Orson Welles, Vol I (79 page)

His passion for the show was intense and stayed with him, manifesting itself first in a stage show some twenty years later, then in a movie, both called
Chimes at Midnight
, and both (as the change of title suggests) concentrating more on the figure of Falstaff than
on the political history in which he
is a minor player. What was it about Falstaff that drew Welles to him? Not what attracted most actors of his period. The description of Maurice Evans’s approach is fairly typical of most actors’ conception of the character at the time: an aristocratic rogue, a lordly buffoon, over-fed, over-sexed, over the top – a comic figure, above all. Schloss, in his Philadelphia review, gave the standard line:
Falstaff, to be Falstaff, needed ‘a belch, a wink, and a soupçon of ham’.

Welles explicitly dissociated himself from that view: in an interview in the
Christian Science Monitor
before the Boston opening he said ‘I will play him as a tragic figure. I hope, of course, he will be funny to the audience, just as he was funny to those around him. But his humor and wit were aroused merely by the
fact that he wanted to please the prince. Falstaff, however, had the potential of greatness in him.’
³³
And the notices again and again comment on the pathos which he brings to the role. Thirty years later, he told Peter Bogdanovich, speaking of
Chimes at Midnight
, ‘the closer I thought I was getting to Falstaff, the less funny he seemed to me. When I’d played him before, in the theatre, he seemed
more witty than comical. And in bringing him to the screen, I found him only occasionally, and then only
deliberately
, a clown.’
³⁴
Certainly, no one found him very funny in
Five Kings
– and Welles liked to be funny, as the joshing about on his radio programmes testifies. Though scarcely endowed with natural comic flair, he could certainly have made his Falstaff funny: there is every opportunity
in the text. But he chose not to. Usually, with Welles, it doesn’t do to go too deeply into his performances; he brings his personality to them, adding superficial touches of colour: a nose here, an accent there, neither of which generally adhere too well. But Falstaff seems to have engaged him deeply, and the quality in the character that he instinctively relates to is his sadness.

Without
delving too deeply into that inexhaustible character’s lineage and symbolism, from Silenus and Ganesha, through Bes of Egypt and Ilya of the Slavs to the Japanese Ondeko-Za, nor following Auden’s suggestion that he is both Lord of Misrule and ‘comic symbol for the supernatural order of Charity’,
³⁵
it is possible to say a couple of simple things about him: he is a drunkard, a trickster, a braggart,
a womaniser, a gentleman and a charmer – and he is rejected by the person he loves most. It takes no trained psychologist to recognise the figure of Richard Head Welles in this description. There is a striking quotation from Niccolo Tucci quoted by Auden in his Falstaff essay, ‘The Prince’s Dog’, which is full of resonance for Welles and his father: ‘the death song of the drunkard
– it may go
on for thirty years – goes more or less like this. “I was born a god, with the whole world in reach of my hands, lie now defeated in the gutter. Come and listen: hear what the world has done to me” … he may be unable to distinguish a person from a chair, but never an unprofitable he from a profitable one. How could he see himself as a very insignificant entity in a huge world of others, when he sees
nothing but himself spread over the whole universe.’
³⁶
Equally, it takes no great leap of imagination to understand why Welles engaged so intensely with the scene in which Falstaff is rejected by his surrogate son and former drinking companion: ‘I know thee not, old man.’

Welles must have been aware, too, that he himself was going, far faster and more furiously, down the same path that had
ended in his father’s death at the age of fifty-five. Auden, in his essay, continues: ‘the drunkard is unlovely to look at, intolerable to listen to, and his self-pity is contemptible. Nevertheless, as not merely a worldly failure but also a wilful failure, he is a disturbing image for the sober citizen. His refusal to accept the realities of this world, babyish as it may be, compels us to take another
look at this world and reflect upon our motives for accepting it. The drunkard’s suffering may be self-inflicted, but it is real suffering and reminds us of all the suffering in this world which we prefer not to think about because, from the moment we accept this world, we acquired our share of responsibility for everything that happens in it.’
³⁷
Welles was all too acutely aware of suffering in
the world; he did ‘prefer not to think about it’. Small wonder that he saw the character as tragic. Despite applying a mountain of padding made for him by the Firestone Rubber and Latex Company to his body and more mountains of make-up to his face, mere is every reason to believe that this Falstaff and both the subsequent ones (in Belfast in 1960 and in Spain, on film, in 1965) are among the most
personal performances he ever gave. In 1939, everything in the reviews suggests that he had not found how to integrate what he felt about the character with the text itself, his own or that of the play. When he started shaping the text entirely round Falstaff, his vision of the character began to fall into place.

