Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (44 page)

Orson cobbled the rest of the roster together from hither and yon. He knew the tall, dapper William Vance either from Evanston, where Vance had attended Northwestern, or from Dr. Sprague’s camp in northern Wisconsin, where Vance was a counselor the same year Orson wrote “Marching Song” nearby. Born in California the same year as Orson, Vance was raised in Freeport, Illinois. He had staged Shakespeare plays upstairs from a bank while still in high school, and made his own home movies of Robert Louis Stevenson stories including
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
One day, Orson had helped the Vance brothers shoot a short comedy featuring William putting up screens at his house in Evanston, and being bothered by a fly until he procures an old-fashioned pump-handle bug sprayer—and ends up spraying himself in the face. The credits read, “Assistant Prop Man: Orson Welles.”

Orson and William Vance had great rapport, and the actor told Orson he’d bring his movie camera to Woodstock for the summer. Orson could rely on this kindred spirit as his understudy and stand-in, especially when he was directing the first production. And Vance would portray the characters Zou-Zou in
Trilby
, Fortinbras in
Hamlet
, and General Talyzin in
Tsar Paul.

Other recruits were drawn from Orson’s family and travels. John Dunn Martin, an Iowa speech teacher in his late fifties whom Orson had met on the Cornell tour, was hired for the old-man parts. John D. Davies, a high school instructor, had approached Orson for advice about launching a community theater in Kenosha, and now he was engaged for supporting roles. Orson tapped another Kenosha connection, his talented cousin William Yule Jr., for the key parts of Laird in
Trilby
, the gravedigger in
Hamlet
, and the Baron in
Tsar Paul.

He and Skipper had hoped to supplement their troupe with “a bevy of stage-struck high school kids,” in the headmaster’s words, who would hammer the sets and sew the costumes while paying for the privilege of basking in the glow of professionals. Orson and Hill convened auditions, “preliminary to extraction of payments from parents,” in Hill’s words, but managed to scrounge up only about twenty youngsters, even after adjusting the tuition of “five hundred big depression-time dollars” to as low as $250. Among them were former or current Todd boys such as the budding artist Hascy Tarbox, always an exceptional help behind the scenes, and Edgerton Paul, another old hand at Orson Welles productions. Handsome blond William Mowry Jr., from Orson’s years at Todd, was another Shakespeare-loving footballer, who was inveigled away from a boring summer in his hometown, Madison, Wisconsin.

Most of the apprentices came from privileged homes in Chicago and the suburbs. Among the sprinkling of girls was Virginia Nicolson, a petite, willowy, blond, blue-eyed eighteen-year-old from Wheaton who had just graduated from the University School for Girls on Lake Shore Drive.
¹⁹
As brainy as she was delicate, she reeled off a snippet from
Henry IV
at her summer theater audition. Orson raised an eyebrow, and Virginia was “in”—though Hill later scoffed that Orson was more impressed by her “shape” than her Shakespeare.

One of Orson’s backstage finds was George Shealy, who had studied under Dudley Crafts Watson at the Art Institute of Chicago. Brought on to jump-start the stage design for
Trilby
, Shealy would replicate the period sets and costumes from du Maurier’s original sketches. (He went on to prominence as an advertising artist for Marshall Field’s before becoming a distinguished art history professor in North Carolina.) The reliable Carl Hendrickson would orchestrate the summer music.

By now, everything was happening at warp speed. As the apprentices and crew beavered away, Orson blocked the cast and rehearsed the staging, trying his best not to shout at the actors. Watching Hilton Edwards in Dublin, and Guthrie McClintic on the Cornell tour, Orson had stockpiled many directing strategies—including vamping and stalling when he was stuck.

At first, Edwards and MacLíammóir watched the novice director warily, unwilling to bail him out. MacLíammóir, for one, sniffed at Orson’s initial staging. “It was disappointingly vague and indefinite,” he told Peter Noble. “Orson had not yet found his true métier, which was a preoccupation with restless grandeur and intoxication, a view of life, wholly American and welling up from the soil of the huge territory which had given him birth.”

During breaks, Orson ushered the Dubliners and Louise Prussing around for publicity appearances at nearby schools and civic clubs, giving talks and interviews, shuttling between Woodstock and Chicago—pledging that “in spirit, at least,” the summer theater would be “a combination Bayreuth and a strawberry festival,” as Welles told the
Woodstock News.

