Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (33 page)

Orson liked to adopt a flirtatious pretense with homosexual men, he told Leaming, but in this case it may have backfired, spiking MacLíammóir’s jealousy and resentment. “It was right back to my childhood, playing parts to keep various people interested,” Welles explained. “I had an entire persona for Micheál, which has no relation to anything I was ever like before or since, or with anybody else—but it was what he
wanted
, and what amused him—it was a kind of
camp.”

But Orson oversimplified when he complained in later interviews that the Gate stopped giving him substantial roles after
Jew Süss.
He played juicy parts in
The Dead Rides Fast
and
The Archdupe
, and soon thereafter he rejected one of the “fattest” parts in the next Gate play, a slice-of-life original called
Youth’s the Season.
The part didn’t appeal to him, he explained in a letter home—and, besides, he had a “financially more inviting” offer elsewhere.

The extra money wasn’t even the main attraction. Orson’s newfound reputation for impersonating old men had led to an opportunity to tread the boards at the legendary Abbey Theatre. He was invited to play a sexagenarian, Lord Porteus—“John Drew’s original part,” as, at sixteen, he was knowledgeable enough to boast—in a limited-run production of Somerset Maugham’s
The Circle.
“It will be a real treat and an experience not to be missed to play at the famous Abbey.”

The production was a weeklong benefit for Irish youth hostels, and his fellow actors were not the true Abbey players, who were off touring.
¹³
But the director, Madeline Ross, was an Abbey veteran, and Orson relished his part, “a terrible, hateful parody of an upper-class Englishman.” The newspapers ran photographs of Welles, tickets sold briskly, and the press covered the opening. Once again made up with wrinkles and padded for girth, Orson “proved himself a character actor of unusual merit,” in the view of the
Independent.

Regardless of what he may have said later, at the time Orson felt guilty about leaving the Gate company in the lurch. “I feel rather small in letting Hilton Edwards, who’s been so very generous to me, down in any way at all,” Orson wrote to his guardian.

But Edwards was indulgent of Orson, so much so that he gave him an excused absence for the Maugham play, shrugging off the defection. And recognizing Welles’s drive and energy, Edwards then encouraged him to join William Sherwood in launching a Gate side project: an “art-theatreish” adjunct company, in Orson’s words, that was going to mount plays in the Peacock Theatre. Named for the color of the upholstery on its walls, the 102-seat Peacock adjoined the Abbey complex. This would give Orson a chance to stretch his wings, taking charge of stage design for the new Peacock Repertory Players.

Even as he was playing the millionaire codger in
The Dead Rides Fast
, Orson was preparing the first Peacock production: Herman Ould’s
The Moon Rides High
, which opened in mid-November and played for one week, nightly with weekend matinees, in the interval between Gate plays. Ould was a protégé of George Bernard Shaw—his one-act had preceded Shaw’s
The Great Catherine
at its 1913 premiere—and he promised Orson an introduction to his famous friend. The supernatural theme of Ould’s play would inspire Orson’s spooky stage design.

Most of the Peacock players were Gate actors who were interested in supplementing their salaries. Sherwood directed all the Peacock shows, except one. As far as can be determined, Orson directed that Peacock production, while also starring and designing the sets. But was it a potboiler called
Mr. Wu
, with Orson in the role Lon Chaney performed in the 1927 silent film; or was it
The Chinese Bungalow
, a mystery melodrama set in the Malay Peninsula?

Some sources say
Mr. Wu.
(“I’ve played it once myself,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich when the play came up in conversation.) Others—including the
Chicago Tribune
(in its coverage of Orson’s return from Dublin), MacLíammóir (in a letter to Peter Noble), and publicity releases for the Katherine Cornell’s tour—say it was
The Chinese Bungalow.
Strangely, though, there is no extant record of Orson Welles’s professional directing debut, or of this starring role (in either play he would have appeared as a pigtailed Oriental)—not in the Gate archives, and not in the electronic indexes of the Irish press.

