Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (40 page)

They talked about “Marching Song” and Orson’s other writing projects. Wilder offered to read the play about John Brown and also the guidebook to staging Shakespeare when it was ready, but he wondered aloud whether Orson could be satisfied as only a writer, keeping his distance from acting. Wilder knew all about the Gate Theatre and saw Orson’s eyes light up as the young man talked about his triumphs in Dublin. Orson told Wilder that he despaired of attracting the attention of important Broadway agents or producers. Wilder told Orson not to give up; his commanding physical presence and godly voice gave him natural advantages. “I urged him,” Wilder recalled, “to earn his living as an actor and not to despise so acknowledged a gift.”

Wilder told Orson to give New York another try. The famous writer knew about several upcoming shows, and offered to introduce him to influential people. Producer Jed Harris, for example, was casting a new play called
The Green Bay Tree.
Wilder said there was a good part still available, and Harris was a friend of his who was also angling to produce Wilder’s translation of Ibsen’s
A Doll House.

Another of Wilder’s friends was Katharine Cornell, who with her husband, the director Guthrie McClintic, was organizing a touring repertory company. Wilder was even closer to Cornell, for whom he had translated
Lucrèce
, which she had starred in on Broadway earlier in 1933. Cornell planned to lead her company across America performing three plays—one of which would be
Romeo and Juliet
, her first foray into Shakespeare. Cornell was going to play Juliet, and the key supporting role of Mercutio, Romeo’s friend, was not yet settled.

One of the other two plays on the tour would be George Bernard Shaw’s
Candida
, with Cornell reprising her acclaimed Broadway turn as the title character. The actor playing Mercutio in
Romeo and Juliet
would rotate as Marchbanks, a young poet trying to woo the formidable Candida. Mercutio was a brash extroverted character, while Marchbanks, as Shaw wrote, was “a strange, shy youth of eighteen, slight, effeminate, with a delicate childish voice, and a hunted and tormented expression and shrinking manner.” Wilder thought Orson had the right look and the range of talent to play both of these important roles.

Orson’s eyes lit up again at the mention of Cornell. Fate, everything was fate.

Wilder said he would write letters of introduction to Harris, Cornell, McClintic, and a few other personages—including Alexander Woollcott, the redoubtable drama critic of
The New Yorker
, “at times Wilder’s mentor, at times his critic, and very often his advocate,” in the words of Wilder’s biographer Penelope Niven. Woollcott, above all, would go the extra mile for Wilder.

When he left Wilder, Orson was in a daze. He never forgot that night, the pep talk from Wilder that brought him back to his first calling.

Keeping his word, Wilder dashed off letters to friends in high places, extolling the young man he had just met. “The whole town [of Dublin] was staggered” by his performance as the Duke in
Jew Süss
, the playwright wrote to Woollcott, so much so that Orson next was persuaded to play Othello, which was also “wonderful beyond belief,” and later, “Hamlet’s father and stepfather.” Never mind the errors of fact, which may have been conspiratorial white lies: “The name is Orson Welles and it’s going far,” Wilder declared.

A professional encourager, a mentor to many young artists and writers in his lifetime, Wilder was amused to read in later years that he had “discovered” Orson Welles. He saw his role in the matter modestly. But Welles felt he owed Wilder an eternal debt of gratitude. They stayed friendly and never lost touch. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author had given him a helping hand when he badly needed one and, like an oracle, had prophesied his greatness.

After Wilder performed his favor, Orson tortured himself with worry that he would be betraying Hill if he moved to New York without finishing the Shakespeare book. The headmaster was in Woodstock preparing for the fall term, hard to reach and even harder to pin down—“with no more than a ‘wotta-mess-I’m-in’ over the telephone—and
my
phone call too!” as Orson complained in a letter to Hortense Hill. “And me stranded here for some
more
time with Mercutios
streaming
into the casting offices of the Belasco and other important things happening when I could just as well be streaming a little myself between periods at my drawing-board in the Algonquin!”

Hortense told him not to fret about the book, and Skipper finally found time to say the same, graciously telling Orson to go and wishing him luck. The young man was packed long before Wilder phoned with auspicious news: Alexander Woollcott had agreed to see him.

