Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (63 page)

The argument dragged on, but Niles refused to budge. Backed into a corner, Orson played his trump card. “We are asking for a series of dress rehearsals,” he insisted. “If that is of no use, there is another way for us—a commercial theatre. It is not used as a weapon—for us it is a least disagreeable one—last night’s affair was a strong argument for the continuance of Federal Theatre. The point is that our gesture did not represent in our minds any form of defiance whatsoever . . . [and] from the point of view of New York City it would be to the advantage of WPA for
The Cradle Will Rock
to open at the Maxine Elliott Theatre in New York tonight.”

Niles said he did not like the implied ultimatum.

“I’m telling you, without this being a threat,” Orson persisted, keeping his words and tone even, “if we are not permitted to put the play on by a series of dress rehearsals that we will simply put this play on a commercial basis. Mr. Houseman and I have nothing—absolutely nothing—to gain by keeping our WPA jobs. We are sincere government workers as you are.

“However defiant our gesture may be, it was kept within the letter of the law. Since [you] do not believe that our suggestion of instituting a series of dress rehearsals will work, we will put the play on a commercial basis,” he said. “We are very anxious not to put the play on a commercial basis, but we will.”

Niles then asked Woodward whether the WPA would grant any future support to Project 891 for
Cradle
if Welles went through with his plan to mount the play commercially. “Our position is clear,” Woodward said. “If you decide to go ahead with a commercial production of the play, then I see no reason for Mrs. Flanagan not to drop this thing.”

The conference ended on this sour note. Orson said he planned to speak to Archibald MacLeish about making a final plea to Harry Hopkins. The WPA officials told Orson they would never reach Hopkins, and he left Washington later in the day knowing the officials were right.

Slumped in his seat on the return flight, Welles tried to collect his thoughts. The work he had done under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project—the Voodoo
Macbeth
,
Horse Eats Hat
, and
Faustus
—had immeasurably boosted his career and stature. He owed a lot to Hallie Flanagan and her support. Now his defiant stand might harm the New Deal program irreparably. He worried “about the political wisdom of it all,” he told Leaming years later.

In the past year, Orson’s political convictions had grown stronger and deeper. Even when his plays were not expressly political, he enjoyed many professional and personal relationships with progressives who were devoted to the Federal Theatre Project, and he had committed himself to numerous liberal and left-wing issues, from equal rights to support for the Republican forces in Spanish Civil War to pro-worker causes. His collaboration with Blitzstein had consolidated his beliefs. He would go on to lend his name to progressive causes for years to come, addressing timely topics in his newspaper columns and radio forums, and taking positions that were both antifascist and socially critical of America. Welles would become “the American Brecht,” historian Michael Denning went so far as to say in his book
The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
, “the single most important Popular Front artist in theater, radio, and film, both politically and aesthetically.”

The left wing of the 1930s generally embraced the New Deal, the Works Project Administration, and the Federal Theatre Project, but this was different. Returning to New York, Barbara Leaming wrote, Welles felt he had “failed” in his mission to obtain special permission to continue with “dress rehearsal” performances of
The Cradle Will Rock.
That had been his sincere goal. “But it might be as exact,” countered historian Barry B. Witham, “to characterize Welles as victorious in acquiring the undisputed rights to a production” originally underwritten by the federal government.

The Cradle Will Rock
now belonged to Blitzstein, Houseman, and Welles.

Curiously, Houseman, usually the diplomat of the partnership, absented himself from the Washington summit. But Orson may have wanted to go it alone, and this was another situation in which his celebrity carried more weight than Houseman’s.