By mid-December, when the Peacock mounted a production of Jerome K. Jerome’s farce
The Celebrity
, the sideline operation was drawing regular attention from the Dublin press, and Orson was being praised for his vivid stage designs. “Touches of originality give interest to the settings designed by Mr. Orson Welles,” observed the
Irish Press
.
The Celebrity
was followed by a clever adaptation of
Alice in Wonderland
in time for Boxing Day. “Brilliantly produced” by “this gifted little company,” according to the
Irish Independent
, the play used twenty-two sets of scenery designed by Orson, which were essential to capturing the “true spirit” of Lewis Carroll. The company also produced, in early 1932, a pairing of Strindberg’s one-act
The Stronger
with Jules Romains’s spoof of medical arrogance,
Doctor Knock.
“Welles gives the [latter] play a brilliant setting,” wrote the
Irish Times.

Programs from the Peacock Repertory Players have not survived, and Orson never mentioned his “art-theatreish” venture in interviews. But it was an important legacy of his stay in Dublin. First, because he directed professionally for the first time. But the Peacock had to live up to the Gate’s reputation, and Orson also had to create the sets within nominal budgets that would live up to the standards set by MacLíammóir. Previous books on Welles have scoffed at the credit he took, later on, for the stage design of certain Mercury Theatre productions, without realizing that he was executing acclaimed professional sets at age sixteen.

Over time, MacLíammóir’s ambivalence about the young upstart’s success would wax and wane. Some of the anecdotes about Welles in his books were scathing and hilarious. He struck at Welles’s Achilles’ heel with jabs at his vanity and immaturity in his Dublin days. He told interviewers young Orson was known to hog the stage and step on other people’s lines—low blows to any actor.
Put Money in Thy Purse
, MacLíammóir’s diary of the filming of
Othello
, added broken financial promises to the litany of Welles’s transgressions.

Orson waited until 1985, after MacLíammóir’s death, to strike back, dismissing him in Lemming’s book as “kind of the less glamorous and extraordinary
sister
of his brother-in-law,” the legendary Anew McMaster. McMaster had it all—beautiful blond hair, godlike looks, a marvelous speaking voice, acting genius. MacLíammóir was “remarkable, he was a really great Hamlet, he was a tremendously amusing writer and a formidable personality, but compared to Mac [McMaster] he was
nothing
! Mac had his eye wiped, as they say in Dublin.”

The Gate’s Christmas play for 1931 was
Mogu of the Desert
by Padraic Colum, a distinguished Irish poet, dramatist, and novelist then living in Paris. An extravagant Oriental saga with crowd scenes, music, and songs, set in mythical Persia,
Mogu
traced a beggar’s rise to power. Orson returned to play a fat role, in more ways than one, portraying Chosroes, the last King of Persia, his face augmented by “several pounds of nose-putty,” as MacLíammóir recalled, his costume topped with “a white turban at least two and a half feet in diameter and three-inch fingernails of peacock-blue and silver.”

In one scene, Mogu (played by Edwards) was meant to whip a dagger out of an assassin’s hand, but he accidentally sliced off Orson’s fake nose. Welles covered his nose with a hand and played through his next pages, a long love scene in blank verse—another mishap to be treasured.

The Gate plays were not all fabulous successes. Georgie Hyde-Lees, the wife of William Butler Yeats—she was called George Yeats by everyone—thought the
Mogu
sets and costumes were marvelous but the acting was an atrocious jumble of accents. “Hilton Edwards played Mogu as he played the Jew in
Süss
,” she wrote to her husband. The second act of
Mogu
had been trimmed without Padraic Colum’s approval, and the writer complained to George Yeats after seeing the production with her on a visit to Dublin: “I don’t recognize my play.” Still, Colum stood everyone to a grand shindig, and Orson once again came off well in reviews, the
Irish Times
seeing his role as “an excellent opportunity to use his fine physique and great voice.”

The year Orson graduated from the Todd School and planted his flag in Ireland culminated in the annual Gate Ball, a dinner, dance, and cabaret celebrating the New Year, held in the grand ballroom of the Gresham Hotel and attended by seven hundred invited friends and luminaries, including the lord mayor of Dublin. Hilton Edwards, garbed austerely as the wise patriarch of the Gate family, crooned evocative Irish ballads; Micheál MacLíammóir donned a mermaid’s costume and sang bawdy songs like “Milly, the Messy Old Mermaid.” The company’s “youngest and only American” also sang, this time “without make-up,” according to the
Irish Tattler & Sketch
, “and we saw how ridiculously young his genius is.”

