Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (62 page)

Around six o’clock, Archibald MacLeish joined the powder room cabal. He had tried to reach Harry Hopkins at the White House, but Hopkins would not rescue them. Blitzstein was at the end of his rope. “Marc’s despair at this point was ghastly to behold,” reported Houseman. “The final, fatal blows had been dealt him by those very unions in whose defense the piece had been written,” which were refusing to allow the musicians and actors to perform.

The School of Music, which held the biggest block of tickets for the night’s preview, phoned to ask if the show really would go on. “Yes!” boomed Orson, rallying everyone’s spirits. “Where?” the caller demanded to know. “Place to be determined later!” Houseman cried.

A crowd of reporters, cast members, and onlookers milled outside, waiting for news. Rumors had spread that a showdown was brewing at the Maxine Elliott, and left-wing activists turned up to glare at the guards and pass out leaflets. At around 7
P
.
M
., without any solution in sight, Welles and Houseman burst through the stage door and headed out front to reassure people.

“Somewhere! Somehow!”

Orson introduced Howard Da Silva, Will Geer, and Chubby Sherman, who teased the outside crowd with highlights from the show—Sherman belting out “I Wanna Go Ter Honolulu,” Da Silva and Geer trading tirades about the war between labor and capital.

Returning to the powder room, Welles and Houseman were confronted by the excited theater broker, who had found just what they were looking for: the Venice Theatre, twenty-one blocks north on Fifty-Eighth Street and Seventh Avenue. Bigger than the Maxine Elliott, with upwards of 1,700 seats, the Venice had housed major Broadway musicals in its prime, but nowadays it was vacant except on Sundays, when it was used by an Italian drama club. They could have it for $100.

Acting with “ingenuity, speed and daring,” Jean Rosenthal recalled, Orson summoned the performers, crew, and musicians to a quick powwow backstage, telling everyone that he and the other key production personnel were on their way to the Venice. The curtain would rise at 9
P
.
M
. “You may not appear onstage,” he reminded the WPA actors, “but there is nothing to prevent you from buying your way into whatever theatre we find, and then why not get up from your seats, as first-class American citizens, and speak your piece when your cue comes?”

Minutes later, the partners emerged from the stage door to speak to the waiting throng, now larger than the Maxine Elliott could have held. Houseman nervously deferred to Orson, who extemporized with fluency and aplomb—his words so beautifully attuned to the moment that they might have come from a polished screenplay.

Forty years later, Welles wrote down an approximation of just what he might have said:

ORSON

Thanks for your patience. And now we’re going to ask you to participate in something that I don’t think has happened in two thousand and more years since people have been going to the theater.

(
Low murmur of interest
.)

What we propose (with your consent) is to move an entire play with its audience on its opening night from this theater to another theatre—twenty blocks away.

(
Surprised and bewildered reaction
.)

If you’re prepared to make that journey—let’s call it a pilgrimage—you’re going to the Venice Theatre between 58th and 59th on Seventh Avenue. But those who think this whole business is as silly as it sounds can have their money cheerfully refunded at the box-office. The rest can help to make a little history.

The backstage principals all jumped into waiting cars and taxis to head uptown. (Later accounts disagree as to who rode in what vehicle: in his unproduced screenplay, Orson said he rode in a cab with Abe Feder, Lehman Engel, and stage manager Teddy Thomas; Houseman, ever the aristocrat, claimed that he, Welles, and MacLeish were chauffeured there in a white Nash.) The sidewalk crowd streamed north on foot—if not actually marching as though in a parade, as happens with pardonable dramatic license in Tim Robbins’s film.

The hour or so it took for the audience to reach the Venice gave Jean Rosenthal enough time to get the imperfectly tuned upright unloaded from the circling truck and installed at center stage. Feder had time to fiddle with the single spotlight he would deploy for the one-man show. Lehman Engel had time to consult with the dazed Marc Blitzstein. Orson took the composer aside, whispering to him, coaxing a laugh out of Blitzstein between bouts of shouting and pointing and frenetic last-minute decision making.

In Welles’s unproduced script, Chubby Sherman draws Orson aside to ask, “Suppose it doesn’t work? Suppose it’s a mess?”

