Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (67 page)

Returning to the original Shakespeare he knew and loved from boyhood, Welles trimmed scenes, reshuffled others, taking chunks out of certain roles in favor of others. (He subtracted from Octavius and Mark Antony in particular, reducing George Coulouris to “a highly effective but one-dimensional” portrait of Antony, thought Houseman.) Orson had long toyed with the idea of eliminating the intermission, and now he did it.

At last Orson came around to the nagging issue of Cinna the poet, which he had been evading and postponing. In Act Three, Scene 3, of Shakespeare’s original, Cinna wanders onstage after dreaming about the assassinated Caesar. He is accosted by a gang of thugs galvanized by Mark Antony to seek out the conspirators and avenge Caesar. The thugs mistake Cinna the poet for Cinna the conspirator. He pleads with them as they close in. No, I am Cinna the
poet
!

Now Welles and Lloyd revisited everything to do with Cinna: his costume, his mannerisms, his line readings. Lloyd had thought all along that Cinna should be dressed as an ordinary clerk, while Orson thought the character ought to have a hint of the Byronic poet about him. Lloyd had an idea: Cinna’s death scene could evoke the tragedy of Maxwell Bodenheim, a real-life alcoholic Greenwich Village figure known for handing out poems for spare change in Washington Square. Orson knew about Bodenheim from Chicago, where the poet had once run a literary journal with Ben Hecht. Melding his own vision of the Byronic poet with Lloyd’s hapless one, Orson reconstructed the scene. He and Lloyd clashed repeatedly, and Lloyd threatened to quit, but Orson pushed ahead, mediating their differences throughout the long night before the next-to-last preview.

Orson blocked the scene anew. Now the thugs would appear singly onstage, then collect into small groups, edging closer to Cinna as they formed a mob. As he found himself surrounded, Lloyd would desperately pull scraps of poetry out of his pockets as proof of his identity. The mob would grab at the scraps, crumple the poetry, hurl it back into his face.

“At two in the morning,” according to Houseman, “the scene began to work, getting tauter and more dangerous as the night wore on. At four-thirty we stopped and it was announced that the Cinna the Poet scene would be in the show for the [next preview] matinee.”

Before the performance, the word spread backstage that critic John Mason Brown from the
New York Evening Post
was in the audience, having been granted special permission by Welles and Houseman to attend the preview because a previous commitment kept him away from the premiere. With the hectic revisions of the last few days still drying on the page, not many felt confidence in the production. As Coulouris prepared to make his first entrance from the darkened basement under the stage, the actor was heard to predict (“in a voice loud enough to be heard by the entire front half of the orchestra,” Houseman recalled) that this play and the Mercury would fold after the previews.

But Coulouris was wrong. In that desperate moment,
Julius Caesar
came gloriously alive. And the immediacy and universality of Orson’s bold, modern-dress vision was capped by his vivid staging of Cinna the poet’s death. Lloyd went down screaming, “I’m Cinna, the poet! The poet! The poet!”—blotted out by the mob and Orson’s blood-red lighting. The killing was followed by a sustained loud peal from a Hammond organ lasting almost a minute. The audience gaped in shock. “An unforgettably sinister thing,” Joseph Wood Krutch later wrote in
The Nation.

That day at the preview matinee, the ovation was overwhelming. Afterward, the
New York Evening Post
’s critic took the rare step of heading backstage. John Mason Brown shook Orson’s hand and congratulated Houseman, telling them what he later wrote in the
Post
: that the Mercury Theatre’s maiden presentation of
Julius Caesar
was hands-down “the most exciting, the most imaginative, the most topical, the most awesome and the most absorbing” play of the new Broadway season.

The official premiere on November 11, 1937, came amid the rising tide of fascism in Europe and widespread fear of an approaching world war. The first-night crowd was plunged into a past that eerily seemed to foretell the present day: the stage in darkness, the lone voice hailing Caesar, a figure resembling Mussolini striding forward in military uniform with a fascist salute. Orson’s Shakespeare adaptations were never fusty. He had sharpened
Julius Caesar
like an assassin’s knife held aloft, amid beams of light that simulated the Wagnerian stage tricks of Hitler’s Germany.

