Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (47 page)

The first performance would occur in Detroit in less than a month.

Orson was still despondent, but he tried to overcome his reservations. The McClintic-Cornell’s
Romeo and Juliet
would be safe, conventional, tasteful, everything he despised in theater—indeed, the opposite of what he and Francis Carpenter were trying to do with their own revisionist take on the same play. Stewing with frustration, he clashed with McClintic during rehearsals. At least once he hurled a teacup at a stage manager who dared to scold him for arriving late—“an ingrained personality defect of his,” wrote Simon Callow, referring to both the tardiness and the tantrums. Several times in the weeks ahead, McClintic would put Orson on notice; once, after
Romeo and Juliet
reached Broadway, the malcontent was even replaced by an understudy for two performances.

Orson shook rival Brian Aherne’s hand, but his smiling face fooled no one. Though Orson was “friendly and good-natured about losing Mercutio” backstage, Aherne wrote later, his resentment came out in other ways. When Tybalt dueled Mercutio onstage, Aherne recalled, Orson “slashed at me with unnecessary venom and twice he broke my property sword off at the hilt.”

The excitement over
Romeo and Juliet
, Cornell’s first Broadway appearance in a Shakespeare play, was so strong that the
New York Times
covered the play’s Detroit premiere on December 3. The revamped production was “colorful” and “fast-moving,” the
Times
reported, and Cornell made a charming, radiant Juliet. Welles was among the few cast members singled out by name as lending “distinction” to the tryout. Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Toronto also went well, although McClintic docked Orson’s salary at least once before the play made it to Broadway. On opening night, Orson sent Roger Hill a “terribly embarrassed” telegram, reporting that he could no longer afford his wedding ring, the “cutaway and garnishes,” or even the fee required for the minister. He begged for another emergency loan, which Hill could consider an advance of $100 on royalties for the Shakespeare book, now scheduled for imminent publication.

UNLESS I CAN GET AT LEAST ONE HUNDRED EVERYTHING IN INDESCRIBABLE MESS STOP KNOW THIS IS A ROTTEN TIME TO IMPOSE ON YOU BUT IN PRETTY BAD STATE ABSOLUTELY SOLEMN PROMISE AND ON MY WORD WILL PAY YOU IN ONE WEEK REALLY PROMISE EVERY CENT REPAID IN WEEK.

The New York premiere of
Romeo and Juliet
fell on December 20. It was a milestone in Orson’s career, the culmination of his years of yearning to conquer Broadway, but now the great moment felt anticlimactic. Orson had talked himself into a mood as fiery as the character he played, and his Tybalt was another performance that divided critics. John Mason Brown in the
New York Post
called the young newcomer’s acting only “passable.” (Aherne was ranked among the “best” Mercutios that Brown had ever seen.) But Percy Hammond in the
New York Herald Tribune
declared Orson’s Tybalt among the finest performances of the season, and others agreed. “He took an unimportant part,” wrote a reviewer for
Collier’s
, “got his teeth into it, and made it mean something.”

On Sunday, December 23, 1934, the weekend of the
Romeo and Juliet
premiere, another anticlimax was staged for guests crowded into the home of Virginia Nicolson’s godmother in a gated community, Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey.

Demonstrating Orson’s growing reputation, the guest list for his official wedding was sprinkled with celebrities. Among the attendees were Thornton Wilder, Alexander Woollcott, and Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic—proving that despite his transgressions Orson was a valued member of their company. Other guests included baritone Mario Chamlee, whose opera performances Orson had reviewed as a teenager, and who made the trip from Chicago along with Herbert Witherspoon, a former opera singer and artistic director of the Chicago Civic Opera, who had known Orson’s mother in her student days. Once again the Hills were present as witnesses, and this time Orson’s guardian, Dr. Maurice Bernstein—“Dadda”—served as his best man.

Carrying a spray of white orchids, the bride was arrayed in a white satin gown with a tulle veil trimmed with seed pearls. The groom wore a formal dress coat tapering to a swallowtail. The presiding minister was the Reverend Vincent L. Burns of the secular Unity Church in Palisade, New Jersey. After the ceremony, Virginia Nicolson Welles sat down at a piano and played an “informal musicale” of her own compositions—including a piece called “Lengthening Shadows” that was vocalized by the versatile Dr. Bernstein.