But it was a long way from 1939 to 1965. Houseman was somehow prevailed upon
to announce, somewhat querulously, that
as always intended
the show would definitely be revived in the fall, with some cast changes. The reporter was unable to contain his scepticism. ‘Still, Welles would not accept defeat,’
³⁸
wrote Houseman. ‘The scenery – all seventeen tons of it – was shipped to New York, where it was held in demurrage for several days at
great expense while Orson made his
last desperate bids for backing. Finally, he was forced to have it unloaded in a theatrical warehouse, where it lay, with the rest of the Mercury scenery, piling up storage charges for the next twenty years. As a final token of defiance, Orson announced that he was retaining his beard and would not shave it off until he had appeared as Falstaff on a New York stage.’ (This was the beard that became
notorious when he went to Hollywood.)

If Welles was kept going by his determination to get
Five Kings
to New York, Houseman had no such passion, nor any appetite to continue the turbulent partnership with Welles. ‘Fatigue, humiliation, mutual reproaches and, through it all, our growing inability to communicate except in anger – all these were having their cumulative and corrosive effect on
an association from which all affection seemed to have been drained and only self-interest (expressed at the moment by our weekly radio show) remained to bind us together.’
³⁹
Houseman, as always when he writes of Welles, is using the language of a love affair. This is not to impute homosexuality (though there is undoubtedly a complexity in that area which Houseman never explicitly acknowledges,
while never censoring the words which give it away): collaboration of this sort is intense, personal, emotional, desperate in exactly the same way and to the same degree that a sexual relationship is. In his memoir, he is able to distance himself in stylish prose; at the time he was almost incoherent with loss and rage. ‘The
Five Kings
year (since
Five Kings
pre-influenced and pre-distorted, or
post-influenced and post-distorted every single thought and action of ours that season) found us fertile, successful, happy,’ he wrote to Virgil Thomson the following year, ‘foolish, perhaps, but in love with ourselves and each other and the theatre and the public … it left us tired to the point of sickness, loaded with debts and full of hatred and distrust of each other, of our audience, of our
theatre – weary and full of fear and loathing for the whole business of producing plays in the theatre. And it left me, personally, without the excitement and, worst of all, without the faith which was, during its brief, brilliant career, the essential quality of the Mercury and before that 891 and before that
Macbeth
.’ And, he might have added, the essential element of his relationship with Welles.
He was writing to Thomson, specifically, because it was he who had given him his first taste of what he called ‘work-in-the-theatre-by-those-who-have-faith-in-each-other’. Now he began to doubt whether the youth he had plucked from Katharine Cornell’s company, for whom and with whom he had foreseen a brilliant and never-ending future, was not going seriously wrong,
running out of hand both personally
and artistically. ‘To tell the story of
Five Kings
is like trying to record the terminal stages of a complicated and fatal disease,’ he writes in
Run-Through
. ‘The name of our disease was success – accumulating success that had little to do with the quality of our work but seemed to proliferate around the person of Orson Welles with a wild, monstrous growth of its own.’ The crucial phrase is ‘of
its own’. He had planted the seed; but now things were out of his control.

