Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (53 page)

Orson had declined his Federal Theatre Project paycheck; he later claimed that he never cashed a government check, and research has yet to prove otherwise. After his years of pleading for bailouts and loans from Dr. Maurice Bernstein and Roger Hill, radio was fast emerging as the quickest way to supplement his income—to pay the grocery bills, as he liked to put it.

CBS offered him his first regular stint in mid-January 1936, just as
Macbeth
got under way. On Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, he recited poetry for fifteen minutes on WABC, alternating with songs by tenor Stuart Churchill and music by Ken Wood’s orchestra. Identified by name on the air for the first time, Orson also plugged a commercial sponsor’s product for the first time: Cornstarch. “I got fifty bucks each time,” he recalled, “and it was terribly nice money to have, because I just turned up five minutes ahead of time and read a poem and ran away with fifty dollars.”

The money was a godsend, and his knack for speaking intimately to housewives led to more of the same. Soon, another station—WEAF, the flagship of the NBC network—was booking him for similar poetry recitals on the
Fleischmann Yeast Hour
, Thursdays at 8
P
.
M
. Then in March, WEAF cast him in a featured role in the popular serial
Peter Absolute
, broadcast nationally on Sunday afternoons.

More important, starting in the late fall of 1935, Orson began to appear with growing frequency on
The March of Time
, a half-hour dramatic re-creation of weekly news events whose “prestige and supremacy,” in the words of
Radio Guide
, were “unparalleled in the radio world.”
The March of Time
was aired nationally from the WABC-CBS headquarters every Friday at 9
P
.
M
. Eastern time, and Orson relished the work. “Great fun,” Welles recalled. “Half an hour after something happened, we’d be acting it out with music and sound effects and actors. It was a super show—terribly entertaining.”

Orson was not yet part of the inner circle of
March of Time
regulars, however, and his status in the world of radio was still modest. He shuttled among studios almost daily, auditioning for each new part, and was paid humbly by comparison with the famous radio stars. But radio was a different type of challenge, and a more spontaneous source of fun. While many well-known theater people appeared on radio shows, the field was full of hardworking anonymous actors like Orson, and they formed their own clique.

One of the radio actors he met in 1936 was Everett Sloane, a journeyman performer who was part of this microphone clique. Orson liked a diminutive actor with a voice that could squeak or roar, and the versatile Sloane had been featured in radio soap operas and crime dramas since the late 1920s. Six years older than Orson, with a receding hairline and a long, angular face, Sloane had just made his Broadway debut in the frenetic comedy
Boy Meets Girl
, in a supporting role that would last for 669 performances. But he remained ubiquitous in radio, where a talented voice mattered more than a pretty face. “He liked me,” Sloane said of Orson, “I liked him. He was always making me laugh.”

Orson was an insatiable workhorse, but he was also a social animal, thriving on interaction with people whose company he enjoyed. As the quality of his radio jobs increased, the medium became more important to him, both as a creative outlet and as a place to make new friends.

Most rehearsals for
Macbeth
took place at night, sometimes stretching from midnight until dawn. Orson was always packing his date book with commitments—on Fridays, for example, the company had to wait all day while their director finished work on
The March of Time
—but his schedule wasn’t the only problem. The second Negro Unit production,
Conjur’ Man Dies
, was performed nightly at the Lafayette Theatre until April 1, and Orson’s
Macbeth
company had to wait until the curtain rang down before they could take the stage for their own rehearsals.

Still, from the earliest read-throughs of his Voodoo
Macbeth
—held in borrowed Harlem auditoriums, in church halls, even at Orson’s West Fourteenth Street apartment—he took charge decisively. One of the first things Orson did to consolidate his authority was banish the man who hired him. Although John Houseman had been crucial in assembling the backstage team and cast, Orson had no desire to be second-guessed by a director with Broadway credits. He shrewdly drew a line between creative and administrative authority that would define and limit his partnership with Houseman from the outset.

