Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (55 page)

Never again would he lack for party invitations. His radio work accelerated, and Orson also had the rare pleasure of impersonating himself on a
March of Time
segment covering the sensational premiere of
Macbeth.
“The greatest thrill of my life—I don’t know why it thrilled me (it does still, to think of it now),” he told Peter Bogdanovich years later. “I guess because I thought
March of Time
was such a great thing to be on. . . . I’ve never felt since that I’ve had it made as much as I did that one afternoon.”

Virginia lobbied for a vacation, but Orson was more allergic to vacations than to pollen.
Macbeth
had brought him fame but no fortune. Now more than ever Orson badly needed income. Suddenly, he was the toast of New York, and he believed in projecting the image of success to nurture the reality of it. New radio programming would not begin until the fall, and in the meantime he had to make do with
The March of Time
, his noontime poetry gig, and odd jobs to pay the grocer.

Meanwhile,
Macbeth
played in Harlem until June 20, when Eric Burroughs, clutching Macbeth’s severed head, delivered the final line for the last time at the Lafayette, amending it to: “Peace! It’s wonderful!” Orson then had to tune up the show for the Adelphia Theater on West Fifty-Fourth Street where the production was to have a two-week Broadway run starting on July 4.

Jack Carter lasted only a week in the midtown rendition before disappearing one night after Act One—either because of “the heat,” as the
New York Times
reported the next morning, or because he was besotted, with drink as Barbara Leaming later wrote. (“Harlem simmered yesterday with another version,” the
Times
added, “something to the effect that Mr. Carter was annoyed when another principal missed a cue.”) The levelheaded Maurice Ellis took over, picking up the role of Macbeth for Act Two and then for the rest of the Broadway dates and the ensuing national tour. Carter’s desertion did not seem to bother Orson; he preserved his passionate friendship with the black actor, and would cast him again.

During its Broadway run, Orson and the crew worked to adapt the production for the road. In the months to come, the Voodoo
Macbeth
would visit Bridgeport, Hartford, Dallas, Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Syracuse, playing everywhere to huge crowds and abundant praise. By the time it was over, more than 100,000 Americans saw Orson’s production, and a number of local Negro Theatre groups and all-black classical experiments were inspired by its example.

Orson did not go on tour with the Voodoo
Macbeth
—with one fabled exception. Late in life, he told interviewers that he rushed to Detroit that September to step in for Ellis when the actor fell ill and couldn’t take the stage as Macbeth. Orson even seized the opportunity to “black up” for the lead. “The only time anybody’s ever blacked up to play Macbeth!” Orson liked to boast. “I was a much darker Macbeth than Jack was. I had to prove that I belonged.”
²⁴

Although his name was freely used in the show’s publicity, Welles received no earnings for the national tour. And while the show was the best possible public relations for the Federal Theatre Project, the production never actually turned a profit—in Harlem, on Broadway, or on tour—largely because of the cheap ticket prices mandated by federal sponsorship. According to surviving records, expenses for the tour came to $97,000—while receipts totaled no more than $14,000.

In most other ways, though, Orson felt richly compensated by the experience. “I would go up two or three nights a week to Harlem where I was the king,” Welles recalled. “I really was the king!”

An all-black production of Shakespeare was a rare event in America in 1935, and rarer still were black productions that played to integrated audiences. The races were seated together wherever the Voodoo
Macbeth
traveled on tour, and the Federal Theatre Project management bypassed cities where theaters refused to do this. Orson’s
Macbeth
was a milestone for civil rights as well as for theater.

Although Orson had grown up within an elite white culture, his mother was a social crusader, his father a Republican when the party of Lincoln was liberal on race. His guardian, Dr. Maurice Bernstein, was an avid New Dealer, and Roger Hill talked Orson’s ears off with his progressive politics. Progressive and populist impulses were as deeply embedded in Orson’s background as elitist airs and privileges.

Orson’s friendships with the out-of-work black Harlemites who populated his Voodoo
Macbeth
, and the very public crucible of mounting the production, deepened his liberal politics and his sensitivity to black history. He forged a lifelong bond with the black community, initially with organizations in Harlem, supporting theatrical causes, and later with national civil rights organizations on broader issues. First he lent his name; later, when he could, he donated money and time.