Here again, public relations wizard John Clayton proved a valuable ally. When Orson proposed “a great dinner” at the Tavern Club to charm Chicago society, Clayton stocked the guest list with newspaper columnists and well-married ladies with time and money to spare. Sculptor Lorado Taft, one of Chicago’s most prominent artists, was among the donors and patrons. Mr. and Mrs. Dudley Crafts Watson represented the Art Institute of Chicago, and the current heads of both the Goodman Theatre and Chicago’s Drama League also were in attendance. “You were play-acting when you were scarcely old enough to walk,” Mrs. Watson teased Orson as he arrived at the dinner. “And you’re still making those funny faces.”

The headliners came late: Welles, Edwards, MacLíammóir, and Prussing arriving with a flourish, dressed to the nines. “We had a [car] breakdown,” Orson explained to the crowd, many of whom he knew from his youth. He introduced MacLíammóir as the star of the summer theater—“devastating fellow”—then added with a wink, “We all had engagements to lecture at a girls’ school. Micheál went up the first week—did a thorough job. Immediately afterward the school cancelled the rest of the lectures. Three girls had run away, they said, to seek stage careers.”

“I expect you to shine brightly at that great dinner,” Orson had told Skipper, and now the young man’s biggest booster came through with a rousing sales pitch. Hill exhorted the society ladies to host dinner parties during the season, and then to lead their guests in a motor parade to Woodstock after dessert. Newspaper folk could travel courtesy of Big Bertha, and expect to be wined and dined en route. “All Roads Lead to Woodstock Opera,” the Chicago press trumpeted, and Charles Collins topped all previous pronouncements by declaring Orson, the chief conjurer of the summer theater, “a striking specimen of adolescent genius.” By the end of the evening, the Woodstock summer theater had effectively won the endorsement of Chicago’s artistic elite.

Thanks to Clayton, Orson even gave midwestern audiences an early taste of his future on the airwaves. During the week
Trilby
opened, broadcasting from the observation platform atop the west tower of the Sky Ride, seven hundred feet above the Century of Progress Exposition, WGN aired a live dramatic sketch with full orchestra backing, which promoted the summer theater. The sketch was written by Orson and performed by him, Edwards, MacLíammóir, and Prussing.

This was Orson Welles’s radio debut.

Bright pennants and ice cream vendors dotted the elm-shaded square on July 12, 1934. A red-coated brass band greeted the town cars arriving at sunset from Chicago, Elgin, Rockford, Lake Forest, Winnetka, Wheaton, and Lake Geneva. The festive crowd included Dr. Maurice Bernstein and the Edward Moores; and the John T. McCutcheons and Dudley Crafts Watsons were among the notables who sponsored caravans from their homes to Woodstock. (“Uncle” Dudley, ever supportive of his cousin Beatrice’s son, also arranged for Orson to flack for his summer theater by lecturing and drawing sketches in front of an Art Institute of Chicago class.) Outside, as darkness fell, Chicago critics and columnists mingled with patrons in their evening finery. The summer heat was intense.

“It is a gala occasion,” rhapsodized India Moffett, a society columnist for the
Chicago Tribune
, “perhaps the most exciting the little town of Woodstock has ever had.”

The atmosphere was matched by expectations inside the theater, where the more than four hundred seats, including the balcony, were filled as the curtain rose. The old-fashioned melodrama, with Orson as Svengali, delighted the crowd. The young star and director gave a barn-burning performance. “Ferocious, bewitching and altogether real,” proclaimed the
Woodstock Sentinel.

The first-tier Chicago critics were more guarded. Charles Collins wrote in the
Chicago Tribune
that Orson mustered “sound stage direction,” but cautioned that his performance evinced “too much Franco-Yiddish accent and too hurried diction,” among other “minor flaws.” Lloyd Lewis flatly charged Orson (with whom he was on a first-name basis) with hamming it up, saying that his Svengali costume resembled “a composite photograph of a hoot owl, Abe Lincoln, Ben Hecht, and John Brown of Osawatomie.” Years later, when Peter Noble asked MacLíammóir for his own recollection, the actor was decidedly ungenerous. “His fakes were on the Titanic scale,” the Dubliner told Noble. “His Svengali lacked grace and humor.”

