Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (56 page)

As with the Voodoo
Macbeth
, Orson wanted made-to-order music for his new production. To compose the eclectic sound and special effects Welles had in mind, Virgil Thomson recommended the gifted Paul Bowles, another pedigreed friend from Houseman’s circle, though more of a free spirit than either Thomson or Houseman. A writer and poet as well as a musician, Bowles had studied under Aaron Copland; he’d also lived in footloose fashion in Paris and Morocco. Orson envisioned almost nonstop music and effects during the production, even through the intermissions; at first Bowles was somewhat daunted by the assignment, and Thomson agreed to walk him through stage conventions and take a credit for “arranging.”

But Orson did not intimidate Bowles personally. Like Welles, Bowles was a restless and fecund talent who enjoyed blurring the line between his art and his life, and the two were almost instantly simpatico. Bowles, too, had spent time in Spain, and they talked about the Spanish Civil War, ignited by a fascist coup that July. “Within ten minutes of our meeting,” Bowles remembered, “Orson shocked me by remarking coolly that he saw no hope of there being anything but fascism in Spain. How right he was!”

For the scenery, costumes, and lighting, Orson lured Abe Feder and Nat Karson away from the Negro Unit, giving them sketches and detailed instructions. To create the horse of the title, he found another imaginative collaborator in the puppeteer Bil Baird, whose shows he had seen at the 1934 Chicago world’s fair. Baird devised a creature made of two halves—a papier-mâché head and a velvety torso with roller-skate hooves—and agreed to play the standing half himself. (Welles had noticed Baird’s performing skills one day while trying to coax Chubby Sherman into taking a dangerous pratfall into the orchestra pit. “So I went, ‘Whoop!’ like that,” Baird recalled, “and did a flop and landed on my back in the orchestra pit. Everybody applauded and Orson said, ‘Mr. Baird, you’re hired.’ ”)

With the script still in progress—it wouldn’t be completed until late August—and Houseman off working on his plans for
Hamlet
with Leslie Howard, Orson planned his return to serious acting with a key role in Sidney Kingsley’s new play,
Ten Million Ghosts.

Kingsley, a respected playwright, had approached Orson shortly after the opening of the Voodoo
Macbeth.
Kingsley had the golden touch: his socially conscious tenement drama
Dead End
had filled the Belasco Theatre for nine months, and Hollywood had scooped up film rights. Now he was going to produce a season of three plays, featuring
Ten Million Ghosts
—his first new work since
Dead End
, and the only one of the three plays that he’d also direct.

Ten Million Ghosts
was another message play, this time attacking post–World War I munitions merchants whose greed was destabilizing the world. All summer long, as Orson worked on
Horse Eats Hat
, Kingsley wrote furiously, crafting the part that Orson would play: a gallant French aviator who defies politically expedient orders and bombs a German munitions plant.

At first,
Ten Million Ghosts
was announced as the final production of Kingsley’s season, scheduled for the spring of 1937. But as difficulties arose with the other two plays in his lineup,
Ghosts
inched forward. Orson welcomed the opportunity. For an actor who was doomed to play heavies, figuratively and literally, for much of his career,
Ten Million Ghosts
afforded a rare chance to play the dashing lead—and at Equity wages, no small consideration for a hardworking young man still paying the grocery bills with small jobs.

Toward the same end—paying for groceries—in August Orson took another step up the ladder in radio, where he was still specializing in character parts. A deep-voiced comic actor named Jack Smart, a charter member of
The March of Time
since 1931, had been slated to host a new ten-week revue series sponsored by Wonder Bread that would be the first full-hour sponsored show on the Mutual Broadcasting System. A few weeks before the first broadcast, however, a Universal scout caught the portly Smart in
The New Faces in 1936
on Broadway and lured him away from radio with a film contract. Smart recommended his comparably deep-voiced friend, Orson.