At first Orson asked Houseman to stay away for just “the first few weeks,” according to the producer’s later account. “Jack,” Orson cautioned Houseman, “if it is possible for you to be at the rehearsals from the day we start, all the way through every day, you are very welcome. But as an occasional visitor you represent an invasion of privacy, and you disturb everybody.” “Overwhelmed” by the managerial challenges of launching the Negro Unit, Houseman agreed to absent himself for the short term—but he never recovered the territory he had ceded.

Some members of the cast and crew would recall Houseman as a benign presence (“so good and nice to everybody,” said the actress Rosetta LeNoire), but to others he was a remote, almost fugitive figure. “Houseman never came to [
Macbeth
] rehearsals unless he had a group of people he wanted to impress,” Orson sniffed years later. “On more than one occasion, I asked them to leave.”

Macbeth
was Orson’s mountain to scale, and it was going to be a steep climb. Some of the actors were capable of rising to the occasion, but the vast majority were being introduced not just to Shakespeare but to acting itself. “It was really ridiculous in a couple of instances,” conductor Leonard de Paur recalled. “There was no way possible that some of these souls were going to be able to read Shakespeare, but read they had to, because they were told to.”

Even as a young man, Orson had an array of strategies for directing and for coaxing performances from actors. He lavished charm and respect on leads, for example. “I seduce actors,” Welles boasted to Barbara Leaming, “make them fall in love with me.” He said much the same to Henry Jaglom: “I direct a movie by making love to everybody in it. I’m not running for office—I don’t want to be popular with the crew—but I make love to every actor. Then, when they’re no longer working for me, it’s like they’ve been abandoned, like I’ve betrayed them.”

With the ladylike Edna Thomas, Orson was a consummate gentleman, taking her out to fine restaurants, buying her dinner and murmuring in her ear. He formed an equally ardent but decidedly more macho bond with Jack Carter. The two big men went roistering together after rehearsals, vanishing amid “the late-night spots and brothels of Harlem till it was time to rehearse again,” according to Houseman. (This sounds more like the exaggeration of a partner left behind: Orson was never much for gambling or whoring.) Orson liked Carter enormously, and the actor learned to trust his director.

Rehearsing the neophytes individually, Orson could be extraordinarily patient. “Let’s try that scene again,” he might say, “Try it like it is with your father this time . . . what would you do if you were having the same problem or same discussion? How would you talk to your father?” He’d flirt shamelessly with the first-time actresses. “He would say, ‘Listen, Sugar; hey, honeybun’—always started out with something to weaken you inside, warm and lovely,” recalled Rosetta LeNoire, who was playing one of the witches—her first job in show business. “Then he’d say, ‘Listen, hon, you know what you just said, and you know the way you said it. Were you angry? Well, that line, it’s not an angry line, is it? Well, would you say it that way if you were saying that from your heart to somebody that you loved?’ Or, ‘How would you say it to somebody you couldn’t stand?’ ”

Orson gave the newcomers to Shakespeare credit for “marvelous” instincts, as he told Leaming years later. “They preserved the poetry in a funny way,” Welles said, “because they found innately the rhythm of the iambic pentameter and observed it without any instruction.”

Sometimes, because of his mood, or because something was going badly onstage—or perhaps because he was stalling for time and inspiration—he unleashed outbursts of Vesuvian proportion. He fumed at people, hurling the script and anything else at hand, stomping around the stage. His reputation for tantrums began here, during the Voodoo
Macbeth.
“He knew what he wanted, and he was darn sure he was going to get it,” de Paur recalled. “He abused people. He yelled and screamed. I never saw him physically assault anybody, but he always seemed capable of it.”

Orson hated the idea of himself as a shouter. “When I shouted, it was theater,” he insisted to Leaming, still trying to repair his image decades later. “I
never
scream at actors,” he told Roger Hill plaintively, adding, “maybe at the crew sometimes.” De Paur again came to his defense, however, estimating that 90 percent of Orson’s tantrums were a “posture” designed to win him “the authority twenty-year-olds don’t generally have.”

When he wasn’t performing on radio or rehearsing the cast, Orson was beseiged by other responsibilities: he had to confer with Virgil Thomson about the music, Abe Feder about the lighting, Nat Karson about costumes, and Asadata Dafata Horton about the voodoo scenes and drumming. He relied on his wife and muse, Virginia, to catch what he missed, and on his assistant director, Tommy Anderson, to run the scenes when he was absent.