Even that was not enough for the Nicolsons. A few months later, they put Orson and Virginia through a private party and reception in suburban Wheaton at Cantigny, the vast estate of Joseph Medill and his grandson Colonel Robert R. McCormick, publishers of the
Chicago Tribune.
After their third marriage celebration, Orson and Virginia strolled around the five-hundred-acre estate hand in hand, taking in the mansion, golf course, and landscaped gardens. Orson had visited palatial residences in Ireland and Morocco, but this was his first American Xanadu.

Brief items in the
New York Times
and
Chicago Tribune
reported that the newlyweds would honeymoon at Blind Brook Lodge in Rye, New York, before moving to a new address in Westchester, the suburban county directly north of Manhattan. Their honeymoon was over by Monday evening, however, when Orson returned to Broadway to play Tybalt. Most nights, after Tybalt was slain at the beginning of Act Three, Orson retreated to a third-floor nook of the Martin Beck Theatre, toiling away on “Bright Lucifer,” increasingly hoping to finish it so that Skipper could produce the play in Chicago in the summer or fall of 1935.

During the winter break, Roger Hill oversaw the first print run of
Everybody’s Shakespeare
at the Todd School; these copies were finished in time for him to bring them to Orson’s wedding in New Jersey and claim 1934 as the year of publication. The 156-page book was handsomely produced, with inside covers featuring a collage of historical posters heralding famous Shakespeareans such as Edwin Booth, Charles Kemble, Helen Modjeska, and David Garrick. The interior was ornamented by Orson’s scene sketches and illustrations, used as insets and marginalia. Two witty, thoughtful, and accessible introductions, one by the headmaster and Orson jointly, and one solely by Orson, opened windows onto the edited plays:
The Merchant of Venice
,
Julius Caesar
, and
Twelfth Night.
(Orson gave his main introduction a jocular title: “Biography of William Shakespeare: No. 1,000,999.” Its opening line: “Well, one more will not seriously disturb his ashes . . .”)

Orson’s favorite bookstore in Chicago, Kroch’s on Michigan Avenue, was persuaded to display
Everybody’s Shakespeare
in its front window, and the volume was also “fronted” by the well-regarded Boulevard Book Shop in the Diana Court building. But “[Marshall] Fields hide [the books] back in an uninhabited corner where they have now relegated all drama and they gather dust,” Hill reported unhappily to Orson in a letter of early 1935. The Chicago newspapers were slow to mention the book. “Sales too,” the headmaster added, “are quite lousy.”

For Orson, the long-awaited publication day was yet another in his recent string of anticlimaxes. He couldn’t find a single store in New York that carried the book; clerks scratched their heads when he asked for a copy. The headmaster was slow to solicit the commercial trade, focusing instead on a mailing list of schools that might be interested in adopting the book for their classes. “Have not yet plugged the bookstores of the country—waiting for reviews (hollow laughter),” Hill responded in a letter, “but will do so in a few days.”

Orson was apoplectic. “Send out a few press releases to the big city newspapers,” he countered. “Something is rotten in the publicity department. . . . I’m not scolding you, you old gentleman farmer, and I wouldn’t even if I had any right to . . .!” He sketched out a burlesque of the kind of press release he thought they should send: “Todd, the wonder-school. Hill, the wonder-schoolmaster. Welles, the wonder-school-boy . . . The director, actor, author, Shakespeare-script-authority (or something) and general globe-trotting—son of a bitch,” Orson wrote to Hill. “By God, I’ll write you some publicity!”

With the help of Ray Henderson, Katharine Cornell’s accommodating press agent, Orson did manage to land one squib for the book in the
New York Times.
Henderson also helped compile a list of drama and book editors across the nation, and a who’s who of theatrical notables to whom Hill should send complimentary copies. Orson asked Hill to send the new book to influential friends such as Thornton Wilder and Alexander Woollcott, who would be sure to spread the word.

Long after Virginia had gone to bed in New York, long after he was done for the night as Tybalt, in the last hours of darkness when Orson really became adrenalized, he brainstormed new strategies for hyping the book. Hill was busy as always at school, and nothing ever happened as fast as Orson wanted. Both men felt disheartened.