Orson “never passed so serene a Pullman night” as when he departed Chicago in “hay-feverish haste,” as he wrote to Skipper. “The train was nice with good food in an Edwardian diner, and lots of wonderful people” on board including former Illinois congresswoman Ruth Hanna McCormick and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, bound for the intermediate stop of Washington, D.C.

Arriving in New York and checking into the Algonquin Hotel, Orson showered, shaved, unpacked, and made his first phone calls, to Woollcott and Guthrie McClintic. (Katharine Cornell was in Europe.) McClintic could not be coaxed to the phone, but Woollcott was “colossally nice” and made an appointment. “The rest of them,” Orson wrote, “are only a matter of time, and not so much of it, they will call me, they will be delighted, even their secretaries are nice.” After his first round of calls, his spirits rose higher. “I am a New Yorker now,” Orson reported to Skipper. “Broadway is deader than Broadway [ever was] and hotter, but the old tread is still nimble, and they turned to gape at me, I was so fresh and smiling.” The support of someone besides the headmaster, his guardian, and the many members of his surrogate family—someone as illustrious as Thornton Wilder—meant the world to him. His letters in the weeks ahead were filled with confidence and good cheer.

“You have given me a whole ring of keys to this city,” Orson wrote to Wilder gratefully.

And Woollcott, who put out the welcome mat for the young Chicagoan early the next week, looked to be “the pass key,” in Orson’s words. The influential drama critic invited Orson to his Forty-Second Street apartment overlooking the East River for cocktails with the humorist Dorothy Parker, before the two men left to dine “salubriously” (Orson’s word) at Voisin, the midtown temple of French cooking. Merry, malicious, and sentimental in roughly equal parts, weighing 250 pounds, with large thick spectacles, a small beak, and a droll mustache, Woollcott never went out dressed less than magnificently. His customary evening garb—wide-brimmed black hat, flowing cape, and walking cane with an ivory head—might have given Orson ideas for the future.

As was often the case with people meeting him for the first time, Orson impressed Woollcott initially as a physical specimen. While Woollcott was notoriously acerbic—his barbed reviews were feared in the stage world—he found himself surprisingly at ease in the company of an intelligent young man almost thirty years his junior who appreciated an excellent cocktail and French cuisine. Woollcott had expected to find Orson a hunk of unformed putty. Yet here was an eighteen-year-old who seemed able to hold forth credibly on any subject—and who listened well too. “Conversation was the most important item in Woollcott’s life,” wrote the critic’s biographer, Howard Teichmann. “Writing and eating ran a close second and third, but talk always came first.”

Woollcott mentioned that Orson coincidentally bore the same last name as a supporting character in
The Dark Tower
, a play he was currently writing with George S. Kaufman. Considering Orson’s mature bearing, along with his résumé of aged and bearded parts, Woollcott wondered if he might care to audition for that role, that of a middle-aged man. “All kinds of people seem to be reading this part,” wrote Orson, “and pretty soon, if I can manage to be convincingly paternal to a young lady who is obviously thirty-two, I am to be given my opportunity—maybe even to put on the makeup and drive over and surprise Mr. Kaufman.”

New York’s most important drama critic made good on his promise to help Orson, taking him out and buying him better clothes for his appointments with producers, including new shoes to replace the worn ones that ill fitted his huge feet. After that first dinner, Orson wrote, Woollcott kept in touch, “calling me up and asking me what he can do for me and being generally pretty wonderful.”

It was harder to pass muster with Jed Harris. The Austrian-born producer and director was already a Broadway legend, admired by many, loathed by others, but easily “the most exciting person in the American theater,” in Orson’s words. Their first meeting, according to Orson, was “an unpleasant ordeal.”

“He has a way of putting one on the witness-stand,” Orson wrote to Wilder. “On the bench, as though one were guilty of something dastardly, out of which one is to get oneself only by fast talking, and the right answers to Mr. Harris’—permit me—prosecutiating [
sic
] cross-examinations. He shut me up finally with a laugh, and ‘All right, we can only take so much!’

