Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (42 page)

The tour had its first one-night stand at the 1,300-seat Parkway Theatre on Madison’s Capitol Square, performing the reliably entertaining
The Barretts of Wimpole Street.
Orson recalled Madison and the Parkway from boyhood, and he was touched when his old friend Stanley Custer from Washington School came backstage to congratulate him. “I didn’t think anyone would remember me!” Orson exclaimed.

Next the Cornell company swung north for five days in Minneapolis, then on to Saint Paul and Duluth for shorter stints, arriving at Duluth the week before Christmas. Guthrie McClintic joined the company in time to give
Candida
its last licks of preparation. “We had been rehearsing all the way along with me directing,” recalled Cornell, “very badly.” McClintic almost instantly regretted casting Orson as the sensitive aesthete Marchbanks, leveling a brusque critique of his introverted performance. Orson would have to improve on the road, and in the next months he did: Cornell would remember him as a “tremendously interesting” Marchbanks, his performance “always provocative.”

In two Pullman cars with two baggage cars, the company embarked on the long train trip to Seattle, where
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
was to open in the evening on Christmas Day. The company left during a heavy snowfall, and somewhere around Montana the train ran into tracks that were washed out from steady rain and heavy flooding. With the engines overheating, the train slowed to a crawl, and the actors were informed they might miss their Seattle opening. Making the best of it, the troupe donned happy faces and poured punch over a Christmas Eve roast chicken feast. Orson and the younger players passed out gifts they’d purchased at a ten-cent store in Duluth, and everyone joined in lusty Christmas caroling. All night and the next day the train inched forward, with emergency crews laying trestles and tracks ahead, until it finally limped into Seattle’s King Street Station shortly after 11
P
.
M
.—more than two hours past the scheduled curtain time.

They arrived to the news that a packed audience of 1,200 in evening dress was still in place at the Metropolitan Theatre, awaiting the show. Shocked, the company sprang into action. Racing to the theater, the crew prepared the sets and lighting in full view of the audience. Seattle was McClintic’s birthplace, and he took the stage as master of ceremonies, narrating the preparations to cheers and applause, urging the stage manager, prop master, and wardrobe mistress each to take a bow as they finished their work. The performance didn’t start until one o’clock in the morning, and lasted until four. The cast woke up late and exhausted but proud.

From Seattle, the Cornell tour snaked down the coast to Oakland and then to its only stop in southern California, Los Angeles—Orson’s first visit to the motion picture capital.

Katharine Cornell was beloved in the city, having set a record for nonmusical box office receipts there when she toured with
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
in 1932. This time her company’s three plays would rotate for two weeks at the downtown Biltmore Theatre, where as usual Cornell was stalked backstage by Hollywood producers bringing her flowers and film offers. But Cornell was a theater purist, and though she regularly promised MGM production chief Irving Thalberg that she would make a screen test, she never did, and she withstood all temptations to play her signature role, Elizabeth Barrett, onscreen. (Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, inherited the character for the MGM picture, which would be released later in 1934.) It would be another ten years before Cornell stooped to her only screen appearance: a fleeting cameo as herself in
Stage Door.

No matter how much they loved movies, most of the cast and certainly Orson felt the same devotion to the theater. Orson may have tried to look up Samson Raphaelson, and he and other young cast members toured the area, gawking from outside at the gated Hollywood studios. The two-week stand was a tremendous success, garnering excellent receipts and reviews (Orson earned his first mention in the
Los Angeles Times
with critic Edwin Schallert writing that he made a “very acceptable” Mercutio). But the collective success was overshadowed by a predawn car crash at the end of the run that involved young cast members and sent three players to the hospital; the company was forced to leave behind another actor, charged with drunkenness.

Road tours, then as now, are remembered for their triumphs but also for their crises and calamities. The car crash in Los Angeles was the worst setback, but not the only one. In Oakland, for example, the scheduled space was divided into a theater and a basketball court; backboard shots and referees’ whistles could be heard faintly as the troupe performed. In Colorado Springs, Colorado, Cornell and the other actresses were forced to share a single dressing room that had only one mirror. In Amarillo, Texas, the actors played through a dust storm so loud they strained to hear their cues.

