Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (58 page)

Despite his stumbles with
Big Sister
and the Cornstarch-sponsored show, Orson continued to thrive on the radio. The fall of 1936 found him playing Great Men with increasing frequency on
The March of Time
and the similarly prestigious
Cavalcade of America,
a feel-good historical anthology series sponsored by Du Pont. At times he sneaked his politics into his portraits of Great Men: in a mid-November episode of
Cavalcade
, on “The Story of Rubber,” he portrayed a stentorian John D. Rockefeller. He played the part “rather too unsympathetically for the taste of the Du Ponts,” he recalled laughingly years later.

Another of his Great Men was the munitions and arms dealer Sir Basil Zaharoff, the inspiration for the greedy death merchant at the center of
Ten Million Ghosts.
When Zaharoff died, on November 27, 1936, Orson played him in the
March of Time
installment reporting his death. The script’s fictionalized opening sequence showed secretaries “burning Zaharoff’s papers in the immense fireplace in the great hall of his chateau—the secret records (the narrator tells us) of a lifetime’s involvement in wars, plots, revolutions and assassinations,” scholar Robert L. Carringer wrote, discovering seeds of
Citizen Kane
in the episode. “Other scenes present witnesses who testify to Zaharoff’s ruthlessness. Finally, Zaharoff himself appears—an old man nearing death, alone, except for servants in the gigantic palace in Monte Carlo that he had acquired for his longtime mistress. [Zaharoff’s] dying wish is to be wheeled out ‘in the sun by the rosebush.’ ” (Orson confirmed this to Peter Bogdanovich: “I got the idea for the hidden-camera sequence in the
Kane
‘news digest’ ” from the
March of Time
episode, he explained, “in which Zaharoff, the great munitions-maker, was being moved around in his rose garden, just talking about the roses, in the last days before he died.”)

Radio producers were now beginning to tap him for showcase productions. CBS launched an experimental series, the
Columbia Workshop
, that mingled dramatizations of classic literary works with original scripts by established authors; Irving Reis and Norman Corwin were the producers. In the fall of 1936 Welles was invited to condense and dramatize his first Shakespeare play for the series.

Was it coincidence or gamesmanship that prompted Orson to choose
Hamlet
, the play John Houseman was staging, almost simultaneously, on Broadway? After out-of-town tryouts, Houseman’s version had opened at the Imperial Theatre in early November, collecting polite reviews (“a handsome production,” wrote the
New York Times
) that usually found lead actor Leslie Howard disappointing compared with John Gielgud’s transcendent Hamlet earlier in the year. Houseman had a trying time with Howard, who was also serving as codirector and who overrode him on major decisions. The production lasted thirty-nine performances before departing for Chicago.

Orson’s radio
Hamlet
was spread over two half-hour broadcasts on successive Sundays in November. He had a cast that included Alexander Scourby (Claudius); Rosamond Pinchot (Gertrude); Edgerton Paul (Polonius); Joseph Cotten (Laertes); Hiram Sherman (Bernardo); and his wife, Virginia, in a small part. Although he was not credited for it on the air, the script was his too—Orson’s first full-length script to be broadcast. He even oversaw the publicity, which reflected his view of the medium in general, promising an “intimacy of interpretation not possible in stage production.”

The radio
Hamlet
was a milestone not only for the medium, but also for himself. At twenty-one years old, he had found another means of bringing classical plays to the masses. Orson made the broadcast, which was one of the rare times in his career when he played Hamlet, a resounding success. “His voice,” as radio scholar Bernice W. Kliman wrote in
Hamlet: Film, Television and Audio Performance
, was “a remarkable instrument evoking visualizations as well as clarifying interpretative choices,” his whispered asides suggesting “interiority or complicity with the audience.”

Also, it was on the
Columbia Workshop
program that Orson first encountered the New York–born, Juilliard-trained composer and conductor Bernard Herrmann, who led the orchestra. At twenty-four, Herrmann already had an estimable career as a symphonic composer when he was not at his day job for CBS. Herrmann was as acerbic and combustible as he was gifted, and just before the
Hamlet
broadcast, when a cue went wrong and he broke his baton, he tossed his script into the air and walked out of the studio. A chuckling Orson dragged him back. “We didn’t have time to get the notes back in order on his stand, so he was one cue off all through it,” Welles recalled. “So we had the fanfares when it was supposed to be quiet, approaching menace when it was supposed to be a gay party, and all live; it was riotous. Nothing to do [about it]—he just went on. It got funnier and funnier.”