Welles would aid in the defense of wrongly arrested Mexican youngsters in the so-called Sleepy Lagoon murder case in Hollywood in 1942; he published a series of articles on prejudice, culminating in his remarkable “Why Race Hate Must Be Outlawed” for
Free World
in 1944 (“a stirring, nearly Lincolnesque speech,” in David Thomson’s words); and in 1946 he used his ABC radio show
Orson Welles Commentaries
to crusade for Isaac Woodard Jr., a black Army veteran attacked and blinded by South Carolina police. His commitment to fighting racism would outlast his involvement in all other politics.

Regardless, by the time the Voodoo
Macbeth
moved on to Broadway, Orson was done with the Negro Unit. The scrutiny of the factions within the black community inhibited him, and the more militant factions had a point: Why shouldn’t the all-black productions have black directors? Having accomplished his goals with
Macbeth
, Orson returned to the idea of forming his own company, one he could shape and dominate as its actor-manager.

Leaving the Negro Unit would also mean leaving behind his sometimes awkward relationship with John Houseman, who was formally tied to the company. There were already spiderweb cracks in their relationship. According to Simon Callow, the partners had “a brief violent, personal row on the sidewalk—a taste of things to come,” after the
New York Times
review of
Macbeth
complimented “the staging by Orson Welles and John Houseman.” Houseman had next to nothing to do with the staging, and the comment rankled Orson.

Virginia, Orson’s closest confidante, was leery of Houseman, sharing Orson’s suspicion that the older man was infatuated with her husband. “At first,” Welles told Barbara Leaming ruefully, “he fell in love with me.” Virginia also foresaw that the producer’s possessiveness and rivalry were destined to sour the partnership.

After the premiere of
Macbeth
and all the acclaim for Welles, Houseman was itching to prove his own creativity. Late that spring, he traveled to California to talk with Leslie Howard about staging a new production of
Hamlet
on Broadway that fall, with Howard starring and codirecting with Houseman. When Houseman returned, Orson told him he was quitting the Harlem operation. Yet the men found themselves talking over the future and brainstorming ideas for what they might do as a team if they were able to break away from the Negro Unit.

Orson left the door open for Houseman, who made the decision to follow him. “Already, I was totally committed to that unreasoning faith in his theatrical genius that was an essential condition of our partnership,” Houseman wrote in his memoir. “Then and later, friends and intimates, especially women, used to reproach me for what they considered my submission to Orson and for devoting so much of my time and energy to promoting his achievements rather than my own. It was difficult to explain to them (since I was not entirely clear about it myself) that if I did subordinate myself consciously and willingly to a man twelve years younger than myself, it was for a compelling and quite selfish reason: it was the price I was willing to pay for my participation in acts of theatrical creation that were far more stimulating and satisfying than any I felt capable of conceiving or creating by myself.”

On July 24, the fourth Negro Unit play opened:
Turpentine
, “a routine play of protest, full of leftist clichés,” in Houseman’s words. By then Houseman already had pitched to Hallie Flanagan and Philip Barber, the new head of the New York branch of the Federal Theatre Project, the idea of an uptown theater venue for him and Welles, promising a range of classical works targeting the Broadway faithful. Thrilled with the success of the Voodoo
Macbeth
, the officials agreed.

Acting swiftly, the partners arranged for a temporary lease on the Shubert organization’s nine-hundred-seat Maxine Elliott Theatre on West Forty-Second Street, where Lillian Hellman’s
The Children’s Hour
was just closing its run. Houseman took over the rose powder room as his administrative command post, while Orson moved into the master dressing room, which included a bedroom and bath. The Maxine Elliott was the first theater Orson could call his own—his personal “magic box,” as he liked to say.

In July, the partners took formal leave of the Lafayette. Orson made a “passionate” departure speech to the Harlemites. Houseman, a founder and leader of the unit, found it harder to bid the company farewell, he wrote later, filled as he was with “sorrow and loss and guilt.”

