Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (78 page)

No less troublesome was a huge elevator contraption Orson sketched out to occupy the center of the stage, which would rise to several levels during the drama, as high as twelve feet above the stage floor. The elevator could hold half a dozen people, and in the course of the play would become a rostrum, a prison cell, a bourgeois salon, and finally, at the climax, the dread guillotine. Orson conceived of the device as a way to change scenes swiftly without using a curtain, but Rosenthal and Tichacek struggled with the contraption, which creaked and groaned alarmingly; and it was surrounded by Orson’s beloved, treacherous trap holes, from which actors and lighting would spring.

Under the circumstances, Orson did less rewriting initially than usual, basing his script closely on the English translation of
Danton’s Death
from the edition Gabel had handed to him, which had been published to coincide with Reinhardt’s 1927 production. During rehearsals, though, he indulged in his usual tinkering, “endlessly shifting the order of scenes and the sequence of speeches,” Houseman recalled. The solemn play certainly
seemed
long, but Orson’s editing brought it down to ninety minutes.

The costs mounted, regardless of Orson’s cost-cutting ideas, and neither the rickety set nor the underrehearsed actors were ready by late September. The Mercury partners were forced to make the first in a series of highly publicized, increasingly anticlimactic postponements.

Perhaps miscast, Martin Gabel struggled to capture the Danton of Orson’s imagination. “In
Caesar
, there had been mutual understanding and faith” between Gabel and Welles, Houseman wrote accusingly. “None of that was evident now. Gabel was aggressive in his insecurity: he knew that he was not ideally cast and that Orson should have been playing Danton. This suspicion hung between them, unspoken and corrosive, all through rehearsal.”

Sokoloff was a consolation, onstage and off; Orson reveled in the older man’s anecdotes about Max Reinhardt and the glory days of Berliner theater—now, with Hitler in power, gone forever. The whole company stood in awe of Sokoloff’s reputation, and Orson left his Robespierre virtually alone—too much so, because Sokoloff had a thick, nearly impenetrable accent. To Houseman, Welles seemed to be going through the motions. “The show was prepared in an anxious mood that fluctuated between uneasy inertia and almost unbearable tension,” the producer wrote.

Orson did drive the actors mercilessly at times, and when he lost his temper Virginia sometimes took the brunt of it. “He was very beastly to her anyway,” recalled actor Guy Kingsley. “He shouted at her, and I suppose it’s all right, because they [were] married, but I don’t think any other actress probably would have put up with the treatment that he gave her, which was rather severe and excessive.”

There were still obvious tensions in their marriage, and the couple did not always go home together. Pushing himself to the limit, Orson moved a bed into an aisle of the theater in October, a step that was turned, like much of what he did, into advantageous publicity. “Actors Often ‘Live in Theater,’ but This Actor Actually Does,” read the headline in the
New York Herald Tribune.
(“For six days and nights recently he never stepped outside of the Mercury Theater,” the article claimed.) After the actors left for their homes, Orson drove the technical rehearsals relentlessly, until the crew could no longer keep their eyes open. Only when they finally crashed did Orson dismiss them and follow suit.

By now John Berry was billed as an actor, but he was also Orson’s first assistant and “green man” (“That means I was in charge of the plants—the prop man and set builder”). Often he was the last man to leave before Orson let them all go. One late, late night Orson stood onstage demanding chalk. Berry told him he didn’t know where to find chalk at two in the morning. “He looked at me with that wonderful, noble, aristocratic hauteur,” recalled Berry. “He said, ‘Why? Must you betray me too, booby?’ Berry grabbed the fire ax, went downstairs to the men’s room of the theater, broke the wall, dug out some plaster, and came back and handed it to him. “Thank you,” said Orson.

Orson counted on strong soldiers like Berry, and on the eleventh-hour inspiration and good luck and serendipity that had blessed his career ever since he and Houseman had teamed up in 1936. But none of their previous productions were dogged by the extraordinary missteps and irredeemable crises that afflicted
Danton’s Death.

