Orson Welles, Vol I (75 page)

Then, unable to restrain himself any longer, the announcer finally comes off the fence about Welles in a thrilling peroration. ‘Because of all his gifts, his genius at playwriting, his ambition, his dynamic direction, his amazing character acting, he has been selected by Campbell’s as the ideal man to conduct
The Campbell Playhouse
. And so tonight Orson Welles makes his bow as the outstanding
programme director of the air, and I have the very great pleasure of presenting him now. Mr Orson Welles.’ Welles, quite unabashed by the preceding hosannas, briskly takes the microphone, telling us that it’s a great big chance for him and a great big challenge, pledging himself to tell good stories ‘from everywhere, from the stage, from moving pictures and from literature … and to try to tell
’em as well as I know how,’ finally staking a claim to quality which was, perhaps, a message to his sponsors as much as it was
to his audience. ‘You know the makers of Campbell Soup don’t believe in all this talk about the radio audience having the average mentality of an eight-year-old child. I can only hope that what I do with
The Campbell Playhouse
will prove how much they mean it and how right
they are.’ He reiterates his familiar commitment to radio radiophonic as opposed to radio theatrical. ‘We have no curtain real or imaginary and as you see, no audience. There’s the only illusion I’d like to create; the illusion of a story.’

So far, so Mercury. Then the announcer brings up one of the innovations. ‘But the star too is important, Mr Welles is that not so?’ The massive enhancement
of the budget had enabled Welles to employ the biggest names in Hollywood and on Broadway; his usual team continued to work for him, but no longer in leading roles. Welles eagerly agrees about the importance of the stars: ‘Yes, indeed. I’d like to say how very fortunate I am in having with me tonight the loveliness and the magic gift of Miss Margaret Sullavan.’ This is a new tone, quite different
from his Mercury manner: what would later become familiar as the manner of the chat show, but which in 1938 was the unmistakable tone of the sponsored programme. It is about selling, about puffing. The puff here extends to the book being adapted. ‘It’s this year’s contender for the five-foot shelf, your best bet for anything from a weekend to a desert island and it’s a book you should read, the
ideal Xmas gift to yourself.’ Then the double puff: of self and author. ‘Miss Du Maurier has flattered me with her confidence in permitting
The Campbell Playhouse
the great privilege of making for radio the first dramatisation of her book.’ She will be listening to the programme; at the end they will talk ‘by special shortwave communication from London’. He signs off (or rather signs on; the programme
proper hasn’t started yet) ‘so ladies and gentlemen and Miss Du Maurier,
The Campbell Playhouse
is Obediently Yours’ – the famous tag has a slightly ironic feel; the multiple genius to whom we have just been so comprehensively introduced makes an unlikely servant.

We are suddenly plunged into
Rebecca
by means of Bernard Herrmann’s luscious waltz-laden score, full of sudden intensities created
by the Lohengrin instrumentation of trumpet and tremolo strings. Hardly have we begun, though, than we are rudely interrupted. ‘Here’s an important message from a man who keeps one eye on the dining table and another on the pantry …’ There follows an apostrophe to chicken and the soup derived from it by Campbell’s. ‘Why not plan to have Campbell’s glorious chicken soup tomorrow?’ Innovation number
two. The commercial breaks
always occur at cliff-hanging moments, a curiously dislocating effect; they are elaborate and emotional, including an extraordinary tribute from the announcer to ‘the good hardworking honest men’ who make Campbell’s Soup. ‘I know the Campbell kitchen, the Campbell soup, the Campbell men: their success is due to the human side of this business, its policy.’ No doubt,
accustomed to sponsored broadcasts of which this was quite typical, listeners’ ears simply glazed over during these interludes, but the layers of fiction involved in the broadcast are somewhat bewildering: palpably unreal tributes to soup by paid announcers are seamlessly interwoven with Mrs Danvers’s tributes to her dead mistress, overlapping with overwrought accounts of Welles’s career and fevered
sales pitches for the novel and forthcoming film.