The tensions within the company were matched by strong headwinds from the black community. Among Harlem’s many left-wing activists and avowed communists, the prospect of an all-black
Macbeth
masterminded by a young white nobody was inherently objectionable. The New York Urban League was forced to issue a statement clarifying that its support for the Negro Unit was contingent on a long-term vision of a permanent Negro Theater. But the “prevalent” view among Harlemites, as the
Amsterdam News
reported, was that the Voodoo
Macbeth
was shaping up as “a blackface comedy or a satirical skit.” At the same time, the WPA and the Federal Theatre Project were being attacked constantly by right-wing congressmen in Washington, and the last thing the program’s leadership wanted was to be perceived as appeasing the left—in Harlem or anywhere else.

Orson’s
Macbeth
wasn’t the first WPA production to provoke discord in Washington. In January 1936, Federal Theatre Project officials had canceled
Ethiopia
, the first production of its Living Newspaper unit, after conservative voices complained that the play—dealing with Italy’s October 1935 invasion of Ethiopia—was too leftist. Elmer Rice resigned his New York branch leadership post in protest. Reeling from the
Ethiopia
controversy, Federal Theatre Project director Hallie Flanagan hoped that the Negro Unit’s
Macbeth
would turn out to be liberal—but not
too
liberal.

And the risks were not just political but financial. The Voodoo
Macbeth
was turning out to be more expensive and fraught with risk than any other federally funded production to date. Some officials thought the investment wasn’t worth the hazards. According to Federal Theatre Project historian Wendy Smith, officials believed that Orson’s production was consuming “a disproportionate percentage of the Negro Unit’s budget and staff time.” Houseman seemed overly deferential to the show’s young, white director; the producer himself recalled that project staffers called the show “my boyfriend’s folly” behind his back.

And there was one more source of stress: the first two productions of the Negro Unit had both met with trouble.
Walk Together Chillun
, the first of the three plays, was a disappointment to both audiences and reviewers; the second, the unpretentiously entertaining
Conjur’ Man Dies
, was pooh-poohed by critics like Brooks Atkinson of the
New York Times
, who labeled it “a verbose and amateur charade.” If the Negro Unit were to survive, its third production would have to be all things to all people: popular yet artistic, politically meaningful yet beyond partisan reproach.

It was Houseman’s job to tamp down the fires, and he brought all his diplomatic skills to the task. Orson was called on to schmooze with worried souls from Harlem and Washington, D.C., and he was good at schmoozing. But he kept his head down as the pressures intensified—and when
Conjur’ Man Dies
sold out and extended its run, the Voodoo
Macbeth
bought some much-needed breathing room.

In April, the motley cast and crew of Orson’s Voodoo
Macbeth
finally took over the Lafayette. Nat Karson’s crew erected his sets—a lush tropical jungle, a majestic castle, a seaboard backdrop—and the actors donned their costumes and makeup, which were every bit as fantastical as the stage design. The witches were wrapped in gnarled, woolly hide; Macbeth’s officers wore gold-braid uniforms with epaulets and feathers on their caps. And the expressive lighting was gradually integrated into the rehearsals, with Orson and Abe Feder arguing venomously about filters and adjustments. “Orson was constantly on Feder’s back,” Edna Thomas recalled, “screaming away at him.”

To all this were added, for the first time, the hypnotic chanting and drumming of Assadata Dafora Horton’s African troupe onstage, with the full orchestra in the pit playing Virgil Thomson’s music, plus sound effects—crashes of thunder, bursts of lightning, jungle commotion.

All this ingenious stagecraft, designed to cast a spell on the audience, also colored the mood for the actors during final rehearsals, giving the novice players some cover for their inadequacies. The music and background noise were almost nonstop, with Orson carrying over from his radio experience the idea of “introducing music into a scene as a kind of emotional prelude to the scene ahead,” as Welles scholar Richard France has observed. The old-fashioned Lanner waltz heard during the coronation ball scene, for example, was gradually overtaken by voodoo drums rising in the background, as the setting shifted to the jungle and witches.