ORSON

The possibility hasn’t even occurred to me.

Orson knew he could count on Sherman. The same went for Da Silva and Geer, who were as professional as they were politically committed. But no one knew whether any others in the cast would step up and perform their parts, even though most of the actors had made their way to the Venice and found scattered seats among the civilian audience around the theater. Tickets and fees were waived, and the downtown crowd poured into the theater. The mood was celebratory. When the Italian flag was spotted hanging from a balcony, the despised fascist symbol was yanked down to cheers and laughter. Orson had told people to spread the word, and though the Venice was nearly three times as large as the Maxine Elliott, it was standing room only long before the curtain rose.

Just before 9
P
.
M
., Welles and Houseman shook hands backstage with Blitzstein, then made their entrance from the wings, “like partners in a vaudeville act,” in Houseman’s words. The audience cheered lustily, then fell quiet. Houseman spoke first, telling the spectators that as artists and men of the theater the Project 891 partners found themselves with no other choice but to defy the WPA and present their musical. But they were making an artistic statement, Houseman stressed, not a political one.

When it came his turn, Orson, “looking tall and boyish,” in Houseman’s account, began by thanking everyone for coming. In his own unproduced script, orson speaks “conversationally—apparently without raising his voice.” Lehman Engle thought at the time that Welles gave a “too-long speech,” as if to apologize for “the situation, the scenes, the deficiencies of this kind of presentation.” But composer Virgil Thomson recalled his words emerging from “the most beautiful voice in the world.”

This is what
ORSON
says in his script:

ORSON

Marc Blitzstein’s opera was written for a large orchestra. The musicians are forbidden to play. Our singers, our actors are forbidden to perform tonight in their own theatre. They are forbidden to stand on any stage, including this one.

(
with a faint, slightly conspiratorial smile
)

But I understand that most of them came along with you, our audience, on your famous . . . long march.

Laughter.

And if those members of the audience who happen to have rehearsed this show would feel an irresistible urge to stand up where they are, and join the performance—I don’t believe there’s any law forbidding that in our free country.

(
seriously
)

I hope the rest of you appreciate what a risk they will be taking. They earn their living in the Federal Theatre, and they could find themselves tomorrow morning without a job.

Marc’s show was meant to have a lot of scenery. But that’s all behind us—twenty blocks behind us, and under lock and key. No playwright, no composer since the world began has ever been so lonely.

He’s up there, and we’re down here—about a thousand of us. But we don’t just have to stare at him—

We can keep him company.

Curtain!

The curtain rose to reveal the composer, seated at his rented piano in short sleeves and suspenders, with a glass of water and a bowl of peanuts close by for munching during his performance. Blitzstein looked a tad forlorn. He had played and sung his agitprop musical in parlors all over town, but never in front of a packed theater. Bathed in the lone spotlight, Bitzstein announced the setting in what Houseman described as a precise, high-pitched voice. “A street corner—Steeltown, U.S.A.!” Blitzstein began to stroke the piano, nervously singing the first lines of the first song.

Then, to everyone’s astonishment, Blitzstein’s music was joined by a faint soprano voice—emanating from a “pale and frightened-looking” woman in a green dress, according to Orson’s account—who rose from her box seat.

The woman was Olive Stanton, a WPA actress who, everybody knew, stood to lose her paycheck by performing. “It is almost impossible, at this distance in time, to convey the throat-catching, sickeningly exciting quality of that moment or to describe the emotions of gratitude and love with which we saw and heard” the actress, Houseman wrote. Other actors started joining in, standing and speaking and singing from orchestra seats, the balcony, the aisles. Feder swiveled his sole spotlight to catch them. One brave accordionist accompanied Blitzstein from the balcony, flouting the musicians’ union. A few cast members watched in stony silence, but Chubby Sherman ably filled in for several of them. Even the Harlem chorus took the gamble and sang their parts.

