Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (57 page)

Orson insisted that the lighting, the music, and the action be timed like fast-action clockwork. The actors should race ahead, improvising to cover any gaffes, just as Orson did the first time he performed sleight of hand at the Todd School. Mistakes forced actors into creativity.

Houseman returned from Canada just in time for the first dress rehearsal—and he found all of Orson’s clockwork chaos unsettling. “It was difficult to differentiate the catastrophes which were deliberately planned from the accidental disasters,” Houseman observed later, “some of which were so splendid we absorbed them into the show.”

Orson had only four weeks to stage
Horse Eats Hat
, even as he was preparing to star in a second Broadway production while commuting to Chicago on Sundays for the sold-out
Wonder Show.
He always had other stray obligations, and sometimes his own clock ran amok.

One day, for instance, Orson forgot the afternoon installment of
Big Sister.
He was “sitting in the barbershop, and I heard the theme song come on.” His friend Everett Sloane, who could imitate anyone, stepped in, duplicating Orson’s voice. But that was the end of Orson’s job on
Big Sister.

He was pushing his luck—rehearsing two different plays, performing in multiple radio shows, “and living it up in between times too,” as Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, “I may as well confess.” He was still doing the lunch-hour program, and was in the habit of writing little lead-ins for the daily verse recitations. “Particularly if [the poem] was obscure and I thought the housewives toiling over their stoves needed a little help,” Welles said, “I’d make a little remark to ‘humanize it,’ as they say.” One day, the poem was a selection from “Sonnets from the Portuguese” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Out of which I could make neither head nor tail,” he said. Reaching for a witty aside to save the day, his mind went back to a line from
The Barretts of Wimpole Street.
“There was a well-received joke made by Robert Browning—a real quote of his, used in the play, in which he was asked the meaning of a poem, and he read it, reread it, and reread it, and finally said, ‘When this was written only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant. Now only God does.’ It is a good line. . . .

“So I thought I’d say that, because I knew the way I would read this poem would be jabberwocky. So I told the nice little story to the housewives, and when I got to the punch line, what I said was this: ‘When this was written only Bravin Drivet Griving—When Grompit Drivet—When this was written only Gropit Drivet—When Gris was Drivet Grinning—’ There were twenty account people in the control room and they began waving and turning purple and everything, and I just put down the script and said, ‘Good morning, ladies,’ and walked out of the studio and was never seen again. I never had the nerve to come back.

“That was the end of my career with Cornstarch.”

After the remarkable success of his Negro Unit Shakespeare, the New York theater world eagerly awaited
Horse Eats Hat.
This time, Orson was serving not only as director, but as coauthor of the adaptation and the lead actor onstage. Some critics had their daggers sharpened for him, predicting the end of the one-hit wunderkind.

The audience that streamed into the Maxine Elliott on the last Saturday of September had varied expectations, but few could have matched the reality. When the curtain rose on
Horse Eats Hat
, what the audience saw was a singular production: French surrealism shaking hands with the Marx Brothers. As different from the Voodoo
Macbeth
as night from day, it was a play in which Joseph Cotten rose up in the air on a chandelier and squirted seltzer over the chorus and crowd; in which Bil Baird stood up in a box seat, appeared to trip drunkenly, then caught his foot in the railing, dangling wildly over the audience; in which the script’s coauthor, Edwin Denby, bent over to play the rear end of a horse.

With his false nose, padded stomach, and shining dome, Orson led the exuberance. In one scene, when he was supposed to punch Baird, sending him into a backflip, Orson actually connected, hard. “He loses his mind in a case like that,” Baird told Barbara Leaming decades later, laughing. “That’s
very Orson
!”

The whole show was very Orson—a wild ride on an exploding merry-go-round—and
Horse Eats Hat
divided the critics even as it consolidated Orson’s reputation for risk taking and controversy. Richard Watts Jr., in the conservative
New York Herald Tribune
, declared
Horse Eats Hat
“a dismal embarrassment.” The Hearst-owned
New York Journal American
wrote that the retooled French farce “represents a new low in the tide of drama.” “Wacky—utterly wacky,” opined the
New York Daily News
, “but, paradoxically, not wacky enough.” The
New York Times
also equivocated: “Half the audience was pretty indignant, and the other half quite amused.”

Some critics were offended by the naughty humor: characters running around in undergarments, all the racy dialogue. An often cited example was the line “It’s nice to see a pretty little pussy,” which was “spoken to a maid,” as Barbara Leaming wrote, who has just “tossed her skirts behind her.” “Sewage!” the Hearst papers declared. Everett Dirksen, a Republican congressman from Illinois, took to the
Congressional Record
to condemn the play as another example of “salacious tripe” from the Federal Theatre Project. (Such plays were “full of Communists,” echoed Harrison Grey Fiske in the
Saturday Evening Post.
) Nervous Project officials rushed in from Washington to see the show for themselves, forcing a number of minor script changes on Orson (“pussy” became “lassie”).

There were plenty of people who enjoyed
Horse Eats Hat
, however, including
Cue Magazine
’s reviewer, who saw it as “a demented piece of surrealism which comes perilously close to being a work of genuine theater art.” And nothing could dissuade its most zealous fans. The author John Dos Passos ran into playwright Marc Connelly in the lobby one night. The two realized they had been seated on opposite sides of the theater, shrieking the loudest with laughter. “I thought it was the best theatre production I had ever seen in the United States,” another Project director, Joseph Losey, said later. Hallie Flanagan herself rated
Horse Eats Hat
as “inspired lunacy,” saying that she felt bad for those who missed it, and “even sorrier for those who didn’t enjoy it.”