At the end of the adaptation (which barely accounts for two-thirds of the broadcast) Welles, still quite recognisably Maxim de Winter, and Margaret Sullavan, as husky and breathless as she was as the second Mrs de Winter, have a chat. ‘Two things I like are good stories and good soup,’ says Miss Sullavan, ‘and when I tell you my idea of a great
soup is Campbell’s chicken soup, that, Mr Welles, is no story.’ A curiously coy exchange follows. ‘Until we met for rehearsals,’ says Welles, ‘I’ve never – to put it bluntly – had the pleasure of your acquaintance, and now in six and a half minutes, you’ll have gone out of my life. The point is – the point is – I’m the director of a theatre, the … the …’ Sullavan: ‘The … Mercury Theatre?’ Welles:
‘The Mercury Theatre, thank you. I’m talking to you as a theatre director. What are you doing next year? I’ll bring you a script tomorrow. Forgive me, ladies and gentlemen, for trying to date up one of the nation’s most gifted and attractive young actresses. I’m sure you’ll sympathise and I hope Miss Sullavan understands.’

Finally, incongruously after all this smooching, comes the conversation
with the author, her fastidious vowels singing out loud and clear across the Atlantic, her consonants clipped: ‘Thenk you for an ebsolutely splendid broadcast.’ She gives Sullavan instructions on how to visit the ‘real Manderley’; there is some pleasant banter about the heroine’s name, which she playfully cuts short. Welles signs off, Obediently Ours.

For Welles on the air, omnipresence was
no innovation. The Welles of
The Campbell Playhouse
however was a significantly different person to the Welles of the Theatre of the Air: master of ceremonies, celebrity, leading actor, salesman, he had become appreciably more a product of the image makers. Sincerity and
intellectual urgency are replaced by flannel and a sort of confidential charm. The leader of the avant-garde, the dashing and
daring adventurer has become a cosier, less challenging figure, authoritative but unthreatening.

He has, above all, gone commercial, the selling of the sponsor’s product and his own indistinguishable from one another; both indistinguishable from the selling of himself. The tone in which he extols the beauty of radio as a medium is the same as the one in which he lauds the makers of Campbell’s
Soup. It is one more stage in the abolition of the boundaries between Welles’s persona and his work, and represented a great increase in his public prominence; the process that Houseman described shortly afterwards, not without bitterness, as ‘the situation of Orson becoming a great national figure (a figure only less frequently and vastly projected into the news and the National Consciousness
than Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler and maybe N. Chamberlain). This has happened in almost exactly inverse proportion to the success of his artistic and professional endeavours.’
²
He overstates; but there was increasingly in Welles’s work a confusion as to whether he was selling it or doing it.

As for
Rebecca
, insofar as one can disentangle it from the surrounding puff and pitch, all
of the skills developed for the Mercury Theatre of the Air are as ingeniously deployed as before (with one or two quite startlingly effective new sound effects), Herrmann’s score is if anything more powerful and imaginative (he later used large sections of it for the film
Jane Eyre
), and the performances of the staple radio repertory are admirable. Of the guests, Mildred Natwick is disappointingly
mild as Mrs Danvers (despite the heart-freezing leitmotiv Herrmann wrote for her); Margaret Sullavan is fresh and true. Welles himself is a gruff and generalised de Winter; powerful, but not haunted. Though not vintage, the programme thrilled its new audience – one of whom was David O. Selznick; describing the show as ‘one of the greatest successes the radio has ever known’ he sent a transcript
of the broadcast to Alfred Hitchcock, with whom he was then struggling over the screenplay for the forthcoming movie. ‘A clever showman,’ he wrote to a perhaps less than enthralled Hitchcock, ‘Welles didn’t waste time and effort creating anything new but simply gave them the original. I hope we will be equally astute. If we do in motion pictures as faithful a job as Welles did on the radio, we
are likely to have the same success the book had and the same success that Welles had.’ At a stroke,
The Campbell Playhouse
had established
itself; Welles was now reaching more people than he ever had, and many of those people were highly influential.

Over the two years of the programme’s run, a galaxy of stars appeared: Beatrice Lillie, Katharine Hepburn, Burgess Meredith, Helen Hayes in
the first couple of months alone. The choice of works was more downmarket, less idiosyncratic, than those of the Mercury of the Air, often featuring bestsellers of the previous decade; though from time to time, Welles remade successes from the Mercury seasons. Some of the zip seemed to have gone out of it. ‘The thing became a constant squabble with the soup-maker – a compromise between
Saturday
Evening Post
material and material not necessarily highbrow but of some human and aesthetic interest,’ wrote Houseman. ‘Alas an end of our fun.’