According to the account of biographer Frank Brady—though no other—Welles seated himself onstage, not far from Blitzstein, reassuring the composer by his presence as he described for the audience “the changes in scenes, the fact that a telephone just rang or an explosion had occurred, or stage business or sound effects that, under the circumstances, could not be produced visually or aurally.” In Orson’s unproduced script, the director defers to Blitzstein and steps offstage, later sneaking out with his wife to the stage door alley for a break during intermission. In Welles’s scripted re-creation, the couple muse about quitting the theater for Hollywood:

“Aren’t you just a little bit tempted by Hollywood?”
VIRGINIA
asks.

“Hollywood,”
ORSON
replies, “is a place where you must never sit down because when you stand up you’re sixty-five years old”—an amusing line from an older, wiser Welles.

Blitzstein’s performance gained force and majesty, and two hours after it began the first public preview of
The Cradle Will Rock
ended with his thunderous musical refrain:

When you can’t climb down, and you can’t sit still;

That’s a storm that’s going to last until

The final wind blows . . . and when the wind blows . . .

The Cradle Will Rock!

“All hell broke loose” when Blitzstein and the cast finished up, wrote Houseman. In Orson’s later-in-life script, the show concluded to “that huge Niagara roar . . . that mighty, loving explosion which can be heard but once or twice in a theatre lifetime.”

The show ended with wild applause, cheering, dancing in the aisles, exploding flashbulbs, and a “joyous blizzard of leaflets,” wrote Orson. Welles, Blitzstein, and Houseman converged at center stage, taking exultant bows. Finally, Orson stepped forward and quieted the tumult, gesturing to a distinguished gentleman in a cream suit who had emerged from backstage to stand beside them. “When you have all sat down,” said Orson with a smile, “the one man standing will be the poet—Archibald MacLeish.” MacLeish then gave a brief speech telling them all that they had just experienced the dawn of a bright new day in the American theater.

The next morning Orson caught a plane to Washington, where he hoped to make a personal appeal to Harry Hopkins to issue a continuance for
The Cradle Will Rock.
Last night he’d been forced into defiance, but now his only goal was to rescue the production. “I kept thinking we could save the situation, somehow,” he told Henry Jaglom decades later.

But Hopkins was unavailable, and Welles had to settle for two high-level Works Progress Administration officials, both of them New Deal liberals: David Niles, a close aide of Hopkins; and Ellen Woodward, who handled women’s issues inside the WPA. A secretary transcribed the afternoon conference.

The impasse over
The Cradle Will Rock
had nearly caused “a riot in the streets,” Orson began dramatically, and now was the time for the WPA to compromise. To save face, he suggested, last night’s unauthorized preview could be reclassified internally as a “dress rehearsal.” What he and John Houseman sought was an exemption from the budget freeze that would allow a series of similar dress rehearsals in lieu of an official opening.

Taking the lead, Niles dismissed Welles’s suggestion as just a matter of semantics. He did not understand why Project 891 was unwilling to comply with the nationwide order to postpone all arts project openings. Orson and his company could have all the dress rehearsals they wanted after July 1; postponement was neither censorship nor cancellation.

Niles framed the issue as a matter of loyalty to the embattled Federal Theatre Project and the WPA. All New Deal programs were under political assault, Niles explained, and well-intentioned administrators were forced to make sensitive decisions. Project 891 had cast the beleaguered New York branch in an unfair light. “The pressure on them is terrific,” Niles said.

Orson countered that postponing
Cradle
hurt his cast and crew just as unfairly. The WPA was not going to keep issuing work-relief checks for rehearsals of a show that no longer needed rehearsing—a show that had now given very public previews.

When Niles was interrupted by a phone call, Welles took the opportunity to ask Woodward if she’d been able to bring the issue before Hopkins. “I had lunch with him,” Woodward replied tersely, implying that Hopkins had left it up to them.

After the call, Niles renewed his insistence on loyalty. He stressed that the Federal Theatre Project was “part of a national picture,” and the New Deal program had the “right to expect” all its participants to “pull together through this terrible thing.” Welles tried to argue, but Niles cut him off repeatedly. “You are hiding behind the letter of what you call a preview performance,” Niles scolded him. “Or dress rehearsal—as [opposed to] the public opening. From your point of view there is no difference. The real difference is in the minds of the public—no matter what you call it—it is a theatrical performance for which we have sold tickets.”