Regardless, Orson was the man of the hour, and he stepped forward after the final curtain to hush the shouted cheers and applause. He had turned nineteen just two months before. Thanking the audience, Orson invoked one of America’s greatest actor-managers: “Joseph Jefferson made a curtain speech here sixty-five years ago. Since then the speeches have been of lesser and lesser importance. But I can say, without any maidenly blushing,” he finished, deferentially nodding to the Dubliners, “our next play is going to be
really
good.”

After more shouts and clapping, Roger Hill led the audience to a buffet hosted by his wife, Hortense, at the school’s poolside patio, strung with lights and bunting. Dr. Bernstein, the Moores, and the Watsons, who attended every opening that summer, mingled happily with other people who had known Orson’s parents, Dick and Beatrice Welles. Cast members brought out their favorite musical instruments and turned the occasion into an informal nightclub revue. Thornton Wilder, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was encouraged to stand and toast Orson as his discovery. The celebration ran late, especially for those driving back to Chicago. But it was a proud, proud night, its glow undimmed for Welles and Hill whenever the years ahead seemed less kind.

Not all the drama that summer took place onstage. In later years, Micheál MacLíammóir vented freely (and pettily) about Orson’s youthful inadequacies as a director and actor. Skipper later maintained that the Dubliners were “rather mean” to Orson at times, making cracks about the young actor-manager in front of other cast members, or rolling their eyes behind his back. “He revered them far too much to fight back,” the headmaster insisted in one interview. “He outwardly pretended that all was as it should be, but secretly he was miserable.”

After nearly fifty years, however, Welles was more than tempted to fight back. He told Barbara Leaming that Edwards and MacLíammóir were “busy hating me” during that summer. He didn’t complain about anything they might have done to him personally, or about any professional failings. But he wasn’t above mocking their sexual orientation—telling Henry Jaglom that “these two wild queens” were known in Dublin as “Sodom and Begorra.” In Woodstock during the summer of 1934, he likewise told Leaming, the Dubliners were “at the absolute high pitch of their sexuality” rampaging through the town “like a withering flame.
Nobody
was safe, you know. It was a rich harvest there for both of them, and they knew no shame.”

When the company held rehearsals at poolside, MacLíammóir’s swimsuit was memorably skimpy, Welles recalled—and the flamboyant Dubliner was even more brazen when cruising the town. “Micheál wore what were then shorts of a briefness unseen on the Riviera,” Welles told Leaming, “and up and down the main street of Woodstock went Micheál, you know, with beaded eyelashes with the black running slightly down the side of his face because he never could get it right, and his toupee slipping, but still full of beauty. Hilton couldn’t keep his hands off his genitals—he went dancing around, caressing himself and sputtering. Everywhere were these four eyes darting about for the next victim. I felt rather guilty about it.”

His “guilt” was surely doubled by the puritanical reaction of Roger and Hortense Hill. Skipper was “shocked” at the Dubliners’ open sexuality, while “pretending not to be,” said Welles. (Behind their backs the headmaster referred to the two men as “roaring pansies.”) MacLíammóir even made a stab at romancing Charles O’Neal, a “vigorous non-homosexual,” according to Welles.

The Hills were a monogamous and chaste couple. Hortense considered it her sacred duty to keep the young boys and girls under her stewardship from engaging in any sexual activity whatsoever. But the Hills had their hands full—especially with Orson, trying to keep him from pursuing the young blond apprentice from Wheaton, who from day one received extra attention and coaching on her few lines from the actor-manager. Soon enough, Orson and Virginia Nicolson began arriving at rehearsals together, late, whispering and chuckling, holding hands.

But these tensions and rivalries seem to have peaked in the first weeks of the theater’s operation, and once
Trilby
ended and
Hamlet
began, Edwards and MacLíammóir settled into more significant roles, and the summer company found a happy rhythm.

Looking forward to MacLíammóir as the Prince of Denmark, the press coverage intensified in Chicago, with ripples throughout the Midwest and the nation. “Irish and London critics have been calling [MacLíammóir] an ideal Hamlet,” Charles Collins wrote in a stringer piece for the
New York Times.
Having dubbed Orson a “genius” in the
Chicago Tribune
earlier in the summer, Collins now noted that Orson had “a terrible reputation as a genius to live down.” This would become a future trend in the press, doubting the hype even when abetting it.