Some missed it because of the scarcity of tickets.
Horse Eats Hat
was a box office smash, selling out the ten-week run. “Some New Yorkers came to see it ten, fifteen, and in one case twenty-one times,” Houseman wrote. Mere mention of the play usually brought a grin to Orson’s face, especially later in his life, when times were harder. “The best of the Mercury shows,” he flatly told Peter Bogdanovich (although Project 891 predated the Mercury Theatre per se). When an oral historian asked L. Arnold Weissberger, Orson’s lawyer and financial manager (and secretary Augusta Weissberger’s brother), which of his client’s plays he recalled most warmly, the lawyer answered easily, “The fondest memories are held by
Horse Eats Hat.”

Around the time that
Horse Eats Hat
was opening at the Maxine Elliott on West Forty-Second Street, Sidney Kingsley was busy over at the St. James Theater, on West Forty-Fourth, with the first blocking rehearsals for
Ten Million Ghosts.
Orson lost weight dashing from daytime rehearsals to nighttime performances six blocks away.

Despite his experience staging
Dead End
, Kingsley was an insecure director. He used a tackboard with thread and colored pins to choreograph the action, shifting the pins contemplatively throughout the rehearsals. Orson was the blue pin, and he didn’t think much of the playwright as a director, according to fellow cast member Martin Gabel, who knew him from
Big Sister.
“He didn’t like
anybody
directing him,” Gabel told Barbara Leaming.

Orson caught catnaps in the St. James Theater during rehearsals for
Ten Million Ghosts
, and at least once he nodded off during an actual performance, according to actor George Coulouris, who was onstage with him. A specialist in cultivated villains, Coulouris shared a dressing room with the Broadway whiz kid, who seemed always to be dozing off, or missing rehearsals, or “dashing off to Chicago” for a silly radio show.

Twelve years older than Welles, Coulouris had started out in his native England performing Shakespearean repertory at the Old Vic. He had seen Katharine Cornell’s production of
Romeo and Juliet
, but hardly viewed Orson as the highlight. (Like Welles, Coulouris had once played Tybalt; “He acts in a very strange way,” Coulouris thought, “as if he’s chewing gum the whole time.”) Coulouris loathed the very notion of an all-black
Macbeth
, and was especially affronted by the story of Orson’s trip to assume the lead in Detroit. (“My God, why did he have to do Shakespeare in blackface?!” he complained in later interviews. “Just for publicity!”)

So began the relationship between Orson Welles and the man who would put an indelible stamp on the role of banker Walter Parks Thatcher in
Citizen Kane.

The cast all knew that
Ten Million Ghosts
was a weak play with an unconfident director, and Orson realized he was not entirely convincing as a doomed romantic hero, the poet-aviator who is willing to die for his ideals. It was the sort of matinee idol part that tempted him now and again, but those roles were invariably too pat for him. One day Kingsley dressed Orson down in front of the others, telling him he was the only actor who wasn’t doing a credible job. Orson slumped off to his dressing room, fighting back tears. He took failures as a director less personally than shortcomings as an actor.

When
Ten Million Ghosts
opened in late October, Orson ceded the role of Mugglethorpe in
Horse Eats Hat
to Edgerton Paul. The Sidney Kingsley play was not much fun, and the critics laid into Kingsley’s script. “The characters are placard stencils,” declared Brooks Atkinson in the
New York Times
, calling the dramatic plotting and incident a “cumbersome snarl.” The play was “inadequate for the big subject,” said Broadway chronicler George Ross.
Ten Million Ghosts
limped along for only ten days before the production was abruptly closed. “We went down,” recalled Coulouris, “and the theater was locked up. We hadn’t been told.”

But none of the reviewers blamed Orson, who looked “unexpectedly handsome” in his pencil-thin mustache, as Richard Watts Jr. observed in the
New York Herald Tribune.
Orson himself later praised the play’s “wonderful Donald Oenslager settings and some imaginative lantern-slide effects,” and admitted that he’d “learned a good deal from this production”—including “one excellent piece of stagecraft” he’d use later in a film.

“The munitions-makers are in a private theatre, watching newsreels from the battlefields showing wholesale slaughter,” said Welles in Peter Noble’s book. “As the newsreels show young men being needlessly butchered, I, as the idealistic youngster, rose to my feet and protested against the whole bloody affair. The munitions-makers also rose to their feet and, silhouetted against the scene of butchery, they retorted, ‘But this is our
business.’

“Second Act Curtain.”

This echoes the scene early in
Citizen Kane,
following the
News on the March
newsreel about Charles Foster Kane. As a group of newsreel reporters and their editor are silhouetted against the screen, the editor says the news digest needs something—a stronger thrust, an “angle.”

“Nobody’s face is really seen,” the
Citizen Kane
script reads. “Sections of their bodies are picked out by a table light, a silhouette is thrown on the screen, and their faces and bodies are thrown into silhouette against the brilliant slanting rays of light from the projection booth.”

Years later, however, Welles rejected Peter Noble’s account. “That is one of the biggest pieces of
Schweinerei
I’ve ever heard in my life,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, claiming he was in his dressing room during that scene every night before the play abruptly closed, and never once saw the newsreel scene—the rare scene in the flop play commented on favorably by nearly every reviewer who wrote about
Ten Million Ghosts.
²⁵

CHAPTER 12

1936–1937

In Show Business It’s Called Friendship

Not without a sigh of relief, Orson returned to
Horse Eats Hat
at the Maxine Elliott. By the time the Americanized French farce closed in early December, the
Wonder Show
radio series had finished its limited run and
Ten Million Ghosts
was a faint memory.