When Orson returned from Washington, however, there was little public bluster over the Federal Theatre Project, for or against. Welles and Houseman merely announced that they’d purchased the rights to
The Cradle Will Rock
from Blitzstein in order to present it in a two-week run at the Venice, starting the very next day: Friday, June 18. Houseman obtained temporary financing from affluent friends and supporters. With his elaborate sets gone forever—confiscated by the WPA, they were later destroyed—Orson tinkered minimally with the impromptu staging from their first night at the Venice. Blitzstein still took the stage alone, while the actors and singers fanned out in the auditorium’s seats and aisles. The WPA kindly allowed a leave of absence for actors drawing federal paychecks, and in order to perform himself, Blitzstein joined Equity and the musicians’ union.

Over the summer, Project 891 was quietly allowed to die. Orson resigned from the Federal Theatre Project first, while his partner lingered in the powder-room office, supervising a skeleton staff until mid-August, when Houseman left to fulfill a one-year appointment, arranged by Hallie Flanagan, as head of Vassar’s Experimental Theatre and Drama Department.

CHAPTER 13

1937–1938

Tales of Orson, Real and Imagined

If anything, the brouhaha over
The Cradle Will Rock
added to Orson’s professional mystique. Personally, too, it seemed a blessing. He took off more time than usual that July and August, and Virginia later called the summer of 1937 “one of the happiest times in our marriage.”

In the late spring, the couple found a country residence on the left bank of the Hudson in Sneden’s Landing, a hamlet about twenty miles north of New York City in Rockland County. A longtime haven for artists and entertainers, Sneden’s Landing gave the Welleses a chance to live in a proper home a long way from Broadway, with a vegetable garden, a good-sized swimming pool, and extra bedrooms for guests. Orson made regular forays into New York by speedboat, his new indulgence, racing back and forth across the river to the train stop.

In the last week of May, shortly before the crisis with
Cradle
, Orson had been receptive when producer Arthur Hopkins invited him to play the title role in
King Lear
on Broadway in the fall of 1937. While Hopkins decided whether to direct the production himself, Orson could spend the summer adapting the script, which he knew and treasured, and confer on the costume and stage design with Pavel Tchelitchew (last seen being chased out of a rehearsal of
Faustus
).

At the same time, Orson had lined up a surfeit of jobs to pay for groceries, including his first major opportunity as a broadcast writer-director. As an experiment in summer programming, the Mutual Broadcasting System agreed to let him shoehorn Victor Hugo’s thousand-page magnum opus
Les Misérables
into seven half-hour broadcasts from WOR, its flagship station in New York, starting July 23.

Set against the backdrop of early-nineteenth-century French history, culminating in a Paris insurrection,
Les Misérables
depicts the struggles of an ex-convict to elude a fanatical police inspector and ultimately redeem himself. Orson wrote a script that ingeniously incorporated disparate narrative devices to streamline the sprawling plot, while remaining as faithful as possible to the literary masterpiece. Directing his first important radio series, Welles demonstrated his inventiveness as well as his command of the medium.

Each of the 10
P
.
M
. weekly broadcasts began with this introduction: “WOR and the Mutual network present Orson Welles, distinguished young author, actor, and director, in an adaptation of this novel, which he has made especially for the radio.” Orson narrated the show and voiced the leading role—Jean Valjean—while cleverly differentiating his polished narrator’s tone from that of the brusque ex-convict and from the other roles he played in the series. (In one courtroom scene, he even played a man
mistaken
for Valjean.)

Orson wove many unusual sound effects into the show—simulating the echo and ambience of the Paris sewers, for example, by recording in a convenient men’s room. His Todd School headmaster, Roger Hill, visiting that summer, always claimed that he was in that men’s room, for the occasion, holding the microphone.

Many in the large cast were already old friends; the result was a kind of informal dress rehearsal for the Mercury Theatre. Orson cast Martin Gabel from
Ten Million Ghosts
and
Big Sister
as Javert; and an actress from
Big Sister
, Alice Frost, as Fantine. He made Virginia his Cosette, and set aside good parts for Everett Sloane, Ray Collins, Will Geer from
The Cradle Will Rock
, and his old Chicago friends Chubby Sherman and Whitford Kane. This would be Orson’s first time working alongside Kane, and
Les Misérables
would also be his first time directing Agnes Moorehead, who voiced several different characters in the serial.