The performances peaked on opening night; the actors would enjoy the best notices of their careers. Caesar’s spectacular assassination (complete with Orson’s real daggers) thrilled the audience, and Cinna’s dance of death was lauded in review after review—Cinna’s demise was reminiscent of “the hoodlum element you find in any big city after a war,” as Welles told the
New York Post
, “a mob that is without the stuff that makes them intelligently alive, a lynching mob, the kind of a mob that gives you a Hitler or a Mussolini.”

Welles’s own portrayal of Brutus (“a fine patrician type, his face sensitive and intellectual” as Orson described the character in
Everybody’s Shakespeare
) added to the opening-night triumph. Almost stealthily Orson had nursed his characterization, committing himself to the character incrementally, while employing his stand-in and juggling his other chores. Welles was often a “king actor,” as he once famously proclaimed in an interview—that is, an actor specializing in kingly performances; but the manner in which he played kingly men always revealed—as Truffaut said (and as Welles agreed)—“the fragility of great authority.” But he was also capable of playing, as in
Julius Caesar
, a high-minded loser swept away by the dark tide of history.

Dressed to stand apart from the other players in his custom-made double-breasted blue pinstripe suit, Welles offered a ruminative Brutus whose soft conversational manner, in the context of such bombast, allowed him to dominate his scenes. Highlighted by his simple and powerful oration at the forum, his characterization served as “a foil to the staginess of the production as a whole,” in the words of John Mason Brown. “There can no longer be any question of his skill as a player,” Richard Watts Jr. wrote of his performance in the
New York Herald Tribune.

The last tableau of the show brought to its feet the capacity crowd that had been privileged to witness the birth of the Mercury Theatre. Fittingly, the final lines belonged to George Coulouris, Orson’s doubting Thomas, who now as Mark Antony strode gravely to center stage and stared out over the audience, declaiming in Brutus’s memory, “And say to all the world this was a man!”

The Nuremberg lights enveloped the ensemble in white brilliance. The theater broke into a frenzy. People shouted hosannas. Women tossed their hats into the air. Critics risked their deadlines to stand in place fiercely applauding with reddened hands.

John Anderson wrote in the
Journal and American
: “Mr. Welles has schemed it out with resourcefulness and imagination, energy, daring, and perception.” Brooks Atkinson wrote in the
New York Times
: “Theatrically brilliant.” Richard Watts Jr. in the
Herald Tribune
called it “the great
Julius Caesar
of our time.” John Mason Brown spoke for all: “The touch of genius is upon it.”

Julius Caesar
opened just one day after Broadway welcomed another breathlessly awaited Shakespeare production,
Antony and Cleopatra
, a big-budget star vehicle for actress Tallulah Bankhead. Bankhead’s foray into Shakespeare cost an inordinate $100,000 to mount onstage, with Virgil Thomson’s score and Cecil Beaton’s costumes among the expenses. Brooks Atkinson criticized it as “elaborately encumbered,” other critics joined in the mockery, and
Antony and Cleopatra
closed after just five performances.

Bankhead rushed over to see Orson’s bargain Shakespeare, then joined the well-wishers backstage. Welles told her the Mercury’s
Julius Caesar
had cost all of $6,000. “Six thousand dollars!” Bankhead shrieked. “That’s less than one of my fucking breastplates.”

As always with Welles, there were skeptics, most of them falling into one of two categories: Shakespeare purists, who were offended; and anticommunists, who were suspicious of the implications of a modern-dress
Julius Caesar
staged by refugees from the Federal Theatre Project. Stark Young in the
New Republic
wrote that he was “on the whole pretty much disappointed” in the production; Mary McCarthy in the
Partisan Review
complained that Welles “cut the play to pieces,” then further ruined it with his own “cloying and monotonous performance.”

But their voices were drowned out by the Niagara roar of acclaim, and by the sound of ticket office telephones, barraged by eager subscribers to the coming Mercury season. The first week of performances sold out, with many standees; the second-night press list rose to 120. “At the box-office as well as in the opinion of the critics,” reported the
New York Times
, “the Mercury Theatre . . . has started life with a hit.”