Orson, who loved mishaps and challenges, stored it all away for future reference. Much has been written about his involvement in this storied tour, often focusing on his immaturity, or on his inability to match the performances of more seasoned players in the company. Orson’s Marchbanks, Basil Rathbone wrote in his autobiography, was “so fatuously unpleasant that Morell became, by contrast, a deeply sympathetic character, which most certainly was not Shaw’s intention.” Then again, Orson “was supposed to be a boy wonder verging on the phenomenon of genius. With this type of advance publicity much should be forgiven him.”

Another player in the troupe, John Hoysradt, who roomed with Orson for much of the tour and later joined his Mercury Theatre, told author Richard France that “Orson at the time always played to the top row of the third balcony, both in make-up and projectivity.”
¹⁷
Welles himself agreed, telling the BBC years later that his performances on Cornell’s tour were sometimes “terribly campy” and constituted “one of the poorer moments in the American theater.”

The tour’s impresario, Guthrie McClintic, later wrote that the eighteen-year-old Welles was “effective” when portraying Mercutio in
Romeo and Juliet
, “but left more than a little to be desired when he undertook Marchbanks in
Candida.
That he got by was by no means enough.” But the stage director conceded that he himself lacked experience working with touring repertory companies, and admitted that the overall casting had involved “plenty of compromise.” McClintic insisted, “It was not the actors’ fault that they were better in some parts than others.”

In particular, McClintic lamented his own mistakes in staging the Shakespeare play. The touring version was too somber, he reflected, its emotionalism telegraphed, its heavy scenery oppressive. Gradually, as the tour progressed,
Romeo and Juliet
—less popular with audiences and critics—saw fewer performances, while
Candida
was phased out entirely.
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
, old hat for Cornell, was the most reliable offering for the sticks.

Any criticisms of Orson should be seen in this broader light. Read carefully, his notices suggest an actor who was making shifts and strides on the road, as often happens over the course of a tour. He pleased many critics and most audiences. Wood Soanes of the
Oakland Tribune
found the young unknown “indifferent” as Mercutio when he first saw
Romeo and Juliet
in January, then “appreciably improved” one month later. (He also said that Cornell’s Juliet had “matured” during the same period of time.) As for Marchbanks, Orson played him “to the hilt,” Soanes wrote. “He looked and acted the sensitive shy poet without ever suggesting femininity. The choking scene was delightfully accomplished and the hearth episode was memorable.”

Of course Orson also received negative reviews—often enough negative
and
positive reviews from different critics in the same city. “Do reviews ever wound you?” Michael Parkinson asked Welles four decades later in an interview on Parkinson’s British television program. “Deeply,” Welles replied without hesitation. “I can remember every bad notice I’ve ever had.” He went on to recall a particularly caustic critique of his Marchbanks, which one reviewer on the Cornell tour likened to “a sea calf whining in a basso profundo.” Welles said the barb still haunted him, and “I’m sure it’s an absolutely accurate description of that performance, which must have been abominable, but it still goes through my head before I go to sleep at night.”

Offstage, he was certainly full of youthful mischief. On one occasion, in a San Francisco restaurant, Orson offended Cornell’s dignity when she caught him and John Hoysradt strutting around wearing false beards and tuxedos, impersonating stuffy foreign dignitaries. Another time, it is said—perhaps apocryphally—that Orson missed the company train and had to charter a plane to make the next tour stop. In Kansas City, with extra time on his hands, he took a room in a cheap neighborhood, put up a sign, dressed like a swami, and told fortunes. In Atlantic City too, he set up a booth and practiced palmistry on vacationers strolling along the boardwalk. He looked for scars on their knees from unhappy accidents when they were children, and wondered if they had undergone a trauma between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Who hadn’t? He certainly did.

“About twice a year I wake up and find myself a sinner,” Orson sweetly apologized in a letter to Cornell at one point during the tour. “Somebody slaps me in the face, and after the stars have cleared away and I’ve stopped blubbering, I am aware of the discomforting realities. I see that my boots are roughshod and that I’ve been galloping in them over people’s sensibilities.”

