Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (45 page)

Edwards promised a faithful
Hamlet
, featuring as much of the original text as possible and the same stellar performance MacLíammóir had delivered at the Gate. “By developing stage settings which can be changed rapidly,” Edwards told the press, “we are able to include more scenes in our play than has been done by other companies playing this work.” Besides directing and playing Polonius, Edwards designed the scenery and effects—simple settings that would be varied with hangings and lights. Orson would play Claudius and the Ghost, as he had at the Gate.

The Dubliners knew
Hamlet
well, but with only three days between the closing night of one play and the opening of the next, they threw themselves into high-pressure rehearsals that often ran past midnight. While Louise Prussing (the Queen), Constance Herron (Ophelia), and Charles O’Neal (Horatio) were professionals, most members of the sizable cast were apprentices and local pickups, and the ensemble was hard-pressed to master the complexities.

The July 26 premiere of
Hamlet
arrived, with all the fanfare returning to Woodstock—the brass band, the Rolls Royces and Pierce Arrows from Chicago, the Big Bertha round-trip for the press, and celebrity guest DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat” for the after-theater party at poolside. Orson diplomatically lowered his profile, and Edwards gave the curtain speech.

In general, the reviews were positive. Edwards’s staging made for “a first rate art theater treatment of the immortal tragedy,” Collins wrote in the
Tribune
, and the “graceful actor” MacLíammóir offered an “exceedingly good” interpretation of Hamlet—although Collins did find him “somewhat lacking . . . in the fire and nervous excitement of a high mettled prince,” with “slowness of pace” his “handicap.”

Orson had conquered audiences in
Trilby
, and now with
Hamlet
he began to win over the Chicago critics. His Claudius was “unconventional,” as John Clayton wrote later, “a King that called forth anathema from the traditionalists.” Charles Collins was one of those traditionalists, and that would keep him out of the Orson Welles fan club in later years. Conceding that the show’s “special virtue” was its local hero, Collins wrote about Orson’s dual performance as Claudius and the Ghost in more than one
Tribune
piece, debating the show as though he were arguing with himself.

Orson recited the Ghost’s speeches magnificently, Collins felt, but his Claudius was an “unorthodox character study” reframing the King as “a completely detestable fellow,” as if in a cheap melodrama. “Sitting with Miss Louise Prussing, who obligingly bared one shoulder to make the most seductive Gertrude in my experience,” Collins mused, “Mr. Welles exchanged caresses, ripe plums, California grapes and lawless looks with her, interjecting so much amorous business as to fairly hog the scene. It is brilliant technical character work, but it flattens the drama.”

Yet there was no question Orson was also brilliantly watchable, Collins allowed, performing with courage and imagination. Claudius, in previous productions of
Hamlet
, had always been “a great disappointment to me,” Collins wrote. Not this time: Orson reveled in Claudius’s villainy, and “acts the king with such floridity that he has started a minor controversy. Some of the Woodstock pilgrims have been proclaiming that they didn’t like him, which merely means that they didn’t like the character. That was young Mr. Welles’s intention.”

Orson proved himself both a crowd-pleaser and a critical provocateur throughout the run of
Hamlet.
On the final weekend, Dudley Crafts Watson brought a record busload of thirty-eight after-dinner guests from his home in Chicago. MacLíammóir’s final performance was his finest, and in his last curtain speech he said he was touched by the crowd’s sustained applause.

Spirits were high in the interval between the second and third productions, and Orson organized an afternoon of fun, in the form of improvised filmmaking. He enlisted William Vance and Virginia Nicolson as co-conspirators and costars, and Charles O’Neal, Edgerton Paul, and William Mowry as performers in the short film he planned. Vance would handle the camerawork. Orson would direct. The Dubliners took the day off.

The film was intended as a send-up of the avant-garde of the time—films like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist
Un Chien Andalou
and Jean Cocteau’s
Blood of a Poet
—with, as Welles explained years later, a heavy dose of
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

There was also a dash of minstrel show in his own central role as a southern plantation owner sporting a bald pate and garish makeup. Twirling a cane, Orson is introduced prancing down a fire escape on one of the Todd School buildings, bending over to leer into a close-up. A blackfaced, white-wigged minion (Edgerton Paul) rings the Todd School bell. A Keystone Kop (not the last in Welles’s filmography) darts past the camera. Virginia, garbed as a grosteque old granny, cackling and gesticulating wildly, rides a rocking chair on a rooftop. Close shots of tolling bells and spinning mirrored globes segue into sinister moving fingers, guttering candles, a hangman’s noose, a skull, a coffin, a tombstone and finally a screen card: “The End.” All of this is intercut with shots of Orson hamming it up on his boyhood instrument: a piano.

But the piano tinkling was not heard. The film was soundless of course, and
The Hearts of Age
was lost and forgotten until 1962, when the young film scholar (later professor) Russell Merritt discovered the footage among Vance’s effects in the Greenwich, Connecticut, public library. Though it is plotless and zany, Welles experts have argued that this first conscious filmmaking on his part anticipates much in his later masterpieces. The spinning mirrored ball can be seen as a precursor to the snowy glass paperweight, and the distorted extreme close-ups presage an old man whispering “Rosebud!” The serially repeated shots are not far from the tragic figure of Charles Foster Kane echoed ad infinitum in a row of mirrors. Not only
Citizen Kane
: Welles would carry these devices, this sort of imagery and jump-cutting, over to many future films.