But Orson’s spirits rose when Ashton Stevens took up his cause in the
Chicago American
, calling
Everybody’s Shakespeare
“the gayest Bard book I ever saw.” Stevens acknowledged Roger Hill’s contribution, but said that Orson, Hill’s “prize graduate,” deserved the major credit. “Master Welles is never stuffed,” the columnist wrote. “He is endeavoring to unschoolmaster the Bard. And I think he goes a good distance to canceling the course of compulsory Shakespeare.”

Such moments brought out Orson’s humility, and he slaved over a letter thanking Stevens for “the very swellest notice imaginable,” carrying a draft around in his pocket for days as he commuted from Westchester to the Martin Beck Theater.

Everybody’s Shakespeare
was an exceptional piece of work, destined for numerous future editions, but it would always be a footnote in Orson’s career.
Romeo and Juliet
would affect him more profoundly, though not in the way he once imagined.

In the audience on the show’s opening night was a thirty-two-year-old stage producer, John Houseman. Temporarily unsettled in his own life, Houseman attended the premiere as a guest of stage designer Jo Mielziner, and like most people in the audience he had never laid eyes on the young actor making his Broadway debut. The “glossy” production failed to impress him; he found Katharine Cornell “fervent” enough as Juliet, but Basil Rathbone was “a polite, middle-aged Romeo.” It was the newcomer to Broadway, Orson Welles, who mesmerized him.

What struck Houseman about the show was “the excitement of two brief moments when the furious Tybalt appeared suddenly in that sunlit Verona square,” he wrote in his autobiographical
Run-Through
, “death, in scarlet and black, in the form of a monstrous boy, flat-footed and graceless, yet swift and agile; soft as jelly one moment and uncoiled, the next, in a spring of such furious energy that, once released, it could be checked by no human intervention.

“What made this figure so obscene and terrible was the pale, shiny child’s face under the unnatural growth of dark beard, from which there issued a voice of such clarity and power that it tore like a high wind through the genteel, modulated voices of the well-trained professionals around him.”

Backstage after the show, Houseman greeted his friends Katharine Cornell, Guthrie McClintic, and Jo Mielziner, but he could not spot Orson, who hadn’t lingered for courtesies. Houseman could not shake the “overwhelming and unforgettable” impact of Orson’s performance. “In the days that followed,” he recalled, “he was seldom out of my mind.”

Born in Bucharest in 1902, educated in England, Houseman was a sophisticate who spoke three languages (four if you counted his smattering of Italian). His first job was as an international trader in his father’s grain business—a fact Welles often noted, with a sneer, after their falling-out in later years. Houseman had gravitated to the theater world in New York, where he became closely associated with a circle of influential artists and show business folk.

“His British, rather wonderfully cool warmth, his considerate good manners, also British, and his elaborate cultural background in foreign letters and languages, all went up to make a hand that he knew he could bid on,” said a friend, composer Virgil Thomson.

By 1934, Houseman had written several plays and staged others—including Thomson’s opera
Four Saints in Three Acts
, with a libretto by Gertrude Stein, which he had produced and directed earlier that year. Hailed by the New York press as a landmark production, experimental and groundbreaking in its form,
Four Saints
featured black principals and an all-black chorus of singers vocalizing the lives of saints in sixteenth-century Spain.

Not long before
Romeo and Juliet
opened, however, Houseman had been fired as director of Maxwell Anderson’s new Broadway play,
Valley Forge.
Houseman was never a great director; rather, he excelled as a sounding board and as the editor and producer of other people’s work. His recent setbacks, the trend toward orthodoxy in left-wing theater, and the difficulty of raising seed money for serious drama during the Depression, had all conspired to undermine Houseman’s confidence about the future.

In the weeks after he saw
Romeo and Juliet
, Houseman courted another of his influential friends, the poet Archibald MacLeish, for permission to stage MacLeish’s new verse play. One of America’s leading modernists, MacLeish had won the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes in 1932 for
Conquistador
, an epic depiction of the conquest of Mexico. His new play,
Panic
, was a blank verse autopsy of the U.S. banking crisis of 1933, complete with Greek chorus.
Panic
was guaranteed to be newsworthy and controversial: American intellectuals scrutinized MacLeish’s poetry for its nuances, and New York’s left-wing arts community skeptically dissected his unaligned politics.
New Theatre
once had branded him an “unconscious fascist.”