Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (54 page)

To casual visitors, the run-throughs sometimes seemed like sheer pandemonium, with Orson barking through a megaphone or angrily dictating notes to secretary Augusta Weissberger or his wife, Virginia. “Orson trusted my opinion and taste,” Virginia recalled, “because if I didn’t understand a thing, my reaction was fairly typical of the average audience.”

Sometimes Orson went too far with his explosive rants, insulting people’s dignity, and some friendly cast member would have to rescue him before he sparked a mutiny. Once, Orson was struggling with a few actors grouped on one side of the stage while Edna Thomas waited on a staircase leading up to the castle. “Orson began to get very abusive,” Thomas recalled, “until, finally, he said to me, ‘Darling, come down here. I’m not going to have you standing there all this time while these dumbbells aren’t catching on.’ When I came down, I told him, ‘Orson, don’t do that; those people will take your head off.’ And they would have.”

Another time, Jack Carter stepped up to defend the director, deriding the complaining victims of Orson’s excesses as “no-acting sons of bitches.” Carter’s invective triggered a brawl onstage, according to John Houseman, resulting in some smashed scenery and injury to at least one cast member. Carter’s loyalty to Welles was a key factor in sustaining general morale throughout the production. “Not only was he [Carter] above reproach in his own behavior,” Houseman wrote later, “but he constituted himself Orson’s champion with the company, scornful of its fatigue, quick to detect signs of revolt and to crush movements of disaffection.”

As opening night neared, another factor entered the picture: Orson started drinking more heavily than anyone had ever noticed before. Virgil Thomson, insisting that Orson nipped on the job, boasted of having taught him “to drink white wine, not whiskey, at rehearsals.” Simon Callow wrote that Orson, like many athletes and entertainers at the time, chewed energy-inducing amphetamines “as if they were candy.”

Orson took pride in the notion that he could work all day and night, whizzing in taxis from the Lafayette to midtown radio studios “sometimes two or three times a day,” in Houseman’s words. But he frequently nodded off in cabs, and stole naps when he could. “The most sleepless period of my life,” Orson told Leaming. “We rehearsed from midnight till dawn. And after dawn would rise, I would walk through Central Park. Imagine what New York was like in those days: I’d walk through Harlem, through Central Park, and with that exercise under my belt, take a shower, and go to whatever studio I had to be at.”

The notes for the final weeks of rehearsal for the Voodoo
Macbeth
have survived, and they reflect the high stakes and frenzy, along with Orson’s impolitic wrath:

“Light on steps typical Feder pink—terrible . . . Light behind dancers too bright—light stinks . . . Tell Feder light on Edna has terrible green value instead of white or lavender . . .

“What about the goddammed thunder? . . . What happened to Virgil Thomson sound effects between the acts? Why wasn’t it started sooner? Thunder ending a little too high . . .

“Jesus Christ, Jack [Carter], learn your lines! . . .
TAKE THE WEARINESS OUT OF YOUR BODY WHEN YOU GO UPSTAIRS
. . . Jack railroading again . . .

“Christ—first half of scene needs
ENORMOUS
amount of work.”

By April, the buzz from Harlem had reached the offices of the
New York Times
, and drama critic Bosley Crowther paid an unusual preopening visit to the Lafayette to observe a rehearsal of this “geographically irreverent
Macbeth.”
Welles was in rare form for the interview, expounding on the Voodoo
Macbeth
as every bit as valid as—perhaps even more valid than—the productions of
Othello
and
The Tempest
he was said to have directed at the Royalty Theatre in London. (He did no such thing, of course; it could have been Crowther’s mistake, or one more bit of mythmaking on Orson’s part.)

“You see,” Orson explained to Crowther, “these Negroes have never had the misfortune of hearing Elizabethan verse spouted by actors strongly flavoring of well-cured Smithfield [ham]. They read their lines just as they would any others. On the whole, they’re no better or worse than the average white actor before he rediscovered the ‘red plush curtain’ style.” In another interview, Orson was more politically insensitive: Asked why no serious Negro theater movement had ever emerged in the United States, he answered, “Just a matter of an appalling lack of really good Negro actors.” (“It must be remembered that most Negro players are simply Brian Aherne in blackface!” he continued, still stinging from being usurped by Aherne on Broadway.)