In prospect, Orson had viewed the political and historical context of the play—the quandary of revolutionary violence, as represented by the gulf between Danton and Robespierre—as comparable to
Julius Caesar
in its contemporary immediacy. But left-wing ideologues might see the play differently, Marc Blitzstein pointed out. The composer brought the partners’ attention to an October 20, 1938, article in
The Daily Worker
, describing
Danton’s Death
as a distortion of the revolutionary impulse, a play that loomed about as radical as the glossy
Marie Antoinette
, the new MGM picture covering much the same terrain. The communist newspaper demanded that the planned Mercury script “be changed or the show dropped from the repertoire.”

Blitzstein himself agreed with this jaundiced take on the play. Danton, he explained patiently to Welles and Houseman, could be viewed as a stand-in for Stalin’s enemy Trotsky, who by 1938 was exiled to Mexico City. Stalin, in this analogy, was the tyrannical Robespierre, while Danton’s demise could be taken as a reflection of the dictator’s ongoing “purge” trials of purportedly subversive government officials and creative artists in the Soviet Union. New York’s left-wing and labor groups had supported the Mercury Theatre since its inception. Now Blitzstein warned that
Danton’s Death
could be perceived as political backsliding.

Blitzstein arranged emergency parleys between Houseman and V. J. Jerome, the commissar of the cultural wing of the U.S. Communist Party, whom both Welles and Houseman had first crossed swords with when the New York left publicly dissected
Panic.
Politely, over tea, Houseman and Jerome debated the play’s symbolism, which Jerome felt was fraught with reactionary implications. The men agreed to disagree, but Houseman consented to remove “a few of the more obvious Trotsky-Stalin parallels” from the script. “In exchange, the Party agreed not to boycott us.”

Blitzstein wasn’t Welles’s only associate who was close to the Communist Party. Although he was progressive politically, Orson was complex ideologically in his stage and screen work, consistently displaying the human side of monsters and tyrants, for example. In this period, however, he was also careful to avoid making an enemy of the communists. He made the changes to mollify the New York leadership of their party, and at the same time he moved a key speech by his character, Saint-Just, to the very end of the play. The speech could be interpreted as validating the revolution: “Mankind shall emerge from this blood-bath like earth from the waters of the deluge—with new giant’s strength, with limbs born for the first time.” Its ambiguity would “please the Party,” as Richard France wrote, and “in fact Orson was delighted to have a chance to bring down the curtain [himself].” A press release assured Mercury’s left-wing base that “it is a characteristic of Danton’s own personality and not a characteristic of revolution or revolutionaries which brings him to his decadence and fall.”

Even apart from the Communist Party input, the script was ever-changing, and never more than a day or two ahead of rehearsals. At one point Welles declared he was going to revise it sweepingly and conclusively from start to finish. He sent the cast home before midnight with a call for late morning. After pulling an all-nighter, Orson decided he needed another twenty-four hours, and the cast enjoyed a rare extended break before gathering at noon on the third day. Arriving late, according to Houseman, Orson vanished into his dressing room, then rushed out with a howl moments later, having discovered he had left the newly revised script in a taxi. After “an hour” spent phoning the police and trying in vain “to trace the missing cab,” Houseman said, “rehearsal resumed exactly where it had left off thirty-nine hours before”—with the previous version.

Troubles with the actors, the sets, the lighting, and New York communists kept stalling the premiere. Originally scheduled for September 24, the first previews of
Danton’s Death
were reannounced for October 24, with advertisements running in New York papers on October 16. One hour after the first public preview was due to begin, however, Welles refused to raise the curtain. He and Houseman argued ferociously, but Houseman was forced to step out front and announce that the show was canceled, meekly sending ticket holders home with a vow to honor their stubs during the future run. The producer remembered the disappointed theatergoers as “a friendly middle-class group that had seen all our shows and would forgive our imperfections,” but the previews had been sold for weeks in advance as benefits for antifascist groups aiding victims of Nazi oppression, and for Manhattan physician Bella V. Dodd’s campaign for a seat in the assembly on the trade unionist American Labor Party ticket.