The constant squabble grew in intensity over the two years; shortly after launching the new programme, however, Welles and Houseman became involved in a new theatrical venture compared to which a month in the Gulag Archipelago would have seemed fun.
This was the much announced, much postponed Wars of the Roses cycle
Five Kings
, the one remaining Mercury project still to be honoured. In the heady days of May 1938, at the end of their triumphant first season, Houseman had entered into partnership with the Theatre Guild, to co-produce the vast – and as yet unwritten – adaptation of the two parts of
Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI
(all three parts),
and
Richard III
. The Guild, for nearly twenty years the dominant organisation in the American theatre, was brilliantly administered and run, but currently uninspired; much of its vigour had evaporated when the two factions that became the Group Theatre and the Playwrights’ Company had broken away. The Mercury seemed irresistibly vital, and apparently infallibly successful. ‘One of our board members,
in an objective mood, analysed our situation,’ wrote Lawrence Langner in his sly, witty memoir,
The Magic Curtain
, ‘and decided that what we needed was more contact with “youth”.’

They were willing to pay for their rejuvenation: Houseman struck a brilliant deal by which the Mercury contributed only $10,000 (five in cash, five in services) to the total budget of $40,000, while availing itself
of the Guild’s organisation and (most attractive of all) its built-in subscription audience in several major cities (Boston, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia) to which they would tour before opening in New York. For Houseman, there was also a pleasing personal dimension to the arrangement; only four years before, Langner and his partner had sacked him as director
of Maxwell Anderson’s
Valley
Forge
. The boot was on the other foot – for the moment, at any rate. It seemed at the time another coup for the Mercury, a clever liaison with an older and maturer partner, and a stunningly audacious idea in itself. The plan was to stage the Falstaff-dominated first half (
Two and a Half Kings?
) separately, only rehearsing the second half, with Welles as Richard III, once that was successfully
running. Finally the two evenings would play alternately; both would be given in one day on Wednesdays and Saturdays. ‘The performance of Shakespeare’s historical plays in batches has become a commonplace of festival showmanship,’
³
wrote Houseman. ‘In 1939 it was a bold and original notion.’

The idea clearly had its roots in his Todd School
Richard III
adaptation. It was, in Welles’s mind,
a means of creating a recognisable profile for a number of plays which (with the exception of
Richard
, one of Barrymore’s great triumphs) had rarely been seen in America. Announcing the production at a luncheon to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday, Welles said: ‘Some of the plays of Shakespeare have been lost to the living theatre. My new production is an effort to return these to theatre audiences.
I hope our performance will make these more lucid.’
⁴
He continued in his neo-Spenglerian vein: ‘so much of everything we seek in art is to be found in the great Shakespeare heritage which will be existing in the world when everything we believe in has ceased to exist.’ This was his credo: great art, above all the plays of Shakespeare, was the one talisman against the welling evil all around and
within us. There were, of course, other, simpler motives. Looking back only a year later, Houseman was inclined to give these prominence. ‘I allowed Orson to use the theatre not only as an instrument of personal aggrandisement but as a tilting ground for a particular, senseless and idle competition with an uninteresting and essentially unimportant theatrical competitor by the name of Maurice Evans,’
⁵
he wrote to Virgil Thomson. ‘
Five Kings
was never a pure aesthetic conception – it was conditioned in its conception and its execution by a desire to go Evans one better in Shakespearean production.’

Ambition and rivalry have powerfully fuelled many a great performance and production; purity of motive is no prerequisite for great art. Houseman is untypically prim here; though there is no question
that Welles’s feelings about Evans were somewhat unhinged. Thirty years later, he was still in a lather about him. ‘Almost any bum can get a crack at Boris Godunov or Lear,’
⁶
he told Peter Bogdanovich. ‘Sometimes the bums even make it with the public. Look at Maurice Evans.’ ‘Bad?’ enquires Bogdanovich.
‘Worse!’ Welles roars back. ‘He was poor.’ The distinction is a good one. In every generation,
there are a number of actors whose success mystifies their fellow players. For reasons that are never entirely clear the press and the public appear to elect to the summit of the profession actors of no discernible physical, vocal, intellectual or sexual distinction. They are constantly cast in leading roles, and are invariably well reviewed in them. If there are prizes to be won, they will win
them; when they do, they are held up as an example to all: the good little boys and girls of the business. It would appear that Maurice Evans was one of these: teachers’ pet for a whole generation of American reviewers. He has left almost no trace behind him, apart from his glowing encomia in the pages of the American press. People who saw his performances can remember nothing about them, though,
equally, they can find nothing on which to fault him. He was intelligent, polished, well spoken, pleasant enough to look at, with the small features of a nicely groomed toy dog, an impeccable professional down to his manicured finger-nails.