The money was good, the workload ideal: all Orson had to do was show up at WOR every Sunday at 8
P
.
M
., when most New York theaters were dark, in time for the hour-long broadcast. Besides emceeing the show as the Great McCoy—“a jovial cross between P. T. Barnum and Sir Henry Irving,” as Orson wrote to Roger Hill—he would also star in the abridged Gay Nineties plays that had been preestablished as the show’s main feature. Although Arthur Pryor Jr. from
The March of Time
was producing the show, Orson had a hand in choosing each week’s mustache-twirling melodrama. The post–Civil War
The Streets of New York
was set for the premiere, to be followed by chestnuts such as
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(which Orson knew from the Todd School) and
Around the World in Eighty Days
(the Jules Verne story, which he’d seen at least once onstage at the Goodman Theatre). All the players would be fully costumed, and the episodes would be performed before live audiences; the sponsors were hoping the show could cross over to television, which everyone believed was just around the corner. The series was known as
The Wonder Show
, a title Orson would fondly cadge for his World War II military service revue.

The Mutual network (and the sponsors’ ad agency) had booked Carnegie Hall to launch
The Wonder Show
on the last Sunday of August. But Orson then had the idea of bringing the radio show to Chicago, taking over the 3,500-seat Opera House (“Mr. Insull’s dream palace,” as he described it in a letter to Skipper) for six Sundays in September and October. The two-month run would open with
The Relief of Lucknow
, set in 1870s Chicago, and the show would be broadcast locally by Mutual’s affiliate WGN, a
Chicago Tribune
subsidiary.

Alert the “press boys,” Orson wrote to Roger Hill; prepare the “strong bally.” Working with the show’s publicist, Orson arranged to have a Todd School stagecoach trucked into the Loop with local personalities in Victorian costumes stepping out of horse-drawn vehicles amid floodlights and photographers. The cast included the married couple John McIntire and Jeanette Nolan, who would show up in future Welles projects (Nolan was Orson’s Lady Macbeth in his 1948 film), and his friend Paul Stewart, who would appear in Welles films from
Citizen Kane
all the way through to “The Other Side of the Wind.”

But
The Wonder Show
alone couldn’t keep Orson and Virginia in groceries. Orson also took a small continuing part as “the cad” in a twice-daily fifteen-minute radio soap opera called
Big Sister.
“God, I loved it,” he told Henry Jaglom years later. “I had this girl in the rumble seat. And the suspense was, was I going to make her? And it went on for about three months. That’s the longest session in a rumble seat, you know.”

Between broadcasts of
Big Sister
and
The Wonder Show
—flying to Chicago every Sunday, flying back on Mondays—Orson also plunged into read-throughs for
Horse Eats Hat.
Then, at the end of August, Kingsley phoned with news: there were problems with the rest of his season and he was pushing
Ten Million Ghosts
ahead for an October opening.

In typical fashion, Orson decided he could do it all: prepare two new Broadway plays simultaneously, while keeping up his schedule of weekly radio gigs. For Orson, time and money were always elastic and ephemeral, hard work and enthusiasm ever-renewable from his deep well.

John Houseman was responsible for organizing the theater building, staff, and operating budget for
Horse Eats Hat
, but once again he maintained a distance from the creative side of the production, and he was absent at critical junctures. He disappeared for most of August, heading to Canada to apply for permanent resident status on foreign territory after his five-year work visa as a resident alien had expired.

While Houseman was away, Orson finalized the
Horse Eats Hat
script and casting. By the time Houseman returned, the launch date for his production of
Hamlet
with Leslie Howard—early November—was fast approaching. “Of all the shows Orson and I produced together,
Horse Eats Hat
is the one in which I was the least involved,” Houseman wrote later. But Orson hardly minded an absentee producer, and
Horse Eats Hat
would be pure Orson.

Squeezing in writing sessions between Orson’s radio appearances, Welles and Edwin Denby hurtled toward the finish line with the
Horse Eats Hat
script in late August. “We’d start about 1
A
.
M
. and work all that night and the following day,” Denby recalled. “We wrote two acts at a stretch like that. By the time it got to be two or three the next morning, we were falling asleep alternately. He would say something. I’d write it down and fall asleep. Then, he’d take over and write something. I would wake up and go on from there, while he fell asleep for a moment. We finished at 9
A
.
M
., and he went off to do a radio program.”

One attraction of
Horse Eats Hat
was the cute role Orson carved out for Virginia, whose career had been languishing while his soared. She would play the shy bride Myrtle, a small but crucial part in the farce—and Orson would be Mugglethorpe, Myrtle’s father, with a sly wink at the audience. Mugglethorpe was the kind of “old gaffer” role that delighted Orson, another chance to break out the greasepaint and padding; for fun, he even tossed in a bald dome.