As the company toasted the New Year, 1932, the “ridiculously young” Orson draped his arms exuberantly around both Edwards and MacLíammóir. Despite their backstage bitchery—a lingua franca among show people—all three men spoke warmly of each other more often than they sniped. (MacLíammóir once described Orson as among “the three deep loves of my life.”) The Gate partners did not always approve of their young protégé’s behavior, but at times like this—and there would be many such times ahead—their mutual respect and affection were manifest.

January and February flew by, with Orson designing sets for the Peacock shows and closing out his Gate tenure with pivotal roles in several main-stage productions. In January 1932, the Gate offered the Italian romantic drama
La Morte in Vacanza
, translated by Walter Ferris as
Death Takes a Holiday.
Orson portrayed Duke Lamberto, the lord of a creepy castle whose unwanted guest—the weary, lonely figure of Death (MacLíammóir)—falls in love with his daughter (Betty Chancellor). MacLíammóir also designed the sets, and Edwards directed.

Death Takes a Holiday
was followed, in early February, by
Hamlet
, Orson’s first professional excursion into Shakespeare, with MacLíammóir as a spellbinding Hamlet, and Edwards, who also directed, sensational as Claudius. Orson was third-billed; he doubled as Fortinbras and the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, who appears several times throughout the drama. His Ghost especially was “very beautifully played,” according to the
Irish Times.
“The Ghost can seldom have been presented more movingly,” observed the
Irish Press.
“One of the best [Ghosts] I have ever seen,” MacLíammóir himself said years later.

Hamlet
was one of the season’s biggest successes for the Gate. The theater was filled to capacity during the run, with the standing ovations stretching close to midnight, after which many members of the audience walked home happily, having missed the last public transport.

The Peacock’s playbill was winding down. And after
Hamlet
, was there anything else on the Gate main stage for Orson? There was talk, probably stirred by him, of an
Othello
in which he would essay the title role. There were other rumors, perhaps from the same source, that he might be in line for the lead in
Coriolanus.
Some believed the talk, and wondered why it never came to anything. “They wouldn’t let him play Othello,” Orson’s loyal crush Betty Chancellor complained to Welles historian Richard France decades later. “He was so remarkably good,” she said in another interview. “I think the management was jealous!”

Writing home to Chicago at the time, Orson grumbled, “I am doomed for a kind of typecasting . . . nothing but roaring villains, old . . . those parts which demand my build and voice.” Hilton Edwards saw things much the same way—at least for now. “I know you can do juveniles and so on,” Edwards told Orson sympathetically, “but Micheál can do them better, and as a producer am I justified in misusing the best heavy and character actor in the company?”

“When he put it that way,” Orson wrote to Dr. Bernstein, “I couldn’t kick!”

So
Hamlet
was the end of it: the last Gate play with the impossibly young American taking major responsibilities. Orson did not even lobby for a part in the company’s February production of Marcel Pagnol’s
Topaze.
By now his sights were set higher. Having heard from visiting English critics and producers that the grass was greener in the West End, he looked ahead to visiting and conquering London.

At the end of February, the company threw an all-night party in Welles’s honor, bidding him farewell. There were speeches and cheers and songs, whiskey and cigars. The last thing Orson did before leaving Dublin was visit the Abbey Theatre, where he had thrown together the sets for one last production by the Peacock Repertory Players:
The All-Alone
by Edward Martyn, which involved a scheming mother, a child of the sea, and a ghostly siren. A workman was changing the marquee for the next Abbey production. Individual actors’ names never appeared on the Abbey’s marquee, as a matter of long-standing tradition, but Orson bribed the man to put his name up there briefly, and take a photograph of him standing in front of it.

By March he was in London, making the rounds of producers, casting offices, and theatrical agents. Despite the reputation he had earned at the Gate, he soon realized that it was futile: with so many British thespians unemployed, a work visa for an American of any age was out of the question.