Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (48 page)

Panic
revolved around a lead character named McGafferty—the “owner of the country’s principal industries and greatest bank,” as the script described him, “the leading industrialist and financier of his time.” McGafferty defiantly battles the panic, but in the end he is brought down by the destructive bank run, and the play shows him to be a pawn of capitalism and a symbol of its demise. Although MacLeish’s script described McGafferty as well into middle age (“a man in his late fifties . . . a strongly built man, his face florid, his hair barely grey, his gestures decisive”), Houseman had a relatively obscure young actor in mind for the part.

The producer may not have known how old Orson was, but he did know how to find him. One night, after Orson’s final scene in the play—Romeo slaying Tybalt—Houseman tipped a doorman to be led up to the backstage third floor of the Martin Beck Theatre. Houseman found the actor bare-chested, his beard and makeup wilting under the hot bulbs, bent over the counter in his mirrored dressing room and scribbling away on “Bright Lucifer.”

Houseman was particularly struck by Orson as a physical specimen. He even noticed the actor’s “extraordinary” hands: “pale, huge and beautifully formed, with enormous white palms and incredibly long tapering fingers.” Those hands were busy sweeping over “sheets of paper . . . all covered with large well-formed writing, doodled figures and gruesome faces (a play he was writing about the Devil, he explained smiling).”

At first glance, the producer—nearly thirteen years older than Orson—made a similar impression on the actor. Houseman was tall, balding, always elegantly if austerely dressed. He spoke with a plummy accent he inherited from his British mother. Late in his life, in an unproduced screenplay for a movie about the staging of
The Cradle Will Rock
, Orson described his old friend with deliberate consideration: “In his early thirties,” Welles wrote, “he conveys an impression of greater age by virtue of a magisterial air, wholly natural and unforced, and already impressive.”

Orson agreed to meet Houseman after the curtain call in a tavern across the street. The producer almost did not recognize the tall, dark-suited, clean, well-combed young man who approached his table, until he noticed the “shuffling, flat-footed gait” that he had found so “frightening” in Tybalt onstage. As the two of them drank their old-fashioneds and talked over Archibald MacLeish’s play, Houseman studied what he later described as Orson’s “pale pudding face with the violent black eyes, the button nose with the wen to one side of it and the deep runnel meeting the well-shaped mouth over the astonishingly small teeth.”

Houseman explained his goal of mounting a few showcase performances of Archibald MacLeish’s verse play for small audiences of the artistic and political elite. The estimable James Light, who had been closely associated with Eugene O’Neill and the Provincetown Players in the 1920s, would direct the production. Everything, from the scene design to the music and choreography, would be top of the line. Houseman had commitments from Jo Mielziner and Virgil Thomson; and Martha Graham, who had worked with Houseman on
Valley Forge
(and with Guthrie McClintic and Katharine Cornell on
Romeo and Juliet
), would choreograph the crowd movements.

After Orson agreed to read the script, he and the producer walked several blocks to Grand Central Terminal, where Houseman saw the actor off on the train to Westchester County. “After he had gone I was left not so much with the impression of his force and brilliance,” Houseman wrote in his memoir, “as with a sense of extreme youth and charm and of a courtesy that came very close to tenderness.”

Over the next several years, Houseman would become Orson’s close collaborator and partner. No one, except perhaps his wife Virginia, was closer to Orson during the creative ferment and high points of the mid-1930s. Partly for that reason, and partly because Houseman was such a vivid and convincing chronicler, his books and many published pieces about his onetime friend have heavily influenced other books about Welles. But Houseman’s writings were highly subjective, and don’t always stand up to the facts; his portrait of Welles was distorted with apocryphal anecdotes, often presenting Orson as an overgrown child capable of monstrous behavior while painting Houseman in a more favorable light.

Fate, everything was fate. As Orson was known to say, luck smiled on him many times in his career. Was it not pure good luck that John Houseman was so struck by Orson’s performance in
Romeo and Juliet
that he offered the struggling young actor the lead in
Panic
?