Les Misérables
was a milestone in Orson’s radio career. “Well-staged and engrossing,” wrote
Radio Daily
, which was the broadcasting counterpart of
Variety
and had first begun to follow him closely in the summer of 1937. His script brilliantly condensed the book; all the acting, his included, was gripping. “Welles has projected his skill into the stellar ranks of dramatic radio entertainment.”

Later in August, Orson wrote and starred in another well-received adaptation—this time of John Galsworthy’s prison drama
Escape
for the prestigious
Columbia Workshop
series. “A fine piece of entertainment,” said the
Radio Daily
critic.

Then, in the first week of September, he joined an all-star cast including Tallulah Bankhead, Cedric Hardwicke, Helen Menken, and Estelle Winwood for an abridged
Twelfth Night
—his third national Shakespeare broadcast in a single year. “It was easy to detect that Helen Menken and Orson Welles had broadcasting experience,” a
New York Times
reviewer reported. “They played to the invisible auditors and with intense feeling, as was revealed by their gestures, grimaces and grins.”
Radio Daily
called it “the finest broadcast” of the network’s summer Shakespeare program.

Finally, by the end of that happy summer of 1937, Orson had caught scent of a real prize: the lead role in a weekly broadcast series.

The Mutual Network owned the rights to
The Shadow
, based on an adventure hero created by the pulp-fiction writer Walter B. Gibson. The series had been a modest hit during its first radio incarnation earlier in the 1930s, with actor Frank Readick introducing each episode with the deathless line, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!”

The original series had been dropped in 1936 after a five-year run, but New York advertising agencies—representing the main sponsor, Blue Coal—wanted to resume the show in the fall, combining the narrator with the character of the Shadow. They were looking for a high-profile actor to play the Shadow’s alter ego, the wealthy and brainy scientist Lamont Cranston, who has “the power to cloud men’s minds so they cannot see him,” and who “devotes his life to righting wrongs.”
The Shadow
was far from Shakespeare, but if he could land the job it would keep Orson and Virginia in groceries for months—and make Orson, for the first time, a national radio celebrity.

Virginia learned she was pregnant in July. The news thrilled the couple, who told Chicago friends and relatives first. “Orson devoted himself to me that summer,” Virginia told her daughter Chris Welles Feder years later. “Every day we swam in the pool and lazed in the garden. We paid no attention to Doctor [Bernstein] when he wrote us from Chicago, ‘I hear you have a lovely house with four spare bedrooms.’ We didn’t need any company except each other and Budget.”

In fact, the couple had plenty of company. They hosted regular “weenie roasts” for neighbors and friends in Sneden’s Landing including Ben and Rose Hecht, and Hecht’s writing partner Charles MacArthur and his wife, actress Helen Hayes. Hecht and MacArthur sometimes brought along their friends Charles Lederer and Herman L. Mankiewicz, New York writers who’d gone to Hollywood but still toiled occasionally on wishful Broadway projects. Chubby Sherman, Whitford Kane, Alexander Woollcott, and Marc Blitzstein visited often. John Houseman was “rarely” invited, Welles pointedly informed Barbara Leaming.

Hecht and MacArthur, the former Chicago reporters who collaborated on the defining newsroom comedy
The Front Page
, also wrote for Hollywood studios on demand, receiving high-paying assignments while writing and directing the occasional quirky independent picture for their own production unit. Orson had much in common with both of them, especially MacArthur—including a schoolboy love of practical jokes. One day, MacArthur found himself wondering whether any of the Welleses’ illustrious guests urinated in the swimming pool. He and Orson tracked down a chemist who had developed “a clear colorless liquid, which if put in the pool immediately detected urine when anybody would pee,” Welles told Leaming. “We put this stuff in and we invited our friends out, naturally, at the weekend, and they were swimming around in raspberry-colored clouds. They were
all
doing it, you see!”