All agree that Orson was the touring troupe’s livest wire. To McClintic, the young actor was “an arresting, stimulating, and at moments exasperating member of the company.” To actress Brenda Forbes—who was six years Orson’s senior and who already boasted some New York credits—Orson was “the talk of the company and our favorite piece of gossip. His youth, talent and beautiful voice made up for what he lacked in discipline, and in spite of never knowing what he was going to do next, we became very fond of him.”

After Los Angeles, the repertory company looped back to the mountain states before heading down to Texas, then north again to Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. After wandering for weeks in the plains states and the Midwest, the tour explored the Deep South and then, in late April, headed for final dates in a cluster of cities on the East Coast and in New England.

As with his notices, every negative anecdote about Orson seems balanced by a positive one. He was one of the leaders of the steamboat expedition down the Ohio River, when the company turned south in the spring, sailing from Cincinnati to Louisville and enjoying a picnic lunch on board with friends including Hoysradt, Forbes, Cornell, and McClintic. On Sunday nights, “whenever we could,” Cornell remembered, Orson joined her and Hoysradt, listening to Toscanini conduct the New York Philharmonic on the radio. The same small group enjoyed the most beautiful of days in Charleston, sipping mint juleps at the Villa Margherita.

The “low point” may well have been New Orleans, where, according to Forbes, Orson and his friends ordered everything at Antoine’s—snails, oysters Rockefeller, lobster thermidor. “Everyone ate and drank too richly,” recalled Forbes.

Forbes’s memories of her fellow actor varied in interviews, and she saved one story for her autobiography, published in 1994. “The young men” of the company, Forbes recounted in
Five Minutes, Miss Forbes
, paid innumerable visits to the red-light district in New Orleans. “One particular night, when most of us were fast asleep in our berths, Orson Welles returned highly elated and full of mischief. He climbed to my upper berth puffing and wheezing (he was a big man even then) and plunked himself down on top of me. What a situation—both horrifying and hysterically funny. Apparently Orson enjoyed himself. Scrunching up railway bed linen to protect myself, I did not.

“Neither one of us ever referred to that night again.”

As much as his stint with the Gate Theatre, Katharine Cornell’s tour was a coming-of-age experience for Welles, restoring his belief in himself as an actor, while encouraging him to contemplate an even more ambitious plan for his future.

The idea had been growing in his mind since boyhood. Dissatisfied by the prospect of a career as a mere actor, he was drawn instead to the careers of actor-managers like Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir, or one he had met earlier in Chicago, Fritz Leiber. His months on the road with Cornell exemplified the type of actor he wanted to be: the head of his own touring repertory company. Edwards needed MacLíammóir for their partnership, and Cornell needed Guthrie McClintic as her coproducer and director. But they were all actor-managers of the breed Orson had grown up following and admiring and longing to emulate.

As a boy, he had watched classical theater presented by the companies of great actor-managers in the twilight of their lifelong tours, and had been privileged to shake the hands of more than a few. He devoured books about the great luminaries like David Garrick, Henry Irving, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and Sir Ben Greet, who did it all: played leads; designed the sets, lighting, and costumes; staged and produced their shows. Orson had the skills to pursue that tradition; he had proved it repeatedly at the Todd School. More important, besides these skills Orson also had belief in himself, energy, drive, and willpower.

Before anyone else would have declared such a path possible, Orson was talking about presiding over his own repertory troupe—such apparently idle talk always serving him as a kind of rehearsal for later reality. He talked about his ambitions incessantly during the Cornell tour. Orson could be “gauche and tiresome,” Brenda Forbes recalled, “always talking about plans for his own theater.”

He would have his chance, sooner than he knew.

By spring, doubt was brewing behind the scenes that
Romeo and Juliet
would be ready for Broadway in the first half of 1934, as originally announced. McClintic was unhappy with the sets and his own ponderous staging; the heavy trappings seemed to be affecting his wife’s performance, which lacked charm. In April, when McClintic rejoined the tour in Cincinnati to talk it over with her, they decided to close
Romeo and Juliet
“for the season,” according to Cornell. “All one-night stands from then on—and threw away the sets.” The company would disperse after the tour to regroup for Broadway in the fall of 1934, when McClintic would reconceive
Romeo and Juliet.