Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (51 page)

When he showed up at the CBS studios on Madison Avenue, Welles was introduced to Cotten by Knowles Entrikin, the network’s producer. “During our chat Orson put the contents of his pipe in the wastebasket and set the office afire,” Cotten wrote in his autobiography,
Vanity Will Get You Somewhere.
“I remember Knowles saying at a later time, ‘That young man certainly left an impression!’ ”

Cotten’s experience with a newspaper and as a struggling actor resonated with Orson, and he liked Cotten at once. As talented as he was handsome, Cotten was also self-deprecating to a fault. Though he was serious about acting, Cotten took his profession lightly and never seemed ruffled by the ups and downs. He has been born the same year as Richard Welles, and Orson quickly forged a brotherly relationship with “Jo,” as Welles always spelled it. Cotten and Welles were soon grinning across a table mischievously as the cast read through the day’s script. “This one was about rubber trees in the jungle,” Cotten recalled. “A couple of the lines suddenly took on a double meaning and very rude connotations. Instead of biting our tongues and ignoring the moment, Orson and I lost control and broke into choirboy giggles. Knowles stopped the rehearsal and warned us. He used words like
schoolchildren
,
unprofessional
and
bad manners.

“I see nothing funny about the line ‘barrels and barrels of pith,’ ” Entrikin scolded them.

(“Thick silence in Studio Two,” recalled Cotten. “Eyes of all actors remained glued to their scripts.”)

“Will Mr. Cotten or Mr. Welles,” Entrikin continued, “please tell us what is funny about the line ‘barrels and barrels of pith’ so that we may all join in with their laughter?” The air was as dead as Grant in his tomb. Then Entrikin made “the mistake of the day,” Cotten recalled. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, if indeed that is what we all are,” the director announced with a glare, “we will now go back to the beginning of the scene.”

The line “barrels and barrels of pith” belonged to another actor, Ray Collins, and this time Collins too collapsed. “His manuscript simply slid from his helpless fingers,” Cotten wrote. “Most of the other actors doubled over, the sound man hid behind his bulky equipment, the orchestra sought refuge in the shadow of the bass fiddle, and the two culprits fled the building in hysterical tears. After a few days, when Knowles’s face had lost its angry crimson color, he allowed it to smile as he shook hands and accepted apologies.”
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Never again would Entrikin cast Welles and Cotten in the same
School of the Air
episode. But he couldn’t keep them apart. It was in the fall of 1935 that Orson first began to round up his future Mercury Theatre. He would never find a better adjutant than Paul Stewart, as sturdy a foot soldier as Ray Collins, as close a comrade as Joseph Cotten.

Stewart was a native New Yorker, educated at Columbia University and Brooklyn Law School. He had quit the legal profession to go into acting, and was playing small parts on Broadway and in radio when he met Welles, seven years his junior. His vaguely sinister looks doomed him as a leading man; he would spend much of his career playing villains or losers, as well as directing prolifically in radio and, later, for television.

If Cotten was Orson’s wishful mirror image, Collins was the born-in-a-trunk trouper of show business folklore. Forty-five by the time he met Orson, seemingly ancient by comparison, Collins was another player with a whiff of newspaper background, the son of the drama critic for the
Sacramento Bee.
Collins had performed with the William J. Elleford and Del Lawrence stock companies on the West Coast, and toured in vaudeville and legitimate companies across North America, appearing with his first wife, Margaret Marriott, in everything from musicals to Shakespeare.

In the early 1920s, Collins followed his ambitions to New York, hoping to become a leading man. Held back by his stocky build and avuncular looks, he found a few good parts on Broadway, but in 1929 he began to concentrate on radio, where he gained a reputation as one of the most dependable actors in the business.

As Orson turned this important corner in life, weaning himself from the Midwest and his past, he was starting to assemble a professional family that would follow him throughout his career.

John Houseman and Nathan Zatkin had leased another theatre, the President on West Forty-Eighth Street, and announced a new season for the Phoenix Theatre, featuring plays that “while known, are risky propositions in the commercial theatre,” according to the
New York Times.
The ambitious list, posted early in the summer of 1935, included Countee Cullen’s all-black revamping of
Medea
, starring Rose McClendon; a translation of the Belgian play
Le Cocu Magnifique
; a night of Cocteau and Strindberg one-acts; and “a couple of new American plays.”

By the time Orson returned to New York, however—and largely
because
he had returned—this list was replaced by a single play: ’
Tis Pity She’s a Whore
, now slated for an early October opening. The interested parties met regularly at the Welleses’ new apartment on West Fourteenth Street, or two doors down at Whitford Kane and Chubby Sherman’s flat. (“If they borrow another pot from us,” Kane wrote to Florence Stevens, “I’ll kill them.”) But ’
Tis Pity She’s a Whore
was a chimera, gradually dissolving over the fall of 1935.

Though no one realized it immediately, the play’s death knell was sounded in mid-October by a headline in the
New York Times
: “$27,000,000 in Jobs for National Arts.” The article announced the appointment of a new regional head of the Federal Theatre Project in New York.

Earlier that spring, the Federal Relief Appropriation Act had allocated $5 billion under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to create jobs for America’s hungry and unemployed. In midsummer, Hallie Flanagan, the director of Vassar College’s Experimental Theatre, was named head of the Federal Theatre Project, part of the WPA relief operation, which was tasked with stimulating work for thousands of jobless stage artists. New York was the largest branch of the project, and in October Flanagan appointed the playwright Elmer Rice to head that branch. The president of the Authors League of America, Rice was a respected experimental playwright and an outspoken foe of commercial theater.