Many of the players in Orson’s production of
Macbeth
had regarded their imperious director warily, privately nicknaming him “Shoebooty” for his lack of decent footwear. As Carlton Moss, a writer and member of the Negro Unit board, recalled, Orson wore “a shoe on one foot and a boot on the other. . . . He was raggedy.” But as the production came together, many enjoyed their first taste of Shakespeare, and no one disputed that Shoebooty pushed himself the hardest. Even in his worst moods Orson seemed to know when to stop just short of landing a permanent insult. He called breaks after midnight and ordered in food and drink for everyone, paying for the sandwiches and beer—and much else—out of his own grocery money.

“A quarter of his growing radio earnings, during
Macbeth
, went in loans and handouts to the company,” Houseman estimated. “Another quarter was spent on the purchase of props and other necessities (including a severed head) held up by bureaucratic red tape; a third quarter went for meals and cabs; the rest was spent on the entertainment of Jack Carter.”

Outside the theater, things looked far less congenial. Fueled by rumors about the production, local activists started picketing the theater, and skeptical drama critics were already sharpening their knives. One night, as Orson and Canada Lee strolled through the foyer, “four alcoholic zealots” (according to Houseman)—or “one” (according to theater historian Wendy Smith)—lunged at Orson. A razor blade was brandished, and for the second time Lee intervened to save him. “Canada quickly overpowered and disarmed the man, who was allegedly put up to it by a Communist faction,” wrote Mona Z. Smith, Lee’s biographer.

Most of the cast and crew of the Voodoo
Macbeth
had the same protective feelings for Orson. One night, as rehearsal broke for the predawn feast that had become a nightly ritual—Orson’s gift to his hungry charges—an actor stopped and exclaimed, “When I die, if I go to heaven and he’s not there—if
Orson’s
not there—
I’m
gonna picket!” Everyone in the theater fell over laughing. “That’s how much we loved him,” Rosetta LeNoire recalled.

The hoopla surrounding the Harlem opening of
Macbeth
was a product of Orson’s long experience at self-promotion. Luminous stencils promoting the all-black
Macbeth
were painted on Harlem street corners. When a free preview was held two days before the opening night, it drew an audience of three thousand, and emergency police had to be called out to disperse the overflow. On April 15, the official premiere, two brass bands of the brightly uniformed Monarch Negro Elks marched through Harlem carrying
Macbeth
banners, finishing with a flourish in front of the Lafayette. By 6:30
P
.
M
., an estimated ten thousand people clogged the front of the theater, the crowd spreading for blocks and blocks. The face value of the tickets was forty cents; scalpers outside were asking $1.50.

Limousines arrived from two directions—“Harlemites in ermine, orchids and gardenias,” in the words of Wendy Smith, “Broadways in mufti.” Theatergoers stepped out of fancy cars, floodlights sweeping around them. The celebrities in attendance included actress Fredi Washington, beloved in Harlem for her role as the light-skinned Negro who tries to pass for white in the film
Imitation of Life
, and Joe Louis, one year away from being crowned world heavyweight champion. Edna Ferber, author of
Show Boat
, came to the opening, along with Harlem Renaissance photographer Carl Van Vechten and playwright Elmer Rice, who had given the go-aheads for the Negro Unit before quitting the Federal Theatre Project. Hallie Flanagan arrived from Washington, D.C., to give newsreel interviews and see for herself the show that had stirred so much alarm. “Excitement,” reported the
New York Times
, “fairly rocked the Lafayette Theatre.”

An hour later than scheduled, with a crash of cymbals and an overture that quoted from “Yamekraw—A Negro Rhapsody,” a 1927 work by Harlem stride pianist James P. Johnson, the curtain rose on the Voodoo
Macbeth.
The sight of its richly realized jungle setting drew a gasp from the sold-out audience, including about one hundred men and women standing in the back and aisles. The three witches launched into Shakespeare’s spiel, amid the drumming and voodoo chants. “Within five minutes,” Houseman wrote later, “we knew that victory was ours.”

With his imperious presence and deliberate manner, Jack Carter commanded the stage. Edna Thomas stood out in Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene. Canada Lee made an indelible impression as Banquo’s cigar-smoking ghost. The audience was riveted, right down to the final dire prophecy, which Orson in his clever revision had plucked from the first act and shifted to the end: holding up Macbeth’s severed head, Hecate proclaims, “The charm’s wound up!”