And yet Orson does not seem to have been struck by the same bolt of lightning. Writing to Roger Hill soon after meeting Houseman, Orson barely mentioned the producer. Touring with the Cornell company, he had missed Houseman’s production of
Four Saints in Three Acts
in April 1934. Perhaps he also missed
The Lady from the Sea
, directed by Houseman in May, although the Cornell company had returned to the East by then, and Orson would probably have attempted to see an Ibsen revival starring one of his favorite actors, Roman Bohnen. One thing Orson definitely knew about—everyone knew—was
Valley Forge
, with George Coulouris, Erskine Sanford, and John Hoysradt in the cast. Houseman’s firing was big news on the Broadway scene.

Orson merely told the headmaster he was excited at the prospect of working on a production that involved so many famous people: an avant-garde circle that included MacLeish, Thomson, Graham, and others whose unconventionality set them apart from commercial theater. Houseman was a member of this circle of bohemian and modernist artists, who gathered for salons in the high-rises of the Upper East Side. Orson wrote Skipper only that the artists and personalities connected with
Panic
were “worth getting in with and swell to be associated with.”

Houseman and onetime press agent Nathan Zatkin had incorporated as the Phoenix Theatre, establishing a bare one-room office on a month-to-month lease above a burlesque theater on West Forty-Second Street. Wearing a tweed jacket, Orson arrived at the office the day after his meeting with Houseman, trailed by “a delicious child with blond reddish hair,” in the producer’s words. Along with his involvement, Orson wanted his wife, Virginia, to have a role in
Panic.
That was okay with Houseman, who introduced the couple to Zatkin and the third man in the room, the tall, aristocratic Archibald MacLeish, who was on hand as both the author and the production’s principal investor. A fellow Illinoisian, dressed in work shirt and trousers, MacLeish extended his hand and told Orson, “Call me Archie.”

MacLeish was skeptical about the young actor, however, his eyes narrowing “in exasperation” as he took in the boyish fellow Houseman had picked to play McGafferty, a character in his late fifties. “Never heard of Orson! Neither had anyone else.” Not only that; Orson would have to master exceptionally complicated blank-verse speeches according to the adapted rhythm MacLeish had created for
Panic
, which the poet-playwright described as “generally trochaic, sometimes dactylic, sometimes spondaic.”

MacLeish and Orson’s delicious child-wife made themselves comfortable in two chairs; Houseman and Zatkin hunched on the floor, their backs against the wall. At Houseman’s request, Orson started with McGafferty’s most difficult scene: his breakdown, which is the climax of the play. MacLeish stared in disbelief as Orson read the lines, hearing the actor’s voice revealed in all its “infinite delicacy and brutally devastating power.” After performing the breakdown scene, Orson started over on page one of
Panic
, reading in his mellifluous tones for the next hour and a half, speaking not only all of McGafferty’s dialogue but the lines of all the other two dozen roles and even the Greek chorus. His few privileged listeners were spellbound. “He was wonderful,” MacLeish recalled. “He had a beautiful voice. . . . He didn’t know how beautiful, so he didn’t spoil it.”

Hours later, Orson wrote to tell Skipper about the triumphant audition. “A swell break,” he told Skipper. “Lead, Star Part, or Protagonist: Orson Welles! I will play a more than middle-aged Babbitt, giving me a chance to show New York that I can (?) play older parts, which alone sells the whole thing to me, besides which the production will get much attention, will draw a superb first night audience, even if it only runs one night (which it probably will).”

But it hardly mattered to him how long
Panic
ran. The play was the thing: it was a worthy effort, and it dovetailed with his evolving political views. “A rich blank-verse belly blow at the Depression,” Orson wrote to Ashton Stevens. McGafferty reminded him of a certain Chicago tycoon, he told Stevens: “a gorgeous, juicy sort of Samuel Insull with a lovely mistress and a lovely suicide. The show is all viciousness, vigour and vividity.”

Even as Orson was still performing nightly on Broadway, James Light launched daytime rehearsals of
Panic
in the last week of January. Houseman and Zatkin booked the Imperial Theatre, the jewel of the Shubert organization on Forty-Fifth Street, usually a showcase for musical comedies. The producers obtained an Equity waiver to underpay the cast, including Houseman’s ex-wife Zita Johann, who had just quit Hollywood and horror films; the multitalented Richard Whorf, whose first musical revue had just closed on Broadway; and the eminent African American actress Rose McClendon, a cofounder of the Negro People’s Theatre in Harlem.