The delays continued. On the night of the second scheduled preview, Welles and Gabel stalled with recitations from
Julius Caesar
before finally deciding the scenery wasn’t ready and canceling again. Then, before the next scheduled preview, at the end of the third week in October, disaster struck—actual, physical disaster. Orson’s huge center-stage elevator contraption collapsed during a run-through, sending several actors to the hospital, including Erskine Sanford, who broke a leg and had to be replaced in the cast. Welles and Houseman canceled all future planned previews as Jean Rosenthal scrambled to fix the “technical difficulties,” working feverishly to construct an improved elevator. The premiere then was moved into the first week of November—in part “because the cast and technical staff bordered on sheer exhaustion from intensive rehearsals,” as the
New York Times
reported.

“Orson continued to rehearse while morale deteriorated,” Houseman wrote later, although the producer conceded that he himself attended only “a few rehearsals.” (His “people” kept him informed.) Houseman was busy with his futile fund-raising efforts (the entire season’s $17,000 was by now nearly exhausted) and with supervisory work on the scripts for the fall radio series.

Finally, on Friday and Saturday, October 28 and 29, the Mercury offered two “perfectly smooth” previews of
Danton’s Death.
At last, it seemed, the jinx was behind them. That Sunday, the cast would gather for rehearsal after the
Mercury
Theatre on the Air
radio broadcast. Several days remained before the press opening, plenty of time for Orson to pull a rabbit out of his hat, as he always seemed to do.

It was also the day before Halloween, one of Orson’s favorite holidays.

The fall season of
Mercury Theater on the Air
had been launched grandly on September 11 with a condensed
Julius Caesar.
The series had continued with radio versions of Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
(September 18); several of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (September 25); a concise version of Charles Dickens’s
Oliver Twist
, with Orson playing both the fate-tossed orphan Oliver and the villainous Fagin (October 2); Edward Ellsberg’s
Hell on Ice
, the saga of a famous nineteenth-century arctic voyage (October 9); Orson’s first adaptation of a Booth Tarkington story, the 1916 best seller
Seventeen
(October 16); and Jules Verne’s
Around the World in Eighty Days
(October 23).

The original “First Person Singular” conceit had involved Orson narrating each episode; that conceit was dropped for the new season, but the host still introduced and closed each show with his own musings. And the schedule was still stocked with his favorite authors, some of them—Charlotte Brontë, Arthur Conan Doyle, Booth Tarkington, and Jules Verne—destined for return engagements in his career.

The program now aired at 8
P
.
M
. EST on Sundays, opposite the number one show in that time slot:
The Chase and Sanborn Hour,
informally known as “The Charlie McCarthy Show” after its star, the wisecracking dummy voiced by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. The Crosley Index of radio ratings showed
The Chase and Sanborn Hour
drawing 34.7 percent of possible listeners, while
Mercury Theater on the Air
attracted only about 3.6 percent. After ten or twelve minutes of opening banter with the puppet, however, Bergen usually yielded the microphone to a popular singer, and the Mercury show got a bump in ratings as the audience turned the dial to see what else was available.

Having been upgraded from its summer replacement status, the fall series was allowed a deeper budget for staff. Paul Stewart, who had directed most of the summer shows, was now better salaried as director of the series. Houseman took the lead on the scripts through September; but when the difficulties with
Danton’s Death
overwhelmed him, he hired Howard Koch, a tall, spindly Columbia Law School graduate turned playwright, to take over the main writing responsibilities.

Koch had written a short-lived Broadway comedy in 1929, but since that time, he had carved out a reputation for earnest drama.
The Lonely Man
, which Koch wrote for the Federal Theatre Project, posited a reincarnated Abraham Lincoln as a college professor mediating a labor strike. When
The Lonely Man
was produced in Chicago in mid-1937, with Walter Huston’s son, John, playing Lincoln’s surrogate, critics acclaimed the production and the playwright. Hardly a dewy-eyed novice (he was older than Houseman), Koch signed a six-month contract with Mercury with a clause giving him the future rights to any radio script he wrote. His capable assistant and secretary Anne Froelick, a onetime actress, was hired with him. Koch did his first writing on “Hell on Ice” in the second week of October.