“Then he turned to an impressive underling (Jewish) who had been doubling as a sort of rock of Gibraltar behind him—Harris—and clerk of the court—and said to him, ‘
This boy is the Baron Munchausen of the theatre
’—to which suspicious compliment I didn’t know the answer.’ ”

Their second meeting was “very different,” Orson wrote. This time he brought a sheaf of clippings to show Harris. “He squinted carefully at the notices,” Orson wrote to Wilder. “Squinted carefully at me and began to talk—every now and then he would stop and ask me little disconcerting things, such as—
Who were my favorite American actors? When had I seen Ruth Gordon? Did I like Helen Hayes? Did I admire Katharine Cornell? Had I ever played a madman? Had I ever played Shakespeare? What plays had I seen in New York last year?
”

Orson was in his element, trading opinions and discussing theatrical esoterica. “In between,” he wrote to Wilder, “[Harris] talked and that was magic. Every time that little man stood up—and he was a ridiculous figure in a sports sweater and shirt-tails—his pants were being altered in the next room—it was an exhilarating and exciting experience.”

Harris too was won over. Unfortunately, the producer had finalized the casting of his new play,
The Green Bay Tree
, but he said he could arrange for Orson to meet the scenic, lighting, and costume designer Robert Edmond Jones. As leading lights of the American theater, Jones and his wife, the vocal coach Margaret Carrington, were certain to have any number of possibilities in the pipeline. Harris thought Orson would be perfect for Mercutio and Marchbanks in Cornell’s company, but he “regretted” that the touring job “would tie me up for the whole season. Mr. McClintic, Harris hoped, would ‘
have the imagination
’ to give it to me.”

Orson wondered if there might be a part for him in any of Harris’s other planned shows in development, if things did not pan out with Cornell and McClintic. “He shakes his head,” Orson reported to Wilder, “said he thought I shouldn’t be given ‘
ordinary
’ parts, that I needed something ‘
vivid
.’ He has plans for the future which seem to involve
Miss Katharine Hepburn
, an Englishman called, I think,
Lawrence
[
sic
]
Olivier
,
Shakespeare
, and it was suggested,
me
.

“It was stressed that I am not to move very emphatically in any direction without consulting him. After some final and very valuable advice about reading Marchbanks, I was dismissed again.”

Another of Wilder’s letters introduced him to Edward “Ned” Sheldon, the playwright from Chicago, whose career Orson had followed avidly. Crippling rheumatoid arthritis had ended Sheldon’s active writing and kept him bedridden. But he was an informal dramaturg for New York show people, and Sheldon would be a sounding board for many of Orson’s projects in the years ahead.

Orson flew through his first week, ushered into the presence of Broadway royalty thanks to Wilder’s name. “All of these great people,” he wrote to Wilder, tend “to geld me into brain prostrations and hideous impotencies of speech—And what shall I say to them? Always, it seems, the wrong thing. But they are very kind and if I don’t cover myself with glory now you’ve opened up this New York to me—why then there’s nothing to cover.”

One exception to the overwhelmingly positive reception was director Guthrie McClintic, the husband of Katharine Cornell. When Orson was informed that McClintic wouldn’t be able to see him for at least a month—because Tallulah Bankhead, the intended star of his new play,
Jezebel
, had fallen ill, throwing him into a tizzy—Woollcott “executed a hearty sniff and straightaway got on the phone,” Orson reported to Wilder. “Read out letter by you to him (Mr. Woollcott), about me, to Mr. McClintic, and won me a presentation at Beekman Place that night.” (Woollcott seemed to enjoy waving his magic wand for Orson. “ ‘
And anybody else?
’ he offered the next morning.”)

Orson was instructed to phone McClintic after 11:30
P
.
M
., when
Jezebel
rehearsals had wrapped for the night. The night he called, he was told to hurry over to the director’s East Side address. He jumped into a taxi. “The great producer himself met me at the door, work-worn, but very cordial and pleasantly folksy in flannel slacks and a Hollywood sport-shirt widely opened to a chest proud with an incredible harvest of black hair,” Orson wrote to Wilder afterward. “He waved me up to what is now visible of his apartment—it’s shrouded in cellophane for the summer—and offered me drinks and then confidences, one after the other, before I could as much as unleash your letter. It was breathtaking but friendly.

“The confidences concerned many things—his liver, his hopes, his fears; Miss Bankhead’s liver, which is keeping her in bed, and the rehearsals in a hospital, and her hopes and fears; you and Nazis, the Nazis and Mr. McClintic; Mr. McClintic and Shakespeare; Shakespeare and the public; the use of mirrors on the stage; the trouble with scene designers; the troubles with the theatre; Mr. McClintic’s troubles.—