Federal regulations required that no more than 10 percent of actors cast in Project 891 productions could be professionals who were drawing wages from elsewhere. For the leads, Orson relied on stage and radio friends who could afford the moonlighting. He lured his tall, handsome friend Joseph Cotten into playing dumb, charming Freddy, the play’s human motor—this was the first time Cotten would perform under Orson’s direction. As Bobbin, Mugglethorpe’s majordomo, he enlisted the effervescent Chubby Sherman, whom he liked almost as much as Cotten. To play the hat shop owner, he cast a pretty young actress, Arlene Francis, whom he’d worked with happily on
The March of Time.

Orson also added a role that did not exist in the original play: Augustus, the grandson of the family patriarch, created expressly for his classmate Edgerton Paul, who had played in Todd School and Woodstock Summer Festival plays and
The Hearts of Age.
Although Paul was Orson’s physical opposite (“a diminutive actor, almost a midget,” in John Houseman’s words), he doubled as Orson’s stand-in during rehearsals and understudy for performances—joining a long line of doubles and understudies Orson relied on when he was overextended.

The smaller roles and chorus were parceled out to the jobless thespians who showed up for open auditions. Orson gravitated to “aging character actors, comics and eccentrics,” Houseman recalled, “middle-aged garrulous ladies with bright colored hair who nobody else seemed to want and a number of bright young ladies.” As with
Macbeth
, the partners had planned the show for maximum employment, and in the end about seventy-four actors, thirty musicians in the pit orchestra, and several dozen crew hands were added to the rolls of the Federal Theatre Project.

Nat Karson designed the principal set as an out-of-control Rube Goldberg contraption, with trapdoors and pop-up pieces and breakaway sections. Aided by Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles contributed a score that consisted of “two long pieces of continuity, three overtures, the horse ballet and several songs,” in his words, mingled with strains of standard Americana. Fulfilling Orson’s vision, the music would be heard almost continuously throughout the performance, with a uniformed woman trumpeter performing Bowles’s “Carnaval de Venise” and Edgerton Paul plunking a mechanical piano to produce “The Song of Hiawatha” during the intervals. An enthusiastic if limited singer, Orson deployed his own baritone in the show’s only true song, Mugglethorpe’s “lyrical salute to his faithful rubber plant” (as Wilella Waldorf wrote in the
New York Post
), which capped Act One.

Orson insisted on pacing
Horse Eats Hat
like a vaudeville revue, with fast, skit-like scenes bursting with physical and risqué humor. The actors flew through the air, spilled across the apron, and raced up and down the aisles, shouting and laughing.

At the center of the maelstrom, however, was a fierce commander. Watching Welles on the first day of the
Horse Eats Hat
rehearsals, “still thinking we were friends,” Edwin Denby recalled, “I called out something or other, some criticism I had in mind. He answered from the stage and put me down completely. Not in a disagreeable way. But it was clear enough to me that, now, he was the director.”

Virginia had a similar revelation during an early rehearsal, when she told her husband she didn’t think his direction for her was “right” for a particular scene. “I don’t care what you think,” Orson replied brusquely, echoing sharp advice from Hilton Edwards. “Just do it.” Virginia had been sipping on a malted—an ice cream drink—and now she flung it in his face. “It wasn’t anything terribly serious,” recalled Arlene Francis, “we went right on with rehearsal.” From then on, however, Virginia never questioned her director.

The occasional outburst notwithstanding, Orson was a “kind, intelligent, generous director and tireless,” recalled Arlene Francis. Compared with the Voodoo
Macbeth
,
Horse Eats Hat
was great fun, and Orson reserved his shouting matches for the irascible Abe Feder. Orson often drew his mood from the material, and his mood during
Horse Eats Hat
was merry and ebullient. The company included many friends, and they were led by the example of Joseph Cotten, whose attitude was beautifully attuned to Orson’s. “[Cotten] had a wonderful sense of humor—and such warmth,” said Denby. “It’s easy in farce to forget the warmth, but that’s what has to sustain it.”