious Eyre and his
rise to office, nor the machinations of the aristocrats, but rather the antics of Firk, Eyre’s apprentice. Welles had long sought a vehicle for Chubby Sherman’s comic genius, from as far back as the first planning sessions for Project 891; this, he knew, was it. Not only did he prune out large sections of text, considered either obscure or tedious, but he reshaped the dialogue to increase its comic
possibilities. These devolved to a great extent on double entendres sometimes present in the original, sometimes not. A characteristic sequence is taken from the scene in which young Roland Lacey, in love with Eyre’s daughter, disguises himself as a Dutch cobbler, and is taken on as an apprentice. The incumbent apprentices quiz him. In Dekker’s text, Firk does all the questioning, as follows:

FIRK

And hark you, skomaker, have you all your tools – a good rubbing-pin, a good stopper, a good dresser, your four sorts of awls, and your two balls of wax, your paring knife, your hand- and thumb-leathers, and good St Hughes’ bones to smooth up your work?

Welles distributes the questions, and the laughs, among the apprentices:

HODGE

Hark you skawmakers, have you all your
tools?

FIRK

A good rubbin pin, a good stopper, your four sorts of awls, and your two balls

LACY

Yaw, yaw

FIRK

Of wax

On this showing, Dekker and Welles might have been the script writers that the late Benny Hill was waiting for. Sherman noted
that ‘All the groupings and firkings were like children’s
¹²
horseplay. We were children saying dirty words.’ A great deal was
made of the homonyms: firk/fuck and, stretching it a bit, firk/fart; firk is, it must be admitted, a rather Clouseauesque fuck. All this is not by any means alien to the Elizabethan mind, though it was only a fraction of it, and only a fraction of Dekker’s play.

Rehearsals were, even more than usual with Welles, a riot, interspersed with strict drilling. Lehman Engel describes his method.
‘He rehearsed with military discipline. He might laugh at something, then have an actor do a piece of business that he’d devised ten times until the actor knew it mechanically.’
¹³
Arthur Anderson recalled one such moment: ‘One day accidentally Hiram ran into the curtain – he and Orson built a gag out of it. He always ran into the curtain. At the end of the show, he’s about to make a speech; the
curtain falls on him.’
¹⁴
Engel never heard Welles explaining a characterisation: ‘he moulded you. Orson only knew his own way and that was “Now everybody keep quiet and I’ll tell you what to do.” That was his only way of working. He simply didn’t know any other … The style of his
Shoemaker’s Holiday
depended on the precise machine-like interplay of movement, music, curtains and light. It was the
director’s expression. The actors were his puppets … usually he demonstrated movements of hand and feet in precise detail, speaking the lines in precise time relationship to them. Then he would have the actors imitate him.’
¹⁵
The results were brilliantly funny and effective, delighting most of the actors, but not, curiously enough, the comic star of the production, Chubby Sherman. ‘Welles was
a choreographer. You’d turn here and go around there. This is where he and I fall out. I don’t believe you can choreograph a comic routine and make it comic in terms of movement alone – especially if there is nothing funny about it to begin with. We had a lot of “You go around in back of Norman. Norman goes back of you.” Being spaced around. Having to hold a position endlessly. You get cramps that
way, not laughs.’
¹⁶