The Mercury, as an idea, was now well and truly dead; as a name, it continued to front Welles’s activities for many years. The only remaining formal association between Welles and Houseman was the radio programme (which Houseman had held together for the duration of
Five Kings
) which would shortly go into its summer
recess. The repertory was distinctly lowbrow: every Friday night, after the show, Welles would abandon the inscrutable horrors of the turntable and the labyrinthine complexities of the fifteenth century, for the worlds of Dodie Smith, Philip Duffield Stong or P.C. Wren (in this last – an adaptation, of course, of
Beau Geste
– Welles played Beau to Laurence Olivier’s John). Light relief indeed.
Radio does have the tremendous advantage for an actor that it is possible in that medium to play roles that you could by no stretch of the imagination essay on stage; thus Welles played Elyot in
Private Lives
(opposite Gertrude Lawrence) and Vincent Price’s old role of Prince Albert, opposite Helen Hayes as Queen Victoria. He returned to
Les Misérables
, this time as Javert to Walter Huston’s Valjean,
and played the Stage Manager in his old friend Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
. The level of radiophonic invention was commensurately lower with the literary and imaginative level of the writing; what can you do with
Private Lives
on the radio but do it, very, very well? His input during the run of
Five Kings
was confined to his own performance, which, almost literally, he phoned in. Paul Stewart ran
the programmes very efficiently, and Houseman produced them with skill and taste. The former spark was largely missing; this proved no barrier either for the audience or for the sponsors, both of whom were highly satisfied. The programme became one of the most successful on the air. One of the few shows to stretch the medium a little had been the adaptation of William Archer’s
The Green Goddess
, with Welles in the role written for George Arliss, a preposterous and rather offensive melodrama which gave the author, who had spent his life fighting the genre of which it is a particularly abject example, an enormous financial success at the end of his career. Its aeroplanes and mountainside
temples, the crucial telegraphic equipment, bands of mysteriously appearing soldiers all made for enjoyable
radio hokum. When
Five Kings
finally collapsed, Welles impulsively decided to take the play on the road in the most peculiar circumstances.

What exactly it was that made him think
The Green Goddess
suitable for performance on stage as part of a vaudeville act is hard to fathom, nor what drew him, a good liberal, to the part of that Nietzschean nabob, the Rajah of Rukh, with his wicked designs
on the body of the hapless white woman stranded in the mountains and the lives of any other whites who might happen to be kicking around. He did, it is true, have a weakness throughout his career for epigrammatic villains, smoothly wicked men whose perfect manners conceal an abyss of wickedness, in which case the Rajah must have suited him to the ground: ‘I don’t know if I care very much for the
millions that you speak of. Life is a weed that grows as fast as death mows it down.’
⁴⁰
Nor did his love of melodrama ever desert him.
The Green Goddess
, however, a pastiche written in 1920, is really scraping the bottom of the barrel in both departments. This, none the less, is what he chose to do next: a tour of the RKO Orpheum Vaudeville Circuit with Archer’s absurd farrago reduced to twenty
minutes, of which five minutes – continuing the experiment he was forced to abandon in
Too Much Johnson
– was on film. This footage (assembled from stock on film from libraries) depicted the aeroplane crash with which the play begins; it has disappeared. Four times a day, with a full orchestra underscoring the show, he and a few remaining Mercurians slogged through selected purple passages: ‘I
knew it! You are playing with me! But the confiding barbarian is not so simple as you imagine. No woman has ever tried to fool me that has not repented it. You think, when you have to pay up, you will fob me off with your dead body. Let me tell you, I have no use for you dead – I want you with all the blood in your veins, with all the pride in that damned sly brain of yours. I want to make my plaything
of your beauty, my mockery of your pride’ and so on, ad libitum. A handful of people bent on entertainment sat in silent bewilderment in the vast spaces of the Palace Theatre in Chicago and the Stanley in Pittsburgh. In both places, there were technical mishaps (the crucial public address system broke down; the film was run backwards); from time to time, the ailing John Barrymore – already,
Welles believed, in the grip of Alzheimer’s disease – would drop by and take over one of the roles, able to remember even less of it than he could of the role he was playing at a nearby theatre. Welles himself, amused by the absence of an audience, decided to play the
Rajah as a different actor at each performance, which led to some tart comment in
The New York Times
: ‘when and if
Five Kings
actually materialises, Mr Welles is now in a position to add even more novelty to the presentation by doing Falstaff as Raymond Massey might play him, or as Jimmy Durante would do it, or maybe Victor Moore.’ They thought he was behaving idiotically, childishly, irresponsibly.
He was. He was behaving like a schoolboy playing hooky – he who was supposed to be the Head Boy, the School Captain. The sense of Great Things being expected of him was oppressive.