Houseman listened to the
Hamlet
broadcast wistfully. Orson’s Shakespeare for radio, which had received less hype than Leslie Howard’s production, was surprisingly good. Welles’s partner returned to Project 891 shortly thereafter, relieved to be back after his dispiriting experience with Howard. “It was pleasant, after the big-time frustrations,” Houseman recalled, “to find myself once again in my faded-rose basement [at the Maxine Elliott], with Augusta Weissberger chirping at me from behind her typewriter and the normal bureaucratic agitations of the WPA enveloping me once again.”

Houseman believed that Orson viewed his own “juvenile lead” in
Ten Million Ghosts
as the same kind of failure as his episode with Howard, “a sort of absurd and shameful interlude of which the least said the better.” As partners, they had soared to spectacular heights in 1936; apart, they had faltered. Now, happily reunited, they plunged into the next Project 891 production:
Dr. Faustus.

The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus
, by the Elizabethan tragedian Christopher Marlowe, was first performed in the late sixteenth century. Orson had an enduring fondness for
Faustus
, which alternated blank verse with prose to tell the tragic legend of a scholar who sells his soul to Lucifer for twenty-four years of power, during which time he roams the world performing dark sorcery. Charles Gounod’s opera, based on Goethe’s classic play
Faust
, had been in regular rotation at the Ravinia Festival, and Fanny Butcher, the “Armchair Playgoer” columnist for the
Chicago Tribune
, loved reminding readers that Marlowe’s play predated Goethe’s by two hundred years. Orson had read Marlowe’s play as a youth, and he had floated
Dr. Faustus
as a possible production in the early days of the Woodstock summer theater in 1934.

In his memoir
Run-Through
, John Houseman propounded his often quoted theory that his partner’s “deep personal identification” with Faustus-Faust stemmed from a personal belief in Satan. “The first time I met him,” wrote Houseman, “he was writing a play about the Fiend and illustrating it with drawings that were, in fact, grotesque caricatures of himself.” Faustus’s bargain with the devil was “uncomfortably close to the shape of Welles’s own personal myth,” he wrote. In short, the producer believed, Orson sold his own soul in exchange for acclamation of his genius and a guarantee of fame. Houseman even claimed that Orson’s lifelong sleeplessness and frequent nightmares were due to his fear of the devil. “No sooner were his eyes closed than, out of the darkness, troupes of demons—the symbols of his sins—surrounded and claimed him.” It was “a very real obsession,” Houseman claimed. “At twenty-one Orson was sure he was doomed.”

Thanks in large part to Houseman, this notion has become firmly established in Welles folklore. In truth, Welles’s interest in the supernatural was far more complicated and unorthodox. He followed no organized religion, and his mother, a Christian who drifted toward secularism and Eastern spiritualism, had shaped his ideas about God and the devil. Welles avoided the subject of religion in interviews, but as a boy who saw both of his parents die at a young age, he may have suffered nightmares, or felt a sense of foreboding, without subscribing to the devil.

Orson believed in evil, however, both as a concrete force in the world—personified, just then, by Hitler’s rise in Germany—and as an effective dramatic tool. He was keenly aware of the relationship between humankind and the devil as an ancient thread in storytelling, not least in the Bible. “Many of the big characters I’ve played are various forms of Faust, and I am against every form of Faust,” Welles mused in his interview sessions with Peter Bogdanovich, “because I believe it’s impossible for a man to be great without admitting that there’s something greater than himself, whether it’s the law, or God, or art.”

As a student of the theater, Orson had read the legend of Faust and seen it performed in multiple productions. Now, as an actor, he welcomed the opportunity to play a man shadowed by evil. And, as a director, he had found a vehicle that was equal to his greatness.

Working on the script for
Faustus
throughout the time when he was involved with
Horse Eats Hat
, Orson had revised and streamlined Marlowe’s text, preserving the high-flown rhetoric while tapering the lengthy speeches. Shaving off lesser characters, shifting around entire scenes, he converted what had previously been a three-hour, five-act endurance test into a seventy-five-minute one-act play with no intermission.