Moving swiftly, by the end of October Rice had authorized and allocated funds for several distinct New York units of the Federal Theatre Project: a “Living Newspaper” that would produce news-oriented plays in conjunction with the Newspaper Guild, which also had been hit hard by the Depression; a “Popular Price” theater for experimental works; and a “Negro Theatre,” cosponsored by the New York Urban League, that would occupy Harlem theater space and produce plays to employ the many out-of-work black citizens. The Negro Theatre Project—or Negro Unit, as it became informally known—was a particularly urgent mission for the Federal Theatre Project; black theater had suffered a sharp decline even before the Depression, and the Harlem community led the New York neighborhoods in unemployment.

Actress Rose McClendon took the lead in early planning for the Negro Theatre Project, and she was embraced by all factions, including black communists in Harlem, who were numerous and influential in those days. After she was diagnosed with cancer, however, she declined formal leadership of the project, offering instead to work with a white coadministrator who might be helpful in building bridges to both white uptown society and Broadway stage artists. Her recommendation for the job was her friend John Houseman. Widely respected for his diplomatic touch as well as his creative personality, Houseman had demonstrated his sensitivity to black artists when staging
Four Saints in Three Acts.

Houseman accepted, leaving ’
Tis Pity She’s a Whore
, the Phoenix Theatre, and his partner Nathan Zatkin behind. He promptly gave orders to refurbish the Negro Unit’s planned playhouse, the fabled Lafayette Theatre on Seventh Avenue near 131st Street, which had been in disrepair since going dark in the summer of 1934. Houseman signed federal forms to renovate and modernize the theater with improved lighting and sound. After consulting with Harlem residents and Federal Theatre Project staff members, Houseman announced that the Negro Unit would be divided into two halves: one to focus on plays set in contemporary Negro locales, written, directed, and performed by Harlemites; the other to present classical works featuring all-black casts.

The first Negro Unit plays were announced in the week before Christmas. The lineup included
St. Louis Woman
by Countee Cullen and Arva Bartemps; an untitled commission by Zora Neale Hurston;
Walk Together Children
by actor-playwright Frank Wilson; and an all-black
Macbeth.
The name Orson Welles was not mentioned.

Once Houseman was ensconced in his position, and the all-black
Macbeth
made the list, however, Orson was in the pipeline. What he always needed more than anything else—money to bankroll his ideas—was suddenly within his grasp. The minute Houseman came to the Welleses’ apartment and asked him to direct
Macbeth
for the Negro Unit, Orson said yes.

Later that same night, Orson phoned Houseman to convey a Big Idea for the production: they should set the all-black
Macbeth
in Haiti. The conceit was salvaged from the ill-fated Caribbean
Romeo and Juliet
—but it was Virginia, Orson always claimed, who recognized the play’s dramatic parallels to the story of Henri Christophe, a former slave who helped lead the rebellion that brought independence to Haiti in 1804. After purging his enemies and proclaiming himself King Henry I, the autocratic Christophe became increasingly unpopular, and killed himself before he could be ousted in a coup.

Virginia may have had the idea, but Orson was primed for it: He knew Eugene O’Neill’s play
The Emperor Jones
, and the 1933 film starring Paul Robeson. In his days at Todd School he had memorized Wendell Phillips’s tribute to Toussaint Louverture, the “black Napoleon” who was the military genius of the Haitian revolution and another inspiration for this new
Macbeth.
Orson had probably visited Haiti on his Caribbean trip with Dr. Maurice Bernstein in 1927; he was familiar enough with the island’s history to rattle it off on the phone to Houseman. He worked deep into the night, and when the producer returned the next day, Orson revealed a plasticine model of the stage set, spread across his ironing board, for the “Voodoo
Macbeth
”—a castle in a jungle clime.

Orson’s size and energy were Bunyanesque, and he sowed excitement like Johnny Appleseed. With contagious enthusiasm, he raved to Houseman about the possibilities: atmospheric tropical scenery, native costumes, spooky lighting, incessant chanting and drumming. If Houseman himself had any genius, on this day it was the kind Orson always preferred in a partner: the genius to believe in him, to be swept along by his vision, and to shout
yes.

Throughout the fall, as Orson proved himself in
American School of the Air
broadcasts, voicing characters of all kinds—from little girls to Great and Famous Men—word spread about the resourceful young actor. Two weeks before Christmas, CBS gave him his first billed role: a special program featuring scenes from the life of composer Frédéric Chopin, who died of tuberculosis. The fifteen-minute show was a one-off, the annual Christmas Seals promotion sponsored by the National Tuberculosis Association, but nonetheless it was Orson’s first starring role in a national radio broadcast, and the first time his name would appear in publicity material fed to scores of newspapers across the country. His mother, a lover of Chopin’s music, would have chuckled.

On Christmas Eve, Orson strolled into Saks Fifth Avenue, he told Barbara Leaming, hoping to grab a last-minute gift for Virginia. “To maneuver himself through the crush of last-minute shoppers,” Leaming wrote, “Orson arrived in a wheelchair, so that people would step aside to make way for him.” The actor went straight for a mink stole, frowning at the price tag and pointing out to the salesmen that this very stole would be going on sale the day after Christmas. Couldn’t they give it to him at the same discount now? “Otherwise, I have nothing for my wife,” he moaned piteously.

The salesmen huddled and voted to give it to him at the lower price. “It was a flash of Christmas sentiment on their part,” Orson said, and “great shrewdness on mine.”

CHAPTER 11

1936

King Orson

The surprising news that a twenty-year-old white actor from the Midwest would direct the Negro Unit’s production of
Macbeth
broke in the
New York Times
on the first Sunday of 1936. Elmer Rice, the head of the New York branch of the Federal Theatre Project, told the
Times
that the “costumes and settings” of the all-black adaptation of the Shakespeare play would be “suggested by Martinique under the empire.”
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