Scrambling to name their new venture, the partners rejected “repertory ensemble” (“inaccurate,” wrote Houseman) and “people’s theatre” (“pretentious”). When they noticed that the unit was designated as Works Progress Administration Project #891 on a government requisition form, that became the name: Project 891.

The partners talked over possible productions, but the final decision was always Orson’s. Eager to shift gears after the heavy solemnity of
Macbeth
, they decided to launch with Eugène Labiche’s
Un Chapeau de Paille d’Italie
(
An Italian Straw Hat
), a mid-nineteenth-century French farce full of slapstick and wicked double entendres—a brand of lighter fare for which Orson had a lifelong weakness. “No sooner would you open a Classical Theater than what public you might have would be sure that they were going to have a feast of Ibsen and Shakespeare,” Welles explained to the press. “That would provide you with a self-conscious theater full of self-conscious actors, impressed with revering the immortal bard. Damn—he’s only immortal only as long as people want to see him! That’s why we call it ‘891 Presents’ and are opening the season with a farce.”

Labiche’s farce had a reputation in Europe, but in the United States it was rarely presented. It had last been seen in New York ten years before, when the American Laboratory produced it as
The Straw Hat.
In 1926, filmmaker René Clair had adapted the farce as a silent picture, which Orson had seen and remembered fondly. The play didn’t exactly qualify as classical drama, a fact Project 891 tried gamely to finesse. “The WPA, in a throwaway leaflet, issues a sort of quitclaim,” explained the
New York Times
, “pointing out that the original ‘has been studied in schools.’ ”

The overlooked French farce was just the start. Welles and Houseman loved debating important and forgotten plays, and they were soon projecting an ambitious future schedule featuring Christopher Marlowe’s
Dr. Faustus
, which Orson had considered producing for his summer theater; a modern-dress
Julius Caesar
, one of the plays Orson had adapted for
Everybody’s Shakespeare
; and Thomas Dekker’s
The Shoemaker’s Holiday,
one of those Elizabethan comedies Orson loved.

The Italian Straw Hat
had a thinly stretched plot, rife with absurd complications. The story begins when a horse eats a lady’s straw hat, compromising two lovers who have been meeting secretly in a park. A frantic search is launched for an exact replica to replace the eaten hat. “It was the kind of action Welles adored,” noted Peter Conrad in
Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life
, “a chase or pursuit that races around in a circle.”

By transferring the original setting and dialogue to an American milieu, as he had adapted
Macbeth
for a Caribbean landscape, Orson could customize the play in his own way. His first order of business was finding a writer to create an updated vernacular translation of the nineteenth-century play, balancing the French flavor with an American sensibility.

One of the members of the Houseman-Thomson circle of modernist artists, musicians, and writers was the erudite dancer and poet Edwin Denby. An American citizen born in China in 1903, Denby was educated at Harvard and the University of Vienna. He had danced professionally in Europe and spoke fluent French. Returning to the United States after the rise of Hitler, Denby developed a budding reputation as a published poet and arts writer. (In time he would become America’s leading dance critic.) A witty, self-effacing ascetic, Denby lived with his companion, the Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt, on West Twenty-First Street, close to Orson’s flat.

Denby and Welles met to discuss Americanizing the farce, and they got along splendidly. Denby agreed to handle the basic translation, while Orson would guide the modernized and Americanized touches. “I would read a speech, and he would criticize it for the sound,” Denby recalled. “If it blurred, he would rephrase it in such a way that the actual spoken sound was very clear and plain and straight. We understood each other perfectly and worked with a good deal of pleasure.”

In fits and starts over the summer of 1936, their collaboration produced a script that followed the twisty French plot while Americanizing the dialogue and the characters’ names. To reflect the shift to a modern setting, certain trappings were updated—horse-drawn carriages were replaced with motorcars, for instance. Fadinard, the groom who leads the frantic hat search in the French farce, was renamed Freddy; Helene, the intended bride, became Myrtle Mugglethorpe; the aggrieved Lieutenant Tavernier became Lieutenant Grimshot. To top it off, Orson gave the adaptation a brisk, amusing American title:
Horse Eats Hat.