Orson hovered anxiously in the wings, his borrowed white shirt drenched, as the curtain fell and the spectators sprang to their feet, cheering wildly. The actors pulled him onstage to join the bows, and eventually, after many salvos of applause, the stage manager gave up on the curtain, and the audience swarmed onstage to embrace the young director and his company.
²³

If Orson’s Voodoo
Macbeth
was a resounding popular success, it was also, like many of his plays and films in years to come, a Rorschach test for reviewers. The opinions of the white first-stringers ranged wildly; often, there were stray pearls of praise amid reviews that were otherwise racially derogatory pans.

“The production is rather weird,” wrote Burns Mantle of the
New York Daily News
, adding, “This is not the speech of Negroes, nor within their grasp.” (Yet it was also “a spectacular theater experience,” he admitted.) Brooks Atkinson of the
New York Times
described the “darktown version” of
Macbeth
as a “weird, vari-colored, raree show,” though it boasted scenes and moments that were “a triumph of theatre art.” John Mason Brown of the
New York Post
called Orson’s direction “inept,” his
Macbeth
the murder of a classic. Robert Garland in the
World-Telegram
said the play was “colorful, exciting, and a good colored show.” Percy Hammond of the
New York Herald Tribune
lamented “the inability of so melodious a race to sing the music of Shakespeare,” and denounced the show as “an exhibition of deluxe boondoggling” that proved the waste and fraud of the Federal Theatre Project.

This last review, in a Hearst paper, rankled certain members of the
Macbeth
cast, and had mysterious consequences. Soon after Hammond’s review appeared, one of the lead drummers, a “dwarf with gold teeth” who encouraged Orson to call him Jazbo, approached the director. “The dialogue, reminiscent of a Tarzan film,” Welles told Peter Noble, “went something like this:

“Jazbo: ‘This critic bad man.’

“O.W.: ‘Yes, he is a bad man.’

“Jazbo: ‘You want we make beri-beri on this bad man?’

“O.W. (slightly bewildered): ‘Yes, go right ahead and make all the beri-beri you want.’ ”

The voodoo drummer marched away purposefully. Ten days later, Hammond, the dean of New York critics, died of pneumonia.
Macbeth
was Hammond’s last major review. “I realize on reflection that this story is a little hard to believe,” Welles liked to say, “but it is circumstantially true.”

The verdict of the black press meant the most to the play’s cast and crew, however, and when it came it was nearly unanimous. “Magnificent and spectacular,” Roi Ottley exclaimed in the
Amsterdam News.
“Our hosannas are extended to Orson Welles.” Harlem could stand proud, Errol Aubrey Jones said in the
New York Age.
“The theatre lives again! Hurrah!” Ralph Matthews declared in the nationally circulated
Afro-American
of Baltimore: “It marked Harlem’s cultural coming of age.” Even the once doubtful
Daily Worker
loved the show. Decrying an “unjustified prediction of failure” by the capitalist press, the communist newspaper hailed the Harlem version of
Macbeth
“as magnificent proof of the dramatic ability of the Negro people.”

As Simon Callow wrote, “Every single notice, good or bad—there were no indifferent ones—makes you long to see the show.” The Voodoo
Macbeth
proved a box office success, selling out every performance for ten weeks through June, with audiences of “terribly chic people from downtown,” in Welles’s words, vying with all “the respectable black bourgeoisie” of Harlem for the available seating. The Federal Theatre Project quickly approved plans to move the show to Broadway and tour it to selected cities.

In a career that spanned more than half a century, Welles had few unqualified triumphs. There was Dublin, when he was just a sprig; there was the handful of
Panic
performances; and then there was the Voodoo
Macbeth.
“That was magical,” he reminisced in 1982. “I think it’s the great success of my life.”

Dr. Maurice Bernstein and Roger Hill traveled to New York to see Orson’s headline-making production. The director turned twenty-one in May, shortly after the Voodoo
Macbeth
opened. Around this time, looking like a Byronic art history major, he sat for Harlem Renaissance photographer Carl Van Vechten. One nationally syndicated Broadway columnist, O. O. McIntyre, dubbed him “the newest wonder kiddie of the theater,” adding, “The Rialto, always skeptical, expects him to be top man in another five years. Or a flash in the pan.”