“It was like finding a youthful play of Shakespeare,” Welles scholar Joseph McBride reported, when he watched
The Hearts of Age
several years after Merritt discovered it. “We can see,” McBride wrote, “through the young man’s mélange of styles, the conglomeration of postures both congenial and unassimilated, a vigorous, unguarded,
personal
approach to even the most second-hand of ideas and motifs.”

“The signature is unmistakably his,” Peter Bogdanovich wrote in
This Is Orson Welles.
“The shots rush at you with amazing speed and variety—complex images of considerable strength; though clearly not a careful or even considered job, it has remarkable spirit and inventiveness.”

“It was a Sunday afternoon home movie that we did between two and five in the afternoon,” Welles said ruefully years later, “I don’t know how it has entered the oeuvre.”

Today, the eight-minute film is easily found online.

The most important thing about
The Hearts of Age
may be the inordinate amount of screen time Orson lavished on the young blond apprentice from Wheaton. Virginia Nicolson was “certainly nubile, probably a virgin” when she joined the summer theater festival in Woodstock, Skipper recalled. But the romance between her and Orson grew serious. Hortense Hill desperately tried to preserve “the virginity of a dozen nubile females” placed in her care by “trustful mothers” that summer, but in a few cases, including this one, she may have failed.

The last scheduled play was Dimitri Merezhkovsky’s
Tsar Paul
, a drama rooted in nineteenth-century Russian history, with Hilton Edwards as the Tsar; Micheál MacLíammóir as his son, Alexander, the heir to the throne when his father is murdered; and Welles as Count Pahlen, who contrives the Tsar’s downfall. Edwards made a triple contribution, starring, directing, and creating the lighting effects. MacLíammóir also designed the sets and costumes. Virginia Nicolson was promoted from apprentice to understudy for Constance Herron, who was playing Empress Elizabeth. Herron took the last night off to introduce “a new star in the making.”

By now the Dubliners were giving full service to the summer theater festival, and the Chicago critics continued their praise. The crowd was overflowing on
Tsar Paul
’s mid-August opening night, and grinning cast members hawked peanuts and soda pop between the acts. Edwards drew the longest ovations, and his curtain speech was filled with warmth and humor.

As crucial as Edwards and MacLíammóir were to the quality of
Tsar Paul
, it was Orson whose acting won the greatest praise, winning over his worst big-city doubters. “Mr. Welles hides his nineteen-year-old face behind a makeup that is a cross between the Saracen Saladin and Gen. Pershing, a swarthy, weather-tanned face of sixty, military, stern, zealously patriotic,” Lloyd Lewis wrote in the
Chicago Daily News.
“That boyish exuberance which made him caricature Svengali and the Danish king is withheld here by Pahlen’s self-discipline. Mr. Welles has, for the moment at least, quit trying to scare his audience to death and is the artist.”

Claudia Cassidy, writing in the
Chicago Journal of Commerce
, agreed: “The show belongs to Orson Welles.” He topped “previous achievements, none of them negligible,” she continued. “He dominates the stage not alone by size and voice, but by sheer ability to create and sustain illusion. His variety and range are literally amazing, and his youth has nothing to do with the matter except to hint at genius.” Even the sometimes grudging MacLíammóir later praised Orson’s performance in
Tsar Paul
as “outrageously exciting.”

The crowds had been good earlier in the summer, but now, in August, they were even better:
Tsar Paul
’s two-week run easily sold out. Not a moment too soon: the festival badly needed the revenue to offset its expenses.

To help pay the festival’s mounting debt, Orson and the headmaster added a last-minute weekend of
The Drunkard.
Charles O’Neal whipped up a fresh production of the old-fashioned melodrama—acting and directing—while Constance Herron reprised the role of Mad Agnes she had so ably performed for him in Chicago in the spring. Festival students and apprentices were promoted to the other substantial roles for a four-night run at the end of August.

The four mainstays of the Woodstock Theater Festival—Welles, Edwards, MacLíammóir, and Prussing—gave notes to the ensemble but otherwise stayed out of it, giving free rein to O’Neal, a well-liked colleague and an old hand at
The Drunkard.
“On the last regretful night of
Tsar Paul
, amid the lantern-lit trees in the courtyard of the school,” MacLíammóir reminisced later, “we drank [to Orson’s] health and swore lasting friendship.”

As friends they parted. Prussing headed for New York. Edwards and MacLíammóir went first to Soldier Field in Chicago, where they helped stage
The Pageant of the Celt
for two nights in late August, with MacLíammóir narrating, in Gaelic, a script he had helped write. The Dubliners then boarded the Santa Fe for a cross-country sightseeing tour. As for Orson, he would “take a vacation in northern Wisconsin for the hay fever season,” according to the local press, “and no doubt will be again with Katharine Cornell for the winter season.”

III

TOMORROW AND
TOMORROW
AND TOMORROW

CHAPTER 10

1934–1935

Big Ideas

Orson was among the thousands of Actors Equity members who made ends meet working in summer stock, then returned like homing pigeons to cluster around producers’ offices in Times Square.

He may have spent a few days in Wisconsin for his hay fever, but he headed to New York in the last week of August, once again checking into the Algonquin Hotel. Anxiously, he arranged to meet with Guthrie McClintic, who had been elusive all summer, but McClintic had only vague promises to offer: Katharine Cornell was vacationing in Italy, he reminded Orson, and they wouldn’t be finalizing their plans to bring
Romeo and Juliet
to Broadway until after her return. Halfheartedly, Orson began to make the rounds of other producers, flaunting the Cornell tour and the Woodstock summer theater on his résumé.