But the Mercury also started life with a debt, and it was more than $6,000. Friends of the project pleaded with the partners to forgo their plans for a revolving repertory schedule, which would require deeper investment, expense, and liability. Instead, the Mercury should pay the bills by keeping
Julius Caesar
onstage for as long as the theater could sell out.

At a celebratory dinner at “21,” over two bottles of champagne, Welles and Houseman talked things over—and decided cheerily that they were not interested in playing it safe. They were still committed to the idea of a repertory theater. “Neither Welles nor I was primarily interested in money,” recalled Houseman. Within days of the premiere, the Mercury management sent out publicity for the second production of the season, Thomas Dekker’s
The Shoemaker’s Holiday.
“The plan is to open it Christmas week,” wrote the
New York Times
, “later alternating it in repertory with
Julius Caesar.”

During that same dinner, the partners considered other revenue-boosting options. Houseman suggested they might send a second company of
Julius Caesar
out on the road in 1938. Orson initially resisted the proposal, seeing himself “as another Henry Irving or Edwin Booth,” as Houseman recalled, who might one day be “leading his company on a triumphal tour of the hinterland, and he wanted no interference with this vision.” With a harrumph, however, Welles finally agreed.

Sundays were dark for
Caesar
, and the partners thought of other ways to use the space. The Mercury could open up the theater building to other events and activities. It could present works in progress, with bare staging and a few props, and only work lights. And they could make good on their contract with Marc Blitzstein and revive
The Cradle Will Rock
for a run of Sundays.

For this new incarnation of
Cradle
, Orson adopted an “oratorio” format, with the performers in street clothing and bare makeup, seated in rows atop one of
Julius Caesar
’s raised platforms. Orson asked Blitzstein and Chubby Sherman to fine-tune the staging, and many players from the original cast, including Howard Da Silva, Will Geer, Olive Stanton, and Sherman, agreed to reprise their roles. Blitzstein would still function as the sole maestro on piano, with a small chorus of black singers seated on a second platform. The new version of
Cradle
was up and ready for its first paid preview—a benefit for the striking union employees of a newspaper, the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
—after the evening performance of
Julius Caesar
on Saturday, November 27.

When
Cradle
then officially reopened on Sunday, December 5, the reviews were so laudatory (“the best thing militant labor has put into a theatre yet,” declared Brooks Atkinson in the
New York Times
) that the Mercury Theatre found itself with a second hit on its hands. The Sunday night shows sold out through mid-December, when
Cradle
exhausted its union permissions for the limited run—after which Blitzstein’s musical was leased to producer Sam Grisman for another incarnation at the Windsor on Broadway beginning in January 1938.

After a dinner at the photographer Cecil Beaton’s apartment, Orson posed for Beaton—one more signpost on the road to Broadway canonization. The portrait shows the twenty-two-year-old actor-director at a worktable, staring intensely over a Roman bust, with scissors, a thick tome, and a human skull draped with beads. Orson returned the favor by inviting Beaton to create the costumes for his conjoined productions of
Henry IV (Parts 1
and
2)
and
Henry V
, now projected as a Mercury offering for the spring of 1938.

Orson was leading a double life in the fall of 1937, reflecting the opposite sides of his persona as a performer: the Shakespearean sophisticate and the cheerful vulgarian. While appearing nightly as Brutus in
Julius Caesar
, he was also appearing frequently (and anonymously) on
The March of Time
, and, more important, purring to life every Sunday night as the Shadow.

The Shadow was his dream role. The job required little forethought, and on this show—unlike
The March of Time
and his other bill-paying radio gigs—he was treated as the most important person in the room. The very first script draft was forwarded to him in New Hampshire for approval, and later episodes were messengered to his Mercury Theatre office, where he marked them up with cuts and improvements. And part of the
Shadow
job was doubling as a pitchman, warning motorists on behalf of Goodrich Tires about roads in treacherous weather.

On Sundays, he often arrived at the studio not having glimpsed the final draft of the script—not even knowing the outcome of the plot. He later said this enhanced the program’s feeling of suspense, quickening his performance along with that of the other actors. He sometimes showed up just minutes before the red light blinked on at 5:30
P
.
M
., striding to the microphone with his usual bounce and roll, just as the mysterioso music faded away, to intone the famous opening: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men . . . ?”