Jo Mielziner crafted a spare stage with raised platforms and beams of light, shot through with swirling dust, that soared into the rafters. Virgil Thomson contributed a sparse score that included a metronome and ticker tape. Martha Graham choreographed swirling movement for the city street vignettes and large chorus, while James Light, the veteran Provincetown director, took charge of the intimate scenes, including Orson’s, revolving around the doomed McGaffrey in his sanctum.

Although plagued by alcoholism, Light was patient and sensitive with artistic types, and MacLeish thought that Orson benefited from Light’s long experience. “Orson was a wonderful amateur actor,” MacLeish recollected. “He was still amateur. He did all the things amateur actors do. I mean, he overdid everything, but he learned awfully fast.”

Young Orson, too, was patient with his troubled older director. He remained “understanding and gentle,” Houseman wrote in
Run-Through
, “when Jimmy [Light] started to crack up in the final harrowing days of rehearsal. With his fellow actors [Welles] was considerate,” he recalled, and, adding one of his poisoned notes, “perhaps for the only time in his life, punctual.”

Whereas
Romeo and Juliet
had struck Orson as hopelessly orthodox,
Panic
was everything he valued: thematically adventurous and artistically courageous. He had learned all he could from Guthrie McClintic and Katharine Cornell, and he would borrow ideas and casting from them for years to come. But
Panic
was the brass ring.

As the March 15 opening loomed, Orson arrived at the theater in the late mornings, before the other actors materialized, to spend hours on his age makeup. Virginia served as his assistant. “He was devoted to the play and devoted to the possibility,” said MacLeish. “Very excited!”

The anticipation for MacLeish’s new verse play built as galleys circulated among tastemakers.
Panic
divided opinions and unleashed “a storm of controversy in all sections of the radical movement,” according to the
Daily Worker
, the U.S. Communist Party’s official newspaper. Would
Panic
be sufficiently left-wing and pro-worker? At first,
New Theater
and
New Masses
, two organs often aligned with the
Daily Worker
, agreed to cosponsor a performance for their New York subscribers. But the controversy forced
New Masses
to backpedal; its editors announced that their sponsorship of one performance did “not necessarily imply their endorsement of MacLeish’s new work.”

Three nights of performances were scheduled, and the Friday, March 15, opening was largely filled with complimentary attendees: subscribers, friends, and drama critics hoping to crunch the weekend deadline. That first night, the audience’s reactions were split; the spectators were “mildly admiring and sincerely grateful,” as Houseman wrote, but “also worn and confused.” At times
Panic
was rousing theater; at other times its message was indecipherable.
The New York Evening Journal
, a Hearst daily, called the production “a pretentious bore,” and Robert Garland in the
New York World-Telegram
said the verse play was “better read than heard.” Brooks Atkinson temporized in the
New York Times
, noting: “If your mind is constantly searching the verse for meaning, it is difficult to listen to in the theatre, and
Panic
, which is perplexing enough to read in book form, is to this attentive listener, nebulous on the stage.”

There was one highlight, Atkinson observed: Orson Welles was “excellent.”

In this regard, critics around town were nearly unanimous—the young lead had carried a rather nebulous play on his strong shoulders. Whitney Bolton in the
New York Telegraph
declared flatly: “Orson Welles was the triumph of the hour—he is bluff, defiant, bullock-like and brutal.” Gilbert W. Gabriel wrote in the
New York American
, “For such a young actor as Welles to play McGafferty as ruthlessly, as interestingly as he did, was a genuine feat.” Gabriel hailed Orson as “one of the most promising artists of our day.”

The second-nighters had to pay for their tickets, shelling out $5.50 each; and that stratospheric price, in the depths of the Depression, left the house only half filled. When the curtain rose, and the parable of power and tragedy embodied in Orson’s character unfolded, some affluent ticket holders took umbrage at the words of the Greek chorus, which excoriated America’s fat cats. There were boos and hisses from the audience.