Like
Horse Eats Hat
, this was every ounce Orson’s show. Writing decades later, Houseman claimed that it was difficult “to describe the creative workings” of their partnership “with any degree of honesty or accuracy,” that their “mutual functions were only vaguely defined.” While it’s true that their skills sometimes overlapped—Houseman could be an ingenious editor of Orson’s ideas—it is
not
hard to say which of the partners repeatedly took the creative lead in choosing and revamping the scripts, designing the shows, and casting the main characters; or which of them
directed
the shows while usually
starring
in them.

Orson would play Faustus, of course, and he wanted his friend the brawny Harlemite Jack Carter as his Mephistopheles, the demon who tempts Faustus with power. (“
MEPHISTOPHILIS
,” Orson emphasized in his unproduced screenplay for the film of about
The Cradle Will Rock
, “Marlowe’s spelling!”) Carter agreed to shave his head for the part, and even took up residence with the Welleses in their Fourteenth Street apartment “for ten days before the opening to keep him from going on a binge,” as Welles recalled to Barbara Leaming. The personal bond between the men would make for a surprisingly tender and rueful onstage relationship between Faustus and Mephistopheles.

By the end of November rehearsals for
Faustus
had begun, with some of the cast members coming directly from
Horse Eats Hat
into the poetic tragedy. Orson had earmarked one of the comedic roles for his understudy Edgerton Paul, and another for monologuist Harry McKee, who was among the comedians Orson collected from vaudeville shows. Paula Laurence, an actress from
Panic
who had become a close friend of Virginia Welles, would appear as the masked Helen of Troy. (
Faustus
has a famous line about her beauty: “The face that launched a thousand ships!”) Joseph Cotten, already a lucky charm for Orson, would play a scholar loyal to Faustus. (Cotten was billed, wittily, as “Joseph Wooll,” to get around Equity rules that prohibited his continued employment in the Federal Theatre Project.) Orson enlisted Bil Baird to craft giant puppets embodying the Seven Deadly Sins, and Paul Bowles to compose eerie music for a small ensemble that included oboe, saxophone, clarinet, trombone, and harp, along with a booming thunder drum.

Easily bored, Orson liked to make the obstacle course harder each time he entered a new arena. His Big Idea for
Faustus
involved draping the stage with black velvet to create a stygian void. Borrowing from the language of magic, he derived the notion from “black art,” a technique used by magicians for making people and objects “disappear” into the scenery. Shafts of light would capture the characters as they emerged from the dark anterior of the stage, or from trap holes in the floor, or from under black cones raised or lowered from the rafters. Welles also wanted a lighting grid more intricate and ambitious than that for the Voodoo
Macbeth
, and an innovative loudspeaker system that could envelop the auditorium in music and sound effects.

The more intimate scenes of the play would be presented on a new extension of the Maxine Elliott stage, a kind of ship’s prow thrusting twenty feet into the orchestra seats—the first Broadway stage to break the “fourth wall” of the proscenium arch.

In later years, many have debated the originality of Orson’s stage designs, suggesting that lighting designer Abe Feder (or, for later plays, scene designer Sam Leve) made decisive contributions to the overall visual look. The controversy was exacerbated by Orson’s acrimonious relationship with some of the parties, and by his penchant for taking public credit for the design, in the program and in promotional interviews. It’s true that Orson’s stage designers were responsible for executing his concepts, but ideas like the “black art” in
Faustus
indisputably came from him. “Everything originated in Orson’s head,” Paula Laurence recalled. “It was the duty of everybody to fill it out.”

Orson’s imperious habits continued. For the first time at
Faustus
rehearsals in early December, he addressed the actors and crew through a microphone, part of the public-address system put in place for music and effects. He still preferred to rehearse late at night, often arriving hectically from radio appearances. He tended to work out of sequence, concentrating on certain actors, holding back on problematic scenes, shifting the elements around until time ran out, or he felt inspired. He was notorious for stalling rehearsals, or sometimes interrupting them altogether, to change the mood. He told anecdotes and jokes or imitated the tics of famous people, with Guthrie McClintic a frequent target (though in public he often praised McClintic as a director whose experience as a onetime actor had taught him how to direct actors productively).